4 ms·

- Sugar. - Social networks. - The coddling of the mind. I think you will find that all three have vicious cycles built into them.

by DenisM 5y ago

nofinator 5y ago
Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
- lovecg 5y ago
  It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
  - DenisM 5y ago
    FWIW, my reading of the tea leaves is that fat alone is fine, sugar alone is bad, and sugar+fat maybe worse. The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this: Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go. Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. Monounsaturated fats seem to be generally just good. Omega-3, also, seems good, and Omega-6 less so, but part of that could actually be more about the ratios of omega-6 to -3, which can be 15:1 in the Western diet but people have better health outcomes when they bring omega-6 consumption down and increase omega-3 to get the ratio closer to 4:1 to 1:1. Saturated fats are still debated - some studies did show replacing saturated fats with vegetable fats did reduce cardiovascular disease etc., but then that might be more that there are some protective effects to the vegetable fats and adding them in rather than replacing might have had a similar effect… Then there are about a million confounding variables. Doing a decent amount of exercise is a big one, because it’s harder to control for than the other common health detriment - smoking, but things like whether your dairy is grass-fed (as it is here in Australia and much of Europe) vs. grain fed apparently makes a big difference (grass fed apparently has a lot more things like CLA, omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin K2, the benefits of which seem to potentially more than cancel out any problem from the saturated fat). One other big problem is that a lot of “low fat” products tend to have more sugar added to make up for it. Too much sugar is bad, yes, and it’s pretty alarming how seemingly little you need to be over that threshold. Literally a single can of coke is almost the entirety of the sugar one should be consuming in a whole day! Fruit juice is also pretty bad unfortunately - basically just as bad as soft drink (I love soft drinks, apple juice, sweet ice tea, it’s been a challenge to cut most of it out!).
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      > I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. You can say that again... I was recently looking at the nutrition content of Wendy's cheeseburgers; they actually do a pretty good job at displaying nutrition facts and also scaling it with custom orders. Anyway, I noticed that a triple cheeseburger could have ~4g of trans fats. Wait a sec, is Wendy's ignoring regulations about trans fats? No, as it turns out. I discovered that some trans fats from nature are actually beneficial (palmitoleic acid and vaccenic acid in the beef patties). This went totally counter to everything I thought I knew. In other words, it never ceases to surprise me how nuanced nutrition can be and how easily we oversimplify it.
      - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        A Wendy’s triple cheeseburger still sounds like a poor choice.
      - stephen_g 5y ago
        Yeah, it's interesting, hey? I mentioned Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) - that's another one that is technically a trans fat, but seems to be beneficial (although apparently supplementation doesn't seem to have the same benefits as getting it in food, so maybe there's another interaction, like how foods that contain CLA also often contain Vitamin K2 as well).
SavantIdiot 5y ago
What is "the coddling of the mind"?
- DenisM 5y ago
  The term came from https://www.thecoddling.com/ https://www.thecoddling.com/ but here I refer to a specific aspect: Suppose your reaction to discomfort is to retreat or isolate yourself from it. Having done so you will find that your calibration of comfort has changed and things you previously found at the fringe but normal now became clearly uncomfortable. If you repeat this process several times you will find that the field of acceptable things to do has narrowed itself to a single fine line of propriety that is surrounded by a vast field horrors and misdemeanors. Worse yet, the narrower the range of acceptable things, the more anxious you will be and the harder you will lash out at those recently (but no longer) normal things. For a tame example, I have a number of friends who as they got richer retreated into more and more comfortable suburbs. Perfectly reasonable right? Well, they are now afraid to visit downtown because crime, dirt, and homeless. Not at all reasonable anymore. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. In fact now that I told you, you can't escape seeing them.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    > Suppose your reaction to discomfort is to retreat or isolate yourself from it. Why wouldn't that be my reaction? Seems a pretty normal reaction to most discomfort. I lean into discomfort only when necessary and avoid it otherwise at all costs, that strategy has gotten me pretty far in my half+ century. But even if we assume the proposition that people somehow become more withdrawn as they withdraw... what's the downside? Perhaps your downtown really is a mess and they choose to avoid it. I'm guessing you're not a mind reader, and yet you've created a narrative that your friends have withdrawn due to their inability to handle discomfort and are now... what exactly, bad for the earth? (Recall, that was literally the proposition you responded to.) Sounds rather arbitrary as well as subjectively punitive to me. EDIT: This reminds me of me when I was in my 20's. I used to look down on people who went on vacation and stayed in hotels, or god forbid, resorts. I saw them as soft-headed sheeple who needed to be spoon-fed "fun in a can". Not me. I backpacked. I went to developing nations. In my mind, if you went to a foreign country, you didn't really "visit it" unless you lived among the natives and got your fingers dirty. I got giardia in Belize, was held up at gunpoint in Serbia, escorted by soldiers in Israel, woke up in a roach infested bed in a hostel in Thailand. ... But today? I want to snap my fingers and have someone bring me a cocktail while I sit poolside and sun my fat belly. I no longer enjoy wallowing in 3rd world filth as a means to establish me credentials. I want comfort because I work too goddamn hard for my vacations to involve police reports. So perhaps this is result of cowering away from discomfort, or perhaps it is just a change of priorities.

- Sugar. - Social networks. - The coddling of the mind. I think you will find that all three have vicious cycles built into them.

by DenisM 5y ago

- Sugar. - Social networks. - The coddling of the mind. I think you will find that all three have vicious cycles built into them.

nofinator 5y ago

Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

lovecg 5y ago
It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
- DenisM 5y ago
  FWIW, my reading of the tea leaves is that fat alone is fine, sugar alone is bad, and sugar+fat maybe worse. The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this: Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go. Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. Monounsaturated fats seem to be generally just good. Omega-3, also, seems good, and Omega-6 less so, but part of that could actually be more about the ratios of omega-6 to -3, which can be 15:1 in the Western diet but people have better health outcomes when they bring omega-6 consumption down and increase omega-3 to get the ratio closer to 4:1 to 1:1. Saturated fats are still debated - some studies did show replacing saturated fats with vegetable fats did reduce cardiovascular disease etc., but then that might be more that there are some protective effects to the vegetable fats and adding them in rather than replacing might have had a similar effect… Then there are about a million confounding variables. Doing a decent amount of exercise is a big one, because it’s harder to control for than the other common health detriment - smoking, but things like whether your dairy is grass-fed (as it is here in Australia and much of Europe) vs. grain fed apparently makes a big difference (grass fed apparently has a lot more things like CLA, omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin K2, the benefits of which seem to potentially more than cancel out any problem from the saturated fat). One other big problem is that a lot of “low fat” products tend to have more sugar added to make up for it. Too much sugar is bad, yes, and it’s pretty alarming how seemingly little you need to be over that threshold. Literally a single can of coke is almost the entirety of the sugar one should be consuming in a whole day! Fruit juice is also pretty bad unfortunately - basically just as bad as soft drink (I love soft drinks, apple juice, sweet ice tea, it’s been a challenge to cut most of it out!).
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    > I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. You can say that again... I was recently looking at the nutrition content of Wendy's cheeseburgers; they actually do a pretty good job at displaying nutrition facts and also scaling it with custom orders. Anyway, I noticed that a triple cheeseburger could have ~4g of trans fats. Wait a sec, is Wendy's ignoring regulations about trans fats? No, as it turns out. I discovered that some trans fats from nature are actually beneficial (palmitoleic acid and vaccenic acid in the beef patties). This went totally counter to everything I thought I knew. In other words, it never ceases to surprise me how nuanced nutrition can be and how easily we oversimplify it.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      A Wendy’s triple cheeseburger still sounds like a poor choice.
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      Yeah, it's interesting, hey? I mentioned Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) - that's another one that is technically a trans fat, but seems to be beneficial (although apparently supplementation doesn't seem to have the same benefits as getting it in food, so maybe there's another interaction, like how foods that contain CLA also often contain Vitamin K2 as well).

SavantIdiot 5y ago

What is "the coddling of the mind"?

DenisM 5y ago
The term came from https://www.thecoddling.com/ https://www.thecoddling.com/ but here I refer to a specific aspect: Suppose your reaction to discomfort is to retreat or isolate yourself from it. Having done so you will find that your calibration of comfort has changed and things you previously found at the fringe but normal now became clearly uncomfortable. If you repeat this process several times you will find that the field of acceptable things to do has narrowed itself to a single fine line of propriety that is surrounded by a vast field horrors and misdemeanors. Worse yet, the narrower the range of acceptable things, the more anxious you will be and the harder you will lash out at those recently (but no longer) normal things. For a tame example, I have a number of friends who as they got richer retreated into more and more comfortable suburbs. Perfectly reasonable right? Well, they are now afraid to visit downtown because crime, dirt, and homeless. Not at all reasonable anymore. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. In fact now that I told you, you can't escape seeing them.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > Suppose your reaction to discomfort is to retreat or isolate yourself from it. Why wouldn't that be my reaction? Seems a pretty normal reaction to most discomfort. I lean into discomfort only when necessary and avoid it otherwise at all costs, that strategy has gotten me pretty far in my half+ century. But even if we assume the proposition that people somehow become more withdrawn as they withdraw... what's the downside? Perhaps your downtown really is a mess and they choose to avoid it. I'm guessing you're not a mind reader, and yet you've created a narrative that your friends have withdrawn due to their inability to handle discomfort and are now... what exactly, bad for the earth? (Recall, that was literally the proposition you responded to.) Sounds rather arbitrary as well as subjectively punitive to me. EDIT: This reminds me of me when I was in my 20's. I used to look down on people who went on vacation and stayed in hotels, or god forbid, resorts. I saw them as soft-headed sheeple who needed to be spoon-fed "fun in a can". Not me. I backpacked. I went to developing nations. In my mind, if you went to a foreign country, you didn't really "visit it" unless you lived among the natives and got your fingers dirty. I got giardia in Belize, was held up at gunpoint in Serbia, escorted by soldiers in Israel, woke up in a roach infested bed in a hostel in Thailand. ... But today? I want to snap my fingers and have someone bring me a cocktail while I sit poolside and sun my fat belly. I no longer enjoy wallowing in 3rd world filth as a means to establish me credentials. I want comfort because I work too goddamn hard for my vacations to involve police reports. So perhaps this is result of cowering away from discomfort, or perhaps it is just a change of priorities.