> The food companies have marched around the grocery store, adding sweetness, engineering bliss points to products that didn’t used to be sweet.
This is why is now really hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in everything.
> It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much?
Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common.
With some willpower and practice, I can now eat nothing but a single bowl of cereal in a 24hr period, including 60m of hard exercise, without anything remotely like hunger pangs. It takes getting used to not constantly rewarding the thought of food with food.
You can do even better than a bowl of cereal. Eat something fatty, and even eating a little will significantly reduce your hunger. These days fatty food, such as cheese and creamy yogurt have been a staple of my diet: I can go by for a lot longer without eating much that way. The fruit-fat-nuts diet is _completely_ doable (of course, I eat 'normal' food too, for a more balanced diet, but only in the weekends, etc.)
I cannot find full fat yogurt in any of my local grocery stores. Is "low fat" as good as it gets? Seems like the low-fat diet craze of the recent past, and the current greek yogurt phenomenon, mean that "zero fat" and "low fat" are the only two options.
Assuming you shop at U.S supermarkets, you can _usually_ find full-fats, but they are almost always the store brand. There are very limited flavor options with full-fat though.
Ohh, what I'd give for full(even extra!) fat yogurt with not a lot of sugar. : (
The best yogurt I have had, by far, far, is Juju Dhau, from Nepal. It's so heavy and creamy, it feels like a meal in itself.
Hey investors, ya hear me? Juju dhau might be the next Chobani!
The low fat ones are marketing BS—loaded with sugar so they don't taste like nothing. Unfortunately that's very nearly the only thing available at most stores. Misleading advertising/labelling defeats good food yet again.
Every grocery store I've seen carries multiple brands of yogurts (usually in all of strained -- Greek, skyr, etc. -- non-strained, and drinkable), not labelled low- or no-fat that are full-fat. (At least one brands labels them as something like 4% fat, which is a low-seeming number, but is actually full fat.)
Stonyfield and Fage make full fat yogurts, for example. I do not remember seeing any at the grocery chain giants, though. More specialized groceries (e.g., Whole Foods, some "ethnic" stores) may carry a full fat yogurt.
Not sure if it qualifies as "full fat" per se, but Noosa brand yogurt has roughly twice the fat content of most Greek yogurts I've tried (seems to really help texture/flavor as well).
Fage, Straus, Maple Hill, Voskos all sell full-fat yogurt, and Trader Joe's sells one under their own brand. Maple Hill's is not strained and made with milk form grass-fed cows.
Try making your own yogurt. It's not quite as easy as buying it, but it's still a very simple process. You can make it with whatever fat content you'd like (and less sugar, which was the big draw for me), and it's really remarkably good. A decent yogurt maker will set you back maybe 20 or 25 bucks:
I can't eat nonfat dairy because it triggers my lactose intolerance. It drives me crazy to know that full-fat Greek style yogurt exists but none of my local stores stock it. The best I have found is 2%, and even then the pickings are slim.
That said, my local Safeway does stock 4% Darigold cottage cheese.
I find that eating something with fat and protein does a better job than fat alone. On days when I add in a mozzarella cheese, I feel satiated much longer than a fruit+nut bar alone (also have a tablespoon of coconut oil in my coffee).
I am interested in trying this, but if I don't eat breakfast, I am sometimes so light headed by 11:00am that I am literally almost falling over and my brain doesn't function. Any advice or articles you'd recommend?
Your symptoms sound like hypoglycemia. As someone for whom hypoglycemia is a chronic issue, the best thing I've found for dealing with fasting is to load up on protein-heavy foods with low glycemic indexes prior to the fast.
Edit: I should be more clear - avoid foods with high glycemic indexes prior to the fast. In fact, just avoid them generally; they're usually empty calories.
A good test for whether you're hypoglycemic is to set an alarm to go off every waking hour for three days, and eat a handful of nuts (or something else with a low glycemic load) every time the alarm goes off.
I did this and felt waaaaaaaaay better than normal mood- and concentration-wise. Realizing that I have blood sugar issues is the most important thing that's happened to me in the last five years except for having a kid.
Right, sorry. Basically that you feel way better, unmistakably better (mood, concentration, alertness, that sort of thing). Not super scientific, but effective at least in my case.
At Wal-Mart, they sell a glucometer called ReliOn. It's the cheapest strips of the ones out there, 50 for $21.
Start testing your blood sugar. Test it when you wake up. Test before you eat, and then 30 minutes after you eat (up to 4 tests) and look at the carb count on what you ate.
A healthy human should be between 85mg/dL and 100 mg/dL. Numbers over that show "something". Over 140mg/dL causes nerve death. We think that over 100 mg/dL causes pancreatic beta cells to die or mutate.
Then start playing around with how much carbs you eat. Dow what's called, "Eating to the Meter".
Also analysing what you're eating may give you a strong answer why you're feeling bad by 11.
Also, look in my history for what I'm doing (from yesterday).
On my fast days (Tues/Thur/Sun) I eat a decent breakfast, but I don't pig out. Then I just don't worry about food until breakfast the next day (when breakfast tastes particularly delicious btw).
To be honest, the biggest factor tied to failure for me is mood. If I'm in a poor mood, I'm 1000% more likely to feel like I can give in and grab lunch on a fast day. And then once I've had lunch...
The next biggest challenge is other people, especially on Sundays. I might eat fruit salad at brunch, b/c it's both hard and weird to not eat in the company of eating friends.
One thing I try to keep front-of-mind is how awesome it feels to wake up in the morning after a fast day with a sense of accomplishment. And how satisfying it was to need to take 2-inches off the waist of the suit I got married in. Success is addictive.
Edit: I allow myself as much coffee/tea with milk as I feel I need. Yeah, it's not fasting, but it's not eating either.
IF is by definition just about constraining your food intake to a certain window of time. Most people do this later in the day out of necessity or habit (e.g. 2-7), but there's no reason your window couldn't be 6-10.
The downside is that you are much more likely to cheat if you do this, because now you have to go all afternoon and evening without eating, and then go to sleep. Psychologically it's much easier to wake up and be able to say "only 6 more hours to eat" and go to bed a few hours after your last meal than it is to eat your last meal, have 12 waking hours left, then try to go to sleep with a grumbling belly.
Edit: A lot of people practice IF without even realizing it. The most popular form (mentioned in rob_61's linked article) is 16/8. If you don't eat until lunch and don't do a late dinner, it's very likely you fall in the 16/8 window.
I've done IF and lost 40 lbs with it. My advice is to eat something really small, and see what the smallest breakfast you can get away with is. After a month or so, try stopping breakfast and see how you make out then.
My understanding is that the gut and vagus nerve are very sensitive to disruptions, any changes in routine have large initial perceived effects, until a new equilibrium is established. I think this mechanism is why diets are so faddish and people think they have food allergies when they actually don't.
So, mitigate the worst of the symptoms, be willing to accept some temporary discomfort, and iterate towards a better diet over time.
Maybe it helps to be a bit heavier. I used to almost faint without breakfast and running to catch the tram, but I gained a bit of weight (back into normal range) since then and now I can do it.
(Travelling and hiking on rice and vegetables seems to be very good for weight loss without hunger.)
How much water have you had? Eat something fatty and high in protein. Your body never enters fat burning mode - as you get used to fasting once per week this process will get easier, like anything really.
> * I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common.*
Not as extreme, but recently started to eat less for lunch(before: eating out, burger/sandwich + fries + drink, etc, now: homemade food, fruits) and already I don't get the afternoon snooze, and haven't needed coffee in a long time!
also haven't been to any fast food restaurants or had soda in a few months, hopefully I can break the one-year mark!
I have a fun story to share about how I created a soda-disgust in myself!
In college at one point, I was drinking soda almost every day. It was bad for me and I knew it, but couldn't help.
So one day, I froze a bottle of some soda, and then let it thaw, sipping it after. It was the nastiest, sweetest, most awful-headaching thing I've ever put in my mouth. Having discovered what soda 'really' was, I stopped drinking it. I drink it maybe once in a year at most, but that's about it.
coke, sprite, Fanta aka 'orange soda', whatever you want. The sweet corn syrup thaws first since it's got higher melting point than water, and it tastes nasty!
It was not until I started a ketogenic diet, that I learned the difference between hungry and thirsty. The signals are very very similar, at least for me.
Culture plays a large role. It's become a thing in America where 'fat shaming' is looked down upon. Although, shaming someone should obviously be looked down upon, merely pointing out the fact that someone is getting fat should not be deemed as 'fat shaming'. In Korea, people regularly tell each other if they're getting fat, which is not taken as an insult, but is a factual statement and is classified as 'caring' and a 'worry' rather than 'shaming'.
My recollection of my time in Korea was that people often lived nearer extended family. This contrasts with my experiences as an American in the US, where many of us do not live near relatives, and a lot of (younger?) folks don't have a significant number (say, more than 3 or 4 locally) of close friends. I'll call this the "intimacy gap". I'm not close enough to anyone that I see on a regular basis that they'd feel comfortable commenting about my weight like that (ok, less true these days with a ton of close friends, but more true a few years back).
don't forget - people don't cook food anymore. i cook dinner every night (usually roasted vegetables and some protein) and i'm seen as some kind of weirdo.
some people get offended if you ask them if they know how to cook. i don't know how american culture got to this point. it's insane.
> i don't know how american culture got to this point.
Time. People don't think they have time to cook, and they may not. They also don't know how to reclaim their time for themselves from various work and social obligations.
Advertisement. Starting with TV dinners in the 60s (?) and fast food restaurants (also 60s), we have "cheap" and quick ways to get meals that don't require a great deal of personal effort, and it's shown to us constantly on television.
This is a constantly perpetuated myth. It is the image that advertisers sell us. If it's something Americans have it's time. Do you know how many hours of TV is watched every day, on average?
Up until about a month ago, that was me. I literally never turned on my oven for weeks on end. My stove was primarily used for boiling the Cup-O-Noodle water. I got fast food (or slow-but-still-bad food) for ~ 90% of my meals.
I also have a belly that needs to go, so I decided to start counting calories and staying completely out of the drive-thrus. This has been a real eye-opener! By best estimate is that my former diet was probably about 3,000 C a day. Now that I'm watching what I eat, I'm easily running at 1,800 and not feeling hungry.
if you haven't already, get a cast iron pan. get it nice and hot, throw a chicken leg and some vegetables or fruit (cauliflower, brussels sprouts, tomatoes, potatoes, whatever) in there, season and sear, and then throw it in the oven for 30 mins @ 350 and eat. make yourself an adult beverage, or not, while you wait.
prep and cleanup is literally 2 or 3 minutes. you don't even have to wash cast iron, you just wipe it off. ~500 calories even if you douse everything in olive oil, and filling.
i do this like 3 or 4 nights a week. it's SO much better than a sad sack of takeout.
Thanks. I'll try that. Chicken and I have become real close friends recently. My usual dinner is some sort of seasoned chicken breast with vegetables and sometimes rice, maybe with bread crumbs if I have the caloric budget for it. I thought it would take a lot of willpower to have "only" that for dinner, but to my nice surprise, it only takes a teeny bit. (I still have thoughts about a nice juicy burger, but those thoughts are easily pushed aside).
The only fear I have now is that this is some sort of phase and that I'll slowly revert to my old ways in a few months. I've been eating like shit for my entire adult life (~20 years now), so I know I'm going to have to be vigilant for a while to make the new habits stick. On the other hand, I was genuinely ignorant to the amount of calories I was eating before. I had greatly underestimated it. Now that I know what 2,000 C really looks like, my perspective has changed. And that's something that is impossible to unlearn.
3k calories is exactly where i was before i started paying attention, and on my cheat days (i do sensible low-carb with periods of keto to get back on track when i regress a bit) that's exactly where i end up. i log everything i eat on MFP.
i think 3k is where most people in the US eat at. it's basically the pointless snacks and carby/sugary crap that make the difference between 2k and 3k. that extra 1k calories is easy to eat, and hard to cut.
quite honestly it's amazing i didn't weigh 300 pounds... a lot of people do weigh 300+. being overweight (and i still am over by about 15 lbs, slowly losing the rest) gave me a serious appreciation for the bad psychological state one must be in to really let it get that bad.
I'm the same way. I'm not hugely overweight (6'0", skinny frame, 188 lbs). I'm also using MFP to track this stuff, and I had the same appreciation about truly obese people the moment I saw how much I was really eating. I had that same, "wow, I should be much fatter than I am!" thought.
The only reason it has taken me this long to change is because my 20's body was able to handle whatever I threw at it. My 30's body now is not so capable.
yeah, i think a lot of people embark on this journey in their early 30's because things start to look bleak if you project your current behavior into the next decade.
it was basically the 'am i or am i not going to seriously be a lifelong fatass. like for real though.' point in my life. like you kind of know, if i let this slip a few more years, there's probably no going back.
i'm also doing weights with a trainer and that has drastically improved my general appearance, especially in my upper body/shoulders. simply losing weight would have produced a weak and skinnyfat version of myself.
I've noticed this with my friends as well. A frozen burrito is cooking to them.
When I have a friend house sit, he complains because I "don't have any real food [in the freezer]" despite cabinets full of pasta/rice, a freezer full of chicken, and dairy products and vegetables in the refrigerator.
I made apple/orange juice from concentrate and my gf of the time (we're late 20s) had never seen it done before (she had only bought bottles of juice).
This will lead to a lot of carbs, some protein, and not enough fat. Consider looking into the Keto Diet. Lots of people are restricting carbs while being liberal with fat, successfully lowering their weight and having more energy. I'm one of those people. The trick is that fat consumption doesn't lead to weight gain. It's glucose production from carbs and sugars that leads to weight gain.
>>the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
Don't be so sure. Stress also causes the body to start hoarding more calories. And if you think about it, people have been working longer and longer hours, and have a lot less job security than they used to in the past. So it is possible that all that extra stress is contributing to the rising obesity rates.
The problem is the issue of choice. Going to sleep in a choice most of the time, but if you stay up too late your body will make that choice for you.
With eating, while it isn't as drastic an effect, having high stress and having the body demanding calories will alter how your mind makes choices related to food. It takes higher levels of willpower to not gain weight when you have more stress. And many people can't just increase their willpower to compensate.
^ True, ^^ True, and ^^^ True, every comment here is valuable!
I think @kuschku got the (slightly tongue-in-cheek) intent behind my original comment, but you're right, and the choice/willpower problem is there, and it ranges from difficult to impossible to overcome for many people!
This is actually a big part of why the food industry's actions putting sugar and fat in everything in order to make it sell more, regardless of the health effects, is being seen more and more as bordering on malicious and being considered for oversight and regulation. Food manufacturers, as businesses, should be doing whatever they can to sell more, but as providers of basic human needs, their sales tactics are now actively working against our interests. Our physiologies are built to take more food than necessary when its available, so these perfectly engineered high calorie bliss-point foods make willpower harder to fight than ever before!
Yes, willpower was one of the things I see as the issue, too.
The food manufacturers make it very easy to overeat, by providing cheap low-quality food that is full of sugar.
I’ve seen myself the issue that, if I buy groceries based on what I feel like, I tend to end up buying premade food.
So, I consciously avoid that. If I have no frozen pizza, no chips, no peanuts, I can’t eat them either. And I’m too lazy to go to the store right now to buy those, so I instead end up making a healthy meal.
The "but it’s healthy!" ads don’t make it easier, as they try to trick your mind, too.
Honestly, if everyone would have the willpower to only buy what is good for them, the food market and the ad business would not be able to exist anymore.
Coca Cola would be bought almost never, except maybe for parties or during holidays or on birthdays (like my parents used to do when we were kids – softdrinks only on these special occasions).
But it would also affect a lot of the "healthy" food that isn’t actually healthy, like "low fat" yoghurt (20% sugar content), or "fruit juice" (with 10% added sugar), etc.
You could argue that, but I wouldn't say so. IIRC (I'd need to go back and dig up the research I read) high-calorie drinks appear to lack the satiating effect that solid foods have, even the high-caloric foods. The point is that high-caloric drinks (sodas, beer, gatoraid, etc) may throw off the body's energy/weight equilibrium more than junk foods.
I will argue that. Coke is definitely, in my mind, part of the "food industry". I speculate the article's author was also including soda manufacturers, due to the use of Dr. Pepper as an example. I personally believe soda is a major contributor to rising negative health problems. This is why I agree completely with and upvoted your previous comment that sugary drinks are a factor.
> What are the other possible factors [than food]?
Could be stress levels, perhaps due to imprisonment of family members or economic inequality, both of which have skyrocketed in the US in recent decades. Other aspects of economic inequality, such as a shift toward emergency medical treatment, are also possible causes. It's observable that the social classes most affected by obesity in the US (and, now, worldwide) are the poorest; this might be due to food, but it might not be.
Could be infectious diseases, which are always changing, or more generally, microbiome changes. Diet changes (e.g. increase in sugar, or increase in usage of emulsifiers such as methylcellulose: http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obes...) are one possible cause of microbiome changes, but far from the only one. For example, obesity-associated intestinal microbiomes have been shown to be contagious under some conditions: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature0...
Another possible cause, though: antibiotics are well known to cause microbiome changes (although maybe this is still "has something to do with food", since most of the antibiotics you consume during your lifetime are in meat.) And antibiotics are also known to induce weight gain — that's why they get put in the meat in the first place, to induce the meat animals to gain weight faster, reducing the time to slaughter. Maybe they make you gain weight too, and they might do that by means other than changing your gut microbiome. Antibiotic use, both in humans and in livestock, has undergone substantial changes over the past decades, and their possible effects on obesity are not well understood.
Another possible cause: dramatically increased air travel and the ensuing jet lag; circadian rhythm disruption has been shown to induce metabolic dysfunction in a wide variety of animal models. http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647
For the same reason: artificial lighting. Artificial lighting color temperature as we switch from incandescent to fluorescent, LED, and computer and TV screens.
Sedentary lifestyles are a possible cause — rates of "exercise" are only going up if you don't count manual labor as "exercise", and rates of manual labor are going way down.
One possible hypothesis advanced for the dramatic testosterone level drop is exposure to environmental contaminants such as pesticides; the pesticides we use, the amount we use, and the places we use them have changed dramatically over the last few decades. Whether or not this affects our testosterone levels, it could easily affect our bodies in other ways, possibly promoting obesity.
(Other factors that are known to lower testosterone levels include stress and lack of exercise.)
Other environmental contaminants with dramatically changing exposure levels over time and that might reasonably be endocrine disruptors include PCBs, phthalates (as the above article mentions), bisphenol-A, lead, and the halogenated flame retardants used in polyurethane foam, which have been circumstantially implicated in the modern epidemic of feline hyperthyroidism. The lower levels of lead and PCBs in the environment are probably good for us, but sometimes there are surprising interactions.
> the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
You, you are an arrogant, pompous idiot, too ignorant even to begin to imagine the extent of your own ignorance.
> You, you are an arrogant, pompous idiot, too ignorant even to begin to imagine the extent of your own ignorance.
Now that you've said that, I realize you're right. In all seriousness, I am in fact fairly ignorant. (Aren't we all, really?) I do try not to be arrogant or pompous, but it does happen. Thank you for your honest feedback.
I would also like to thank you for the well-researched analysis. Everything you've brought up are important and serious considerations, and they are all in fact not just possible, but probable magnifying factors in the serious issue of increasing obesity.
A final thought. Since you're demonstrating to me possibilities that I might not have considered before my ignorant comment, please also consider the possibility that you may not have understood exactly what I meant, or evaluated all the possibilities behind the intent or tone of what I said originally before you chose to try to insult me.
I am surprised and delighted to see your comment, and I am glad that my post was helpful to you. I'm totally open to whatever further explanations you may wish to offer.
I'm glad you came back, I felt bad I made you mad.
My original comment was a bad combination of geeky and joking. It was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and I think the mistake I made was using the word "due", as in obesity is 100% due to food. When I wrote it, I was thinking, and should have written, to mirror the author's original wording "something to do with food".
The gist of my comment is that I thought the opening line was funny, because obviously it has "something" to do with food. It has, again tongue-in-cheek, but also quite literally, everything to do with food. My silly nerd point of clarification being that the issue to discuss is what causes us to eat too much, not whether to eat.
What I didn't mean to say, but I actually did say through poor word choice, was that food was the one and only cause of these problems. I realize I also implied that personal responsibility and self control are the one and only cause and solution. On the contrary, my true opinion is that I quite agree with the article's author that the food industry is deliberately causing widespread over-eating, and the effect is then magnified by the use of excessively caloric ingredients. And that's just one of many problems we have.
Human physiology, culture and habits are also massive influences and are extremely hard to overcome. We have evolved to eat more than we need, for good reason, because historically humans didn't have food availability at all times. Now that we have 100% availability of food, and now that almost all of the available food presented to us is both excessively caloric, and being scientifically engineered to cause extra craving, its really no surprise that obesity is a widespread issue. While I'm not always pro regulation, this is one area where I think more regulation is in order and overdue.
I also know personally that there are many factors making diet really incredibly difficult to control. I've been trying to control my weight my entire life, with varying levels of success, or lack thereof. I've had jobs & friends where the socializing made it nearly impossible to control my weight. I've hung around with people that don't hesitate to chastise me if I don't eat & drink the same way they do, and I frequently chose to eat, drink, and have a good time over suffering through a discussion drawing attention to my eating.
I have had more success in the last year than ever before, and its because I quit my job and lost most of the friends that hassled me about eating while socializing. (Though nearly all my friends and family still do, in at least small amounts.) I also discovered for myself a couple of things I didn't know before, that going to the gym wasn't the answer to losing weight, and that for me personally, I'd had a mental block surrounding calorie counting, and when I actually tried it for an extended period, it worked, and was not as hard as my mind tried to make it seem. That's just me, and its not necessarily the same, or easy, or even possible for everyone. I also couldn't have done it (and didn't) at my previous job, so my situation is a factor. If there was a tinge of me being pompous, this is why, my current personal understanding of diet & fitness may have been leaking into my comment.
Funny enough, I actually wrote a paragraph worth of edit to explain myself a little better right after I posted, but then decided I'd let it be short and hope that people understood. Now I regret not having edited my comment, but I hoped this helped, I hope what I added here is more thoughtful and less stupid.
The problem is in conflating weight with overall health, which most media reporting does. Weight is primarily controlled by the quantity of food you eat (it is not "100% due to diet" because there do exist conditions that cause people to carry too much weight even with a "normal" diet), but to assume all problems are purely a result of weight is reductionist and incorrect.
Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop metabolic and other health problems. Those problems arise from lack of activity, diet composition, and other factors beyond simply weight. Those problems are also the core plague of the "obesity epidemic", so it would behoove society not to focus so narrowly on weight and to focus on overall health (of which weight is a component).
Which is also true, but the statements are not equivalent.
Tobacco use (and actually, all forms of smoke inhalation) has a specific, acute mechanism whereby use increases the chances of lung cancer and other respiratory problems. We do not have that kind of causal link for obesity-related diseases. There is a correlation between weight and several so-called lifestyle diseases, but the causal link is fuzzy.
That lack of causation is why reducing the obesity problem to a simple matter of weight control is a bad idea. There are other mechanisms at play, particularly related to body composition, that appear to be sensitive to diet composition and activity levels. Telling people they can be sedentary as long as they don't eat too much (which is basically what the original post I was replying to was saying) is dangerous.
> there do exist conditions that cause people to carry too much weight even with a "normal" diet
You are absolutely correct in the same way that saying "there do exist conditions that cause twins to be born such that their bodies are fused together at one or more points." It's true but the vast majority of the time it is an irrelevant fact.
I don't think many people assume all problems are purely a result of weight. That being said if your knees bother you and you're clinically obese, perhaps tracking your calories and getting on a stationary bike occasionally is probably a better long-term decision than double knee replacement surgery.
> Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop ... health problems.
I'm curious how you think most diagnosed cases of hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes are caused, then.
> It's true but the vast majority of the time it is an irrelevant fact.
Vast majority is not 100%. As I replied elsewhere, I was reacting to the laziness of the statement more than trying to assert it is not generally the case.
> I'm curious how you think most diagnosed cases of hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes are caused, then.
That is a good, unanswered question. Along with why people who have never been overweight in their life also develop hypertension and Type 2 diabetes and why so many obese people never do. There is certainly a correlation, but there is no causal link as yet to anything in particular.
Tumor Necrosis Factor α: A Key Component of the Obesity-Diabetes Link[0]
The hormone resistin links obesity to diabetes[1]
Excerpt:
Type 2 diabetes...is strongly associated with obesity; however, the mechanism by which increased adiposity causes insulin resistance is unclear. Here we show that adipocytes secrete a unique signalling molecule...increased in diet-induced and genetic forms of obesity.
Pigment Epithelium-Derived Factor Contributes to Insulin Resistance in Obesity[2]
Excerpt:
Herein, we show that the noninhibitory serine protease inhibitor, pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF), plays a causal role in insulin resistance. Adipocyte PEDF expression and serum levels are elevated in several rodent models of obesity and reduced upon weight loss and insulin sensitization.
I think many readers think I am trying to deflect blame away from being overweight, or even indicate that being fat is OK. I'm not. Being overweight (or more precisely, overfat) is a problem. It is not the end-all, be-all problem with general health, though. You cannot ignore other health measures just because your weight falls within a statistically normal range.
Even if that is the true breakdown, "100% due to diet" is intellectually lazy and intended primarily to evoke an emotional reaction on a scientific topic.
There's some evidence that being overweight (but not morbidly obese) is healthier. It's a dispute that's going to run for a while....
(1) The big fat truth
"More and more studies show that being overweight does not always shorten life — but some public-health researchers would rather not talk about them."
(2) Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health
I really, truely do not like the taste of sugar in my bread, pasta sauce, and yogurt. (I like the yogurt to taste yogurty, then add something sweet to it, like a banana or chocolate chips.)
But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up.
I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.
Trust yourself that you can make your own, delicious, low-effort bread. I produce 2-3 loaves a week, and the effort involved is maybe 30 minutes each time. The cost, barring additional ingredients (usually egg), is close to a dollar per loaf, and you can make exactly the loaf you're in the mood for.
As long as you don't find a way to kill the yeast, even your bad bread will taste better than store bought bread.
After a brief trip to Europe a couple of years back, I returned to the States to discover that our bread is actually, physically, nauseating. It was weeks before I could stomach it again. I've been to Europe on other occasions and not had this happen, not sure why it happened this time.
Same. I'm continually disappointed at how hard it is to find decent bread back home (US), and how expensive it is when you do. Cheese, too.
I know we've supposedly got some of the lowest food prices in the developed world, but buy like-for-like with a typical (say) Parisian's shopping basket and I bet we don't do so well.
Indeed, and it's not for lack of interest. Trying to imitate European foodstuffs is a huge part of what our food industry does. But since it's produced by the same industrial machine as everything else, it mostly comes out the same. "Greek" yogurt, for instance. Or "Italian" bread. It's as if we understand that Europeans eat better food, but we can't seem to figure out what makes it that way.
Well, if one wants to figure out why European foodstuffs often has higher quality, that’s simple.
If you buy the bread you find at ALDI for half a dollar, that’s made in factories in Poland, that won’t be any better. But most people don’t.
Go to a local brick & mortar bakery, usually there’s a bakery that makes fresh bread next to most stores in the suburbs, or, if you’re in a city, at every street corner.
Go there, and you’ll find fresh bread, rolls, crossaints, sandwiches, etc. A mix of a bakery, a starbucks, and a subways, but cheaper and better.
And of course, fresh, handmade quality bread will be better – as these bakeries’ only selling point is quality. If their quality would not be far above the factory bread, they wouldn’t exist anymore.
Same here. Once I cut back on soda and salt, it's hard to eat popular food items.
Things like panda express and Hawaiian onion chips are way too salty... silk soy milk is way too sweet, even when unsweetened. And forget about popular cereal brands... geesh, it's like drinking sugar water. Then there are Starbucks drinks... man, those things are super sweet. Not sure how other people drink it.
I also like what you said about capitalism. As you can see by my food choices, I am not a vegan hipster or anything. But I definitely feel that corporate America does not cater to my taste buds.
I've been wondering for years no why nobody offers sweetener-free pops. I just want something bubbly with a hint of flavor, but without the sweetness: like lemon-flavored club soda for example.
I have a hard time believing there's no market for this.
That stuff is everywhere (in grocery stores) in the US. My local safeway carries several "flavors" (which are more like an essence or hint of flavor): raspberry, lemon, etc.
If you're in a rich area in the US, look for Spindrift soda -- the brand started out in Boston, but has spread to other upper-class milieus since then. There's also La Croix, as mentioned by another poster here -- it's artificially flavored, I think, but still pretty good and definitely low on sugar. (Spindrifts are made with fruit and soda water; they're not low-sugar or sugar-free, but they haven't been sweetened out the wazoo like Coca-Cola.)
Free market capitalism is not going to give me a non-x86-based PC ecosystem even if I want it, because not enough other people want it to justify the required investment. Of course for say $30G/year one could get it, and you can get whatever bread you want to for much less, but perhaps for more than you'd like to. In other words, you either need to be in the majority or to spend a lot to get what you want from a market.
Which doesn't sound that great if you didn't live in a centrally planned economy where you can't buy woolen socks nor wool so what you do is you buy a woolen sweater and you make woolen socks out of that. That's the sort of unarguably idiotic waste of resources that free markets eliminate. Of course it's easier to appreciate that if you've spent thousands of hours queuing to buy some bread, any bread, than it is when the bread you can most easily buy doesn't taste as you'd want it to.
Conversely, to me non-white bread tends to taste like mud to me unless it's fresh bakery bread or somerhing similar. I'm glad wonderbread et al are the way they are.
I would recommend a couple of documentaries in this context about sugar.
1. The Botany of Desire [1]
See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple cider vinegar.
2. That Sugar Film [2]
This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and "healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers.
The Botany of Desire is based on a book by the same name. The author, Michael Pollan, has written quite a bit about food. Another book of his, The Omnivore's Dilemma, thoroughly examines the industrial food chain (in addition to others) from its origins to methods of production.
Ugh, apples today taste disgustingly sweet to me. My teeth shouldn't feel like I drank a litre of coke from eating an apple.
It's sad... the saddest thing is the loss of variety. There is such an amazing variety of wild apples, berries, rice, potatoes out there, each with unique flavors and nutritional qualities, yet 99% of grocery stores carry the same bland, overly-sweet varieties that look like they came out of an assembly line.
And it's not even about the bottom line: farms throw away tons of "imperfect" produce every day. It's about re-educating people.
Someone was on the America's Test Kitchen podcast discussing artificial flavors. He said that on the one hand the chemists and food scientists have been making their flavors better so that artificially flavored things are more irresistible than ever--potato chips, corn chips, etc. On the other hand, on the fresh side, the scientists engineer the food so it is easier to ship and can stay on the shelf longer, making it less flavorful. Bad confluence.
The Salt,Sugar,Fat book is great. Sections on Coke's tactics to get everyone hooked in 3rd world countries and the government cheese program are disturbing.
due to some health issues that have me on an extremely low sodium (500mg/day or less) no caffeine (including things like chocolate/cocoa) diet some years back I had to switch to eating basically 100% unprocessed unseasoned food and never eating out, it was quite amazing how at the beginning it felt that food had nearly no taste, but nowadays many things that before required a lot of seasoning have a lot of salty/sweet tastes of their own.
Lately for example I have found that corn can be nearly too sweet to eat, I mean, plain steamed sweet corn, some varieties are extremely extremely sweet to my tastebuds; when reading that every year corn is engineered to be sweeter and sweeter I can definitely see why, it honestly tastes as sweet as ice-cream did when I still ate it.
Plain carrots are fairly sweet tasting, some brands more than others, but a lot more than I had expected; plain potatoes are salty, not too strong, but definitely noticeable, things like clementines / tangerines / mandarins / pomegranates taste way absolutely amazing, much much much better than any dessert I had when I was still eating processed food.
As much as I theoretically now could eat oil and sugar (there was a period of time where they really did not sit well with me) I honestly don't miss them, especially the sugar / syrups which nowadays taste way way too strong.
I doubt anybody nowadays would want to eat 100% unprocessed as honestly it can be a bit of a drag having to cook from scratch every meal starting from unprocessed ingredients and not adding any salt etc., not to mention it definitely will impact your career to not be able to go out to eat with coworkers, but if you find yourself concerned about having to have a lot of processed food for taste reasons, when you are on vacation it might be a worthwhile investment for you to try to eat this way for a few weeks to "reset" your tastebuds a bit.
It's amazing just how one can go from eating 5000mg of sodium a day and foods tasting "normal" to 500mg and after a period of adaptation them tasting "normal" as well, same deal for sugar.
(edit) and btw, as another interesting n=1 datapoint, although that was not the reason for the low sodium, going from 5-6000mg/day to 400-500mg/day my bp went from 135/85 to 105/65 over a few years, without really changing how I felt, and without taking any medications, that was surprising as I always thought that bp would not vary that much just due to diet.
Well, in my family we always cooked everything ourselves. Everything. No tin can food, ever.
When my mum, due to medical condition, had to switch to low iodine diet, we could just switch our salt we used, and it was easy to adapt.
But I can say, you’re right – I hate corn. Literally, I can’t deal with the annoying sweetness of it. It’s horrible.
Carrots are the perfect level of sweetness, we used to grow them ourselves, but don’t do that anymore.
But, still, doing this myself without having any medical need myself, I obviously still add nutella to my pancakes, or so on.
To me it’s just surprising how many people in this thread don’t make their food on their own. Even if you just boil a pot of potatoes and put some onions in the frying pan in a bit of olive oil, you can quickly make some neat food. Or scrambled eggs with Bratkartoffeln and bacon, or noodles with your own sauce, and so on. Making your meals yourself is so easy, and quick.
I’m literally disgusted by the whole Soylent movement. NO! instead of spending less time for food, just spend less time for work! Unionize, damn.
I don’t know – I was just too lazy to translate it, and then I usually pretend that the German word would be english. Most readers never notice anyway.
I do think this is an unfair characterization of food manufacturers. In a real sense, they only make what WE want to eat. And we only buy, for the most part, what we WANT to eat. So there's a arms race that's been building ever since food became an industry. When one brand of bread adds sugar to their recipe, consumers love it and all the other brands must follow suit. Breaking this cycle will just as hard as breaking the industrial inertia towards fossil fuels.
Opting out of this is hard, expensive and against our natural desires. Or, to reiterate my other post, "Soylent, FTW."
This is the same justification for every consumable. If people didn't want X, companies wouldn't make X.
Calling companies out for increasing our desire for their products, especially when that desire goes against our better interests (mental and physical health, in particular), is not unfair, it's smart. It gets people thinking about what they're doing and why so they can make better decisions, even when all the advertisement (obvious or not) is directing them away from what they should be doing.
> did his high math regression analysis thing, put the data in the computer, and out comes this bell shaped curve where the perfect amount of sweetness, not too little, not too much, is at the very top of the curve
Same here, and with the lowercase "the", my mind kept reading it as "How the Food Industry Engineers Need to Eat". Unfortunate but I don't think it's wrong.
There are 50 million languages, platforms, frameworks, databases, etc. It gets really old just seeing the same articles rehashed with different nouns, like so many technology mad libs. Likewise, I honestly could care less about startup/vc drama.
The thing that keeps me coming back to hacker news are posts about cutting edge engineering/science, how to be a better hacker/maker/productive person in general, and interesting new perspectives on life/politics/social institutions.
This is why is now really hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in everything.
> It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much?
Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.