Digging around I  found these nuggets…

Fat chance of tough love on the obese – Health – NZ Herald News …  Finally, an expert on human nutrition brave enough to tell us what we don’t want to hear …

Cindy here: article is opinionated, totally non-PC – and sensible! It backs up those good old sayings: ‘You are what you eat’ and ‘You reap what you sow’… (here’s my take on this story)

Row erupts over lap-band surgery to combat obesity | The Courier-Mail … OBESITY has become a financial battleground, with heated debate over who will pay for the soaring burden of the overweight on the public purse. This week, the parliamentary report Weighing It Up described obesity as “one of the last bastions of discrimination in our community”. Estimating thousands of morbidly obese people last year cost Australia $58.2 billion, the report urged the Federal Government to recognise obesity as a chronic disease and provide taxpayer-funded treatments – including lapbanding surgery …

Cindy: The numbers may stack up – saving so much on each person who has the operation – but people aren’t numbers. Who’s to say they won’t re-gain the weight?

The Human Condition : Stop Doing Sit-Ups – Why Crunches Don’t Work … Of course, it won’t matter how muscular your torso is if your body fat is too high. The best way to build strong, visible abs isn’t through repeated sit-ups, but by engaging in circuit training that has you working your entire core while you’re burning calories – and to keep yourself disciplined during meals. “If you want to burn your fat mass, make sure you have a combination of weight training and cardiovascular, but 90 percent of good abs is your nutrition …

Cindy: Great – I always hated sit-ups!

Multivitamins linked to younger ‘biological age’: Study

Cindy: Before you rush out to buy some multi-vitamins, read the story. Even the authors say that it could simply be that people who take multivitamin supplements are more healthy anyway.

Why Restaurants Make You Fat – Page 1 – The Daily Beast … Restaurant Syndrome: 1. Eat out. 2. Eat too much. 3. Feel bad. 4. Repeat. The Daily Beast’s Susan B. Roberts on why you do it—and five ways to minimize …

Great story from the USA with some practical tips. But I’m not sure how my family would react if I ‘accidentally’ spilled water on the chips!

Push for nutrition labels on junk food menus | The Courier-Mail … FAST food restaurants could soon be forced to display nutrition labels on menus, as part of the Rudd Government’s crackdown …

Cindy: Hmm… if I was hanging out for a burger and fries I don’t think I’d bother trying to work out which was the healthiest.

Men roasted in the kitchen | The Courier-Mail … ONE in three Australian men barely puts a foot in the kitchen and when he does he tends to be a monotonous cook trying to hog the limelight and demand movie star-like attention. That scathing description has been served up by corporate food producer, Nestle, in a new survey of …

Remember Boyd Swinburn? He used to be the head of the New Zealand Heart Foundation – and a great advocate for healthy eating. Well my post on whether food or exercise has the most effect on weight was sparked by this recent study he conducted …

Increased food intake alone explains the increase in body weight in the United States

Amsterdam, the Netherlands: New research that uses an innovative approach to study, for the first time, the relative contributions of food and exercise habits to the development of the obesity epidemic has concluded that the rise in obesity in the United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased energy intake.

How much of the obesity epidemic has been caused by excess calorie intake and how much by reductions in physical activity has been long debated and while experts agree that making it easier for people to eat less and exercise more are both important for combating it, they debate where the public health focus should be.

A study presented on Friday at the European Congress on Obesity is the first to examine the question of the proportional contributions to the obesity epidemic by combining metabolic relationships, the laws of thermodynamics, epidemiological data and agricultural data.

“There have been a lot of assumptions that both reduced physical activity and increased energy intake have been major drivers of the obesity epidemic. Until now, nobody has proposed how to quantify their relative contributions to the rise in obesity since the 1970s. This study demonstrates that the weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. It appears that changes in physical activity played a minimal role,” said the study’s leader, Professor Boyd Swinburn, chair of population health and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Australia.

Although the study looked at the USA, we can assume it’s similar for NZ and Australia.

The scientists started by testing 1,399 adults and 963 children to determine how many calories their bodies burn in total under free-living conditions. The test is the most accurate measure of total calorie burning in real-life situations.

Once they had determined each person’s calorie burning rate, Swinburn and his colleagues were able to calculate how much adults needed to eat in order to maintain a stable weight and how much children needed to eat in order to maintain a normal growth curve.

They then worked out how much Americans were actually eating, using national food supply data (the amount of food produced and imported, minus the amount exported, thrown away and used for animals or other non-human uses) from the 1970s and the early 2000s.

The researchers used their findings to predict how much weight they would expect Americans to have gained over the 30-year period studied if food intake were the only influence. They used data from a nationally representative survey (NHANES) that recorded the weight of Americans in the 1970s and early 2000s to determine the actual weight gain over that period.

“If the actual weight increase was the same as what we predicted, that meant that food intake was virtually entirely responsible. If it wasn’t, that meant changes in physical activity also played a role,” Swinburn said. “If the actual weight gain was higher than predicted, that would suggest that a decrease in physical activity played a role.”

The researchers found that in children, the predicted and actual weight increase matched exactly, indicating that the increases in energy intake alone over the 30 years studied could explain the weight increase.

“For adults, we predicted that they would be 10.8 kg heavier, but in fact they were 8.6 kg heavier. That suggests that excess food intake still explains the weight gain, but that there may have been increases in physical activity over the 30 years that have blunted what would otherwise have been a higher weight gain,” Swinburn said.

“To return to the average weights of the 1970s, we would need to reverse the increased food intake of about 350 calories a day for children (about one can of fizzy drink and a small portion of French fries) and 500 calories a day for adults (about one large hamburger),” Swinburn said. “Alternatively, we could achieve similar results by increasing physical activity by about 150 minutes a day of extra walking for children and 110 minutes for adults, but realistically, although a combination of both is needed, the focus would have to be on reducing calorie intake.”

He emphasized that physical activity should not be ignored as a contributor to reducing obesity and should continue to be promoted because of its many other benefits, but that expectations regarding what can be achieved with exercise need to be lowered and public health policy shifted more toward encouraging people to eat less.

I completely agree with Boyd’s comments: both exercise and food are important but not too many of us can fit in a two hour walk each day. We don’t need deprivation diets, just some simple swaps – water instead of fizzy and sushi instead of burgers and chips. Let’s hope the school canteens who made healthy food changes to meet the last government’s guidelines continue to promote these foods. We can’t force people to eat healthy food but we can certainly make it easier for them to choose these foods.

What do you think?

Related:

Overeating to blame for U.S. obesity epidemic – Lack of Exercise is Secondary (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)

Overeating, not sedentary living, to blame for obesity epidemic (nationalpost.com)

His family were worried, his workmates were worried. But Charlie (name changed) wasn’t worried – at least not worried enough to do anything about it. Sure he was a bit overweight, sure he could only sing a couple of songs at church before he had to sit down, out of breath, but he was doing fine.

“You are doing the nutrition course,” his boss ordered him. Reluctantly he came along to the ten week course to learn about healthy eating. It doesn’t happen to everyone but for Charlie, the timing was right and the light went on! In the first session he realised that his breakfast was not that great. Two French sticks split open and filled with thickly sliced butter – his workmates said it was like thickly sliced cheese. He decided to give up the butter and boy did he look miserable the next week!

Habits and taste preferences take about three weeks to change so by about week 4 Charlie was looking much happier. By the end of the course he looked alive – his face glowing with life, not sweat.

At the end of the course he stood up and spoke to everyone. “Please allow me to preach a little,” he said. “It says in the Bible ‘My people perish for lack of knowledge’. That is what happened to me – and is happening to many of our people. I didn’t realise what all that butter was doing to my body – or what all that soft drink was doing to my grand-kids. Now I eat two pieces of wholemeal toast for breakfast, not two French sticks.” He patted his greatly diminished tummy. “Now I can stand up in church and play guitar for three hours without getting breathless, and my wife is very happy too.”

Charlie was probably eating about 100 grams of butter a day. When he quit the butter he slashed his kilojoule intake by at least 3000kJ (700 calories) a day. That’s about a third of his daily kJ requirement. He started walking a bit more but nothing too extreme. Diet or exercise?  In Charlie’s case it’s pretty obvious which had the biggest impact.

I normally do quite a lot of exercise and yes, it allows me to eat a bit more, but not that much more. For the past six weeks I have not been allowed to go for walks or runs. That’s about 24km running and 3-4 hours walking a week that I am not doing. You would think I might have ballooned out into a big blimp. But no. Despite massively reducing my exercise, I have only had to reduce my food intake a little to maintain my weight. I just can’t get away with the extra muffin or naughty snack, especially if it’s after dinner.

So when the NZ Herald today published a story about diet being more important than exercise for weight loss, I tend to agree. Exercise is important too – to build and maintain muscle strength, to keep your metabolic rate up, to help you look firm, not flabby, to help reduce high blood pressure, to give your heart a work-out and to produce some mood-enhancing endorphins. But as Charlie and I have both discovered, cutting back on a few unnecessary extras like butter, cookies and cake is all it takes to maintain or lose weight.

Follow-up post here.