{"id":37,"date":"2006-08-10T11:50:46","date_gmt":"2006-08-10T09:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/146.107.134.84\/wordpress\/index.php\/2006\/08\/10\/supersize-me\/"},"modified":"2010-12-29T11:45:50","modified_gmt":"2010-12-29T09:45:50","slug":"supersize-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2006\/08\/supersize-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Supersize me and the fake food hypothesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Is there any sense of genetic studies aiming at an association with body mass index? Will there ever be a public health strategy or any medical intervention based on a genetic marker?<br \/>\nI am recalling what Christoph &#8211; a friend of mine at medical school and a now professor for child psychiatry &#8211; once told me when he was working on his thesis about anorexia: &#8220;You only need to weight them for a diagnosis&#8221;. As there are now lots of weighing machines out there, there are plenty of DNAs (intended for different outcomes!), which might be a reason of the <font class=\"pmlinkna\">5946<\/font> &#8220;obesity and gene&#8221; papers.<br \/>\nWill this help anybody? I fear, that responsibility is even shifted to &#8220;poor genes&#8221; (of course I acknowledge that there might be gene nutrient interactions &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ingentaconnect.com\/content\/ilsi\/nure\/2006\/00000064\/A00105s1\/art00008?token=0053163b4558286b3427656c3c6a333f25663541333c4a2f24386a435747464c233f3c448f5fd657d4a\">Paul Soloway<\/a> wrote a nice essay on that). My view &#8211; developed with my wife over many years &#8211;  is that that the obesity epidemics is largely an environmental trait of poor eating habits, wrong orientation on dress models and not enough physical activity. I recall also Professor <font class=\"cntText\">Walter Willett &#8211; who has been my former advisor in Nutritional Epidemiology &#8211; that things can be quite simple. Check for his &#8220;Low Glycemic Index&#8221; on the web, find a sports club for biking, jogging or walking, concentrate on eating and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hon.ch\/News\/HSN\/533978.html\">use small spoons<\/a> and forget about diets.<br \/>\nThere is long-standing discussion, how the body signals by &#8220;being hungry&#8221; that something is missing (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/entrez\/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&#038;db=pubmed&#038;cmd=Retrieve&#038;dopt=abstractplus&#038;list_uids=3537796\">sorry, only 1 historic reference<\/a>). Of course this works also in non-humans: Have you ever seen supersized animals? My guess is, that the well developed and unconscious <strong>food recognition process is largely fooled by pre-processed food<\/strong> that contains additives changing appearance, taste and smelling. So, you have now heard the first time about the fake food hypothesis. I do not believe so much in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supersizeme.com\/home.aspx?page=bythelb\">voluntarily overeating<\/a> &#8211; it seems much more an involuntary repeated intake to find someting useful.<br \/>\nComing back to our start: Imagine that <\/font>drugs that can block hunger (as we now learned the search for required food ingredients) and imagin that the developed world continues to eat their currently preferred food: Everybody will then need a professional nutrionists to balances his\/her daily intake. <font class=\"cntText\">So, we better save tax payer money for these BMI-gene studies. Yea, yea.<br \/>\n<\/font><\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"bottom-note\">\n  <span class=\"mod1\">CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is there any sense of genetic studies aiming at an association with body mass index? Will there ever be a public health strategy or any medical intervention based on a genetic marker? I am recalling what Christoph &#8211; a friend of mine at medical school and a now professor for child psychiatry &#8211; once told &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2006\/08\/supersize-me\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Supersize me and the fake food hypothesis<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[12,2945,2952,4,2946,103,104,107,111,109,98,102,106,105,101,99,110,100,108],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics-biology","category-philosophy-of-science","tag-children-future","tag-genetics-biology","tag-note-worthy","tag-population-epidemiology","tag-philosophy-of-science","tag-body_mass_index","tag-body_signal","tag-dress_models","tag-fake-food","tag-genetic_marker","tag-low_glycemic_index","tag-ncbi","tag-nutrient_interactions","tag-nutritional_epidemiology","tag-obesity","tag-public_health_strategy","tag-sports_club","tag-walter_willett","tag-weighing_machine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5345,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/5345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}