6 ms·

After following his rules for a year now and losing 50 pounds with literally no exercise, I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests ar

by claar 10y ago

After following his rules for a year now and losing 50 pounds with literally no exercise, I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed. It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy. Perhaps the science is thin on things like caloric sources (quality vs quantity), preservatives, complexity of sugars, the effects of high processing of food, etc., but my anecdotal evidence and growing intuition aligns with the author's opinions. For me personally, removing added sugars and processed foods and moving to a more "real foods" meal plan (meat, veggies, fruit) has been transformative.

trentmb 10y ago
> I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed. I dunno- the longer you live, the longer I can sell shit to you.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- LionessLover 10y ago
  Corporations - especially publicly traded ones - are not exactly known for their long-term planning. Quarterly reports on the other hand...
  - billmalarky 10y ago
    It's a prisoner's dilemma. Lacking government regulation, investment will always flow to the food companies willing to sacrifice the longterm health of consumers in exchange for higher revenue. That is, food corporations that practice methods that increase consumption to unhealthy levels - high sodium, high sugar, low satiating and cheap to produce foods (high-carb, high-yield meat products due to growth hacks like bovine growth hormone). The food companies that choose not to play along are either niche health food companies, or they will go bust by not being able to compete in a commodity market. Sarah Palin (1) would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream. We are "free" to eat whatever is available, and baring government intervention what is available is subject to the forces described in my previous paragraph (ie garbage optimized to make us over-consume). The obesity epidemic WILL NOT be resolved until heavy government regulation comes into play in the food industry. Pretending otherwise is no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex. 1. Obviously I'm just using her here as poster child for a certain political ideology.
    - combatentropy 10y ago
      > Sarah Palin would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream. I don't know, in every town there is a grocery store that sells produce, raw meat, and other unprocessed foods. If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism. Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed. > no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex May I suggest you look into that more?
      - billmalarky 10y ago
        >If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism. You're free to believe that most humans are capable of making healthy eating choices by their own free will if you want (not trying to be catty, and I'm not sure that was the point you were communicating, just how I interpreted your comment), but the data overwhelmingly suggests otherwise. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/USObesityRate1960-2004.svg/350px-USObesityRate1960-2004.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/US... At a certain point I believe it is important to protect people from themselves. Being too proud to admit that "humans can be taken advantage of using certain hacks/tricks" makes society as a whole weaker. >Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed. You and I agree on this point 100%. Currently I believe the FDA has allowed too much leeway with the food industry. I'm not foolish enough to think that it couldn't easily swing too far in the other direction as well.
- nickbauman 10y ago
  But long term returns almost always have a lower priority to short term returns in a company's balance sheets.
  - sheepleherd 10y ago
    sigh... lemme tell ya what they taught us in finance theory class: rich investors are not stupider than average investors; in fact, if investing "for the long term" is the right thing to do, rich investors actually have the resources, wherewithal and the time to do it. The problem is, as hard as it is to predict the future, it is harder to predict farther into the future; and, once you set up a pot of "long term" honey, people have a chance to reorganize their affairs to siphon off said honey and if your idea is to not pay attention to their short term results, you set yourself up for a big long term surprise. Publicly traded companies are mostly companies that have products, markets, customers, service, etc. Generally, when they are losing money compared to other companies, it does not scream "we're pouring money into R&D, great things are around the corner!" This boils down to, statistically speaking, short term results are actually the best indicator of long term results. You'd be foolish (statistically) to overemphasize long term hypotheticals in the face of short term losses. TL;DR that financial markets are too tilted in favor of "short term" results is largely a myth. if it were not a myth, wealth would shift from the majority people who supposedly pay attention to short term results and toward people who ignore short term results leading to the end of the myth. edit (couple above and): I'm not saying that long term projects and ideas and thinking don't ever pay off; I'm saying that saying that they are undervalued and therefore represent an opportunity is a stretch and requires proof that you most likely will not find if you look because others have looked.
    - eightbit 10y ago
      Algorithmics would disagree with you: the greedy algorithm, or trying to find a global maximum from local maxima, usually fails as a method. It's usually a "stupider" way of doing things :P My own experiences, especially related to corporations, seem to corroborate this.
      - 10y ago
andrei_says_ 10y ago
Having stopped consuming processed sugar a few years ago, I can easily say this was the single change I've made with the largest impact on my health and quality of life. When I started reading labels and stopped buying anything with sugar, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice etc., I automatically eliminated processed food. As for food companies, their responsibility is to maximize profit which usually involves selling as much as possible at the highest profit margin possible. Given that high profit margin excludes the possibility of expensive quality ingredients, the variables that remain are taste and perception. Thus, food commercials, stories, "healthy food fetishism" (and pushing same crap as such) and taste laboratories where scientists focus on making said crap palatable, tasty and if possible addictive. Sugar is an addictive substance so it is almost always a part of this formula.
tetrep 10y ago
> I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed. This is touched on a bit in the Omnivore's Dilemma, people without heavy encouragement otherwise, have a rough limit on how many calories they will consume in a day. As a food company that has sufficient market penetration, you're stuck growing your profits at the same rate as the population. To get around this, you'll either need to increase your profits per calorie (sell less for more, cheaper ingredients, etc) or increase the amount of calories people are eating, through marketing and/or formulating your foods in such a way to encourage more consumption. I think most companies opt for both, there's a lot of limits/diminishing returns on the making food cheaper side of things, but on the human consumption side, there's a lot of room for growth until everybody is morbidly obese. The bigger you are, the more calories you need to consume to keep that weight. More calories consumed is more money for food producers.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  I totally agree with you, but surely some food companies are taking a different approach and that is to charge more for high quality food? Personally I'm very happy to pay a premium for food I know has been prepared with good ingredients.
frontendthing 10y ago
was it really "literally no exercise" or was it just "no exercise"? or did you just fatfinger that word?
Frozenlock 10y ago
Hopefully you include the government into those corporate interests. They are the one that pushed the food pyramid and all the anti-fat craze.
agumonkey 10y ago
The food industry is close to absurd. To cut costs the makes things barely edible, then spend a few millions in marketing[1] and another load of money in chemically compensated taste (fancy name to mean sugar+fat+salt, and colors). ps: said that earlier, my body made me change diet, you discover a lot of sensations you don't sense with the average industrial diet (everything is fuzzed by sugar and fat). It's not easy though because you lack all the hoops all these sweet meals gave you before, and your brain crave them a lot. Without a change in culture/lifestyle and real constraints (disease) it seems impossible to achieve on long term. [1] there's a research department in some English univ. dealing with consumer buying reflex optimization, they investigate the package-sound-crispiness / buying ratio
duaneb 10y ago
> It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy. There are two sides to this: it's cheaper to supply unhealthy food, but only when people buy it. Other brands (Whole Foods, Amy's frozen foods, arguably the entire "cooking show" industry) are built around fetishization of the healthy eating. This is why the recent ruling on displaying "added sugars" is so important, even if many more similar steps are necessary for people to make educated, healthy decisions when hungry. If we can convince corporations it is in their profit margins' interest to provide healthier food—ideally because consumers assign value to the nutritional content instead of just calories—we'll see widespread health benefits. That said, you're completely correct, which is why there are systemic problems with the diets of the lower class. Why buy real food when you can feed yourself (or your kids, or your relatives) with cheaper food that is easy to eat? There's simply no reason for those brands to invest in cheaper, healthier food when it would be harder to sell and couldn't piggyback off shared food processing (e.g. processed sugars, grains, meats, proteins).
drivers99 10y ago
This seems similar to the guidelines from the book "Diet Cults" called "agnostic healthy eating" which is a list of foods with the better foods to eat at the top of the list. Essential foods (eat more of these than the other types of foods): 1. vegetables 2. fruits Recommended foods: 3. nuts, seeds, and healthy oils 4. high-quality meats and seafood (by this he means "wild-caught fish and shellfish, only the highest-quality farm-raised seafood, the leanest meat cuts, and meats from wild game and free-ranging animals fed natural diets". Also eggs.) 5. whole grains 6. dairy Acceptable foods (eat less of these than the other types): 7. refined grains 8. low-quality meat and seafood ("all processed meats and all but the leanest cuts of unprocessed meats" as well as "seafood that does not meet the quality standards of watchdog organizations such as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council" are in this category) 9. sweets 10. fried foods No particular category is required if you don't want to eat them, as long as you eat more of each grouping than the one below it. Some of the differences between the two are that the linked article would allow "low-quality" meat as long as it isn't processed, but doesn't include as much "healthy oil" or dairy. Another difference is the article would consider a whole grain cereal to be "highly processed" whereas it would be "whole grains" in the book (the appendices have more details on which foods go in which categories). Same for 100% whole grain bread. So the only qualm I might have is it could be healthier to include more healthy oil and less meat. The article adds behavioral guidelines to cook at home and eat with people to get you to cook more. These guidelines seem both slightly more strict yet also makes the whole list easier to follow. I lost weight on the list I wrote above (agnostic healthy eating), but stopped following it after a while. Your success on the article's guidelines makes me want to try it.
- tcj_phx 10y ago
  I make an effort to a avoid foods made with biodiesel, as I am of the opinion that deodorized polyunsaturated oils are not appropriate for human consumption. If I'm sort of lazy, I'll eat something made with palm oil, even though there is a lot of Omega 6.
namenotrequired 10y ago
What would you recommend for breakfast and lunch? Mine have always been based on bread and I can't find a good alternative.
- fokinsean 10y ago
  Yogurt + granola for breakfast Salads for lunch
- claar 10y ago
  I'm not afraid of carbs, so my usual bread replacement is potato or sweet potato. My usual lunch is a potato & meat & fruit. I'd probably add broccoli or something to that if I weren't lazy/cheap. I'm also not afraid of oil/butter/salt, so it's not hard to make the veggies taste good. Ideal breakfast for me is eggs & meat & perhaps fruit, though I currently have only black coffee for breakfast on weekdays (mild intermittent fasting). I might add that feeling "full" at meals has been a huge motivator for me. Skipping breakfast and not placing limits on what I eat otherwise so long as it's real food has worked extremely well psychologically; I don't feel deprived, and I can see myself continuing this for life.

by claar 10y ago

trentmb 10y ago

> I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed. I dunno- the longer you live, the longer I can sell shit to you.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
LionessLover 10y ago
Corporations - especially publicly traded ones - are not exactly known for their long-term planning. Quarterly reports on the other hand...
- billmalarky 10y ago
  It's a prisoner's dilemma. Lacking government regulation, investment will always flow to the food companies willing to sacrifice the longterm health of consumers in exchange for higher revenue. That is, food corporations that practice methods that increase consumption to unhealthy levels - high sodium, high sugar, low satiating and cheap to produce foods (high-carb, high-yield meat products due to growth hacks like bovine growth hormone). The food companies that choose not to play along are either niche health food companies, or they will go bust by not being able to compete in a commodity market. Sarah Palin (1) would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream. We are "free" to eat whatever is available, and baring government intervention what is available is subject to the forces described in my previous paragraph (ie garbage optimized to make us over-consume). The obesity epidemic WILL NOT be resolved until heavy government regulation comes into play in the food industry. Pretending otherwise is no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex. 1. Obviously I'm just using her here as poster child for a certain political ideology.
  - combatentropy 10y ago
    > Sarah Palin would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream. I don't know, in every town there is a grocery store that sells produce, raw meat, and other unprocessed foods. If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism. Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed. > no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex May I suggest you look into that more?
    - billmalarky 10y ago
      >If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism. You're free to believe that most humans are capable of making healthy eating choices by their own free will if you want (not trying to be catty, and I'm not sure that was the point you were communicating, just how I interpreted your comment), but the data overwhelmingly suggests otherwise. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/USObesityRate1960-2004.svg/350px-USObesityRate1960-2004.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/US... At a certain point I believe it is important to protect people from themselves. Being too proud to admit that "humans can be taken advantage of using certain hacks/tricks" makes society as a whole weaker. >Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed. You and I agree on this point 100%. Currently I believe the FDA has allowed too much leeway with the food industry. I'm not foolish enough to think that it couldn't easily swing too far in the other direction as well.
nickbauman 10y ago
But long term returns almost always have a lower priority to short term returns in a company's balance sheets.
- sheepleherd 10y ago
  sigh... lemme tell ya what they taught us in finance theory class: rich investors are not stupider than average investors; in fact, if investing "for the long term" is the right thing to do, rich investors actually have the resources, wherewithal and the time to do it. The problem is, as hard as it is to predict the future, it is harder to predict farther into the future; and, once you set up a pot of "long term" honey, people have a chance to reorganize their affairs to siphon off said honey and if your idea is to not pay attention to their short term results, you set yourself up for a big long term surprise. Publicly traded companies are mostly companies that have products, markets, customers, service, etc. Generally, when they are losing money compared to other companies, it does not scream "we're pouring money into R&D, great things are around the corner!" This boils down to, statistically speaking, short term results are actually the best indicator of long term results. You'd be foolish (statistically) to overemphasize long term hypotheticals in the face of short term losses. TL;DR that financial markets are too tilted in favor of "short term" results is largely a myth. if it were not a myth, wealth would shift from the majority people who supposedly pay attention to short term results and toward people who ignore short term results leading to the end of the myth. edit (couple above and): I'm not saying that long term projects and ideas and thinking don't ever pay off; I'm saying that saying that they are undervalued and therefore represent an opportunity is a stretch and requires proof that you most likely will not find if you look because others have looked.
  - eightbit 10y ago
    Algorithmics would disagree with you: the greedy algorithm, or trying to find a global maximum from local maxima, usually fails as a method. It's usually a "stupider" way of doing things :P My own experiences, especially related to corporations, seem to corroborate this.
    - 10y ago

andrei_says_ 10y ago

Having stopped consuming processed sugar a few years ago, I can easily say this was the single change I've made with the largest impact on my health and quality of life. When I started reading labels and stopped buying anything with sugar, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice etc., I automatically eliminated processed food. As for food companies, their responsibility is to maximize profit which usually involves selling as much as possible at the highest profit margin possible. Given that high profit margin excludes the possibility of expensive quality ingredients, the variables that remain are taste and perception. Thus, food commercials, stories, "healthy food fetishism" (and pushing same crap as such) and taste laboratories where scientists focus on making said crap palatable, tasty and if possible addictive. Sugar is an addictive substance so it is almost always a part of this formula.

tetrep 10y ago

> I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed. This is touched on a bit in the Omnivore's Dilemma, people without heavy encouragement otherwise, have a rough limit on how many calories they will consume in a day. As a food company that has sufficient market penetration, you're stuck growing your profits at the same rate as the population. To get around this, you'll either need to increase your profits per calorie (sell less for more, cheaper ingredients, etc) or increase the amount of calories people are eating, through marketing and/or formulating your foods in such a way to encourage more consumption. I think most companies opt for both, there's a lot of limits/diminishing returns on the making food cheaper side of things, but on the human consumption side, there's a lot of room for growth until everybody is morbidly obese. The bigger you are, the more calories you need to consume to keep that weight. More calories consumed is more money for food producers.

simonswords82 10y ago
I totally agree with you, but surely some food companies are taking a different approach and that is to charge more for high quality food? Personally I'm very happy to pay a premium for food I know has been prepared with good ingredients.

frontendthing 10y ago

was it really "literally no exercise" or was it just "no exercise"? or did you just fatfinger that word?

Frozenlock 10y ago

Hopefully you include the government into those corporate interests. They are the one that pushed the food pyramid and all the anti-fat craze.

agumonkey 10y ago

The food industry is close to absurd. To cut costs the makes things barely edible, then spend a few millions in marketing[1] and another load of money in chemically compensated taste (fancy name to mean sugar+fat+salt, and colors). ps: said that earlier, my body made me change diet, you discover a lot of sensations you don't sense with the average industrial diet (everything is fuzzed by sugar and fat). It's not easy though because you lack all the hoops all these sweet meals gave you before, and your brain crave them a lot. Without a change in culture/lifestyle and real constraints (disease) it seems impossible to achieve on long term. [1] there's a research department in some English univ. dealing with consumer buying reflex optimization, they investigate the package-sound-crispiness / buying ratio

duaneb 10y ago

> It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy. There are two sides to this: it's cheaper to supply unhealthy food, but only when people buy it. Other brands (Whole Foods, Amy's frozen foods, arguably the entire "cooking show" industry) are built around fetishization of the healthy eating. This is why the recent ruling on displaying "added sugars" is so important, even if many more similar steps are necessary for people to make educated, healthy decisions when hungry. If we can convince corporations it is in their profit margins' interest to provide healthier food—ideally because consumers assign value to the nutritional content instead of just calories—we'll see widespread health benefits. That said, you're completely correct, which is why there are systemic problems with the diets of the lower class. Why buy real food when you can feed yourself (or your kids, or your relatives) with cheaper food that is easy to eat? There's simply no reason for those brands to invest in cheaper, healthier food when it would be harder to sell and couldn't piggyback off shared food processing (e.g. processed sugars, grains, meats, proteins).

drivers99 10y ago

This seems similar to the guidelines from the book "Diet Cults" called "agnostic healthy eating" which is a list of foods with the better foods to eat at the top of the list. Essential foods (eat more of these than the other types of foods): 1. vegetables 2. fruits Recommended foods: 3. nuts, seeds, and healthy oils 4. high-quality meats and seafood (by this he means "wild-caught fish and shellfish, only the highest-quality farm-raised seafood, the leanest meat cuts, and meats from wild game and free-ranging animals fed natural diets". Also eggs.) 5. whole grains 6. dairy Acceptable foods (eat less of these than the other types): 7. refined grains 8. low-quality meat and seafood ("all processed meats and all but the leanest cuts of unprocessed meats" as well as "seafood that does not meet the quality standards of watchdog organizations such as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council" are in this category) 9. sweets 10. fried foods No particular category is required if you don't want to eat them, as long as you eat more of each grouping than the one below it. Some of the differences between the two are that the linked article would allow "low-quality" meat as long as it isn't processed, but doesn't include as much "healthy oil" or dairy. Another difference is the article would consider a whole grain cereal to be "highly processed" whereas it would be "whole grains" in the book (the appendices have more details on which foods go in which categories). Same for 100% whole grain bread. So the only qualm I might have is it could be healthier to include more healthy oil and less meat. The article adds behavioral guidelines to cook at home and eat with people to get you to cook more. These guidelines seem both slightly more strict yet also makes the whole list easier to follow. I lost weight on the list I wrote above (agnostic healthy eating), but stopped following it after a while. Your success on the article's guidelines makes me want to try it.

tcj_phx 10y ago
I make an effort to a avoid foods made with biodiesel, as I am of the opinion that deodorized polyunsaturated oils are not appropriate for human consumption. If I'm sort of lazy, I'll eat something made with palm oil, even though there is a lot of Omega 6.

namenotrequired 10y ago

What would you recommend for breakfast and lunch? Mine have always been based on bread and I can't find a good alternative.

fokinsean 10y ago
Yogurt + granola for breakfast Salads for lunch
claar 10y ago
I'm not afraid of carbs, so my usual bread replacement is potato or sweet potato. My usual lunch is a potato & meat & fruit. I'd probably add broccoli or something to that if I weren't lazy/cheap. I'm also not afraid of oil/butter/salt, so it's not hard to make the veggies taste good. Ideal breakfast for me is eggs & meat & perhaps fruit, though I currently have only black coffee for breakfast on weekdays (mild intermittent fasting). I might add that feeling "full" at meals has been a huge motivator for me. Skipping breakfast and not placing limits on what I eat otherwise so long as it's real food has worked extremely well psychologically; I don't feel deprived, and I can see myself continuing this for life.