Posted 7/10/2008

DIETING MISDIRECTIONS

The weight gain road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Even good, common sense ideas can turn out badly. For example, the experts have long recommended some silly stuff:

• "Drink a diet cola; it has fewer calories than a regular cola."
• "Eat many small meals a day, not the traditional three squares."
• "Portion control, buy smaller packages."
• "If you must eat junk food, don't let your children do it."

But alas, all of these suggestions have proven to be dead wrong.

Some even cause you and your children to gain unwanted weight.

Diet drinks cause you to overeat. Thirty years ago, a Philadelphia researcher found that sweet diet products enter your mouth and promptly signal the rest of your digestive tract to expect some sugary goodies. But when your stomach receives only sweeteners and not sugar, it loses its temper and rumbles and grumbles – demanding something real.

The researcher ran these experiments on fish, finding that their stomachs reacted differently to food taken through the mouth vs. those fed by injection directly into the stomach. From fish he progressed to humans, later proving that the stereotype of the fat guy at McDonald's dining on a Big Mac, double fries and a large Diet Coke was a reflection of reality.

The more diet stuff you put into your mouth, the more high-calorie stuff your stomach will want. And you gain weight as your stomach rumbles, "More! More!"

Eat many small meals a day. Many doctors have recommended this practice indicating that your system is better off with something in your stomach constantly. Big mistake. Example of the right brain not understanding the left brain. Unfortunately, almost everyone ingests more calories per day by eating five or six "light meals" instead of the traditional "three squares." Wives, mothers and chefs don't help matters by overfilling the serving plate.

Portion control. Buy smaller packages. A recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research indicates that buying smaller packages and eating smaller portions actually does the reverse of what's intended – you will want to eat more than you would by eating from larger packages.

The researchers say that consumers ate twice as many potato chips when given nine small bags instead of the same amount in two large bags. Consumers ate ice cream much faster when given Häagen-Dazs in small packages instead of larger ones. They ended up eating more ice cream out of the small packages.

The researchers also claim that you are more hesitant to open a large package than a small one, leading to increases in both quantity and frequency of food consumed.

If you must eat junk food, don't let your children do it. "Do as I say, not as I do" has always been a losing proposition – and there is now research to prove it. The Royal Veterinary College in the U.K. conducted experiments on rats which demonstrated that mama rats eating junk food produced baby rats who demanded junk food too. Worse yet, the baby rats were more likely to become obese even when fed a healthy diet.

This suggests that eating a junk food diet can affect a mother's genetic makeup, perhaps explaining why heavy mothers tend to produce heavy babies. Shanghai mothers switching to fatty foods have produced an infant crop with a 17% obesity rate. (You can be sure the kids are never going to go back to rice and fish head soup.)

There is new evidence that mother's eating a fatty diet will tend to produce more boys than those eating a more healthful diet. Researchers at the University of Missouri have found that female sheep fed a diet high in polyunsaturated fats one month before conception have a significantly higher chance of producing males. A recent study of human mothers found that those eating a higher level of protein products tended to produce more boys than would be expected by statistical chance alone.

Our bodies are descended from the animal world. Especially the omnivores like dogs, bears and monkeys. Like omnivores, our systems are programed to eat a lot at one time with the expectation that we may not find new food for a day or two. Those who survived in ancient days were those capable of storing fat when food was available, and living off that fat when food was scarce.

Unfortunately, modern man is entirely mis-programmed to deal in an era when food is readily available. We are hardwired to eat like there is no tomorrow and store fat. But when tomorrow comes, there is plenty of food and we just store more fat and more fat.

Some experiments of alternate-day stuffing and fasting have shown that man can lose weight. But who wants to go through all that pain?

Nexium one day, cravings the next.

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