Individual and national plans to end the obesity epidemic, diet myths debunked, and the latest weight loss research. No payment or registration necessary.

New Theories of Weight Gain and Loss

“The true voyage of discovery consists not of going to new places, but of having a new pair of eyes.” -Marcel Proust

Let us review what we know so far. We know that over the last one hundred years changes in the modern diet—often called the Western diet—have resulted in more and more people in the industrialized world, especially the United States, becoming overweight and having difficulty losing weight. Because of international commerce, this diet has spread around the world. The widespread adoption of the modern diet has resulted in increasing levels of obesity in diverse areas of the globe, as a significant percentage of the people who eat this diet gain weight. At the same time, those people who keep their traditional diets remain thin.

While certain people seem to have genes that protect them from becoming overweight on the modern diet, others do not. However, there is still hope for those of us without these genes. We have a mystery, and we need to identify the villain or villains that are causing so much harm to us. Remember our quote from Sherlock Holmes, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

If we analyze the modern diet and determine which of its characteristics are innocent, whatever remains must contain that which is guilty, no matter how improbable it seems. If we can identify the culprits that cause weight gain and avoid them, many millions of us can be lean and free of weight gain and the diseases that are associated with it.

Potential Suspects from the Modern Diet

Suspect:	High Fat Consumption
Verdict:	Insufficient Explanation
Reason:	Followers of low carbohydrate diets showed that, under certain circumstances, high fat consumption does not cause weight gain. These people were not genetically prone to being thin, yet they ate a diet consisting largely of meat and fat and became somewhat thinner, at least in the short term. If high fat consumption were the only cause of weight gain, this diet would have made them even more overweight, but it did not. Further evidence against high fat consumption causing weight gain was seen in the French Paradox and the Inuit diet.

Suspect:	Sugars, Carbohydrates, and Refined Grains
Verdict:	Insufficient Explanation
Reason:	If sugary desserts and refined grains were the only causes of weight gain and impaired weight loss, the Atkins dieters who avoided them would have become perfectly thin. However, while at one point almost 10% of American adults were on low carbohydrate diets, such diets later fell from favor because they did not produce satisfactory results for many people who tried them. The Atkins and other low carbohydrate diets help with the loss of blood sugar control that is associated with obesity, but carbohydrates are not the cause of poor blood sugar control.

Suspect:	High Calorie Diet
Verdict:	Insufficient Explanation
Reason:	We saw that people of normal weight who volunteered to eat a very high calorie diet, almost ten thousand calories a day in some cases, did gain weight, but when the experiment was over they lost all of the weight without effort. People who had preexisting weight problems but lost weight on a low calorie diet experienced symptoms of starvation when they limited their calories enough to lose weight. Almost all of them regained their weight within three years of losing it. A high calorie diet is a symptom of excess hunger, not the root cause of obesity.

Suspect:	An Unbalanced Diet
Verdict:	Not Guilty
Reason:	An unbalanced diet may not be healthful, but it is also not the cause of weight gain. In 1900, Americans received the vast majority of their calories from carbohydrates. At that time, only about one person in 150 was significantly overweight. It is only as we have started eating more protein and fat that our weight has increased. However, this seems coincidental because protein and fat are also not causes of weight gain.

With that, it appears that we are at a loss. We know that something about the modern diet is causing weight gain and interfering with fat metabolism, but all of the traditional suspects and combinations of traditional suspects are not guilty or offer incomplete explanations on closer examination. Scientists as a whole are baffled by this and, without a solution, the problem has become worse and worse. There are now more people in the world who are overweight than who have insufficient food—but there is something we are overlooking.

We have ruled out all of the traditional sources of calories in the modern diet, but we have not proved that what causes obesity relates to calories. We have made the mistake of assuming this. Remember the unexplained research we looked at earlier. We need to explain why soda causes weight gain and why diet soda causes more weight gain than regular soda does. Diet soda has essentially no calories, so whatever is causing weight gain from diet soda does not contain calories.

We have to explain the hunger-obesity paradox: Why is it that overweight people have higher levels of hunger than people of normal weight? We have to find out what is causing this greater hunger. We also have to explain why overweight people have higher levels of cortisol secretion and higher cortisol levels in their body tissues, we have to explain what is causing the higher levels of stress witnessed in people who gain weight, and we have to determine what is lowering their rates of fat oxidation. There are several substances that may contribute to many or all of these effects.

Prev Chapter

Next Chapter

Order the Paperback

Please help spread the word about this site.