Look around you at the bodies of the extremely old - when was the last time you recall seeing an obese centenarian? Excess fat held over the years is a killer, and the oldest people are very rarely overweight.
As it becomes more apparent to a wider audience that engineered healthy longevity - medicine to repair the biochemical damage of aging - is a very plausible prospect for the decades ahead, we’ll see much more discussion on the topic. As that discussion broadens, I fully expect it to follow much the same lines as bioethical handwringing over past advances: a decade or so of public idiocy that is followed by an era in which people quickly forget that anybody ever claimed the advance in question was a bad idea. Look at in vitro fertilization back a ways, or the changing public discussion over stem cell science.
According to Boing Boing, this gigantic horrifying hotdog weighs in at 3.5 lbs, and is free if you can snork it down in less than four minutes. Best of all, it’s called the Hillbilly Homewrecker. BB called it a “weapon of cardiovascular mass destruction”.
Mary’s CRON Diary has a nice piece on dealing with “Bad” Food.
We had a little chat about not eating bad food. I said that it’s easiest to think of it as “not food”. At some point, in the first year, I found myself going down the grocery store aisles, saying “not food”, “not food”, as I passed by cookies and potato chips. This food was dead to me as “food”. It was as inedible for me as exotic foreign cuisine is for many people.
Good perspective, as it takes away the sense of deprivation.
OK, this is just scary. The Sun Herald gives us Who We Are: The Land of Big Buyers, which outlines the top 100 purchases by Australians (that is, the products that make the most money in Aussie supermarkets), presented in story form. Look at the food choices (along with the other choices, like spraying weekly with bug spray).
For lunch Julie makes herself a can of Campbell’s. Jessica has an Uncle Toby’s muesli bar and a couple of squares of Cadbury’s. When he gets some from school Ben has a packet of Smith’s and a glass of Milo. When she gets home from work, Jessica has two Tim Tams and a can of Diet Coke. Julie’s afternoon tea is Arnott’s Shapes.
And:
For dinner, Julie makes a sauce with Leggo’s tomato paste, McCain frozen peas and John West tuna, to put over San Remo rigatoni. Michael drinks a can of VB, Julie has a glass of Jacob’s Creek chardonnay. For dessert they eat Goulburn Valley tinned fruit with Peter’s icecream.
Fresh food? Whole foods? Apparently, this fictional family says “pass”.
The authors of the study showed that by the time we end adolescence, our number of adipocytes has been set. Heavy people begin adulthood with more fat cells, and lighter people with fewer, and the numbers won’t change as we age or as we become more obese or leaner. The only thing that does change, if we gain or lose weight, is how plump with fat each cell becomes. Meanwhile, however, even though the total adipocyte number remains constant, the cells themselves don’t just sit there getting bigger and smaller. Instead, they constantly turn over. Whether you are heavy or lean, losing weight or gaining it, the same rule applies—every year about 10 percent of your body’s fat cells die, and they are replaced by the same number of new ones.
This would appear to help explain why fat children become fat adults, and the importance of good diet early on.
Food Matters, an upcoming Australian documentary, looks like it’s going to be great. Here’s their blurb:
With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what’s wrong with our malnourished bodies, it’s no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide ‘Sickness Industry’ and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for curing disease naturally.
Here’s the trailer:
The web site has good info on it as well. Check it out.
