No, noooo:
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has announced a 15% increase in the country’s main cash-transfer programme for poor families, as well as free weight-loss jabs, prompting criticism from opponents who say the moves are electorally motivated just two weeks before the presidential election.
He’ll be promising $5,000 each if he wins next, right?
All auctions of stolen goods, right?
“has announced a 15% increase in the country’s main cash-transfer programme for poor families, as well as free weight-loss jabs”
Why do poor people need weight-loss jabs? I’m sure those families of the Jarrow marchers weren’t exactly Rubenesque, because of a lack of food, heating or transport.
Why do poor people need weight-loss jabs?
To prepare them for socialism?
He’s a question. Were the darkies always fat, or do they simply inflate as soon as they get a reliable cheap food source? I notice the Somali women around my way are almost invariably HUUGE.
Well yes they are. It’s the genetics. Anything over a maintenance diet they put on fat.
Genetics? You’re not allowed to say that! It implies that they’re different.
Funny thing is, the Japs have also historically had a maintenance diet. Now they’re rich but few are fat. They must be differently different.
I suspect it’s civilisational level. There are evolutionary advantages to putting on fat. And evolutionary disadvantages. If food supplies are irregular, putting on fat’s an advantage. If you have a decent level of civilisation & can control food supplies, that advantage disappears. So the disadvantages breed it out.. Africa’s never had much in the way of civilisation.
As Samuel Jackson observed in pulp fiction “I wouldn’t go so far as to call the brother fat, I mean he got a weight problem. What’s the nigger gonna do? He’s Samoan”
Polynesians evolved to retain fat. So once diet improved they got fat.
I initially thought smoking but that’s quite low uptake now. Possibly a cultural thing involving personal discipline and work. There is no on-street parking (anywhere, as far as I can tell sampling the islands with satellite view) so maybe there’s a fair amount of walking still.
They scuttle about everywhere and ride bikes a lot. You see young mums with 2 kids on a bike, one in a seat on the handlebars, the other behind her. Offices and factories still do organised exercise to music twice a day and there a regulations on gut size.
But the secret, I reckon, is chopsticks. It’s hard to shovel food into your gob with them, so they force you to eat more slowly and you become satiated before gut-busted. That, plus the water-based low oil cuisine.
It’s amazing, though. You can look at vids of retired women exercising in parks and they have the bodies of teenagers, never mind young women. Suits me 🙂
This’ll amuse you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8khYHJrjtuo
But the secret, I reckon, is chopsticks. It’s hard to shovel food into your gob with them
You’ve never seen the Chinese tackle a bowl of rice. 🙂
I have. The Japs rarely eat that way. It’s unseemly.
That video: we did that in the Scouts when I was a weean.
Average Jap daily calorie intake: 1900 kcals
But in the UK:
On average, men report eating about 2,065 kcal but actually consume closer to 3,119 kcal, while women report about 1,570 kcal but consume around 2,393 kcal.
Weight is almost entirely caused by diet. Exercise can help, but not that much because it takes a lot to burn off calories (and exercise makes you hungry). Most Western people simply overestimate how much food they need to eat.
If one takes *enough* exercise one burns off weight. Training for a marathon does wonders for the scales (and the waistline).
Weight is a result of diet, exercise and general lifestyle.
Yes but it’s mostly what you put in. Exercise is good for a number of reasons, but every year millions of people sign up to gyms hoping to lose weight and just lose money instead. It takes over 20 minutes of running to work off a Mars bar. Ain’t nobody got time for that unless they’re training for marathons (now Snickers)
You can control your weight easily without doing cardio. But you can’t control your weight without controlling your diet. Cardio is good for energy and endurance, but your body is a very efficient engine which doesn’t burn that fuel cheaply. It’s a suboptimal solution to people who are simply just eating too much.
WB says Polynesians “evolved” to “retain fat”. Sounds like a Just So story to me – what population of humans didn’t evolve to retain body fat? Obviously population level (racial) genetic differences exist but we’re not that different. Women have a far harder time shedding pounds than men, because of how their hormones work (very likely natural selection at work because mothers need to retain fat or their babies will die). But I reckon the difference between men and women is bigger than the difference between Samoan men and Swedish men.
So it’s probably their diet. Polynesians famously love spam and I don’t think they like being hungry. A chunky Pacific Island chap would be as skinny as a Jap if he reduced the calorie intake and consumed fewer carbs and sugars. What can I say except “you’re welcome”?
We are what we eat. The French eat snails, and look at them. The Mongols were easily worth 10 Chinamen each in battle because the Mongols ate a high meat, high dairy diet whilst Chinee peasants subsisted on rice. This is one of the reasons I hate evangelical vegetarians so much – they want to force us to eat slave food and a herbivore’s diet. Free men eat plenty of red meat.
Sorry, Steve but you really do not know what you are talking about. I have had periods when I paid no attention to calorie content of my diet and still lost weight. Eighteen years before my first marathon I lost a stone in a fortnight (admittedly that was after going back to college after Christmas at home when I had put on a stone in roughly the same time) without deliberately cutting back on food. You cannot lose weight that fast simply by going on a diet.
You cannot lose weight that fast simply by going on a diet.
But you can lose a stone in a fortnight if you go zero carbs for a while. Ketosis kicks in and the pounds melt off. This is why I’m trying to tell you it’s mostly about diet. I read Dr Atkins’ book after years of having to make new holes in my belt, it completely changed my life.
If you go with a calorie restricted balanced diet, you will also lose weight, just more slowly. Intermittent fasting is even better, most Western people no longer know what hunger is but we should be hungry sometimes.
It’s not as simple as calories in vs calories expended, the type of calories you’re consuming makes a big difference. General health makes a difference. But it’s not much more complicated than calorie maths either. You burnt a load of calories because you were a fit young man doing a lot of exercise, that’s great, but it’s also the hard way to slim down. Most people don’t have it in them to run marathons, but they can eat less.
No, someone my size cannot lose 8lbs in a week or a stone in a fortnight by starving (obviously dehydrating can take off 3lbs before it gets dangerous, but that’s a one-off so you have to exclude that from the comparisons). I’ve looked at what happened when I simply didn’t eat after getting a stomach bug or a dose of food poisoning and I didn’t lose weight that fast.
Yes, of course it’s a hard way and that is one reason why most people don’t do it. It is true that most people can eat less BUT I have, more than once, lost more weight by exercise than it was possible to do by starvation.
Maybe someone two or three times my weight can lose a stone by dieting but can they lose >10% of body-weight just by dieting?
Maybe someone two or three times my weight can lose a stone by dieting but can they lose >10% of body-weight just by dieting?
Yes. I lost 6 stone through nothing but a change in diet. I’m still not quite as skinny as Jeremy Guscott, but at least I’m not morphing into Bill Cavubati anymore.
But ymmv depending on your natural body type.
It’s not about diet, Steve. It’s about not having a metric for hunger apart from having not eaten recently. Few people these days have ever been any time without food. But the get comfort from stuffing things in their mouths.
“The French eat snails, and look at them.”
Not much now. They’re peasant food. Cheap protein. Tasteless, which is why they get baked with lots of butter, garlic and herbs.
The French love meat. There are more branches of McDonalds in France than any other country in Europe. Everything about French gourmet food is like thinking most of England is like Hugh Grant rather than Milwall fans.
On average, men report eating about 2,065 kcal but actually consume closer to 3,119 kcal, while women report about 1,570 kcal but consume around 2,393 kcal.
I’ve been wondering about that. Every now and then I keep a food diary and tabulate the calories consumed, going by the label on the box. Even the biscuits and the milk and sugar in tea. It would consistantly total around 1500 but if so I should be losing weight. I’ve started suspecting that I am really consuming maybe 2500+ but the reported figures I’m using are wrong.
Epigenetics rather than genetics. Food scarcity alters the epigenetics of unborn children (up to the second or third generation), predisposing them to obesity when the scarcity ends. See the studies of the descendants of the survivors of the Dutch hunger winter. Grikrath will know the details…
It’s a much greater time scale than that. My latina friends, if they have any of Africa in them, tend to run to hefty thighs & well cushioned rears. And they all fight weight problems. It’s not only in the genes but shows up even if they’re only one eighth. It’s not a single event. It’s 5000 years.
You could be right about that, but we are IMO dealing with different (sub-)species of human. Comparing even Latino/a octoroon negros with Somalis or north-western Europeans is like comparing neanderthals with sapiens: they can inter-breed, but they are not identical genetically.
But on this particular issue there does appear to be a connection between fat retention & African inheritance. Probably west African rather than east.
Civilisation wise, Europeans were building stone circles in 4000BC. Similar in east Asia. That implies a production surplus. You don’t see much happening Sub-Sahara until fairly recently. And you need a production surplus for civilisation. Other side of the Atlantic civilisation is fairly contemporary with Eurasia.
No doubt Theo would like to connect it with IQ. Personally, I think IQ’s a load of bollox. The scoring favours those who set IQ tests & score high. I believe it’s a way of thinking rather than intelligence. I’ve never seen anything to make me believe those with high IQs are particularly intelligent. Generally the contrary.
I think possible the absence of civilisations in Africa are for the same reasons as absence of the horse. Biological. Africa has too many nasties like tetsi fly etc
Also geography and the difficulty of travel, therefore cultural and genetic isolation, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out. Humans are primates: physically and behaviourally we adapt to our environments exactly the same way all other species do. Africans have evolved to be the way they are because they’re in Africa.
As for fat and West/East, Somalis are East and when they come here you’ll find few female arses wider. The men often stay thin. Probably khat.
Sure. The further from Africa the more genetic bottlenecks have been passed through.
“You don’t see much happening Sub-Sahara until fairly recently. And you need a production surplus for civilisation.”
Further, the now subsistence crops were part of the Columbian exchange. Maize and cassava came from Latin America. Before that the grains were millet and sorghum (Teff in Ethiopia but that only works there). Wheat didn’t/doesn’t work between the Sahara and the Fish River in S Africa (and they didn’t have it anyway). Africa actually had a big, big, population boom 1500 onwards as the new crops made a higher population possible. Before that they were caloris stressed and at the Malthusian limits.
Most Polynesian societies were too. It’s wholly possible – possible only – to imagine the gaining weight in time of plenty thing common to both as being common to both as a result of that same filter of century upon century at the population living right at that calorie limit.
The New World had a very different pool of plants and animals amenable to domestication to the Old World, and it severly restricted the ability to have a settled population building a surplus that would develop civilisation. We had eg pigs, cattle, sheeps, goats, ducks, chickens, wheat, oats, barley, rice; they has basically potatoes and lllamas.
The very phrase “production surplus” implies that a change from hunter-gatherer to farmer has already occurred. If your civilisation has remained happy, relatively care-free hunter-gatherers because there is enough food without inventing boring (and sometimes “back-breaking”) farming, then you don’t build store-houses and never learn the technique to build stone circles.
Try hunter gathering john77 & you’d find out how hard it is. Most hunter gather people live right on the margin. The only places it’s a relatively easy life is somewhere like Amazonia. And Amazonia isn’t natural. It’s gardened
The Irish are not identical genetically which is why they have a higher proportion of redheads ….
Yeeeesss… I’m familiar with that particular piece of …. Research™….
Now, Theo….. Here’s a tub of lye soap and a wire brush.
Now goeth and washeth thine mouth of that filth you just uttered…
Next time you might start quoting articles blaming UPF’s for whatever bugaboo has the author “invested”. Or promote MMT as the economic solution to Everything. Or…..
Eh? — The rigorous Dutch studies that show the direct effects of in utero exposure (1st generation) are universally accepted as highly reliable because of specific replicated alterations at the IGF2 locus. [Yes, there might be selection bias, and blood methylation patterns might not mirror what is happening in metabolic tissues, yet the general results are very robust.] 2nd generation is debated but the evidence is still quite strong.
Further trans-generational evidence is much less reliable because it is difficult to isolate data from shared family environments or cultural habits – though the anti-racist geneticists would argue that!
yeah Theo… Nope….
It’s true that certain types of obesity occur because of (de)methylation of the IGF2 locus because of starvation during certain stages of pregnancy.. *That* much is true…
The problem is in the interpretation of this phenomenon, mostly fuelled by the name “epigenetics” for the various processes in the control layer of genetic expression that causes a genotype to become a phenotype.
It *implies* “inheritance”, and in some cases it actually does.
Mitochondria and ( parts of) various other organelles which are part of the epigenetic complex *do* inherit through the mother.
The process that causes this particular type of obesity and associated ailments is, however, caused by a *developmental* disorder which originates during pregnancy, not because of inheritance.
It’s a developmental defect in the foetus caused by environmental stress due to insufficient nutrients.
Thing is… the methylation status of the IGF2 locus in the individuals who have this particular birth defect will *under normal circumstances* get stripped and “properly” re-applied during gametogenesis.
So healthy eggs and sperm will have been “reset” to Factory Settings, and as such *cannot* pass on that particular epigenetic “trait”.
Doesn’t mean there can’t be sperm ( millions upon millions…. ) which have a wonky IGF2 locus , or even with even less probability eggs..
Biological processes aren’t perfect, sometimes deliberately so, so there will be, even in a “perfectly healthy” person.
The question there is whether or not people with IGF2 induced obesity are more likely to produce such misimprinted gametes.
Which all data to date so far has not been able to confirm.
The usual decline in quality of sperm due to obesity and associated diabetes, but that’s not unique to this type.
*Every* form of severe obesity/associated diabetes has this decline in gamete quality, with roughly the same characteristics for the specific defects.
Even then, during the first stages of pregnancy that site gets (de) regulated regularly to enable the various embrionic stages to happen, before finally being locked down *tight* in almost all tissues.
Which means the initial state of the site will *not* be the same as that during conception for any given cell.
The only way for the condition to re-occur is “starvation” during the relevant crucial stages of pregnancy.
Which, again, makes it a *developmental* defect. Not a genetic or “inheritable” defect.
So if there’s a “second generation” it’s because the *mother* has as bad a diet as the grandmother during pregnancy.
( which *needn’t* be actual starvation, but merely food that doesn’t contain the vitamins/trace elements the foetus needs…)
Which is a social issue, not an underlying biological cause.
That besides the fact that I wouldn’t worry about the obesity effect of this particular embuggerance…
The direct link to aberrations of this locus causing a heavily increased risk of specific types of * quite agressive* colonorectal cancer, liver cancer, and renal cancer are *much* more impactful, and can’t be mitigated by diet and exercise…
Are world leaders abandoning the WEF and turning Trumpy?
Lula has announced a 15% increase in the country’s main cash-transfer programme for poor families
Yep. A straight vote buy
However I’ve been convincing poor Brasilians wealth transfer is against their interest. Problem with Brasil is most of the wealth of its wealthy is in land. Increase taxes on the wealthy & they’ll economise on labour. And Brasil has a relatively small middle class but an awful lot of poor. Wealth transfer from them will be too small to make any difference to the poor. But it will stop them creating jobs.
And what Brasil needs more than anything else is jobs. Brasilians aren’t like Brits. They want to work. They have a tremendous work ethic. Give them the opportunity & they’ll dig themselves out of poverty.
You mean you chat with your girlfriend and her family?