Does the Vitamin and Mineral Content of Food Influence Our Food Intake and Body Fatness?

The Claim: We Overeat Because Our Diet is Low in Vitamins and Minerals

We know that animals, including humans, seek certain properties of food. Humans are naturally attracted to food that's high in fat, sugar, starch, and protein, and tend to be less enthusiastic about low-calorie foods that don't have these properties, like vegetables (1). Think cookies vs. plain carrots.

In certain cases, the human body is able to detect a nutritional need and take steps to correct it. For example, people who are placed on a calorie-restricted diet become hungry and are motivated to make up for the calorie shortfall (2, 3). People who are placed on a low-protein diet crave protein and eat more of it after the restriction is lifted (4). Humans and many other animals also crave and seek salt, which supplies the essential minerals sodium and chlorine, although today most of us eat much more of it than we need to. At certain times, we may crave something sweet or acidic, and pregnant women are well known to have specific food cravings and aversions, although explanations for this remain speculative. Research suggests that certain animals have the ability to correct mineral deficiencies by selecting foods rich in the missing mineral (5).

These observations have led to a long-standing idea that the human body is able to detect vitamin and mineral (micronutrient) status and take steps to correct a deficit. This has led to the secondary idea that nutrient-poor food leads to overeating, as the body attempts to make up for low nutrient density by eating more food. In other words, we overeat because our food doesn't supply the micronutrients our bodies need, and eating a micronutrient-rich diet corrects this and allows us to eat less and lose body fat. These ideas are very intuitive, but intuition doesn't always get you very far in biology. Let's see how they hold up to scrutiny.

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... peanut M + M's!!!

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Does "Metabolically Healthy Obesity" Exist?

Obesity is strongly associated with metabolic alterations and negative health outcomes including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some types of cancer (1, 2, 3, 4). Excess body fat is one of the primary causes of preventable health problems and mortality in the United States and many other affluent nations, ranking in importance with cigarette smoking and physical inactivity. Obesity is thought to contribute to disease via the metabolic disturbances it causes, including excess glucose and lipids in the circulation, dysregulated hormone activity including insulin and leptin, and inflammatory effects. This immediately raises two questions:

1. Does metabolically healthy obesity exist?
2. If so, are metabolically healthy obese people at an elevated risk of disease and death?

Does metabolically healthy obesity exist?

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The Higher Ed STEM Myth

In Malcolm Gladwell�s recent book David and Goliath, he repeats the following common claim: �At a time when students with liberal arts degrees struggle to find jobs, students with STEM degrees are almost assured of good careers.� The only problem with this idea is that it is at best misleading and possibly completely false. Looking at recent labor data and multiple research studies, it appears that at the very moment the Obama administration and most state officials are pushing for a rapid increase in students holding college degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, most jobs in these areas have faced stagnant wages and decreased job opportunities.

According to the article, �The STEM Crisis is a Myth�, �there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.�  In face of this decrease in STEM-related job opportunities, we are reminded that, �President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10,000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100,000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas�temporary immigration permits for skilled workers�from 65,000 per year to as many as 180,000.�  In other words, high-tech companies are pushing for increased access to high-skilled foreign workers in order to drive down labor costs and produce a more competitive labor market.  Meanwhile, government officials are calling for a massive increase in funding to educate people for jobs that do not exist.

One of the major reasons why the government seems to have it all wrong is the way STEM jobs are defined: �According to Commerce, 7.6 million individuals worked in STEM jobs in 2010, or about 5.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. That number includes professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences as well as management. The NSF, by contrast, counts 12.4 millionscience and engineering jobs in the United States, including a number of areas that the Commerce Department excludes, such as health-care workers (4.3 million) and psychologists and social scientists (518,000).�  The first problem is then the US government itself has conflicting ways of defining who is working in a STEM job, and thus the National Science Foundation is able to call for more STEM funding by including in its ranks, healthcare workers, psychologists, and social scientists.  However, if we look at the more traditional understanding of STEM jobs, which is used by the Commerce Department, only 5.5% of all current US jobs fall into this area. 

Not only is the STEM crisis being pushed by bad data and loose definitions, but it is also being fueled by a massive misunderstanding regarding the relationship between college degrees and future employment: �Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor�s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them�11.4 million�work outside of STEM.� Thus, not only are there limited employment opportunities in the STEM areas, but most of the people with STEM degrees do not work in STEM jobs, and most of the people working in STEM jobs do not have STEM degrees. This mismatch between degrees and jobs means that there is not a pressing need to produce more people with STEM degrees, and non-STEM degree holders often end up being employed in STEM jobs. 

One reason why the STEM labor market is hard to predict and plan for is because of the business and labor practices dominating these areas: �Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcingor replacement by automation.� It turns out that the celebrated jobs in the STEM areas are highly susceptible to downsizing, outsourcing, and boom-and-bust business cycles. 

The unstable nature of STEM jobs is matched by the short-term thinking of many high-tech companies: �In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.� Like so many other fields and professions, the older model of career employment has been replaced by a new system of just-in-time flexible labor, which in turn, reduces the opportunity for job advancement since companies do not want to invest in workers who have no future with their corporations.

Like the employment practices in higher education, wages in the STEM areas are being pushed down by an over-supply of future workers and an under-supply of new good jobs: �if you apply the Commerce Department�s definition of STEM to the NSF�s annual count of science and engineering bachelor�s degrees, that means about 252,000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor�s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70,000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field. Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master�s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there�s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.�  If you work at a university and college, this story should be very familiar; in the face of decreased job opportunities, colleges continue to flood the market with new workers, which then functions to drive down wages and create a class of underemployed and unemployed degree-holders.  

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... Oreo cookies!!!

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Beans, Lentils, and the Paleo Diet

As we continue to explore the foods our ancestors relied on during our evolutionary history, and what foods work best for us today, we come to legumes such as beans and lentils. These are controversial foods within the Paleolithic diet community, while the broader nutrition community tends to view legumes as healthy.

Beans and lentils have a lot going for them. They're one of the few foods that are simultaneously rich in protein and fiber, making them highly satiating and potentially good for the critters in our colon. They're also relatively nutritious, delivering a hefty dose of vitamins and minerals. The minerals are partially bound by the anti-nutrient phytic acid, but simply soaking and cooking beans and lentils typically degrades 30-70 percent of it, making the minerals more available for absorption (Food Phytates. Reddy and Sathe. 2002). Omitting the soaking step greatly reduces the degradation of phytic acid (Food Phytates. Reddy and Sathe. 2002).

The only tangible downside to beans I can think of, from a nutritional standpoint, is that some people have a hard time with the large quantity of fermentable fiber they provide, particularly people who are sensitive to FODMAPs. Thorough soaking prior to cooking can increase the digestibility of the "musical fruit" by activating the sprouting program and leaching out tannins and indigestible saccharides. I soak all beans and lentils for 12-24 hours.

The canonical Paleolithic diet approach excludes legumes because they were supposedly not part of our ancestral dietary pattern. I'm going to argue here that there is good evidence of widespread legume consumption by hunter-gatherers and archaic humans, and that beans and lentils are therefore an "ancestral" food that falls within the Paleo diet rubric. Many species of edible legumes are common around the globe, including in Africa, and the high calorie and protein content of legume seeds would have made them prime targets for exploitation by ancestral humans after the development of cooking. Below, I've compiled a few examples of legume consumption by hunter-gatherers and extinct archaic humans. I didn't have to look very hard to find these, and there are probably many other examples available. If you know of any, please share them in the comments.

To be clear, I would eat beans and lentils even if they weren't part of ancestral hunter-gatherer diets, because they're inexpensive, nutritious, I like the taste, and they were safely consumed by many traditional agricultural populations probably including my own ancestors.

Extensive "bean" consumption by the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert

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Protesting, Dissent, and Unionization

November ^20th was a perplexing day for some on the UC campuses.  As AFSCME and UAW held a joint strike, many students and media people wanted to know why graduate students would go out on strike to support mostly manual workers.  Of course, the reason for this support was that both unions were protesting against the sense that the UC administration does not respect collective action and collective bargaining.  Moreover, what really scares and confuses many people in power is the sight of seeing both service and professional workers protesting together.

People in power must know that a coalition of organized professional and service workers could be one of the only groups strong enough to stop the neoliberal political economy, and when you throw recent immigrants and indebted students into the mix, a very threatening progressive coalition emerges. Although some may say that the protests and strike were really only about pensions and pay, it is clear that a more fundamental democratic yearning was evident in these actions. Not only do workers and students feel that they do not have a voice at their own institutions, but they also feel alienated by the silent forces of global capitalism and austerity politics.

AFSCME did a very smart thing by working with various student groups to form a diverse coalition of workers, students, and faculty, and while the peaceful demonstrations did not generate much police presence, recent trends suggest that once organized dissent becomes visible and disruptive, it will be countered in a forceful way.  Let us hope that this is the beginning of a more forceful organization of the people who make this university work.

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A Message for the Regents and President Napolitano

As the UC regents meet this week, it is important to look at some of the major issues facing the University of California system.  One of the topics that has received very little attention is the fact that UC has close to $16 billions of debt, and this may be tolerable with historically low interest rates, but once interest rates increase, two large problems will emerge.  First of all, UC will spend even more money servicing its debt, and second, UC may have to reduce the programs that are dependent on cheap borrowing. 

As debt has gone up, UC has continued to increase the size of classes and reduce the number of teachers.  As the graduate student union�s recent report indicates, the quality of education has gone down, but the rankings of the campuses has continued to escalate.  The major proposed solution to this problem of educational quality is to turn to online courses; however this cure could be much worse than the disease.  Not only do online courses threaten to further reduce instructional quality, but the system has not figured out how to fund the sharing of courses and students among campuses.  For instance, I have asked UCOP officials many times about what happens if most of the UCSB students decide to take their Spanish classes online with UC Irvine. In this situation, will UCSB have to fire its faculty who currently teach Spanish? And who will pay UC Irvine to hire more teachers or graduate students to cover the increased enrollments?  Moreover, how much should UCSB pay UC Irvine to teach UCSB students?  None of these questions have been answered, and instead, the system plans to throw a lot of money around the first few years, and then it will decide how to make he sharing of online courses work.

Another major issue is the deterioration of UC benefits.  Although UC in the past has been able to attract and maintain faculty and workers with relatively low pay because it has offered superior benefits, this is no longer the case.  With major reductions in retiree healthcare and a new pension tier, benefits have been reduced.  Furthermore, the new health plans have discriminated against one campus, UCSB, which does not have its own medical facilities or any hospital that is willing to be part of UC Care.  

UC has also moved many of its investments into alternative assets, but recent research shows that this strategy has backfired.  Due to the high fees associated with private equity and hedge funds, the UC might do better by simply investing in low-cost index funds.  Yet, in the pursuit of high returns, the university has continued to increase its investments in high-risk, high-fee investment vehicles. 

Another major problem is that even though tuition has remained flat for the last two years, very few people have looked at the total cost of a UC education. By pursuing an amenities race, UC, like other universities, has continued to increase the student cost for housing, dining, and services, and these increases fuel student debt.  Moreover, while there have been efforts to reduce the administration at the Office of the President, we continue to see administrative bloat on the campuses. 

Let�s hope that the new UC president has the foresight to address these pressing issues. 

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Recent and Upcoming Appearances

Smarter Science of Slim

Jonathan Bailor recently released an interview we did a few months ago on the neurobiology of body fat regulation, and the implications for fat loss.  It's a good overview of the regulation of food intake and body fatness by the brain.  You can listen to it here.

Super Human Radio

Carl Lanore interviewed me about my lab's work on hypothalamic inflammation and obesity.  I'm currently wrapping up a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Michael Schwartz at the University of Washington, and the interview touches on our recent review paper "Hypothalamic Inflammation: Marker or Mechanism of Obesity Pathogenesis?"  Dan Pardi and I are frequent guests on Carl's show and I'm always impressed by how well Carl prepares prior to the interview.  You can listen to the interview here.

The Reality Check podcast

Pat Roach of the Reality Check podcast interviewed me about the scientific validity of the "carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis" of obesity.  The Reality Check podcast "explores a wide range of controversies and curiosities using science and critical thinking", and a dash of humor.  This one should be very informative for people who aren't sure what to believe and want a deeper perspective on the science of insulin and body weight regulation.  You can listen to it here.

Obesity Society conference

Next Thursday 11/9, I'll be speaking at the 2013 Obesity Society conference in Atlanta.  My talk is titled "The Glial Response to Obesity is Reversible", and it will be about my work on the reversibility of obesity-associated hypothalamic neuropathology in mice.  My talk will be part of the session "Neuronal Control of Satiety" between 3:00 and 4:30, specific time pending.  See you there!

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Buckwheat Crepes Revisited

One of my most popular posts of all time was a recipe I published in 2010 for sourdough buckwheat crepes (1). I developed this recipe to provide an easy, nutritious, and gluten-free alternative to flour-based crepes. It requires no equipment besides a blender. It's totally different from the traditional buckwheat crepes that are eaten in Brittany, in part because it's not really a crepe (I don't know what else to call it, maybe a savory pancake?). I find these very satisfying, and they're incredibly easy to make. They're especially delicious with fresh goat cheese, or scrambled eggs with vegetables, but they go with almost anything. Chris Kresser also developed his own version of the recipe, which is fluffier than mine, and more like a traditional pancake (2).

Buckwheat is an exceptionally nutritious pseudograin that's rich in complete protein and minerals. In contrast to most whole grains, which have low mineral availability due to phytic acid, buckwheat contains a high level of the phytic acid-degrading enzyme phytase. This makes buckwheat an excellent source of easily absorbed minerals, as long as you prepare it correctly! Phytase enzyme works best in an acidic environment, which may be part of the reason why so many cultures use sour fermentation to prepare grain foods. My original recipe included a sour fermentation step.

But there's a problem here. Buckwheat doesn't ferment very well. Whether it's because it doesn't contain the right carbohydrates, or the right bacteria, I don't know, but it spoils rapidly if you ferment it more than a little bit (using a strong sourdough starter helps though). Others have told me the same. So here's my confession: I stopped fermenting my buckwheat batter about a year ago. And it tastes better.

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New Post on Eat Move Sleep Blog

Yesterday, the Dan's Plan blog Eat Move Sleep published a blog post I wrote about sleep, artificial light, your brain, and a free computer program called f.lux that can help us live healthier lives.  Head over to Eat Move Sleep to read it.

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The Power of 10? How UCSB is being Screwed

The University of California likes to say that one of the things that make it the best public university system in the world is that the system acts as if it is a single system with pooled resources and power.  However, there are often large inequities within the system.  In fact, for several decades, tuition dollars and state funds were distributed in a secret and unfair way. It took a UC-AFT sponsored state audit to help change this system.  Now, tuition dollars are kept on the campuses, and there is an ongoing effort to distribute state funds in a more equitable fashion, yet decades of inequity cannot be easily reversed.

One of the major effects of this long history of secret subsidizations is that the campuses without medical centers have much lower staff and faculty salaries.  Unfortunately, these under-funded campuses are also the campuses with the highest numbers of under-represented minority students.  Adding insult to injury, the new healthcare plans for the UC system discriminate against UCSB, which also has some of the lowest salaries in the system.

  

Although we should support the UC effort to take advantage of the fact that it has many outstanding medical facilities, we should remember that these institutions have been built out of a secret subsidy, which has disadvantaged campuses like UCSB.  The medical centers and schools have also relied on shared UC resources to finance their debt and construction endeavors. Moreover, while it is not uncommon for medical professors and administrators to make over $300,000 a year, most other UC faculty and staff have seen their salaries stagnate.

Everyone in the system has to embrace a broader understanding of equity and the power of 10.   

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Sleep and Genetic Obesity Risk

Evidence is steadily accumulating that insufficient sleep increases the risk of obesity and undermines fat loss efforts. Short sleep duration is one of the most significant risk factors for obesity (1), and several potential mechanisms have been identified, including increased hunger, increased interest in calorie-dense highly palatable food, reduced drive to exercise, and alterations in hormones that influence appetite and body fatness. Dan Pardi presented his research at AHS13 showing that sleep restriction reduces willpower to make healthy choices about food.

We also know that genetics has an outsized influence on obesity risk, accounting for about 70 percent of the variability in body fatness between people in affluent nations (2). I have argued that "fat genes" don't directly lead to obesity, but they do determine who is susceptible to a fattening environment and who isn't (3). I recently revisited a 2010 paper published in the journal Sleep by University of Washington researchers that supports this idea (4).

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Is a College Degree Worth it? The Wrong Debate Continues

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There are two dominant views concerning the value of a college degree currently circulating in American culture.  One view is that on average, people with college degrees make much more money over their lifetime than people without degrees.  The other view is that the over-production of college degrees has deflated their value, and we now have taxi drivers and baristas with PhDs.  I have often presented a third view, which is that a value of a college degree should not be equated with future earning power or job prospects, and instead of seeing higher education as a private good, we must see it as a public good.

The first problem with the idea that a college degree means higher earnings is that this correlation can have multiple causes.  We know that on average, students with wealthy parents and more social connections to high-paying jobs graduate from college at a higher rate.  Likewise, SAT scores are highly correlated with the wealth of the parents, and college rankings are highly correlated with SAT scores, and even financial aid is now often linked to SAT scores. The system as a whole thus reinforces class privilege, and so it may be that people who attain college degrees earn more because they start off with more and are given more opportunities and advantages as they move through the education and job systems. 

On the other side of the coin, the over-production of college degrees can be directly related to the under-supply of good jobs.  What we are seeing in many different job markets is that due to the lack of unionization, the increase in automation, and the globalization of labor and consumption, employers are able to depress wages and benefits.  One interesting test case for this theory is in higher education itself where we have witnessed a significant decrease in �good� jobs.  In just a few decades, we have moved from a system where the majority of the teachers had full-time, tenure-track positions to a situation where the majority of the faculty have part-time, non-tenure-track positions.  During this period, enrollments have increased, so we cannot say that there is a decrease in the demand for people with PhDs.  Instead, universities and colleges have decided to de-professionalize the professoriate.  As I have pointed out before, one cause for this problem is that the same institutions that produce the PhD degree do not require a PhD to teach undergraduate students. 

In other fields, this casualization of the labor force has been pushed by the use of technology to reduce compensation.  Due to the Web and the new media economy, professionals in journalism, entertainment, and other services have been replaced by citizens who are willing to work for little or nothing.  This reduction in earnings was once countered by the recognition that workers in a domestic economy must be paid enough to participate in the local consumer economy, but now in a globalized economy, there is always another person willing to consume our products.

What this analysis tells us is that we cannot expect higher education to fix our employment problems since so many of the labor issues are derived from the power of employers to reduce the compensation and benefits of their workers.  Just as the current funding model of higher education is rigged to reinforce class inequality, our failure to protect workers from destructive labor practices functions to enhance economic stratification.  When we throw high student debt into this mix, we see that our entire economic and social system is programmed against the future.    What we need is better labor laws and better employers.  Once all of the income gains stop going to the top 1%, we will see more good jobs, but education alone cannot fix this issue.

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Speaking in Lisbon on October 5

My friend Pedro Bastos graciously invited me to speak at a conference he organized in Lisbon on October 5 titled "Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases".  I will give two talks:

• "Ancestral Health: What is Our Human Potential?"  This talk will explore the health of non-industrial cultures in an effort to understand how much of our modern chronic disease burden is preventable, and it will briefly touch on one major aspect of non-industrial life that may protect against the "diseases of civilization".  This presentation will focus on age-adjusted data from high quality studies.  
• "Why Do We Overeat: a Neurobiological Perspective."  This talk will attempt to explain why most of us consume more calories than we need to maintain weight-- a phenomenon that is a central cause of morbidity and mortality in the modern world.  It will touch on some of the brain mechanisms involved in ingestive behavior, and outline a framework to explain why these mechanisms are often maladaptive in today's environment.

Pedro will speak about dairy consumption, vitamin D, and chronic disease.  

The conference is targeted to health professionals and students of nutrition, however it's open to anyone who is interested in these topics.  It's sponsored by NutriScience, a Portuguese nutrition education and consulting company.  Sadly, I don't speak Portuguese, so my talks will be in English.  

Access the full program, and register for the conference, using the links below:

Program

Registration

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The Quality of Education Problem

In my book Why Public Higher Education Should be Free, I argue that universities and colleges can only reduce costs and improve quality if they concentrate on their core missions of instruction and pure research.  When schools fail to focus on these basic activities, they end up spending enormous funds on side projects; in other words, when quality education is not the main priority, there is no way to contain costs.  However, the problem remains of how do you define and monitor educational quality?

This question of educational quality became a topic of debate at a recent meeting at Governor Brown�s office.  The objective of this stakeholder�s meeting was to discuss how best to implement Assembly Bill 94, which calls for the UC and CSU to report on the following performance measures:  the four-year graduate rate, the six-year graduation rate, the two-year transfer graduation rate, the number of low-income students, the number of transfer students from community colleges  enrolled, the number of degree completions in the STEM disciplines, the number of course credits accumulated by undergrad students at time of graduation, and the total amount of funds received per undergraduate degree.

At this meeting, I argued that while I applaud the governor�s focus on the state�s university systems, his metrics will be counter-productive if the quality of education is not protected.  For example, to increase graduation rates, the UC can simply increase the size of classes, inflate the credits given to particular classes, and offer more credit for non-UC classes.  Although I do not think we should push for standardized tests to see what students are actually learning in their classes, I do think the state can motivate universities to focus their attention on undergraduate instruction by reporting on the following: percentage of the core budget spent on direct instructional activities, student credit hours generated in courses of less than 26 students, and student credit hours generated in courses taught by full-time faculty (whether tenure-track or not). The universities should also report on the increased costs related to administration on each campus. 

Like President Obama�s recent push for more accountability measures in higher education, the state�s focus on inputs and outputs does not look at what actually happens in the classroom.  What I propose in my book is that higher ed institutions need to monitor the quality of education by using the model of assessment that is presented in the UC lecturer�s contract.  All higher ed teachers should be able to demonstrate that they can communicate their course material in an effective manner, that they have a clear and effective method for assessing student learning, and that they are current in their field. The idea here is not to dismiss the important role of research, but rather, to tie research to teaching and to make sure that minimal standards for instruction are met.     

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