Fat vs. Carbohydrate Overeating: Which Causes More Fat Gain?

Two human studies, published in 1995 and 2000, tested the effect of carbohydrate vs. fat overfeeding on body fat gain in humans. What did they find, and why is it important?

We know that daily calorie intake has increased the US, in parallel with the dramatic increase in body fatness. These excess calories appear to have come from fat, carbohydrate, and protein all at the same time (although carbohydrate increased the most). Since the increase in calories, carbohydrate, fat, and protein all happened at the same time, how do we know that the obesity epidemic was due to increased calorie intake and not just increased carbohydrate or fat intake? If our calorie intake had increased solely by the addition of carbohydrate or fat, would we be in the midst of an obesity epidemic?

The best way to answer this question is to examine the controlled studies that have compared carbohydrate and fat overfeeding in humans.

Horton et al.

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The UC Admissions Bait and Switch

The UC has published its 2014 admissions� statistics, and while the system is still required to admit all qualified students from California, a secret tactic is being used to make sure that it increases the number of high-paying non-resident and international students.  What the UC is doing is admitting students from California, but not offering them places at the campuses of their choice.  Simply put, students are applying to Berkeley and UCLA, but they are being admitted to Merced and Riverside. 

Looking at the latest statistics, we see that Berkeley accepted 8,391 students from California, 3,071 from out of state, and 1,333 international students.  Likewise, UCLA accepted 9,128 from California, 4,095 from out of state, and 2,537 international students.  So out of the 28,555 students accepted by both campuses, 11,036 are not from California.  These students (39% of the total admittees) each pay $23,000 exrtra for tuition, and they do not receive financial aid. Of course, not all of these students will accept their admission offers, but if all of them did, the two campuses would bring in an additional $254 million. 

If we now look at Merced, we find that 9,313 were accepted from California, and 152 from out of state, and 315 are international students. In the case of Riverside, we get 17,758 from California, 649 from out of state, and 1,390 are international. This means that out of the 27,071 admits from both campuses, 2,506 are not from California, which is 9%, for a total extra revenue of $57 million. In other words, the two elite campuses admitted almost the same amount of students as the two non-elite campuses, but the elites will get about $200 million more in tuition revenue.

Although the UC system is supposed to be correcting the historic inequality between the campuses, it is clear that this is not happening.  Meanwhile, the UC knows that many students who do not get their top choice and are offered admissions at Merced or Riverside will decide to go elsewhere.  Furthermore, the ability of UCLA and Berkeley to be more selective helps to raise their school rankings, which then perpetuates the disparities, since students do not want to go to a lower ranked school. 

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Congress Recycles Higher Ed Myths

Currently, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is holding a series of hearings in anticipation of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.  The main underlying theme appears to be that the Democrats want to regulate the for-profit colleges and do something about student debt, while the Republicans would like to deregulate higher education and help the �free market� expand its reaches into public higher education.  In a recent hearing on student debt, this polarized discourse was mediated by a bipartisan set of misconceptions regarding the costs of higher education. 

During his opening statement, ranking Republican member, Lamar Alexander set the stage by arguing that since the average cost for community college was about $3,000 and students receive over $4,000 in aid, some of the money must be going to other things.  In fact, Alexander�s own press release entitled, "College More Affordable than Most Students Think,� argues that, �The average community college student in America is receiving about $1,500 more in grants and scholarships than it costs in tuition and fees� The problem with Alexander�s argument is that he fails to take into account the total cost of education (tuition, fees, room, board, books, and living expenses), and so he can pretend that there is no reason for students to borrow, and if they are borrowing, it is for personal pleasure.

According to Alexander, �An Inspector General�s report from the U.S. Department of Education warns that some students borrow excessively for personal expenses not related to their education.�  However, it is clear that students need a place to live and they have to buy books for their classes, and so these non-educational expenses are actually the main cause for student debt.  The US Department of Education reports that the total annual cost of attendance for a full-time community college student is  $13,237, so if students are receiving on average $4,500 in grant funding, they are still on the hook for close to $9,000 per year. 

Apparently, not only Alexander fails to understand the difference between the cost of tuition and the total cost of attendance, but also James W. Runcie , Chief Operating Officer of Federal Student Aid of the Department of Education, does not understand why students borrow money to go to college.  In response to Alexander�s question about why students are taking out more money than they need, Runcie, (at minute 50) simply says that this is a concern, and the department is looking into possible cases of fraud or abuse.  The underlying message Alexander and others are circulating is college students are going into debt because they are borrowing money to spend on leisure items like fancy cars and clothing. 

This failure to understand the true cost of attending college is also shaping several recent proposals to make community college freeto students in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Oregon.  All of these states are only discussing making tuition free, but most lower- and lower-middle-income students already have their tuition covered by state and federal grants.  This means that only upper-income students will receive the new break, and these tuition-free programs may end up cutting additional funding to the non-wealthy students who need aid to pay for the non-tuition aspects of the total cost of attendance.   Once again, a progressive sounding policy turns out to be welfare for the wealthy as the non-wealthy continue to get stuck with the bill. 

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Garden Update: A Banner Year

Things are warming up here in Seattle and the flowers are blooming. I just planted my first crops of the year-- potatoes and strawberries.

2013 was a banner year for my 500-square-foot urban vegetable garden, including my first experience growing and processing a grain. I never got around to posting about it last year-- so here it is.

Interbay mulch technique

The bed on the right has been mulched with leaves, spent coffee
grounds, and burlap sacks ($1/sack at the local hardware store).
The beds on the left were planted with a rye-clover-vetch-pea
cover crop. Paths are mulched with wood chips.

In the fall of 2012, I tried a new technique for improving the soil called "Interbay mulching". This is a variation on sheet mulching, which involves placing uncomposted organic matter directly onto the garden soil in fall and letting it compost until the next growing season. To Interbay mulch, you simply cover your sheet mulch with burlap. This keeps everything moist, protects earthworms from bird predation so they can munch freely, and suppresses weeds. I used leaves (carbon) and spent coffee grounds from a local coffee shop (nitrogen) for my organic matter.

When I pulled back the burlap last spring, I was initially disappointed. The coffee grounds had disappeared completely, but there was still a lot of leaf matter left on the soil, indicating that it had only partially composted. However, I later decided that it had worked well, because the soil structure underneath was improved and it seemed to be enriched with significant organic matter as well as a large population of fat earthworms. The mulch suppressed weeds remarkably well, and the beds remained mostly clean for the rest of the season.

Those observations, combined with huge yields from the mulched beds, convinced me that it was worthwhile.

New tools
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More Graphs of Calorie Intake vs. BMI

In the last post, a reader commented that the correlation would be more convincing if I graphed calories vs. average BMI rather than the prevalence of obesity.  It was a valid point, so I went searching for average BMI values from NHANES surveys.  I dug up a CDC document that contains data from surveys between 1960 and 2002 (1).  Because these data only cover five survey periods, we only get five data points to analyze, as opposed to the eight used in the last post.  The document contains BMI values for men and women separately, so I averaged the two to approximate average BMI in the general adult population.  It's also worth noting that I use the approximate midpoint of the survey period as the year.

First, a graph of average BMI over time.  It went up:

Now, let's see how well average BMI correlates with calorie intake:

The correlation between calorie intake and obesity prevalence was remarkable, but this correlation is simply incredible.  An R-squared value of 0.98 indicates that daily calorie intake and average BMI are almost perfectly correlated.

We can further deduce that each 100-calorie increase in daily food intake is associated with an 0.62-point increase in average BMI among US adults.  

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Calorie Intake and the US Obesity Epidemic

Between 1960 and 2008, the prevalence of obesity in US adults increased from 13 to 34 percent, and the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from 0.9 to 6 percent (NHANES surveys). This major shift in population fatness is called the "obesity epidemic".

What caused the obesity epidemic? As I've noted in my writing and talks, the obesity epidemic was paralleled by an increase in daily calorie intake that was sufficiently large to fully account for it. There are two main sources of data for US calorie intake. The first is NHANES surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control. They periodically collect data on food intake using questionnaires, and these surveys confirm that calorie intake has increased. The problem with the NHANES food intake data is that they're self-reported and therefore subject to major reporting errors. However, NHANES surveys provide the best quality (objectively measured) data on obesity prevalence since 1960, which we'll be using in this post.

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Uncovering the True Health Costs of Excess Weight

Is excess weight hazardous to health, or can it actually be protective? This question has provoked intense debate in the academic community, in some cases even leading researchers to angrily denounce the work of others (1). There is good evidence to suggest that excess body fat increases the risk of specific diseases, including many of our major killers: diabetes, heart attack, stroke, heart failure, cancer, and kidney failure (2). Yet strangely, the studies relating excess weight to the total risk of dying-- an overall measure of health that's hard to argue with-- are inconsistent. Why?
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Subprime Higher Ed and Washington DC

Like everything else in our nation�s Capitol, higher education has become a deeply polarized issue.  Although the Higher Education Act is supposed to be re-authorized this year, no one thinks that it will get done.  On one side, you have the Republicans in the House who are upset with the Obama administration�s efforts to regulate high-debt, low-peforming for-profit schools, and on the other side, you have some progressive Democrats trying to find ways to reduce and refinance student debt.  While technology is no longer being presented as the solution to all problems, there is little discussion of a comprehensive plan to help higher education.  In fact, most politicians argue that we still have the best system in the world, so all we need to do is just improve access for some excluded groups.

On a more positive note, the United States Student Association�s legislative conference did show that students are very concerned about student debt and the fact that students are paying more and getting less.  There is a new coalition (Higher Ed, Not Debt) that has been formed around the student debt issue, and it has brought together several important groups and progressive political leaders, like Senator Elizabeth Warren.  I am hoping to work with this campaign to tie the issues of student debt, contingent faculty, instructional quality, and higher ed funding together.

When people ask me why I think anything might change for the better in higher education, I argue that the student debt issue threatens to affect so many individuals and families that something will have to be done regarding how we fund and regulate universities and colleges.  As Suzanne Mettler stresses in her book Degrees of Inequality, much of this debt is being driven by the rise of for-profit schools who have used their profits to capture Washington regulators and politicians.  These schools now take in collectively a quarter of all Pell grant funding and a large part of the current GI bill. At some point, the failure of profit-colleges to graduate students could push the government to re-invest in public higher education.

Of course the irony of the for-profits is that many of them receive more than 90% of their funding from the federal government; thus instead of being the free market alternative to public higher ed, these institutions embody the rise of corporate welfare within the context of the fall of public welfare.  Mettler documents how the Obama administration�s attempts to regulate this industry has been countered by not only the free market evangelists of the Republic party but also progressive Democrats who believe that for-profits are the only schools catering to low-income African-American and Latino students.  Like the bipartisan push for subprime loans to minority populations, this cashing in on the poor is a bi-partisan affair: the liberals want to do something for disadvantaged people, and the conservatives want to support the corporations seeking to turn public money into private profits.  Let�s hope that when the student loan bubble bursts, the Fed will bail out the students and not the banks.

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New Position with Nestl�

Warning -- Satire -- April Fool's Post

I'm happy to announce that I've accepted a Product Research and Development position with Nestl� Foods.  Nestl� is known for its skillful application of 'neuromarketing'-- using neuroscience to enhance product development and sales-- and the company recruited me for my background in neuroscience and food reward.

As Whole Health Source readers know well, food reward has a major impact on food selection and consumption, and therefore it has huge potential as a product development strategy.  Although product development by the food industry has always relied to some extent on a basic understanding of food reward, corporations still lag far behind the cutting edge of food reward research, and they are therefore missing out on a major opportunity to drive repeat purchase and consumption behavior and increase total sale volume.  I plan to leverage science-corporate synergy to develop food product solutions that people LOVE*.

Even more exciting, Nestl� has asked me to lead a strategic partnership initiative with Coca-Cola to utilize neuromarketing to tailor beverage product development specifically for children, who have a somewhat different set of reward criteria than adults.  We're excited to develop product solutions that kids LOVE* even more than current offerings, by scientifically designing new combinations of flavors, sweeteners, and totally safe habit-forming drugs such as caffeine.

Both companies have been very responsive to my nutritional concerns about processed foods, and so we're working together to make healthier products.  Here are some of the changes we're discussing:

• Adding vitamin C and cod liver oil to chocolate.
• Replacing a portion (1.7%) of the sugar in beverages with stevia across the board.
• Stealthily decreasing the portion size of beverages.  To do this, we'll increase the thickness of the plastic bottles so the exterior of the bottle is the same size, but the actual beverage content is reduced by 0.2 oz.
• Getting these healthy snacks and beverages back into schools where kids can enjoy them!

One of the first things we discussed is getting the advertising department at Nestl� to write guest posts for Whole Health Source.  This will be a fun way for WHS readers to stay informed of current Nestl� products and what we have coming down the pipeline!

April Fools!!!!!!


* Learned Obedience Via Eating

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