26 ms·

This drug is a net good for society, but we have to fix the root problem. Much of the food we eat is filled with addictive ingredients (sugar, excess fats/oils,

This drug is a net good for society, but we have to fix the root problem. Much of the food we eat is filled with addictive ingredients (sugar, excess fats/oils, etc) that provide little nutritional value but are highly addictive. We’re subsidizing companies that create unhealthy addictive food and subsidizing companies to create drugs to counter the unhealthy addictive food. This is an enormous waste of resources.

drjasonharrison 4y ago
While we are drowning in quick to consume, non-nutritious, calories, we also have higher levels of anxiety, stress and more distractions. To your comment, maybe more countries should attempt to implement programs similar to the UK's success in lowering sodium intake by slowly adjusting the sodium content of all manufacturered foods. https://www.nature.com/articles/jhh2013105 https://www.nature.com/articles/jhh2013105
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > we also have higher levels of anxiety, stress Why should that be true? Your kids aren't going off to WW2 to die. You aren't going to starve if bugs ate your crops. You aren't going to get clubbed and robbed if you follow a forest path.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I would say our 'actual' stressors are far less, but our contrived stressors are far more. The fact I'm not going to die tomorrow from starvation is an actual reduction in stress. The fact that someone on the TV is screaming 24/7 that I'm going 'fucking die because THEY are out to get me' is a contrived stressor that has a real effect on everybody in society.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Maybe that's the point. A lack of overt threats leads to greater trepidation over covert threats. Wouldn't you think that there was more anxiety and stress in the Cold War among the civilian population than in WWII? Certainly societal upheavals seem to indicate so.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      > Wouldn't you think that there was more anxiety and stress in the Cold War among the civilian population than in WWII? No. I lived through part of the cold war. In WW2 everybody knew families with dead sons or sons that came back in pieces or sons that just disappeared. My neighbor in the 60s was a paratrooper, who came back missing a leg.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    By that logic, the phenomenon of professional burnout thanks to constant stress shouldn't be a thing in IT, and yet it clearly is.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EamonnMR 4y ago
If we're going to treat calories as addictive and addiction as a disease rather than a personal failing it should follow that we treat the disease with a drug.
- elcomet 4y ago
  But not only. It also follow that we need to regulate the industry and stop advertising for sugar for example
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    We do not - because it just codifies our misinformed populist views instead of actually solving the problem. Sugar consumption is going down and it doesn't seem to have any impact. Calorie equated studies show no difference between low fat or low carb diets. It all boils down to excess calories.
- hansonkd13 4y ago
  They didn’t say calories are addictive. They clearly said certain foods are addictive. Those foods should be more regulated like cigarettes and companies take more responsibility as a first or at least concurrent step to everyone taking more drugs.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    As far as I can tell, our social policies don't really work for managing addiction. We just hook up a vacuum cleaner to people's pockets and suck the money out of them if they smoke. Call it a "sin tax". But the problem is that people prioritize their next fix above other things; would you rather get some cigarettes or pay your rent, many people choose the cigarettes. I'm not sure how that helps anyone, and I'm not sure how expanding it to sodas or doughnuts would help anyone. Regressive taxes also don't work well. I don't always eat super healthy. Making unhealthy food cost more wouldn't have any measurable impact, except maybe tanking my 401k because half the Fortune 500 goes out of business.
kenjackson 4y ago
Isn't all food addictive? Is there something more specific you mean about addition when it comes to these foods? It seems like it may be more about caloric density than addiction.
- maxlamb 4y ago
  You find broccoli addictive?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Hell yes. Have you ever roasted it with some lemon slices? Or broken up all the individual florets with a mandolin and tossed it as a salad? Whirred it into a soup? Broccoli is incredible.
  - mjmahone17 4y ago
    Not OP but I do. If I had a plate of steamed or roasted broccoli available on demand at any time, I would eat it like most people do chips. Broccoli tastes great, but requires a lot more prep than “junk food” to get there. I eat junk food mainly because it takes me no effort and still tastes good: for me the addiction is not having to put in any effort to be satiated, more than the taste itself.
    - kenjackson 4y ago
      I'm OP, and I agree wholeheartedly with you. And when I do eat junk food I don't eat a crazy amount in volume. But the calorie density of them makes it such that I ate a crazy amount of calories. It's not that I eat a bag of chips per day. But a small bag of chips is 240 calories, while carrot chips of the same mass/volume are 20 calories. Do I prefer junk food over some healthy food -- yes, probably so (but I love broccoli). But I don't know that my eating habits are drastically different between the two. To put it another way, if the junk food I ate suddenly became healthy for you, I think people say I was just eating a healthy diet.
      - 4y ago
dcolkitt 4y ago
Disagree. People genuinely enjoy those foods, because they're tasty and flavorful. And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus. We know this because we have hunter-gatherer populations who consume 50% of their diets in sugar (e.g. the Hadza) or fats (e.g. Intuit), and they have none of the diseases of abundance found in modern populations because they have near zero obesity. The problem is not the food. The problem is obesity. The food is only an issue because some people have overly strong appetites relative to the abundance of food. If we can cure obesity, then we can literally have our cake and eat it too. Humans obviously value tasty and flavorful food, and its existence adds joy to people's lives. That's why they'll pay hundreds of dollars per meal for the best restaurants. In sum total the development of GLP-1 agonists has maybe cost $20 billion in research at most. That's literally less than 0.1% of global GDP, hardly an "enormous waste of resources".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Gatsky 4y ago
  There are randomised controlled trials of diets (without caloric restriction). They show that some diets are better than others for real clinical endpoints, eg mediterranean vs low fat diet for secondary prevention of cardiac events [1]. The effect size in that example is not small, it is large, despite most participants already being on a statin. This data shows that diets are biologically active and significantly impact health. Therefore, the philosophy you espouse cannot be correct, or at least needs to be heavily modified. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00122-2/abstract https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
  - dcolkitt 4y ago
    You haven't controlled for body weight changes though. Nobody doubts that diets (if adhered to) can reduce weight. So if biomarkers improve relative to an alternative diet, the question is it because A) the Med diet is more effective at weight loss, or B) the Med diet has benefits outside weight loss. The research you linked is interesting, but confounded by weight loss. Research that has directly tried to control for this has generally found that the health benefits of the Med diet are mostly or wholly attributable to the mediating impact of weight/fat loss.[1] This is a critical question, because GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide are far more effective at weight loss (with much lower dropout rates) than any diet known to mankind. So if the benefit of the Med diet is mediated by weight loss, who cares in the age of GLP-1 agonists? It's like arguing about the fastest hot air balloon after the invention of the jet engine. [1]https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Obesity-Mediates-the-Association-between-Diet-and-Park-Zhang/9fcfb1a781d9fc83aa6949307949a226be3dd6dd https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Obesity-Mediates-the-A...
imranq 4y ago
I agree that we have incredible waste on both sides, but there is an even greater culprit: people are lacking true meaning and purpose in their lives and are indulging in these foods to distract themselves from their inner emptiness.
- mym1990 4y ago
  This is a pretty big leap, what is even "true meaning and purpose"? The culprit is that this food is literally everywhere and billions of dollars are poured into research everywhere to design systems that entice humans to take the convenient way out. If I was to go along with your hypothesis, I would alter it to say that poor nutrition is what contributes to a person's lack of "true meaning and purpose".
  - skulk 4y ago
    > what is even "[lacking] true meaning and purpose"? Perhaps the alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor? It's underrated how depressing it is to not get to eat the sausage you broke your back making.
    - mym1990 4y ago
      Uhh okay, I can give you 100,000 examples of what is not a tree, but that isn't what I asked for is it?
      - skulk 4y ago
        When we talk about things, we sometimes use their relationship to other things to define them rather than talking about them directly. I'm not sure how my answer is irrelevant and deserving of your snark.
  - imranq 4y ago
    I agree that society has been designed to make things more and more convenient in the name of progress and that we haven't made the nutritious food convenient yet. Stated another way, poor nutrition is the default choice in most of the western world. Still, I think its possible to make the idea of "purpose" more concrete. You could define "true meaning and purpose" to be goals that are greater than oneself that require one's full potential in mind and body and sacrifice of immediate pleasures for long-term gain. The widespread nature of obesity indicates that many people don't consider a healthy body as necessary for their goals and hence don't sacrifice immediate food gratification for those goals. Hence most people don't have goals that require their full body potential.
plutonorm 4y ago
I think that toxin exposure - unavoidable in the modern world - is likely the biggest culprit here. There are plenty of ideas about which toxins are causing the problem, but there are so many that it would be nigh on impossible to regulate them all out of the environment.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I would think you're completely wrong. The green revolution was the first time in history that we were able to continually produce excess food for (excluding distribution issues) the entire earths population. Even more so, the new foods we are able to supply via processing are highly calorically dense. Simply put if you take mammalian models and allow them to eat all they want they blow up like little balloons. This is no different from bears feasting on salmon for the last millions of years. Creatures are designed to overconsume because the ones that didn't in the past didn't make it thru the lean times.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  Please define 'toxin' and the mechanism by which they produce harm.
moffkalast 4y ago
That really is the core of the issue, and furthermore once you've used to a sugar diet you crave it more and regular food starts tasting worse in comparison somehow. I bet it's something to do with the gut-brain connection and a large glut of sugar eating bacteria signalling it's time to feed them. Just a theory, but there is some kind of correlated process there. And the reverse is also true, if you go a while without eating anything high in sugar, what used to taste normal can taste almost unbearably sweet. Exceedingly hard to do with it added to just about all things in absurd amounts though.
- CadmiumYellow 4y ago
  The first time I tried ketchup after strictly avoiding added sugars for several weeks was a WILD experience. It tasted sweeter than maple syrup. I used to douse my food in ketchup and now I can't even eat it on fries because it's so sickeningly sweet. I noticed the same with most bottled salad dressings and sauces (barbecue sauce and honey mustard being even more egregious than ketchup).
  - grecy 4y ago
    I just came back to North America after 18 months in Australia. Ketchup compared to Tomato Sauce is a wild difference!
    - CadmiumYellow 4y ago
      Is it?! Maybe I need to order some tomato sauce from Australia. I miss ketchup, I just want it to taste like salt/vinegar/tomato like it used to before I noticed the sugar.
paulpauper 4y ago
Even healthy, nutritious food is packed with calories. Anything that is not a fruit or vegetable can easily cause weight gain. Before civilization, humans had to expend a lot of energy just to get food, what little they could obtain.
grecy 4y ago
> This is an enormous waste of resources Of course it is, which is fantastic for the economy. Like the Industrial War Complex, it's horrifically bad for people and resources, but does wonders for the pockets of those in power
mateo1 4y ago
Carbohydrates, fat and protein are the 3 main classes of molecules humans need to survive. Sugar is simply a fast absorbed carbohydrate, glucose is basically the very thing that keeps us alive 99% of the time. We are literally build around glucose. Marking it as "addictive" and without nutritional value is idiotic. A choice of a particular diet high in sugar can have negative affects, but guess what, you can chose a different diet and stop being obese instead of asking for one of the most important nutrients that exist to be banned.
npsimons 4y ago
> We’re subsidizing companies that create unhealthy addictive food People love to bitch about the "diet industry" (which as a whole, seems to be almost entirely bro-science and snake oil), but the profits made there pale in comparison to fast food and processed food. It's really something that we should fix, like we did with tobacco and alcohol. Fixing food deserts, even though they are not really widespread enough to entirely account for the obesity epidemic, needs to happen as well. And taking subsidies away from animal products like meat, dairy and corn (specifically for HFCS) would go a long ways to improving the standard American diet (aka, SAD).

drjasonharrison 4y ago

While we are drowning in quick to consume, non-nutritious, calories, we also have higher levels of anxiety, stress and more distractions. To your comment, maybe more countries should attempt to implement programs similar to the UK's success in lowering sodium intake by slowly adjusting the sodium content of all manufacturered foods. https://www.nature.com/articles/jhh2013105 https://www.nature.com/articles/jhh2013105

WalterBright 4y ago
> we also have higher levels of anxiety, stress Why should that be true? Your kids aren't going off to WW2 to die. You aren't going to starve if bugs ate your crops. You aren't going to get clubbed and robbed if you follow a forest path.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I would say our 'actual' stressors are far less, but our contrived stressors are far more. The fact I'm not going to die tomorrow from starvation is an actual reduction in stress. The fact that someone on the TV is screaming 24/7 that I'm going 'fucking die because THEY are out to get me' is a contrived stressor that has a real effect on everybody in society.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Maybe that's the point. A lack of overt threats leads to greater trepidation over covert threats. Wouldn't you think that there was more anxiety and stress in the Cold War among the civilian population than in WWII? Certainly societal upheavals seem to indicate so.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > Wouldn't you think that there was more anxiety and stress in the Cold War among the civilian population than in WWII? No. I lived through part of the cold war. In WW2 everybody knew families with dead sons or sons that came back in pieces or sons that just disappeared. My neighbor in the 60s was a paratrooper, who came back missing a leg.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  By that logic, the phenomenon of professional burnout thanks to constant stress shouldn't be a thing in IT, and yet it clearly is.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

EamonnMR 4y ago

If we're going to treat calories as addictive and addiction as a disease rather than a personal failing it should follow that we treat the disease with a drug.

elcomet 4y ago
But not only. It also follow that we need to regulate the industry and stop advertising for sugar for example
- moonchrome 4y ago
  We do not - because it just codifies our misinformed populist views instead of actually solving the problem. Sugar consumption is going down and it doesn't seem to have any impact. Calorie equated studies show no difference between low fat or low carb diets. It all boils down to excess calories.
hansonkd13 4y ago
They didn’t say calories are addictive. They clearly said certain foods are addictive. Those foods should be more regulated like cigarettes and companies take more responsibility as a first or at least concurrent step to everyone taking more drugs.
- jrockway 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, our social policies don't really work for managing addiction. We just hook up a vacuum cleaner to people's pockets and suck the money out of them if they smoke. Call it a "sin tax". But the problem is that people prioritize their next fix above other things; would you rather get some cigarettes or pay your rent, many people choose the cigarettes. I'm not sure how that helps anyone, and I'm not sure how expanding it to sodas or doughnuts would help anyone. Regressive taxes also don't work well. I don't always eat super healthy. Making unhealthy food cost more wouldn't have any measurable impact, except maybe tanking my 401k because half the Fortune 500 goes out of business.

kenjackson 4y ago

Isn't all food addictive? Is there something more specific you mean about addition when it comes to these foods? It seems like it may be more about caloric density than addiction.

maxlamb 4y ago
You find broccoli addictive?
- tptacek 4y ago
  Hell yes. Have you ever roasted it with some lemon slices? Or broken up all the individual florets with a mandolin and tossed it as a salad? Whirred it into a soup? Broccoli is incredible.
- mjmahone17 4y ago
  Not OP but I do. If I had a plate of steamed or roasted broccoli available on demand at any time, I would eat it like most people do chips. Broccoli tastes great, but requires a lot more prep than “junk food” to get there. I eat junk food mainly because it takes me no effort and still tastes good: for me the addiction is not having to put in any effort to be satiated, more than the taste itself.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    I'm OP, and I agree wholeheartedly with you. And when I do eat junk food I don't eat a crazy amount in volume. But the calorie density of them makes it such that I ate a crazy amount of calories. It's not that I eat a bag of chips per day. But a small bag of chips is 240 calories, while carrot chips of the same mass/volume are 20 calories. Do I prefer junk food over some healthy food -- yes, probably so (but I love broccoli). But I don't know that my eating habits are drastically different between the two. To put it another way, if the junk food I ate suddenly became healthy for you, I think people say I was just eating a healthy diet.
    - 4y ago

dcolkitt 4y ago

Disagree. People genuinely enjoy those foods, because they're tasty and flavorful. And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus. We know this because we have hunter-gatherer populations who consume 50% of their diets in sugar (e.g. the Hadza) or fats (e.g. Intuit), and they have none of the diseases of abundance found in modern populations because they have near zero obesity. The problem is not the food. The problem is obesity. The food is only an issue because some people have overly strong appetites relative to the abundance of food. If we can cure obesity, then we can literally have our cake and eat it too. Humans obviously value tasty and flavorful food, and its existence adds joy to people's lives. That's why they'll pay hundreds of dollars per meal for the best restaurants. In sum total the development of GLP-1 agonists has maybe cost $20 billion in research at most. That's literally less than 0.1% of global GDP, hardly an "enormous waste of resources".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Gatsky 4y ago
There are randomised controlled trials of diets (without caloric restriction). They show that some diets are better than others for real clinical endpoints, eg mediterranean vs low fat diet for secondary prevention of cardiac events [1]. The effect size in that example is not small, it is large, despite most participants already being on a statin. This data shows that diets are biologically active and significantly impact health. Therefore, the philosophy you espouse cannot be correct, or at least needs to be heavily modified. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00122-2/abstract https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- dcolkitt 4y ago
  You haven't controlled for body weight changes though. Nobody doubts that diets (if adhered to) can reduce weight. So if biomarkers improve relative to an alternative diet, the question is it because A) the Med diet is more effective at weight loss, or B) the Med diet has benefits outside weight loss. The research you linked is interesting, but confounded by weight loss. Research that has directly tried to control for this has generally found that the health benefits of the Med diet are mostly or wholly attributable to the mediating impact of weight/fat loss.[1] This is a critical question, because GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide are far more effective at weight loss (with much lower dropout rates) than any diet known to mankind. So if the benefit of the Med diet is mediated by weight loss, who cares in the age of GLP-1 agonists? It's like arguing about the fastest hot air balloon after the invention of the jet engine. [1]https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Obesity-Mediates-the-Association-between-Diet-and-Park-Zhang/9fcfb1a781d9fc83aa6949307949a226be3dd6dd https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Obesity-Mediates-the-A...

imranq 4y ago

I agree that we have incredible waste on both sides, but there is an even greater culprit: people are lacking true meaning and purpose in their lives and are indulging in these foods to distract themselves from their inner emptiness.

mym1990 4y ago
This is a pretty big leap, what is even "true meaning and purpose"? The culprit is that this food is literally everywhere and billions of dollars are poured into research everywhere to design systems that entice humans to take the convenient way out. If I was to go along with your hypothesis, I would alter it to say that poor nutrition is what contributes to a person's lack of "true meaning and purpose".
- skulk 4y ago
  > what is even "[lacking] true meaning and purpose"? Perhaps the alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor? It's underrated how depressing it is to not get to eat the sausage you broke your back making.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Uhh okay, I can give you 100,000 examples of what is not a tree, but that isn't what I asked for is it?
    - skulk 4y ago
      When we talk about things, we sometimes use their relationship to other things to define them rather than talking about them directly. I'm not sure how my answer is irrelevant and deserving of your snark.
- imranq 4y ago
  I agree that society has been designed to make things more and more convenient in the name of progress and that we haven't made the nutritious food convenient yet. Stated another way, poor nutrition is the default choice in most of the western world. Still, I think its possible to make the idea of "purpose" more concrete. You could define "true meaning and purpose" to be goals that are greater than oneself that require one's full potential in mind and body and sacrifice of immediate pleasures for long-term gain. The widespread nature of obesity indicates that many people don't consider a healthy body as necessary for their goals and hence don't sacrifice immediate food gratification for those goals. Hence most people don't have goals that require their full body potential.

plutonorm 4y ago

I think that toxin exposure - unavoidable in the modern world - is likely the biggest culprit here. There are plenty of ideas about which toxins are causing the problem, but there are so many that it would be nigh on impossible to regulate them all out of the environment.

pixl97 4y ago
I would think you're completely wrong. The green revolution was the first time in history that we were able to continually produce excess food for (excluding distribution issues) the entire earths population. Even more so, the new foods we are able to supply via processing are highly calorically dense. Simply put if you take mammalian models and allow them to eat all they want they blow up like little balloons. This is no different from bears feasting on salmon for the last millions of years. Creatures are designed to overconsume because the ones that didn't in the past didn't make it thru the lean times.
Eisenstein 4y ago
Please define 'toxin' and the mechanism by which they produce harm.

moffkalast 4y ago

That really is the core of the issue, and furthermore once you've used to a sugar diet you crave it more and regular food starts tasting worse in comparison somehow. I bet it's something to do with the gut-brain connection and a large glut of sugar eating bacteria signalling it's time to feed them. Just a theory, but there is some kind of correlated process there. And the reverse is also true, if you go a while without eating anything high in sugar, what used to taste normal can taste almost unbearably sweet. Exceedingly hard to do with it added to just about all things in absurd amounts though.

CadmiumYellow 4y ago
The first time I tried ketchup after strictly avoiding added sugars for several weeks was a WILD experience. It tasted sweeter than maple syrup. I used to douse my food in ketchup and now I can't even eat it on fries because it's so sickeningly sweet. I noticed the same with most bottled salad dressings and sauces (barbecue sauce and honey mustard being even more egregious than ketchup).
- grecy 4y ago
  I just came back to North America after 18 months in Australia. Ketchup compared to Tomato Sauce is a wild difference!
  - CadmiumYellow 4y ago
    Is it?! Maybe I need to order some tomato sauce from Australia. I miss ketchup, I just want it to taste like salt/vinegar/tomato like it used to before I noticed the sugar.

paulpauper 4y ago

Even healthy, nutritious food is packed with calories. Anything that is not a fruit or vegetable can easily cause weight gain. Before civilization, humans had to expend a lot of energy just to get food, what little they could obtain.

grecy 4y ago

> This is an enormous waste of resources Of course it is, which is fantastic for the economy. Like the Industrial War Complex, it's horrifically bad for people and resources, but does wonders for the pockets of those in power

mateo1 4y ago

Carbohydrates, fat and protein are the 3 main classes of molecules humans need to survive. Sugar is simply a fast absorbed carbohydrate, glucose is basically the very thing that keeps us alive 99% of the time. We are literally build around glucose. Marking it as "addictive" and without nutritional value is idiotic. A choice of a particular diet high in sugar can have negative affects, but guess what, you can chose a different diet and stop being obese instead of asking for one of the most important nutrients that exist to be banned.

npsimons 4y ago

> We’re subsidizing companies that create unhealthy addictive food People love to bitch about the "diet industry" (which as a whole, seems to be almost entirely bro-science and snake oil), but the profits made there pale in comparison to fast food and processed food. It's really something that we should fix, like we did with tobacco and alcohol. Fixing food deserts, even though they are not really widespread enough to entirely account for the obesity epidemic, needs to happen as well. And taking subsidies away from animal products like meat, dairy and corn (specifically for HFCS) would go a long ways to improving the standard American diet (aka, SAD).