Aside from some unfortunate travel-related issues (which I ranted about in this diary), the ISSN conference was a terrific experience. I know how difficult it is to pull these things off, having watched my friend Jean-Paul Francoeur put together and run his annual JP Fitness Summit the past few years. So my thanks and congratulations go out to Joey Antonio, Doug Kalman, and Maelu Fleck for their talent, hard work, and hospitality.

I plan to write in detail about some of the topics raised at the conference in the next couple of days, as soon as I've had a chance to review my notes together and contact speakers to get more information. And I'll confess up front that some of the more scientifically challenging presentations were over my head. (After one of them, Chris Shugart and I wondered if we were the only ones who had no idea what the speaker had just spent 40 minutes talking about. I had to ask Jeff Stout for an interpretation.) Then there was one that just pissed me off, for reasons I'll get into in another post.

But I was able to follow, absorb, and even at times enjoy much of the material, despite my lack of academic training in sports nutrition or exercise science. I'll share the most thought-provoking information and insight in future posts.

Today, I want to talk about Rethinking Thin, the latest book from New York Times reporter Gina Kolata.

Kolata's central premise is that people are fat or lean because of their genes, and there's really not much any of us - individually or as a society - can do about it.

According to the research she cites and the scientists she interviews, each of us has a narrow range of possible body weights - perhaps 10 percent of our current weight in either direction. So if your weight has been stable for a few years, and you haven't done anything extraordinary to get to that weight, chances are that the most you could gain or lose would be 10 to 20 pounds. A 200-pound guy might be at risk of gaining 20 if he let himself go, but couldn't lose more than 20 no matter how hard he tried. If you're extremely overweight and hope to pull a Huckabee and lose triple-digit pounds without gaining it all back, you're almost certainly doomed to failure.

Like her previous book, Ultimate Fitness, about half of Rethinking Thin is fascinating and provocative. A third is pure filler that her editor should've persuaded her to leave out. The rest is infuriatingly reductive. Her conclusion about exercise in Ultimate Fitness is that we exercise because we already feel good; people who don't feel strong and healthy don't exercise. In Rethinking Thin, she posits that thin people demonize obesity because we can't possibly get fat, and refuse to accept that fat people can't possibly get thin.

I think all of us in the fitness business understand it's not that simple. Nobody should dismiss the power of genetics over any aspect of weight control. All of it - appetite, food preferences, metabolism, hormonal tendencies - has genetic links, and all of it affects the actual pounds we carry on our skeletons. But at the same time it's unlikely that every fat or thin person we encounter has only minimal control over his or her weight.

Take, for example, the guy in the seat in front of me on the flight to Las Vegas. He must've weighed at least 400 pounds. His normal breathing was as labored as mine after a set of squats. His wife was also large (not to mention dumb as a rock; she thought a flight from Cincinnati to Las Vegas should take just one hour, since her ticket said we'd take off at 9 and arrive at 10 - someone had to explain to her the concept of time zones), and their kids were on the heavy side as well. No weight-loss expert in the world would look at that guy and say his genetics doomed him to weigh 400 pounds, and that his best hope would be to lose 10 percent of his current weight and waddle through life at a relatively svelte 360.    

He did something extraordinary to get to that weight, and if more than 10 percent of his current girth was his own doing, that means he could reverse course and lose more than 10 percent of it. It wouldn't be easy. The guy would almost certainly have to low-carb it and swear off beer. If he had a psychiatric disorder, like binge-eating disorder, he'd have to get that treated by a medical professional. His wife would have to go along with it, and that might be the hardest part of all - a woman who could plan a 2,000-mile trip from east to west without realizing it would involve multiple time zones might not understand the difference between a turkey sandwich and a Whopper with fries.

That's a big order, but it would take a lot to convince me that it's impossible.

Kolata sums up her thesis this way:

I edited that passage to remove references to two different researchers, who express these ideas as their opinions. But it's clear Kolata is as convinced of this conclusion as they are. As she did in Ultimate Fitness, Kolata plays up those who agree with her exhortation to rethink thin, and ignores or marginalizes those who disagree.

That's fine - it's her book, and it's not my place to tell her how to fill her pages. (If the situation were reversed, I wouldn't want her to tell me how to fill mine.) But I think genetics are only half the story, and, as I said, I think Kolata deliberately ignored the other half.

I'll concede that if each of us ate the exact same foods in the exact same volume, our genes would determine how much each of us weighs. But the human species is entirely capable of manipulating our environment to our advantage. We know that different foods and feeding styles have different effects on our metabolic and hormonal responses. We know that fructose, for example, has an insulin-muting effect. The sugar is still getting into our bloodstreams, but without the insulin response that, for better or worse, tells the sugar where to go. The 900 calories in a six-pack of Mountain Dew provoke a very different physiological reaction than 900 calories in the form of a 12-ounce sirloin steak. The steak makes us feel full. The Mountain Dew doesn't.

Kolata argues that, over time, it all balances out, and that each of us maintains a genetically determined caloric balance. If we skip a meal on Wednesday, we eat more on Thursday or Friday to make up for it. The assumption is that all calories are equal, and that our bodies are fully cognizant of how much we're taking in and burning off. It has nothing to do with supersized Cokes and French fries.

That argument is so extreme, and so extremely unlikely, that a review in her own newspaper (written by Emily Bazelon of Slate), takes her to task for it:

This probably says more than Bazelon meant to say. In condemning the effort to reverse childhood obesity, Kolata calls to mind the reality-averse fools and fantasists currently running our government with ever-more-disastrous results. But in doing so, Kolata, a science reporter by trade, shows a neocon's ability to blind herself to inconvenient information and analysis.

Consider this passage, which appears two pages after the one I cited earlier. Once again, she's quoting an obesity researcher, but it's pretty clear Kolata shares his opinion:

But to take this argument to its logical endpoint, Kolata is suggesting there's a gene that predisposes someone to choose an 800-calorie Big Gulp over a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast. That's like saying someone who becomes addicted to gambling would be addicted to gambling even if he'd never played a game of cards or entered his first casino. The fact that casinos exist would be enough to give him an insatiable appetite for gambling.

Until that gene is located, I'll continue to believe that choices matter. One person may be hungrier than the next, but that doesn't mean the hungrier person in incapable of resisting the siren call of refined carbohydrates.  

Make-up blog meat

• For an entirely different point of view, check out Jimmy Moore's review of Rethinking Thin. Moore lost 180 pounds in one year on a low-carb diet - 44 percent of his original 410 pounds - and has kept it off for two and a half years. I understand that Moore's experience is an anecdote, not a data set. But it also puts him in a pretty good position to take issue with Kolata's idea that we have no control over the behaviors and choices that affect our weight.
• This story - "Infants Being Treated for Obesity" - seems like it should be an Onion parody. (Along the lines of this one and this one.) But apparently it's real. One doctor is quoted as saying he knows of parents who gave their child a McDonald's milkshake in a baby bottle. There's no mention of socioeconomic issues, but I have to suspect we aren't talking about the brightest or best-educated parents here. It's well-known that the poorest and least educated are the fattest. (If you go to the link, click on Table 2. The study's a few years old, but I'm not aware of any new information that contradicts these findings.) So what do we do to save the children? Outlaw stupidity? Or just outlaw stupidity in people with a genetic predisposition to obesity?
• A companion piece to the one above: Children in the UK are being taken from their parents because of the kids' weight. Seems obesity, in extreme cases, can now be considered a type of child abuse. (Thanks to Rannoch Donald for these links.)