Why We Eat (Too Much): The New Science of Appetite

by Andrew Jenkinson

The energy saved from preparing and cooking foods has helped us to evolve to be human.

‘If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?’ Albert Einstein

The Diet–Heart Controversy

Cholesterol types and their effects to health

In later years, it was shown that cholesterol had many different forms in the blood depending on how it was being carried (being insoluble it needed a vehicle, called lipoprotein, to travel in the blood).

The small and dense LDL type A cholesterol is the cause of atherosclerosis and ultimately heart disease. The latest research suggests it is increased not by fat, or by cholesterol either, but by carbohydrate and sugar,8 exactly what Dr John Yudkin had been saying in the 1950s before being discredited by the sugar scientists.

The only consistent result seemed to be a trend in the development of cancer among those subjects eating low fat.

Currently the biggest-grossing drugs class in the world is statins. These drugs decrease cholesterol levels in order to reduce the risk of heart attacks and grossed $35 billion worldwide in 2010. The research direction for profit is still undoubtedly cholesterol. The pharmaceutical industry would see a big drop in profit if the diet–heart hypothesis were to be disproved, and this is why they employ many of the top scientists and top labs in the world – to try and support the crumbling edifice of this fragile theory.

The report had recommended replacing these unhealthy saturated fats with what they identified as healthy polyunsaturated oils.

Advances in genetic engineering of rapeseed in Canada meant canola oil (Can-ola is short for Canada- oil) became a new staple alongside soya oil.

Most nutritionists will develop a fanatical gleam in their eyes when explaining the health benefits of polyunsaturated vegetable oils: low in saturated fats (the diet–heart hypothesis lives on), high in ‘good fats’. We are now consuming vast amounts of these oils when only 100 years ago they were used as lantern fuel and to make candles. What exactly i...

If you think that vegetable oils are simply made from compressing plant seeds (rapeseed, soya, sunflower), think again. Olive oil (which is a natural and healthy monounsaturated fat) is produced in this way, the simple extraction technique going back to the days of the ancient Greek civilization. Vegetable oil production is a little more ‘industrial’. You may nee...

This means that vegetable oils have to be treated by a process called hydrogenation to ensure they do not contain too much omega-3, which would shorten its shelf life.

Hydrogenation turns some of the omega-3 from good guys into very dangerous bad guys called trans-fats. Trans-fats cause heart disease. In fact, they are very potent poisons that once in our bodies will increase those bad-cholesterol particles – the LDL type, small dense molecules that can burrow into your arteries, causing inflammation and atherosclerosis.

By lowering use of animal fats and increasing vegetable oils, we inadvertently increased trans-fats and increased our risk of heart disease. The detrimental effect of this change on heart disease in the population was masked epidemiologically for many years by the decrease in smoking rates and advances in the treatment of blood pressure.

After the McGovern Report, lard and butter, the traditional stable fats (high in saturates) used in baking had been replaced by a solid form of vegetable oil called ‘shortening’. Vegetable oil is liquid at room temperature, and there is only one way to make it solidify: you guessed it, more hydrogenation, meaning more trans-fats in all types of processed foods – cakes, biscuits, crackers, doughnuts, pies and margarine.

Different consistencies of the processed foods, such as soft, chewy or crunchy, add a further level of pleasure when we eat them.

So, we have gorgeously tasty foods, with colourful labels saying they are healthy, all at reasonably low prices. And a consumer group of very vulnerable people. Those vulnerable people are you and me, humans, Homo sapiens. The same species which evolved only because it learned to cook food has now manufactured its own types of food – and we love them.

Our healthcare systems are designed to treat these new diseases – that are thought to occur because of the changes in our environment and living conditions. They include heart disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, depression and cancer. One overriding condition contributes to all of them – obesity.

With the scheme below. Ancestors vs modern human disease

Let’s compare the food pyramids of these two populations.

Hunter gatherer vs modern people

The whole edifice of modern medicine, it seems, is built on the treatment of these diseases of modern civilization.

We have made great progress in curbing smoking and making it more socially unacceptable. This has had a major impact on the rates of heart disease, emphysema and lung cancer. However, other ‘lifestyle diseases’ are beginning to rise again as we are faced with another epidemic – obesity – leading to increasing rates of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. What should we do about this? Continue pouring more money into research and treatment, or do the sensible thing – learn our lesson from history and tackle the cause?

WHO figures from 2017 show that worldwide obesity rates tripled during this period.

20.000 years ago obesity started mid victorian age 5% 1980 15% 2017 tripled since 1980 (45%)

After the McGovern Report, our food choices which had previously been determined by our culture and family background were hijacked by the scientists.

In the fourteenth century the bubonic plague had swept across Europe, killing half of the population; the Spanish flu of 1918–19 caused the death of 50–100 million people worldwide in one year; AIDS has so far taken the lives of 25 million people. Nowadays, there are over 650 million people in the world who suffer with obesity (WHO figures for 2018).

In the future, I suspect, we will be talking in the same way about the obesity epidemic and how, in the early twenty-first century, its side effects – diabetes, heart disease and cancer – caused similar death and suffering to the wealthiest nations.

Summary

Figure 8.6 The history of humans’ relationship with food

Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.

Check out the book you are what you eat

Thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency can catch up with you quite fast. We only have eighteen days’ supply of this vitamin in our system.

Deficiency of B1: beriberi

At each point in the history of beriberi, many years before the true cause was discovered, doctors would be convinced that their current treatment was the correct one, even when it was clearly ineffective. I wondered whether, in the future, we might look back on our current understanding of obesity and see a similar pattern to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of beriberi sufferers before vitamin B1 was discovered. Certainly, our current advice and treatment does not seem to be working to affect the obesity crisis, but doctors are still convinced that the current treatments are the correct ones.

Beriberi was first described in ancient Chinese manuscripts dating back to 2000 BC. The name originates from a Sinhalese translation of ‘weak-weak’.

The only disparity they could find was that the warden who looked after the hen coops had changed. When they questioned him, they found that the old warden had fed his chickens with polished rice whereas the new keeper fed them wild rice! They had finally proved that beriberi was caused by something lacking in polished rice. Within a few years, research teams had isolated vitamin B1 in the husk of the wild rice and purified it for treatment. Beriberi, after causing millions of deaths, had finally been understood and cured.

The moment of beriberi cure discovery

Scurvy, caused by a lack of vitamin C, was a well-known condition even before the era of long-distance seafaring.

Napoleon’s armies were similarly affected on their long campaigns, and it was noted by Napoleon’s own physician that eating horse meat seemed to protect his men from the condition. The meat was fresh and contained adequate amounts of vitamin C to prevent scurvy developing. The Napoleonic soldiers developed a taste for healthy horse meat and continued to eat it even after they left the army, starting a French tradition that has been passed through the generations and continues to this day.

Vitamin C deficiency, Scurvy

The British Navy, although slow to implement Lind’s theories, remained ahead of all their rivals in other countries and gained a significant military advantage. In fact, the 1804 blockade of Napoleonic ships within French ports, an exercise requiring sailors to stay for months on board their ships, would not have been possible without the Royal Navy’s purchase of 50,000 gallons of lemon juice for its sailors. The blockade prevented Napoleon’s grand plan of a sea invasion of Britain and changed the course of history.

Lind found that scurvy is caused by lack of fresh fruits

In 1867 all naval vessels were ordered by Parliament to carry a supply of limes and lime juice. The association of British sailors with limes spawned the nickname ‘limeys’ – still in use today to describe British expats living abroad – and is a reminder of a long-forgotten disease.

Limeys

What’s Missing?

A different approach to find the cause of obesity

Figure 9.1 US obesity rates, 1960–2008

Rise had started only after dietary guidlines published

Our final question on the hunt for our deficiency – what was taken out of the food we consumed as a result of these changes? Did the dramatic rise in vegetable oil consumption, combined with food-processing techniques, somehow cause a micro-deficiency of a food essential for our health? Recent research into lipids (fats) suggests that this may indeed be the case, and that these changes may not only be contributing to obesity but also to other common Western diseases such as heart disease, autoimmune conditions and cancer.

To help us understand the potential lipid (fat) deficiency that may be contributing to the obesity crisis, let’s take a refresher in fats and what they do within our bodies.

Read below brain hormones inflammatory process cell walls

Into the Frying Pan

Deep dive into fat types

Think of the fat molecule as a long dining table in a medieval banquet,

Analogy #2

Think of what happens to food when it is left out and unattended: it goes brown and decomposes – this is oxidation.

The Sunshine Fat – Omega-3

Omega 3 sources

Chloroplasts are the plant equivalent of our own cellular energy factories (our mitochondria). However, they can be considered the most important structures on Earth.

All the biological energy on Earth stems from chloroplasts. But they produce something else that is essential to us as well. Chloroplasts produce omega-3.

The Autumn Fat – Omega-6

Omega 6 sources

But it’s not only the decreasing amount of meat that affects omega-3 intake, it is also the quality of the meat.

Grass fed cattle - high quality meat with high omega 3 Grain fed cattle - low quality meat with low omega 3 (more omega 6)

Fish are not immune to this change in their nutritional quality either. Most of the fish now available in supermarkets originate from fish farms, and just like cattle (and humans) fish get bigger if they are fed grains rather than their natural food (plankton).

Processed foods, the food made in factories (and not farms), need to have a long shelf life. But, remember, any type of food that has a reasonable shelf life will have had most of its omega-3 removed. Fresh foods contain omega-3, that’s why they go off rapidly when left out of the fridge. The same rule applies to vegetable oils (but not olive oil): they need to be rid of their omega-3, otherwise they become rancid quite quickly. Therefore they are chemically and heat treated to eliminate it. As mentioned previously, the hydrogenation process to remove the oxidizing potential of unsaturated fats causes the production of cardio-toxic trans-fats – all in the interest of making the food taste fresher for longer, and ultimately with the aim of making the food company a larger profit.

Since omega 3 is more flexible and oxidized more quickly