Grocery Run

I've made it a habit whenever we go to the store now to watch what other people are buying who are in line next to me, just out of curiosity. Today there was a lady in front of us, she had no meat or protein that I could see, except for two cartons of eggs. What she did have, was two loaves of white bread, macaroni and cheese, white spaghetti noodles, among a bunch of other carb laden merchandise. She spent about $200 (that's what the mum-in-law said), I didn't see the total. I could buy a lot of meat for that, and be much more satiated than after eating all that junk. She was overweight, but not terribly so, of course, she would probably be considered obese by the BMI standard.

Behind us was a family, mother, father, and three school age kids, a boy and two girls. They appeared to be a normal weight, although they were talking about sports the kids played, so I'm assuming they are not genetically predisposed to insulin resistance and because they're lean, they play sports and burn the carbs off before they do damage. I believe it was Taubes who said in Good Calories, Bad Calories, that athletes are not thin because they're athletes, they're athletes because they're thin. For some that works well, others, it eventually stops working, which is why many people who are thin when they are young are not when they get past 40. They too had no meat or protein that I could see, except for a box of flax seed meal. They had multiple boxes of granola bars (which in my opinion are nothing more than sugar laden junk food most of the time), pop tarts, frozen bread thingies with cheese on them, snack cups of fruit, along with some other frozen pizzas and other frozen carb junk.

What did we buy? Besides some broccoli (we're making Chicken Divan again tonight, it's delish!), we bought a bunch of marked down chicken livers and ground beef, for our dogs. We decided that we have too many dogs, eight at the moment, so that we can't afford to feed them entirely meat all the time, but we decided we could supplement their dog food. Before you freak out and wonder how or why we have so many, we live in the country and seem to have a knack for accumulating unwanted and dumped dogs. The last dog we got, dug into our fence during a storm. We put up fliers and no one claimed him. We figured he was dumped and decided to keep him since he chose us LOL. One of the dogs is actually mine, the other seven are my in-laws'. My dog was also dumped, we found him at a filling station, curled up in a little ball on the pavement. People had been feeding him hot dogs, he was malnourished, and absolutely covered in fleas. He also had a hurt back. He's completely better now, after being on Previcox for some months, we were able to take him off of it, and his back seems completely better. I don't understand how people can just throw a dog away like it's nothing. But whatever, their loss is our gain.

Anyway, we currently feed them the Costco brand, which isn't terrible, since the first ingredient is chicken, but it still doesn't have enough meat in it I think. The third ingredient is rice. I'm sorry, but the ancestors of dogs, living in the paleolithic probably didn't eat much in the way of rice. They may have eaten some grains from the intestines of the animals they ate, but probably not much. On that note, hubby and I were talking about it, and we wondered if that wasn't how people came to invent bread (and subsequently settle down to get their fix of it). It's possible I suppose, that if ancient people roasted intact, the stomach of big game animals that they may have gotten something the consistency of bread if the animal were eating grains.

Cognitive Dissonance and Obesity Research

After reading about obesity in children, since it's Heart Month there's a ton of obesity articles in general going around, I got to looking for scientific journals on the subject. One of the better articles is "Obese babies and young children: an approach to paedratric management" from the British journal Paediatrics and Child Health, Volume 19, Issue 9, Sept 2009, pages 425-429.

They actually say that the "energy in/energy out" that is used to justify why people should be blamed for being overweight is "too simplistic an explanation..." They even mention insulin insensitivity (resistance) as predisposing a child to gain weight. Amazing!

And then what do they do? They go on to say that "Hormonal causes of obesity are also extraordinarily rare." and "...however, at present identifiable metabolic and hormonal causes are exceptionally rare." I'm hoping that they're excluding insulin from this, as last I checked, insulin is a hormone and is very much responsible for most people's weight problems.

Later in the article they elucidate one reason why people may not be motivated to change their lifestyle.

"Unfortunately research shows that parents too often find that health professionals (and particularly doctors and dieticians) are critical, judgemental, blame them for their child's obesity, make them feel guilty, or are dismissive."

Well no duh! Especially when most nutritionists and people in general act like it's your fault that you're fat or your kid is fat. When you're eating corn syrup and sugar from the first day of life, what do you expect to happen? This isn't their fault, it's what they're being told to eat. It's what they're being told to feed their children.

"Babies are born with a natural ‘fuel gauge’ which signals when enough has been eaten. Unfortunately this gauge is often overridden by the way children are fed, which contributes to the development of obesity."

I don't think it's the way they're being fed, I think it's what they're being fed. They still talk of limiting food intake, contradicting what they said at the beginning of the article about how "calories in/calories out" was too simplistic of an explanation. They do say to avoid juice and stick with food that are of a low glycemic index, which is good, but I think doesn't go far enough. This is cognitive dissonance, which runs rampant through the field of dietary and obesity research. I guess old habits die hard.