Jessica Preston

Nutrition for Fat Fucks and Lazy Bastards. Just like you are now, I use to be a fat fuck. [caption id="attachment_214" align="alignleft" width="198"] not me[/caption] But then I starved myself and took a shitheap of drugs. I lost a fair bit of muscle and elasticity, and a bit of fat in there too -about 15kg all up.. work out the conversion yourself-. And now I'm a flabby, lazy bastard, who's a Big Mac away from being a fat fuck again. If you ask me, it seems like a fucking waste of a good body. I should be in top condition but I feel like shit most of the time. I get puffed out walking up stairs. My hair is falling out. I'm tired and sluggish everyday. I feel like a right mess. And a piss poor role model at that. Now, if there's one thing I've learnt in my 30+ years; if there's one thing I'm dead set sure of, it's choices- I can do nothing and continue to feel crap for the next 40 or so years - yeah, nah. I can try fad diets and exercise programs, which I'll get bored of within the week -if not hour - been there many times-, or I can actually get an understanding of what my body needs and when and how.. -After all, bitches, knowledge is power- So, I'm gonna check out some online free course sites, like edX or Alison.com or coursera and share my learning as we go.. -In my own brand of communication- Well, shitheads, let's get learning! What's the Go Joe? To make it easy for us brain-dead chunktards, we'll break the learnings up over a few weeks so we have a chance to re-read it all several times, look up the big words in the dictionary, and let the wokeness really set in. First up we'll: cover how nutrition and human health are sexy lovers, entwined in the dance of healthiness explore the chemistry of the three main nomnoms (macronutrients): fat, carbohydrate and protein discover how our bodies take in, hoard and then use what we eat to make the energy; and chat about how the nomnoms we eat does stuff to our health. Then we'll check out:  energy homeostasis -whatever the fuck that is- some stuff to do with the regulation of body weight; and grill the fuck out of our pathetic psyches on how shit obesity is -like we don't already know- We'll also cover some Nutritional Science and the different methodologies used by these health hippies in nutritional research. Keep an eye out on the side menu - I'll be posting up some videos, whatever recommended readings and bits'n'bobs I come across, and some 'fun' quizzes n sheeeeiiit. Now that our almonds are activated, let's get stuck into it, like a hefty whore in her prom dress.   Week 1: Basic shit Alrighty my shitheads, let's check out a couple of topics: 1. How Hippy Scientists Study Nutrition 2. WTF is Our Alimentary Tract Is -I have no fucking clue either- can you feel the learning begin people??- QUICK FACT: Alimentary tract, or GI tract, or bottomless pie-hole, gob, face anus- is the bit that takes the food into the body and converts it to goodness 1. How Hippy Scientists Study Nutrition These health conscious, fart smelling, scientists have been nutting out the role that diet, health and disease play for decades, and here are the main methods they use to do it: Experimental or Interventional Studies; and Observational Studies: Ecological Cross-sectional Case-control Cohort Knowing that not all studies will carry the same weight -pun pun-, researchers have to be strict as fuck with how they carry out their study and what design method they use. If you wanna look at the effect that booze has on people's fun at a party, you can't just give a bunch of them some alcohol and go "maaaate, having fun yet?". You'd have to have a couple of groups, give one group the grog and the other group some non-alcoholic abomination (a placebo -like the band!-) and then ask both groups to rate how they enjoyed themselves. By having a control group get the snake oil, or placebo, and the other get the top shelf, we get a better idea of how alcohol, as opposed to boring old sobriety, effects enjoyment. Overview of Research Designs As we just learnt, researchers can choose from a number of different study designs to understand how nutrition and health relate to each other. Every approach has its own set of pros and cons. So what's the difference between experimental and observational studies, and what are they good for?  In experimental studies, researchers do an actual experiment - holy fucking shit! (called intervention), for example, providing a group of fatty's one kind of diet and then comparing them to a different bunch of fatty's who are on a different type of diet. "Experimental studies are the most powerful research design in nutritional science." -I reckon you could confidently make that assumption on pretty much any fucking field that uses research... looks like I'll be filtering out much of this idiots pretentious monologue about how special nutritional science is.. Fucking toss pot- Whereas observational studies don't try to change the fatty's diet but instead record the eating habits of a bigger -lol- group and see if there is an actual relationship to health that way. Observational studies look at things like - Do fat fucks who eat a lot of crap have higher rates of heart disease? Do drunkards who regularly get on the piss have higher levels of the "good" cholesterol? -waaaait, grog has good cholesterol?- Do lard-arses who eat loads of saturated fat have a higher risk of kicking the bucket? So what we're looking at with observational studies is people in their normal day-to-day doings. Generally, the rotund lab-rats tell the dietitian what they normally munch on without being asked to change their habits or take a pill or some other type of thingness. Because there's no comparison, like what we have in the experimental method, Observational studies don't tell us if an association between what we're eating and a measure like blood pressure, body fat level, risk for certain diseases, etc., is causal. -To break that down for the special specials - Observational studies wont show us if sinking tinnies cause an increase in "good" cholesterol levels, but they can tell us if there is a relationship between drinking the liquid gold and increased levels of the -fabled- "good" cholesterol. Observational studies are: Prospective (cohort) studies Case-control studies Cross sectional studies, and Ecological studies. Before we go deeper down the observational study design hole, let's learn a bit about how food intake data -yes, food intake data is what it's actually called, they spent some time coming up with that one- are collected. Dietary Assessment Methods Food intake can be determined in a bunch of ways, generally though, researchers use these questionnaires called food frequency questionnaires (FFQ's). These questionnaires ask butterballs stuff like: Do you make time for breathing in-between meals, and Do you use a horse trough or an old whiskey barrel instead of a normal dinner plate. Some questionnaires are epic novels that can take a yonks to complete, others are shorter depending on whether it is targeting the eating of certain eats. Another way to assess dietary intake is to get the pudgy's to keep note of all the foods (and amounts) they stuffed into their nom holes over the past 24 hours. This is called a 24h dietary recall -wow, so fucking cryptic- Usually, this is done a few times to get a decent estimate of what the lard-arse's regular food consumption is like. Another method for keeping tabs of what is going in is -are you ready for this gem?- a food diary or food record - BAM! fucking lightning bolt-. People write down and/or weigh all the food they eat for a week or longer. Food diaries can be quite accurate if done well. The problem with getting fatty's to keep food diaries is that they tend to change what, or how much, they eat when they have to write everything down -cos admitting to yourself you're a junk bucket is hard and makes you feel bad. Another con is that food diaries are expensive and time-consuming. And, after a few days, people get slack in recording their food intake. The next step in the assessment is to convert the information from the food questionnaires and food records into nutrient intake using food composition tables. Food composition tables These are very large -everything's a fat pun- tables that hold information on the nutrient content of a range of foods in any specified region. Included are: fat, carbohydrate (including fiber and sugar), protein, vitamins and minerals. When you combine the info on how often people eat certain foods with info on the nutrient content of these foods we can estimate the daily nutrient intake. BIG PROBLEM: food composition tables are generally incomplete: many food products are not listed, so researchers have to calculate nutrient intake using info from a different food -mmmm sciencing good-. It's important to note that the approach we just learned is the basis of nearly all observational studies. While one of the main pro's is that it's efficient and can be used to collect data of a large group, the major con's are that people bullshit when filling in these questionnaires/food diaries, potentially resulting in large errors. For example, it is well known that most piss-heads lie about their alcohol consumption. The same is probably -definitely abso-fucking-lutely- true for fat fucks eating fat food. Not only that, the big blimps have a strong tendency to under-report total food and energy intake -no surprise that fat cunts will lie about what and how much they eat, no surprise at all-. Nowadays many people use diet and nutrition apps to monitor their food and caloric intake. Examples include: MyFitnessPal My Diet Diary Calorie Counter; and Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker Play Store Ecological Study Ecological studies are a type of observational study in which we're looking at populations or groups of people, rather than individuals. So let's say we are interested in the relation between dousing our food in olive oil and kicking it from heart disease. We would look at countries and see if the countries that eat a lot of olive oil per capita have a lower rate of heart disease compared to countries where they don't consume much olive oil at all. By doing this we see that type of relationship which would suggest that olive oil is good for you, heart protective as you could say. But there are some issues with these type of analyses, which are best illustrated by using another example where we look at the relationship between traffic death and alcohol consumption if you compare countries that have a high alcohol consumption with those that have a low alcohol consumption, you see that the fewest traffic deaths occur in those countries that consume the most alcohol. That would suggest that alcohol would actually be protective, but we know that's not the case.So there is a serious problem with this type of study that we always need to take into account. The unit of measure is a country or group and you can not extrapolate that to the individual, which means for an individual, drinking alcohol is not a good idea in traffic. Imagine that you are interested in the link between olive oil and heart disease. One could compare the frequency of occurrence of heart attacks across countries that differ in olive oil consumption per capita, or across regions in France that differ in olive oil consumption per capita. Because the unit of analysis in an ecological study is the group, any association between an exposure and outcome cannot automatically be extrapolated to individuals. Imagine that we are interested in the relation between alcohol consumption and traffic fatalities. Ecological studies would show that the countries with a high alcohol intake (UK, Germany) have much fewer traffic fatalities (expressed per 100,000 inhabitants) compared with countries that have a low alcohol intake (such as Turkey, Pakistan, most African/Asian countries), which may lead to the conclusion that a high alcohol intake prevents traffic fatalities. However, within the UK, at the individual level, alcohol is anything but protective. Indeed, close to half of all traffic fatalities in the UK  can be attributed to alcohol. This example illustrates how an association emerging from an ecological study cannot automatically be extrapolated to individuals. The reason why traffic fatalities are low in the UK and Germany is because of the common use of seat-belts, quality of the cars, road design etc., and obviously has nothing to do with the high alcohol consumption. 1. The characteristic of an ecological or population based study is that the unit of measure is not the individual but a group or a country. 2. I think this is most easily explained by giving you an example: 3.