Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
While it's true that obesity has risen, a percentage of the human population has always been overweight. While on the other hand, the increasing amounts of environmental pollution and contamination is newer. It can be argued as being the greater challenge to human health and straining the genetic ability to adapt to such problems.
That's showing that air pollution I would guess mostly from cars has gone down since 1990.
There are lots of other new chemicals not shown on that chart that are in our food and clothes and everything, particularly almost everything modern babies in the US come in contact with.
While PFAS and microplastics and the like are a huge problem, you can't just dismiss the major efforts done over the decades to reduce pollution and improve health; wood / coal fire bans, mandatory catalytic converters, ban on asbestos and CFCs, lead-free fuel and paint, EVs, renewable electricity generation, emission zones, trash collection & safe disposal, smoking bans and discouraging measures, etc. It's not an either/or, and not celebrating successes means there will be less inclination to also solve the newly discovered issues.
This mindset drives me nuts. It's like the rhetorical opposite of victim-blaming. It takes something that is within an individual's locus of control and pretends they have zero agency in the matter.
Last week I finished a two month diet where a big chunk of my weekly calories and nutrients came from cheap staples I prepared myself (specifically brown rice, black beans, steelcut oats, spinach, and eggs).
Aside from the food, the cost was 1. watching some ads in the free version of the calorie counter app I used to make sure I was getting the nutrients I needed and 2. ~$30 for a food scale so I could be precise about what I was eating.
Circumstances make it easier to be unhealthy but what I did is attainable by the vast majority of obese people.
It's complicated because it's both, with varying levels of influence.
Obviously, it cannot be 100% on the individual. Because then, how did we get an obesity epidemic? Did people somehow, magically, become more lazy since 1970? That doesn't sound plausible to me.
It's systemic in nature. Consider tobacco use, a problem we've largely solved in the US. We went from something like 50% of people smoking in 1960 to about 10% now. In young people, the results are even more drastic. It's sort of magic - a reverse obesity epidemic.
How did we do this? A combination of things. Of course people worked very hard to quit, but they also got PSAs and their doctor's helped them. And then we made it much, much harder to smoke.
The thing is, people are creatures of influence and habit. Much of what we do is because it's low resistance. We've allowed obesity to become a systemic problem because of our food available, our culture, and our lifestyles.
It's not that some place like, say, Paris is healthy. But it's a lot easier to be accidentally not-obese in Paris, France than in Paris, Texas.
The question of how someone who wants to lose weight should do so doesn't really have much to do with why people in general are more overweight than decades ago. People in the 80s and 90s had a lot of processed foods, didn't generally use food scales, and calorie counter apps hadn't been invented yet.
is Nestor's book really excellent? I didn't make it more than halfway through because nowhere could i find any references for all the outlandish claims that are made. A lot of them are implausible anyway, and so far as I know the actual science does not support all these theories put forth in the book. If a thing is made out to be the cure to everything, it's likely the cure to nothing.
would be happy to have some good references.
this isnt to say that breathing exercises are not beneficial, but this book left me scratching my head.
The most outlandish thing I can remember was about chewing hard gum to fix your teeth, which seems kind of crazy but could be true. I don't remember breathing being posited as a cure to everything, and I also remember plenty of discussion of various studies. It seems quite believable to me that improper breathing causes all sorts of problems. It's possible I'm too credulous, or that you're too incredulous. Who's to say.
Not really. genetics play a huge role in satiety signaling, and you can't just willpower your way out of it the way someone who simply lacka discipline can.
At this point, "they'll use it however they want, eventually" feels like the default mental model for any data you hand over, no matter what the original context was
> including pelvic floor exercises into the routine and correct belly breathing utilizing the diaphragm are probably the best options for preventing issues with reduced venous blood flow from the testicles
These days, whenever i read "headet only" i immediately get scared about compile times. Does using this library make compilation expensive in the way that eg protobuf or nlohmann_json do?
I don't use the amalgamated version, though (that only exists for this standalone version) and the library overall is significantly smaller than either of those and doesn't drag in nearly as many standard library headers.
A good debunk of his nonsense claims is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZPKTaVB1IU&t=64s