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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day II & III “Even our dogs and cats are fat … and it’s not because they’re watching too much advertising.”
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There’s lots of things government can do, but I don’t think government can prevent children from nagging their parents.
-Timothy Muris, head of the US Federal Trade Commission
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Even our dogs and cats are fat …
This is, actually, quite true. Diet food for animals has been on sale for several years in the US. Which raises some interesting questions. Is it really plausible that cats exercise less and have less willpower than they used to? Are they caving in to advertising? Are they sneaking Big Macs when we aren’t looking? Or is it more likely that we’re beaming some kind of nuclear fat rays into our food supply?
Okay, maybe not nuclear fat rays, but I’m betting we’re doing something bad in the food manufacturing process.
Pets are fat because people are inactive and don’t give them the chance to get some exercise. Also overfeeding is natural.
Presented with food, and logical animal living before the advent of today’s abundance would eat as much as possible, saving for a rainy day, so to speak.
This actually explains why humans get fat too.
Hopefully medical science will make a pill obese people can take before government takes wild action to stop the pandemic problems of progress. heh
Maybe we could start eating bureaucrats, which would lower our appetite and their population.
Pets are fat because people are inactive and don’t give them the chance to get some exercise. Also overfeeding is natural.
Who walks cats? And why haven’t they always been fat if it’s natural to overfeed?
Because prior to modern life, cats (for example) had to work to get their food. Farm cats will get the majority of their food from hunting – that is their purpose, after all.
Of course, as long as there have been doting owners, there have been obese pets. A good example is the story of Tricki Woo in James Herriot’s books – I think mostly in All Creatures Great And Small, which is an American compilation of two of the books he wrote (the first two, mostly.) (And while he fictionalized his accounts, “Tricki Woo’s” owner recognized herself and was greatly amused, even though it’s not entirely flattering.)
Am I the only person on the planet that who remembers that Americans (and their cats and dogs) weren’t, by and large, lard-asses until 1985? And the only change in our lifestyle in my lifetime has been that we eat less and exercise more?
“we eat less and exercise more?”
Some people do it this way and some the other way arround.
Give your cats less food and they’ll be less fat.
What amuses me is the notion that if these foods aren’t advertised, their existence will become a huge secret, and everyone will throw up their hands, sigh, and say, “Well, McDonald’s is out of business, and Hostess stopped making Twinkies, so I guess it’s a life of celery sticks and daily jogs for me now.” The extent to which the supporters of advertising bans, fat taxes, and regulation that would require fast food places to fit doors so small that fat people couldn’t fit throught hem can delude themselves about the causes of obesity and ill health is stunning.
Doesn’t anyone remember this – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/263674.stm ?
Ban advertsising for cats now!
Jacob writes:
“Some people do it this way and some the other way arround.
Give your cats less food and they’ll be less fat.”
It’s just not that simple.
By some estimates, the average person in the UK consumes 20% less than s/he did in the 1970s. There seems to be no reliable figure for any comparable decrease in physical activity.
Even if there were, the minimal number of calories burned-off by exercise cannot reasonably account for the rapid, recent average weight-gain. Indeed, given the ‘fitness’ craze which began in the 1980s, it is very likely that the average person gets more exercise than s/he did in, say, 1976.
How many people did you know in the 1970s with gym membership or the ever-present baby’s bottle of mineral water instead of a G&T?
Meanwhile, we may assume that cats (typically fed one can of MoggieGlop per day) are the same lovable, indolent bastards they have been since they let us believe we had domesticated them. Comparisons with farm cats are meaningless – compare today’s one can a day feline with its 1957 equivalent. Same amount of food – lots more pussycat.
Something has changed and is not being taken into account by people hooked on satisfyingly fasionable neo-puritan ‘explanations’.
My cats aren’t fat. It’s my observation that cats regulate themselves. They take a little snack when hungry and walk away from the dish, even if it still has food in it, when they judge they’ve had enough.
They also exercise themselves, without the benefit of a human gym master, with sudden frantic chases up and down stairs and across furniture, using a convenient human head to propel themselves great distances.
They also have incredible will power and will – not – eat – something – they have already made clear – they hate. They’ll let it rot in the bowl rather than bend. No matter how hungry they are, they wait until the dish has been washed and the correct food put down.
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.
“Something has changed and is not being taken into account by people …..”
Must be Global Warming.
Well, it could be Global Warming. But central heating and greater car-use look like more plausible suspects. [The cats don’t travel in cars much, but they stay indoors to keep from under the wheels, or contribute less to weight statistics.]
I am surprised that people still think we exercise more. If we eat less and yet grow fatter, me must perforce be exercising less. Alternatively, we are eating less overall but a lot more proportionately of the wrong sorts of food.
So what if millions have gym memberships? How many people actually use these memeberships? How many go each week? Twice a week? Once in six months? People drive more often, and for shorter distances – probably even to the gym, and perhaps the gym is used by many (when they go) as a place to “network” in that horrid phrase rather than to exercise. I suspect people talk about getting fit a lot more than they actually practice it.
I eat when I’m hungry, don’t when I’m not, cycle 70 miles a week to and from work (subject to Scottish weather), have at 39 the same waistline I have had since I was 14, and haven’t seen the inside of a gym since I left school.
And no, cats don’t generally overeat. Other animals do, though, dogs and humans being two well known examples. Probably something to do with us being social animals whereas cats are solitary.
EG
I am surprised that people still think we exercise more. If we eat less and yet grow fatter, me must perforce be exercising less.
If indeed calories in minus calories out is all there is to metabolism.
Look, vanity makes me hesitate on this topic — I’m sure people imagine me a giant lazy fat-ass making excuses. I’m not (though I’m fatter than my parents were at my age, which is interesting in itself).
I don’t know about Britain, but when I was a kid in the sixties and seventies, I didn’t know a single grownup who owned a bicycle, let along cycled ten miles a day to work. Nobody walked anywhere — my mother would drive from one end of a shopping center to the other to visit two stores. And forget about anything like a gym membership.
We had television. We didn’t have computers, but we had these things called “books”, which were hugely popular time-consumers among my friends.
Breakfast was bacon, eggs, buttered toast and coffee with sugar and cream. Lunch was school stodge, or a great heaping plate of fried something at a diner. Or MacDonald’s – I grew up on Big Macs. For supper, meat and boiled veg with butter. And plenty of junk food in between. Nobody went within miles of a raw vegetable.
And yet, it wasn’t until the mid-80’s that we seriously started to chunk up. Really, when we’d stopped doing much of the above. Look at newsreels for confirmation. I can think of, like, three fat people I knew personally when I was a kid. Now, I work in an office full of people who are grotesquely fat. Fatter than anyone I’d ever seen as a kid, outside the circus. And wherever the American diet goes, people start to chub up.
Either a calorie isn’t a calorie, or my fellow countrymen got together almost exactly twenty years ago and collectively got lazy and lost all willpower.
Here is a scientist(Link) who says that there is no obesity epidemy.
He also says it’s all in the genes and we don’t have really any control over how fat we are, or rather – that eating habits aren’t the dominant factor, it’s all hormones and genetics.
Maybe it is evolution, Darwin style. Food is overabundant; the genetic mutations that produce obese people prosper, i.e., the obese don’t die off quickly, and manage to pass the obesity genes to more offspring. How that could happen in a short span of time is unclear, but on the other hand we also have an enormous number of tall people; I read somewhere that the average height grew by about 4-5 inches in a period of 25-30 years.
Anyhow – it seems to me that those who do have a tendency to grow overweight can control it by eating less and exercising more. So, off to the gym (and brocolli) with y’all.
It’s not because cats are solitary that they regulate their own diet better than do dogs and people. They just have better self-control and more pride. You seldom see a cat that can’t push itself away from its dish. If you put down more than it wants, it just walks away.
And, being so lithe, they naturally do stretching exercises for a couple of hours a day, up and down trees, weird contortions to get washed, pretending to pounce, chasing anything that moves.
Also, they hate sweets. When I was a child, I offered a cat a lick of my ice cream and it backed away as though I’d threatened it. And they don’t like carbohydrates. Try persuading a cat that a potato is food.
And they don’t seem to feel the need to bulk up for winter, which most mammals in cold climates do.
Plus, cats have killer will power. Rather than give in and allow you to think you can feed it just anything, it will starve itself in the certain knowledge that its will is strong than yours.
In fact, cats are the perfect models for the Atkins diet. They really don’t like eating anything but protein. They are also, other than man) the only animal that hunts for pleasure. A well fed cat will continue to hunt, but will walk away from its prey after it’s killed it.
I agree with S Weasel that people started ballooning in the mid-80s. Why?
Jacob – oh, yes, that’s right. People who are fat say it’s not their fault. It’s their hormones. In that case, why has no one thought of sending huge bottles of hormones over to Africa to relieve their famines?
Jacob writes:
“Anyhow – it seems to me that those who do have a tendency to grow overweight can control it by eating less and exercising more. So, off to the gym (and brocolli) with y’all.”
Well, it may seem that way to you, but I’m afraid it is far, far too simplistic. Put simply, the maths simply don’t justify the conclusion
I’m in agreement with S.Weasel that there has been some unacknowledged and yet fundamental shift in the Western diet in the past twenty or so years which is causing mayhem. Atkins seems to have been fishing in the right area but didn’t perhaps have it entirely nailed.
Trans fats? Glucose syrup? Increased sucrose consumption? No one knows. But until someone can plausibly nail the cause with an explanation less risible than ‘we exercise less today’, or ‘it’s all McDonalds’ fault’, this one isn’t going to go away and will be seized by the neo-puritan Left to get an even tighter grip on private behaviour.
G Cooper has some good points. First, additives. Not in the form of the chemicals the Gramscian health fascists draw unremitting attention to, but yes, in the form of sucrose. You can get what passes for normal bread from bakeries in France, or you can go to the supermarket and get what they fondly imagine to be “American bread” – called, with cutting French irony, “Harry’s American Bread”.
Loathing French bread as I do, I tried Harry’s, aka “cake”. It was so revolting I threw the whole loaf out. Sucrose is going into almost everything these days, if you read the labels. Soup. Bread. Frozen food.
Perhaps – I’m not a food conspiracist – people have been manipulated into accepting the sweetness of sucrose in their food, as long as it was buried in other tastes.
In which case, of course, why have it?
I don’t know. But I think J Cooper’s on to something. Who runs the sucrose lobby? Did it begin to become powerful in the 1980s? It really seems that the presence of sucrose, unaccountably now in everything from hamburgers to bread to chili, yet unheard of before the ’80s – presumably sold as a “flavour enhancer” – is an abnormal addition to food that has caused widespread (sic) poor health.
And because they don’t yet eat much in the way of prepared foods, is this why the French are still infuriatingly thin? We were as thin as the French, once. And is it why the people in Britain and the rest of the Anglosphere who have the leisure or interest in cooking their own meals are also thin?
Without dieting?
I think G Cooper has actually found the Rosetta stone cake.
How much soda do you drink? I think it would be interesting to see whether we drink more soda now than previously.
This link talks about the health effects of high fructose corn syrup they’re finding as well as the Fanjul family who are responsible for its prevalence.
“Following meals accompanied by the fructose-sweetened beverage, circulating levels of insulin and leptin were decreased compared to when the women ate the same meals accompanied by the glucose-sweetened beverage. Lower levels of insulin and leptin, hormones that convey information to the brain about the body’s energy status and fat stores, have been linked in other studies to increased appetite and obesity.
In addition, levels of ghrelin, a hormone thought to trigger appetite that normally declines following a meal, decreased less after meals on the day the women drank the fructose-sweetened beverage. And, the fructose also resulted in a long-lasting increase of triglycerides, fatty molecules in the blood that are indicators of risk for cardiovascular disease.
There’s more. Much more. In other words beverages with real sugar in them are healthier for you than beverages with high fructose corn syrup. Check the link.
“It is estimated that consumption of fructose has increased by 20-30% over the past three decades, a rate of increase similar to that of obesity, which has risen dramatically over the same time span. Data from the present study suggest a mechanism by which fructose consumption could be one factor contributing to the increased incidence of obesity.”
another quote.
I’ve also read about how soda can weaken the bones of the elderly. I’ve often wondered that if it can hurt the bones of the elderly, what must it do to growing bones?
Check out this disturbing article from the WashingtonPost.
“While soft drinks and fruit beverages such as lemonade are the leading products containing high-fructose corn syrup, plenty of other items — including cookies, gum, jams, jellies and baked goods — also contain this syrup. [For more information about which foods contain these and other added sweeteners, see the Lean Plate Club column on Page F2.] “
“In the 1980s, manufacturing methods improved, prompting a boost in production of high-fructose corn syrup and a drop in price to just pennies below that of refined sugar. “While that may not sound like much to the average consumer, when you consider how many pounds [the soft drink industry buys], it was millions of dollars if not hundreds of millions of dollars in savings,” says Drew Davis, NSDA’s vice president for federal affairs.
The switch made economic sense and, as Davis notes, “back then, there was no suggestion that high-fructose corn syrup was metabolized differently” than other sugars. More recent research suggests, however, that there may be some unexpected nutritional consequences of using the syrup. “Fructose is absorbed differently” than other sugars, says Bray. “It doesn’t register in the body metabolically the same way that glucose does.”
The stats on how much high fructose corn syrup Americans consume is staggering. I’ll try and find that number I saw in the Washington Post awhile ago.
That’s very interesting. But you are talking about soft drinks and other items that would normally contain sugar.
They use sucrose in things that shouldn’t be containing sugar or sugar substitutes. Like bread, as I said. And also frozen meals. They ladle sucrose into every conceivable food item (I don’t know, but I’ll bet hamburgers contain it, too), so even if in itself it has no effect on hormones, etc., people are unsuspectingly eating a form of sugar in items where they wouldn’t expect to encounter it. It could easily make a difference of 100 calories a meal x 3 meals a day = 300 extra calories a day consumed by unsuspecting people.
3,500 calories a week = 1 lb a week in added weight.
Does anyone know when manufacturers first began to have sucrose pushed as a “flavour enhancer”? If it was in the mid-’80s, this would be very interesting.
To be fair, I only used sucrose as one example (though Verity is quite right – it does seem omnipresent).
As for linden’s issue with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) this definitely is a prime contender – but only one of several. Interestingly, HFCS was listed as ‘safe’ by the US FDA in…. 1983.
Beyond any one constituent, of course, there remains the possibility that what is at work here is the combined effect of several newcomers to our diet – any or all of which could be safe on their own but, in untested combination, could have quite profound hormonal or metabolic effects.
Again, as Verity has said, a ‘trickle charge’ effect would have quite serious implications over the course of, say, a year.
G Cooper – 1983 … Well, well, well.
So it is after all in the diet and not in your hormones!!!
Stop drinking sweet sodas, water is just fine (wine too), stop eating prepared food that contains unknown substances (i.e. ALL prepared food), and above all – eat less of everything.
This is the patented, superefficient, proven (by me) Jacob diet.
Er, Jacob, you mean, you think people should go into the kitchen and wash things and peel and chop things and baste and grill and stir and figure out how to get it all to come out at the same time? Blech.
My ideal diet is, zap it in the microwave, thus ensuring that you don’t lose any valuable drinking time doing fiddly things. Whisky and soda destroys all known corn syrups. (Soda alone is not effectual.) I just poured a drink (we’re an hour ahead in France, so stop being so judgemental) and I can feel that corn syrup just melting off.
Verity writes:
“Whisky and soda destroys all known corn syrups. (Soda alone is not effectual.) I just poured a drink (we’re an hour ahead in France, so stop being so judgemental) and I can feel that corn syrup just melting off.”
Move over, Dr Atkins. I see a new diet revolution coming along….
Gosh, and to think the main homelocked Brit’s fantasy about living in France is the food!
Not that we’ve had corn-syrup in the EU much with all that subsidised beet to get through. It’s an American speciality, where the corn is as high as an elephant’s whatever, and they’ve even more federal-funded surplus of that to get rid of. If we’re fat… if you’re fat on both sides of the Atlantic, it might be both the sugar and the fructose, but it certainly isn’t only one or the other.
Verity
“Er, Jacob, you mean, you think people should go into the kitchen and wash things and peel and chop things and baste and grill and stir and figure out how to get it all to come out at the same time? Blech. ”
Some enjoy tremendously cooking. Others marry ladies who specialize in it. But you can always hire a cook.
“Gosh, and to think the main homelocked Brit’s fantasy about living in France is the food!”
Absolutely correct.
Food should be enjoyed, not taken in as an unpleasant chore between gulps of whisky. Those who claim to enjoy big macs should have their head, or at least their taste glands, examined.
Jacob – Well, you’re at the right site. We’re a pretty judgemental bunch around here, so I don’t mind your judging my eating and drinking habits despite not knowing me. But:
1. I don’t gulp whisky. Why would anyone gulp whisky?
2. I’ve never had a Big Mac in my life. Thus, I wouldn’t know whether to agree with your opinion of them or not.
3. Cooking is the ultimate bore.
4. Like 99.9999999999% of animals in the world, I like eating. It’s not an unpleasant chore. But the thought of food doesn’t engage me constantly the way it does some.
Verity writes:
“But the thought of food doesn’t engage me constantly the way it does some.”
You do realise that sort of talk could get you burned at the stake in certain parts of North London, don’t you?
And no… I don’t get the chattering class’s absolute obsession with food, either.
G Cooper – Don’t know N London, but I see burning at the stake as a cutting edge (pun here, but I can’t think of it) new trend. They’ve tried everything else.