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from the these-boots-are-made-for-walkin dept.
NewsChina http://new.newschinamag.com/newschina/articleDetail.do?article_id=2414 is running an article titled, "The Walking Dead - The lack of public sport facilities and sites have seen a growing number of urban residents take to public roads for exercise"
Xu Guilin has been restless and anxious of late. As the head of the Outdoor Sport Association of Lanshan District in the city of Linyi, Shandong Province, he's used to organizing hikes and walks in an urban landscape increasingly hostile to pedestrians. But now he's facing a media blitz after tragedy struck his group – while also handling members who are keen to take to the roads again.
In the early morning of July 8, 2017, a taxi rammed into a crowd of walkers on the highway in the city, killing one and injuring two. After the accident, more than 20 teams of walkers were told to halt their activities.
"I am under mounting pressure," Xu told NewsChina. He doesn't know how to cope with his thousands of members. "They want to exercise and walk, where could they go?" He's very worried that some walkers will strike off on their own, risking another accident, and he's facing massive criticism online where netizens flocked to condemn walkers for their alleged intrusion onto public roads.
It seems that with all the new urban construction in China, they haven't built sidewalks, parks or sports fields. Meanwhile, people that want to walk for exercise have banded together in groups and take to the streets for lack of anywhere else to walk. These are not small groups -- one founder started in 2010 with a few friends and by 2015 his group had grown and split many times...10,000 people were engaged in group walking in Linyi city.
We may think that groups of road cyclists are blocking the roads in a few places, but walking in China appears to be in a whole different league. Some groups taking a lane have been run over by cars (there is a picture in the article that purports to show this) and other groups banned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday October 09 2017, @07:24PM (2 children)
> Last I checked the problem was too many carbs and not enough proteins and fats
Last I checked, the food problem was too much energy coming in (too often, indeed, in ratios of molecule types not balanced to match biological needs), and not enough going out.
What constitutes the perfect balance is always a topic of discussions, fashions, and highly dependent on individuals. But the immutable part is how, unless you have a very specific extremely rare disease, people being overweight is the simple result of failing to address an intake that doesn't match a lifestyle.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:43PM
Wrong. Insulin spikes modulate food metabolism and drives the efficiency of digestion. Combined with how calorie dense high-carb food is compared to high-fat and high-protein (aka, meat) foods, and you end up getting fat on a high-carb diets that total the same calories as high-protein diets you'd lose weight on while only satisfying your appetite on the high-protein\fat diets. The actual number has been suggested to be as much as a 30% difference in calorie intake depending on meal frequency and life style but considering most people are getting fat from as little as 5-10% surplus and you can see what a huge difference it makes.
And it's not just the insulin. Protein digestion is relatively inefficient and has high limits whereby the body expels excesses early before making it to the blood stream. However, extra glucose readily turns into fat.
The insinuation behind your statement is that it's possible to build a healthy high-carbs diet even for people with sedentary lifestyles simply by reducing the amount of carbs. That's just wrong. Practically speaking not only people will never be able to satisfy their appetites on such a diet leading to it failing, their energy levels throughout the day will fluctuate as their blood glucose spikes leaving them dysfunctional in their lives and jobs. And that disregarding the health of their kidneys.
Honestly I don't know why people insist on repeating these sugar industry propaganda points. Food is addictive. The biological reason we have addiction in the first place is food. The idea a normal person should be expected to demonstrate self-control and regulate their own dosages when served the equivalent of pure heroin 3 times a day is against everything we observe in the real world. Millions of years of biological evolution were done around regularly consuming scraps of meat with the odd fruit you picked off a tree with a non trivial amount of effort. We're not built for growing and eating wheat, rice and corn. It's a recent change and our biology just hasn't caught up. You're not supposed to be satisfied with such an energy dense diet since it wouldn't have naturally happened enough for humanity to evolve to. Adopting self-flagellation in the form of exercise might satisfy emotional needs for some to the point of sedating their appetites, but it doesn't help most people and makes a really bad argument when considering other countries who don't suffer from obesity and have just as many sedentary people don't have huge populations of gym rats to offset the figures to their favor.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Monday October 09 2017, @11:24PM
And what, pray tell, a "very specific extremely rare disease" would make you gain weight while not eating enough? Breatharianism? A perpetuum mobile creating energy then converting it to mass?
Stuffing yourself is an absolute requirement. No matter what "healthy at any size" crowd will tell you, being fat is purely your fault. No "hormones" can make you produce body mass out of nothing.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.