When it comes to healthy eating, there is no silver bullet.
Soda, candy and fast food are often blamed for the rising rates of obesity in America and, while eating any one high-calorie or high-sugar food to excess is obviously unhealthy and will not help you lose weight, a major new study found that consumption of these foods is not related to body mass index in 95 percent of the population. The report was published by the Food & Brand Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. “While a diet of chocolate bars and cheeseburgers washed down with a Coke is inadvisable from a nutritional standpoint, these foods are not likely to be a leading cause of obesity,” the study said.
Underweight Americans actually consumed more soda and sweet snacks than average-weight individuals, while overweight, obese, severely obese and morbidly obese individuals consumed less soda, sweet snacks and salty snacks than average-weight individuals. Morbidly obese people (with a BMI of 44.9 or more) ate fewer sweet snacks and salty snacks. Oddly, they did eat 50 percent more French fries than average-weight individuals. The researchers say people shouldn’t deprive themselves of their favorite food because that sacrifice is unlikely to be related to their weight — unless, that is, their favorite food is French fries.
So what’s the culprit? Calories in, calories out. The amount you eat versus the amount of exercise you get. Americans are eating over 500 calories more every day than they did four decades ago: 2,544 calories per day in 2010 versus 2,039 in 1970. And there are some other culprits — aside from French fries — but they exist across a range of meals. The number of calories consumed every day spiked for grains such as white bread (409 calories in 1970 versus 582 calories in 2010), added oil and dairy fats (346 versus 589 calories) and added sugars (333 versus 367 calories).
“This means that diets and health campaigns aimed at reducing and preventing obesity may be off track if they hinge on demonizing specific foods,” says David Just, professor and director of graduate studies in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University, and co-author of the study. “If we want real change, we need to look at the overall diet, and physical activity. Narrowly targeting junk foods is not just ineffective, it may be self-defeating as it distracts from the real underlying causes of obesity.” Overall diet obviously plays a role and, according to a recent study, residents in some US states are more obese than others.
The latest Cornell University study, which was published in the October edition of the journal Obesity Science & Practice, analyzed the consumption of these foods by nearly 6,000 people from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “National Household and Nutrition Examination Survey,” and cross-referenced this data to their body mass index, used as a measure of obesity. Adults with a body mass index (which calculates weight in relation to height and gender) of 25 to 29.9 are considered overweight, while individuals with a BMI of 30 or more are considered obese.
Portion control is critical, says Julie Barnes, a New York-based clinical psychologist. And dining out (unless they are taking a doggy bag home) is one way Americans give up control over their portions. On days when people eat out, they consume an average of 200 calories more than when they eat at home, according to a study in the journal Public Health Nutrition. And butter sales in the US were up 14 percent in 2014 from a year earlier, according to a new report — “Fat: The New Health Paradigm” — by the Credit Suisse Research Institute in Switzerland.
It's a good article but I don't agree with all of it. First of all, Obese people have so much extra fat there metabolism is working very slow. They burn the very minimal amount of calories because their body is spending most of their energy trying to keep all the extra fat alive and Obese people are normally less active then other people. Also their diet consists mostly of store bought food or restaurant food which are both loaded with bad fats. It's only very recently that Trans Fats were outlawed but that doesn't mean that all restaurant can't use Trans Fats. So I believe the only way you'll get obese people to lose weight is to get them to eat healthy.
This article originally appeared on Marketwatch.
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