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The belief in physical activity as a method of weight control is relatively new, however, and it has long been contradicted by the evidence. When Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic lectured on obesity in 1932, he noted that his patients tended to lose more weight with bed rest, "while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss." "The patient reasons quite correctly," Wilder said, "that the more exercise he takes the more fa..
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Gary Taubes |
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Russell Ross reported that insulin also stimulates the proliferation of the smooth muscle cells that line the interior of arteries, a necessary step in the thickening of artery walls characteristic of both atherosclerosis and hypertension.
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Gary Taubes |
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The idea of specific populations predisposed to obesity is encapsulated in a notion now known as the thrifty gene--technically, the thrifty-genotype hypothesis--that is now commonly invoked to explain the existence of the obesity epidemic and why we might all gain weight easily during periods of prosperity but have such difficulty losing it. The idea, initially proposed in 1962 by the University of Michigan geneticist James Neel, is that we..
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Gary Taubes |
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human history was dominated by what Jared Diamond had called the "conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle." Reasonable as this may seem, we have no evidence that food was ever any harder to come by for humans than for any other organisms on the planet, at least not until our ancestors began radically reshaping their environment ten thousand years ago, with the invention of ..
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Gary Taubes |
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Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as "the worst mistake in the history of the human race.")"
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Gary Taubes |