"In France, for example, a serving of ice cream is typically a single modest scoop, while in America, it’s often three gargantuan scoops."
This was the first thing that struck me when I first moved here. Portions for all kinds of food from ice-cream, to coffee are huge. Why are huge portions such a common thing here?
I think it was because America was the first country that could eat afford to eat like that, so we did. Look at the differences in traditional Italian food and Italian American food.
Dealing with virtually unlimited quantities of food is a very recent problem, and Americans were the first to have this problem at scale.
Most of the rest of the world now has this problem too. If you look at overweight trends, most developed countries are about were America was 30 years ago [1].
There are other differences as well. For one, America was the first country with ubiquitous car ownership--contributing to lower population density and less walking, more time sitting, and drive through restaurants.
I think there is some truth to this, but it also seems to be true that on average the US is valuing quantity over quality (in food) more than many other economies that can certainly afford to overeat.
I'm sure there are some cultural differences, but keep in mind 30-40 years ago we didn't have huge quantities they way we do now, and we didn't go out to eat the way we do now. It took time for the cultural norm to catch up to our ability to overeat.
While other countries can now afford to overeat as easily as we can, they've been able to do so for a lot less time. Again the charts for percentage of the population that is overweight and obese back up this hypothesis--other developed countries are trailing behind the US by about 30 years. They have just had less time to make a habit out of over-consumption.
Also, most other developed countries still haven't caught up to the US in terms of affordable overeating. In PPP terms the US ranks 10 in GDP per capita, higher than every other major economy and higher than almost all of Europe by a very significant margin.
It is the simplest way to increase revenues. If for example a food item is sold for $5, and you would like more revenue then increase the portion size (costing say 20c in ingredients) and charge $6. Labour and space costs are pretty much fixed so this is the resolution to getting more per customer.
There are also some other cultural differences. Eating out is far more common amongst similar peer groups (comparing US and UK). Additionally Americans seem less able/willing to cook, despite the amusing amount of "food porn" TV channels and shows. That also ties in with the doggie bag - the idea being that the meal served is for more than one meal, taking the difference home for eating at another time thereby avoiding having to cook later.
It's not only in America anymore. I've seen just as gigantic portion sizes while traveling to Europe (England, Netherlands, Romania, Italy, France) and Australia, though not so much in China (except Macau). Likely other countries are moving in the same direction as America.
At restaurants, however, there is very good incentive to provide large portions. A restaurant has fixed portions that need to feed everyone from small children to gigantic football players. Without the large portions, many larger people would feel unsatisfied and not come back/give the restaurant a bad rating. Because costs are marginal it makes perfect sense that restaurants would have large portions. I've also noticed that there is a general fear of running out of food at social gatherings such as parties. Generally two to three times the amount is ordered. I'm sure this type of thinking is pretty common though this might be more of an American attitude (I don't really know).
"a general fear of running out of food at social gatherings such as parties."
I went to a social xmas party a few years back, and the rule was "you have to bring a dish to share". No one brings enough to just share with just one other person - everyone brings a dish/item that serves at least 4 people. We had a gathering of about 30 people and enough food to serve 150.
They changed the rule the next year (I think that was the first and only year they tried that rule, IIRC).
This. Have been in almost all countries in Europe and nowhere portions seemed to be as big as in the US on average, let alone you'd ever get absurd portions like sometimes in the US. Don't really know where the joesmo went.
It's probably a number of factors. A couple of possibilities I can think of are Americans' sense of value (get as much as you can for your money,) and a general addiction to the sensation of a full stomach.
if you're an immigrant from a poor country where food is an issue, portion size is the first sign of success.
recent studies compared obesity levels of immigrants from mexico - you see a huge spike once they're settled in the US.
the direct correlation between poverty and obesity in the US is driven by that. cheap, sugar and fat rich food with huge portions. "i didn't work my ass off to eat a fucking salad".
Or perhaps, people with childhood food insecurities and a habit of gorging what's available, when it's available, as quickly as possible will probably eat more of worse food when given the chance.
i didn't work my ass off to eat a fucking salad
... which is amusing, given that the extremely affluent classes consume well produced salads with quality ingredients as main meals, even in the face of significant choice.
Actually - skipping breakfast helps you keep your insulin low and promotes lean body mass.
Your body is in prime fat burning mode in the morning and holding off on breakfast (and spiking the blood sugar / insulin levels) can help you keep burning fat through mid-morning.
To a point but logically it could be concluded that skipping breakfast offers a longer period of time where the blood sugar and insulin response has a chance to drop lower which might hypothetically make a resulting spike from food intake actually higher in comparison.
It makes sense - it's fairly common that we see things that get bigger/worse when postponed. It's entirely possible that this doesn't happen with post-fast insulin spikes, but it seems a reasonable thing to want to check on. At this point it's no longer a question that can be resolved without measuring things (or finding other people who have measured those things), though.
Wait... what constitutes exercise on an empty stomach? because I workout early in the morning. So I just have a apple+banana+milk shake for preworkout. And then after workout I'd have my breakfast.
Actually, completing eliminating your meal pre-workout may provide better results in terms of fat loss. However you may feel tired but having some caffeine and/or protein with limited calories may alleviate that. It's called "fasted training" and you can read more here - [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/201...]
If you want to go completely extreme, intermittent fasting only allows you to eat within a limited window (e.g. 6-8 hours). Lots more research has been done on that but the pressures of conforming to traditional meal timings especially via social occasions can be difficult.
So the conclusion that can be drawn from the article is that if you can't control your portions, eat early. If you can control your portions, as she says Europeans do, then it's fine to eat late.
So then the issue really at hand isn't eating time, it's portion size.
> If you can control your portions, as she says Europeans do,
Spanish portions can be huge. A paella "starter" could feed 2 people for a main course. UK portions sizes are growing, too. My Slovenian friend says they have huge portions in Slovenia, where quantity is valued over quality.
It's very hard to generalise about Europe and its ~600 million inhabitants.
Sorry but like basically every other scientist's guess about nutrition, this latest guess is anecdotal, with huge assumptions built in, a lack of control subjects, making it, like all fad pop-diet articles spouting the newest half-baked discovery about nutrition, vague bullshit at best.
Also it comes with the huge caveat that it's only true for those in the USA with their poor impulse control and huge portions.
It would be good to apply "Nakedrobot2's law of nutrition articles" which states that they are ALL A BUNCH OF LIES :-)
The idea that serious health problems can be cured with lifestyle changes is compelling, but unfortunately often wrong. This is a big problem in medicine in my opinion, because doctors often come into a relationship with a patient with the assumption that the patient's own behaviors are the root of the medical condition. This is essentially blaming the victim, and often absolutely incorrect.
My personal anecdotes relating to this are as follows. I have had serious acid reflux for years. It is generally the "silent" type and one of the main symptoms I have is asthma, especially night-time or sleeping-time asthma, triggered by the reflux.
I have tried various diets, including abstaining from caffeine, anything that could possibly contain wheat or trigger a wheat sensitivity, Atkins, fasting. None of those changes make my acid reflux or other related symptoms go away. I have also done experiments with strictly reducing my intake of food and drinks after certain times of day. This was also ineffective.
What does seem to help, to some limited degree, is taking large doses of acid reducer pills, and staying as upright as possible while sleeping.
Also, when I had a TIF surgery to repair my minor hernia and supposedly eliminate the reflux, it was significantly reduced, but never went away completely. And unfortunately after a few months I must have done something to undo much of that surgery because it is probably almost back as much as it was before. And I know my sliding hiatal hernia is back.
I suffer acid reflux a lot of times. One trick I read some years ago proved to be magical: eat a teaspoon of dry, milled coffee. It works instantly and lasts for at least 2-3 hours. It can be tough to swallow the coffee at the beginning, but once you get used to it, it isn't that difficult.
My doctor prescribed a truckload of antiacids and proton-pump inhibitors for me, until they stopped working. Then, as a new year's resolution, I decided to stop eating potato chips... after avoiding them for about 3 weeks, the acid reflux completely went away. Whether it was because of all the salt, or the oil, I don't know, but it solved it for me. Give it a try!
It could be just that. I was at a point where I could not lie down for 5 seconds without feeling like I was choking in my own acid until I quit eating chips.
I am very suspicious of this - one of the symptoms of very bad reflux is vomiting "coffee grounds"; or dried blood. I can't see how this would work, and I worry that you might confuse or mask dire problems with this method.
I'm obviously not a doctor. I can only say that in my experience, eating a teaspoon of coffee works for me and relatives of mine who have tried it. And it works amazingly fast and well.
Of course, I also know what kind of food or drinks I shall avoid in order not to get acid reflux, so I always try to avoid getting it in first place.
Hypothesis... dry means it reduces liquid levels in the gut. Also, diuretic? You could test the first part of this hypothesis by using other highly absorbent foodstuffs and seeing if the same result can be gained.
For me it wasn't when or how much but what. At it's worst I was taking prescription medicine ate what I thought was healthy food (whole grain bread, oat cereal) and still had heartburn every night. I am not celiac but eliminating beer, whole grain wheat, and oats got rid of my acid reflux. Wheat, especially the modern variety, is not well tolerated by humans http://news.discovery.com/human/why-you-should-probably-stop.... If you can't give up bread eat Sourdough http://cookusinterruptus.com/blog/?p=4245
This. I live in a major city and our water is majorly chlorinated. I read a bit about this online and thought, sure, what the heck, I'll try eliminating chlorinated water and see what happens.
Now I have an under-counter water filter and all our drinking water has a significant amount of the chlorine filtered out. It made a huge difference for me. YMMV, and of course doesn't mean much for well water.
On top of this, certain foods may be worse than others. Through experience I've found out that the following foods seem to increase symptoms related to acid reflux: dairy products, red meat, citric products, chocolate, alcohol, soda drinks and coffee.
that's just way to general and way too much depending on the objective thing called taste. Next to chocolate/coffee/... I also really like the taste of vegetables like carrots, broccoli, fennel, pumpkins, ... I really doubt they would fall under the category of stuff which is likely to increase reflux.
Ori Hofmekler for years has been promoting his evidence-based Warrior Diet [1], which claims that humans have always been nocturnal eaters and that only the slaves were eating during the day and warriors were feasting at night. I reduced my meals to two a day (within 6 hours), mostly at night, and have since lost a few pounds although I've increased my caloric intake from fats. I slowly want to shift to a single meal at night with the help of healthy fats during the day (ghee and coconut oil). Ori says that some protein and carbs (berries) during the day are fine.
I hope this warrior diet is a good diet, and the things in your description that make me cringe are just marketing gimmicks. What was the average life expectancy of a warrior at the time and place this diet was based on? Likely under 35. Your description makes it sound like the diet's creator started with a bad premise and unhelpful constraints and used (hopefully) good science to hill-climb his way to some local maximum in some scoring function that's hopefully not particularly far from the global maximum in that scoring function.
An appeal to nature is a terrible line of reasoning that underlies way too many diets I hear friends promoting these days. The usual implied or explicitly stated premise is that there was some time and place of peak human fitness in the distant past, brought about by evolution, and we should return to the diet of that time and place and apply scientific methods to improve upon that diet.
There are at least 3 huge flaws in using evolutionary arguments to base modern diets on what humans ate thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Let's start with the flawed premise that after the explosion in variety of foods available when we learned to domesticate both animals and plants, that evolution rapidly converged within a few thousand years the human body to be optimally tuned for all of the foods available at whatever time the diet's creator has chosen. (1) A human at the global optimum for a given diet does not imply that the diet is a global optimum for the human. (The implication arrow goes the other way. Evolution has not optimized plants and animals to be the most fit food source for humans.) (2) Evolution tends to converge to pretty good working solutions, not optimal solutions. (3) There hasn't been enough time since human domestication of animals and plants for evolution to produce more than a hand full of adaptations.
The only two human dietary-related beneficial mutations I'm aware of in the past 10-15 thousand years both happened to have arisen in Europe. One is a mutation that makes a high wheat diet less harmful and the other is a mutation that causes toleration of lactose late into adulthood. The way some people construct diets, they would then start with the premise that people whose ancestors mostly came from Europe should mostly eat wheat and dairy products. The diet creator would then do some reading of dietary studies to scientifically improve the quality of the starting diet to some local maximum based on some set of starting constraints and some limit of research effort. This might actually produce a decent diet with whole grains, yoghurt, and lots of fruits and vegetables added through a healthy dose of hand waving combined with good scientific research.
It would be much better to throw out the flawed starting point. If you're going to pick an arbitrary time and location in human history as a starting point for constructing a diet, don't pick a time and location that had a life expectancy less than half that of modern first-world countries. If I were to design a diet, I would probably look at modern diets in countries with the highest life expectancies or lowest rates of whatever diet-related maladies you're trying to avoid, and scientifically improve the diet from there. I might even try to find a set of countries that had very different diets and yet all ranked highly in my selection criteria and try to find commonalities in their diets as a starting point for designing a diet.
EDIT: I should point out that there are cases where an appeal to nature is a reasonable line of reasoning, but I have never seen such in the context of diet.
Warriors died young from violent deaths or infectious diseases, not from a chronic diseases. The appeal to nature is simply following the idea that we are what we're best adapted to, but I agree that working solutions and not always the optimal ones. In this case though, it's more of an attempt to avoid poorly working ones. That's why I strongly believe in having a solid base as a diet and optimize using "hacks" like turmeric and coconut oil, for example. I'm not adapted to those as my predecessors didn't eat those foods, but I eat them and they optimize my ancestral diet further.
I didn't downvote you, but I think your downvotes are probably from people who read your summary as a diet based on a flawed appeal to nature. I'm not sure if a carbhead advocates a high carb or low carb diet, but I imagine most of the downvoters would probably also downvote a post advocating a high-carb or low-cab diet that appeared to use poor logic as a starting point.
By "carbhead" I mean a person caught in the vicious circle of high-carb addiction. But I meant refined carbs, not all carbs are evil. Think pothead. And this is why carbhead is similar to pothead: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904095856.ht...
The diet is not absurd. It's the easiest form of intermittent fasting. Marketing? Well, he sells whey protein and some other things, but they are not anything specific to his diet. Yes, based on comments, there are way too many carbheads and kalesippers here. What's funny is that most "hackers" are not really ready to hack their diet.
Does this include Europeans? My experience is that most western Europeans are their meals quite late, do they have the same problems that this article purports?
Since you apparently didn't bother to read the article...
Europeans have fewer cases of reflux than we do, even
though many of them eat late. That’s most likely from
portion control. In France, for example, a serving of
ice cream is typically a single modest scoop, while in
America, it’s often three gargantuan scoops.
"Europeans have fewer cases of reflux than we do, even though many of them eat late. That’s most likely from portion control. In France, for example, a serving of ice cream is typically a single modest scoop, while in America, it’s often three gargantuan scoops."
How did you fit that around work? I could do the 2nd breakfast if it was something I could eat at my desk (fruit for example) but the 15:00 dinner would probably last too long to fit in on my lunch hour (and it's quite late for lunch too when most employees break at 12:00 or 13:00).
Well there is a ritual in Jainism which says not to eat after sunset (remember: this was written/said generations before all science and research came into existence). Being Jain, I am just amazed by how precise our religion/literature is. Like many other ritual, this one is also backed by science now.
One might posit that some traditions from other religions were also meant to avoid common problems without understanding the science behind why. Take not eating pork for example, to avoid trichinosis.
That's a pretty disrespectful comment but fair enough on an objective level. To take the same analytical approach, however, what you are advocating is a modern scientific mode of enquiry. You may be interested to learn that Jainism, Buddhism and other early philosophies of India did in fact have significant (core) portions of their scriptures dedicated to formalistic enquiry in to the nature of being, mind, and senses; and from the results of those enquiries, philosophical extrapolations. After taking a formalistic approach they decided to veer away from rigid analytical inquiry and embrace empathy. Einstein famously had this to say, which can can be applied with somewhat reduced accuracy to Jainism:
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in the cosmic religion for the future: It trancends a personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. - Albert Einstein
You should not be so quick to dismiss other traditions.
This was the first thing that struck me when I first moved here. Portions for all kinds of food from ice-cream, to coffee are huge. Why are huge portions such a common thing here?