Tag: video

Dr. William Davis on Why Grains are Bad for You

I like this guy. He wrote ‘Wheatbelly’ (which I have not read), but I *have* read – multiple times – his book ‘Undoctored’. Now the world is filled with con men and kooks – as well as the earnest-yet-misinformed. The latter are not bad folks – it’s just the shit they believe has got their mind all shut. The con men are dangerous to your health and wallet, and the kooks just dangerous to your health. With the explosion of people who did keto for a year and are setting themselves up as ‘experts’, I am wary of most preachers out there and am quite choosy about who I listen to.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening and reading Dr. Davis and his approach has convinced me at least up to this point that:

  1. He is not a kook
  2. He wants to make a buck off of his work

There is *nothing wrong* with wanting to make a buck. We all have to eat and pay our mortgages. It’s *how* we do it. Dr. Davis wrote a bunch of books to compliment the ‘Wheatbelly’ diet, but ‘Undoctored’ is bolder. This is more of a crusade against modern medicine itself. He must not be held in high regard by most of his colleagues. I’ll discuss him a bit more some other time, perhaps, but here is an interesting, if a bit sciencey, lecture on why grains are bad for you. (TL;DW version – they have molecules that fit into your brain’s opioid receptors but instead of making you high, they make you hungry for more grains.) It’s more than that, though – I encourage you to give the video a watch. Yeah, I know: it’s an hour. 

“TV Allowance” – A Breakthrough In Reducing Childhood Obesity?

I suppose I should be proud to say this amazingly simple product, TV Allowance, was developed at a university in my locality.  Researchers came up with a large-calculator-sized device that lets families program “budgets” into their home televisions and computers, decreasing the available screen time from 10% to 50% over a period of several months.  They then studied 70 children of both genders between age 4 and 7 who had a higher-than-average BMI and watched TV or played computer games a minimum of 14 hours per week.  Along with the reduced screen time, the kids were also given inducements; monetary rewards and praise were doled out for doing something other than sitting idle in front of the boob tube.  Parents who reduced their family’s weekly video availability by 17.5 hours on average wound up with kids who ate less and lowered their BMIs.  The two-year study appears in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

“Results showed that watching television and playing computer games can lead to obesity by reducing the amount of time that children are physically active, or by increasing the amount of food they consume as they are engaged in these sedentary behaviors,” said one of the study’s authors.

The author, while admitting the overall changes were “modest,” believes the use of this device across the population may produce “important reductions in obesity and obesity-related health problems.”  Additionally, while it did reduce the time these kids were in front of a video screen, it did NOT increase their physical activity.  The study’s assumption is that the restriction minimizes cues to eat by limiting the number of child-targeted food ads to which this demographic is exposed.

So, is the underlying problem the amount of time these little couch potatoes sit doing nothing, or is it the continuous bombardment of sugar-peddling marketing schemes on their impressionable minds?  If they weren’t being active, as the study found, what were they doing?  Reading?  Meditating? 

So these kids “ate less” and had “modest” changes in BMI over a two year period.  Can someone do a study letting a similar group watch whatever they want but restrict their carb intake?