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Obesity is a disease of improper nutrition and nothing else. Physical activity can not fix the problem with food. A country like China could easily control obes

Obesity is a disease of improper nutrition and nothing else. Physical activity can not fix the problem with food. A country like China could easily control obesity by banning all the companies producing obesity by selling obesity causing food products. In the West this is outright difficult, but it's trivial for a country like China. Ban soft drinks, ban fast food, ban junk food. Obesity solved.

jimmy1 8y ago
This is a hot take, but it's wrong. Obesity is a result of genetics and the very simple, battle tested equation of: if calories_consumed > calories burned then x_amt_weight_gain. That's it. You can shift the scale in your favor by being born with the right genes, by not consuming as many calories, or burning more calories. Obviously the most effective one is simply not putting those calories in your body to begin with.
- lardo 8y ago
  Do you ever find yourself thinking, "that looks easy, but maybe there's more nuance here?"
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    Sure. I also find myself thinking "things really don't have to be as hard as people make them out to be"
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
      Medical intervention based on “eat less, exercise more” has a success rate around 2% So yes, it really is that hard. And mostly because it isn’t as simple as the calories in/calories out model. Lots of things contribute in various way. And if anything dieting and exercise can actually make things worse if done wrong. In the “biggest loser” approach, f.ex, all contestants, ended up with a lower metabolic rate, and of course all but one ended up gaining more weight than before the show.
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        > Medical intervention based on “eat less, exercise more” has a success rate around 2% Wait, shit. So what should one do?
        ArrayList 8y ago
        Intermittent fasting. (See "The Obesity Code" by Jason Fung, MD.)
        CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
        Not determined yet it seems but from the looks of things an upgraded model involving the endocrine system and more recently the gut microbiome seems promising. The obesity code referenced in a sibling comment is an interesting read absolutely, fasting is the authors suggestion. It doesn’t talk much of gut microbiome, which seems like a big factor from recent studies, but mentions a very interesting connection to fiber intake though which the author (at that time) interprets simply as a means, to lower GI. Edit: My take - Avoid sugar and sweeterners (Probably want at least 14-days between servings) - Avoid highly processed grains, treat them as sugars, go for whole grains and things with husks instead - In general avoid things that trigger cravings - Healthy fats (nuts, virgin olive oil) are an excellent source of calories, don’t go hungry - Eat lots (lots) of different vegetables - (for adults) Take longer fasts from time to time (3+ days, but probably no more than a week without proper guidance) - East at most two times a day
      - imtringued 8y ago
        Well, it sounds to me like it worked but then they stopped and blame their failure on their success. People can't stay healthy their whole life if they only eat healthy for a few months.
        CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
        Heres the follow up. It’s not just a case of blame, there were measurable harm as a result. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the... But I agree, a healthy diet probably could help them, the one they tried wasn’t it though.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    The nuance here is all in the difficulty of actually taking in fewer calories, due to things like limited willpower
    - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
      This took me probably too long to figure out. As a kid i was always told to finish my plate, then the usual "think of the starving kids" guilt trips, and whatever else. As an adult, I just eat smaller portions of the same garbage I ate before, and I started to lose a bit of weight. I didn't change anything else (at the time). Now I'm working on the rest, but the biggest stepping stone for me was literally just eating smaller portions.
- rjf72 8y ago
  I think you're both saying the same thing here. The key point is that nutrition can change the weights of your equation, which must be accurate even if by appealing to the conservation laws of the universe, in ways that are not obvious to many people. For instance aspartame, a fake '0 calorie' sugar, has been shown to have a relationship with weight gain by numerous studies including some controlled experimental studies. In other words it's not confounded by the fact that overweight/obese are likely substantially more likely to consume aspartame infused products than others. But there's no magic there. While the exact mechanism isn't known (it's not that it simply makes you eat more food) it's going to come down to something that impairs your ability to burn calories. So the equation still stands. It just means that if you consume aspartame you need to eat even less to see weight loss (or not weight gain) than somebody who does not. In practice the exact opposite happens, and then people try to blame things outside their control - such as genetics. But such arguments hold little weight. Obesity has skyrocketed exponentially in just the past several decades. People didn't suddenly all spontaneously change their genetics. But nutritional standards, and indeed calories consumed, both radically changed for the worse.
  - a11595 8y ago
    >relationship with weight gain Yes. An Inverse one. There is no getting around the fact that a 16oz coke has 300 calories, and diet has zero. Believing those tailored studies apply to the obesity use case is being ignorant, and reading the abstract, not the body of the study. Sweeteners can confuse you into being more hungry vs no sweeteners. That does not mean sweeteners making you a tiny bit more hungry, and you eating an extra bite of food to reflect that, is worse than the 300 calories from the coke. Also, if someone is not overweight but actually obese, this does not effect them at all. overweight people - as in no stomach hanging over the belt, but no visible abs stop eating when they stop being hungry, but don't burn all those calories. Aspartame will be worse for them vs having no sweetener OR sugar. But if you have to have something sweet, of course the sweetener is better - it's 300 calories less, and tens of extra calories from the extra bite of food. Obese people - sweeteners don't effect them in any way at all vs no sweetener. They don't just not do enough physical activity to burn off the calories. They also keep eating once they're full. And then they eat some more. Them feeling hungry for an extra 5 minutes does nothing to change the time they stop eating - which is 30 minutes after they stopped being hungry. Shit be tastin' goo boo. Now, I eat complete crap. I eat pizza before bed, and always have desert. I'm 40, 5'11 at 170lb, 6% bodyfat. I've been this way all my life. Food tastes good, and I like to have lots of muscles, so I use up all the calories. So to summarize, you as well as the OP with his talk of exercise, are completely wrong.
baroffoos 8y ago
Ban cars and a lot of the problem will be gone.
- devoply 8y ago
  It's possible. Let's ban them in a few cities and see what happens. All technology creates a certain order, change or eliminate the technology and all of reality changes... Whether that change is overall positive or negative is difficult to predict without going all in. Our approach to technology is stupid because it relegates the decision of which technology is created or destroyed to human desire... which is open to all sorts of corruption and addiction. People will pay for the worst and most addictive thing because it appeals to their psychology not because it's something actually positive. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/28/car-free-belgium-why-cant-brussels-match-ghents-pedestrianised-vision https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/28/car-free-belg...
senectus1 8y ago
Nothing in the universe is "is just" anything. there are complicating variants to everything. even the term "obesity" itself is used entirely too much to cover a massively wide rage of different issues.
tokyodude 8y ago
> A country like China could easily control obesity by banning all the companies producing obesity by selling obesity causing food products really? so ban rice and wheat production? I'm pretty sure I can get fat on natural foods. There have been fat people long before Coke. Japanese Sumo get fat on chanko nabe. Nothing artificial about it.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  Yes, you can get fat on rice, but it's much easier to get fat on sugar. Sugar messes with your body's signaling causing you to consume more than if you were just eating carbs. If we outlawed sugar today, I would place all my savings on the obesity rate declining.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Despite soda consumption dropping over the past 5 years, obesity rates have kept going up....
    - lhl 8y ago
      Do you have a source for this? The data I've seen in peer reviewed publications are based primarily on NHANES data, which doesn't cover recent history. I've seen a Beverage Marketing Corporation graph that shows a 1% decline in soft drinks, but a 4-5% increase in ready-to-drink tea, sports drinks, and energy drinks. The raw Excel data is sold for $3000, so I don't know what the absolute values are, but it seems likely the decline is soda is largely being offset by equivalently bad/sugary replacement drinks.
    - dexterbt1 8y ago
      I'm personally observing that soda companies have diversified their products across sugary drinks and foods, acquisition or new proxy companies even (at least here in Asia). So called sports drinks, fruit juices, coffee/milk/chocolate/soy based sugary drinks, even oat-meals/cereals have over the years increased in SKUs; I bet the net sugar consumption would still be higher if you account all of these.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
There is plenty of Chinese food with lots of sugar in it, not to mention those that are super carb heavy. It isn’t just the western versions of Chinese food either, you could avoid processed and fast food and still have a problem.
- slacka 8y ago
  I lived in mainland China for over 4 years. I lost weight switching from a typical American diet to Chinese one. I don't claim to know the cause, but the standard drink with meals was unsweetened tea, not soda. Yes, the meals were carb heavy, but these carbs were primarily vegetables. Rice was always served at the end, only to fill up, if you were still hungry. From the hundreds of local restaurants to Foxconn's cafeteria, I am sure of a few things. Compared to Americans, they eat a higher percent of vegetables and fat and less meat. For example ordering a pork dish, might actually be chunks of pork fat that Americans would never eat. As far as sweet foods, I only observed that when I was in Shanghai. Most Chinese do not like main courses to be sweetened.
  - sn41 8y ago
    Is the food oily? I am more or less a vegetarian, and have always wondered why Chinese food is seemingly able to hold down obesity as compared to Indian food (I'm Indian) - well, modern Indian food at least. I am not sure whether the traditional Indian food of 70-80 years ago was as oily, fatty and unhealthy as today's fare.
    - GordonS 8y ago
      Something I've observed in India is that (probably due to industry meddling), there have been campaigns to get people to switch from ghee to vegetable and palm oils, saying that ghee is unhealthy. At the same time, obesity and diabetes rates have rocketed. Of course, this is the only cause, but we had similar campaigns in the west against butter and lard, steering people towards vegetable oil.
    - temporoei 8y ago
      One thing I noticed when I was in India, is that local curry has a lot of butter in it. Much more than I ever expected. It tasted delicious, but has its health costs.
fireattack 8y ago
"Ban soft drinks, ban fast food, ban junk food" is trivial for China? I knew HN is auti-China but this is just ridiculous. I have no idea what country China is in your imagination.
- abc-xyz 8y ago
  The world is anti-China, you know, with putting millions of innocent muslims in concentration camps, harvesting organs, building a surveillance state and whatnot. Once the social credit score is fully rolled out then it should be trivial to get rid off (argubly before that as well), put increased tax on unhealthy food and "encourage" companies and supermarkets to sell less unhealthy/more healthy, deduct points for eating unhealthy, ban companies from selling certain products (e.g. give Coca Cola a year to replace their drinks with healthy alternatives). It's difficult to imagine any resistance from the citizens considering what they've gotten away with already, and considering they have full control over media and social networks.
  - taurath 8y ago
    It would seem your idea of the day to day life in China is one entirely written by US news networks - it’s much the same idea that the average American has to dodge bullets from active shooters once a month, which is quite a common idea outside the US.
    - labster 8y ago
      That's ridiculous, it's much closer dodging to active shooters once a year, at least locally. There were a lot of people at the Borderline Grill who were in Vegas for that one music festival a year ago.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      I'll agree that non-Americans will probably not have the most accurate picture of the US, but saying that it's a common idea that they have to dodge bullets from shooters once a month sounds like you also have a bad idea about the life of non-Americans.
dorkwood 8y ago
The idea that there are types of foods which make you gain weight is incorrect. Anecdotal, but I've actually lost several kilos this year on a diet of pizza, fried chicken, and Coca-Cola (I was skinny to begin with -- I'm just even skinnier now). I'm not saying my diet is "healthy", but I do know that it hasn't made me obese. I do, however, worry about the damage I might be causing my body without realising. All my research seems to point to obesity being the main cause of diet-related health issues -- but I'm not obese. I fast for most of the day, so I don't imagine I'll develop insulin sensitivity anytime soon. I walk for over an hour a day, so I don't imagine I'm at a high risk for heart disease. I lift weights twice a week, so I don't have a disproportionate amount of fat on my frame. Is there something I might be doing to myself without realising? I really just eat this way out of convenience. I'd hate to think I was going to die 30 years early because of it.
- kasperni 8y ago
  > The idea that there are types of foods which make you gain weight is incorrect. I'm sorry but you are wrong. Calories-In and Calories-Out might be the main proponent, but it is just not the whole story. And you can find tons of research on it. A link to a recent one, done by Harvard Medical School: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc111218.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc11121...
  - dorkwood 8y ago
    Woah, that’s a huge difference. For those reading, the study claims that participants on a low-carb diet (20% carbs) burned 250 calories more per day than those on a high carb diet (60% carbs), while eating the same amount of calories as the high-carb dieters. To be fair to me, though, the study doesn’t say that specific foods make you gain or lose weight. It says that an overall trend in one’s diet does. I was thinking more in terms of how the general public seems to think “if I eat salad, I will lose weight” and “if I eat fried chicken, I will gain weight”, which I still don’t think is correct. Sorry if I wasn’t very clear about hat.
  - ttty2 8y ago
    He didn't say he ate a ton. He said he eats pizza and doesn't get fat. Well... I agree with him, I ate whatever I wanted for a few months but just half of what I usually eat... lost 7-8kg in 3 months. I was still eating pizza
bluecalm 8y ago
Alternative theory: modern lifestyle with very little exercise, exposure to natural light, less face to face human contact and many addictive devices like smartphones and tv causes people to have lower neurotransmitter levels, be more depressed and looking for cheap dopamine hits which junk food provides. There is a reason people on simulants lose weight even though they have access to the same food. If that's true it doesn't matter what's available unless you straight up introduce ban on buying excess calories. On the other hand more exercise and other lifestyle changes could help with the problem.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  The body processes sugar/high glycemic index food calories in a very different way. Also, sugar is a highly addictive drug, on par with tobacco. Obesity is 90% diet (and avoiding sugars) and 10% exercise because the body is extremely efficient.
  - krzat 8y ago
    Why is sugar so much worse than starch?
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      Half of sugar is fructose which follows a different metabolic pathway than glucose.
    - geomark 8y ago
      Actually, some starchy foods are worse than pure sugar when considering their glycemic index. Jasmine rice, for example, has a GI of 109, where pure sugar is 100. So choose your starches smartly so that you don't get the large spike in blood sugar that can lead to health problems.
      - GordonS 8y ago
        Even how you cook starches impacts on the GI - the more cook them, the worse it gets.
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
I don’t remember the study but HFCS is no more harmful than regular sugar. It’s just that HFCS causes mitochondrial disturbances in your liver when overfeeding. I’d suspect it would be the same for sugar. Banning and restriction is not the solution, it’s education. Especially when one is poor, one is not educated about the impact food choices have on their health. That’s why there is a high degree of correlation between being poor and obesity.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > Especially when one is poor, one is not educated about the impact food choices have on their health. That’s why there is a high degree of correlation between being poor and obesity. In addition, healthy fresh food is expensive, especially more expensive than pre-made food, and poor persons are more likely to work two jobs and/or to raise a child alone, which means that they do not have the time to prepare a meal themselves. Taxing sugar is nothing more than another tax on being poor or otherwise disadvantaged in life.
  - jamienicol 8y ago
    I don't have data, and realise my experience is limited as someone who can afford healthy fresh food. But I've noticed the sugar tax in the UK has led to a reduction in sugar in many items, rather than just passing the cost on to the consumer.
- bad_user 8y ago
  I don't know about "mitochondrial disturbances", however fructose gets metabolized only in the liver, so very unlike glucose or saturated or monounsaturated fat. Fructose competes in the liver with other nutrients and in large quantities it becomes toxic, leading to a fatty liver, or a fatty pancreas. And as I wrote elsewhere, a fatty liver or a fatty pancreas are the best predictors of obesity or diabetes. Our body is very efficient at processing glucose, so glucose is very different from fructose. This is why honey is much healthier than table sugar, because of the glucose/fructose ratio. Also "the dose makes the poison". Eating a banana or two per day won't screw your liver, but drinking Coca Cola daily will.

jimmy1 8y ago

This is a hot take, but it's wrong. Obesity is a result of genetics and the very simple, battle tested equation of: if calories_consumed > calories burned then x_amt_weight_gain. That's it. You can shift the scale in your favor by being born with the right genes, by not consuming as many calories, or burning more calories. Obviously the most effective one is simply not putting those calories in your body to begin with.

lardo 8y ago
Do you ever find yourself thinking, "that looks easy, but maybe there's more nuance here?"
- jimmy1 8y ago
  Sure. I also find myself thinking "things really don't have to be as hard as people make them out to be"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
    Medical intervention based on “eat less, exercise more” has a success rate around 2% So yes, it really is that hard. And mostly because it isn’t as simple as the calories in/calories out model. Lots of things contribute in various way. And if anything dieting and exercise can actually make things worse if done wrong. In the “biggest loser” approach, f.ex, all contestants, ended up with a lower metabolic rate, and of course all but one ended up gaining more weight than before the show.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      > Medical intervention based on “eat less, exercise more” has a success rate around 2% Wait, shit. So what should one do?
      - ArrayList 8y ago
        Intermittent fasting. (See "The Obesity Code" by Jason Fung, MD.)
      - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
        Not determined yet it seems but from the looks of things an upgraded model involving the endocrine system and more recently the gut microbiome seems promising. The obesity code referenced in a sibling comment is an interesting read absolutely, fasting is the authors suggestion. It doesn’t talk much of gut microbiome, which seems like a big factor from recent studies, but mentions a very interesting connection to fiber intake though which the author (at that time) interprets simply as a means, to lower GI. Edit: My take - Avoid sugar and sweeterners (Probably want at least 14-days between servings) - Avoid highly processed grains, treat them as sugars, go for whole grains and things with husks instead - In general avoid things that trigger cravings - Healthy fats (nuts, virgin olive oil) are an excellent source of calories, don’t go hungry - Eat lots (lots) of different vegetables - (for adults) Take longer fasts from time to time (3+ days, but probably no more than a week without proper guidance) - East at most two times a day
    - imtringued 8y ago
      Well, it sounds to me like it worked but then they stopped and blame their failure on their success. People can't stay healthy their whole life if they only eat healthy for a few months.
      - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
        Heres the follow up. It’s not just a case of blame, there were measurable harm as a result. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the... But I agree, a healthy diet probably could help them, the one they tried wasn’t it though.
- mikeash 8y ago
  The nuance here is all in the difficulty of actually taking in fewer calories, due to things like limited willpower
  - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
    This took me probably too long to figure out. As a kid i was always told to finish my plate, then the usual "think of the starving kids" guilt trips, and whatever else. As an adult, I just eat smaller portions of the same garbage I ate before, and I started to lose a bit of weight. I didn't change anything else (at the time). Now I'm working on the rest, but the biggest stepping stone for me was literally just eating smaller portions.
rjf72 8y ago
I think you're both saying the same thing here. The key point is that nutrition can change the weights of your equation, which must be accurate even if by appealing to the conservation laws of the universe, in ways that are not obvious to many people. For instance aspartame, a fake '0 calorie' sugar, has been shown to have a relationship with weight gain by numerous studies including some controlled experimental studies. In other words it's not confounded by the fact that overweight/obese are likely substantially more likely to consume aspartame infused products than others. But there's no magic there. While the exact mechanism isn't known (it's not that it simply makes you eat more food) it's going to come down to something that impairs your ability to burn calories. So the equation still stands. It just means that if you consume aspartame you need to eat even less to see weight loss (or not weight gain) than somebody who does not. In practice the exact opposite happens, and then people try to blame things outside their control - such as genetics. But such arguments hold little weight. Obesity has skyrocketed exponentially in just the past several decades. People didn't suddenly all spontaneously change their genetics. But nutritional standards, and indeed calories consumed, both radically changed for the worse.
- a11595 8y ago
  >relationship with weight gain Yes. An Inverse one. There is no getting around the fact that a 16oz coke has 300 calories, and diet has zero. Believing those tailored studies apply to the obesity use case is being ignorant, and reading the abstract, not the body of the study. Sweeteners can confuse you into being more hungry vs no sweeteners. That does not mean sweeteners making you a tiny bit more hungry, and you eating an extra bite of food to reflect that, is worse than the 300 calories from the coke. Also, if someone is not overweight but actually obese, this does not effect them at all. overweight people - as in no stomach hanging over the belt, but no visible abs stop eating when they stop being hungry, but don't burn all those calories. Aspartame will be worse for them vs having no sweetener OR sugar. But if you have to have something sweet, of course the sweetener is better - it's 300 calories less, and tens of extra calories from the extra bite of food. Obese people - sweeteners don't effect them in any way at all vs no sweetener. They don't just not do enough physical activity to burn off the calories. They also keep eating once they're full. And then they eat some more. Them feeling hungry for an extra 5 minutes does nothing to change the time they stop eating - which is 30 minutes after they stopped being hungry. Shit be tastin' goo boo. Now, I eat complete crap. I eat pizza before bed, and always have desert. I'm 40, 5'11 at 170lb, 6% bodyfat. I've been this way all my life. Food tastes good, and I like to have lots of muscles, so I use up all the calories. So to summarize, you as well as the OP with his talk of exercise, are completely wrong.

baroffoos 8y ago

Ban cars and a lot of the problem will be gone.

devoply 8y ago
It's possible. Let's ban them in a few cities and see what happens. All technology creates a certain order, change or eliminate the technology and all of reality changes... Whether that change is overall positive or negative is difficult to predict without going all in. Our approach to technology is stupid because it relegates the decision of which technology is created or destroyed to human desire... which is open to all sorts of corruption and addiction. People will pay for the worst and most addictive thing because it appeals to their psychology not because it's something actually positive. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/28/car-free-belgium-why-cant-brussels-match-ghents-pedestrianised-vision https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/28/car-free-belg...

senectus1 8y ago

Nothing in the universe is "is just" anything. there are complicating variants to everything. even the term "obesity" itself is used entirely too much to cover a massively wide rage of different issues.

tokyodude 8y ago

> A country like China could easily control obesity by banning all the companies producing obesity by selling obesity causing food products really? so ban rice and wheat production? I'm pretty sure I can get fat on natural foods. There have been fat people long before Coke. Japanese Sumo get fat on chanko nabe. Nothing artificial about it.

TACIXAT 8y ago
Yes, you can get fat on rice, but it's much easier to get fat on sugar. Sugar messes with your body's signaling causing you to consume more than if you were just eating carbs. If we outlawed sugar today, I would place all my savings on the obesity rate declining.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Despite soda consumption dropping over the past 5 years, obesity rates have kept going up....
  - lhl 8y ago
    Do you have a source for this? The data I've seen in peer reviewed publications are based primarily on NHANES data, which doesn't cover recent history. I've seen a Beverage Marketing Corporation graph that shows a 1% decline in soft drinks, but a 4-5% increase in ready-to-drink tea, sports drinks, and energy drinks. The raw Excel data is sold for $3000, so I don't know what the absolute values are, but it seems likely the decline is soda is largely being offset by equivalently bad/sugary replacement drinks.
  - dexterbt1 8y ago
    I'm personally observing that soda companies have diversified their products across sugary drinks and foods, acquisition or new proxy companies even (at least here in Asia). So called sports drinks, fruit juices, coffee/milk/chocolate/soy based sugary drinks, even oat-meals/cereals have over the years increased in SKUs; I bet the net sugar consumption would still be higher if you account all of these.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

There is plenty of Chinese food with lots of sugar in it, not to mention those that are super carb heavy. It isn’t just the western versions of Chinese food either, you could avoid processed and fast food and still have a problem.

slacka 8y ago
I lived in mainland China for over 4 years. I lost weight switching from a typical American diet to Chinese one. I don't claim to know the cause, but the standard drink with meals was unsweetened tea, not soda. Yes, the meals were carb heavy, but these carbs were primarily vegetables. Rice was always served at the end, only to fill up, if you were still hungry. From the hundreds of local restaurants to Foxconn's cafeteria, I am sure of a few things. Compared to Americans, they eat a higher percent of vegetables and fat and less meat. For example ordering a pork dish, might actually be chunks of pork fat that Americans would never eat. As far as sweet foods, I only observed that when I was in Shanghai. Most Chinese do not like main courses to be sweetened.
- sn41 8y ago
  Is the food oily? I am more or less a vegetarian, and have always wondered why Chinese food is seemingly able to hold down obesity as compared to Indian food (I'm Indian) - well, modern Indian food at least. I am not sure whether the traditional Indian food of 70-80 years ago was as oily, fatty and unhealthy as today's fare.
  - GordonS 8y ago
    Something I've observed in India is that (probably due to industry meddling), there have been campaigns to get people to switch from ghee to vegetable and palm oils, saying that ghee is unhealthy. At the same time, obesity and diabetes rates have rocketed. Of course, this is the only cause, but we had similar campaigns in the west against butter and lard, steering people towards vegetable oil.
  - temporoei 8y ago
    One thing I noticed when I was in India, is that local curry has a lot of butter in it. Much more than I ever expected. It tasted delicious, but has its health costs.

fireattack 8y ago

"Ban soft drinks, ban fast food, ban junk food" is trivial for China? I knew HN is auti-China but this is just ridiculous. I have no idea what country China is in your imagination.

abc-xyz 8y ago
The world is anti-China, you know, with putting millions of innocent muslims in concentration camps, harvesting organs, building a surveillance state and whatnot. Once the social credit score is fully rolled out then it should be trivial to get rid off (argubly before that as well), put increased tax on unhealthy food and "encourage" companies and supermarkets to sell less unhealthy/more healthy, deduct points for eating unhealthy, ban companies from selling certain products (e.g. give Coca Cola a year to replace their drinks with healthy alternatives). It's difficult to imagine any resistance from the citizens considering what they've gotten away with already, and considering they have full control over media and social networks.
- taurath 8y ago
  It would seem your idea of the day to day life in China is one entirely written by US news networks - it’s much the same idea that the average American has to dodge bullets from active shooters once a month, which is quite a common idea outside the US.
  - labster 8y ago
    That's ridiculous, it's much closer dodging to active shooters once a year, at least locally. There were a lot of people at the Borderline Grill who were in Vegas for that one music festival a year ago.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I'll agree that non-Americans will probably not have the most accurate picture of the US, but saying that it's a common idea that they have to dodge bullets from shooters once a month sounds like you also have a bad idea about the life of non-Americans.

dorkwood 8y ago

The idea that there are types of foods which make you gain weight is incorrect. Anecdotal, but I've actually lost several kilos this year on a diet of pizza, fried chicken, and Coca-Cola (I was skinny to begin with -- I'm just even skinnier now). I'm not saying my diet is "healthy", but I do know that it hasn't made me obese. I do, however, worry about the damage I might be causing my body without realising. All my research seems to point to obesity being the main cause of diet-related health issues -- but I'm not obese. I fast for most of the day, so I don't imagine I'll develop insulin sensitivity anytime soon. I walk for over an hour a day, so I don't imagine I'm at a high risk for heart disease. I lift weights twice a week, so I don't have a disproportionate amount of fat on my frame. Is there something I might be doing to myself without realising? I really just eat this way out of convenience. I'd hate to think I was going to die 30 years early because of it.

kasperni 8y ago
> The idea that there are types of foods which make you gain weight is incorrect. I'm sorry but you are wrong. Calories-In and Calories-Out might be the main proponent, but it is just not the whole story. And you can find tons of research on it. A link to a recent one, done by Harvard Medical School: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc111218.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc11121...
- dorkwood 8y ago
  Woah, that’s a huge difference. For those reading, the study claims that participants on a low-carb diet (20% carbs) burned 250 calories more per day than those on a high carb diet (60% carbs), while eating the same amount of calories as the high-carb dieters. To be fair to me, though, the study doesn’t say that specific foods make you gain or lose weight. It says that an overall trend in one’s diet does. I was thinking more in terms of how the general public seems to think “if I eat salad, I will lose weight” and “if I eat fried chicken, I will gain weight”, which I still don’t think is correct. Sorry if I wasn’t very clear about hat.
- ttty2 8y ago
  He didn't say he ate a ton. He said he eats pizza and doesn't get fat. Well... I agree with him, I ate whatever I wanted for a few months but just half of what I usually eat... lost 7-8kg in 3 months. I was still eating pizza

bluecalm 8y ago

Alternative theory: modern lifestyle with very little exercise, exposure to natural light, less face to face human contact and many addictive devices like smartphones and tv causes people to have lower neurotransmitter levels, be more depressed and looking for cheap dopamine hits which junk food provides. There is a reason people on simulants lose weight even though they have access to the same food. If that's true it doesn't matter what's available unless you straight up introduce ban on buying excess calories. On the other hand more exercise and other lifestyle changes could help with the problem.

andrei_says_ 8y ago
The body processes sugar/high glycemic index food calories in a very different way. Also, sugar is a highly addictive drug, on par with tobacco. Obesity is 90% diet (and avoiding sugars) and 10% exercise because the body is extremely efficient.
- krzat 8y ago
  Why is sugar so much worse than starch?
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Half of sugar is fructose which follows a different metabolic pathway than glucose.
  - geomark 8y ago
    Actually, some starchy foods are worse than pure sugar when considering their glycemic index. Jasmine rice, for example, has a GI of 109, where pure sugar is 100. So choose your starches smartly so that you don't get the large spike in blood sugar that can lead to health problems.
    - GordonS 8y ago
      Even how you cook starches impacts on the GI - the more cook them, the worse it gets.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

I don’t remember the study but HFCS is no more harmful than regular sugar. It’s just that HFCS causes mitochondrial disturbances in your liver when overfeeding. I’d suspect it would be the same for sugar. Banning and restriction is not the solution, it’s education. Especially when one is poor, one is not educated about the impact food choices have on their health. That’s why there is a high degree of correlation between being poor and obesity.

mschuster91 8y ago
> Especially when one is poor, one is not educated about the impact food choices have on their health. That’s why there is a high degree of correlation between being poor and obesity. In addition, healthy fresh food is expensive, especially more expensive than pre-made food, and poor persons are more likely to work two jobs and/or to raise a child alone, which means that they do not have the time to prepare a meal themselves. Taxing sugar is nothing more than another tax on being poor or otherwise disadvantaged in life.
- jamienicol 8y ago
  I don't have data, and realise my experience is limited as someone who can afford healthy fresh food. But I've noticed the sugar tax in the UK has led to a reduction in sugar in many items, rather than just passing the cost on to the consumer.
bad_user 8y ago
I don't know about "mitochondrial disturbances", however fructose gets metabolized only in the liver, so very unlike glucose or saturated or monounsaturated fat. Fructose competes in the liver with other nutrients and in large quantities it becomes toxic, leading to a fatty liver, or a fatty pancreas. And as I wrote elsewhere, a fatty liver or a fatty pancreas are the best predictors of obesity or diabetes. Our body is very efficient at processing glucose, so glucose is very different from fructose. This is why honey is much healthier than table sugar, because of the glucose/fructose ratio. Also "the dose makes the poison". Eating a banana or two per day won't screw your liver, but drinking Coca Cola daily will.