Hacker Cinema
Why Are Thin People Not Fat?
2009 · Film · documentary · 59 min
Directed by Emma Sutton
The world is affected by an obesity epidemic, but why is it that not everyone is succumbing? Medical science has been obsessed with this subject and is coming up with some unexpected answers. As it turns out, it is not all about exercise and diet. At the centre of this programme is a controversial overeating experiment that aims to identify exactly what it is about some people that makes it hard for them to bulk up.
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4 comments on Hacker News
In the other direction, see the documentary "Why Are Thin People Not Fat" where a group of thin volunteers are overfed by about double their normal calories for 4 weeks:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7838668.stm
http://youtu.be/U1hbPXooB1U
They all easily return to their starting weight, and at least one volunteer gains muscle but not fat. The body is amazing at maintaining homeostasis. Here's an nytimes article from 2011 that discusses much the same thing as the article submitted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap.html
The companion documentary (Eat, Fast, and Live Longer) is worth watching - https://vimeo.com/50912488
Personal note: I've been following this diet since Jan 1. I also run ~ 70 miles/week. I've run 3 of my best marathons this year and lost 5 stubborn lbs (145 -> 140, I'm 5'8"). There are other styles of intermittent fasting. I'm enjoying this way of eating.
Aside, a related BBC/Horizon documentary I saw years ago flipped the question of obesity on its head and asked: Why Are Thin People Not Fat?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1hbPXooB1U
Let me phrase it like this. If you consume less calories than you expend, you are going to lose weight as the body will used stored chemical energy to survive.
I can recommend the BBC Horizon documentary "Why Are Thin People Not Fat"
Homework: Exactly where does they weight you lose go?
The professor specifically meant the statistical inference, e.g. that accounting for all other factors that some factor X1 (in this case sugar) is Y times more correlated with Z observation (diabetes) than X2 (total calories).
The main issue I would have would this video is the excessive focus on sugar the product and its direct sweetness associates rather than blood sugar levels which is far more directly relevant to diabetes and obesity in general. For example, common wheat bread and many sodas have a higher glycemic index than granulated table sugar! Therefore, they are converted into higher levels of blood sugar while at the same time being incredibly easy to over-consume (compared to trying to eat sugar directly).
There is an excellent documentary created three years ago which explained in simple terms a huge amount to laymen about current scientific understanding and the unbelievable lengths to which industry and governments have gone to "encourage" a specific type of modern agriculture and associated food industry regardless of its health effects or consistent scientific evidence, especially in the US. It also covers why the Lipid Hypothesis is completely unvalidated, if not provably wrong.
It is called "Fat Head (2009)" and it was available in full on Youtube until copyright notices removed it. It starts a little slowly and actually begins with a deep criticism of the logical fallacies in "Supersize Me" the movie, uses at one point slightly silly comic imagery, but by the second half there is excellent up-to-date food science and historical explanation as to why society is at is now. I am very grateful to another HN user that referred it to me about a year go.
Anther superb and complementary programme was a Feb 2009 BBC Horizon episode called "Why Are Thin People Not Fat?" which is available on iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hbsk2). It is almost two programmes side-by-side. One sub-programme is a loose experiment to attempt to make a random group of young adults fat and why in some cases it effectively failed. The other sub-programme covers the summary results and science behind a deep, long and published study of a large number of obese people at a specialist clinic which profoundly contributed to scientific understanding of how obesity develops and what makes it so difficult to reverse beyond a certain point.
I highly recommend both programmes. They will change they way you think, even if you have absolutely no interest in changing your food or lifestyle, and in some cases are surprisingly uncommon "common sense". But the kind of common sense only your grandparents and all those who were born before the 1970s would implicitly understand.