It is cruel because so many of us have believed it. It is cruel because all of our “trusted health sources” tell us it is true. It is cruel because when it fails, we blame ourselves. Let me state it as plainly as I can: “Eat Less” does not work. That’s a fact. Accept it.
Pharmaceutical methods of caloric reduction only emphasize the spectacular failure of this paradigm. Orlistat (marketed in the U.S. as Alli) was designed to block the absorption of dietary fat. Orlistat is the drug equivalent of the low-fat, low-calorie diet.
Among its numerous side effects, the most bothersome was euphemistically called fecal leakage and oily spotting. The unabsorbed dietary fat came out the other end, where it often stained underwear. Weight-loss forums chimed in with useful advice about the “orange poop oil.” Never wear white pants. Never assume it’s just a fart. In 2007, Alli won the “Bitter Pill Award” for worst drug from the U.S. consumer group Prescription Access Litigation. There were more serious concerns such as liver toxicity, vitamin deficiency and gallstones. However, orlistat’s insurmountable problem was that it did not really work.16
In a randomized, double-blind controlled study,17 four years of taking the medication three times daily resulted in an extra 6 pounds (2.8 kilograms) of weight loss. But 91 percent of the patients complained of side effects. It hardly seemed worth the trouble. Sales of the drug peaked in 2001 at $600 million. Despite being sold over the counter, by 2013, sales had plummeted to $100 million.
The fake fat olestra was a similarly ill-conceived notion, born out of caloric-reduction theory. Released to great fanfare several years ago, olestra was not absorbed by the body and thus had no caloric impact. Its sales began to sink within two years of release.18 The problem? It led to no significant weight loss. By 2010, it landed on Time magazine’s list of the fifty worst inventions, just behind asbestos.19
( 4 )
THE EXERCISE MYTH
DR. PETER ATTIA is the cofounder of Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSi), an organization dedicated to improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research. A few years ago, he was an elite long-distance swimmer, one of only a dozen or so people to have swum from Los Angeles to Catalina Island. A physician himself, he followed the standard prescribed diet high in carbohydrates and trained religiously for three to four hours daily. He was also, by his own estimation, about forty pounds (18 kilograms) overweight with a body mass index of 29 and 25 percent body fat.
But isn’t increasing exercise the key to weight loss?
Caloric imbalance—increased caloric intake combined with decreased caloric expenditure—is considered the recipe for obesity. Up until now, we’ve assumed that exercise was vitally important to weight loss—that by increasing exercise, we can burn off the excess calories that we eat.
THE LIMITS OF EXERCISE: A HARSH REALITY
CERTAINLY, EXERCISE HAS great health benefits. The early Greek physician Hippocrates, considered the father of medicine, said, “If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.” In the 1950s, along with increasing concern about heart disease, interest in physical activity and exercise began to grow. In 1955, President Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. By 1966, the U.S. Public Health Service began to advocate that increasing physical activity was one of the best ways to lose weight. Aerobics studios began to sprout like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
The Complete Book of Running by Jim Fixx became a runaway bestseller in 1977. The fact that he died at age fifty-two of a massive heart attack was only a minor setback to the cause. Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s book The New Aerobics was required reading in the 1980s where I went to high school. More and more people began incorporating physical activity into their leisure time.
It seemed reasonable to expect obesity rates to fall as exercise rates increased. After all, governments around the world have poured millions of dollars into promoting exercise for weight loss, and they succeeded in getting their citizens moving. In the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2008, regular exercise increased from 32 percent to 39 percent in men and 21 percent to 29 percent in women.1
There’s a problem, though. All this activity had no effect on obesity at all. Obesity increased relentlessly, even as we sweated to the oldies. Just take a look at Figure 4.1,2 on the next page.
Figure 4.1. The increasing worldwide prevalence of obesity.
The phenomenon is global. A recent eight-country survey revealed that Americans exercised the most—135 days per year compared to a global average of 112 days. The Dutch came in last at 93 days.3 Weight loss was the main motivation for exercise in all countries. Did all this activity translate into lower rates of obesity?
Glad you asked. The Dutch and Italians, with their low exercise rates, experienced less than one-third the obesity of those iron-pumping Americans.
The problem was apparent in the American NHANES data as well. From 2001 to 2011, there was a general increase in physical activity.4 Certain areas (Kentucky, Virginia, Florida and the Carolinas) increased exercise at Herculean rates. But here’s the dismal truth: whether physical activity increases or decreases, it has virtually no relationship to the prevalence of obesity. Increasing exercise did not reduce obesity. It was irrelevant. Certain states exercised more. Other states exercised less. Obesity increased by the same amount regardless.
Is exercise important in reducing childhood obesity? The short answer is no. A 2013 paper5 compared the physical activity (measured using accelerometry) of children aged three to five years to their weight. The authors concluded there is no association between activity and obesity.
What went wrong?
Inherent to the Calories In, Calories Out theory is the idea that reduced physical activity plays a key role in the obesity epidemic. This idea is that we used to walk everywhere, but now we drive. With the increase in laborsaving devices such as cars, our exercise has decreased, leading to obesity. The proliferation of video games, television and computers is also believed to contribute to a sedentary lifestyle. Like any good deception, this one sounds pretty reasonable at first. There is a small problem, though. It is just not true.
Researcher Dr. Herman Pontzer studied a hunter-gatherer society living a primitive lifestyle in the modern day. The Hadza in Tanzania often travel 15 to 20 miles per day to gather food. You might assume that their daily energy expenditure is much higher than a typical office worker. Pontzer discusses the surprising results in a New York Times article: “We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States.”6
Even if we compare relatively recent activity rates to those of the 1980s, before the obesity epidemic came into full swing, rates have not decreased appreciably.7 In a Northern European population, physical-activity energy expenditure was calculated from the 1980s to the mid 2000s. The surprising finding was that if anything, physical activity has actually increased since the 1980s. But this study’s authors went one step further. They calculated the predicted energy expenditure for a wild mammal, which is predominantly determined by body mass and ambient temperature. Compared to its wild-mammal cousins such as the seemingly vigorous cougar, fox and caribou, Homo obesus 2015 is not less physically active.
Exercise has not decreased since hunter-gatherer