What Makes So Many Kids Fat?

From the Marshall Memo #439

In this provocative Newsweek cover story, UCLA/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health investigator Gary Taubes wonders why so many poor children during the Depression were overweight. It certainly wasn’t because they were eating too much, because there wasn’t enough food to go around. In fact, he says, it was because the food that was most affordable in hard times was scientifically designed to make them fat. 

Taubes believes the conventional wisdom on reducing obesity – eat less and exercise more – is wrong. We need to focus on reducing intake of the same substances that made Depression-era children fat – sugars, refined flour, and starches – because they affect the hormone insulin, which regulates fat accumulation. 

Sugars include the now-omnipresent high-fructose corn syrup, which is metabolized by liver cells. “From there, the chain of metabolic events had been worked out by biochemists over 50 years,” says Taubes. “Some of the fat accumulates in the liver cells, which become resistant to the action of insulin, and so more insulin is secreted to compensate. The end results are elevated levels of insulin, which is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes, and the steady accumulation of fat on our fat tissue – a few tens of calories per day, leading to pounds per year, and obesity over the course of a few decades.” 

What about exercise? Isn’t that essential to weight reduction? “So why is the world full of obese individuals who do exercise regularly?” asks Taubes. Because running three miles only burns the calories contained in a single candy bar – and leaves a person hungry enough to consume more than a candy bar’s worth of fat-producing junk. 

“At the moment,” says Taubes, “the government efforts to curb obesity and diabetes avoid the all-too-apparent fact… that exhorting people to eat less and exercise more doesn’t work, and that this shouldn’t be an indictment of their character but of the value of the advice… If the latest research is any indication, sugar may have been the primary problem all along. 

“So what should we eat?” he asks. “The latest clinical trials suggest that all of us would benefit from fewer (if any) sugars and fewer refined grains (bread, pasta) and starchy vegetables (potatoes). This was the conventional wisdom through the mid-1960s, and then we turned the grains and starches into heart-healthy foods and the USDA enshrined them in the base of its famous Food Guide Pyramid as the staples of our diet. That this shift coincides with the obesity epidemic is probably not a coincidence.” 

“The New Obesity Campaigns Have It All Wrong” by Gary Taubes in Newsweek, May 14, 2012, http://byliner.com/gary-taubes/stories/the-new-obesity-campaigns-have-it-all-wrong