A Big Breakfast and an I Told You So

I guess, more accurately, this would be a big "startfast."

That's leftover tri-tip roast, grilled on the BBQ for guests last evening. Three strips of fried, uncured bacon, two eggs over easy, and some red grapes. Of course, the unsalted butter in which I fried the eggs went on top of the roast. Yum.

Next meal tomorrow night, about 36 hours from this meal, and a few hours after a workout at the gym.

Next up, some will recall my two posts concerning a speech given by Gary Taubes, here, and then a follow-up here. I was trying to get across the idea that what Taubes seemed to be driving at is that it's not nearly so simple as calories in, calories out. Ultimately, that's true, but that's just the raw material, and not the causal factor which, I speculated was akin to a positive feedback mechanism. I wrote the following in the second post referenced above:

... it's not simply the fact of excess calories of any sort that makes people fat, but rather, they are turning on a fat-accumulation hormone that tips a balance, such that fat begins to act much like a tumor...

[...]

And what happens when a tumor gets to be of sufficient size? Does it not then become a self-sustaining cannibalistic parasite, sacrificing healthy bodily tissue for its own sake in a positive-feedback mechanism, such that the bigger it gets, the bigger and more parasitic its influence on the rest of the body until eventually its pathological selfishness kills the very host that feeds it?

This morning I cam across this bit of research news, courtesy of a commenter over at Art's.

Your belly fat could be making you hungrier

The extra fat we carry around our middle could be making us hungrier, so we eat more, which in turn leads to even more belly fat.

[...]

Yang says “this may lead to a vicious cycle where NPY produced in the brain causes you to eat more and therefore gain more fat around your middle, and then that fat produces more NYP hormone which leads to even more fat cells.”

Many of the things I have learned over the last months seem so dammed obvious and simple that's it's really difficult to understand why this "low fat, whole grains" culture persists. One thing's for sure, and that's that most of the people out there spouting it aren't -- and probably never did -- actually thinking about any of it. When that happens, there's just no telling what you're going to get. I'd point to political implications, but that'd be just too obvious.