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I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devote

I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.

kragen 3y ago
olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  But they were relatively expensive and scarce. And no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil or eating tubs of butter. It's a combination of more high-calorie convenience foods and a more sedentary lifestyle than even just 50 years ago.
  - kragen 3y ago
    the fact that no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil would seem to conclusively disprove your hypothesis as previously stated the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia clearly the proximate cause of obesity is eating more and metabolizing less (both by way of lower exercise and lower basal metabolism). but why are people doing that? did they lose the gene for willpower in a single generation? that seems implausible it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't
    - nullindividual 3y ago
      Olive oil is a natural laxative. If you're gaining weight on olive oil, I'd be impressed, beyond how one would keep it down due to taste and texture. People aren't gaining weight on olive oil because people aren't consuming it in mass quantities required to gain weight, if one could even do so after having your intestines coated by oil. But many are consuming highly processed foods which is shown to lead to less optimal health outcomes. > clearly Clearly a post on HN doesn't make for a scientific study!
      - kragen 3y ago
        clearly it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic
        nullindividual 3y ago
        None of those would have been common as we know them today. Refined sugar was expensive until ~industrialization. And HFCS simply didn't exist, which is what people are really discussing when they talk about sugar, refined foods, and the obesity epidemic.
        kragen 3y ago
        industrialization was still 100 years before the obesity pandemic the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far 'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead
  - cyclever 3y ago
    Right, no one is getting fat because of fat! It's the catbohydrates that make you fat! And humans eat butter and olive oil since climbing down the trees. Eating fruit and cane is a world domination scheme by the oppressing caste.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  Let's be real though - sugar tends to be a lot more palatable than butter, especially when baked or dissolved in acid. I could eat an entire bag of crunch bars, but set me down with a box of sticks of butter and I'm not going to make much progress. Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar. So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before. The closest I can think of is fruits, and they come with a lot of fiber, and again if you make it into juice, it tends to still not be palatable to drink gallons of it. Whereas people will literally drink a 2 liter of coke in a single sitting.
  - kragen 3y ago
    i think it's almost certainly something about industrially-mass-produced food that tubs of butter don't share, so i think you're a bit closer to the mark. and sugary drinks are surely an especially bad food even among industrially-mass-produced foods clearly calorie density alone is not it. and i don't think it's even as simple as 'palatability'. even if you mix cacao, butter, sugar, vanillin, and citric acid into candy, you can't get people to live off the candy and brown sugar mixed with dried lemon juice and oil has been cheap for... significantly longer than the 50-year-old obesity pandemic so, what changed? why is food now so addictive?
    - kijin 3y ago
      Modern fast food is deliberately engineered to make it as addictive as possible while still being palatable and cheap to produce, in order to maximize sales. That sounds more nefarious than I intended, so let me rephrase it. Modern fast food is the result of rapidly iterating, debugging, and optimizing recipes in a huge market for the last 70 years, leaving only the best selling, low cost, consistently reproducible recipes and discarding the rest. This process naturally selects recipes that contain lots of junk calories and bring in the most repeat customers. Although many of the ingredients and similar foods have been around for centuries, it wasn't possible to do this kind of agile cooking on a massive scale until after WW2.
- phil21 3y ago
  Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and easily. Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store. There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response. Edit: to refute some other points downthread. > the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia I believe this to be false. Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. Crisco started to exist because it was cheap. It took hours of work to turn these items into palatable calorie-dense foods, if that was even the outcome. Today? The average working class person goes out to fast food multiple times per week. This was a luxury even in my time growing up. Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access. > it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't I'm not sure how you could come to such a conclusion? That is pretty much the sole feature of those foods. Readily available highly-addictive and highly calorie dense foods fit for immediate (or near it) consumption. No magic woo-woo explanations needed. We simply teleported society into a place literally surrounded by cheap easy to access food typically hundreds of feet away at any given time and then wondered what happened to "willpower" as if it ever existed in such a manner.
  - kragen 3y ago
    if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely
- modo_mario 3y ago
  The issue is mostly sugars i'd guess. Not fats.
- thrwwyunpopular 3y ago
  False equivalence. This doesn't help advance the debate. The amount of olive oil in the average diet is minuscule relative to the amounts of sugar or palm oil. Nuance is important.
  - kragen 3y ago
    it helps advance the debate by conclusively showing that caloric density is not the only relevant factor, or even a dominating one, and that in fact nuance is important, which is my point there are lots of simple, well-known explanations, and they are all wrong. that was one of them. 'it's sugar' and 'it's hfcs' are two others that have popped up in this thread
    - thrwwyunpopular 3y ago
      I get your point but olive oil is nowhere near as prevalent as sugar. Some products even market themselves as "premium" for containing olive oil.
      - kragen 3y ago
        sesame oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, and palm oil have the same caloric density as olive oil, are roughly as digestible, and have been cheap and cultivated by humans for far longer than the obesity pandemic. i'd mention suet and lard, too, but it turns out that those have somewhat lower digestibility, so i don't want to confuse the discussion by contrast, sugary foods commonly have about the same caloric density as healthy foods so i think caloric density is clearly an important factor (you won't get fat by pigging out on lettuce and tomatoes unless you add salad dressing) but the comment i was rebutting gave the following simple, clear, and wrong explanation of the obesity pandemic > I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find and that just isn't an accurate description of the situation
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  > olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years no it hasn't. for most of that timespan approximately no-one outside of the eastern Mediterranean even knew what an olive was
  - kragen 3y ago
    the eastern mediterranean didn't have widespread obesity
- landemva 3y ago
  Why mention butter? It is delicious in morning tea or coffee and somewhat pricey having been imported from Ireland. I'm in the recommended weight, while some of the fattest people I know consume loads of low-fat products.
  - kragen 3y ago
    because butter's caloric density is 7-9 kcal/g, higher than the 'cheap calorie dense food' being blamed for the obesity pandemic, yet the widespread availability of butter (in some societies) starting ten thousand years ago did not cause widespread obesity, even when it wasn't pricey this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity probably the loads of low-fat products you're talking about are packed with sugar and modified food starch, though, as well as xanthan gum, guar gum, carob bean gum, dibutylhydroxytoluene, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, polyethylene glycol, all kinds of novel food colorings including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, antifungal additives like propionate, and so on. some of these don't occur naturally, and others aren't traditional food ingredients. it wouldn't be very surprising if one or more of those novel additives affected hormone balances, inflammation levels, or intestinal microbiota in a way that promoted overeating and inactivity. some of them are well-known to affect intestinal microbiota this is the first time i've seen one that provoked an antibody response, though i think i'm going to go buy a delicious, cold coca-cola now
    - billyjmc 3y ago
      Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie-dense and engineered to be highly palatable. This is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
- pvaldes 3y ago
  The concept of beauty has changed a lot also. Many sex symbols in Rubens age would be seen as clearly obese today. But I agree that the obesity could be boosted by chemical contamination. It should be treated as a disease and not as just a sin.
- notJim 3y ago
  People are reaching for expense, but I think that's the wrong explanation, it's cost/availability + palatability + caloric density. Olive oil has maybe one or two of those, but it's missing the key ingredient of palatability. Not many people want to guzzle olive oil.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > Not many people want to guzzle olive oil. I myself find good olive oil to be quite tasty, far more so than soybean or canola, and I don't think I'm in a tiny minority there. Dipping bread directly in olive oil (sometimes seasoned with a little garlic or whatever) is very common in Mediterranean diets.
    - dopidopHN 3y ago
      Absolutely, olive oil, garlic and salt is my snack.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This is extremely disingenuous. You cannot drink anything more than a little bit of olive oil without serious gastric consequences, which is why most of history involves using a little bit of vegetable oil here and there for the other desirable properties. Nevermind the fact that nobody could afford large quantities of ANY food, and even after we brought the potato, a way more efficient means of growing calories, to europe, most people still couldn't afford more than sufficient quantities of calories. Even then, there are arguments to be made that such potato growing was an important element of significant population growth after it became popular. Meanwhile, you average normal person nowadays CAN eat a bag of potato chips in one sitting, without gastric consequences. Then they can compensate for eating half a pound of salt by following it up with half a candy bar for something sweet. Or maybe they got a milkshake with their burger or something.
  - kragen 3y ago
    the quality of your comment is not up to even the fairly low bar set by the rest of this thread
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  That's probably because people don't chug olive oil. It's more of a food ingredient than a food itself.
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Have you tried gulping down olive oil...? And marvel at what happens later...? :D
- downrightmike 3y ago
  ... Right around the green revolution where we figured out that we can pour fertilizer and water on crops and they grow really well, which lead to high fructose corn syrup in everything and its sugar composition (high fructose) leads to obesity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522469/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522469/
- abletonlive 3y ago
  It's really not that deep. Anybody tracking calories and logging food will quickly realize that the comment you're replying to is correct. You have to make very thoughtful choices when choosing your foods because it's easy to eat 2-3x your TDEE with the current available foods that are sold. Most of it is calorically dense junk.

kragen 3y ago

olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old

schnitzelstoat 3y ago
But they were relatively expensive and scarce. And no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil or eating tubs of butter. It's a combination of more high-calorie convenience foods and a more sedentary lifestyle than even just 50 years ago.
- kragen 3y ago
  the fact that no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil would seem to conclusively disprove your hypothesis as previously stated the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia clearly the proximate cause of obesity is eating more and metabolizing less (both by way of lower exercise and lower basal metabolism). but why are people doing that? did they lose the gene for willpower in a single generation? that seems implausible it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    Olive oil is a natural laxative. If you're gaining weight on olive oil, I'd be impressed, beyond how one would keep it down due to taste and texture. People aren't gaining weight on olive oil because people aren't consuming it in mass quantities required to gain weight, if one could even do so after having your intestines coated by oil. But many are consuming highly processed foods which is shown to lead to less optimal health outcomes. > clearly Clearly a post on HN doesn't make for a scientific study!
    - kragen 3y ago
      clearly it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic
      - nullindividual 3y ago
        None of those would have been common as we know them today. Refined sugar was expensive until ~industrialization. And HFCS simply didn't exist, which is what people are really discussing when they talk about sugar, refined foods, and the obesity epidemic.
        kragen 3y ago
        industrialization was still 100 years before the obesity pandemic the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far 'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead
- cyclever 3y ago
  Right, no one is getting fat because of fat! It's the catbohydrates that make you fat! And humans eat butter and olive oil since climbing down the trees. Eating fruit and cane is a world domination scheme by the oppressing caste.
atomicnumber3 3y ago
Let's be real though - sugar tends to be a lot more palatable than butter, especially when baked or dissolved in acid. I could eat an entire bag of crunch bars, but set me down with a box of sticks of butter and I'm not going to make much progress. Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar. So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before. The closest I can think of is fruits, and they come with a lot of fiber, and again if you make it into juice, it tends to still not be palatable to drink gallons of it. Whereas people will literally drink a 2 liter of coke in a single sitting.
- kragen 3y ago
  i think it's almost certainly something about industrially-mass-produced food that tubs of butter don't share, so i think you're a bit closer to the mark. and sugary drinks are surely an especially bad food even among industrially-mass-produced foods clearly calorie density alone is not it. and i don't think it's even as simple as 'palatability'. even if you mix cacao, butter, sugar, vanillin, and citric acid into candy, you can't get people to live off the candy and brown sugar mixed with dried lemon juice and oil has been cheap for... significantly longer than the 50-year-old obesity pandemic so, what changed? why is food now so addictive?
  - kijin 3y ago
    Modern fast food is deliberately engineered to make it as addictive as possible while still being palatable and cheap to produce, in order to maximize sales. That sounds more nefarious than I intended, so let me rephrase it. Modern fast food is the result of rapidly iterating, debugging, and optimizing recipes in a huge market for the last 70 years, leaving only the best selling, low cost, consistently reproducible recipes and discarding the rest. This process naturally selects recipes that contain lots of junk calories and bring in the most repeat customers. Although many of the ingredients and similar foods have been around for centuries, it wasn't possible to do this kind of agile cooking on a massive scale until after WW2.
phil21 3y ago
Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and easily. Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store. There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response. Edit: to refute some other points downthread. > the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia I believe this to be false. Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. Crisco started to exist because it was cheap. It took hours of work to turn these items into palatable calorie-dense foods, if that was even the outcome. Today? The average working class person goes out to fast food multiple times per week. This was a luxury even in my time growing up. Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access. > it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't I'm not sure how you could come to such a conclusion? That is pretty much the sole feature of those foods. Readily available highly-addictive and highly calorie dense foods fit for immediate (or near it) consumption. No magic woo-woo explanations needed. We simply teleported society into a place literally surrounded by cheap easy to access food typically hundreds of feet away at any given time and then wondered what happened to "willpower" as if it ever existed in such a manner.
- kragen 3y ago
  if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely
modo_mario 3y ago
The issue is mostly sugars i'd guess. Not fats.
thrwwyunpopular 3y ago
False equivalence. This doesn't help advance the debate. The amount of olive oil in the average diet is minuscule relative to the amounts of sugar or palm oil. Nuance is important.
- kragen 3y ago
  it helps advance the debate by conclusively showing that caloric density is not the only relevant factor, or even a dominating one, and that in fact nuance is important, which is my point there are lots of simple, well-known explanations, and they are all wrong. that was one of them. 'it's sugar' and 'it's hfcs' are two others that have popped up in this thread
  - thrwwyunpopular 3y ago
    I get your point but olive oil is nowhere near as prevalent as sugar. Some products even market themselves as "premium" for containing olive oil.
    - kragen 3y ago
      sesame oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, and palm oil have the same caloric density as olive oil, are roughly as digestible, and have been cheap and cultivated by humans for far longer than the obesity pandemic. i'd mention suet and lard, too, but it turns out that those have somewhat lower digestibility, so i don't want to confuse the discussion by contrast, sugary foods commonly have about the same caloric density as healthy foods so i think caloric density is clearly an important factor (you won't get fat by pigging out on lettuce and tomatoes unless you add salad dressing) but the comment i was rebutting gave the following simple, clear, and wrong explanation of the obesity pandemic > I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find and that just isn't an accurate description of the situation
tomjakubowski 3y ago
> olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years no it hasn't. for most of that timespan approximately no-one outside of the eastern Mediterranean even knew what an olive was
- kragen 3y ago
  the eastern mediterranean didn't have widespread obesity
landemva 3y ago
Why mention butter? It is delicious in morning tea or coffee and somewhat pricey having been imported from Ireland. I'm in the recommended weight, while some of the fattest people I know consume loads of low-fat products.
- kragen 3y ago
  because butter's caloric density is 7-9 kcal/g, higher than the 'cheap calorie dense food' being blamed for the obesity pandemic, yet the widespread availability of butter (in some societies) starting ten thousand years ago did not cause widespread obesity, even when it wasn't pricey this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity probably the loads of low-fat products you're talking about are packed with sugar and modified food starch, though, as well as xanthan gum, guar gum, carob bean gum, dibutylhydroxytoluene, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, polyethylene glycol, all kinds of novel food colorings including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, antifungal additives like propionate, and so on. some of these don't occur naturally, and others aren't traditional food ingredients. it wouldn't be very surprising if one or more of those novel additives affected hormone balances, inflammation levels, or intestinal microbiota in a way that promoted overeating and inactivity. some of them are well-known to affect intestinal microbiota this is the first time i've seen one that provoked an antibody response, though i think i'm going to go buy a delicious, cold coca-cola now
  - billyjmc 3y ago
    Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie-dense and engineered to be highly palatable. This is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
pvaldes 3y ago
The concept of beauty has changed a lot also. Many sex symbols in Rubens age would be seen as clearly obese today. But I agree that the obesity could be boosted by chemical contamination. It should be treated as a disease and not as just a sin.
notJim 3y ago
People are reaching for expense, but I think that's the wrong explanation, it's cost/availability + palatability + caloric density. Olive oil has maybe one or two of those, but it's missing the key ingredient of palatability. Not many people want to guzzle olive oil.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > Not many people want to guzzle olive oil. I myself find good olive oil to be quite tasty, far more so than soybean or canola, and I don't think I'm in a tiny minority there. Dipping bread directly in olive oil (sometimes seasoned with a little garlic or whatever) is very common in Mediterranean diets.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    Absolutely, olive oil, garlic and salt is my snack.
mrguyorama 3y ago
This is extremely disingenuous. You cannot drink anything more than a little bit of olive oil without serious gastric consequences, which is why most of history involves using a little bit of vegetable oil here and there for the other desirable properties. Nevermind the fact that nobody could afford large quantities of ANY food, and even after we brought the potato, a way more efficient means of growing calories, to europe, most people still couldn't afford more than sufficient quantities of calories. Even then, there are arguments to be made that such potato growing was an important element of significant population growth after it became popular. Meanwhile, you average normal person nowadays CAN eat a bag of potato chips in one sitting, without gastric consequences. Then they can compensate for eating half a pound of salt by following it up with half a candy bar for something sweet. Or maybe they got a milkshake with their burger or something.
- kragen 3y ago
  the quality of your comment is not up to even the fairly low bar set by the rest of this thread
oh_sigh 3y ago
That's probably because people don't chug olive oil. It's more of a food ingredient than a food itself.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Have you tried gulping down olive oil...? And marvel at what happens later...? :D
downrightmike 3y ago
... Right around the green revolution where we figured out that we can pour fertilizer and water on crops and they grow really well, which lead to high fructose corn syrup in everything and its sugar composition (high fructose) leads to obesity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522469/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522469/
abletonlive 3y ago
It's really not that deep. Anybody tracking calories and logging food will quickly realize that the comment you're replying to is correct. You have to make very thoughtful choices when choosing your foods because it's easy to eat 2-3x your TDEE with the current available foods that are sold. Most of it is calorically dense junk.