A doctor - not pictured here - at the Conshohocken Weight Control has been arrested for his alleged behavior towards female clients.

News reports vary, but they agree that Arie Oren, 64, of Narberth, has been charged with four counts of aggravated indecent assault and eight counts of indecent assault for his alleged conduct with six patients who range in age from 24 to 59.

The women felt like he was attacking them, and that's all that matters. Whether it's medical or it's sexual, you need informed consent. On the other hand, it's quite possible that a good love life can result in weight loss, if it reduces stress. (If you want your partner arrested, it's a sign that it's not reducing stress.)

Diets Don't Work

About 40 years ago, there was a book published that said diets don't work. Minor fluctuations, less than ten percent of your body weight, could be temporarily influenced by diet, they conceded, but not significant permanent weight loss. The publisher offered a $100,000 prize for anyone who could come up with a diet that was proven to work. To win the prize, dieters had to lose 40 pounds, keep it off for four years - and what's more, you got the money even if 80% of the people who started it failed to meet the objectives.

Nobody claimed the prize. The author said that weight loss surgery was the only technique that could achieve even a 5% weight loss.

I've spent a lot of time, over the years, scouring the PubMed database of the National Institute of Health. There's still no progress on coming up with a successful diet. Neither does exercise help. It will reshape your body, but it builds muscle mass, and you end up heavier, rather than lighter, if you do that. It turns out that about 2% of the population has significant weight loss in any given year without surgery - but that's 2% of those who are dieting, and 2% of those who aren't.

A Quick Ten Pounds

If you want to lose ten pounds in ten days, I do have a diet that will work for you. Confine yourself to eating raw bacon and rancid tuna. Boy, if vomiting and diarrhea don't take the pounds off, nothing will.

And I know you weren't wondering, but I'll answer this for you anyhow: it's as hard to pack on the pounds as it is to take them off. Dieting just doesn't work.

When I tell people dieting doesn't work, one common reaction I get is a scornful, "Sure, you fat slob. Just give up!" I point out to them that I'd like to be able to fly. No, I don't want to pilot an aircraft, I'm taking about me flying. How many times should I jump off the garage roof, my arms flapping, before I give up on that? Why is it considered admirable to repeatedly do something futile?

Researchers in the United Kingdom decided in the 1980s that obesity is normally caused by stress, and although it took a while for that idea to spread, it was commonly accepted by obesity researchers worldwide by the mid-1990s.

Diet Pills Don't Work, Either

So what about the various prescription diet pills? Don't they work? The quick answer is "no". They get approved, and then they go off the market a few years later, often because of the many lawsuits coming from people harmed by the pills, as in the case of phen-fen. I took a look at the trials for Meridia that were submitted when they were trying to gain approval by the government.

Highly motivated dieters, as you would imagine, initially they lost quite a bit of weight. The pills do have an effect, and dieters lost more weight than non-pill dieters in the first few months, but by the end of a year, the amount of weight lost was about the same for both pill and non-pill dieters. The second year, even though the dieters had not yet achieved the weight they wanted to achieve, they lost no more weight, and after 18 months, some of the dieters were starting to regain weight, even though they were still following their diets

If you look at other diets in PubMed, you find the same thing. In the third year, dieters are gaining back the weight they lost. According to one study, if you would weigh the people today, who started a weight-loss diet five years ago today, they would average a weight gain of 5-10% from their former weight. Dieting stresses your body.

If you really want to improve your diet, I have two suggestions for you. One is to restrict your sodium intake. They have studied everything over the years, and someone announces that coffee is bad for you, and then someone else does a study and decides that, no, coffee is good for you, and it's been the same story with everything they've tested - except for sodium. They've never found that excess sodium levels are good for you.

Electrolyte Balance

I've read articles that say it's not sodium per se but the electrolyte balance that matters. When you get too much sodium, your kidneys expel both sodium and potassium and it's the low potassium levels that get you. These articles point out that our blood isn't greatly different in composition from sea water - and they recommend that we consume sea salt, which is a blend of sodium and potassium, rather than table salt or kosher salt, which is just sodium. Maybe they're right. I try to use sea salt instead of sodium salt.

On the other hand, the foods we buy in supermarkets and restaurants are generally prepared with sodium salt. I suppose one could carry a shaker of sea salt into restaurants, but I rarely salt food in restaurants, so that is of limited value. Switching in the supermarket from buying canned food to frozen food, and from frozen food to fresh fruits and vegetables is far more helpful. It's not cheap, but the co-pays on pills and doctors' visits aren't cheap, either. Just remember to buy sea salt and to throw out the sodium salt.

Vitamin "F" - Fiber

The other suggestion is to get more fiber. Nutritionists aren't the brightest bulbs - they haven't caught on to what obesity research is showing them - but they suggest that most of us aren't getting enough fiber nor enough calcium.

These days, bariatric surgeons are promoting the idea of reducing food consumption by restricting the size of the stomach. They used to promote the idea of reducing food absorption by bypassing most of the length of the small intestine.

The old surgery was dangerous. Patients had to get B-12 shots monthly because the site that absorbed it was bypassed. Because food passed through the body so quickly, patients had severe problems with gas. If they got the flu, the food passed through the body even more quickly, and that led to electrolyte imbalance, which can cause heart attacks. On the other hand, the old surgery was much more effective than the new surgery at producing the desired weight loss.

Nutrient Density Matters

If you get more fiber into your diet, you reduce the nutrient density in your intestines. Food passes through your system more quickly, and less of it is absorbed. Some people with eating disorders take laxatives to lose weight, and it works somewhat but eating more fiber is a safer way to do that. What's more, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables accomplishes this goal at the same time that it reduces your sodium intake.

Over the years, the US population has been getting fatter. I have previously suggested here that it may have something to do with high fructose corn syrup. I've been recommending here for three years that we all follow the Rule of 1900: If someone's grandmother wouldn't have recognized it as a food in 1900, we probably shouldn't eat it. My grandmother, in 1900, didn't know what a Kiwifruit was, nor how to prepare a plantain, but somebody's grandmother did. The problem is not food from far corners of the planet, but foods that aren't really foods, for instance, Crisco.

What If It's Not Food That Makes Us Fat?

Over the past few months, Little Brudder and I have been talking over these things, and he poked me in the cerebellum. "What if we're not getting fat because of what we eat, but because of the air we breathe, or the water we drink?"

Boy, that set me on my heels, because he's absolutely right. There's a lot of crap in the air that wasn't there in 1900. Even more so, there's a lot crap in our water supply that wasn't there in 1900. In 2003, Enviro-Test Laboratories found prescription drugs in Canadian municipal water supplies, and in 2008, the EPA found them in US municipal water supplies.

Since I moved off the farm to Pennsylvania, I've been buying spring water to make coffee with and to drink, but my ice comes from tap water, and I obviously can't control the water that's used in producing the foods and the beverages I purchase. Conceivably, when I water tomatoes in the back yard with a garden hose, the drugs in the water are taken in by the plant's roots and are incorporated in the tomatoes.

Water Worries Me

I'm concerned about our water supply, especially because pure water isn't particularly desirable. The distilled water sold in supermarkets and drug stores is for steam irons, not safe for drinking. Even if it wasn't for pseudomonas that is usually found in distilled water, the lack of minerals leaches the minerals out of our systems.

When farmers fertilize their crops to get larger harvests, they produce "hollow foods", with more protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but not corresponding vitamins and minerals, so we can't distill water in our homes and make up for it with more fruits and vegetables.

And if fracking the Marcellus Shale poisons the streams and the ground water, what are we going to do?

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Arie Oren - bariatric surgery - Conshohocken Weight Control - Diets Don't Work - electrolyte balance - exercise - fiber - fracking - giving up - high fructose corn syrup - intestinal bypass - Marcellus shale - Meridia - potassium - Rule of 1900 - sodium - spring water