PRISM Nutrition

Is your food environment supporting your body composition goals or is it undermining your progress?

Did the food environment cause the obesity epidemic?

As usual, Kevin Hall provides a great brief overview of an important question. In this open access review paper, he describes the putative explanations of obesity that focus on aspects of the food environment, including dietary macronutrient composition, energy content, and overall quality of the food supply.

To summarise:

- Given that our genes have not changed appreciably over the past several decades, environmental changes must have caused the current obesity epidemic.

- Changes in protein intake or the ‘protein leverage hypothesis’ of obesity don’t seem to explain the obesity epidemic.

- Rather, an increase in overall energy intake adequately explains the obesity epidemic, with dietary fat seemingly contributing to a greater extent than carbohydrates.

- That said, focusing solely on the increased calories in the food supply masks the complexity of the simultaneous changes that occurred in food quality, with highly-processed “added value” foods containing relatively high amounts of salt, sugar, fat, and flavour being increasingly common.

- Hall’s conclusion. “It is difficult to imagine a definitive scientific demonstration of the cause of the obesity epidemic since population environmental changes are difficult to isolate and experimentally manipulate. It is easier to rule out simple explanations of obesity such as those based on individual dietary macronutrients. More plausible explanations invoke complex changes in the overall food environment and the associated alterations in normative eating behaviors. Furthermore, a confluence of multiple interrelated environmental changes apart from the food environment, such as decreased occupational physical activity, likely played important moderating roles in the development of the obesity epidemic. Disentangling the relative contributions of these environmental variables is a difficult problem, but it seems clear that the food environment is likely the primary driver of the obesity epidemic.”

FREE full-text link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5769871/

An absolute pleasure and honour coaching friend and client Humphrey for his second service with PRISM Nutrition.

Making his Men’s Physique debut with limited preparation time, his work ethic and consistency was second-to-none.

Wishing him all the best on his new venture, I hope we cross paths again in the near future.

Full testimonial linked below:
http://bit.ly/PRISMHumphrey