11 ms·

How the Food Industry Engineers the Need to Eat

106 points by saidajigumi 11y ago

dahart 11y ago
> The food companies have marched around the grocery store, adding sweetness, engineering bliss points to products that didn’t used to be sweet. This is why is now really hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in everything. > It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much? Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
- subpixel 11y ago
  I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common. With some willpower and practice, I can now eat nothing but a single bowl of cereal in a 24hr period, including 60m of hard exercise, without anything remotely like hunger pangs. It takes getting used to not constantly rewarding the thought of food with food. It's sort of a drastic measure, but the only one that has enabled me to lose real weight - plus there are purported health benefits: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-benefits-of-occasional-fasting-20121116 http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-benefits-of-occasion...
  - benten10 11y ago
    You can do even better than a bowl of cereal. Eat something fatty, and even eating a little will significantly reduce your hunger. These days fatty food, such as cheese and creamy yogurt have been a staple of my diet: I can go by for a lot longer without eating much that way. The fruit-fat-nuts diet is _completely_ doable (of course, I eat 'normal' food too, for a more balanced diet, but only in the weekends, etc.)
    - CompelTechnic 11y ago
      I cannot find full fat yogurt in any of my local grocery stores. Is "low fat" as good as it gets? Seems like the low-fat diet craze of the recent past, and the current greek yogurt phenomenon, mean that "zero fat" and "low fat" are the only two options.
      - jokamoto 11y ago
        Not sure if it qualifies as "full fat" per se, but Noosa brand yogurt has roughly twice the fat content of most Greek yogurts I've tried (seems to really help texture/flavor as well).
      - ashark 11y ago
        2% Fage is usually the best I can find. The low fat ones are marketing BS—loaded with sugar so they don't taste like nothing. Unfortunately that's very nearly the only thing available at most stores. Misleading advertising/labelling defeats good food yet again.
      - ashmud 11y ago
        Stonyfield and Fage make full fat yogurts, for example. I do not remember seeing any at the grocery chain giants, though. More specialized groceries (e.g., Whole Foods, some "ethnic" stores) may carry a full fat yogurt. http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whole-milk-plain http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whol... http://usa.fage.eu/product/fage-total-7-oz http://usa.fage.eu/product/fage-total-7-oz
      - benten10 11y ago
  - sopooneo 11y ago
    I am interested in trying this, but if I don't eat breakfast, I am sometimes so light headed by 11:00am that I am literally almost falling over and my brain doesn't function. Any advice or articles you'd recommend?
    - rob_61 11y ago
      Here is the best summary I've seen on IF... http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/ http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/ btw, I've been practicing IF for 2+ years and love it.
    - pc86 11y ago
      IF is by definition just about constraining your food intake to a certain window of time. Most people do this later in the day out of necessity or habit (e.g. 2-7), but there's no reason your window couldn't be 6-10. The downside is that you are much more likely to cheat if you do this, because now you have to go all afternoon and evening without eating, and then go to sleep. Psychologically it's much easier to wake up and be able to say "only 6 more hours to eat" and go to bed a few hours after your last meal than it is to eat your last meal, have 12 waking hours left, then try to go to sleep with a grumbling belly. Edit: A lot of people practice IF without even realizing it. The most popular form (mentioned in rob_61's linked article) is 16/8. If you don't eat until lunch and don't do a late dinner, it's very likely you fall in the 16/8 window.
    - andy_ppp 11y ago
      How much water have you had? Eat something fatty and high in protein. Your body never enters fat burning mode - as you get used to fasting once per week this process will get easier, like anything really.
    - ksk 11y ago
      Have you tried gradually increasing the fasting window over time?
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      I've done IF and lost 40 lbs with it. My advice is to eat something really small, and see what the smallest breakfast you can get away with is. After a month or so, try stopping breakfast and see how you make out then. My understanding is that the gut and vagus nerve are very sensitive to disruptions, any changes in routine have large initial perceived effects, until a new equilibrium is established. I think this mechanism is why diets are so faddish and people think they have food allergies when they actually don't. So, mitigate the worst of the symptoms, be willing to accept some temporary discomfort, and iterate towards a better diet over time.
  - ljk 11y ago
    > * I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common.* Not as extreme, but recently started to eat less for lunch(before: eating out, burger/sandwich + fries + drink, etc, now: homemade food, fruits) and already I don't get the afternoon snooze, and haven't needed coffee in a long time! also haven't been to any fast food restaurants or had soda in a few months, hopefully I can break the one-year mark!
    - benten10 11y ago
      I have a fun story to share about how I created a soda-disgust in myself! In college at one point, I was drinking soda almost every day. It was bad for me and I knew it, but couldn't help. So one day, I froze a bottle of some soda, and then let it thaw, sipping it after. It was the nastiest, sweetest, most awful-headaching thing I've ever put in my mouth. Having discovered what soda 'really' was, I stopped drinking it. I drink it maybe once in a year at most, but that's about it.
      - Drdrdrq 11y ago
        When you say soda, what do you mean? Coca Cola?
        benten10 11y ago
        coke, sprite, Fanta aka 'orange soda', whatever you want. The sweet corn syrup thaws first since it's got higher melting point than water, and it tastes nasty!
  - mtreis86 11y ago
    It was not until I started a ketogenic diet, that I learned the difference between hungry and thirsty. The signals are very very similar, at least for me.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  The problem is in conflating weight with overall health, which most media reporting does. Weight is primarily controlled by the quantity of food you eat (it is not "100% due to diet" because there do exist conditions that cause people to carry too much weight even with a "normal" diet), but to assume all problems are purely a result of weight is reductionist and incorrect. Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop metabolic and other health problems. Those problems arise from lack of activity, diet composition, and other factors beyond simply weight. Those problems are also the core plague of the "obesity epidemic", so it would behoove society not to focus so narrowly on weight and to focus on overall health (of which weight is a component).
  - adrianN 11y ago
    That's like saying "smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop lung cancer".
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      Which is also true, but the statements are not equivalent. Tobacco use (and actually, all forms of smoke inhalation) has a specific, acute mechanism whereby use increases the chances of lung cancer and other respiratory problems. We do not have that kind of causal link for obesity-related diseases. There is a correlation between weight and several so-called lifestyle diseases, but the causal link is fuzzy. That lack of causation is why reducing the obesity problem to a simple matter of weight control is a bad idea. There are other mechanisms at play, particularly related to body composition, that appear to be sensitive to diet composition and activity levels. Telling people they can be sedentary as long as they don't eat too much (which is basically what the original post I was replying to was saying) is dangerous.
  - chillydawg 11y ago
    Diet = 99% Other Factors = therest%
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
- chongli 11y ago
  The rule for shopping in the grocery store is simple: stay out of the aisles, stick with fresh produce and lean meats.
  - dayon 11y ago
    This will lead to a lot of carbs, some protein, and not enough fat. Consider looking into the Keto Diet. Lots of people are restricting carbs while being liberal with fat, successfully lowering their weight and having more energy. I'm one of those people. The trick is that fat consumption doesn't lead to weight gain. It's glucose production from carbs and sugars that leads to weight gain.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    Why lean meats?
- sunwooz 11y ago
  Culture plays a large role. It's become a thing in America where 'fat shaming' is looked down upon. Although, shaming someone should obviously be looked down upon, merely pointing out the fact that someone is getting fat should not be deemed as 'fat shaming'. In Korea, people regularly tell each other if they're getting fat, which is not taken as an insult, but is a factual statement and is classified as 'caring' and a 'worry' rather than 'shaming'.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    My recollection of my time in Korea was that people often lived nearer extended family. This contrasts with my experiences as an American in the US, where many of us do not live near relatives, and a lot of (younger?) folks don't have a significant number (say, more than 3 or 4 locally) of close friends. I'll call this the "intimacy gap". I'm not close enough to anyone that I see on a regular basis that they'd feel comfortable commenting about my weight like that (ok, less true these days with a ton of close friends, but more true a few years back).
- pvnick 11y ago
  > What are the other possible factors? High-caloric drinks
  - wtetzner 11y ago
    Does that not count as food?
    - pvnick 11y ago
      You could argue that, but I wouldn't say so. IIRC (I'd need to go back and dig up the research I read) high-calorie drinks appear to lack the satiating effect that solid foods have, even the high-caloric foods. The point is that high-caloric drinks (sodas, beer, gatoraid, etc) may throw off the body's energy/weight equilibrium more than junk foods.
      - dahart 11y ago
        I will argue that. Coke is definitely, in my mind, part of the "food industry". I speculate the article's author was also including soda manufacturers, due to the use of Dr. Pepper as an example. I personally believe soda is a major contributor to rising negative health problems. This is why I agree completely with and upvoted your previous comment that sugary drinks are a factor.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero. Don't be so sure. Stress also causes the body to start hoarding more calories. And if you think about it, people have been working longer and longer hours, and have a lot less job security than they used to in the past. So it is possible that all that extra stress is contributing to the rising obesity rates.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Indeed. But even then, the body can only hoard calories that you eat. As long as you spend more calories than you eat (even if you feel shit from that), the energy stored in the fat in your body will go down.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      The problem is the issue of choice. Going to sleep in a choice most of the time, but if you stay up too late your body will make that choice for you. With eating, while it isn't as drastic an effect, having high stress and having the body demanding calories will alter how your mind makes choices related to food. It takes higher levels of willpower to not gain weight when you have more stress. And many people can't just increase their willpower to compensate.
      - dahart 11y ago
        ^ True, ^^ True, and ^^^ True, every comment here is valuable! I think @kuschku got the (slightly tongue-in-cheek) intent behind my original comment, but you're right, and the choice/willpower problem is there, and it ranges from difficult to impossible to overcome for many people! This is actually a big part of why the food industry's actions putting sugar and fat in everything in order to make it sell more, regardless of the health effects, is being seen more and more as bordering on malicious and being considered for oversight and regulation. Food manufacturers, as businesses, should be doing whatever they can to sell more, but as providers of basic human needs, their sales tactics are now actively working against our interests. Our physiologies are built to take more food than necessary when its available, so these perfectly engineered high calorie bliss-point foods make willpower harder to fight than ever before!
- beachstartup 11y ago
  don't forget - people don't cook food anymore. i cook dinner every night (usually roasted vegetables and some protein) and i'm seen as some kind of weirdo. some people get offended if you ask them if they know how to cook. i don't know how american culture got to this point. it's insane.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    > i don't know how american culture got to this point. Time. People don't think they have time to cook, and they may not. They also don't know how to reclaim their time for themselves from various work and social obligations. Advertisement. Starting with TV dinners in the 60s (?) and fast food restaurants (also 60s), we have "cheap" and quick ways to get meals that don't require a great deal of personal effort, and it's shown to us constantly on television. EDIT: Words. I can use the right ones sometimes.
    - xorcist 11y ago
      This is a constantly perpetuated myth. It is the image that advertisers sell us. If it's something Americans have it's time. Do you know how many hours of TV is watched every day, on average?
  - function_seven 11y ago
    Up until about a month ago, that was me. I literally never turned on my oven for weeks on end. My stove was primarily used for boiling the Cup-O-Noodle water. I got fast food (or slow-but-still-bad food) for ~ 90% of my meals. I also have a belly that needs to go, so I decided to start counting calories and staying completely out of the drive-thrus. This has been a real eye-opener! By best estimate is that my former diet was probably about 3,000 C a day. Now that I'm watching what I eat, I'm easily running at 1,800 and not feeling hungry.
    - beachstartup 11y ago
      if you haven't already, get a cast iron pan. get it nice and hot, throw a chicken leg and some vegetables or fruit (cauliflower, brussels sprouts, tomatoes, potatoes, whatever) in there, season and sear, and then throw it in the oven for 30 mins @ 350 and eat. make yourself an adult beverage, or not, while you wait. prep and cleanup is literally 2 or 3 minutes. you don't even have to wash cast iron, you just wipe it off. ~500 calories even if you douse everything in olive oil, and filling. i do this like 3 or 4 nights a week. it's SO much better than a sad sack of takeout.
- kragen 11y ago
  > What are the other possible factors [than food]? Could be stress levels, perhaps due to imprisonment of family members or economic inequality, both of which have skyrocketed in the US in recent decades. Other aspects of economic inequality, such as a shift toward emergency medical treatment, are also possible causes. It's observable that the social classes most affected by obesity in the US (and, now, worldwide) are the poorest; this might be due to food, but it might not be. Could be infectious diseases, which are always changing, or more generally, microbiome changes. Diet changes (e.g. increase in sugar, or increase in usage of emulsifiers such as methylcellulose: http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obesity-and-gut-disease-1.16984 http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obes...) are one possible cause of microbiome changes, but far from the only one. For example, obesity-associated intestinal microbiomes have been shown to be contagious under some conditions: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature05414.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature0... Another possible cause, though: antibiotics are well known to cause microbiome changes (although maybe this is still "has something to do with food", since most of the antibiotics you consume during your lifetime are in meat.) And antibiotics are also known to induce weight gain — that's why they get put in the meat in the first place, to induce the meat animals to gain weight faster, reducing the time to slaughter. Maybe they make you gain weight too, and they might do that by means other than changing your gut microbiome. Antibiotic use, both in humans and in livestock, has undergone substantial changes over the past decades, and their possible effects on obesity are not well understood. Another possible cause: dramatically increased air travel and the ensuing jet lag; circadian rhythm disruption has been shown to induce metabolic dysfunction in a wide variety of animal models. http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647 http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647 For the same reason: artificial lighting. Artificial lighting color temperature as we switch from incandescent to fluorescent, LED, and computer and TV screens. Sedentary lifestyles are a possible cause — rates of "exercise" are only going up if you don't count manual labor as "exercise", and rates of manual labor are going way down. Worldwide testosterone levels are falling for unknown reasons; testosterone is very well known to reduce body fat. http://www.globalresearch.ca./health-and-the-environment-testosterone-levels-fall-worldwide/30129 http://www.globalresearch.ca./health-and-the-environment-tes... One possible hypothesis advanced for the dramatic testosterone level drop is exposure to environmental contaminants such as pesticides; the pesticides we use, the amount we use, and the places we use them have changed dramatically over the last few decades. Whether or not this affects our testosterone levels, it could easily affect our bodies in other ways, possibly promoting obesity. (Other factors that are known to lower testosterone levels include stress and lack of exercise.) Other environmental contaminants with dramatically changing exposure levels over time and that might reasonably be endocrine disruptors include PCBs, phthalates (as the above article mentions), bisphenol-A, lead, and the halogenated flame retardants used in polyurethane foam, which have been circumstantially implicated in the modern epidemic of feline hyperthyroidism. The lower levels of lead and PCBs in the environment are probably good for us, but sometimes there are surprising interactions. > the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero. You, you are an arrogant, pompous idiot, too ignorant even to begin to imagine the extent of your own ignorance.
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arthurgibson 11y ago
The Salt,Sugar,Fat book is great. Sections on Coke's tactics to get everyone hooked in 3rd world countries and the government cheese program are disturbing.
jimbokun 11y ago
I really, truely do not like the taste of sugar in my bread, pasta sauce, and yogurt. (I like the yogurt to taste yogurty, then add something sweet to it, like a banana or chocolate chips.) But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up. I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.
- ksk 11y ago
  > Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, They should also know what they're getting to make an informed choice. Sadly, most ways of selling or advertising are about lying through omission.
- vinhboy 11y ago
  Same here. Once I cut back on soda and salt, it's hard to eat popular food items. Things like panda express and Hawaiian onion chips are way too salty... silk soy milk is way too sweet, even when unsweetened. And forget about popular cereal brands... geesh, it's like drinking sugar water. Then there are Starbucks drinks... man, those things are super sweet. Not sure how other people drink it. I also like what you said about capitalism. As you can see by my food choices, I am not a vegan hipster or anything. But I definitely feel that corporate America does not cater to my taste buds.
- sevensor 11y ago
  After a brief trip to Europe a couple of years back, I returned to the States to discover that our bread is actually, physically, nauseating. It was weeks before I could stomach it again. I've been to Europe on other occasions and not had this happen, not sure why it happened this time.
  - ashark 11y ago
    Same. I'm continually disappointed at how hard it is to find decent bread back home (US), and how expensive it is when you do. Cheese, too. I know we've supposedly got some of the lowest food prices in the developed world, but buy like-for-like with a typical (say) Parisian's shopping basket and I bet we don't do so well.
wyldfire 11y ago
On HN, "engineers" is usually a plural noun. This took a few re-reads to parse.
- krisdol 11y ago
  Same here, and with the lowercase "the", my mind kept reading it as "How the Food Industry Engineers Need to Eat". Unfortunate but I don't think it's wrong.
- dionidium 11y ago
  It's a Garden Path Sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
newscracker 11y ago
I would recommend a couple of documentaries in this context about sugar. 1. The Botany of Desire [1] See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple cider vinegar. 2. That Sugar Film [2] This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and "healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers. [1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/ [2]: http://thatsugarfilm.com/ http://thatsugarfilm.com/
- nickles 11y ago
  The Botany of Desire is based on a book by the same name. The author, Michael Pollan, has written quite a bit about food. Another book of his, The Omnivore's Dilemma, thoroughly examines the industrial food chain (in addition to others) from its origins to methods of production.
- gregmac 11y ago
  Fed Up [1] is another to add to the list, available on Netflix. [1] http://fedupmovie.com/ http://fedupmovie.com/
- noam87 11y ago
  Ugh, apples today taste disgustingly sweet to me. My teeth shouldn't feel like I drank a litre of coke from eating an apple. It's sad... the saddest thing is the loss of variety. There is such an amazing variety of wild apples, berries, rice, potatoes out there, each with unique flavors and nutritional qualities, yet 99% of grocery stores carry the same bland, overly-sweet varieties that look like they came out of an assembly line. And it's not even about the bottom line: farms throw away tons of "imperfect" produce every day. It's about re-educating people.
swagv 11y ago
Is it 2013 all over again? This book is old news.
mrfusion 11y ago
I bought scan of chili the other day. 16 grams of sugar! I was stunned.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
due to some health issues that have me on an extremely low sodium (500mg/day or less) no caffeine (including things like chocolate/cocoa) diet some years back I had to switch to eating basically 100% unprocessed unseasoned food and never eating out, it was quite amazing how at the beginning it felt that food had nearly no taste, but nowadays many things that before required a lot of seasoning have a lot of salty/sweet tastes of their own. Lately for example I have found that corn can be nearly too sweet to eat, I mean, plain steamed sweet corn, some varieties are extremely extremely sweet to my tastebuds; when reading that every year corn is engineered to be sweeter and sweeter I can definitely see why, it honestly tastes as sweet as ice-cream did when I still ate it. Plain carrots are fairly sweet tasting, some brands more than others, but a lot more than I had expected; plain potatoes are salty, not too strong, but definitely noticeable, things like clementines / tangerines / mandarins / pomegranates taste way absolutely amazing, much much much better than any dessert I had when I was still eating processed food. As much as I theoretically now could eat oil and sugar (there was a period of time where they really did not sit well with me) I honestly don't miss them, especially the sugar / syrups which nowadays taste way way too strong. I doubt anybody nowadays would want to eat 100% unprocessed as honestly it can be a bit of a drag having to cook from scratch every meal starting from unprocessed ingredients and not adding any salt etc., not to mention it definitely will impact your career to not be able to go out to eat with coworkers, but if you find yourself concerned about having to have a lot of processed food for taste reasons, when you are on vacation it might be a worthwhile investment for you to try to eat this way for a few weeks to "reset" your tastebuds a bit. It's amazing just how one can go from eating 5000mg of sodium a day and foods tasting "normal" to 500mg and after a period of adaptation them tasting "normal" as well, same deal for sugar. (edit) and btw, as another interesting n=1 datapoint, although that was not the reason for the low sodium, going from 5-6000mg/day to 400-500mg/day my bp went from 135/85 to 105/65 over a few years, without really changing how I felt, and without taking any medications, that was surprising as I always thought that bp would not vary that much just due to diet.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, in my family we always cooked everything ourselves. Everything. No tin can food, ever. When my mum, due to medical condition, had to switch to low iodine diet, we could just switch our salt we used, and it was easy to adapt. But I can say, you’re right – I hate corn. Literally, I can’t deal with the annoying sweetness of it. It’s horrible. Carrots are the perfect level of sweetness, we used to grow them ourselves, but don’t do that anymore. But, still, doing this myself without having any medical need myself, I obviously still add nutella to my pancakes, or so on. To me it’s just surprising how many people in this thread don’t make their food on their own. Even if you just boil a pot of potatoes and put some onions in the frying pan in a bit of olive oil, you can quickly make some neat food. Or scrambled eggs with Bratkartoffeln and bacon, or noodles with your own sauce, and so on. Making your meals yourself is so easy, and quick. I’m literally disgusted by the whole Soylent movement. NO! instead of spending less time for food, just spend less time for work! Unionize, damn.
CharlesMerriam2 11y ago
I'm not quite understanding this story on HackerNews. What platform does it run on? How do I hack it?
- DanBC 11y ago
  What do you think is on topic for HN? Why do you think that? See dang's reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200
  - leereeves 11y ago
    I've seen people say they stopped visiting Hacker News because it includes so much non-programming/startup content.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Do you have any evidence that the ratio has changed?
      - leereeves 11y ago
        No, I'm not that interested. I like the non-programming/startup content. But every post from the beginning is still available. It wouldn't be too hard to write an app to research that question if you are. A fairly recent archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791
    - CuriouslyC 11y ago
      There are 50 million languages, platforms, frameworks, databases, etc. It gets really old just seeing the same articles rehashed with different nouns, like so many technology mad libs. Likewise, I honestly could care less about startup/vc drama. The thing that keeps me coming back to hacker news are posts about cutting edge engineering/science, how to be a better hacker/maker/productive person in general, and interesting new perspectives on life/politics/social institutions.
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adamwong246 11y ago
Soylent, FTW
- fluxquanta 11y ago
  Have they fixed their backlog issue? I canceled my order after they pushed the delivery date back two months three separate times.
  - adamwong246 11y ago
    it's much much faster. It's not perfect but I usually get my soylent in about a week.
necessity 11y ago
So they're guilty of making too good a product? Too tasty a food? lol
adamwong246 11y ago
I do think this is an unfair characterization of food manufacturers. In a real sense, they only make what WE want to eat. And we only buy, for the most part, what we WANT to eat. So there's a arms race that's been building ever since food became an industry. When one brand of bread adds sugar to their recipe, consumers love it and all the other brands must follow suit. Breaking this cycle will just as hard as breaking the industrial inertia towards fossil fuels. Opting out of this is hard, expensive and against our natural desires. Or, to reiterate my other post, "Soylent, FTW."
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  > they only make what WE want to eat This is the same justification for every consumable. If people didn't want X, companies wouldn't make X. Calling companies out for increasing our desire for their products, especially when that desire goes against our better interests (mental and physical health, in particular), is not unfair, it's smart. It gets people thinking about what they're doing and why so they can make better decisions, even when all the advertisement (obvious or not) is directing them away from what they should be doing.
massysett 11y ago
Someone was on the America's Test Kitchen podcast discussing artificial flavors. He said that on the one hand the chemists and food scientists have been making their flavors better so that artificially flavored things are more irresistible than ever--potato chips, corn chips, etc. On the other hand, on the fresh side, the scientists engineer the food so it is easier to ship and can stay on the shelf longer, making it less flavorful. Bad confluence.
cowpig 11y ago
> did his high math regression analysis thing, put the data in the computer, and out comes this bell shaped curve where the perfect amount of sweetness, not too little, not too much, is at the very top of the curve What is High Math, exactly?

106 points by saidajigumi 11y ago

> The food companies have marched around the grocery store, adding sweetness, engineering bliss points to products that didn’t used to be sweet. This is why is now really hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in everything. > It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much? Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.

subpixel 11y ago
I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common. With some willpower and practice, I can now eat nothing but a single bowl of cereal in a 24hr period, including 60m of hard exercise, without anything remotely like hunger pangs. It takes getting used to not constantly rewarding the thought of food with food. It's sort of a drastic measure, but the only one that has enabled me to lose real weight - plus there are purported health benefits: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-benefits-of-occasional-fasting-20121116 http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-benefits-of-occasion...
- benten10 11y ago
  You can do even better than a bowl of cereal. Eat something fatty, and even eating a little will significantly reduce your hunger. These days fatty food, such as cheese and creamy yogurt have been a staple of my diet: I can go by for a lot longer without eating much that way. The fruit-fat-nuts diet is _completely_ doable (of course, I eat 'normal' food too, for a more balanced diet, but only in the weekends, etc.)
  - CompelTechnic 11y ago
    I cannot find full fat yogurt in any of my local grocery stores. Is "low fat" as good as it gets? Seems like the low-fat diet craze of the recent past, and the current greek yogurt phenomenon, mean that "zero fat" and "low fat" are the only two options.
    - jokamoto 11y ago
      Not sure if it qualifies as "full fat" per se, but Noosa brand yogurt has roughly twice the fat content of most Greek yogurts I've tried (seems to really help texture/flavor as well).
    - ashark 11y ago
      2% Fage is usually the best I can find. The low fat ones are marketing BS—loaded with sugar so they don't taste like nothing. Unfortunately that's very nearly the only thing available at most stores. Misleading advertising/labelling defeats good food yet again.
    - ashmud 11y ago
      Stonyfield and Fage make full fat yogurts, for example. I do not remember seeing any at the grocery chain giants, though. More specialized groceries (e.g., Whole Foods, some "ethnic" stores) may carry a full fat yogurt. http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whole-milk-plain http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whol... http://usa.fage.eu/product/fage-total-7-oz http://usa.fage.eu/product/fage-total-7-oz
    - benten10 11y ago
- sopooneo 11y ago
  I am interested in trying this, but if I don't eat breakfast, I am sometimes so light headed by 11:00am that I am literally almost falling over and my brain doesn't function. Any advice or articles you'd recommend?
  - rob_61 11y ago
    Here is the best summary I've seen on IF... http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/ http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/ btw, I've been practicing IF for 2+ years and love it.
  - pc86 11y ago
    IF is by definition just about constraining your food intake to a certain window of time. Most people do this later in the day out of necessity or habit (e.g. 2-7), but there's no reason your window couldn't be 6-10. The downside is that you are much more likely to cheat if you do this, because now you have to go all afternoon and evening without eating, and then go to sleep. Psychologically it's much easier to wake up and be able to say "only 6 more hours to eat" and go to bed a few hours after your last meal than it is to eat your last meal, have 12 waking hours left, then try to go to sleep with a grumbling belly. Edit: A lot of people practice IF without even realizing it. The most popular form (mentioned in rob_61's linked article) is 16/8. If you don't eat until lunch and don't do a late dinner, it's very likely you fall in the 16/8 window.
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    How much water have you had? Eat something fatty and high in protein. Your body never enters fat burning mode - as you get used to fasting once per week this process will get easier, like anything really.
  - ksk 11y ago
    Have you tried gradually increasing the fasting window over time?
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    I've done IF and lost 40 lbs with it. My advice is to eat something really small, and see what the smallest breakfast you can get away with is. After a month or so, try stopping breakfast and see how you make out then. My understanding is that the gut and vagus nerve are very sensitive to disruptions, any changes in routine have large initial perceived effects, until a new equilibrium is established. I think this mechanism is why diets are so faddish and people think they have food allergies when they actually don't. So, mitigate the worst of the symptoms, be willing to accept some temporary discomfort, and iterate towards a better diet over time.
- ljk 11y ago
  > * I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common.* Not as extreme, but recently started to eat less for lunch(before: eating out, burger/sandwich + fries + drink, etc, now: homemade food, fruits) and already I don't get the afternoon snooze, and haven't needed coffee in a long time! also haven't been to any fast food restaurants or had soda in a few months, hopefully I can break the one-year mark!
  - benten10 11y ago
    I have a fun story to share about how I created a soda-disgust in myself! In college at one point, I was drinking soda almost every day. It was bad for me and I knew it, but couldn't help. So one day, I froze a bottle of some soda, and then let it thaw, sipping it after. It was the nastiest, sweetest, most awful-headaching thing I've ever put in my mouth. Having discovered what soda 'really' was, I stopped drinking it. I drink it maybe once in a year at most, but that's about it.
    - Drdrdrq 11y ago
      When you say soda, what do you mean? Coca Cola?
      - benten10 11y ago
        coke, sprite, Fanta aka 'orange soda', whatever you want. The sweet corn syrup thaws first since it's got higher melting point than water, and it tastes nasty!
- mtreis86 11y ago
  It was not until I started a ketogenic diet, that I learned the difference between hungry and thirsty. The signals are very very similar, at least for me.
vonmoltke 11y ago
The problem is in conflating weight with overall health, which most media reporting does. Weight is primarily controlled by the quantity of food you eat (it is not "100% due to diet" because there do exist conditions that cause people to carry too much weight even with a "normal" diet), but to assume all problems are purely a result of weight is reductionist and incorrect. Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop metabolic and other health problems. Those problems arise from lack of activity, diet composition, and other factors beyond simply weight. Those problems are also the core plague of the "obesity epidemic", so it would behoove society not to focus so narrowly on weight and to focus on overall health (of which weight is a component).
- adrianN 11y ago
  That's like saying "smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop lung cancer".
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    Which is also true, but the statements are not equivalent. Tobacco use (and actually, all forms of smoke inhalation) has a specific, acute mechanism whereby use increases the chances of lung cancer and other respiratory problems. We do not have that kind of causal link for obesity-related diseases. There is a correlation between weight and several so-called lifestyle diseases, but the causal link is fuzzy. That lack of causation is why reducing the obesity problem to a simple matter of weight control is a bad idea. There are other mechanisms at play, particularly related to body composition, that appear to be sensitive to diet composition and activity levels. Telling people they can be sedentary as long as they don't eat too much (which is basically what the original post I was replying to was saying) is dangerous.
- chillydawg 11y ago
  Diet = 99% Other Factors = therest%
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
chongli 11y ago
The rule for shopping in the grocery store is simple: stay out of the aisles, stick with fresh produce and lean meats.
- dayon 11y ago
  This will lead to a lot of carbs, some protein, and not enough fat. Consider looking into the Keto Diet. Lots of people are restricting carbs while being liberal with fat, successfully lowering their weight and having more energy. I'm one of those people. The trick is that fat consumption doesn't lead to weight gain. It's glucose production from carbs and sugars that leads to weight gain.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Why lean meats?
sunwooz 11y ago
Culture plays a large role. It's become a thing in America where 'fat shaming' is looked down upon. Although, shaming someone should obviously be looked down upon, merely pointing out the fact that someone is getting fat should not be deemed as 'fat shaming'. In Korea, people regularly tell each other if they're getting fat, which is not taken as an insult, but is a factual statement and is classified as 'caring' and a 'worry' rather than 'shaming'.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  My recollection of my time in Korea was that people often lived nearer extended family. This contrasts with my experiences as an American in the US, where many of us do not live near relatives, and a lot of (younger?) folks don't have a significant number (say, more than 3 or 4 locally) of close friends. I'll call this the "intimacy gap". I'm not close enough to anyone that I see on a regular basis that they'd feel comfortable commenting about my weight like that (ok, less true these days with a ton of close friends, but more true a few years back).
pvnick 11y ago
> What are the other possible factors? High-caloric drinks
- wtetzner 11y ago
  Does that not count as food?
  - pvnick 11y ago
    You could argue that, but I wouldn't say so. IIRC (I'd need to go back and dig up the research I read) high-calorie drinks appear to lack the satiating effect that solid foods have, even the high-caloric foods. The point is that high-caloric drinks (sodas, beer, gatoraid, etc) may throw off the body's energy/weight equilibrium more than junk foods.
    - dahart 11y ago
      I will argue that. Coke is definitely, in my mind, part of the "food industry". I speculate the article's author was also including soda manufacturers, due to the use of Dr. Pepper as an example. I personally believe soda is a major contributor to rising negative health problems. This is why I agree completely with and upvoted your previous comment that sugary drinks are a factor.
enraged_camel 11y ago
>>the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero. Don't be so sure. Stress also causes the body to start hoarding more calories. And if you think about it, people have been working longer and longer hours, and have a lot less job security than they used to in the past. So it is possible that all that extra stress is contributing to the rising obesity rates.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Indeed. But even then, the body can only hoard calories that you eat. As long as you spend more calories than you eat (even if you feel shit from that), the energy stored in the fat in your body will go down.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    The problem is the issue of choice. Going to sleep in a choice most of the time, but if you stay up too late your body will make that choice for you. With eating, while it isn't as drastic an effect, having high stress and having the body demanding calories will alter how your mind makes choices related to food. It takes higher levels of willpower to not gain weight when you have more stress. And many people can't just increase their willpower to compensate.
    - dahart 11y ago
      ^ True, ^^ True, and ^^^ True, every comment here is valuable! I think @kuschku got the (slightly tongue-in-cheek) intent behind my original comment, but you're right, and the choice/willpower problem is there, and it ranges from difficult to impossible to overcome for many people! This is actually a big part of why the food industry's actions putting sugar and fat in everything in order to make it sell more, regardless of the health effects, is being seen more and more as bordering on malicious and being considered for oversight and regulation. Food manufacturers, as businesses, should be doing whatever they can to sell more, but as providers of basic human needs, their sales tactics are now actively working against our interests. Our physiologies are built to take more food than necessary when its available, so these perfectly engineered high calorie bliss-point foods make willpower harder to fight than ever before!
beachstartup 11y ago
don't forget - people don't cook food anymore. i cook dinner every night (usually roasted vegetables and some protein) and i'm seen as some kind of weirdo. some people get offended if you ask them if they know how to cook. i don't know how american culture got to this point. it's insane.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  > i don't know how american culture got to this point. Time. People don't think they have time to cook, and they may not. They also don't know how to reclaim their time for themselves from various work and social obligations. Advertisement. Starting with TV dinners in the 60s (?) and fast food restaurants (also 60s), we have "cheap" and quick ways to get meals that don't require a great deal of personal effort, and it's shown to us constantly on television. EDIT: Words. I can use the right ones sometimes.
  - xorcist 11y ago
    This is a constantly perpetuated myth. It is the image that advertisers sell us. If it's something Americans have it's time. Do you know how many hours of TV is watched every day, on average?
- function_seven 11y ago
  Up until about a month ago, that was me. I literally never turned on my oven for weeks on end. My stove was primarily used for boiling the Cup-O-Noodle water. I got fast food (or slow-but-still-bad food) for ~ 90% of my meals. I also have a belly that needs to go, so I decided to start counting calories and staying completely out of the drive-thrus. This has been a real eye-opener! By best estimate is that my former diet was probably about 3,000 C a day. Now that I'm watching what I eat, I'm easily running at 1,800 and not feeling hungry.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    if you haven't already, get a cast iron pan. get it nice and hot, throw a chicken leg and some vegetables or fruit (cauliflower, brussels sprouts, tomatoes, potatoes, whatever) in there, season and sear, and then throw it in the oven for 30 mins @ 350 and eat. make yourself an adult beverage, or not, while you wait. prep and cleanup is literally 2 or 3 minutes. you don't even have to wash cast iron, you just wipe it off. ~500 calories even if you douse everything in olive oil, and filling. i do this like 3 or 4 nights a week. it's SO much better than a sad sack of takeout.
kragen 11y ago
> What are the other possible factors [than food]? Could be stress levels, perhaps due to imprisonment of family members or economic inequality, both of which have skyrocketed in the US in recent decades. Other aspects of economic inequality, such as a shift toward emergency medical treatment, are also possible causes. It's observable that the social classes most affected by obesity in the US (and, now, worldwide) are the poorest; this might be due to food, but it might not be. Could be infectious diseases, which are always changing, or more generally, microbiome changes. Diet changes (e.g. increase in sugar, or increase in usage of emulsifiers such as methylcellulose: http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obesity-and-gut-disease-1.16984 http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obes...) are one possible cause of microbiome changes, but far from the only one. For example, obesity-associated intestinal microbiomes have been shown to be contagious under some conditions: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature05414.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature0... Another possible cause, though: antibiotics are well known to cause microbiome changes (although maybe this is still "has something to do with food", since most of the antibiotics you consume during your lifetime are in meat.) And antibiotics are also known to induce weight gain — that's why they get put in the meat in the first place, to induce the meat animals to gain weight faster, reducing the time to slaughter. Maybe they make you gain weight too, and they might do that by means other than changing your gut microbiome. Antibiotic use, both in humans and in livestock, has undergone substantial changes over the past decades, and their possible effects on obesity are not well understood. Another possible cause: dramatically increased air travel and the ensuing jet lag; circadian rhythm disruption has been shown to induce metabolic dysfunction in a wide variety of animal models. http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647 http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647 For the same reason: artificial lighting. Artificial lighting color temperature as we switch from incandescent to fluorescent, LED, and computer and TV screens. Sedentary lifestyles are a possible cause — rates of "exercise" are only going up if you don't count manual labor as "exercise", and rates of manual labor are going way down. Worldwide testosterone levels are falling for unknown reasons; testosterone is very well known to reduce body fat. http://www.globalresearch.ca./health-and-the-environment-testosterone-levels-fall-worldwide/30129 http://www.globalresearch.ca./health-and-the-environment-tes... One possible hypothesis advanced for the dramatic testosterone level drop is exposure to environmental contaminants such as pesticides; the pesticides we use, the amount we use, and the places we use them have changed dramatically over the last few decades. Whether or not this affects our testosterone levels, it could easily affect our bodies in other ways, possibly promoting obesity. (Other factors that are known to lower testosterone levels include stress and lack of exercise.) Other environmental contaminants with dramatically changing exposure levels over time and that might reasonably be endocrine disruptors include PCBs, phthalates (as the above article mentions), bisphenol-A, lead, and the halogenated flame retardants used in polyurethane foam, which have been circumstantially implicated in the modern epidemic of feline hyperthyroidism. The lower levels of lead and PCBs in the environment are probably good for us, but sometimes there are surprising interactions. > the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero. You, you are an arrogant, pompous idiot, too ignorant even to begin to imagine the extent of your own ignorance.

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arthurgibson 11y ago

The Salt,Sugar,Fat book is great. Sections on Coke's tactics to get everyone hooked in 3rd world countries and the government cheese program are disturbing.

jimbokun 11y ago

I really, truely do not like the taste of sugar in my bread, pasta sauce, and yogurt. (I like the yogurt to taste yogurty, then add something sweet to it, like a banana or chocolate chips.) But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up. I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.

ksk 11y ago
> Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, They should also know what they're getting to make an informed choice. Sadly, most ways of selling or advertising are about lying through omission.
vinhboy 11y ago
Same here. Once I cut back on soda and salt, it's hard to eat popular food items. Things like panda express and Hawaiian onion chips are way too salty... silk soy milk is way too sweet, even when unsweetened. And forget about popular cereal brands... geesh, it's like drinking sugar water. Then there are Starbucks drinks... man, those things are super sweet. Not sure how other people drink it. I also like what you said about capitalism. As you can see by my food choices, I am not a vegan hipster or anything. But I definitely feel that corporate America does not cater to my taste buds.
sevensor 11y ago
After a brief trip to Europe a couple of years back, I returned to the States to discover that our bread is actually, physically, nauseating. It was weeks before I could stomach it again. I've been to Europe on other occasions and not had this happen, not sure why it happened this time.
- ashark 11y ago
  Same. I'm continually disappointed at how hard it is to find decent bread back home (US), and how expensive it is when you do. Cheese, too. I know we've supposedly got some of the lowest food prices in the developed world, but buy like-for-like with a typical (say) Parisian's shopping basket and I bet we don't do so well.

wyldfire 11y ago

On HN, "engineers" is usually a plural noun. This took a few re-reads to parse.

krisdol 11y ago
Same here, and with the lowercase "the", my mind kept reading it as "How the Food Industry Engineers Need to Eat". Unfortunate but I don't think it's wrong.
dionidium 11y ago
It's a Garden Path Sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

newscracker 11y ago

I would recommend a couple of documentaries in this context about sugar. 1. The Botany of Desire [1] See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple cider vinegar. 2. That Sugar Film [2] This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and "healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers. [1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/ [2]: http://thatsugarfilm.com/ http://thatsugarfilm.com/

nickles 11y ago
The Botany of Desire is based on a book by the same name. The author, Michael Pollan, has written quite a bit about food. Another book of his, The Omnivore's Dilemma, thoroughly examines the industrial food chain (in addition to others) from its origins to methods of production.
gregmac 11y ago
Fed Up [1] is another to add to the list, available on Netflix. [1] http://fedupmovie.com/ http://fedupmovie.com/
noam87 11y ago
Ugh, apples today taste disgustingly sweet to me. My teeth shouldn't feel like I drank a litre of coke from eating an apple. It's sad... the saddest thing is the loss of variety. There is such an amazing variety of wild apples, berries, rice, potatoes out there, each with unique flavors and nutritional qualities, yet 99% of grocery stores carry the same bland, overly-sweet varieties that look like they came out of an assembly line. And it's not even about the bottom line: farms throw away tons of "imperfect" produce every day. It's about re-educating people.

swagv 11y ago

Is it 2013 all over again? This book is old news.

mrfusion 11y ago

I bought scan of chili the other day. 16 grams of sugar! I was stunned.

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

due to some health issues that have me on an extremely low sodium (500mg/day or less) no caffeine (including things like chocolate/cocoa) diet some years back I had to switch to eating basically 100% unprocessed unseasoned food and never eating out, it was quite amazing how at the beginning it felt that food had nearly no taste, but nowadays many things that before required a lot of seasoning have a lot of salty/sweet tastes of their own. Lately for example I have found that corn can be nearly too sweet to eat, I mean, plain steamed sweet corn, some varieties are extremely extremely sweet to my tastebuds; when reading that every year corn is engineered to be sweeter and sweeter I can definitely see why, it honestly tastes as sweet as ice-cream did when I still ate it. Plain carrots are fairly sweet tasting, some brands more than others, but a lot more than I had expected; plain potatoes are salty, not too strong, but definitely noticeable, things like clementines / tangerines / mandarins / pomegranates taste way absolutely amazing, much much much better than any dessert I had when I was still eating processed food. As much as I theoretically now could eat oil and sugar (there was a period of time where they really did not sit well with me) I honestly don't miss them, especially the sugar / syrups which nowadays taste way way too strong. I doubt anybody nowadays would want to eat 100% unprocessed as honestly it can be a bit of a drag having to cook from scratch every meal starting from unprocessed ingredients and not adding any salt etc., not to mention it definitely will impact your career to not be able to go out to eat with coworkers, but if you find yourself concerned about having to have a lot of processed food for taste reasons, when you are on vacation it might be a worthwhile investment for you to try to eat this way for a few weeks to "reset" your tastebuds a bit. It's amazing just how one can go from eating 5000mg of sodium a day and foods tasting "normal" to 500mg and after a period of adaptation them tasting "normal" as well, same deal for sugar. (edit) and btw, as another interesting n=1 datapoint, although that was not the reason for the low sodium, going from 5-6000mg/day to 400-500mg/day my bp went from 135/85 to 105/65 over a few years, without really changing how I felt, and without taking any medications, that was surprising as I always thought that bp would not vary that much just due to diet.

kuschku 11y ago
Well, in my family we always cooked everything ourselves. Everything. No tin can food, ever. When my mum, due to medical condition, had to switch to low iodine diet, we could just switch our salt we used, and it was easy to adapt. But I can say, you’re right – I hate corn. Literally, I can’t deal with the annoying sweetness of it. It’s horrible. Carrots are the perfect level of sweetness, we used to grow them ourselves, but don’t do that anymore. But, still, doing this myself without having any medical need myself, I obviously still add nutella to my pancakes, or so on. To me it’s just surprising how many people in this thread don’t make their food on their own. Even if you just boil a pot of potatoes and put some onions in the frying pan in a bit of olive oil, you can quickly make some neat food. Or scrambled eggs with Bratkartoffeln and bacon, or noodles with your own sauce, and so on. Making your meals yourself is so easy, and quick. I’m literally disgusted by the whole Soylent movement. NO! instead of spending less time for food, just spend less time for work! Unionize, damn.

CharlesMerriam2 11y ago

I'm not quite understanding this story on HackerNews. What platform does it run on? How do I hack it?

DanBC 11y ago
What do you think is on topic for HN? Why do you think that? See dang's reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200
- leereeves 11y ago
  I've seen people say they stopped visiting Hacker News because it includes so much non-programming/startup content.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Do you have any evidence that the ratio has changed?
    - leereeves 11y ago
      No, I'm not that interested. I like the non-programming/startup content. But every post from the beginning is still available. It wouldn't be too hard to write an app to research that question if you are. A fairly recent archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791
  - CuriouslyC 11y ago
    There are 50 million languages, platforms, frameworks, databases, etc. It gets really old just seeing the same articles rehashed with different nouns, like so many technology mad libs. Likewise, I honestly could care less about startup/vc drama. The thing that keeps me coming back to hacker news are posts about cutting edge engineering/science, how to be a better hacker/maker/productive person in general, and interesting new perspectives on life/politics/social institutions.

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adamwong246 11y ago

Soylent, FTW

fluxquanta 11y ago
Have they fixed their backlog issue? I canceled my order after they pushed the delivery date back two months three separate times.
- adamwong246 11y ago
  it's much much faster. It's not perfect but I usually get my soylent in about a week.

necessity 11y ago

So they're guilty of making too good a product? Too tasty a food? lol

adamwong246 11y ago

I do think this is an unfair characterization of food manufacturers. In a real sense, they only make what WE want to eat. And we only buy, for the most part, what we WANT to eat. So there's a arms race that's been building ever since food became an industry. When one brand of bread adds sugar to their recipe, consumers love it and all the other brands must follow suit. Breaking this cycle will just as hard as breaking the industrial inertia towards fossil fuels. Opting out of this is hard, expensive and against our natural desires. Or, to reiterate my other post, "Soylent, FTW."

Jtsummers 11y ago
> they only make what WE want to eat This is the same justification for every consumable. If people didn't want X, companies wouldn't make X. Calling companies out for increasing our desire for their products, especially when that desire goes against our better interests (mental and physical health, in particular), is not unfair, it's smart. It gets people thinking about what they're doing and why so they can make better decisions, even when all the advertisement (obvious or not) is directing them away from what they should be doing.

massysett 11y ago

Someone was on the America's Test Kitchen podcast discussing artificial flavors. He said that on the one hand the chemists and food scientists have been making their flavors better so that artificially flavored things are more irresistible than ever--potato chips, corn chips, etc. On the other hand, on the fresh side, the scientists engineer the food so it is easier to ship and can stay on the shelf longer, making it less flavorful. Bad confluence.

cowpig 11y ago

> did his high math regression analysis thing, put the data in the computer, and out comes this bell shaped curve where the perfect amount of sweetness, not too little, not too much, is at the very top of the curve What is High Math, exactly?