[HN Gopher] Study finds childhood diet has lifelong impact
___________________________________________________________________
Study finds childhood diet has lifelong impact
Author : gmays
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-02-05 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ucr.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ucr.edu)
| lend000 wrote:
| From my armchair, the microbiome aspect of this study seems like
| something that would vary significantly between mice and humans
| (when the bacterial environment over a few months in mouse-time
| is being extrapolated to many years in human-time).
|
| Might be wishful thinking since I didn't eat very well as a
| teenager.
| encoderer wrote:
| File under shit we didn't need to study.
|
| Is this just careerism, needing to get published to advance a
| career?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The objective of this research seems to be understanding the
| mechanism, not just the result. That is something worth
| studying.
| ska wrote:
| > File under shit we didn't need to study.
|
| At first glance this seems very obviously wrong. Can you
| elaborate why you think there is no value in understanding the
| impact of things like diet on development and beyond?
| encoderer wrote:
| It's a study of feeding junk food to mice. What cause of
| science was advanced here besides authors getting published?
| tryonenow wrote:
| >We studied mice, but the effect we observed is equivalent to
| kids having a Western diet, high in fat and sugar
|
| Is there any evidence beyond correlation that high fat diets are
| unhealthy?
|
| Also the researchers measured mice intestinal biome at 14 weeks,
| given that the lifespan of bacteria is probably similar whether
| in mice or in humans, I wonder if the comparison to human
| lifespan is valid, considering that a transition that takes x
| mice-years may only take y human-months, so to speak.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| we have good evidence that partially hydrogenated oils are
| directly responsible for cardiovascular disease, I believe.
| "High healthy fats" diets? Probably not as much of a well-
| studied link there.
|
| I would 100% agree that a high-sugar low-fat diet is more
| dangerous than eating high-fat low-sugar, but high-fat high-
| sugar is a hell of a lot worse than either of the other
| combinations - and a more common diet in the population at
| large. That's probably more relevant to this study, as limited
| as it is.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Not all fats are created equal.
|
| There's data pointing that Omega-6 fatty acids (primarily
| vegetable/seed oils and trans fats) are harmful.
|
| See the following talk by Dr. Chris Knobbe:
|
| https://youtu.be/7kGnfXXIKZM
|
| You can jump here for the studies:
|
| https://youtu.be/7kGnfXXIKZM?t=2020
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I think the trouble is define 'high fat diet'
|
| What kind of fats are we talking about exactly. Trans-fats?
| Rancid fats. Fats in cured meat? Fats from seed oils? What kind
| of seeds? Vegetable fats? If so again what kind? Maybe you
| think olive oil is okay. What if I told you 90% of olive oil is
| adulterated? Animal fat? What's that animal been eating?
|
| The last one is interesting. Before WWII frozen chicken really
| wasn't a thing because frozen chicken tasted rancid after it
| was thawed. Someone figured out you could fix that by switching
| the feed from linseed to corn.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| Well, that's depressing, especially since parents make most of
| the choices for children. "Your parents fed you bad food so I
| guess you're screwed." Yay.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Seems like this is something that could be treated, perhaps a
| slightly more sophisticated version of, stop eating sugar and
| "take these probiotic pills/foods."
| hntrader wrote:
| > parents make most of the choices for children
|
| That's mostly true for _what_ the kid eats, but not really _how
| much_ the kid eats. Childhood obesity is largely genetic, the
| correlation between an adoptee 's BMI is stronger with that of
| their biological parents than with their host family.
| johnkpaul wrote:
| I wouldn't think of it that way! Think about the control you
| have now.
|
| My mother was so into sugar and had other medical issues and
| had all her teeth pulled and dentures by 35. I was born into an
| extremely high insulin environment and was morbidly obese by 8.
|
| I just hit my 4 year anniversary of carbohydrate recovery and
| I've made super significant change in my weight, cholesterol,
| A1C and tons of other unmeasurables.
| trollski wrote:
| no shit sherlock
| cmbuck wrote:
| ...in mice
| auslegung wrote:
| I wouldn't dismiss a study just because it was done on mice. My
| understanding is that scientists have tested and respected ways
| of transferring findings in mice to insights for humans.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Mice studies are useful to scientists in the field. My guess
| is the popularizing mice studies to the general public is
| very, very misleading.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, also if you feed a kid corporate garbage they will believe
| it is food, i.e. whatever we experience as a child is "normal."
| Later, these habits are very hard to break. These folks tend to
| believe you need "will power" to force down actual
| delicious/nutritious food. Do the opposite and enjoy healthy food
| from the get-go.
| monadic3 wrote:
| There is more to the story of childhood diet than simple
| narratives of cheap nutrition, though that certainly plays a
| massive role. Consider, for instance, eating disorders,
| including some which may be mistaken for playing into
| aforementioned narrative, such as binge eating (a common
| symptom among eating disorders in general and often co-morbid
| with eating comforting but "bad" food) and picky eating (such
| as ARFID, also correlated with eating comforting but "bad"
| food). In neither situation is the consumption of the "bad"
| food the cause or most even the most harmful symptom.
| slothtrop wrote:
| No one binge-eats a bag of apples. You can't really divorce
| the nature of the food from overconsumption.
| jjj123 wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I have some issues with food addiction
| and have absolutely binged on celery, Greek yogurt,
| broccoli, etc. in an unsuccessful attempt to eat healthier
| without fixing the root issue.
|
| Of course I prefer to binge on pizza but I'll overeat just
| about anything.
| r00fus wrote:
| How does one overeat celery? It literally takes more
| energy to eat than it gives you in calories...
| jjj123 wrote:
| Overeating means eating so much your life is negatively
| impacted in some way. Gaining weight is definitely an
| example of a negative impact but certainly not the only
| one.
|
| I would eat until I felt sick. Sometimes I'd have a food
| hangover the next day.
| slothtrop wrote:
| These foods are so fibrous it's difficult to have
| anything resembling a binge, even if the volume seems
| high.
|
| A large bag of chips contains an average 1200 calories.
| Anyone can eat that in a sitting. An apple averages 93
| calories, it would take you 13 to yield 1200 calories.
| Broccoli florets have 25 calories; meaning you'd have to
| consume 48. I don't believe for a second you've ever
| eaten 48 broccoli florets in a row.
|
| Yes, emotional eating / stress eating is its own problem
| which isn't _dictated_ by a given food, but is absolutely
| facilitated by food, to the extent that in absence of
| ultra-processed foods binge-eating is far less likely,
| and drastically reduced.
| jjj123 wrote:
| > these foods are so fibrous it's difficult to have
| anything resembling a binge
|
| You're talking about eating too many calories, I'm
| talking about overeating and binging. They are related,
| but not the same. It is absolutely binging to eat
| broccoli to the point where you feel sick and can't sleep
| and contemplate making yourself vomit (speaking from
| experience here), even if calorie-wise it's less than a
| donut.
| est31 wrote:
| Agree with you on your general point, but i wouldn't phrase
| it as "no one":
|
| https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines/airline-
| passengers...
| monadic3 wrote:
| My point is that "overconsumption" has a very different
| meaning inside the context of "underconsumption" to the
| point that binge eating is a substantial source of your
| calories and might not be considered "overconsumption" at
| all. If you don't eat the apple in the first place avoiding
| junk food doesn't do any good. Furthermore, there are
| probably hundreds of millions of people silently
| malnourishing themselves through fad diets that non-doctors
| prescribe and overexercising. Such a rigid view of
| nutrition as the parent poster implied (e.g., health
| problems in america are generally traceable back to high
| availability of food high in sugar and fat but low in fiber
| and a culture of non-exercise) obscures deeply complex ways
| that people consume food and how this is informed through
| the media and social norms.
|
| Anyway, I'm not gonna stop chugging milkshakes any time
| soon; I need the nutrition to gain weight.
| r00fus wrote:
| It extends all the way to not only consuming healthy foods but
| also learning to prepare/cook them as well.
|
| I found out the hard way about the cooking part in College (ate
| healthy @ home but didn't care for the cooking bit, and it was
| considered "for girls" so my parents didn't press). Then I tons
| of allergy and other diet related issues after I moved out
| until well into my 20s.
|
| I'm now committed to not only cooking healthy for my kids but
| teaching them at an appropriate age to learn how to make (and
| procure) the dishes as well.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| I'm one of those kids.
|
| I'm about 30 years old now and my diet is pretty much shit.
| It's actually kind of funny/embarrassing when my shopping cart
| has bags of pizza rolls and hot pockets. I take full
| responsibility, but I must say I'd have a much easier time if I
| had grown up eating healthy foods from the beginning.
|
| Luckily, I don't overeat, so I'm skinny and somehow have good
| cholesterol and blood pressure, but I know this will come back
| to bite me at some point.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| There is hope. Tipping my vintage, my mom used to buy 14
| boxes of King Vitamin cereal every 2 weeks. My siblings and I
| ate a full box each day, most at breakfast, with whole milk,
| the rest after school. We were very popular because we had so
| many toys that came in the cereal boxes, we'd just hand them
| to the neighbor kids.
|
| As an adult, I started discovering foods that were
| startlingly delicious. For example, a fully ripened pear,
| when all the pears I'd eaten were harder than apples. U-pick
| cherries in season. Strawberries that you didn't need to dip
| in powdered sugar. Darker and darker chocolates to the point
| I can't eat milk chocolate any more. The way my wife prepares
| salmon, simply broiled with a little salt, pepper and soy
| sauce is fantastic. Fast food is Chipotle, which for fast
| food is as fresh and healthy as you're going to get.
|
| Make a point of exploring quality flavorful foods. It's
| enriching in many ways.
| RickS wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've found this to be surprisingly impactful. One of
| my brothers was a bodybuilder/athlete who ate clean and exercised
| a lot early in life. The rest of us were typical "mountain dew
| and warcraft" types. As we all enter our 30s, fit brother is able
| to do things the rest of us can't get away with, like eat a box
| of donuts a day for a weeks straight and keep an impressively
| lean figure, even when neglecting his fitness routines. Surely
| this would take a toll if he did it constantly, but his
| metabolism appears to have a "buffer" that my other brothers
| don't/didn't have at the same age.
|
| Really makes me regret all that young stress eating, and a crazy
| example of how "The body keeps the score" w/r/t early life
| experiences.
| hn8788 wrote:
| IIRC, the "buffer" is because your body has to expend extra
| energy to make more fat cells if they aren't already there.
| Even if you lose weight after being fat, the extra fat cells
| are still there, so it takes less energy for your body to get
| fat again.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Nah it depends how you loose weight. If you properly do some
| kind of body re-composition diet where you gain muscle and
| loose fat mass and also change your BMR a bit, you can go in
| and out of this "metabolic buffer" state. My metabolic buffer
| lasts for about a month and a half and then I notice muscle
| mass going down and fat going up and my BMR changes.
| eggbert12 wrote:
| If you go to lean from being fat and manage to stay there,
| are those fat cells eventually broken down or is that a new
| permanent record?
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I was a fat kid and I'm hit by the same regret every now and
| then (mice studies or not) when I compare myself with early-
| thin people. Two ideas cheer me up:
|
| -Our starting point does not determine where we end up. An
| early lead is a big advantage but plenty of people have
| overcome the hand they were dealt through work and forming good
| habits. Being in the top quintile (at lots of things, fitness
| included) is not that hard once you get in the groove.
|
| -We probably traded that early edge in fitness for some other
| capacity that we see ourselves as more "naturally" gifted in.
| Maybe you're better at abstract reasoning? Computers in
| general? So yeah, that negative might be balanced by a quality
| you developed in your early years by playing all the warcraft.
| Looking back I can see lots of good things in my life came from
| hours and hours of online gaming and forums - being fluent in
| English is probably one the largest (and easiest to acquire)
| edges I have over most Europeans and it came from umpteen late
| night CS sessions with Americans.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| > Your starting point does not determine where you end up.
|
| First sentence of the article: "Eating too much fat and sugar
| as a child can alter your microbiome for life, even if you
| later learn to eat healthier, a new study in mice suggests."
| So yes, eating bad as a kid means that you'll always be worse
| off and never get to where others are.
| codingdave wrote:
| The end of that sentence says, "a new study in mice
| suggests." It later suggested that the effect may last up
| to 6 years post-puberty, which is a more than a few decades
| shy of claiming that it remains true for all humans for
| their entire life. And even later, it said that exercise
| may compensate for it by building up other similar
| bacteria.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I have seen plenty of obese childhood friends transform
| themselves into thin people through discipline and hard
| work. Is it harder for them to keep the weight off than for
| other friends who have had six-packs since 10? You bet. Are
| they doing it anyway? You bet. Am I one of them? Not at all
| :)
| mlinhares wrote:
| Most of research shows that doing that is hard and very
| few people are able to keep it up so yeah, congrats for
| those able to do it, but it would be better not to place
| such burdens on people from the get go if possible.
|
| You have to pay for this cost forever. I've been going
| through it for 10 years now and I'd rather just not have
| to care about this or invest on it as much :)
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| No doubt! I wish I hadn't grown up obese, it was probably
| the most damaging thing to ever happen to me
| psychologically. It's not fun being the fattest kid in
| school. But there's only so much your parents can get
| right - I was loved, well-cared for, never abused or
| molested. I'll never know what sort of burden someone who
| grows up in extreme poverty or around violence carries.
|
| Could my parents have fed me a few cheeseburgers less?
| Absolutely. But it's a very small tarnish all things
| considered.
| [deleted]
| ars wrote:
| I'm the opposite - I was thin as a kid, and gained weight only
| in my 30's, for no reason that I could figure out.
|
| My diet did not change, I rarely eat junk food, no sweetened
| drinks except tea, and I prefer vegetables over other food, and
| all my meals are cooked at home (no restaurant food, no pre-
| made food - not even cereal).
|
| And yet, I keep gaining weight. I attribute it to eating too
| much of the healthy food I do eat, but I can't help it, I'm too
| hungry otherwise - but of course that doesn't really answer the
| question of why.
|
| Oh, and if I exercise my hunger skyrockets and I gain even
| more.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I was thin as a kid, and gained weight only in my 30's, for
| no reason that I could figure out.
|
| That's pretty commonplace. But there are things happening
| that nobody tells you about. I can't fit into the pants I
| wore in my 20's anymore (not for a long time). But I don't
| weigh that much more. Being observant, I noticed that men
| over 30 simply did not have the slim hips that younger men
| do.
|
| Googling it confirmed my suspicions - your hip bones grow
| wider as an adult, by a fair chunk.
|
| I've also noticed my shoe size is larger as well.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Muscle mass, itself, plays a big part in metabolism. Two people
| with similar builds, weighing the same, but with very different
| body compositions (say a weight lifter versus couch potato)
| will burn different amounts of calories both at rest and when
| performing various physical activities. The weight lifter going
| on a 5-mile walk will, typically, be burning more calories than
| the couch potato. Even just overnight while sleeping, the
| weight lifter will be burning more calories.
| [deleted]
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I must say as a parent it's pretty frustrating that we battle day
| in day out to try and maintain something resembling a good diet
| for our kids, but at least superficially their actual health
| honestly appears indistinguishable from kids in families where
| they really don't bother at all. It would be nice to have some
| real evidence that this is making a big difference.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| Look at the obesity statistics by age, this is something that
| will pay off far into the future imo.
|
| One good thing my parents taught me is that vegetables can be
| eaten without cheese or salt, and I currently eat healthier
| than anyone I know, and it's not a struggle at all for me.
|
| It's just "normal" and I'm accustomed to it. I think this can
| still be trained as an adult, but it's probably easiest if you
| never have to "transition" or break out of bad habits. Wishing
| your family the best.
| toyg wrote:
| As someone who lived both sides of that situation: you just
| can't know. If anything, because the minute they leave the home
| they will be free to eat shit like all their peers do, and
| might even do it with _more_ passion since it carries an
| element of transgression.
|
| It's the same with all things in parenting: you do your best
| and hope they will understand you did it out of love. But there
| are no guarantees.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. My son is an athlete, but he
| used to not eat really well. So I tried to get the diet used
| from other elite athletes, but I quickly learned that they
| often had terrible diets. So you ask, if Lebron James was
| raised on this diet then how bad could it be?
|
| Coincidentally, what made him into a healthy eater is that he
| found that food with lots of sugar and fat made him feel worse.
| Oddly, it doesn't happen to me at all, but he grew to be
| sensitive to it for some reason that we never understood. But
| he eats extremely healthy, if not a bit bland, now -- and is a
| great athlete.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Why does it have to be a battle? A balanced diet can delicious
| with little fuss.
|
| The evidence will come later if it hasn't already. Their
| behavior might be a hint. It impacts focus, brain development,
| everything.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-05 23:02 UTC)