How Many Calories in B.S.?

To tell people who are overweight that they need to move around more and count calories is kind of like telling Yogi Bear to leave tourists alone and avoid eating the contents of picnic baskets.  It ain’t gonna happen.

I have long ago surrendered to the fact that logic, reason, science and – yes, even the truth – have overcome the need to manipulate the population with misinformation in order to control them and to wring every bit of money out of them.

I give professional nutritionists the benefit of a doubt — even though two of them wrote this book.  After all, every dietitian I have ever known was “recovering” from at least one eating disorder.  And usually on the “lower serotonin” side of life, probably a little obsessive, maybe a little depressed.

Mostly, these are people who believe everything they are told without questioning, or exist on “wishful thinking.”  Or they have a political or professional agenda.

I can flashback to the first hospitalization of my life.  I spent time in the intensive care unit of a California teaching hospital after suffering a surprise coma and my husband had been warned that the odds were against me surviving the night.

(If you are interested in all the gory details, I wrote about it in my book, This Is NOT A Diet Book.)

The young, conservative, medical professor/doctor who had been taking care of me came in to do my discharge planning.

I told him I thought I ought to see a dietitian just once before discharge.

“Why?” he asked me with open mouth and blank stare.

“Well,” I said, “I have been really sick and I don’t know what the hell to eat.”

“Talk about a discipline that has contributed nothing to medicine,” he answered.

“Really? Can we elaborate?”

“Well, nobody knows half of what goes into food, nobody normal is going to follow a detailed list of what to eat, and really, sometimes people get sicker trying to eat what they are supposed to, so I generally tell people they don’t need it.”

A few times, I have worked with dietitians or eating-disorder specialists in private practice.  Mostly, it’s because I’ve found they can present my patients a less expensive option – and everyone complains about expense no matter how much danger their life is in.  I have given these nutrition gurus detailed directions necessary to save the patient’s life, which sooner or later they ignore to proselytize their own world view.

Ignorance may be bliss, but ignoring could be fatal.

In over 20 years of medical training in two countries, a half-a-dozen states and a bunch of cities (medical school, an internship, three residencies, two fellowships and a heck of a lot of On-The-Job training), I’ve gone through less than ten hours of formal nutritional education.

Exactly – boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

Most of this was emergency room stuff — the basics of intravenous nutrition for really sick folks in hospital facilities.  Hardly anything about gaining, maintaining or regaining lost health.

But as a chronically obese woman – who happens to be a scientific researcher – I discovered a way to lose over half my body weight without drugs, fad diets or even a bunch of strenuous exercise

I had to.  My life was on the line.

So I hope someone will believe me when I say — counting calories is an insult to science.

The dietitians who wrote the book do not cite research studies in the format provided by the news-reporting folks.  Some may exist, but if they do, they are unlikely to take into account the messy nature of food in 2012.

I continue to gather information on genetically modified food, which is commonplace and cheap.  Most Americans eat this stuff — unless they are organic food enthusiasts who are wealthy enough to buy at specialized food stores in California.

This is assuming that accurate labeling exists, because for genetically modified food in these United States it does not.  And this is also assuming that if it does, people speak and write truth.  I do not believe they do.

As if this were not enough, I have only recently learned that there is such a thing as “food fraud” — well known to the United States Pharmacopeia.  They publish lists and cite frequent discrepancies.  For example, the substitution of hazelnut oil for olive oil, depending on its processing, may hike the calories of a food.

I doubt the authors of the book reviewed here are scientists.  I’d also bet money both have a history of eating disorders.

It was 1944 when Ancel Keys did studies at the University of Minnesota – now referred to as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment — on allegedly normal people who were put on a restricted diet in what later would have been called a “metabolic ward.”  The part of the data that impressed psychiatrists most was that these folks — who basically had an externally induced eating disorder — ended up in careers that dealt with food.  Like cooks.  Oh, and nutritionists.

Asking people to move more and eat less doesn’t work.  They have too much personal experience, too many satisfying memories, and too little incentive for lifestyle change.

The only people known to me who have lost weight on a diet have gained back more than they have lost when they were done.  No matter how much they are preached to about health maintenance.  They might be able to lose weight and might even be able to maintain a weight loss, but generally these are folks who suffer from obsessive personalities.

A non-negligible amount of people who get surgery for weight loss gain it back or have — worse, in my estimation — complications from absorption problems.  And some people have died from weight loss drugs given without adequate risk benefit assessments by a physician.  As a patient, I fired one who thought I needed them.  We need to do better.

Of course there are researchers who are searching for the Holy Grail — a pill or something you inject.  My guess is they are paid by drug companies who make us believe that it is possible to develop a pill that will fix anything.

It would make a lot more sense to do on a larger scale what I have done.  Just observe people.  And look fearlessly at data that is not exposed — more likely actively covered up — by companies that process food.   Processed food is less expensive.  As far as I can figure, that is the only reason it gets processed.

There just is not enough time or money to research all this.  People are suffering from poor health and dying from same.  So I tell everyone who will listen to me — eat the least processed food you can afford to, the least fast food you can afford to, read labels, and try to focus on the other things in life that give you pleasure.

We can always tell Yogi Bear to pick and choose what he eats from his picnic baskets.  If he is really “smarter than the average bear,” he just might get it.