3 ms·

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,

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.
  - kragen 3y ago
    this is clearly a thing that has happened, and it is a crucial link in the chain, but there's still a missing link. wouldn't it be more profitable if those recipes happened to have low caloric density, like coca-cola? then you could sell each customer six meals a day instead of three, and they'd be more profitable because they'd mostly be made out of water, which is cheaper than deodorized canola oil and palm oil, much less potatoes, texturized soy protein, mechanically separated chicken, and beef. you'd maybe have to include enough cellulose and xanthan gum to make it seem solid, but that wouldn't overcome the cost savings from removing the expensive calorie-bearing ingredients. it's even legal! yet fast-food consumers have been gravitating to the macronutrient-rich menu items, not texturized carboxymethylcellulose jello, which would undoubtedly be widely available if it sold well. so they are following their homeostatic regulatory system to seek calories their homeostasis is just broken what broke the homeostasis? i don't think it's an intentional thing or even a means to improve sales. if wendy's breaks your homeostatic feedback and mcdonald's doesn't, will that help them competitively? no, because their metabolically damaged customers will still eat at mcdonald's, except for the most loyal ones. if wendy's goes out of business, it'll take a generation for mcdonald's to see the result in terms of declining sales. even then, they're unlikely to be able to recognize that the demise of wendy's is the reason for their troubles it's plausible that it's nothing more than 'ultra-palatable food makes you overeat, which disrupts your homeostasis'. but i'm skeptical of that because people seem to be able to eat very palatable food occasionally, or even often, without disrupting it
    - kijin 3y ago
      Coca-Cola is indeed highly profitable, but American consumers have indicated time and again that they want some real bread and beef to go with that Coca-Cola. They want to feel reasonably full, and they can't come back 6 times a day no matter what, because they have to work in order to pay for your burger. You're not going to make a large profit if you diverge too far from this social norm. Don't think like a startup, because we're talking about traditional multinational businesses here.
      - kragen 3y ago
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  You can get fruits and fruit juices in your winter months, that is newer. OJ came in small glasses because it too was a luxury. But HN linked an article a few years back about some research indicating that in the 1980s people ate as many or more callories, and got on average less physical activity, but were significantly less overweight. They reaction was that it was wrong, because thermodynamics, but the thermodynamic argument is a vast oversimplification. We can and do excrete plenty of energy such that other organisms post process our waste. Fat in particular can go unused with little notice. We can burn or conserve energy in ways that are hard to measure by just observing behavior. Given that complexity, it wouldn't surprise me that chronic inflammation could be a culprit. It could be the removal of a burden too, such that we are more efficient at processing calories. The food equivalent of meth amphetamine being available everywhere and cheaply doesn't help either, but enough people are studying it that I don't think it will be one simple thing.
  - kragen 3y ago
    do you have a link to the article or remember the authors
    - galangalalgol 3y ago
      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871403X15001210 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18714...
      - kragen 3y ago
        this is fantastic, thanks 10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007
- bluescrn 3y ago
  Food is part of the equation (marketing and availabity as well as ingredients) But then there's the rise of the car, and of screen-based jobs/lifestyles, and other little conveniences that remove any last little bits of physical effort from life, from takeaway delivery to dishwashers to power tools. Exercise used to be an unavoidable part of life.
toast0 3y ago
For me, soda with hugh fructose corn syrup is way easier to drink a lot of than soda with sugar too. In my mind, the industry trend of 'reduced fat' products that tend to have increased sugar, and the substitution of HFCS for sugar both contribute towards easier over consumption of calories.
checkyoursudo 3y ago
> I'm not going to make much progress Not with that attitude you're not. > 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. I was just thinking about this earlier today. I had a friend whom I would swear was actually, literally addicted to McDonald's burgers and fries. He wouldn't usually go seek out just any old burgers and fries, so I have a hard time saying he was addicted to them in general. I think that McDonald's (and to be clear, I am not blaming the Golden Arches here) had just some right taste that he could not help himself. I don't like food particularly much at all, so I have never really felt like "oh that was so good I want more," but I can kind of see what you are saying here.
notJim 3y ago
Fruits are not calorically dense. A huge ripe pear can be incredibly delicious and sweet, and only has like 100 calories. The best peach you've ever eaten is like 60-80. It would be pretty challenging to eat a calorically problematic portion of them. A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.
- kragen 3y ago
  not if you have to shell them yourself
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  Yeah that's what I meant by the fiber - they cut the density substantially and would fill you up super fast. And just juicing them gets you into palatability problems - try drinking a gallon of raw apple juice. (Vs drinking a 64oz large coke).

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.
- kragen 3y ago
  this is clearly a thing that has happened, and it is a crucial link in the chain, but there's still a missing link. wouldn't it be more profitable if those recipes happened to have low caloric density, like coca-cola? then you could sell each customer six meals a day instead of three, and they'd be more profitable because they'd mostly be made out of water, which is cheaper than deodorized canola oil and palm oil, much less potatoes, texturized soy protein, mechanically separated chicken, and beef. you'd maybe have to include enough cellulose and xanthan gum to make it seem solid, but that wouldn't overcome the cost savings from removing the expensive calorie-bearing ingredients. it's even legal! yet fast-food consumers have been gravitating to the macronutrient-rich menu items, not texturized carboxymethylcellulose jello, which would undoubtedly be widely available if it sold well. so they are following their homeostatic regulatory system to seek calories their homeostasis is just broken what broke the homeostasis? i don't think it's an intentional thing or even a means to improve sales. if wendy's breaks your homeostatic feedback and mcdonald's doesn't, will that help them competitively? no, because their metabolically damaged customers will still eat at mcdonald's, except for the most loyal ones. if wendy's goes out of business, it'll take a generation for mcdonald's to see the result in terms of declining sales. even then, they're unlikely to be able to recognize that the demise of wendy's is the reason for their troubles it's plausible that it's nothing more than 'ultra-palatable food makes you overeat, which disrupts your homeostasis'. but i'm skeptical of that because people seem to be able to eat very palatable food occasionally, or even often, without disrupting it
  - kijin 3y ago
    Coca-Cola is indeed highly profitable, but American consumers have indicated time and again that they want some real bread and beef to go with that Coca-Cola. They want to feel reasonably full, and they can't come back 6 times a day no matter what, because they have to work in order to pay for your burger. You're not going to make a large profit if you diverge too far from this social norm. Don't think like a startup, because we're talking about traditional multinational businesses here.
    - kragen 3y ago
galangalalgol 3y ago
You can get fruits and fruit juices in your winter months, that is newer. OJ came in small glasses because it too was a luxury. But HN linked an article a few years back about some research indicating that in the 1980s people ate as many or more callories, and got on average less physical activity, but were significantly less overweight. They reaction was that it was wrong, because thermodynamics, but the thermodynamic argument is a vast oversimplification. We can and do excrete plenty of energy such that other organisms post process our waste. Fat in particular can go unused with little notice. We can burn or conserve energy in ways that are hard to measure by just observing behavior. Given that complexity, it wouldn't surprise me that chronic inflammation could be a culprit. It could be the removal of a burden too, such that we are more efficient at processing calories. The food equivalent of meth amphetamine being available everywhere and cheaply doesn't help either, but enough people are studying it that I don't think it will be one simple thing.
- kragen 3y ago
  do you have a link to the article or remember the authors
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871403X15001210 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18714...
    - kragen 3y ago
      this is fantastic, thanks 10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007
bluescrn 3y ago
Food is part of the equation (marketing and availabity as well as ingredients) But then there's the rise of the car, and of screen-based jobs/lifestyles, and other little conveniences that remove any last little bits of physical effort from life, from takeaway delivery to dishwashers to power tools. Exercise used to be an unavoidable part of life.

toast0 3y ago

For me, soda with hugh fructose corn syrup is way easier to drink a lot of than soda with sugar too. In my mind, the industry trend of 'reduced fat' products that tend to have increased sugar, and the substitution of HFCS for sugar both contribute towards easier over consumption of calories.

checkyoursudo 3y ago

> I'm not going to make much progress Not with that attitude you're not. > 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. I was just thinking about this earlier today. I had a friend whom I would swear was actually, literally addicted to McDonald's burgers and fries. He wouldn't usually go seek out just any old burgers and fries, so I have a hard time saying he was addicted to them in general. I think that McDonald's (and to be clear, I am not blaming the Golden Arches here) had just some right taste that he could not help himself. I don't like food particularly much at all, so I have never really felt like "oh that was so good I want more," but I can kind of see what you are saying here.

notJim 3y ago

Fruits are not calorically dense. A huge ripe pear can be incredibly delicious and sweet, and only has like 100 calories. The best peach you've ever eaten is like 60-80. It would be pretty challenging to eat a calorically problematic portion of them. A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.

kragen 3y ago
not if you have to shell them yourself
atomicnumber3 3y ago
Yeah that's what I meant by the fiber - they cut the density substantially and would fill you up super fast. And just juicing them gets you into palatability problems - try drinking a gallon of raw apple juice. (Vs drinking a 64oz large coke).