5 ms·

With all of the keto grifters on the internet, I suspect this is merely a pendulum-swing to another mistake. There are so many novelties in what the average pe

With all of the keto grifters on the internet, I suspect this is merely a pendulum-swing to another mistake. There are so many novelties in what the average person eats today--dyes, stabilizers, flavor enhancers, packaging residue, thickeners, artificial sweeteners, preservatives... and the manufacture of each one is a moving target (changing feedstocks, equipment, process, etc). Some are used in such minute quantities, or are legally classified so broadly, that they don't even have to be specifically labeled. All I know is that the boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style, and lived in decent health to a ripe old age, while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams. Before anyone lectures me on epistemology, I offered this as a data point, not an academic study. Industry wants to move product. If fat is the problem--or at least if people think it is--industry moves to sugar. If sugar is the problem, they'll move back to fat. An inconvenience, but an easily surmountable one. Packaging and preservatives would be a tougher nut to crack--far fewer options. An entire market segment could be up-ended if a single option were suddenly forbidden. It may not even be the food. The younger generation has been on a staggering number of medications in their formative years. Boomers are also inveterate pill-poppers, but not from early childhood. Think of the difference between giving aspirin to a child or to an adult. There may be another "reye's syndrome" hiding here.

nullfield 2y ago
I can’t help but feel like, while the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not’ data’, lots and lots of people make the same observation about “Boomers”. The human body has been working with fat and sugar and such a lot longer than all the newer, more engineered stuff, making it seem even more reasonable.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  The human body has been working with fat and sugar Most people didn't have much access to sugar until the sugar islands were cultivated a few hundred years ago. Before that it was just fruit which was probably less sweet, has fiber in it and was more rare. all the newer, more engineered stuff Like what specifically?
  - hello_computer 2y ago
    azo dyes (already banned in the EU), trisodium phospate (we used to use this to clean walls for painting, now we use it in noodle manufacture to keep the machine from clogging), titanium dioxide (colorant and possible carcinogen), plasticizers leached from the packaging (BPA [a weak synthetic estrogen], BPS, BPF)... the soaps, lotions, and cosmetics also have a number of novel (to human consumption anyway) components, which can enter the bloodstream dermally. One of my chemistry professors remarked that bodies take longer to decompose now due to the residual amounts of tetrasodium EDTA in our bodies from hair shampoo. For a while, many young men were getting gynecomastia from the lavender and tea tree oil in their shampoos and body washes. Many of the crops are doused in glyphosate during both growth and harvest, so there's weed killer in the cheerios now, and we're just supposed to accept that. Most of us do.
    - smolder 2y ago
      + Brominated vegetable oil (also banned in the EU)
  - watwut 2y ago
    Pretty sure people eate rice and grains before few hundred years ago. They eate a lot of carbohydrates.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      "Rice and grains" and the like contain only starch. The physiological effects of starch, which is composed only of glucose, are very different from the effects of sugar, half of which is fructose. Until about two hundred years ago, all the sources of concentrated sugar, i.e. honey, cane sugar, dried fruits and boiled fruit juice were very expensive in comparison with other kinds of food and very few people could afford to eat them more frequently than a few times per year, at more important holidays. Almost nobody could eat food with high content of sugar every day, like most people do now. The availability of sugar or glucose-fructose mixtures that are cheaper than almost any other kind of food, so they are now added to reduce the cost of industrially-processed food, is a very recent phenomenon.
- flyingspaceship 2y ago
  It's been known for a long time that these things cause health problems especially among sedentary people, however. It wasn't uncommon for the rich to be fat and ill hundreds of years ago. I was reading Emma by Jane Austen recently which was written in the late 1800s and the story opens with the main father going on a tirade about cake being bad for you and nobody else caring. It is a scene that would fit all over the place today. It feels as though abundant, cheap and rich food has simply been scaled up to the level where the damage it does has become too visible to ignore anymore. It's not just a few lazy rich guys getting plump, it's the entire population.
sramsay 2y ago
> All I know is that the boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style, and lived in decent health to a ripe old age That's a data point. > while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams. That's not a data point. That's a broad statement that generalizes about a population, and yes: It would be a good to see a source that indicates that an entire generation is "falling apart at the seams" either as a result of their preference for "fair trade free range organic" food or their avoidance of fat and sugar -- if, indeed, that is even true of the population in question.
- hello_computer 2y ago
  It is a data point because it is the same family, similar genetics, similar upbringing, similar socioeconomic status. One generation ate crap and did okay. Another was more cautious, but to no avail. As to whether or not that diet is causal, I made no statement or suggestion. I don't even have an opinion on it. I am merely stating that, according to the science of the day, they did "the right thing", but the situation did not improve.
  - sramsay 2y ago
    Forgive me, I think I read you wrong. It sounds like you meant, "the millennials in my family". Which, yes: I see what you're saying.
keybored 2y ago
I’ve found in general (from a few years back, not based on this submission) that the arguments of the low-carb camp are very convincing. Fat is an essential macro. carb-sugar is entirely optional. > With all of the keto grifters on the internet, I suspect this is merely a pendulum-swing to another mistake. You suspect. In a vacuum (without data) this pendulum-swing argument is equally convincing as both carbo-macros-are-good and fat-macros-are-good. You don’t get any extra points for seemingly taking a step back and concluding it’s-all-the-same. Exactly because it’s just “I suspect”. The grift in keto seems entirely optional. You can eat low-carb or keto based on things you get at the supermarket. > Industry wants to move product. We have to eat. So I guess anything but calorie-deficit or photosynthesis can be accused of being a grift?
- hello_computer 2y ago
  Academia pumped-out paper after paper--for over 50 years--on how terrible fat was for you, and now that it has become so very difficult to convince people that that emperor has clothes, they are pivoting to a different bogey-man. This was never the slow march of science, and it still isn't. One guy gets his money from Procter and Gamble, another gets it from publishing royalties, another gets it from youtube monetization. It is all a grift. The actual truth is probably hiding on some Peruvian amateur scientist's blog these days. I never wrote "it's all the same". I did write that it may be something else entirely, and that some of the more likely suspects are not investigated with the same intensity--probably because a conclusive answer would upset many apple carts. to ta988: for publishing royalties, i'm not talking about research papers, but popular books / articles. teicholz is a one-woman industry in that respect. not saying that she's right or wrong, but that she (like many others in this space) is both financially and reputationally locked-into a narrative, which is not really science.
  - DontchaKnowit 2y ago
    Yo are somewhat correct but honestly you just must have become aware of keto after it had passed through the cultural meat grinder of consumerism. Back in like 2012, keto was extremely fringe, niche, and almost all of the keto literature online was genuine science/nutritional hobbyists who were enthusiastic about revealing the deception inherent in our nations nutritional guidelines as a result of lobbying. There was no grift there whatsoever. Now theres lots of grifters, but the core idea of keto is an incredibly powerful dieting strategy for many people and has very positive effects on symptoms of a number of difference health problems.
nradov 2y ago
While I have no proof of this, I suspect many of the Millenials' health problems are more mental (including psychosomatic) than dietary. To stereotype a bit, they generally seem less resilient and more prone to catastrophizing minor physical problems that older generations would have just dealt with.
- smeej 2y ago
  Psychosomatic, and(/or) psychogenic. There comes a point where the influence of the mind actually makes things physiologically wrong, which becomes even harder to untangle.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  They also barely move their bodies.
  - yowlingcat 2y ago
    I think this is the elephant in the room that is generationally hard to address. At least in America, all demographics have gotten more sedentary over time, but Millennials in particular. To your point, it doesn't really matter what you eat if you live a sedentary lifestyle with more screentime and less physical activity than is ideal. To put it in a neutral way, I would not be surprised if many emergent cultural wars nominally about body acceptance are actually more a societal reaction to this root cause.
- vlod 2y ago
  Some humour/sarcasm to illustrate your point: "No better way to sum up the generations" https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/s4nbru/no_better_way_to_sum_up_the_generations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/s4nbru/no_better_way_...
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
When boomers were the age of millennials, they were eating foods that were just foods. They weren't overly engineered. The 80s came about, scientists decided that fat was a problem, and so they started removing fat from food. But in order to make those foods palatable, they needed to add a filler. They chose the cheapest one, most addictive one: sugar. Then when people got tired of eating oat bran with everything, they added the fat back but kept the sugar. So now you've got the very worst of both worlds. Likewise, when boomers were growing up, even the pre-packaged food they ate was packaged in wax paper and glass. Everything today is some form of plastic. It's much harder to become obese if you aren't eating products that come out of food labs.
settsu 2y ago
You would seem to have a valid point about the tendency for "pendulum swings" in diet trends (well, especially in fads), as well the additives that are seemingly much more common in processed foods made for the American market (I mean, if you simply look at the number of those additives that are specifically prohibited elsewhere, it can almost be alarming.) However, when you say "boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style", 1) I'm assuming you meant "my family", and 2) the point of the link is that Boomers as a whole didn't eat a lot of sugar until fat was demonized by campaigns specifically intended to "downplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat"†. And I don't believe they consumed comparatively nearly as much sugar as their children. And let's not even get started on the topic of high fructose corn syrup (which is problematic for more reasons than potential negative health effects.) Seriously, if you look at just how many food products in a typical American supermarket have added sweeteners, it's can be staggering. † 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...
ta988 2y ago
I remember reading studies about how parents diet had an impact on their kids through epigenetics.
alejohausner 2y ago
Another thing that’s changed since young boomers roamed the earth is soil depletion. Decades of farming the heartland in the US midwest have used up all the zinc and boron and other minerals in the soil. If you consult the USDA food tables, they list the nutrients in foods, but those measurements were done back int 1940s and 50s, and things have changed.

nullfield 2y ago

I can’t help but feel like, while the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not’ data’, lots and lots of people make the same observation about “Boomers”. The human body has been working with fat and sugar and such a lot longer than all the newer, more engineered stuff, making it seem even more reasonable.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CyberDildonics 2y ago
The human body has been working with fat and sugar Most people didn't have much access to sugar until the sugar islands were cultivated a few hundred years ago. Before that it was just fruit which was probably less sweet, has fiber in it and was more rare. all the newer, more engineered stuff Like what specifically?
- hello_computer 2y ago
  azo dyes (already banned in the EU), trisodium phospate (we used to use this to clean walls for painting, now we use it in noodle manufacture to keep the machine from clogging), titanium dioxide (colorant and possible carcinogen), plasticizers leached from the packaging (BPA [a weak synthetic estrogen], BPS, BPF)... the soaps, lotions, and cosmetics also have a number of novel (to human consumption anyway) components, which can enter the bloodstream dermally. One of my chemistry professors remarked that bodies take longer to decompose now due to the residual amounts of tetrasodium EDTA in our bodies from hair shampoo. For a while, many young men were getting gynecomastia from the lavender and tea tree oil in their shampoos and body washes. Many of the crops are doused in glyphosate during both growth and harvest, so there's weed killer in the cheerios now, and we're just supposed to accept that. Most of us do.
  - smolder 2y ago
    + Brominated vegetable oil (also banned in the EU)
- watwut 2y ago
  Pretty sure people eate rice and grains before few hundred years ago. They eate a lot of carbohydrates.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    "Rice and grains" and the like contain only starch. The physiological effects of starch, which is composed only of glucose, are very different from the effects of sugar, half of which is fructose. Until about two hundred years ago, all the sources of concentrated sugar, i.e. honey, cane sugar, dried fruits and boiled fruit juice were very expensive in comparison with other kinds of food and very few people could afford to eat them more frequently than a few times per year, at more important holidays. Almost nobody could eat food with high content of sugar every day, like most people do now. The availability of sugar or glucose-fructose mixtures that are cheaper than almost any other kind of food, so they are now added to reduce the cost of industrially-processed food, is a very recent phenomenon.
flyingspaceship 2y ago
It's been known for a long time that these things cause health problems especially among sedentary people, however. It wasn't uncommon for the rich to be fat and ill hundreds of years ago. I was reading Emma by Jane Austen recently which was written in the late 1800s and the story opens with the main father going on a tirade about cake being bad for you and nobody else caring. It is a scene that would fit all over the place today. It feels as though abundant, cheap and rich food has simply been scaled up to the level where the damage it does has become too visible to ignore anymore. It's not just a few lazy rich guys getting plump, it's the entire population.

sramsay 2y ago

> All I know is that the boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style, and lived in decent health to a ripe old age That's a data point. > while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams. That's not a data point. That's a broad statement that generalizes about a population, and yes: It would be a good to see a source that indicates that an entire generation is "falling apart at the seams" either as a result of their preference for "fair trade free range organic" food or their avoidance of fat and sugar -- if, indeed, that is even true of the population in question.

hello_computer 2y ago
It is a data point because it is the same family, similar genetics, similar upbringing, similar socioeconomic status. One generation ate crap and did okay. Another was more cautious, but to no avail. As to whether or not that diet is causal, I made no statement or suggestion. I don't even have an opinion on it. I am merely stating that, according to the science of the day, they did "the right thing", but the situation did not improve.
- sramsay 2y ago
  Forgive me, I think I read you wrong. It sounds like you meant, "the millennials in my family". Which, yes: I see what you're saying.

keybored 2y ago

I’ve found in general (from a few years back, not based on this submission) that the arguments of the low-carb camp are very convincing. Fat is an essential macro. carb-sugar is entirely optional. > With all of the keto grifters on the internet, I suspect this is merely a pendulum-swing to another mistake. You suspect. In a vacuum (without data) this pendulum-swing argument is equally convincing as both carbo-macros-are-good and fat-macros-are-good. You don’t get any extra points for seemingly taking a step back and concluding it’s-all-the-same. Exactly because it’s just “I suspect”. The grift in keto seems entirely optional. You can eat low-carb or keto based on things you get at the supermarket. > Industry wants to move product. We have to eat. So I guess anything but calorie-deficit or photosynthesis can be accused of being a grift?

hello_computer 2y ago
Academia pumped-out paper after paper--for over 50 years--on how terrible fat was for you, and now that it has become so very difficult to convince people that that emperor has clothes, they are pivoting to a different bogey-man. This was never the slow march of science, and it still isn't. One guy gets his money from Procter and Gamble, another gets it from publishing royalties, another gets it from youtube monetization. It is all a grift. The actual truth is probably hiding on some Peruvian amateur scientist's blog these days. I never wrote "it's all the same". I did write that it may be something else entirely, and that some of the more likely suspects are not investigated with the same intensity--probably because a conclusive answer would upset many apple carts. to ta988: for publishing royalties, i'm not talking about research papers, but popular books / articles. teicholz is a one-woman industry in that respect. not saying that she's right or wrong, but that she (like many others in this space) is both financially and reputationally locked-into a narrative, which is not really science.
- DontchaKnowit 2y ago
  Yo are somewhat correct but honestly you just must have become aware of keto after it had passed through the cultural meat grinder of consumerism. Back in like 2012, keto was extremely fringe, niche, and almost all of the keto literature online was genuine science/nutritional hobbyists who were enthusiastic about revealing the deception inherent in our nations nutritional guidelines as a result of lobbying. There was no grift there whatsoever. Now theres lots of grifters, but the core idea of keto is an incredibly powerful dieting strategy for many people and has very positive effects on symptoms of a number of difference health problems.

nradov 2y ago

While I have no proof of this, I suspect many of the Millenials' health problems are more mental (including psychosomatic) than dietary. To stereotype a bit, they generally seem less resilient and more prone to catastrophizing minor physical problems that older generations would have just dealt with.

smeej 2y ago
Psychosomatic, and(/or) psychogenic. There comes a point where the influence of the mind actually makes things physiologically wrong, which becomes even harder to untangle.
CalRobert 2y ago
They also barely move their bodies.
- yowlingcat 2y ago
  I think this is the elephant in the room that is generationally hard to address. At least in America, all demographics have gotten more sedentary over time, but Millennials in particular. To your point, it doesn't really matter what you eat if you live a sedentary lifestyle with more screentime and less physical activity than is ideal. To put it in a neutral way, I would not be surprised if many emergent cultural wars nominally about body acceptance are actually more a societal reaction to this root cause.
vlod 2y ago
Some humour/sarcasm to illustrate your point: "No better way to sum up the generations" https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/s4nbru/no_better_way_to_sum_up_the_generations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/s4nbru/no_better_way_...

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

When boomers were the age of millennials, they were eating foods that were just foods. They weren't overly engineered. The 80s came about, scientists decided that fat was a problem, and so they started removing fat from food. But in order to make those foods palatable, they needed to add a filler. They chose the cheapest one, most addictive one: sugar. Then when people got tired of eating oat bran with everything, they added the fat back but kept the sugar. So now you've got the very worst of both worlds. Likewise, when boomers were growing up, even the pre-packaged food they ate was packaged in wax paper and glass. Everything today is some form of plastic. It's much harder to become obese if you aren't eating products that come out of food labs.

settsu 2y ago

You would seem to have a valid point about the tendency for "pendulum swings" in diet trends (well, especially in fads), as well the additives that are seemingly much more common in processed foods made for the American market (I mean, if you simply look at the number of those additives that are specifically prohibited elsewhere, it can almost be alarming.) However, when you say "boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style", 1) I'm assuming you meant "my family", and 2) the point of the link is that Boomers as a whole didn't eat a lot of sugar until fat was demonized by campaigns specifically intended to "downplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat"†. And I don't believe they consumed comparatively nearly as much sugar as their children. And let's not even get started on the topic of high fructose corn syrup (which is problematic for more reasons than potential negative health effects.) Seriously, if you look at just how many food products in a typical American supermarket have added sweeteners, it's can be staggering. † 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...

ta988 2y ago

I remember reading studies about how parents diet had an impact on their kids through epigenetics.

alejohausner 2y ago

Another thing that’s changed since young boomers roamed the earth is soil depletion. Decades of farming the heartland in the US midwest have used up all the zinc and boron and other minerals in the soil. If you consult the USDA food tables, they list the nutrients in foods, but those measurements were done back int 1940s and 50s, and things have changed.