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>there appears to be some correlation between this and the consumption of processed foods. Really? I would love a source on this, because it seems that the #1

• _delirium 11y ago
  There's a moderate amount of evidence that the type of food plays a significant role in overconsumption of calories. One factor is differing satiation for the same number of calories, i.e. 300 calories of some foods make you feel fuller than 300 calories of other foods. There is also something specifically weird going on with a handful of foods that seem to promote ongoing consumption to degrees seen much less often with other kinds of food. Soda and salty/fat snacks are two where people are observed consuming huge numbers of calories in kind of a chain-consumption binge, which is much less often seen with, say, pork chops or broccoli.
  • balabaster 11y ago
    What about the fact that our chemical laden foods feeds into addiction that perpetuates the cycle? We become addicted to the types of food we consume which causes us to want more than we should. This in combination with increasing portion sizes is exacerbating the problem.
    • agumonkey 11y ago
      Also quite often documentaries shows (or at least claim-suggest) how much the """"food"""" industry loves to put sugar on top of the remains the sell as meals so it doesn't taste like sand.
      • balabaster 11y ago
        and corn syrup, monosodium glutamate, BHT, Red dye number whatever it is (Tartrazine) and other chemicals that by all accounts do everything from feed addiction and provoke ADHD and cause cancer, all in the name of profit.
        • munificent 11y ago
          I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
          • balabaster 11y ago
            I wasn't, but I've gotta be honest, it doesn't appear to matter in the context of this specific topic. With the amount of information and disinformation out there regarding food and nationwide obesity levels, it's tough to tell what is and isn't true or to what degree. It's somewhat akin to the propaganda campaigns run by tobacco companies in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
        • DougMerritt 11y ago
          I'm not sure what you have in mind; Tartrazine is lemon yellow (although of course often mixed to create other colors) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine The famously banned "red dye number whatever" I think was red dye number 2, banned in 1976 due to suspected carcinogenicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_(dye) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_(dye) But there are so many dyes that I can't be sure what you meant. I will say, though, that although many food additives are ultimately a bad idea in one way or another, historically most of the suspected carcinogens are not, because humans are resilient in ways that mice are not (in part due to two million years of cooked food, and in part due to testing using cancer-prone inbred mice for decades).
          • balabaster 11y ago
            Thanks for the clarification. I was mixing up E102 as it is labelled int the UK (Tartrazine) which was banned in 2013 due to being linked to aggravating/causing ADHD and Red Dye Number 2 which was banned in North America in 1976 due to being a Carcinogen. [One of the downfalls of being an immigrant is that after a while you can never remember (or perhaps just lose the inclination to care) which news applied in which jurisdiction and not the other and which numbering systems belong where]
    • redthrowaway 11y ago
      >chemical laden foods feeds into addiction Care to explain what you mean by this?
      • balabaster 11y ago
        There are many articles on the internet - with varying levels of credibility. A quick Google for such things as chemical food addiction should yield many of this type of thing: http://www.alternet.org/5-unhealthy-foods-engineered-be-addictive http://www.alternet.org/5-unhealthy-foods-engineered-be-addi... Obviously you will be able to discern which are credible and which are not. That was sarcasm/cynicism, because it's really hard to discern what is credible, to what degree and what the motive of the author was. There is much propaganda on both sides of the fence, so at this point, it's pretty tough, beyond a religious debate to have any objective discussion.
  • RIMR 11y ago
    >One factor is differing satiation for the same number of calories >a handful of foods that seem to promote ongoing consumption >people are observed consuming huge numbers of calories in kind of a chain-consumption binge As I said: It has absolutely nothing to do with the foods or how they are processed; it has everything to do with how much people eat of these foods. Fatty/Salty foods can promote overconsumption, but blaming the foods for a person's lack of self-control is, as I said previously, incredibly foolish. Sure, food trends may have increased the amount of fatty/salty foods on the market in the past 30 years, and this certainly would contribute to the obesity epidemic. However, the burden ultimately rests on the consumer to ensure that they are not only consuming healthy foods, but that they are consuming healthy portions of these foods compared to the amount of exercise they get daily. I could easily eat 3 Big Macs for lunch, but I am aware that that would be 1600+ calories, so I don't.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • balabaster 11y ago
      > As I said: It has absolutely nothing to do with the foods or how they are processed; it has everything to do with how much people eat of these foods. > Fatty/Salty foods can promote overconsumption, but blaming the foods for a person's lack of self-control is, as I said previously, incredibly foolish. Not everyone has the same self-control/discipline. Exploitation of this fact by food companies is becoming more visible as time goes on. One that immediately springs to mind are the slogans for products such as Pringles: "Once you pop, you can't stop!" Certain foods cater to, nay exploit, addiction and human behavioral traits. You can't exploit weaknesses in the human psyche and then say "it's their own fault," without assuming any responsibility or blame. That's like blaming a drug addict entirely for becoming addicted to crack and not apportioning any of the blame to the dealer... not everything is entirely the fault of the... I'm struggling for a better word than victim, but that's not really the word I mean. Most addicts are at first desensitized, then conditioned and then coerced into trying what they become addicted to long before they become addicted. Food companies have been slated to add chemicals into their food that have been found to correlate with addiction, to keep people coming back for their product. The media desensitizes, conditions and coerces people into trying their product. Portions are decided not based on what is a scientifically proportionate amount of food, but what is most profitable or will make the "client" keep coming back for more - to feed the addiction - in exactly the same way that dealers cut their drugs with chemicals that feed addiction and keep the addict coming back for more - even though many of them want desperately to quit.
  • pyre 11y ago
    > There is also something specifically weird going on with a handful of foods The food industry specifically targets the "bliss point"[1] when figuring out the formula for snack foods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
• AlisdairO 11y ago
  > but it's downright foolish to pretend that we are gaining weight for any other reason than that we are eating too much and exercising too little. Right, that's pretty obvious to most observers, but it's not the end of the road. The interesting question is why this is happening. Is the cause purely social (perhaps we're lazier, or perhaps large portion sizes occur purely by normalisation over time), or are there other changes to our society or what we eat that make over-eating and under-exercising more common?
• balabaster 11y ago
  I wasn't saying this at all... the operative word in my statement was "appears"... perhaps the correlation is entirely coincidental. Many correlations we note when we don't have enough data turns out to be coincidence - we draw incorrect conclusions and hey presto, the next great fad begins. I agree with your statement: Portion size in North American markets is ridiculous; Our consumption and exercise levels are way out of whack and that surely does need correcting; But there does appear to be a not insignificant number of people where despite diet, exercise and unimaginable will-power and discipline, there is little if any change in body mass. Some people despite eating ridiculous amounts of junk food their entire lives and doing little if any discernible exercise have a disproportionately low body weight; and some people despite eating little store all the fat their bodies can muster. I watch enough of this around me every day to know that these people aren't lying - if they could flip a switch to make their lives easier, why wouldn't/shouldn't they? I would. I know that even having the tine/discipline to lose 10-20lbs is hard. Imagine those that have 100+lbs to get into a healthy range. That's a struggle many of us will hopefully never have to comprehend.
• Anderkent 11y ago
  > but it's downright foolish to pretend that we are gaining weight for any other reason than that we are eating too much and exercising too little. Right, but the question here is why are we eating too much? (why we're exercising too little is easier to answer: it's harder to exercise when you're overweight, and our lifestyles have changed). It seems that the hunger mechanism is out of whack; either because the types of food have changed, or something changed in our internal reactions to calories/fat/etc
• seiji 11y ago
  beliefs that their weight problems have nothing to do with their personal habits Eating garbage food is a personal habit, but the food is also engineered to be not very filling, high in calories, and mildly to strongly addictive (more profit!), so how do we balance personal responsibility in the face of adversaries engineering addiction? instead placing the blame on the quality of the foods they've been eating. Except, the food quality/provenance is the problem. Go to middle america and watch obese people at restaurants. Most of them are ordering more obese-enabling foods. Giant sandwiches, giant cheese fries, giant cokes refilled three times per meal. A lot of people just don't have the training or education to connect what they eat to their physical body—bodies are magical things that "just exist" and "just happen" with no responsibility in any direction. You can't get an obese person (100+ pounds overweight) down to "normal" just by exercising more and eating less of already addictive bad-for-you foods. You've got to remove all the crap from their diet and essentially de-program them from a lifetime of bad habits. Oh, and we need to do this on a national (even global) scale on the order of hundreds of millions of people.
• daniel-levin 11y ago
  >> “Obesity has traditionally been seen as the result of an imbalance between the amount of food we eat and how much we exercise, but this view ignores the contribution of genetics to each individual’s metabolism,” says senior author Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and of the Broad Institute. The article is pretty clear in stating that this new research is novel because it might depose the firmly held belief that diet and exercise is the sole cause/determinant of one's obesity.
• JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  There's no actual moral high ground to exercise and careful eating. Its just an unfortunate fallout of the human condition. Somehow this has turned into a popular victim-blaming culture? Perhaps because its voluntary. But lots of other things are voluntary - I stay out in the sun too long, I burn. Anybody want to shame me? I like to play in the sun. Unfortunatly I'm very pale and prone to burning. I'd be perfectly content with a switch to flip, and have no guilt nor shame in flipping it.
  • RIMR 11y ago
    >Somehow this has turned into a popular victim-blaming culture? Obesity is directly related to an individual's diet and exercise habits. Gaining/losing weight is easier/harder for different people for different reasons, but ultimately a person's BMI is within their control. To pretend that they are "victims" of some unavoidable outside force misses the point entirely. Obese people do not deserve to be mocked, shamed or blamed for their problems, but one cannot pretend that the power to fight obesity lies anywhere other than with the obese person. People don't "develop" or "catch" obesity, they become obese by allowing body fat to become too large a portion of their body mass. This problem may be harder to tackle for some people than others, which isn't fair, but that's life for you. >I'd be perfectly content with a switch to flip, and have no guilt nor shame in flipping it. As an overweight person, I completely agree! It would be great to have a truly reliable method for accelerating weight-loss. However, we can't pretend that this is going to lead to some "eat whatever you want and lose weight" magic diet pill. This research seems like it could lead to promising treatments that one would use alongside lifestyle/dietary changes and exercise.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Yes, yes, missing the point. I'm a victim of sunburn, even though its voluntary, because not everyone has this issue. Likewise, its normally reasonable to eat in moderation and exercise moderately, unless its not for you. So we are a victim of our genes in that way. The thread is about a genetic switch and treatment that could bring more people a higher quality of life. This is a great idea; and unless I misinterpret the article, yes indeed it is a 'magic bullet' at least for those with unfortunate genetics.
• rayiner 11y ago
  I had a professor once who specialized in human factors design in cockpit safety. Her view was that it was pointless to blame anything on "pilot error" because if the plane let the pilot screw up it was a flaw in the design of the plane. That's a good way to view any problem having to do with people. People are the same as they've always been--it's ludicrous to think that they're intrinsically any lazier or have less self-control than people a generation or two ago. If they're a lot fatter than prior generations, then something external must be different. You're never going to fix people, so if you want to solve the problem you have to focus on those external things.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Populations change over time - its called culture. We eat out more; we have better access to sweets and soda, we indulge in exotic fruits and meats. Not possible in the past. Its all tangles up of course. But fixing people was actually the topic of this thread - with gene therapy. That indeed seems to be possible!
• j42 11y ago
  This actually is within the realm of common sense and inductive/deductive reasoning if you know a bit about nutrition. First I'll agree with you that most people lack self control, and that the increase in portion sizes is a significant factor contributing to the obesity epidemic we're seeing right now. That said, as someone who's been tangentially involved in product engineering for years, literally everything from the packaging to the chemical composition is designed the re-enforce addictive behavior (which is intrinsic to human psychology). Serving sizes are also often deceptive as they don't clearly indicate the macronutrient content for an entire package (as they do in many other countries). Sure, 7g of sugar per serving seems ok for cookies, until you realize that's every 2 in a box of 20 and you've eaten the whole thing (70g). Most preservatives and artificial sweeteners are actually fairly inane, despite scary-looking ingredients lists. What you should be worried about are the cheap forms of sugar, refined carbohydrates, hydrolyzed oils/trans fats (which are thankfully declining in popularity), and HFCS/cane-sugar-based drinks which average 32-68g of sugar per bottle. All of these things cause a condition called insulin resistance, which leads to obesity and eventually if untreated, acquired diabetes. Insulin is the hormone that extracts glucose (energy) from carbohydrates (food), and turns it into a source of energy for your cells. [It is well established scientifically that the aforementioned "watch-list" all spike your insulin levels, and that instability in your insulin levels relative to blood glucose is bad.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2995635 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2995635) In layman's terms, these things make your body release disproportionate amounts of insulin compared to the amount of food you've ingested, and this has a few downstream effects; a large spike can make you feel intensely hungry (why people say "empty" foods make you eat more than you would otherwise), and most importantly insulin becomes less effective at transporting glucose. That's the beginning sign of Insulin Resistance Syndrome, and its correlation to obesity is well established. Ultimately it's because of the composition of processed foods, not any dangerous chemical additive (with a few notable exceptions) that most long-term complications arise. Looking back 30 years you may be correct, but looking back 500 to pre-industrial diets, you'll notice sugar was less prevalent in the food of most Anthropocenes, and fiber was much more common. The sugar lobby of the 1900's is largely responsible for its GRAS status and current abundance. These days we mill our grains into cereals, removing any traces of fiber/micronutrients and inject large amounts of liquid sugar into most beverages for 'flavor,' having the compound effect of up-regulating what we perceive to be "sweet." Both of these things make our bodies release far more insulin than is needed to extract their energy, making us hungrier disproportionally to caloric intake and setting the stage for a diabetic future. To the unconscious consumer, these forces are silent and automatic. For as little self control as people may have, I personally can't place sole blame on the individual when I know the entire chain of supply to be rigged against their nutritional best interests.
• asdfgtyuiohj 11y ago
  "processed foods make you fat" isn't infuriating nonsense. Placing blame on people while saying it has nothing to do with the quality of foods they are eating is infuriating nonsense. The nutritional profile of processed food is generally very different from what we have evolved to digest and process in ways that will lead to you getting fat. The most obvious and egregious example is the amount of rapidly-digested carbohydrates. Eating a plant-heavy diet will naturally slow down carbohydrate absorption, eating a diet heavy on processed food leads to much faster absorption, producing excess fat and a variety of other poor health outcomes. Exercising less is hardly to blame. The healthiest, oldest-aged populations ("blue zones") on the planet do not significant amounts of what most people would consider exercise. They do a lot of moderate activity (walking, gardening), but they're not extraordinarily physically active in terms of calorie burning. "Eating too much" is a consequence of high intake of processed foods, not the other way around. If you ate mostly unprocessed foods, you'd find it hard to eat too much, and your body's natural response would not entice you to anyway.