This amounts to trolling, so please stop. This site is for substantive discussion in which we stand to learn something. It is not a flamewar site for exchanging the same, tired volleys over and over again.
That's like saying global warming is simply a matter of simple thermodynamics as people emit a lot of CO2 buy using hydrocarbons. True but uninsightful and unactionable.
Why do people eat more calories than they need? It's presumably a complex interaction of physiological, social, emotional, and, yes, market factors, with different factors of different importance given the situation.
I can recognise this even though my weight would have been considered normal 50 years ago.
When Mt. Dew Kickstart came out, I thought I would try it. I had one and it was decent so I got four or five. Went through those and then when I was done, I could feel my body craving it, even though I was only drinking one can a day. I thought it was weird and went back to read the ingredients.
Sucralose was the prime suspect. I did some more research and found out:
Sucralose is about 320 to 1,000 times sweeter than sucrose, three times as sweet as both aspartame and acesulfame potassium, and twice as sweet as sodium saccharin.
I knew Sucralose was much sweeter than sugar, but was alarmed to find out by how much. It was scary to feel my body craving it and knew I had to stop drinking it. I could've easily put down three or four a day if I didn't stop when I did.
Not all adaptions prove themselves advantageous. Additionally, would not expect new developments in food science or chemical warfare to have evolutionary genetic adaptions.
People aren't dumb. They know this. They're still fat. You can beat people over the head with it all you want, but we've been doing that forever and if it were a solution to anything it would have worked by now.
Exactly. It's not a matter of simple physics because it requires action by humans, actions almost everyone is bad at like willpower, delayed gratification, and discipline. I like the way an episode of Freakonomics explained these issues: "People aren't dumb, the world is hard."
Or not. Pretty sure it wasn't willpower, delayed gratification, and discipline that kept people from being fat back in the 50s or 60s. Something changed in the food, or, worst case scenario, abundant cheap food means it's easier to get fat now than ever before.
As a Cultural Anthropologist, I talked about this with other grad students and professors. We concluded it had a lot to do with the disintegration of the nuclear family and proliferation of fast food and a much faster paced lifestyle.
Mother and father are working longer hours with no set office hours, the kids are constantly on the go with athletics, school clubs or after school programs. Nobody has the time to really take the time and prepare a decent meal. Heavily processed food just became a substitute for the time it took to prepare a real meal. Fast food then became a crutch for families on the go even replacing the heavily processed food that replaced the real food people used to prepare.
The end result is kids and parents both eating poorly, heavily stressed at school and at work. They eat poorly, they don't get enough exercise and now they gain weight and other issues that affect their health.
As many people have pointed out in various other threads, in the 50's and 60's people hardly ever ate out, the family dinner was a big deal and most families ate at the same time every day, had set schedules and the kids exercised a lot more (whatever happened to recess??) by playing games, athletics, and using their imaginations.
In food, or in general "chemical environment" we live in (including cosmetics, air pollution, plastics and paints, etc.). Or in lifestyle. Or a combination of some or all of these.
It's really hard to disentangle plausible causes. But I agree, something must have changed, something that makes this problem correlate with "westernization" and technological advancements of societies.
My "willpower, delayed gratification, and discipline" leave something to be desired. I'm not super healthy, I don't eat great. I'm not fat, though. I don't forego food when I'm hungry and I don't exert much control over what I put in my face. But somehow, I don't put too much in.
I think some people just have their internal "hunger" thermostat set wrong- whether it's hormonal or psychological or whatever. Other people have it set more correctly so by and large, "willpower" doesn't come into it.
I don't need willpower to stop myself overconsuming water, but if I was thirsty literally all the time, I'd drink gallons.
You might as well describe global warming as the "simple physics" of the Earth taking in more calories than it expends. It's technically correct but utterly useless information.
It would be a pretty useful information for a hypothetical perfect human, in full conscious control of all their bodily function. Alas, real humans are not like that, and deviations from homeostasis tend to manifest themselves in a way that's under limited, or beyond, conscious control.
I understand that some things are much harder for some people than for others, but let's not just throw out entirely the idea that individuals can make a concerted effort to change their lifestyle.
I used to cope with boredom by overeating candy and drinking sugary sodas. after a while I noticed that I was starting to get fat. I figured this was probably happening because I was consuming too many calories, so I stopped eating candy and drinking soda. it sucked for months, but eventually my hunger adjusted to the new level of calorie intake and I no longer had to think about it consciously.
I'm not trying to claim that people can't change their lifestyles with sustained effort. I'm really going for two things here:
1) Willpower is something for an individual to try, but given that so many people seem to completely fail at it, it's not a productive avenue for solving this problem in a systemic way. For the same reason, we e.g. prefer to design safe electrical systems instead of just telling people to be careful.
2) A lot of signals coming from our bodies influence our behavior on the level beyond conscious control. It would be much easier to will yourself into healthy weight if you only had to decide to eat less, instead of constantly fighting hunger, fatigue, stress, and compulsive thoughts about food. The degree and type of such subconscious influence seems to differ between people.
What's the pseudo-science? Science doesn't deal with blame. Science simply explains phenomena. In this case being obsese comes with a variety of phenomena, along with getting obese, and curing obesity in a perosn.
The body distinguishes between fat, carbs and protein. There is a different physiological hormonal response to each of these macro nutrients. I.e, insulin primarily only responds to carbohydrates. So yeah, it's all about physics, but not every macro nutrient is treated the same. It's highly dependent on physiology. There's a maximum amount of energy in a calorie, obviously, but the body treats 100 calories of sucrose differently than 100 calories of fat and it mediates the bodies response through hormone and protein signaling. Look up mTOR for example. That's a protein that acts like a nutrient sensor that tells the cells which proteins it needs to generate, and it's primarily mediated through IGF-1 which is a response to dietary protein.
We can have a very interesting discussion on leptin resistance, insulin, etc, as these are relevant to myriad conditions, but surely you agree that is a different discussion from thermodynamics, which is where this all begins. Gaining and losing weight is not some nebulous scientific mystery.
Uh, it is very widely understood that eating & absorbing fewer calories than you burn leads to losing weight, and vice versa.
The question is, how does one generally control this?
There appear to be a multiple biological systems, psychological, economic, health, societal, cultural, and evolutionary factors at play which influence how much/how often/what a person eats, how they metabolize what they eat, how much they exercise, etc.
You’re ignoring all that if you try to treat it as matter of “simple physics”. You’re effectively denying the problem by vastly oversimplifying it.
> The question is, how does one generally control this?
How does one generally control becoming addicted to any addictive substance? Generally, moderation or abstinence, particularly for those susceptible to addiction.
Food addiction is not so different from drug or alcohol addiction, though food has a much shorter 'high' associated with it than nearly any drug. And food addiction is societally acceptable, whereas drug addicts are generally looked down upon.
The problem you're sweeping under the rug is that calorie in and calorie out are interrelated. You have to account for the existence of complex control systems. The temperature in a room is also just a question of calories in / calories out,
but when there is a thermostat in the room, opening the window or adding an extra heater might not work so well.
If external factors are fucking with your thermostat, it's going to be more challenging to reach a target temperature.
There are complex feedback systems controlling hunger and physical activity. In one study it was found that when participants were fed extra calories,
only some of them gained weight. Some of them burned them off by unconsciously fidgeting more, others didn't. People can burn 350 cals per day from fidgeting.
On the flipside, excercising makes people hungrier.
This is a matter of the food environment. People used to be a lot thinner back then. Does anyone really think this is because people had gotten more lazy and less disciplined?
Of course, a bad food environment is not an excuse to not lose weight, but it's also not an excuse for the government and society to do nothing at all and blame it all on the individuals.
