Seth's Blog

Years ago I had lunch with a woman whose father ran a chain of weight-loss clinics. They were very successful and he was often invited to give talks. He never accepted these invitations, his daughter said, because he was seriously overweight — like 300 pounds.

I was reminded of this by Tara Parker-Pope’s recent New York Times Magazine article “The Fat Trap”. Parker-Pope tells us she is “at least 60 pounds” overweight, a bit of brave honesty for which I give her credit. I give her less credit for unskeptically quoting expert after expert — her article is essentially a review of expert opinion. If these experts are as wonderful and accurate as she says (by repeating their ideas), why is she 60 pounds overweight?

She never answers this question. She doesn’t even seem to ask it. However, someone else asks it. “The Fat Trap” includes this:

In most modern cultures  . . . to be fat is to be perceived as weak-willed and lazy. It’s also just embarrassing. Once, at a party, I met a well-respected writer who knew my work as a health writer. “You’re not at all what I expected,” she said, eyes widening. The man I was dating, perhaps trying to help, finished the thought. “You thought she’d be thinner, right?” he said. I wanted to disappear, but the woman was gracious. “No,” she said, casting a glare at the man and reaching to warmly shake my hand. “I thought you’d be older.”

I already knew it was “just embarrassing” to be fat. What’s interesting is that the story that follows this unremarkable idea doesn’t support it.  Her date wasn’t saying she’s fat. Sixty pounds overweight is not surprisingly fat. The “well-respected writer” can’t possibly have been surprised simply by that. Her date knows this. He’s bringing up something that puzzles him (“if you know so much about health, why are you fat?”), a reasonable question. By “you thought she’d be thinner, right?” he means “you thought, because of her job, she’d be thinner, right?” Parker-Pope and her editor don’t notice this.

Parker-Pope continued to reshape reality in an interview she gave, which included the following:

Q. What were your hopes in writing “The Fat Trap”?
A. My hope was that people would leave the article feeling informed and empowered. . . . [I got the story idea talking] with Dr. Michael Rosenbaum at Columbia about the science of weight loss. . . .  [He told me what dieters already know:] that most people who are fat, are going to stay fat. . . . The truth is: Once you’ve gained weight, it’s really, really hard for most people to lose weight and keep it off.

Is she sure this “truth” is empowering? To me it sounds discouraging.

The speed of the obesity epidemic — 30 years ago, Americans were much thinner — implies that the obesity epidemic has an environmental cause. Genes don’t change that fast. Something about the environment — something that controls weight — has changed. Not exercise. Thirty years ago, Americans probably exercised less than now. It is likely that something they ate kept them thin, without trying. Parker-Pope fails to understand this. Or at least failed to ask the experts she spoke to about it. What about the environment has changed? she should have asked. If I were her, I’d be angry. The obesity epidemic is 30 years old! Thirty f—ing years! Why is it taking so long to figure out the cause?

The length of the obesity epidemic reflects research failure. Against her own self-interest, she doesn’t grasp this. At the end of “The Fat Trap”, like a brainwashing victim,  she says:

I do, ultimately, blame myself for allowing my weight to get out of control.

I disagree. She should not blame herself for not knowing how to stay thin — hardly anyone knows. No, her failure is journalistic: (a) not grasping that the obesity epidemic must be due to changes in what we eat (lots of people understand this), (b) not grasping this means there must be a way to be almost effortlessly thin (in the 1970s  people were much thinner with little effort), and, above all, (c) not confronting the experts she interviews. Her insensitive date spoke an uncomfortable truth. Now she is failing to ask uncomfortable questions (why is it taking so long?) Much worse.

My theory of weight control says the crucial environmental change that caused the obesity epidemic was increased consumption of foods that produce very strong (= very fattening) smell-calorie associations. To produce a very strong smell-calorie association, a food must (a) have a strong smell (a strong “flavor”), (b) have quickly digested calories (e.g., a high glycemic index), and (c) have exactly the same smell each time. All three features, especially the third, are much more true of factory food, fast food, and junk food than of handmade food. Typical food processing almost always increases flavor (e.g., add spices) and speeds digestion (e.g., cooking). Factory and chain restaurant food processing produces much less variable flavor than ordinary human food processing. Exactly when the obesity epidemic started, there was a big shift toward factory and chain restaurant food. One reason was microwave ovens. Microwave entrees taste exactly the same each time. Another reason was an increase in eating at chain restaurants. The Shangri-La Diet goes into more detail.

At the end of “The Fat Trap” is this:

All the evidence suggests that it’s going to be very, very difficult for me to reduce my weight permanently.

No, not all the evidence. Alex Chernavsky used the Shangri-La Diet to lose 25 pounds and has kept it off easily and apparently permanently.

Alex Chernavsky, who often comments here, has updated his Shangri-La Diet (SLD) page. It now shows his weight over four years: two years before he started SLD and two years that he has been doing it.

Before he started SLD he was slowly gaining weight. After he started SLD, he went from 220 pounds (BMI = 32) to 193 pounds. He slowly gained a few pounds. Then (on my advice) he added a tablespoon of nose-clipped coconut butter and the steady climb stopped. Ffor about nine months has been steady at 195  pounds (BMI = 28). In other words, there is no sign that he is regaining the lost weight.

Because Alex has added a lot of omega-3 to his diet (via flaxseed oil), I’m sure his health has improved in other ways. Because he is a vegan, he had no interest in a conventional (Atkins) low-carb diet.

Alex reminded me that a doctor named Quigley left the following comment:

I’ve tried to find data that your diet works for SUSTAINED weight reduction in a study that would be applicable to a generalizable population. As you know, temporary weight loss is relatively easy. Sustained weight loss (wt loss > 2 yrs), is hard. If your diet can do it, I’d prescribe it every day.

 

• Interview with me on Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Locarb
• This article about natto helped its author win a prize for best newspaper food column
• great QS talk about self-measurement by John Sumser. “It all started when I quit smoking. Bad idea. Since I quit smoking in 2004, every quarter for 7 years it has rained shit on me.”
• In a QS talk, I compare the Quantified Self movement and the paleo movement.
• Chinese high-school students in America: Not what was promised. Lack of “rigor” has benefits, as I have blogged: “Dismayed by the school’s [poor] college placement record, Chen considered transferring. Instead, he began to enjoy himself. Because his courses were undemanding, he had time for friends and outside interests. He took four Advanced Placement tests on his own.“I’ve developed my personality a lot,” Chen said. “Everything turned out for the best.””
• If you read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, a pro-vegetarian book, you may remember the big role played by some casein experiments with rats. Rats that ate a low-casein (= low animal-protein) diet were supposedly in better health than rats that ate a high-casein (= high animal-protein) diet. In this article Chris Masterjohn shows how misleading that was. “One thing is certain: low-protein diets depressed normal growth, increased the susceptibility to many toxins, killed toxin-exposed animals earlier, induced fatty liver, and increased the development of pre-cancerous lesions when fed during the initiation period of chemical carcinogenesis.”

Thanks to Janet Chang.

Has someone been reading The Shangri-La Diet (2006)? In 2009, the Coca-Cola Company began offering new Coke machines (Coca-Cola Freestyle) that are close to what I proposed in the last chapter. They produce great diversity of flavor because you can mix many different flavors. Your soft drink, with or without sugar, can be different each time.

According to this curiously-worded article, they did not get the idea from me:

The self-serve fountains — which represent a complete departure from anything The Coca-Cola Company has offered previously — were in development for more than four years prior to launching in 2010.

In The Shangri-La Diet, I proposed adding random flavoring to your food so that it tastes different each time. Someone named this crazy spicing. Nose-clippng is much easier but less socially-acceptable.

Thanks to Phil Alexander.

• The Shangri-La Diet: still too good to be true. It was my dream — and maybe every scientist’s dream — to discover something (a) useful and (b) counter-intuitive, the more surprising the better. It did not occur to me that (a) and (b) conflict. I think that more surprising discoveries are eventually more useful (as logic suggests), but it takes much longer.
• Marisa Tomei wants to play Jane Jacobs. “I love that she saved Greenwich Village.” When she does, perhaps Robert Caro will post the unpublished Jane Jacobs chapter of The Power Broker.
• Symposium on The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
• Did you know that Mindy Kaling’s amusing article in this week’s New Yorker is an excerpt from a forthcoming book? Neither did I. Likewise, the recent Murakami story Town of Cats was from a forthcoming book. The New Yorker, unlike other magazines, never identifies book excerpts. This  is unfortunate because doing so would help both writers (sell books) and readers (find books to read). For more criticism of  The New Yorker, see the great book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

This person has been doing the Shangri-La Diet (SLD) for two weeks:

The appetite suppression is now strong. Yesterday I went to dinner at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants. Ordered my favorite meal there.  I could only eat about 1/3 of my favorite dish and a few chips and salsa. . . .. That is nothing short of amazing. The best part is: it satisfied me. I would normally eat the whole meal and not be satisfied, I would be able to eat more. I wouldn’t normally eat more, but I could eat more. Not this time. Didn’t want more.

He eats about 700 calories/day nose-clipped — that’s his version of the diet. Before he started the diet he was gaining 10 pounds every year. When he started SLD, he weighed 250 pounds at 5 feet 10 inches tall (BMI =  36).

If I were to write The Shangri-La Diet all over again I would emphasize nose-clipping. You can easily eat lots of smell-free yet healthy calories nose-clipped and get great appetite suppression, as in this case. That’s one reason the book is short. I wanted to get the idea out in the world soon, so other people could help improve it. That’s what happened. Nose-clipping was someone else’s idea (Gary Skaleski, 2006), not mine. It was a better application of my theory and early findings (e.g., sugar water causes weight loss) than I was capable of. Now, thanks to the Internet, I can find out what happens when people do the new improved version.

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I started this process on or around the 3rd week of July. Not sure of the exact date lets say 7-23-11. Weight was 228 lbs, blood pressure maxing out at 160/100. Today (9-30-11) my weight is 195 lbs and the bp is below 120/80.

So in 10 weeks I have dropped 33 lbs about 3.3 pounds a week or half a pound a day. My goal weight is 175. I have done the canola oil twice a day. No breakfast and mixing in salad and fruit for lunch and dinner with 6 ounces of meat, seafood or chicken. Some carbs but not a lot. I have not had any cravings to overeat or to snack on junk food and I just stopped drinking sodas for no reason that I can explain and I don’t feel hungry after meals.

People at the gym must think I am sick because I am losing weight and don’t do very much. I lift 20 minutes to maintain what I have and ran twice in the past 10 weeks for a total of maybe 3 miles. I have started doing more abs now that you might be able to see them when all the fat is gone.

In 30 years of dieting this is the easiest thing I have ever done. I don’t understand why this isn’t the number one diet in the world.

Let it not be because I don’t blog about it. Someone else, who started at 321 pounds, has lost 67 pounds in 8 months. Graph here.

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I have just been doing the flaxseed oil for a few days and I am experiencing a dramatic decrease of my arthritis pain! It is a wonderful benefit. . . . My doctor friend who told me about the SLD told me that the flaxseed oil would help my arthritis as well, but I never expected anything this dramatic or quick!

A friend of mine noticed something similar: his sore back stopped hurting shortly after he started taking flaxseed oil. If he skipped a day or so, the pain returned. Update: Reminded of this, he said, “I had forgotten all about that. When people ask me how my back is I tell them it never bothers me anymore since I stopped going to the gym.”

Update 2: At first the arthritis sufferer took 4 1200-mg capsules 3 times/day — that is, 12 capsules per day. Then she increased her dosage to 6 capsules 3 times/day (= 18 capsules/day).

Update 3. ” Yesterday, I was off to work and could not find my oil capsules.  I didn’t have time to look for them, so I resigned myself to doing sugar water during the day.  . . .  I did notice a small but significant worsening of the pain in my knees.  When I got home, I found the capsules, and began taking them again.  By the time I woke up this morning, I noted that my knees are again feeling better.”

A new longitudinal study finds:

Despite conventional advice to eat less fat, weight loss was greatest among people who ate more yogurt and nuts, including peanut butter, over each four-year period. . . .

That yogurt, among all foods, was most strongly linked to weight loss was the study’s most surprising dietary finding, the researchers said. Participants who ate more yogurt [than the average for all participants?] lost an average of 0.82 pound every four years.

Why might this be?

Yogurt and peanut butter are both unusual foods. Yogurt is strange because unflavored yogurt has little or no smell. It tastes good for other reasons: strong sourness, creaminess, and coolness. People are also pushed to eat it not only by how pleasant it is to eat but by the thought that it is good for them. Most foods, in the form that we eat them, have a smell. I explain the yogurt results by saying that yogurt consumption replaced consumption of foods with stronger smells.

Peanut butter is unusual because when I was visiting publishers to sell The Shangri-La Diet, I met a woman who told me she had lost weight simply by eating peanut butter — that is, by adding peanut butter to the rest of her diet, making no other changes. I think she ate about 3 tablespoons per day. This predisposed her to think there might be something to my ideas. No one has ever told me such a story about another food. If peanut butter has a smell, it’s really weak. It’s pleasant to eat because of fat content and texture. When I was a boy, my mom made me peanut butter sandwiches (no jam) for school lunch. I never came to like them. This implies I never learned a smell-calorie association. The bread must have supplied a strong fast calorie signal so this implies that the peanut butter generated little or no smell signal.

Thanks to Eri Gentry.

This shows Justin Wehr‘s weight over two years. He is 26 years old and 6 feet 2 inches tall — at 140 pounds, very thin. The record begins with a switch to a vegan diet. Over three months he lost seven pounds but gradually regained the lost weight, even though his diet didn’t change. In the middle he suddenly gained five pounds on a trip to Alaska and Seattle and then gradually lost it.

He describes his diet like this:

My diet was pretty average Midwestern meat and potatoes sort of thing prior to going vegan-ish, and I emphasize the ish. I’ve been vegan-ish since I started tracking weight, meaning that I don’t buy meat or dairy products at the store, but I’ll happily eat whatever sounds good off of a restaurant menu or whatever is being served when I’m eating at someone else’s place. I intentionally keep my diet very boring. I eat an absurd amount of peanuts and raisins, I estimate in the range of 600 – 900 calories per day. Besides peanuts and raisins, most of my calories come from lentils, frozen vegetables, and bread + olive oil. I drink almost exclusively water, with a few swigs of OJ most days, and have a glass of wine or a bottle of beer on occasion.

The features of this data that interest me are (a) weight loss when he changed what he ate (first three months) and (b) gradual regain of the lost weight (after that). Few theories of weight control can explain the regain. However, the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet can. It says that he initially lost weight because he shifted to foods with relatively weak flavor-calorie associations — weak because the foods were relatively new. As he ate them again and again, the flavor-calorie associations got stronger and this raised his set point.