I have a solution to the obesity epidemic, that would be realistic to implement. Right now the factors for what we analyse in nutrition is calories, macro nutrient content, and micronutrient content. What we really care about is satiation and satiety. These are words that no one talks about, and but get to the core of the issue. If I eat this food, how many calories will I consume before feeling full?(satiation). After eating this food, how long until I feel the need to eat again? (sateity).
Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actaully have less obesity than skim milk drinkers.
If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.
I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment.
The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. The obesity epidemic is a direct result of sitting in an office 9 to 5 (or 6,7,8,...) and making two meals a day full of fat and sugar, because you're craving.
When you have a better lifestyle, you naturally gravitate towards better food, because you have time to cook (as opposed to pizza/snacks) or look for good dinner (as opposed to drive-thru), have time to go to the grocery store buy vegetables/fruits more frequently (as opposed to industrialized food which doesn't spoil), and even time to appreciate food itself making various small meals a day.
EDIT: I would like to know why the downvote. The correlation between obesity and office workers is a recurrent research topic.
> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day
Is there any research that actually shows that?
My own personal experience with leangains (intermittent fasting; taking all my calories in an 8 hour window with lunch being my first and biggest meal) is that I find it far harder to overeat that way than with smaller meals. It's "easy" to fit in a snack between small meals, but after lunch I'm totally sick of food, and it's hard for me to even meet my macro nutrient goals (I lift weights; my protein intake is high). Often I have to force myself to take in a second meal to meet my calorie needs (edit: because I simply often don't want to eat again before the end of my eating window, around 8pm, after my massive lunch at noon).
On the opposite end, I see very few people around me that eat "only" two meals. My co-workers for example, might very well only sit down for a meal twice, but they snack constantly. And their "snacks" are often substantially higher calorie than their main meals. When I did try to diet with many small healthy meals, it was a nightmare - I was constantly hungry and constantly craving food.
When I do intermittent fasting, I have hunger pangs in the mornings 2-3 days, and then I stop being hungry in the mornings.
I have a similar experience. I follow a diet (in the general sense, not in terms of weight loss) that contradicts most of dieticians recommendations (hearty breakfast,good lunch, light dinner, lots of healthy snacks during the day), that is to say that I try to have a single luscious meal, usually at dinner, and have just some fruit or yogurt during the day when I'm hungry.
This way I know that I'll be completely satisfied at least once per day, and of course there are limits of what I can eat in a single meal (and not much time left in the day for eating more).
I found out that this is what works best for me, my personality and my relationship with food. I can do this indefinitely, while in the past, I would eat healthily for maybe weeks or months, but then I would go back to the same old habits.
For other people it would not make sense, or be a bad fit.
My point is that, in the end, nutrition is something very personal and has heavy psychological implications, and should be treated case by case, there is not a "silver bullet" working for everyone.
The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food and devour an insane ammount of calories in minutes before your body triggers a sensation of satiety. Then depending on your genetics and level of activity, you will get malnourished, obese or both.
You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. As long as you don't go lunch with a blackhole in the stomach and are mindful about what you're eating, it's fine. Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
> The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food
When I eat more meals a day and then suddenly have a longer gap than I'm used to, I find it easy to do that.
When I systematically east 1-2 meals a day, I adapt to that pattern in 2-3 days, and then have no problems eating a diet where getting sufficient fat is actually hard, and where I often find I have to add some "easy" carbs to meet my calorie requirements because the sheer volume of food I am due to eat for my lunch makes it an annoying chore.
Part of the reason I don't like the "many small meals" approach is because I then quickly adapt to getting hungry many times a day, and the chance of getting hungry at a time I can't eat makes it very easy to snack on unhealthy foods.
> You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule.
Exactly. With no need for many meals a day.
> Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
Not my experience at all. I get the "wild sugar peaks" when I eat irregularly and/or when I consume lots of easily digested sugars. But since I don't get hungry very often while do intermittent fasting, I have no problems eating a lot of my fat and protein first, at which point I don't generally want much sugar, and my diet ends up being foods that are digested fairly slowly. I do get a bit tired shortly after lunch, but I quickly get more energy again and conversely my mornings are generally far more alert than they used to be with lots of small meals.
Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
I am not sure if this is true. I think in people without diabetes, insulin does it's job and regulates your blood sugar pretty well during a fast and I think cognition is better when a large amount of your body's resources are not being used to digest food.
Let me add some more anecdotal evidence in favour of so called intermittent fasting.
Without snacking during the day, it is far easier to quantify exactly what I am putting into my body and it is easier to make sure whatever it is, is of a higher quality and is actually what I need (or feel that my body needs). In addition to this, big meals in the late afternoon or evening are a lot more satisfying to me than multiple small meals that just leave me wanting more.
I would highly recommend this way of life to anyone struggling with what they are eating.
> Without snacking during the day, it is far easier to quantify exactly what I am putting into my body and it is easier to make sure whatever it is, is of a higher quality and is actually what I need (or feel that my body needs).
The "snacks" between meals is for eating something like a fruit, yogurt, nuts... not french fries. Without eating fruits throughout the day you probably don't even meet the minimum fruit intake recommendation. Depending on the country, the average intake is half than the recommended.
Well, I snack constantly, but my diet consists mostly of vegetables, fruit, nuts, meat and water. I haven't had weight issues yet. If my snack consist of one carrot, one apple, handful of nuts or one orange, it's not that bad. Doesn't hurt that apples and oranges are delicious. But then again, I'm not trying to lose weight, just eat healthier than coffee and donuts every day. My dietary requirements might be different if I actually also did strength training in addition to cardio (running & walking).
> There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment.
Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it.
The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result.
I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things:
1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible.
2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero.
3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often.
#2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism.
> 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible.
The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood.
While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today.
You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
Good pizza and good squid risotto aren't polar opposites: they are both full of carbs and contain almost the same amount of sodium. Pizza probably has more vitamins due to the tomato sauce.
My contention is that pizza doesn't have to be junk food, it just is most of the time in the US. Choose a better restaurant or make your own.
What I'm comparing is the satisfaction hit you get from having a greasy pepperoni pizza delivered and devoured in 20 minutes and eating something completely different depends totally on lifestyle and mood.
What the OP was implying is that fast/junk food is inherently irresistible and that's why more people are obese. What I'm saying in turn is that it's today's lifestyle which makes people find it irresistible and that nothing else satisfies.
I know what you were saying, I was going off topic, because as an Italian and a food enthusiast, I'm tired of hearing pizza being described as junk food. That's all. :)
Even mass-produced pizza doesn't have to be junk food ... but when you sit down and eat a whole pie, you're going to be over-doing it regardless of how healthy the ingredients were.
Why do you think pizza is bad for you? I incorporate pizza in my diet frequently. The main limiting factor with it for me is keeping carbs down, but as someone else pointed out: a risotto is also carb heavy; that rice is pretty much all carbs.
Pizza can be massively unhealthy if you buy from somewhere that's full of sodium and soaked in grease, but there are plenty of ways of making pizzas that are fine to eat every day even.
Heck, squid works just fine on a thin pizza base too, as do mussels and prawn if you want a nice seafood mix.
You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
Well yes, but solving problems like depression, stress, and overly-long working hours is much tougher than just blaming food executives.
> 3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals.
This is unfortunately true, as in it will take probably another 20 to 30 years for the majority of Western men to realize that they can cook, too, and that cooking is not only a "woman's job". Coming from a family where both my parents worked full-time jobs and where my dad was actually cooking tastier meals than my mum it surprised me when I grew up and saw that in other families the husband wouldn't approach the kitchen even if he would be starving to death.
Otherwise I cannot really understand why a majority of people have starting seeing cooking a healthy meal as a "waste of time". This is something so ingrained in our well-being, I'd say is almost quintessential to who we are as a species, that it baffles me when I see so many people relying only on pre-processed food that comes packaged in cardboard boxes.
I'm a pretty good cook, and when I was a single guy, I assure you my excess of body fat came from some of my awesome home cooking rather than TV dinners. The biggest problem is everything being oriented around "family size" being 4+ but actual real world sitting at the table tonight and eating probably averages about 2 on long term average due to other committments etc. There are four members of my immediate family but tonight I eat dinner alone, and I need a individual portion size not "family size".
You're right, because it's generational. My dad only knows how to make "Kraft Dinner" and hot dogs. I love cooking and most other males my age (30s to 40s) do as well. The advent of cooking competition tv shows and celebrity chefs has really catapulted this sentiment into mainstream society.
> 2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero.
Got any source for that?
I worked for 3 years in a European Union Scientific project (FP7) of Rural Development and Agriculture in 6 countries (Germany, Czech Republic, UK, France and Bulgaria). The findings we got (including direct interviews with farmers, Eurostat data and other panel data) contradict your claim.
Specially if we consider that one of the main requirements of food is land (either for crops, trees or pasture for animals), and if anything, fertile land is getting more expensive.
Download Table 7 (Food expenditures by families and individuals as a share of disposable personal income), and you will see a steady march from 24% of disposable income to 9%.
As a quick data point, corn was $1.32/bu. in 1970. Adjusted for inflation, that would be close to $8 today. Current price is $5.16. That does indicate a downward trend in prices, and I expect you will see similar trends for other food commodities.
Have you ever thought what the people at the food industry eat? Do the C levels at General Mills and Mars eat all that cereal and candy? Do the McDonalds people eat at McDonalds? What are the diets of leaders in the food industry vs the diets of leaders in technology?
Donald Thompson looks like he might have a BMI above Larry Page.
Also not sure how the price of food is near zero? Are you implying that the cost now is near zero because I don't have to go out and kill a cow, nor do I have to farm and scavenge? So cost as in physical cost? Because breakfast and lunch today were not near zero and I have noticed the cost of milk and eggs going up, not down.
>The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle.
Is that the case? Many countries that have much stricter cultural traditions about when and how much to eat (the French, the Italians) eat 2-3 meals a day. They don't eat when they feel hungry, the eat when it is eating time.
Notice one important thing about Italian culture: they eat slow. Lunch time takes more than one hour and includes several dishes (antipasto, pasta, meat, then fresh fruit). Same for dinner. So they do eat spaced and having time to chew does increase satiety.
Now compare that to having to lunch in 15 minutes when you are starving. You want to swallow a Whooper and grab a Coke that you can drink while walking back to the office.
> I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment.
But surely there is such a thing as food that is more filling and food that is less so, and how hungry you are (or how happy) will lead to deviations from that baseline, but it won't cause that baseline to magically disappear, I would think?
-> I once saw a very fat boy (12-14) and his very fat mother (cant guess age) in a very poor neighborhood as I was taking a bus to college.
"Mom, can I eat vegetables today?"
"No, you're eating pasta tonight! We don't have no vegetables"
"AWWWWWWWW!!! No fair!"
"Shut up"
McDonalds is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Most shit food is cheap and easy. Non-shit food is not cheap nor is it easy. We must make a tax to make shit food as pricy as non-shit food. Then people will start making better decisions.
Now going back to hcarvalhoalves' point -- 9-5 schedule gives us that 1 hr lunch. We cannot spend our time preparing food so we can eat during that one hr. We go for fast-food lunch. Usually that means high sugar, or high something not great for you. If its good for you and can fit that 1 hr schedule, its usually very pricy and most people can't afford to spend say $20 per meal 5+ times a week.
Excellent point. Furthermore, new foods can be developed that achieve better combinations of satiation and satiety, and other desired outcomes.
I think it's fair to say that the entire medical profession has in the past suffered from a tendency to convince people to maximize their health, rather than maximize the combination of their health, and whatever other outcomes people desire, such as eating tasty food or feeling satiated. This tendency is flawed because it is not consistent with what people want to do, and is always therefore an uphill battle.
As the field matures, this is definitely changing, but the discussion around nutrition shows there is still a long way to go.
I don't think this is a magic bullet, but it's very important. There are biological feedback loops in satiety, and high-carb diets do make one artificially hungry. After giving up sugar and grains, it's a lot easier to maintain caloric equilibrium by just eating until I'm full, and I usually only need two meals per day.
Giving up grains or sugars isn't necessary, though, especially since "giving up sugar" would entail giving up fruit, and grains, while high in carbs, are some of the most nutritious foods you can eat. In fact, most nutritional recommendations I've read recommend a ratio of 60/20/20 for carbs/fats/protein.
Instead of thinking about whether something is "high carb" or not, it's better to think about the digestibility of the carb. Kidney beans, for example, are high-carb and high satiating. Sugar is all-carb and not satiating at all. You can find the satiation relative to carbs by examining the food's glycemic index.
A caveat: 60/20/20 might work for reasonably sedentary people.... Most people doing exercises, especially resistance exercise, will want much more protein.
40/20/40 or relatively close to that is a common split. Many will up the fat too (at the expense of carbs). At 60/20/20, there's absolutely no way I'd manage keeping up my lifting program.
I do end up with a lot of chicken and prawn, and a lot of jerky, as well as milk, and various protein supplements (shakes with up to 90% protein by dry weight, mixed with water - generally tastes foul; people writing sales copy for protein products are the most blatant liars in the world).
It's not unusual for me to eat a lunch consisting of 400g of lean chicken breast (ca. 100g of protein), ca. 600g of chicken drumsticks (ca. 70g of protein), a small-ish sausage and egg sandwich (~25g protein), a yoghurt drink and a flapjack. The rest I'll make up with a small meal in the evening.
My intake on exercise days is actually ~2800kcal so you hit pretty much where I am. But note that 2800kcal on exercise days is above my maintenance level at 103kg, at relatively advanced (but not competitive) levels on most my lifts.
Most people will need less than that, and you can get by on substantially less - you will just see less progress. It is fairly self-limiting. A lot of people you see struggling with the same weights in the gym over and over are simply eating too little.
The evidence for very high protein diets goes in all kinds of directions, though the evidence for increasing protein to support muscle growth is fairly good as far as I know. There's evidence for various degrees of beneficial (from a muscle building perspective) effects of up to 3g-4g of protein per kg of lean body weight depending on who you ask.
Though the main reason to aim for that kind of level simply "in case" it makes a difference, and because it allows for slip-ups without affecting the gym routine much, and unless you have kidney problems there are few to no negative effects.
Note that even a lot of gym goers would qualify as relatively sedentary...
That's an interesting idea. Is Satiation/sateity easily measurable? Is it proportionally consistent among everyone, or do some people get satiated more by some foods than others?
It depends on many factors, from the objective to the subjective. Objectively the measurements would vary according to the people, eg: obese vs not obese, old vs young, ethnicity, dietary history, and so forth.
Subjectively it would vary according to cultural norms and personal opinions, for example.
Additionally people can be accustomed to certain foods regardless of such measurements.
There is some serious interest in diets like Ketogenic or Paleolithic, which espouse similar dietary requirements to what the parent suggested (eg: whole milk has significantly more fat than skim milk, as such they affect satiation and satiety differently from each-other).
Fibrous vegetables tend to be the lowest calories/highest satiation foods there are. I replace all the snacks I eat at work with carrot sticks recently, and I think might be losing weight without thinking about it much.
I never feel fully 'satisfied' with the carrots, but I do feel physically full after eating them. It's a far better alternative to the candy, nuts, yogurts, fruits and oatmeal bars that we have at my work for snacks, which are extremely calorie dense and don't really make me feel full physically.
As a tweak to my general food lifestyle, it's far easier to maintain than a diet or cooking for myself consistently.
> the candy, nuts, yogurts, fruits and oatmeal bars that we have at my work for snacks, which are extremely calorie dense and don't really make me feel full physically.
With the exception of candies, those are nog bad options per se. The problem with all those options is the way they are packaged: Companies put a lot of salt (in nuts) or sugars (yogurts, oatmeal bars) to 'enhance' the flavour. Unfortunately there seem to be very few options (and usually more expensive) for 'ready made' health-ish food, but it can be made.
There are many healthy options in my list of snacks, but they are all extremely calorie dense and not satiating. For example, a small bowl worth (100g) of almonds is almost 600 calories, which is 1/3rd of my daily calorie allotment to lose weight! The same amount in carrots is around 40 calories, and makes me feel more full in some ways than the nuts because of the fiber.
The palm sized Fage yogurts packages are almost 300 calories, and wouldn't fill me up. The Fage yogurts have no real additives to them. 300 calories of carrots is a stomach straining 730g. The oatmeal bars are 150 calories each and might as well be air. 1 M&M is 9 calories alone! 5 M&Ms exceed my small bowl of carrots! I can go on and on about how insidious the snacks are at my work.
Try adding hummus, if you are into that sort of thing. I thought the same thing, but found that I felt great after eating veggies and hummus. Fresh fruit like Fuji apples, oranges, and red grapes are great instead of sweets or soda. And I've found coconut water to be the best beverage all around. I still like my meat, soda, and banana splits too, but as in everything, moderation is key.
What?!? Source please. It appears somewhat high in fat, but no saturated fat, nor is it high in carbs. Some fats like olive oil are actually good. Not to mention, I'm talking about adding it to fresh vegetables, not eating a whole tub of it by itself.
For satiation index, I suggest we use micronutrient-to-macronutrient ratio. More simply stated, "nutrient density".
Raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and lean meat all contain a high ratio of micronutrients to calories. Ignorant consumers could finally stop avoiding cashews and avocado, and start avoiding low-fat pop tarts and cereals.
The problem with nuts is that a reasonable serving is very, very small. If you get people to actually buy and take a decent (calorie wise) serving and eat it slowly, it works great. But it's all too easy to eat a 800kcal-1000kcal bag of nuts without thinking about it.
I think a huge part of the problem in general is large packs of food. Ready-made sandwiches in packs with 800-900kcal, for example, or nuts or high-calorie drinks sold in quantities that ought to be anywhere from 2-3 to 10+ servings. Ready-meals that comes only in massive portions that might work ok if you're buying it to split 2 or 3 way, but that are often horribly oversized if you eat alone.
It's all great and economical when you're buying stuff to put in the cupboard and have the willpower to resist eating larger quantities, but clearly we can see that people don't. And unfortunately there's little reason for most manufacturers or supermarkets to offer smaller alternatives, as we're too easily seduced into buying the larger packs.
Personally I found my soda intake dropped substantially after I started buying my weekend soda "allowance" in 250ml bottles instead of 0.5l or 1.5l bottles, for example. And a lot of my other diet maintenance boils down to picking smaller containers, smaller plates, smaller glasses for everything except water.
I was under the impression that macronutrient makeup was a pretty solid proxy for satiation/satiety. Perhaps the reason there isn't a ton of research behind satiation/satiety is that it's largely a "solved problem" (in terms of research being "thin"; I do think adding more clarity on packaging isn't a bad idea).
Satiation index exists already, in the form of Glycemic Index. It's not designed to measure satiation, but in practice that's what it does. Eating low GI foods will make you feel full; eating high GI foods will not.
Over the years, this is the third or fourth version of this same story that I've read.
Read one on low carbs. Read one on low fat. Now this one.
The assumption here, as it was in the others, is that we now know what works and what doesn't. And that forces beyond our control conspire to keep us fat. In this version, the thesis is that some form of certification system for marketing to children can cure the obesity epidemic.
Beats me. But I'll bet twenty bucks that a decade or two from now we'll be reading the same type of article, only with different kinds of suggested cures.
I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong, or rather that the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions, which have changed drastically in the last 100 years. I doubt controlling marketing material will have a long-lasting effect, but anything is worth a shot. It is a very serious problem.
Looking at the recent past, I'd be just a bit more humble about it.
It doesn't take a conspiracy, or especially evil actors, or even the population acting unnaturally (WTF would that even mean?). All it takes is millions of local optimizations to get us into the state we're in now: optimize a marketing campaign for profitability, optimize a snack for deliciousness, optimize what you stock based on what sells and what takes the longest to spoil, optimize what you eat based on price and healthiness judged on limited and flawed information ("low in fat! just ignore the rest of the ingredients...").
Lots and lots of evidence out there for you on the malleability of the human appetite, from people changing the portions that they eat based on the size of the plate they have in front of them, to the absurd effectiveness of rearranging grocery stores to sell snack food, children's food, etc on top of what people would already buy. We are complicated creatures, and you only need a few percentage points from each of these things to justify doing them.
And again, there is nothing evil in saying "I will make a packaged children's lunch that kids will actually love", and there's nothing wrong with a parent deciding to get that lunchable for their kid. We could try to demonize both parties there (good luck with that), or we could try to change the fitness landscape and figure out ways to at least better stack the odds in favor of healthier eating.
Marketing at kids might not be the best lever, but it is one of the easiest, as it is extremely effective (again, see that article), children are already acknowledged as a protected class when it comes to some types of speech (definitely when regulated by the FCC, and narrowly-defined laws like COPA have been upheld by the supreme court, for better or worse), and there's precedent that the public will accept this (parents are already harried enough by requests for specific brands, and the cigarette ad bans in the 90s have shown that there could easily be support for this sort of thing).
I can't categorically prove that is wholly false, but I also think it is naive to think that many involved in making numerous such "optimizations" didn't do so knowing fully that they were increasing their own welfare at the vastly greater expense of numerous others. I have no need to classify them as "evil", but extremely selfish, greedy, misanthropic, or sociopathic would suffice.
Oh noh!, that snack is so delicious that I cannot stop eating it.
It really puzzles me that, in America, the 'vote with your wallet' place, people who care to be healthier doesn't just start buying healthier foods.
After all, the USA is characterized for a strong free market no? as soon as demand for healthier food increases, companies surely would start selling this kind of food I think.
The truth is that people don't care (and not only Americans... in Mexico we have the same problems).
They care. They care very much. But, they want the fix to be easy and convenient. Therefore, what we get are foods that people _think_ are healthier, but actually aren't. Why do they think they are healthier? Because producers and advertisers convince them of such. (Think whole-wheat/grain pasta.) The reality is that the truly healthiest food options are also the least-processed. But that reality doesn't sell because it requires too much effort and "sacrifice" on the part of the consumer.
Why is this the top response? That's exactly the point, there is nothing wrong with delicious snacks. The problem is that have a mountain of evolution distorting your "free market" of food choices, and snacks optimized for deliciousness flipping biological triggers that want to make you eat more of those snacks.
And yes, you can overpower those triggers, but we're talking about over a nation's population. Plenty of people care and still end up gaining 2-3 pounds per year, which is really not that much (20-30 calories over your expenditure per day, on average), but 3 pounds a year really adds up over a decade or two or three.
As for increases in the demand for healthier food, I urge you to read that article for how that demand is met, often in ways that are not substantially healthier (if at all).
Why do you think they don't care? You can't blame individuals for a culture that completely eschews skepticism and critical thinking skills in children. I'll bet you that every time an educational program is proposed for nutrition in grade schools (at the local, state, or national levels), the junk food lobby steps in and uses its money to quash education. Our educational system is shaped by moneyed interests, just like everything else in government. Our children are taught what doesn't hurt the industries with the paid lobbyists or the status quo in general
Really ? I find this article blames the usual culprits :
> “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”
I'm not claiming this true or false. However, if this isn't blaming, then what is ?
From the article in Scientific American:
> According to the General Mills letter, if everyone in the US started eating healthfully, it would cost us $503 billion per year! That might affect our ability to pay CEOs like General Mills’ Ken Powell annual compensations of more than $12 million.
Same.
My beefs here:
1) this guys' job is not to keep America thin or healthy. That's the job of Americans. I especially do not want government to dictate what is acceptable food (beyond verifying it is safe - as in not poison or rotten)
2) that $503 billion has to come from somewhere. Given the margins on food companies, that money is not coming from their profits, because it just isn't there. So this is another tax on the poor.
This is nothing but another case of rich people "wondering" why everyone doesn't eat according to the very latest trends that they currently consider in vogue. I know why. So does everyone else. The question is not more interesting than why everyone seems to prefer non-Ferrari cars.
From the same article:
> Of course, we don’t necessarily want you to be unhealthy. It’s just that it’s so much more profitable to provide foods that happen to be unhealthy. We’ve been able to industrialize the food system so that we can produce massive amounts of the cheapest ingredients available, in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.
I wonder why we have industrialized the food system ... It happened at the same time starvation disappeared in America, probably just a coincidence.
"I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong, or rather that the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions, which have changed drastically in the last 100 years. I doubt controlling marketing material will have a long-lasting effect, but anything is worth a shot. It is a very serious problem."
Which is it then, 'nothing wrong' or 'serious problem'?
Nothing structurally or behaviorally unusual. There has been no new change in the species or some external factor that has caused the obesity epidemic. It's all based on changing external conditions, mostly food availability.
So there's no "disease" to cure, and no mastermind manipulation of the population by forces using [insert latest ideas here].
If anything, this leads me to believe that we'll need to take evolution into our own hands to fix this. Various measures like this could be a useful stopgap. Like I said, beats me. Happy to confess ignorance here (as opposed to seemingly most every other commenter who speaks on this topic) If pressed, however, also happy to provide more speculation.
As an obese person, I can definitely add that the disease metaphor, like the "moral blemish" metaphor before it, in my opinion does more damage than good. People come up with these ideas, then start wrapping them in the conspiracy theory of the month garb. Enough with the evil corporations, corrupt governments, sick people, lazy no-goods. These highly emotionally-charged models of analysis are not helping the public conversation.
For the entire history of the species nobody has had to worry about obesity until very recently. It follows that social structures and the physiology of humans are not the changing variable. The only obvious changing variable is food availability. So yes, obesity is a public health hazard, but it's not one based on some fault with people or social structures. It's simply the result of changing environmental conditions for which the species is ill-prepared.
>The only obvious changing variable is food availability. So yes, obesity is a public health hazard, but it's not one based on some fault with people or social structures.
Okay, but it's people growing and selling all that food. Social structures subsidize most of our foods. Sure, food availability is the "only variable," but it's a variable highly caused & correlated to people and social structures.
>physiology of humans are not the changing variable
Of course the physiology of humans are a changing variable. African Americans did not exist as a physiological idea 400 years ago, but today they represent a medical population that's much differently susceptible to disease, especially obesity, than Africans living in America or white Americans.
>no "disease" to cure
Similar language was used by the tobacco industry to argue against the link between tobacco marketing, tobacco use and ultimately lung disease. [0]
If the only variable you're going to invoke is food availability, why isn't everyone - or near enough everyone - obese?
Also:
You'd expect, if food availability was the sole variable, for things like pasta to be the ones best correlated with obesity. (Well, no, actually you'd expect wheat flour at $0.07 to be, but you'd expect pasta to correlate better )
So, how comes Coca Cola is $0.46 per 200 calories while pasta is $0.21 per 200 calories, and yet it's the consumption of sweetened beverages that correlates so well with obesity? How comes so much of our energy comes from fast food, (a Jack in the Box burger is $0,57 per 200 calories) rather than wheat flour based products?
Confusing availability solely with cost and not time.
Flour costs about 3 to 4 hours to bake some bread or at least an hour to make a homemade cake or cookies. That's the most expensive.
Pasta will cost me 1/2 hour absolute minimum to make spaghetti and meatballs. Cheaper, but still expensive.
Next cheapest is garbage grade fast food. Well, you're in for a long walk or a short drive, I figure I can get to the closest McD and get served "something" in less than 10 minutes. Cheaper yet...
Cheapest of all is a can of soda. I can hit the vending machine at work and walk back to my desk in about 3 minutes.
Hmm and the cheaper they are on this list, the more blame they get for making people fat. Some of it is the hair shirt brigade with the usual claim that if we had to raise our own apple orchards we would be holy enough, err, good enough, err whatever we'd be thin.
I will say that a significant medically diagnosed food allergy in the family is probably the most effective weight loss plan I've ever heard of. No wheat ever again, you say? Well that eliminates 90% of the grocery store's processed/junk food right there.
It's not time-consuming to eat healthy. So much of what you're talking about doesn't require you to be standing anywhere near the thing. Breadmakers for instance - flour does not cost you 3-4 hours to make bread, it costs you more like a minute to stick the things in the machine and press the button.
Pasta's about 20 minutes - which doesn't need you to be standing there. Bolognese sauce is about 20 minutes, regardless of the amount you make. Make a bunch of the things up and stick them in the freezer. - 4 minutes in the microwave, only a few seconds of which need you to be standing there.
Rice, similarly, doesn't need you to be standing there while it boils. Heck you can get rice-cooking machines. Anything made in a slow cooker pretty much by definition doesn't need you to be standing there....
Its a skinner box reward training system rather than anything else. Like a MMORPG grind game but with real food. I'm talking about the timestamp delta between "I'm hungry (or bored, or its a habit, or whatever)" and "I'm eating".
Its not that it takes 3 hours of work to make bread, its that it takes 3 hours from "I'm hungry and I'm going to do something about it" to the reward of gulping down fresh bread. So its harder to get fat off homemade bread, than, say, a can of corn syrup soda. 20 minutes for bolognese sauce (only outta a can I'm thinking, unless you're an iron chef or something) vs 3 minutes for a chocolate bar and a can of coke from the vending machine.
I'm not arguing its right. I have a totally different diet and I mostly raid the fruit bowl and eat an apple or banana or some nuts or fresh grapes or berries or generally speaking something vaguely paleo diet ish as much as reasonably possible. But people consider my diet to be really weird and un or outright anti american so I don't count. When someone opens a drive thru fruit stand (now there's a startup idea?), then we'll see how much weight I gain.
This is an important part about the debate. Obesity is not about the food. Some slightly more intelligent dietary changes and we'd be complaining about Americans being fat because they go thru the drive-thru wheatgrass juicer fast food joint every day for a snack and the drive-thru fruit stand for lunch every day and eat a whole package of dehydrated bananas outta the vending machine and a whole pint of blueberries all at once while watching TV on the couch or whatever. Americans would in general be a whole lot healthier, but still just as fat, and we'd still be listening to psuedo-dietary complaints about rich corporations screwing us over, because its really all about the latter economic part of the story rather than the dietary former part. Roll the presses with "They are intentionally addicting us to dehydrated blueberries!!!"
If you store your food the time between being hungry and eating should be minutes at worst. You're not going to put the bread on when you're hungry, you're going to put the bread on earlier in the day, or the day before even, and just cut a bit off when you want a sandwich. Similarly for anything you can cook without being there or store. Stick the slow cooker on before you go to work and come back to a lovely stew or something. That sort of thing.
It should not take you 3 hours to make a sandwich from the time you decide you're hungry. If it does, then there's something fairly seriously wrong about the way you plan and/or execute procedures. To the point where it seems you end up assuming that their horizon for meaningfully planned actions is less than 3 hours.
> 20 minutes for bolognese sauce (only outta a can I'm thinking, unless you're an iron chef or something)
Dice and fry an onion, fry some minced beef, pour a can of chopped tomatoes into it. That should have taken you 10-15 minutes to do all three, tops. The tomatoes will boil pretty much instantly, maybe throw in a handful of chopped mushrooms, bit of bazil, bit of oregano. Drop of tomatoes purée, maybe a little bit of gravy to thicken if you added too much moisture earlier on.
It's not hard to do in 20 minutes.
If you fry onions for 15 minutes or meat for 15 minutes, getting you up to a 30 minute sort of time span, then you're going to be getting dessicated husks out at the other end. You only fry onions for a handful of minutes with hot oil, 'till they start to go transparent, any longer than that and they start to crisp and blacken. As for meat - it'll just go increasingly rubbery. Yuck. Fry it until you can't see any pink bits left, continually spreading it around with the spoon to make sure it's done all the way through, and then it's pretty much done - get your tomatoes in.
> It's all based on changing external conditions, mostly food availability.
Most people given access to unlimited lentils would not become obese. Food availability is NOT the only factor.
A core message of the article is that the food industry has lobbied against restrictions on advertizing to children food with habit-forming non-nutritive calories. The food industry is built around cheap production of highly-processed ingredients that addictively fuel consumption and sabotage health.
>Read one on low carbs. Read one on low fat. Now this one.
I'm not convinced you did read the article. It actually mentions the previous health trends. This doesn't push any single health trend. So what exactly do you mean by:
>Now this one.
How does this article relate to the health fads over the years?
I generally agree with you, but I don't think this:
> the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions
is the same as, or even necessarily implies, this:
> there is nothing wrong
I would say we're surviving rather sustainably right now, in the sense that we've adapted to our environment well enough where it isn't really a hindrance to our propagation as a species; but I highly doubt it's even close to being optimal. In the same sense that having long life expectancy doesn't necessarily imply having a good quality of life.
The problem is that we're too quick to assume that we're already living in a 'future' where we know everything, and that things have been distilled to be so convenient, that it all had to be 'proven' or something by now, right? It plays out all the time: "Oh look, this conveniently packaged product has 0 carbs! Awesome, I can eat a ton of this now, cause I just heard of a study that said carbs are bad." Except that the product label is misleading because it only accounts for one tiny serving that was specifically chosen to fall below the "0 carb" requirement guidelines (which do have a bit of wiggle room), and that study was actually sponsored by the company who made that product you're now looking at. And this happens all over the place.
It's unfortunate, but it does seem the whole setup we have going right now might be a bit too shaky to really say much conclusive about nutrition. Nutritionists aren't necessarily doctors; Doctors aren't necessarily scientists; and Scientists could always be swayed by the entities funding their research -- research which can go on to live safely in journals probably without many attempts at reproduction, so it's ok to fudge the numbers a tiny bit if you need things to work out a bit more.
Despite what it sounds like, I'm actually not very cynical; I just think we need to gain a bit of perspective about where we are as a species right now. We'll figure it out eventually, but it is admittedly kinda tough to navigate the seas of nonsense out there right now.
> I generally agree with you, but I don't think this:
>> the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions
> is the same as, or even necessarily implies, this:
>> there is nothing wrong
I think by "nothing wrong" GP meant "people are behaving exactly to specification", not "people are behaving in a way that benefits them". Lots of adaptations are quite wrong for life in XXI century, but humans executing them are acting correctly, with respect to the way their hardware is wired.
I'm aware that this was most likely the meaning of that statement, however I don't see the usefulness in presenting 'wrongness' this way when it basically deems any outcome that doesn't involve the extinction of the human race as 'working'. It's just a simplistic non-stance that doesn't really mean anything, so I figured it would be more productive to invoke the 'moral' wrongness of it.
It does mean something. It tells us that the problem isn't moral, so we shouldn't run around screaming of how human civilization is declining. It tells us that this is how things are supposed to work in the environment we set up, so we shouldn't tell people this is an illness. It reminds us that this failure mode is the default state, so we really do need to work and/or remodel our environment if we want to avoid it.
There is a reason I put the word 'moral' in quotes, and you just explained it. The thing is, that I think it has already become sufficiently obvious that as a society, we see a need for change. Using vague terms like 'morality' make a lot more sense when you put them in a quantifiable context that represent the will of the populous. Thus I don't see the need to regress back to this 'default state' of pretending we don't know where we stand because it seems we've already established that much. Instead, presenting things that way seems to confuse and induce semantic arguments like this one because it removes knowledge that people already know; leading to [IMO] wasted brainpower -- unless a lot of people really are unaware of the current zeitgeist, in which case I would take back my arguments.
> For example, any food marketed to children must “contain at least 50% by weight one or more of the following: fruit; vegetable; whole grain; fat-free or low-fat milk or yogurt; fish; extra lean meat or poultry; eggs; nuts and seeds; or beans.”
UK advice is to give children full fat milk until they are 2, and not skimmed until they are 5, and only then if they have a good diet. This is because of the fat soluble vitamins, and also because children need the energy. As part of a sensible diet full fat milk is fine.
This advice is part of the healthy drinking stuff. Children should have water or full fat milk. If you give them fruit juice dilute it at least 10 parts water to 1 part juice. Use a free-flow beaker, or a straw cup, or a regular cup, rather than a sippy cup.
All this advice from government sounds a bit preachy. But tooth removal is a significant cause for hospitalisation for UK children under 5.
"The dairy industry is asking the Food and Drug Administration to allow it to add artificial sweeteners to some milk and dairy products. But it does not want to advertise ”reduced calories” in a prominent place on the label of the product."
Sources? I would be dismayed, and even shocked to find out if milk had added sugar in it without consistent labeling.
At least in the United States, milk must be sold with pasteurization, homogenization, and no additives. If it is different in the U.K, please enlighten us.
This is one of those things that varies across the UK thanks to devolution: Scotland bans raw milk products, but England and Wales don't IIRC. Even in England, you can only buy raw milk / cream directly from the producer. Raw milk cheese is available in ordinary shops though.
I can go into my local small supermarket and buy pasteurised, unhomogenised milk from Jersey cattle which is very, very rich. Fantastic for making custard!
The definition of what you're allowed to sell as 'milk' is probably set by the EU somewhere, but I've never seen milk have added ingredients listed, unless it's something like chocolate milk.
Well, for one thing, some people believe that it is not the role of the Almighty State to dictate and micromanage every single action or inaction that businesses and individuals take.
Sometimes these people have the audacity to believe that businesses should be permitted to voluntarily exchange with broadcasters and that parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the content their children consume.
Anyway, I agree. I don't buy this whole "liberty" nonsense either.
That freedom of action is generally predicated on the idea of competent individuals and businesses interacting voluntarily. When dealing with children that rationale goes out the window, because children are not competent to voluntarily participate in the economy. There is very little that is more in the province of the state to micromanage, even in a libertarian utopia, than interactions between businesses and people who are legally incompetent, like children.
If your counter-argument is predicated on businesses freely exchanging with parents to convince them what products to feed their children, I fully agree that they should be free to do that, but that's distinct from advertising to children directly.
The counter-argument is that advertisement is speech, even if it is undesirable, and that speech is information.
Parents who do not wish their children exposed to advertising could use the same rules they would use to prevent their children from being exposed to violent media and profanity.
I think the solution is for parents to simply start thinking of media portraying drug consumption and media portraying Twinkie consumption as logically equivalent, and for parents to stop paying for an information service to deliver them such media (television), and to demand the market provide a new information service which more adequately matches their preferences for media (a kid-oriented Netflix?).
This solution does not require a state to monitor and decode the nutritional value of information transfers.
Advertising is only kinda speech, in the sense that its a proposal for a commercial transaction. The principles under which advertising is regulated is similar to the principles under which fraud is regulated. Its not speech when you propose to sell something to someone that you don't own or that doesn't do what you claim.
For information which functions as advertising to also be a candidate for fraud it must first assert something as fact.
There are many forms of advertisement which do not assert facts or even include language. An advertisement could simply consist of a graphical fictional portrayal of consumption or brand usage done in a glamorous light.
If something does not include a representation of facts, it does include a potential for fraud, and it would not make sense to regulate it as such solely on a principle of equivalence.
> For information which functions as advertising to also be a candidate for fraud it must first assert something as fact.
That's sort-of fine, again, when dealing with competent adults. Though plenty of research demonstrates that even competent adults are incapable of avoiding being influenced by good advertising in ways that may very well be against their own interests.
But when targeting children, it takes very little before your slight manipulation gets treated as if it was fact by young children. That it isn't "asserting something as fact" by adult standards is meaningless when discussing advertising that is targeting children.
And as a parent: Short of locking my child in the house with no access to any media, there is no way I can prevent my son from being exposed to advertising that he (at 4 years old) is in no way prepared to objectively assess the fact content of.
That's not the point. The point is that commercial advertising isn't full-blooded speech (and thus may be subject to regulation for the same reason that fraudulent speech is subject to regulation).
> Parents who do not wish their children exposed to advertising could use the same rules they would use to prevent their children from being exposed to violent media and profanity.
That doesn't fly. The nature of advertising is intrusive. I have to sign up for porn cable channel. I have no control about what goes on air on Discovery Kids at 10 PM between the shows. I can choose what magazine I buy. I can't choose which ads are printed between the articles. It goes on...
Dumb mass media advertising could die tomorrow. Every advertising should be like AdWords (query initiated suggestions curated by the channel, not nagging driven by the advertisers). Unfortunately we still have mass media since that's profitable for the agencies mafia, they still get away selling impressions/exposure, not real results.
> because children are not competent to voluntarily participate in the economy.
But isn't it still up to the parents to decide what to buy?
There's a campaign in my country (Brazil) to ban/regulate all sorts of advertising to children, and I've heard some parents who support it claim (essentially) that they can't say "no" to their children. As someone who grew up in a lower-middle-class family and understood very early that I couldn't have all the toys, or even all the toys my slightly higher-middle-class classmates had, I find that trend rather bizarre.
What harm is there in banning advertisement directed at children? Perhaps they may become less well equipped to deal with advertising as adults (but this seems an easy enough problem to solve). Conversely, the benefits of banning children-directed advertising are huge.
It was easy (relatively) for your parents to say "no" because they just couldn't afford it. It's much harder when you can afford it, but you don't think it's good for them to buy your kid YetAnotherPieceOfCrapTheyveBeenAdvertisedIntoWanting(tm).
There are some parents who will not say "no", and there are some children who will holler until they get their way. The advertisers know this, and will take advantage of it. Different families deal with demand and desire for products differently.
Children can't consent. So the state has to protect them. One way to do that is by shielding them from things that hurt them.
It happens that junk food hurts them, and a lot of the reason why they eat junk food is because of television ads. Since they can't consent and the state must protect them, we ought to limit advertising unhealthy things to kids.
I'm sure 99.9% of parents, if properly educated, would agree that an overweight or obese child is a bad thing. They might not know what to do about it, and TV ads might turn out to be more powerful than parent's routine meal planning.
It might turn out that asking them to turn off the TV is impractical. Maybe telling them what to feed their kids is even worse. In terms of practical means to reduce obesity, most parents would not oppose limiting TV advertising to children.
A lot of the time, the measures the state needs to take to protect children includes protecting them from actions of parents that might very well be well-meaning, but just as clueless and easily manipulated by advertising as their children, but all to often even don't care.
While I'm for reducing the power of the state, protection of children is not something society can abdicate from without severe negative effects.
I will admit that this is a tricky area. Children are people and people certainly can choose to come to the aid of someone else who is being abused or harmed. But dealing with children is somewhat special, since it is generally considered the parent's responsibility and prerogative to decide how to raise their children.
Sadly I don't think there is any way to come to any real, objective answer on this issue. It is one, IMO, that will cause conflict as long as there are people.
Yes but, for example, full fat yoghurt won't hurt them and wouldn't fit the guidelines. The guidelines stupidly and unscientifically advocate for lowfat milk products which leave all the potentially dangerous aspects of dairy while taking out the good stuff. If the problem is marketing to kids who can't consent, let's address that separately!
throwit hardly seems to be talking about a libertarian utopia. Kids are susceptible to advertising. They're also susceptible to what their parents teach them. For many of the first years of their lives, they have absolutely no ability to purchase any of these products for themselves.
Is it really so much to ask that we be allowed to make our own decisions about food? Come on, we're talking about food! Not medicine. Not heavy machinery or automobiles or airplanes or nuclear energy. Food!
You don't have to accept the position of the documentary, that the corporate form is intrinsically a bad thing. But tell me that the marketers behind the "Nag Factor" report don't disgust you.
It is nice to imagine that each family is an island of rationality, well-informed about choices and their eventual effects, never choosing the easy path, immune to marketing and peer pressure. In the real world, things are a little more complex. And the marketers behind reports like "The Nag Factor" make millions by subverting family relations to serve their purposes.
It is good to be skeptical of regulation, but this is so clearly a case where more good can be done than harm.
I'm not saying he's proposing a libertarian utopia. I'm saying that even in a libertarian utopia, regulating interactions between people who are competent to participate freely in the economy and those who are not is reasonably the province of the state.
I'm not talking about limiting anybody's decisions. I'm talking about regulating interactions between businesses and people who are incompetent to make their own decisions.
This is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Just food? Food is something that can be as deadly as drugs, yet is as accepted as air.
>Not medicine.
It's worse than medicine exactly for the sentiment you are expressing. No big deal right? It's so normal it couldn't possibly be abused, right? It's exactly the opposite. We can push poison and it's no big deal because it's "just food".
It's not about forcing people to make decisions. It's about deceiving people into make the wrong decisions for your own profit. That is not innocent business. That is fraud.
You're absolutely right! We shouldn't let these petty concerns about the competence of children infringe on our liberties! For too long has the Almighty State been sticking its nose where it doesn't belong and we should do something about all these ridiculous limitations.
Why should it be illegal for children to drink alcohol? Their parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the beverages their children consume.
Why should it be illegal for an adult to have sexual intercourse with a minor? The parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the sexual behavior of their own children.
Down with the meddling of the state! Our freedom is at stake!
"Why should it be illegal for children to drink alcohol? Their parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the beverages their children consume."
I think you mean this to be sarcastic and obviously wrong, but many states in the US permit parents to give minors alcohol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Underage_consumption_map_2...) Some states permit this anywhere (including in pubs), others restrict it to the home. This is considered entirely reasonable by many, dare I say most, people.
There's a balance to strive for between making a statement concisely and making it nitpick-proof. I could have been more factually correct by stating that it's illegal to sell booze directly to minors, but that would've made the tone of my comment less rabidly libertarian.
The point, of course, is that parents can make a meaningful decision about whether they'll give booze to their kids a lot more easily than they can do the same for exposing their kids to advertisement.
Plus, I'm pretty sure that, even in those states, you could get in some sort of legal trouble for giving whiskey to a 2-year old. Obviously, we can't claim similar level of damage when it comes to advertising, but we don't seem to be willing to look more closely into it, either.
> I could have been more factually correct by stating that it's illegal to sell booze directly to minors, but that would've made the tone of my comment less rabidly libertarian.
Yes, it is a damn shame when reality gets in the way of your strawmen...
Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and South Carolina all allow minors to drink alcohol on private property without the consent of their parents.
In several states the only way you could get in trouble for giving whiskey to a 2-year old is if you gave it in sufficient quantities that child endangerment became clear. Letting your kid to take a small sip of whiskey under supervision to convince the kid that he wants nothing more to do with it is reasonable and legal in many areas.
These markets are already intensely and exhaustively managed.
I'm not disagreeing with you; what annoys me is that the people who suddenly claim to support business independence from heavy government regulation remain silent until some new law is proposed.
If there is a problem with banning businesses from advertising from children, then there is a problem with the FTC today, not tomorrow, because they already heavily regulate advertising, including what you can show to children. In the US government agencies have vast reaching legal authority to create and enforce their own rules. When there is a scandal they answer to elected representatives, but otherwise? Not so much.
Does that mean that TV shows targeted to children can't have advertising? Goodbye kids TV (not all of it is bad). Venue aside, what are the signs of being targeted to children? Show too many kids in the frame, the wrong color scheme, the wrong narration style or fonts? How close can you get?
We talked about "airtightness" in the taxation thread, but I'm realizing there's another issue. If the law isn't carefully defined, it could be possible to interpret nearly any advertising as being targeted, in part at least, to children. This is the kind of thing that will slide toward more restriction under the pressure of various kinds of activists, once we get the idea that we can ban advertising based on its audience.
The (live) children's TV my daughter watches is on PBS. The extent of the advertising she is exposed to while watching it is the idea that giving money to PBS allows them to continue to show the TV programs. The other children's TV she watches is on Netflix, with no advertising. While some of those shows exist because of advertising during their first run, if that option weren't present then something would fill the void.
Anyway, "advertising to children" is already specifically defined and regulated in many countries. The question is simply how far to take those regulations under existing definitions.
Does that mean that TV shows targeted to children can't have advertising? Goodbye kids TV (not all of it is bad).
Plenty of kids' TV is decent stuff, but almost all of it is still obnoxiously commercial. I remember thinking so as a child (the tendency of plastic toys to break into shitty little useless pieces probably helped make me an anti-capitalist, down the line).
So I see very little wrong with just outright banning advertising to children and shifting the creative effort over into "whole family" genres that don't just make up a new way to babysit your kids without paying a babysitter.
The conclusions of that article that are nonsensical, at least those that weren't already established. In particular, the evidence cited doesn't support drawing the causality arrow in that direction. Why on earth would a logo for a car company or something stimulate the same areas as one for food? That's not how people work, and it's not specific to children.
Should we use the law to stop everything we consider a bad influence on our children? I guess this talk of regulating food advertising proves it isn't just the right that makes "won't somebody think of the children" arguments.
To my mind, there are "think of the children" arguments, and there are "think of the children" arguments.
One uses "think of the children" as an excuse to enact broader control over society. Witness kiddie porn being the argument against P2P and PGP, or trying to censor "satanic" or sexually explicit lyrics, or any of a litany of other such nonsense claims.
The other uses it to remind people that this shit actually, you know, affects the children.
It's also worth bearing in mind the needs of the many, vs. the needs of the few.
With the kiddie porn issues, generally the number of children being talked about is a very small minority of the total, and usually the issue under discussion has only indirect possibility of helping those children.
However advertisement of poor food choices to children is something almost all children are subjected to on a daily basis, therefore when discussing regulation we can see that the majority of children will be beneficiaries.
That would make a lot of sense, but the explanation is, quite simply, that advertising is speech, and you can't go around banning speech because you don't like what it says and to who it's addressed.
Sometimes it's subtle. Look at the second picture: what kind of cereal is on a low shelf within that child's reach? And what kind is higher up where mom is reaching?
To pay for the development of children's entertainment. Public television is wonderful but I bet all of us look back fondly on a show that we loved as children that would not have existed without ads to pay for its production.
Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion: Without children's entertainment, kids would be forced to read free books from the library or go play outside. The horror!
Look, shared cultural nostalgia is great, and all, but I'm not sure that makes for a good reason to allow advertizing to kids.
I wonder if young adults in two or three decades, the ones growing up with netflix and amazon instant video accounts, will have to say the same.
I know I cannot already, since I grew up without cable television and had most of my childhood televised entertainment provided for me through public broadcasting and rented/bought VHS. I'll admit that my circumstances were unusual though.
Until you try watching an episode as an adult and realize it was complete and utter shlock.
That's not to say good kids' stuff doesn't exist, but I see nothing wrong with just murdering the whole model of Media-Driven Consumption, from food to toys to fashion, in its sleep. With a knife.
It's bad, and society should feel bad for allowing it.
So I think you can't advertise bad food to kids in my country (the few times I've seen kids advertising it's for toys, not lollies), but honestly I think the stuff that is worse is advertising to mothers. Some of those are disgustingly predatory.
The proposal mandating 50% of something in food marketed to kids is stupid nonsense. If anything, reason should tell you that evolution must have selected for a "resiliant" digestive system - so much that it's thriving on anything we throw at it. So why bother increasing the costs - besides for control and power?
Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health? Do they have large scale studies properly done? (I mean not on rats but on humans - it's kinda tough to force them to eat only what's prescribed during a study, and you can't follow them all day long for years) Do you want so much to reduce customer choice and force your thoughts on them? This is the polar opposite to freedom, and based on a flawed methodology.
There are some evidence that a given regime or another may be beneficial for a given disease, but nothing convincing yet to the best of my knowledge when taking into account all the diseases (you don't get to hand pick the diseases you'll get).
IMHO, the proper methodology would require a large scale datamining operation along with biological tests and proper outcome monitoring. We just don't have all the technology to do that yet on say at least 10 million humans for 10 years (and that wouldn't be large scale - there are 6 billions of us, and with a longer lifespan!).
10 millions over 6 billions would be a 0.0016 ie 0.16% sample - with such a small sample on only 1/7 of the human lifespan, I wish you good luck to anyone willing to take into account genetic polymorphism, intolerance to some food (milk, gluten) etc. It will just be an exercice in "manually correcting" so many things that the end result should not be trusted.
Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't.
To quote Djikstra, I'd say such laws and rules are just the root of all evil - premature optimization!!!
EDIT: Downvotes as always. I find that downvoting for a disagreement is not fair play. You don't like my opinion? I would be delighted to be proved wrong, with facts please.
We can't experiment directly on humans - we can only look for correlations, which always causes trouble with determining causality. Biological questions are inherently complicated, so any hypothesis is necessarily little more than a stab in the dark, even if we had the ability to compensate for genetic variation et cetera, which we most certainly don't. Large-scale studies are expensive, time-consuming, difficult to organize, and would inevitably end up politicized from 200 different directions, and then driven into the ground in the next campaign season.
In short, any and all dietary studies are doomed to be 99% failures.
But that 1% is important. I don't think there's much question that we have a better understanding today, of what constitutes healthy food, than we did 50 years ago. We know, in particular, that foods rich in certain substances (I don't want to try to classify them all in one or two words, because I don't study this stuff and would get it wrong - I'm talking about tradition "junk foods" and sweets, like cupcakes and potato chips.), are strongly correlated with a wide variety of health issues, the incidence of which has increased over the last several decades. Furthermore, these foods are inherently attractive to children, and (perhaps more controversially?) display limited addictive properties.
Yeah, our knowledge is limited, and yeah, we'll have missteps. But I don't think this is "premature optimization" - the program's running really slowly, and everyone's complaining about it. We don't understand a lot of why it takes so long to finish, but there is something we can do that would probably make it at least 5% faster. Why not give it a shot, and then go back to profiling?
Oh, and have an upvote, for contributing to the conversation. Because that's the etiquette around here, although some seem to have forgotten.
Thanks for this interesting counter argument (and for the upvote, although the effect was quite short - I guess there are more emotional than rational voters).
It is quite valid - if we have a strong suspicion on something, it could be helpful to give a shot.
I'm just concerned we don't know how strong our suspicion is, which turns that into a bet (more on that later)
The real problem IMHO is that this bet will certainly prevent or stall proper studies for a long time afterwards.
Take for example LSD - there are many results suggesting it might be effective on depression. Yet it was banned, which means once we have the technology to conduct a real large scale study, we may not have enough data points as we would have if it had not been banned (thanks to recreational users)
I mean, it is not ethical to willfully expose human to known dangerous drugs, yet if they take it wilfully by themselves or by mistake, it's a great source of data: for example, pharmacovigilence collects accidental use of drugs by pregnant mothers to guesstimate the toxicity on the fetus or the LD50 on humans)
This is just an example, but you can see how it might scale, basically we are taking bets, and it hampers research.
Also, it is quite philosophical. Personally, I'm against coffee due to its addictive potential and it's social image, yet it would be wrong for me to say there are no positive outcomes linked to it, or that on average it might have positive health benefit. I just don't know. There are many contradictions and I remember reading an article on how there seems to be time trends in negative or positive studies result, with an oscillation. (which would suggest that our research results are biaised by our perception)
An outright ban on caffeine, like on LSD, even if it might be a) coherent with my refusal, and b) more comfortable to me since I know I wouldn't be accidentally exposed to coffee (ex: in a soda), would certainly hamper further research, which would be detrimental if there was after all a positive health benefit on average - ie it would deprive me of future data which could help me change my mind.
IMHO, with bad data, taking bet with one's health is acceptable (if at no cost for the health system). Taking bets with the other people health - aka banning or mandating, is wrong.
EDIT: I just noticed your answer. Sorry if I improperly stated my intend. The goal was not to enter into a philosophical debate, but to have counter arguments. I am interested in either proving or disproving my thoughts - both are fine. Therefore, to avoid sparking a debate, I will not reply to your comment. Your answer however was very helpful and helped me clarify my thoughts. I agree with your points. Thanks a lot, thanks also for telling me your position and your data on coffee. For my position on coffee, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632696 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632995 - I'd rather not say more, or a coffee fanboy may start a debate.
Oh man, a philosophical/ethical rabbit hole! Down we go...
> I mean, it is not ethical to willfully expose human to known dangerous drugs, yet if they take it wilfully by themselves or by mistake, it's a great source of data: for example, pharmacovigilence collects accidental use of drugs by pregnant mothers to guesstimate the toxicity on the fetus or the LD50 on humans)
The issue at hand isn't the subject's consent, I assume - the issue is our act of encouraging an individual to do something that might be harmful. Otherwise, there would be nothing wrong with performing studies on heroin use, as long as the appropriate warning labels were affixed. (I'm just assuming you're not a hard-core libertarian. If you are: just have a private company enforce the ban, and all will be well ;P )
I think, though, that it's also unethical to allow /others/ to knowingly encourage an individual to do something harmful. I recognize this is pretty controversial (if I were religious, I'd be a pain in the ass), but it means that if we are reasonably certain that item X is harmful, banning or restricting advertising is a must.
I also think it's ethically preferred to, where feasible act to discourage others (without coercion) from doing things harmful to themselves. Government- and charity-run nutrition programs, PSAs, etc.
That's our ethical dilemma, I guess, or at least mine. On the one hand, long-term scientific knowledge may be more rich and valuable if nothing is done. On the other, there is a moral imperative to take actions which might limit that long-term knowledge.
I'm inclined to assert, boldly and without factual basis, that there will be "enough" people who disregard the advertisements and PSAs, that scientists won't be much bothered by the missing data. Remember it's not like LSD; we're not banning the substance, just the encouragement. People smoke plenty of cigs, even though they're not advertised (and there's abundant negative advertising).
(By the way, I'm also very against coffee, having bad personal experiences with an individual who's behavior was/is noticeably negatively affected by the stuff. I'd support normalizing drug laws by lumping hyper-junk foods, caffeine, alcohol, cigs, pot, and other mildly harmful items of varying addictiveness into one big "restricted advertising" category, and using the taxes to send out occasional PSAs.)
Your biggest complaint seems to be that nobody is using sample sizes that are large enough to satisfy you. What is your justification for setting the bar so high? Just what kind of confidence levels are you looking for before you think a public health intervention is justified? 10 million people may be only 0.14% of the world population, but the total size of the world population has basically nothing to do with what constitutes a healthy diet for most people - human biology hasn't changed much in the past 300 years even though the population grew by a factor of 10. Huge sample sizes are only necessary if you're trying to study something rare (which is almost by definition not public health), or if the population is very inhomogeneous: an assumption you're making without supplying much evidence.
And the first two paragraphs of your comment read like a conspiracy nut's rant. It significantly lowers your credibility and quite justifies downvoting you for making assertions that contradict scientific consensus without providing any supporting evidence.
So why bother increasing the costs - besides for control and power?
Because it is killing people
Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't.
We may not know what is best, but we do know some things that are extremely harmful.
We know that eating extremely calorie-dense foods is a contributing factor to obesity. Beside the many studies that show this (which may or may not meet your somewhat unusual standards) we can rely on chemistry and biology.
It's easy to calculate how many calories someone eats based on their diet. It's easy to calculate how many calories they burn based on their lifestyle.
If the amount they eat is in excess of what they burn, they gain weight. In children some of that goes towards growing, but it's easy to calculate that too based on average growth weights.
Most researchers who publish studies are unfamiliar with the scientific method and hypothesis nullification. Either that, or it's not in the interests of the publishers to properly apply these concepts in their studies. We've gotten to a scary point where "science" is now getting more and more into the hands of the public and become a consumer good purely for consumption in the form of news. People love studies that confirm something they already believe. It's bad for business to dispel myths that people have an emotional investment in.
"The proposal mandating 50% of something in food marketed to kids is stupid nonsense" + "Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health?" = flamebait => downvote
> Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health?
Yes. You don't need to look at the effects of a particular diet because you can be reductionist as a proxy. For example, examining the effect of a meat-heavy diet on people is difficult, as you said. But if you know what meat does in a diet (correlates with high cholesterol, e.g.) you can examine the effect of high cholesterol on a diet, and if you find out it's bad you could determine that eating in a way which contributes to high cholesterol is generally a bad idea.
While I agree with most of what is in the article, I always wince when I see whole grains advertised as healthful foods.
They're not. Wheat contains gluten, a known gastrointestinal irritant, and celiac and IBD patients know that wheat is one thing you want to stay away from. It can also trigger inflammation and cause serious health problems for anyone with an inflammatory condition.
Perhaps proposing gluten-free foods is a better idea.
In addition, the guidelines for "advertising to children" are quite peculiar, and I don't know why children should be advertised to at all. What even constitutes advertising to children is not quite clear either.
It's called gluten intolerance (or sensitivity), not "self-diagnosed wannabe celiac stuff" and last time I checked it affected something like 5% of the US population (some state the incidence rate is as high as ~20%).
Most people just live with the stomach discomfort because it's difficult to try a gluten-free diet. And dismissive comments like yours also aren't helpful in motivating people to experiment.
I lived with stomach issues for 30+ years, and after trying a myriad of solutions, from eliminating dairy to exercise, I finally tried eliminating gluten from my diet. That did the trick.
Exactly. The jury is still out on exactly how prevalent gluten intolerance is, but the percentage is definitely a lot higher than most would guess.
A second problem is that there is a whole spectrum of how intolerant people can be to gluten. Some people will simply find they are a little more constipated or gassy the next day if they eat gluten and some will find that they need to urgently visit the restroom 30 minutes after consuming it. Neither of those groups of people would be considered celiacs. Many of the people in those groups go through live oblivious as to the cause.
Unfortunately, ignorance like that of lysol's grandparent comment dominates this debate. It's amazing and a bit scary the number of otherwise intelligent people who blindly assume that what is true for them is true for everyone. It's as if the mere fact that some people prefer to avoid gluten in their diets is a personal affront to them. It baffles me.
Most people don't realize that they too have gluten issues.
I thought I didn't have any issues with gluten until I stopped eating it for a month. Now if I eat gluten I get a headache almost immediately afterwards.
Edit: This was a reply to Kunai, asserting that gluten is an inflammatory agent.
I'm married to a woman with a dietetics degree. We have discussed this subject. She has read papers on the topic, and knows the literature.
You, I am guessing, are a software developer, who, in all likelihood has not read the literature on this subject (if this assumption is incorrect i would be happy to stand corrected).
It mystifies me how people stand so sure of themselves and claims such as "gluten is an inflammatory agent", despite the fact that grains have been consumed by vast numbers of humans for millennia, the absence of evidence that it causes disease, and the fact that no causal links have been proposed between gluten and causing Celiac disease†.
†: my wife says that if you are strongly predisposed to Celiac (which has a genetic component), then yes, consuming gluten may exacerbate your condition. However the idea that you can take an otherwise healthy (or heck even unhealthy) person, force them to gorge on gluten to give them Celiac is definitely wrong.
My genetic markers for gluten were negative, but I do have IBD, and consuming any gluten at all usually causes a marked exacerbation of my symptoms. I am not well-versed in dietetics; although my parents are both physicians, and have seen many patients with Celiac disease and a predisposition towards gluten sensitivity, whereas 20 years ago there were very few. Other physicians have asserted similar stances.
It's not empirical, but if you have any evidence that suggests otherwise, I would gladly be corrected.
When it comes to the medical literature, I'm even cautious about doctors claims. Dr. Oz is a doctor, but he's a cardiac surgeon. So when he makes claims about the healthiness of palm oil (which is solid at room temperature, and is only healthy by comparison to lard), he is abusing his credibility as an MD.
You'll note in the epidemiology section that Celiacs to genetics. The disease is prevalent primarily in western european populations (or populations descended from western europe), and has actually shown a decrease in non-european descended populations.
(My wife also notes that in the Infant Diet section it does say that if you feed gluten to infants it can increase their chance of Celiac's. This is true if you have genes which predispose you to Celiac's. If you do not have the genes, you can't develop Celiac's. And even if you do have the genes, you can go throughout your life w/o developing Celiac's, although apparently being fed gluten early in life does increase your risks. Seems more like a thing about feeding infants than it does about gluten really.)
Edit: My wife also points out that Celiacs diagnoses prior to 1997 were done via biopsy (which is of course, invasive, when we're talking about intestines). After 1997, and the availability of a simple blood screening test, testing for Celiac's has become cheaper, easier, and more prevalent. That certainly must contribute to the increased number of diagnoses.
Well, lactose intolerance and gluten intolerance aren't dieting fads. I silently sneered at those labels, until I realized 6 years ago that I might have been lactose intolerant for the prior 10 years. (Now I know so.) And I felt the same way about gluten intolerance, until... 1 month ago. Now I realize that I have gluten intolerance. My intolerance for lactose is fairly strong, and for gluten, it's fairly weak, but now I know why I get stomach cramps and breakouts on my lower face. 75% of the world has at least some degree of lactose intolerance.
Bread (and others) have provided the fuel to build civilization, true. However, they are man-made foods. When was the last time you saw a chimpanzee or caveman enjoying a loaf of bread, plate of pasta, etc?
As it has only existed since the dawn of agriculture, your tying of it to evolution is incorrect.
I'm going to stop you right there and say that evidence is empirical.
I'll believe personal experience and observation over some conclusion from a published paper that used obscure statistical methods, possibly lied, got paid to publish a pre-determined finding and found a 2% significance of some occurrence of something with some caveats thrown in.
The ADA has no interest in preventing or curing diabetes as curing diabetes would end the institution. The AMA isn't interested in getting people healthy and proper treatment because that would eliminate the need of such an organization. The only reason Snickers isn't in the food pyramid is only because people aren't that stupid... yet.
You're both wrong and mongering conspiracy theories.
Sure, the Academy has its flaws, and there are bad actors who are out there just for fame and money who will lie to enrich themselves. But that's doubly true for the "health food" industry and people who claim to be nutritionists.
Humans are terrible at introspection regarding health matters. Absolutely horrible. This is one of the reasons why double-blind test protocols exist.
And so, even if you are so paranoid as to think that the American Medical Association is engaged in some mass conspiracy to keep people sick, unless you are also writing off all health care researchers, you've got to admit that there are people who are trying to help people, and help cure disease (which lets face it, we're actually pretty damn good at, all things considered).
> I'll believe personal experience and observation over some conclusion from a published paper that used obscure statistical methods
Then you are in good company. There are many reports of villages complaining about wireless towers causing headaches and other health issues... even when it later turned out the towers were not even active. I read an interview today with Bill Gates, who noted that one of the biggest problems the Gates Foundation has encountered in its efforts to eradicate certain diseases is that 10-20% of the people hear rumors of vaccines being bad and refuse to take them.
I'm a bit confused by your statement; are you saying you trust your own experience (sample size: 1) over any published science? That seems fundamentally flawed.
Whole grains are absolutely a healthy choice in food, unless you have Celiac disease. What you're saying equates to calling nuts unhealthy because many people have nut allergies, but this is obviously the exception, not the rule.
Healthy in relation to what, donuts? In comparison to meat, vegetables, nuts, and fruit, I'd say whole grains aren't a very good choice. Any food that readily breaks down into carbohydrates (and by extension, sugar) should be avoided except on occasion. I'm looking at you potatoes.
the high phytate content of whole grains binds to minerals such as iron, calcium, magnesium, and zinc in the gastrointestinal tract, significantly reducing their absorption by the body
Effects of dietary fiber and phytic acid on mineral availability
It has long been recognized that high cereal grain consumption induces vitamin D deficiency in various animal species, including primates, our closest animal relatives. By studying the fate of radio-labelled vitamin D, researchers observed significantly increased excretion of vitamin D in healthy human volunteers fed sixty grams of wheat fiber daily.
This includes tree nut allergies as well. The short of it is that 0.6% of children under 18 in this study were found to have peanut or tree nut allergies. If this is true, that means many schools will probably have fewer than 5 students with the allergy.
In this case, outright bans seem to be more about reducing potential liability in the face of activist or litigious parents than they are actually addressing a student health issue.
Banning peanut butter would help with that, but it couldn't stop there. Plenty of packaged foods contain peanuts or other nuts, or are processed on equipment which processes those things. Foods are often repackaged by parents such that labels are not available.
My understanding of this type of reaction is that it doesn't require a large volume of the allergen to cause a very serious response. Trace amounts can be very dangerous. So it seems impossible to guarantee prevention by banning foods.
In my opinion, kids need to be aware of what they can and cannot eat, and the school must be prepared to actually deal with a reaction situation instead of just saying 'look, we banned peanut butter, what else do you expect?'
Peanut allergies can kill a kid pretty quickly. While it is a very small percentage of people who react strongly enough to it, if you've got a kid in the school with a known hypersensitivity, banning is not a bad idea.
Anaphylaxis from food can take a while (up to an hour or two I believe) to set in. When it does, it can cut off an airway, and then you're basically racing against suffocation with an epipen. If the kid's outside at recess or in the bathroom alone or just slow to tell a teacher, you're in a bad situation.
I don't know how much gluten it takes to trigger some of the scarier symptoms of IBD or if any of them are lethal in children. My guess is they're not, just because I haven't heard of gluten bans in schools.
Well, this is anecdotal, but I'm 14, and a few slices of bread landed me in the hospital with two emergency blood transfusions, and a final diagnosis of IBD.
It was... bad. Another classmate also ended up hospitalized with a celiac diagnosis. Whether it was brought on by food, I don't know, but the prevalence of wheat in a standard American diet could lead one to believe so.
A single peanut can cause an anaphylactic reaction which can be lethal in minutes. IBD symptoms from consumption of slices of bread is not remotely comparable.
"There also appears to be an increased incidence of celiac disease, with one study which looked for antibodies from 1950s American blood samples finding that celiac disease is about four times as common as it was"
"One study examined the effect of ω-5 gliadin, the primary cause of wheat dependent exercise/aspirin induced anaphylaxis, and found increased permeability of intestinal cells caused by this gliadin and another wheat albumin."
"Another line of research shows gliadin binds a chemoattractant receptor and causes increases of a factor that destroys tight junctions. These junctions prevent leakage around the cells that line the small intestine, resulting in the leaking of food proteins into the body."
Except that all kinds of auto immune diseases and alergies are rising across the board - so may be something else going on (An article in NYTimes recently suggested that we live in so (relatively) sterile environment that out immune system cannot calibrate itself and is going berserk with the smallest irritant)
The second and third studies are a bit too specific. Can you break this down into a list of effects on every day people?
I think this quote sums it up best: "Gluten intolerance is one of the most popular self-diagnoses because of its over-expanded list of potential symptoms. The gluten scare is mostly an overblown hippy-fueled movement."
It seems like the jury is still out on how many people suffer from gluten sensitivity, or the extent of the negative effect of gliadin.
> A 2011 panel of celiac experts concluded that there is a condition related to gluten other than celiac disease and named it "non-celiac gluten sensitivity".[51] however, for those without celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, the diet is unnecessary.
On a visual analog scale, patients were significantly worse with gluten within 1 week for overall symptoms (P=0.047), pain (P=0.016), bloating (P=0.031), satisfaction with stool consistency (P=0.024), and tiredness (P=0.001).
Gluten free doesn't mean 100% of the gluten is removed from the food. So most people who are 'severely allergic' to gluten are really just convinced that is the case.
The last time I saw my cousin she looked and acted anorexic, meanwhile raving about her new gluten free vegan lifestyle. She looked terrible. My other cousin who suffers from narcolepsy was on the same diet raving about all her new energy while falling asleep at the table. Meanwhile I went from being the fattest person in the family to the most in shape in less than 10 months. I usually jokingly order a side of gluten these days, just to piss the gluten freers off.
Tip for American grocery shoppers: Don't hit the isles. Stay within the vegetable and fruits section, shop there, only there, then leave. That is a healthy diet. Usually there are nuts and meat in that section. Don't be looking for the gluten free potato chips and cookies, that isn't healthy.
As someone who has tried to hack his way out of unhealthy eating (and succeeded somewhat), I've found that the biggest grocery shopping tip is to go to the store just after a meal.
I couldn't help but giggle at your choices - onions are not particularly healthy as far as vegetables go (better than potatoes, not as good as nearly any other veg) and mushrooms aren't vegetables. That said, I'm all for eating more vegetables (though fresh v. frozen is not an important consideration in my mind; I eat plenty of frozen peas, carrots, artichokes, and broccoli).
You knock the gluten avoiders and follow that up by saying you became healthy by staying to the periphery of the grocery store where the fruits/veggies/meats/dairy are (and not the grains/gluten)...
Well no, you just made my point for me. See, if that is gluten free, then I didn't know it. I am not gluten free I just eat healthy. I have accumulated knowledge of a healthy diet rather than a gluten free one. Good point though.
What I'm responding to is the fact that most foods don't contain gluten in the first place and people who are severely allergic to gluten know better than to eat foods in which gluten has been "removed" from the food through some chemical process (which is extremely rare, by the way, I can think of only one such product off the top of my head... much more common is accidental cross contamination which is a constant worry for celiacs and gluten intolerant people).
Celiacs don't even eat food prepared in the same production environment as foods that contain gluten. The sentiment that these people are deluding themselves because their very careful planned and meticulously controlled gluten free diets still contain gluten is preposterous.
I am someone who at this stage in life seems to have^ an issue with gluten.
Lots of people aren't like me though, and for them I do not believe there is any particularly well documented issues when it comes to gluten.
^Where 'seems to have' is self-produced anecdata: I spend months working through food group diet permutations (starting with removing basically except lightly cooked vegetables, miso soup and congee :-/) in an attempt to zero in on what was causing near-permanent (~10am->sleeping) acid reflux I had developed. Conclusions point fairly strongly to gluten, which I now mostly stay away from (I still eat it occasionally, zomg burgers, I just make sure breads/pasta/etc isn't the base of my diet).
One demonstrative experiment is to go cold turkey on grains for a few weeks, then try eating something like a bagel or two. When I did this, I found that eating wheat products made me feel sick. Been largely avoiding grains since (though I "cheat" from time to time)
That's true of a lot of foods. Definitely true of meat, especially red meat. I don't think the fact that your stomach has to spend some time adapting to a food is really evidence that it's categorically bad for you.
>That's true of a lot of foods. Definitely true of meat, especially red meat.
I'd definitely be interested in a citation if you have one! I find this really interesting, especially since I've accidentally cut red meat out of my diet recently (despite enjoying it quite a lot, so I don't want to be ill next time I have it!), so I'm wondering on what sort of timescales these effects happen (both losing and gaining the ability to digest a certain food group).
I don't have a research paper to cite, but it seems fairly common knowledge that people who go vegetarian for a while --either by choice or by moving somewhere meat is scarce-- often have a period of re-adjustment when they return to eating meat; especially red meat. This is on a time scale of a few months in each direction.
This is not a universal truth -- I was raised vegetarian and began eating red meat in college; I never had an adjustment period. In fact, I suspect the incidence of this is greatly overstated and largely psychological.
I find that if I become addicted to junk food after a binge weekend, simply fasting for 24hours makes me craaave healthy foods like vegetables, even spinach which I usually hate, and white meats. Its weird, but I recommend at least 24 hours of fasting each week. Its a great system reset.
Apparently a journalist asked one family in each of 20 different countries to gather all of the food they bought in one week and take a picture. It's a fascinating look at global diets. The UK is even more disturbing than the US.
Mexico is interesting. A table full of fresh food, and... what looks like 12 2-liter bottles of Coke.
On the USA table, there is literally nothing fresh. Every food is packaged, plus McDonalds, Burger King, 2 pizzas... Plus Diet Coke of course.
And in Germany, again looks like a lot of healthy food there but then there's like 4 bottles of wine and 30 bottles of beer. Uh, that's a weeks worth of booze is it?
And finally, with Chad. Three bags of something (rice I suppose) and a bottle of water. No fresh food, like the Americans. But compare the two pics side by side - wow.
This article points to the very obvious problem that it is very profitable to sell unhealthy foods in the US.
There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is caused by the government. We subsidize the growing of industrial corn, soy, and wheat. These are the primary ingredients of junk food -- and junk food is significantly cheaper because of these subsidies.
The subsidies provided for growing fruits and vegetables are extremely low compared to the subsidies for these big '3' ingredients.
There are reason Coca Cola is made with corn syrup in the US, and real sugar in Mexico. The reason is farm subsidies, which make the cost of corn significantly cheaper, and thus make the cost of a can of Coke much less to produce.
A very simple step to fixing the obesity issue is to change the farm subsidies. The artificial government role in the market should be modified to support the growth of healthy foods, instead of supporting the growth of corn and soy.
Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen due to the political climate that has existed for a long time.
However, in my dream world, here's what I would do:
Gradually transition farm subsidies away from big industrial farms, to small local farms that produce a variety of crops. Over 10-15 years, all farms over a certain size would no longer be eligible for subsidies. Instead, small farms that produce and sell food to their local population would be eligible for subsidies. And they would get more for producing a diverse crop, and for certain organic practices. Ideally the cheap food would eventually be produced by tens of thousands of small farms that serve their local communities and are accountable to their local communities.
Plus, a huge network of local farms would result in a very resilient food system -- one of the primary goals of food subsidies.
You're absolutely right about weight. One of the big concerns of an industrial food system is shipping. The other big concern is shelf life.
Neither of these are nearly as big of a concern if you get your food from a local farmer. The health of the consumer is not much of a concern, except in terms of marketing.
Right now, it is more expensive to buy local food from a farmers market than it is to buy industrial produced shipped from thousands of miles away. This should change, and it should change by shifting subsidies away from large industrial farms to small local farms.
No one knows what food is healthy and what food isn't.
Full stop.
The more you read about this, the more you realize it is so. Government advice and regulation about healthy eating has likely been a contributing factor to a huge explosion in chronic disease. Enough is enough, improve and expand mandatory food labeling and stay out of the rest.
Meanwhile, no one should market anything to kids, if you really think about it.
> No one knows what food is healthy and what food isn't.
I don't know about "healthy" food, but I'm pretty certain that Cap'n'Crunch Oops All Berries! (which contains 50% sugar and—oops—no berries whatsoever) is the opposite of that.
Better labeling is nice, but I'd rather have a law that says that breakfast cereals should contain at least 50% of cereals.
Personally, I would hate to take away your choice to make yourself fat. Less competition for me in pretty much everything - jobs, friends, women, you name it.
Maybe we don't know what exact combination of foods is most healthy, but there are things we do know.
For instance, we know that carbohydrates consist of a ton of readily available energy. And if you eat more energy than you burn, you store the energy as fat. Bad? Maybe not, but it can easily get you to a bad state of health.
We also know that there are vitamins and minerals in leafy greens that we really do need. Since they are easy to eat and also contain fiber, yet are low in energy, they are very healthy.
My best advice is to pick up on these sorts of tidbits, not the latest diet/trend/fad.
We don't know why people gain weight, and there are no known essential nutrients which cannot be acquired through eating cows. So what with all this talk about leafy grens? IMHO it is pseudoscience. (Although, I gotta admit, I feel a lot healthier when I EAT some leafy greens rather than when making a pedantic point)
Big corporations can make lots of money selling expensive salad dressings if I'm convinced to buy icky tasteless styrofoam iceberg lettuce. Therefore the intense push to get people to eat veg/fruit in the form of salad. "They" might not be selling profitable wheat flour in the form of twinkies anymore, but "they" are selling salad dressing for about the same cost per pound as chicken/beef (depending on dressing and meat cut, etc), gross fake bacon bits, etc.
I occasionally eat salads but eventually I get burned out on the salad dressings (there really aren't that many) and stop for awhile.
The most revolutionary thing you can do is just eat an apple or gnaw on a carrot or bake a potato. No dips or crusts or toppings or any other profit centers. Assuming you already have enough fiber in your diet, run your veg thru a juicer. That really pisses "them" off.
Believe it or not, not everything is a corporate conspiracy. Iceberg lettuce is pretty useless, but there are hundreds of thousands of leafy green plants that are edible by humans. Romaine is a better simple alternative, but again there a vast amount of edible leaves. And you don't need to put any toppings on at all. Eat it dry.
>The most revolutionary thing you can do is just eat an apple or gnaw on a carrot or bake a potato.
Not if your goal is to lose weight. Those three plants are extremely high energy (carbs). If you want to do something "revolutionary", grow your own. Raise your own chickens. Pasture feed them. Eat their eggs. Butcher them. Feed them your vegetable scraps. Plant some apple trees. Eat a dandelion. Your brain is trained to rebel against these companies. All they have to do is encourage you to eat right and soon you'll be eating unhealthy just to "piss them off".
We actually do. In simple terms, if you eat more than you can use, you will gain weight. It is slightly more complicated. I can explain more, but the web will do a better job than I can.
The talk about leafy greens is that, we know they are low calorie, have essential vitamins and minerals, and provide fiber. Thus, they are definitely good for you. They don't harm you, they provide sustenance and other benefits and so your statement that we don't know what is healthy is just false.
I don't believe that to be true. I have researched the hell out of this for years and I don't believe there is a definitive answer about this weight gain/loss thing.
Are you saying that someone eating 4,000 calories a day, but using only 2,000 per day will not gain weight?
There are a small number of people with a bacteria that helps them gain weight. There are people with a bacteria that helps them not gain weight. There's a small number of endocrine disorders that make weight gain easy. There are some medications (eg some anti-psychotics) that increase weight gain (and it's not just increasing input).
But even with all of that most weight gain is simple: people eat more calories than they use.
The stuff about satiety doesn't address calories in, it just talks about feelings of fullness.
What we don't know so much about is why some people over eat, and over eat to the extent they do. When a bariatric patient in a specialist weight-loss hospital smuggles in packets of crackers and jars of peanut butter (by hiding them under the folds of fat on their bodies) we can say that there's something weird going on.
But again, 500 lb patients are not the norm and that kind of eating isn't the norm.
Most people just don't know how much they're eating; don't know how many calories they're eating; and don't get enough exercise.
The technical explanation of scientifically measured intake and output of calories smashes into uselessness when it collides with real world psychology.
Example. Given gluten-intolerant subject. Feed them 4000 calories of whole wheat bread and they lay on the couch all day feeling kinda "off" and only burn 2000 calories BMR so they get fat. How did you feel today? "Eh about normal". Didn't you lay around all day and take an afternoon nap? "Well, yeah, now that you mention it..." Then feed them 4000 calories of steak and they get all hyper and burn 5000 calories going on a marathon bike ride or whatever and get thin. How did you feel today? "Eh about normal". Didn't you get all hyper and exercise all day like a madman? "Well, yeah, now that you mention it..."
Obviously the real world delta is not 2000 calories a day. But a delta of 100 calories a day, which is NOT a heck of a lot, adds up over a year to 35 thousand calories or a delta, plus or minus, of about 10 pounds of fat per year. Repeat for a couple decades and you get either really fat or really skinny.
You start by saying that calories in vs calories out is useless.
You then give two examples. The first is where someone eats more calories than they burn, and gain weight. The second is where they eat less calories than they burn, and lose weight.
Please, how does this mean that calories in vs calories out is useless?
You appear to be ignoring the part of my post where I say that satiety is important for losing weight, but that it doesn't change the basic calories in vs calories out.
> But a delta of 100 calories a day, which is NOT a heck of a lot, adds up over a year to 35 thousand calories or a delta, plus or minus, of about 10 pounds of fat per year. Repeat for a couple decades and you get either really fat or really skinny.
Yes. We seem to agree? Eating more calories than you burn means you put on weight. Eating less calories than you burn means you lose weight.
Its a hard science error propagation thing. Look at your equation:
(In) - (out) = (delta aka gain/loss)
Some background is that both are about the same, it takes a decade or so to swing from anorexia to the worlds fattest man. Lets say the (delta) represents a percentage of (In) / (Out) of perhaps 110% for a pregnant woman with quadruplets to maybe 99% very long term for an anorexic.
Watch the error propagation. The order of the (delta) error percentage is roughly equal to the order of whichever error is bigger, in or out.
I claim the percentage error of (Out) greatly exceeds 10%. Saying more than 50% makes me uncomfortable. Probably the true value is well in excess of 25%. This means any estimation or modification of (In) less than 25% is lost in the noise of the (Out) signal making the calculated delta meaningless. Garbage in equals garbage out.
Very few people screw around with their diet on a long term average more than 25%. Therefore any change they make will be lost in the noise of output energy level.
The way you get thin is by altering your diet so you are more active. Some diets screw around with your blood sugar, insulin levels, inflammation levels, all that is going to screw around with energy out flow. Large amounts of dairy products make me kinda queasy, so rather than going out for a walk or yard work, its sit on the couch. Large amounts of protein make me feel pretty darn energetic so I walk about more. Certainly the swing exceeds that experienced with having a cold vs being healthy. For some people with gluten issues its probably more like having the flu vs being healthy.
The TLDR is (in)-(out)=(delta) is useless because you need to characterize (delta) to pretty high accuracy to even figure out if your gaining or losing, and outside of a medical facility under observation you cannot characterize (out) accurately enough, or frankly, probably not characterize (in) well enough either unless you stick to industrially produced hyper consistent super processed foods, like all TV dinners every day, or always and only fast food or vending machines.
Rats on a treadmill hooked up to a timer with analytical balance measured food intake and no free will WRT activity, yes that equation could have low enough error bars on both (in) and (out) to be usefully applied to get a realistic value for (delta). Average american diet and lifestyle? Naw all you're going to get as an output is a white noise source, on a medium term large population average anyway.
(Ah I edit in this "real world-ish" example. Lets say skinny 20 yr old dude turns into fat 30 year old dude and he burns about 3000 calories per day to make the math easy. That means he averages a mere 103% of his perfect ratio of (In) vs (Out) where 100% would have resulted in no gain or loss over a decade. I theorize the error bars on (In) exceed three percent unless under constant medical supervision (every apple you ever ate was within 3% of spec? Really?) and the error bars on (Out) exceed twenty five percent, so the delta is meaningless WRT getting this dude either fat or thin. What does work is if his diet makes him sleepy / lazy / queasy / slow / blood sugar high or crash / whatever that screws up his (Out) enough to make him fat. And any change in (Out) is going to be more effective than any change in (In). So eat what makes you healthy, as long as you define healthy as "active" not necessarily classical stereotypical exercising)
arguing by assertion doesn't make it true. You are referring to the caloric balance hypothesis, and it is sad that you guys are downvoting me for calling it in to question. It has not been experimentally verified.
And yeah, some friends and I have tested on ourselves eating 4,000 calories without significantly altering exercise levels, and anecdotally have not gained weight.
I just spent the last year losing 60 pounds. I did so by reducing my food intake. At one point I began to exercise without reducing intake and I began to lose weight. Once classes started, I could not longer exercise as much and my weight loss stagnated. So I tried simply eating less and continued to lose weight. I lost about 40 by exercising only and about 20 reducing intake only.
There is a difference between protein calories and carbohydrate calories and how each is processed, but beside that, calories represent energy. Energy that must be used. Otherwise, it will be stored.
Just because something works doesn't mean your hypothesis as to WHY it works is true. See any research published on Traditional Chinese Medicine for a similar example. [spoiler: it definitely works, but is it REALLY because of qi meridians?] I think it is great that your approach is working for you, because that is what matters. Congrats on the weight loss.
>Just because something works doesn't mean your hypothesis as to WHY it works is true.
But in general, it actually does. This is how science works. You get an idea that doing something will produce a result. If you do that thing and see the expected result, that indicates a successful hypothesis. After that the conversation devolves into existential questions on whether humans can really know.
Ah, the oldest scientific trap. In actuality you must form a hypothesis, then construct an experiment designed to DISPROVE the hypothesis. For example, for how many months must I eat 4000 calories a day without altering exercise or gaining weight (just hypothetically) before I cause you to reconsider your hypothesis.
To disprove a hypothesis, you must already have data. You can't form a hypothesis without data. How can I start to collect data to disprove a hypothesis I haven't come up with yet?
Well to get initial data, you must have some guidance in the data you decide to collect. There must be structure, a control, standardized values. You can't form a proper experiment without first having a hypothesis. Your goal is not to prove it correct regardless of the results, your goal is to gain insight on your hypothesis base on the results. I never said you must prove your hypothesis correct. But the goal is certainly to assess the accuracy of your estimation.
Your comment is really just a strawman tactic anyway. Thread derailed.
People are notoriously poor at recording and estimating both food intake and actual caloric output including changes in base metabolic rate and overall activity level including sleep and even mood changes. Unless you were in some kind of inpatient medical facility under medical observation I'm not thinking your data is going to be accurate enough to detect any change, especially short term.
The other issue is a crude engineering rule of thumb (why isn't it a dietary rule of thumb?) is something like one hundred calories per day, every day, equals one hundred pounds of fat per decade, either plus or minus. Very few people get fat (or thin) in a week or a month or even a year. It takes a fairly heroic effort for a woman to just gain baby weight in 9 months. Try four thousand calories per day for a decade and get back to us, if someone can roll you to the keyboard at that time (unless you're all pro atheletes or lumberjacks or something).
I have experienced dramatic weight loss in recent years by addressing other issues. I agree with some of the statements you have made here, though they don't give a good idea of what you do think is true. I would be interested in hearing about that. If you don't want to do it in a public and openly hostile environment, my email address is in my profile.
I know, but every assumption that allows one to make the above statements is actually unproven.
- constant scarcity in historical environment
- inheritable biological "instinct" for eating a certain way
- rate of evolution of that instinct
- actual abundance in our current environment
Jesus figure out how to package soylent already. Honestly, if I could buy a vaguely appetizing drink at 7/11 and knew that it had 1/3 of my daily nutrients, I'd be pretty damn ecstatic.
Ironically, I doubt the industry would lose as much money as is claimed. Instead they would mostly likely just reorganize themselves about being profitable by selling healthy foods. The only problem I see is how long it would take for them to reorganize around healthy foods.
I just started the paleo diet and lost 10 lbs this last month.
Overwhelmingly I've been amazed to see that most people seem to have no regard whatsoever for their nutrition. Things go into their body but it often has 0 nutricional value.
Also - it's actually really really hard to eat well. Since so many restaurants cater to what people are familiar with, there's next to no alternative for people trying to eat nutritious food.
That is a ridiculously large amount to be spending on groceries, even if you eat every meal at home. For comparison, I think I eat quite well and I spend well under $300/month (my goal is $50/week). A lot of this depends on your area, but I highly recommend checking out any ethnic[1] grocery stores in your area. The supermarket I shop at is, large, clean, and has comparable produce for 1/2 the price or less as the conventional supermarkets in the area. This is in Southern California, but I had a similar experience in Austin, TX and south-eastern Michigan, so I think it applies to most places in the US.
Also, organic foods are nutritionally equivalent to conventionally grown foods according to the most recent research; you may want to reconsider your budgeting on that front.
[1] I've been told this is not the politically correct term, but I'm not sure what the right one is; suggestions welcome! What I mean by this in reality is usually something like "Indian/Chinese/Mexican grocer."
The thing is, I read "Super Immunity" by Joel Fuhrman and I've been obsessed with following his recommendation of eating greens, onions, mushrooms, beans, berries and seeds every day. Whole Foods is the only place around here where I can get all of these grown organically.
Pesticides scare me. Especially since I can't be bothered to wash my food before eating it. But as I understand it, if you use pesticides, then the plants don't produce their own natural chemicals that fight off pests and other symbiotic organisms. I don't remember where I read it but according to my research those chemicals are very beneficial part of the total nutriment.
I have a solution for the obesity epidemic which would be difficult to implement, but might actually work:
Address the socioeconomic and political factors that create so much poverty in our country, and which also depress income in general.
We evolved to eat meat. The ethics of this I won't touch but the economics are only a sticking point if you assume we must have a poverty-stricken underclass in our country. And by poverty stricken underclass I mean anyone who can't afford a couple of lbs of free range organic meat per day.
Do the math. Because most of our pre-civilization ancestors ate like that all the time. Why can't we afford the same?
And don't say overpopulation. Back of the envelope math says the US could easily produce meat at those levels for around 600 million people. And modern societies have negative population growth in the wealthy demographics.
So isn't the problem just the ever increasing number of people who are being dragged in to poverty?
I read Scientific American most of my childhood - articles about physics, biology, math and especially the Amateur Scientist column (I so wanted to make that laser but had no vacuum pump). I loved it!
Then in the 1990s something changed instead of being about new discoveries it began to cover news and to advocate for various causes, even political positions. Then they dropped the Amateur Scientist column.
Why couldn't they stick to science instead of snarky articles like this hectoring every American to eat better? Were they afraid of Omni, Popular Science or Time?
Perhaps this was a good business decision but I have no regrets about canceling my subscription.
'Healthfully' (as in healthful) or 'healthily' (as in healthy) are both fine according to the OED.
Personally I've never heard of 'healthful'. Looking around Fowler's Modern English Usage suggests preference for 'healthful' is a U.S. thing (an even there it seems people are unaware of it, judging by the comments at a U.S. dictionary site). Fowler's also notes 'healthful' is considered 'old-fashioned and literary' or 'formal' by some teaching dictionaries.
The best always end up being (IMO):
- listen to your body
- exercise some. doesn't have to be gym. even walking 30min a day is fine.
- eat fresh food rather than frozen or processed food (hint: it requires cooking)
- drink water, not soda or beer
- Keep things balanced. Ying & yang principle applies basically everywhere. Including food types, salting, sweetening, etc.
then you generally don't need to force diet upon you. you don't need medication. you don't need a "diet plan". you don't need to "hit the gym".
you don't need to make extra efforts that you'll revert in 3month.
you're also not going to get bulky or a skeleton. you're just going to get normal and healthy.
of course, all the above take some effort. and its true that it's harder to find fresh food or proper food in general in the US than elsewhere, actually.
Contrary to what the exercise industry tells you in ads, you actually can't lose weight with exercise. Diet is almost always required to lose weight.
Going to the gym for an hour, burning a measly 400 calories walking on a treadmill, and then celebrating that with a 800 calorie Smoothie after, is actually making people gain weight not lose.
> Contrary to what the exercise industry tells you in ads, you actually can't lose weight with exercise. Diet is almost always required to lose weight.
You can certainly lose weight by doing exercise and keeping your caloric intake constant. It might as well be that out of all people who want to lose weight, only a small % of people have the discipline/volition to follow such a plan. But that's a far cry from "you can't lose weight with exercise".
Perhaps a better way to state it is that most people find it quite significantly easier to lose weight by reducing caloric intake by a given amount as opposed to increasing physical activity by the proportionate amount.
I stand by my original statement. Unless you are on The Biggest Loser and exercising 8 hours per day, burning 5,000 calories per day with exercise, you have to control what you eat to lose weight. It can't be done with "1 hour of exercise, 3 times per week" as the TV commercials claim.
You called it "caloric intake constant", but that's counting calories, and sounds like a diet to me. And most people unconsciously eat more after a workout. They don't think they do, but they do.
Exercise is a good supplement to diet for weight loss. But it is not necessary.
One of my friends is morbidly obese, it's quite tragic. And her nutritionist keeps telling her to "do more exercise". It's such a terrible idea, it would put a lot of stress on her body, be extremely extremely hard work and all for mediocre benefits.
The bulk of weight loss is from correcting your diet. Again the nutritionist advice for her is generally along the lines of allowing her to eat as much sugar (carbs) as she wants but try and stay below some arbitrary limit, which is difficult.
I find it both funny and scary that more than one person thought I mention exercise as weight loss.
Exercise is necessary for general well being. It doesnt have to be the gym. Walking around is ok.
I also think that people who are extremely overweight generally (unless they have a specific sickness causing this) are simply too weak minded to over come this.
For these, the only way I know of is to educate them as young age. Ie, the ones that are lost are already lost.
Some will overcome their weak mind and eventually get healthy again, but a vast number will not.
And facts will back this up, unfortunately - I don't even think this needs a citation :/
I don't think the food industry would be too worried about lost revenue. They will be more worried about the cost of having to create and replace whole new ranges of products to fit into these guidelines, but in the end they will deliver the same wide spectrum of foods as they do today and fit into the guidelines. Perhaps it will raise the prices of the products generally, which will help with overeating but will also make products falling outside of the guidelines more attractive. The irony is that in 10 years time our 'understanding' of what is healthy and what is not will probably have changed radically.
So we're too stupid to pick out healthy food, but we're smart enough to vote in people who know what's best for us and are ethical enough to not abuse their power for self-enrichment?
Let's also ignore the fact that most of the food industry's processed low-fat crap was a direct result of the government's earlier attempts to tell us that fat was evil and shove the food pyramid down our throats.
>If one company didn’t, their competitors would, so we all kind of have to do it.
There is a point here lots of people, especially western countries, and most especially Americans miss. So many people think government regulation takes away freedom and unfettered capitalism gives it. People whose own interests aren't even represented by that idea. And we all suffer because of this.
I've been thinking for a long while, now, about how to stitch together the many threads of thought around diet, nutrition, environment, and economics:
1) eating a plant-based diet is healthier (Mark Bittman), or at the very least, eating natural things (Michael Pollan)
2) eating meat costs more, and it threatens the environment (http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/commentary/...), including in China (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/11/china-meat.html)
3) for that matter, others foods besides meat that come from animals (ex: dairy) have the same effect. Roughly 75% of the world has some degree of lactose intolerance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance)
4) nutrition is more than calorie counting -- it is about getting nutrients in the diet (http://supplementsos.com/blog/how-to-actually-eat-healthily-...) Lentils play an important part as a quality, cheap source of protein.
5) there are ways to make good food affordable to the people who can least afford it (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/jul/28/new-mobile-food-truck-s...) In fact, the idea (or 'business model') of making necessary things affordable to the people who can least afford it as been around for 50 years (http://infinitevisionaries.com/)
6) a very important factor to incentivize people to switch diets is knowing that the food will taste good. While it might involve a slight change in cultural diet, this is absolutely possible (http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-dos...)
7) the vegetarian diet of Tamils in Tamil Nadu (India) and Tamil Eelam (Ceylon) is wide & varied, largely dairy-free, and mostly gluten free. This largely applies for the other South India states, too. The diet consists in large parts of lentils, leafy greens, vegetables, and spices.
8) in particular, the diet in Tamil Nadu/Tamil Eelam of 50 years ago should be examined, which is before the Green Revolution occurred in India. Back then, many of the healthier grains eaten in large quantities by a large swathe of people (millet, sorghum, finger millet, etc.).
9) An unintended consequence of the Green Revolution in India and China in the 1950's is that, at least in India, many of the healthier grains eaten in large quantities by a large swathe of people (millet, sorghum, finger millet, etc.) were dropped in favor of the far less nutritional white rice, which was for many just a once-in-a-while treat. In North India, the favored, newly-proliferated crop of choice was wheat. (Both rice and wheat are dreadfully water-intensive.) Brown rice doesn't exist there, but in the region, only people in Kerala and Tamil Eelam eat a red rice that is similarly nutritious. Of course, this is said to be not as nutritious as things like finger millet or "thinai" (similar to quinoa).
10) People talk about the importance of vitamin B12, and that you can only get it from animal based sources. But this diet has been around for 4,500 years, people have been just fine. (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/01/indus_civili...) I'm sure people have been vegetarian for at least 2,000 years of that, if I judge based on the Thirukkural (2,000 year old literature of virtuous maxims, of which 10 talk about not eating meat). There are athletes and body-builders in America who are vegetarian and vegan.
So I really think that a restaurant (or at the least, food truck) should pop up selling a variety of vegan Tamil food at a very low price. This would solve so many problems. I've been thinking of this for a long while now, but I would be just happy if someone 'steals' the idea and runs with it.
(note: I'm sure there are other ways to achieve low cost, high nutrition, vegan diets in varied, tasty ways, but this is part of my birth tradition. You can treat that as a disclaimer / proof of authenticity. For me, personally, I'm fairly lactose-intolerant, and I'm wondering now that I might be gluten intolerant. I've been trying to be more vegan/vegetarian for the past 5 months, and it's helped a lot in my finances. It hasn't negatively impacted exercising. I'm hoping to see more change once I start cooking!...)
I have recently visited Bangalore in Karnataka in India (which is fairly close to Tamil Nadu), and even as a convinced meat and cheese eater, I can confirm that they have tasty vegan and vegetarian food.
> Pollan’s central thesis is that introducing science into our food system has done more harm than good and that the best thing for all of us would be to go back to eating a more traditional diet. It’s fair to point out that nutritional science has led to some mistakes (such as recommendations to replace saturated fats with hydrogenated oils), but Pollan devotes too much of his effort to dismantling his own shallow caricature of science.
It is, in short, the Naturalistic Fallacy run wild, which is quite common when the topic of nutrition comes up. In short: Something being 'natural' is orthogonal to it being 'good' or even 'good to eat'.
> Roughly 75% of the world has some degree of lactose intolerance
Which means nothing to the people who don't have it, whose ancestors evolved to retain lactose tolerance into adulthood for the simple reason that milk is good food, full of proteins, fats, sugars, and vitamins that are just as important to an adult as a child. Just because the default First World diet induces a calorie surplus at this point instead of a calorie deficit does not negate any of milk's benefits.
> nutrition is more than calorie counting -- it is about getting nutrients in the diet
Everyone knows this. That doesn't mean most First World people need supplements, because they don't.
> If you're generally healthy and eat a wide variety of foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, low-fat dairy products, lean meats and fish, you likely don't need supplements.
> Which means nothing to the people who don't have it
So in the case of lactose intolerance, what's interesting, in fact, is the environmental impact of the fact that the people in the Western world are largely fine with lactose. As the PBS NewsHour story about the causes and effects of China's meat consumption habits shows, Western habits are having a significant influence in the diets of the younger generation in developing countries. The effects of large-scale pollution of water resources is horrific, and competition for water resources is, after oil, the next source of conflict in the world. So yes, it will affect everyone.
> Everyone knows this. That doesn't mean most First World people need supplements, because they don't.
Sure, First World people don't need supplements, if they have a varied diet. In North America, that's a big if. There are cultural impediments to that varied diet, even for those with the means to afford it. But for many lower-income families, and especially those living in low-income neighborhoods, they experience the "food desert" problem. And they lack the same access to quality foods as more affluent people. That is a systemic issue related to how society (via government) deals with the problem. And the economics of the prices of foods is, in some part, related to the energy requirements which is related to the 90% energy loss up each level of the food chain. There is an environmental impact there.
btw: I just threw in the names of Bittman and Pollan as representatives of the ideas of plant-based and natural diets. It's not like they invented the ideas; they're just the most recognizable cheerleaders for them at the moment.
Since you mention them together a few times, I think it is worth pointing out that the vast majority of lactose intolerant people simply lack the ability to produce an enzyme that digests lactose, while gluten related conditions mostly seem to involve some sort of immune response. Some people probably do have a genuine milk allergy, but mostly lactose intolerant people are just unable to make lactase.
The discomfort stemming from lactose intolerance comes from bacteria digesting the sugar and making gas, etc. The discomfort (and further problems) from gluten is well understood to be an immune response in some instances (Celiacs, wheat allergies), and still thought to be an immune response in most remaining cases.
So is it that we have to eat unhealthy at the gun point? No! We are free to eat whatever we want. And if most people want to eat poison then that's what the free market economy will provide them with.
It reminds me a little bit the situation with the banks. Somehow when times were good and everybody and their uncle could get a loan everybody loved Goldman Sachs CEO. But now, when it is pay off time people just hate the banks. Just shows a hell lot about people's attitudes (me! me! me!)
The same with the food industry. It's not my fault I eat like pig day and night, it's because the commercial on TV told me to do it. Sure, and if they told you to eat shit, you would eat shit, right?
Socialism is the love of blaming somone for your own failures. Free people not only make decisions, but also take responsibility for them. People who don't, should live for some time in a country where 'Dear Leader' will decide for them how they should live their lives because there is no difference to them anyway.
I'm tired of this BS. Used to have a coworker who was eating all the time. She had a small refrigerator in her cubicle. And of course, yeah, she wants universal healthcare. So I and others will pay for her bad choices. This is just immoral.
Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actaully have less obesity than skim milk drinkers.
If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.