The Real Reason We're Gaining Weight

[Over43]

This came through on Yahoo! today:

http://health.yahoo.net/articles/obesit ... overeating

[BrightAngel]

Great article, Thanks for sharing it.

[Joyofsix]

Thanks

[Sienna]

Young recommends sticking with three meals a day and choosing healthy snacks (such as fruits and vegetables) rather than processed foods. "And keep your portions in check," she says.

I'm all about fruits and vegetables being healthy, but has anyone else wondered if this mixed message is part of what has led to the increase in snacking?

"Stick to 3 meals a day, oh but healthy snacks are ok" seems fundamentally to be a slipperier slope than "Stick to 3 meals a day, oh and healthy food is good, but try to eat it at those 3 meals instead of grazing throughout the day"

And I have experienced it first hand. When people ask me about NoS, they seem pretty on board with the no seconds and no sweets rules. Even if it maybe doesn't sound like a lot of fun, they seem to easily accept them as reasonable.

But the no snacks rule? But apples are healthy. And almonds are good protein. And why on earth would a diet limit how many carrot sticks I can have? Surely those snacks are okay! What? You can't even have healthy snacks? But that can't be right.

But a few healthy snacks a day adds up.
An apple between breakfast and lunch: 100 calories
A handful of almonds to get you through the afternoon at work: 160 calories
A few carrot sticks while you are waiting for/prepping dinner: 50 calories
A cup of blueberries after dinner: 80 calories
A day of healthy snacking: 390 additional calories!

And that's healthy snacks. I know more than one person who started with healthy snacks and then started to add dip for the carrot sticks. And then switched to chocolate covered almonds. And so on.

[sheepish]

I've gone through phases of keeping a record of things I didn't eat because of No S - at first I did this for motivation but now I mostly do it for interest value. There were two things that stood out. The first was boring and cliched - how much I was eating in the office for "social" reasons, biscuits at meetings, colleague's birthday treats, that kind of thing. The second was quite surprising to me - fruit. I love fruit. I can just hover up fruit. And I did. No joke, I think one of the things that was making me gain weight was fruit. Even though it's healthy, if you eat it in the quantities that I did (still do on S days!), it can make you fat.

So, I absolutely agree with Sienna on "healthy" snacks.

[SpiritSong]

Young recommends sticking with three meals a day and choosing healthy snacks (such as fruits and vegetables) rather than processed foods. "And keep your portions in check," she says.

I'm all about fruits and vegetables being healthy, but has anyone else wondered if this mixed message is part of what has led to the increase in snacking?

I agree! I was going to share the article link on my FB page, and then I got to the end and the "healthy snacks" part.

[Strawberry Roan]

I agree that healthy snacks can be one's downfall.

Cheese sticks, pretzels, an apple/orange/banana, yogurt, a boiled egg, etc. Nothing that a person would look at and say,

Oh I couldn't possibly eat that because I am trying to eat healthier, yet it could very well be what is causing their problems. I now try to incorporate my healthy "snacks" into part of my three meals a day. It is amazing how mindless I use to be when I would eat because I thought it was well, "good for me".

[Strawberry Roan]

I love that most of the ads on the page are for snacks

[oolala53]

Does anybody else think that average of 4.9 for meals and snacks is low? That would mean less than 5 eating events a day, and I think a lot of people have gotten used to popping food in even more often between meals than that, though each time may not be a "whole" snack. And when people are out and about, they're not eating carrot sticks. Heck, most of them aren't eating carrot sticks when they're in!

[planner lady]

Sienna, when I have mentioned NOS to people I get the same response you do. They're okay with the rules about no seconds or no sweets but heaven forbid we shouldn't be allowed to snack!

I mentioned NOS to my accountability partner and she flipped out. She didn't think it was a good idea at all. Why does everybody think you'll die if you don't have snacks? I asked her to look at the website so she could see what it was about and maybe understand it better. She came back and said it would be fine but she was clearly skeptical about whether it would work. She's a long-time dieter and long-time dieters absolutely tend to be negative about it. I was pretty discouraged.

[milliem]

My OH is quite skeptical about the 'no snacks' thing and cites the stuff about eating 5-6 times a day to keep your metabolism up. For him it probably works ok as he doesn't need to lose weight, works out regularly and in fact is trying to bulk up muscle-wise.

For someone like me who needs to lose weight and doesn't really exercise i really doubt that eating 5-6 times a day is necessary.

Also, I don't think that NoS is particularly compatible with snacking. If you are doing a diet that measures and counts everything that you put in your mouth, you could probably keep track of your snacking calories so that you don't end up over-eating. But I think that most of us are here because that type of 'diet' doesn't work for us long term. The snacking culture is a pretty recent thing, humans have survived for a long time without 'needing' to eat a bunch of grapes or a 'diet snack bar' every 2 hours!!

[Joyofsix]

I would say the pervasiveness of the attitude that snacks are necessary are a product of some pretty effective advertising. Stumbling on No S has made me think back to my grandparents. They just didn't snack. They ate hearty farm meals but making a snack other than possibly popcorn on a weekend was too much trouble. They also never really watched to much TV. Connection?

[Bella75]

Where did the idea of snacking come from anyway? How did this come to be seen as part of a healthy lifestyle?

Honestly, most of the time when I snack it is not because my body has reached true hunger. I usually just have a craving to put something in my mouth and at best I am maybe on the cusp of true hunger. It would probably have benefited me more to just skip the snack and let my body get to the real hunger stage.

[DaveMc]

Thanks for the link, that seems like a conceptual extension of the earlier study Reinhard often cites in support of the proposition that most of the increase in eating comes in the form of snacks. This more recent study comes to a similar conclusion.

PLoS (Public Library of Science), where this new study was published, is an open-access journal, meaning there's no subscription required to access it. If you want to see it, here you go:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/inf ... ed.1001050

They have quite a nice Editor's Summary where the main points of the paper are summarized in very clear, non-technical terms.

EDIT: In fact, why don't I just go ahead and include that summary, here, as a public service?

Editors' Summary

Background

Since the mid 1970s, the proportion of people who are obese (people who have an unhealthy proportion of body fat) has increased sharply in many countries. In the US, the proportion has doubled since 1980, and a third of all US adults—more than 72 million people—are now classified as obese. That is, they have a body mass index (BMI, an indicator of body fat calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared) of greater than 30. Compared to people with a healthy weight (a BMI between 18.5 and 25), obese individuals and overweight people (who have a BMI between 25 and 29.9) have an increased risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and stroke and tend to die younger. People become unhealthily fat by consuming food and drink that contains more energy (kilocalories, or kcal) than they need for their daily activities. In these circumstances, the body converts the excess energy into fat stores.

Why Was This Study Done?

Because obesity causes illness and premature death, it is essential that the obesity epidemic is halted and, if possible, reversed. But before public health policies can be formulated to prevent obesity, we need to understand what is driving the epidemic. Many experts believe that increases in the total daily intake of energy from food and drink, irrespective of changes in physical activity, are enough to explain the observed increases in weight at the population level since the 1970s. But why has total energy intake increased? Three main causes have been proposed—an increase in the frequency of meals and snacks (eating occasions), increases in the typical food and drink portion sizes, and changes in the energy density of the foods and drinks consumed. In this study, the researchers use data from US food surveys to examine the relative contributions made by these three variables to changes in daily total energy intake between 1977 and 2006.

What Did the Researchers Do and Find?

The researchers used a technique called “mathematical decomposition†to analyze cross-sectional, nationally representative dietary intake data for US adults collected in food surveys undertaken in 1977–78, 1989–91, 1994–98, and 2003–06. Cross-sectional surveys examine a group of people at a single time point; food surveys collect information about all the food and drink consumed by individuals over a 24-hour period. The average daily total energy intake increased from 1,803 kcal in 1977–78 to 2,374 kcal in 2003–06, an increase of 570 kcal. In the last decade of the study alone, the average daily energy intake increased by 229 kcal. Between 1977–78 and 1989–91, changes in portion size accounted for an annual increase in the daily total energy intake of nearly 15 kcal, whereas changes in the number of eating occasions accounted for an increase of just 4 kcal. By contrast, between 1994–98 and 2003–06, changes in the number of eating occasions accounted for an annual increase in daily total energy intake of 39 kcal, whereas changes in portion size accounted for an annual decrease in daily energy intake of 1 kcal. Changes in the energy density of food and drink accounted for a slight decrease in daily total energy intake over the 30-year study period.

What Do These Findings Mean?

These findings indicate that, although the energy density of food and drink, portion size, and the number of meals and snacks per day have all contributed to changes in the average daily total energy intake of US adults over the past 30 years, increases in the number of eating occasions and in portion size have accounted for most of the change. The accuracy of these findings may be affected by the use of self-reporting in the food surveys (people tend to underestimate the calorie content of “junk†food) and by the mathematical formula used to assess the relative contribution of each component of daily energy intake. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that efforts to prevent obesity among US adults (and among adults in other developed countries) should focus on reducing the number of meals and snacks people consume during the day as a way to reduce the energy imbalance caused by recent increases in energy intake.

Some of these numbers are quite startling: an average increase of 570 kcal ("food calories") per day over the past thirty years!? Using 3500 kcal per pound of fat, you can work out how much weight you'd gain in a year if you ate an extra 570 kcal per day: 570x365/3500 = 60 pounds! If that's anywhere near accurate (and the self-reporting nature of the surveys might well mean that it's a low-ball estimate, given that people tend to underestimate how much they eat), it's no wonder that North Americans have put on so much weight.

There's another interesting pattern in the data: from the late 70s to the early 90s, people started eating much bigger portions, but not much more often per day. Then from the mid-90s to the 00s, portion sizes dropped very slightly, but people started eating a *lot* more often. Thank you, snack food industry! The next time I meet some huckster claiming that I need to eat every 2.5 hours lest my metabolism become unrevved-up, I will have to resist the urge to smack them upside the head.

[finallyfull]

I think the reason people freak out about the no snacks idea is because it IS the problem. We love them, we love the freedom to munch all day, it's cheap, it's fun, we don't want to stop. To paraphrase Mr. Heston, you will have to pry these Cheetos out of my cold, dead hands! Or in this case, my dead, orange, plump fingers.

What often gets me is how many people, when advising healthy snacks as part of weight loss, suggest having cheese or nuts in between meals. Is there anything more calorie dense? I'm in full agreement on putting them on your meal plate, but to have them IN ADDITION to three full meals is terrible advice from a mathematical angle.

Also, the indignance about having fruits and vegetables as snacks is funny, really. If they are so important (and they are), why do so many of us have trouble incorporating large amounts of them into our actual meals? Why do they have to be "snacks"? I think the notion that "healthy snacks are important" is a clever cover story to help us pretend that the reason we eat snacks is for our health. This reason disappears when you realize that you can very easily get all of the fruits and vegetables into 3 meals. If I "can't" do this, then I probably have too much other crap on my plate.

[BrightAngel]

I think the reason people freak out about the no snacks idea is because it IS the problem. We love them, we love the freedom to munch all day, it's cheap, it's fun, we don't want to stop. To paraphrase Mr. Heston, you will have to pry these Cheetos out of my cold, dead hands! Or in this case, my dead, orange, plump fingers.
I think the notion that "healthy snacks are important" is a clever cover story
to help us pretend that the reason we eat snacks is for our health.
This reason disappears when you realize that you can very easily get all of the fruits and vegetables into 3 meals. If I "can't" do this, then I probably have too much other crap on my plate.

Good post !