How fat can you get?

[Dominik D]

/i've found that being poor really helps combat obesity

Not really. Obesity in US is partially caused by the income inequality. The poorer you are, the worse food you consume, with a lot of saturated fats and low quality carbs. This builds up rather quickly. So unless by poor you mean starving to death poor - I'd have to disagree.

 

[liolio]

Not really. Obesity in US is partially caused by the income inequality. The poorer you are, the worse food you consume, with a lot of saturated fats and low quality carbs. This builds up rather quickly. So unless by poor you mean starving to death poor - I'd have to disagree.

In the US I found that the vegetable were more expensive than here in France, so was meat.
Overall everything that is healthy was more expensive in the US yet it is doable to eat for cheap, we did. The lack culture with regard to cooking and unwillingness to spend the time to cook is more responsible than junk food. Nobody force junk food into one mouth, there are also eating schedules...

It still has a lot to do with one's social condition but in a more complex way than buying power, poors are alienated from society, lacks any culture outside of mass consumption bullcrap, it shows wrt violence, relation to sex, pregnancy, etc. It is a lot worse than sub-culture it is more like some people have been going through an "aculturation" process

 

[Arwin]

Generally all over the world unhealthy food is cheaper and more readily available. The one buck hamburgers say, or white rice in China (which already has a huge overweight issue comparable to the U.S.).

But of course education and other social factors matter too - I was shocked to read that 44% of the poorest 25% in my own country (which has a relatively small differences between rich and poor) doesn't have any real friends they can rely on. It's hard to believe but it actually held up for quite many people I have met.

 

[Davros]

Noodles are pretty healthy
I can get 4 packets of these for £1

get 2 lots £2 (about $3) and you have a weeks food

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Generally all over the world unhealthy food is cheaper and more readily available. The one buck hamburgers say, or white rice in China (which already has a huge overweight issue comparable to the U.S.).

White rice doesn't have anything wrong with it. It is an excellent source of glucose. It's the choice of rice in all of Asia pretty much and I'm guessing the obesity in China has other reasons besides rice eating. If you eat too much something it's your fault, not the food's and you can eat a lot of white rice without getting obese.

edit: Just want to add a few things. It's true that rice is quite dense in energy, but for example 100g of uncooked rice becomes a pretty big pile once cooked. In itself the taste is fairly neutral and doesn't encourage gorging. I really doubt too many people are willing to cook and eat so much white rice that it should be blamed for the fat gain, unless you are a sumo wrestler. Of course the food intake should be balanced with the energy expenditure.

More people getting fat in the cities of China has got to be about their lifestyle in general shifting more towards the same lazy ass way of western living where energy need goes down and ingested energy goes up, more fat rich fast food etc. They certainly haven't adopted rice from us.

 

[tuna]

Noodles are pretty healthy
I can get 4 packets of these for £1

get 2 lots £2 (about $3) and you have a weeks food

How is this healthy food?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Generally all over the world unhealthy food is cheaper and more readily available. The one buck hamburgers say, or white rice in China (which already has a huge overweight issue comparable to the U.S.)

China's overweight issue (which btw is only comparable to US in the larger cities) comes from the little emperor syndrome and proliferation of fast food.
It has nothing to do with the consumption of white rice. Pretty much every eastern and south-eastern asian countries use rice as their main source of carbohydrates. The only country with an obesity problem AFAIK is China - again, only in the larger cities where they have fast food.

How is this healthy food?

In the way that you verify its nutrition value per 100g and you'll find it to have decent proportions for it to be part of a meal.

 

[Arwin]

Every food is ok if there isn't an abundance of it and/or people have a healthy lifestyle. I will certainly not blame anything on a single factor. DNA plays its part, temperature you live and or sleep in, etc. However, white rice has low fiber, simple carbs that very easily gives you sugars that bring your intake habits out of balance, is easily over eaten and is easily stored as fat in the body, much more so than, say, brown or silver(?) variants. When cooked it is twice as calory rich as pasta and four times as much as potatoes.

This article confirms both of our arguments to some extent (though yours perhaps more)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-22443

But there are also a bunch of science papers out there suggesting that white rice is linked to obesity.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653247/

 

[tuna]

In the way that you verify its nutrition value per 100g and you'll find it to have decent proportions for it to be part of a meal.

If that is the definition than almost anything can be "healthy". What about other attributes? Could there be chemicals in those noodles that might be bad for you? Are there any fibers? What kinds of fats do they contain? Those kinds of questions are important (at least in my opinion) to rate the healthiness of any food.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

But there are also a bunch of science papers out there suggesting that white rice is linked to obesity.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653247/

That study says:

RESULTS
We failed to find any significant association between frequency of white rice consumption and body mass index or waist circumference, neither in crude model nor in adjusted models.

CONCLUSION
Although there was no significant association between white rice intake and obesity factors in our study, more studies are necessary with larger population and better design.

I mean did you read that at all? It sounded like the study was conducted based on some preconceived misguided opinion about the subject, but they couldn't find anything to support it. White rice is among the safest foods out there and a good source for energy. Only very few people have problems with white rice, it's easy on the digesting system, much better than any form of wheat for many and imo better than the other rice versions. Dense in energy is not a bad thing! It's a good thing. It's not dense in micronutrients, but it should not be the only thing on the plate anyway.

 

[Rurouni]

I once thought that white rice tasted bland, until I tried red rice.... I think if you want to eat with red rice, you must plan your meal with that in mind. You need the other component of your food to compensate for it, thus just using the same dish with the same seasoning and change white to red isn't working for me.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

If that is the definition than almost anything can be "healthy". What about other attributes? Could there be chemicals in those noodles that might be bad for you? Are there any fibers? What kinds of fats do they contain? Those kinds of questions are important (at least in my opinion) to rate the healthiness of any food.

You could just look at the anecdotal evidence of the people who eat instant noodles frequently (again, southeast and east asia) and see if they have a big problem with it (spoiler alert: they don't).
There are no evil chemicals in instant noodles. Any licensed nutritionist will tell you that much.

 

[Billy Idol]

Not really. Obesity in US is partially caused by the income inequality. The poorer you are, the worse food you consume, with a lot of saturated fats and low quality carbs. This builds up rather quickly. So unless by poor you mean starving to death poor - I'd have to disagree.

Saturated fats are no problem at all, read newest science on that matter. Sugar and carbs do...

http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/349/bmj.g7654.full.pdf

 

[tuna]

You could just look at the anecdotal evidence of the people who eat instant noodles frequently (again, southeast and east asia) and see if they have a big problem with it (spoiler alert: they don't).
There are no evil chemicals in instant noodles. Any licensed nutritionist will tell you that much.

Chemicals can't be evil. However, I am fairly certain that SOME instant noodles have some things that might not be good for either baked in or in the flavoring. There are good and bad noodles just like there is good and bad bread.

 

[Davros]

Davros B3D's Resident health guru
Send me your wage packet every week (keep $3 for yourself) and you'll soon be lean mean fighting machines like my good self

 

[Arwin]

That study says:

I mean did you read that at all? It sounded like the study was conducted based on some preconceived misguided opinion about the subject, but they couldn't find anything to support it. White rice is among the safest foods out there and a good source for energy. Only very few people have problems with white rice, it's easy on the digesting system, much better than any form of wheat for many and imo better than the other rice versions. Dense in energy is not a bad thing! It's a good thing. It's not dense in micronutrients, but it should not be the only thing on the plate anyway.

Or you didn't read the study. The outcome of this particular, rather small, study, isn't so important. If you read the body, it actually refers to other studies that do find differences between whole-grain and refined/processed rice, and it seems that the process matters. It lists several reasons (among which a much lower GI for Iranian rice) as a possible cause for this difference.

Anyway, just pointing it out. You don't have to believe me, but if you look, you will see that wholegrain vs refined/processed as linked to obesity is a *thing*.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Or you didn't read the study. The outcome of this particular, rather small, study, isn't so important. If you read the body, it actually refers to other studies that do find differences between whole-grain and refined/processed rice, and it seems that the process matters. It lists several reasons (among which a much lower GI for Iranian rice) as a possible cause for this difference.

Anyway, just pointing it out. You don't have to believe me, but if you look, you will see that wholegrain vs refined/processed as linked to obesity is a *thing*.

My stance here has been solely about white rice. I don't want to broaden the topic further than that, it's what I quoted in the beginning. I just went through most of the content and links to the other articles in that study and there really wasn't much if any even half concrete evidence to discriminate white rice in particular.

I personally feel that very many of these studies and pub med articles in general serve very little purpose or at least the results are very often extrapolated to mean something that the raw data just does not support. The hypothesis behind many studies are often poorly thought out and the mechanisms aren't understood, this sometimes leads in to illogical conclusions and it only gets worse when the studies cross reference each other. They put too much emphasis on things like glycemic index vs total calories or other major life style components. Imo when the studies are properly constructed and focused, you don't see negative results with with white rice, just like you don't see it in real life.

I'm not trying to tell you how to run things. I know your family doesn't eat white rice, I personally feel like that is an overkill, but if you are willing to do that, I'm guessing your kid doesn't get too much candy or McDonalds either, so you are probably doing a good job there and I'm not claiming white rice is somehow required in the diet, it's just a convenient way to get carbohydrate energy without getting fructose at the same time. The higher the energy demands are the more benefit it has.

 

[Arwin]

No McDonalds, correct. White rice isn't an absolute no-no, we just go for whole-grain whenever possible. I'm willing to bet that just eating better tasting food increases the risk of being overweight. But most impressive to me by far has been research on how the substances that release serotonin (reward drug) are released more gradually from complex carbs, which means that food will have a less direct serotonin boost and thus be less addictive, less likely to unbalance or lower the serotonin base level, and so on.

I realise I didn't really have to point out that white rice vs obesity is a controversial topic. I'm willing to agree that it may well be that white rice isn't a real factor in obesity. But I do want to point out that all things that are bad for us in too high quantities (fat, salt, sugar, whatever) is generally considered a highly valued energy sources when food is scarce, and our bodies were designed to deal with scarcity above everything else, and once you get into the surplus area (as moving into cities, becoming more wealthy nad needing less exercise to get your food), some of the most valuable and rare nutrients can become killers.

In the end, as some really great dietary meta-studies have shown - the more complex your diet is, the better you'll deal with overweight. So it's not so much that diets are good because they cut out on certain things, it's that they make you aware of that you're eating in the first place, and remind you that overeating is a bad idea. The more (mental) barriers you throw up against that next bite of anything, the better in that respect.

 

[Sto_Helit]

Some people are actually limited in the amount of weight they can gain by what appear to be genetic factors.
http://dm5migu4zj3pb.cloudfront.net/manuscripts/106000/106570/JCI71106570.pdf

 

[tangey]

White rice is linked to obesity ?

two questions

1) How many thousands of years have the chinese been eating white rice
2) How long has obesity in China been an issue.