4 ms·

The proposal mandating 50% of something in food marketed to kids is stupid nonsense. If anything, reason should tell you that evolution must have selected for a

by guylhem 13y ago

The proposal mandating 50% of something in food marketed to kids is stupid nonsense. If anything, reason should tell you that evolution must have selected for a "resiliant" digestive system - so much that it's thriving on anything we throw at it. So why bother increasing the costs - besides for control and power? Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health? Do they have large scale studies properly done? (I mean not on rats but on humans - it's kinda tough to force them to eat only what's prescribed during a study, and you can't follow them all day long for years) Do you want so much to reduce customer choice and force your thoughts on them? This is the polar opposite to freedom, and based on a flawed methodology. There are some evidence that a given regime or another may be beneficial for a given disease, but nothing convincing yet to the best of my knowledge when taking into account all the diseases (you don't get to hand pick the diseases you'll get). IMHO, the proper methodology would require a large scale datamining operation along with biological tests and proper outcome monitoring. We just don't have all the technology to do that yet on say at least 10 million humans for 10 years (and that wouldn't be large scale - there are 6 billions of us, and with a longer lifespan!). 10 millions over 6 billions would be a 0.0016 ie 0.16% sample - with such a small sample on only 1/7 of the human lifespan, I wish you good luck to anyone willing to take into account genetic polymorphism, intolerance to some food (milk, gluten) etc. It will just be an exercice in "manually correcting" so many things that the end result should not be trusted. Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't. To quote Djikstra, I'd say such laws and rules are just the root of all evil - premature optimization!!! EDIT: Downvotes as always. I find that downvoting for a disagreement is not fair play. You don't like my opinion? I would be delighted to be proved wrong, with facts please.

skylan_q 13y ago
Most researchers who publish studies are unfamiliar with the scientific method and hypothesis nullification. Either that, or it's not in the interests of the publishers to properly apply these concepts in their studies. We've gotten to a scary point where "science" is now getting more and more into the hands of the public and become a consumer good purely for consumption in the form of news. People love studies that confirm something they already believe. It's bad for business to dispel myths that people have an emotional investment in.
srl 13y ago
Yes, it's hard. We can't experiment directly on humans - we can only look for correlations, which always causes trouble with determining causality. Biological questions are inherently complicated, so any hypothesis is necessarily little more than a stab in the dark, even if we had the ability to compensate for genetic variation et cetera, which we most certainly don't. Large-scale studies are expensive, time-consuming, difficult to organize, and would inevitably end up politicized from 200 different directions, and then driven into the ground in the next campaign season. In short, any and all dietary studies are doomed to be 99% failures. But that 1% is important. I don't think there's much question that we have a better understanding today, of what constitutes healthy food, than we did 50 years ago. We know, in particular, that foods rich in certain substances (I don't want to try to classify them all in one or two words, because I don't study this stuff and would get it wrong - I'm talking about tradition "junk foods" and sweets, like cupcakes and potato chips.), are strongly correlated with a wide variety of health issues, the incidence of which has increased over the last several decades. Furthermore, these foods are inherently attractive to children, and (perhaps more controversially?) display limited addictive properties. Yeah, our knowledge is limited, and yeah, we'll have missteps. But I don't think this is "premature optimization" - the program's running really slowly, and everyone's complaining about it. We don't understand a lot of why it takes so long to finish, but there is something we can do that would probably make it at least 5% faster. Why not give it a shot, and then go back to profiling? Oh, and have an upvote, for contributing to the conversation. Because that's the etiquette around here, although some seem to have forgotten.
- guylhem 13y ago
  Thanks for this interesting counter argument (and for the upvote, although the effect was quite short - I guess there are more emotional than rational voters). It is quite valid - if we have a strong suspicion on something, it could be helpful to give a shot. I'm just concerned we don't know how strong our suspicion is, which turns that into a bet (more on that later) The real problem IMHO is that this bet will certainly prevent or stall proper studies for a long time afterwards. Take for example LSD - there are many results suggesting it might be effective on depression. Yet it was banned, which means once we have the technology to conduct a real large scale study, we may not have enough data points as we would have if it had not been banned (thanks to recreational users) I mean, it is not ethical to willfully expose human to known dangerous drugs, yet if they take it wilfully by themselves or by mistake, it's a great source of data: for example, pharmacovigilence collects accidental use of drugs by pregnant mothers to guesstimate the toxicity on the fetus or the LD50 on humans) This is just an example, but you can see how it might scale, basically we are taking bets, and it hampers research. Also, it is quite philosophical. Personally, I'm against coffee due to its addictive potential and it's social image, yet it would be wrong for me to say there are no positive outcomes linked to it, or that on average it might have positive health benefit. I just don't know. There are many contradictions and I remember reading an article on how there seems to be time trends in negative or positive studies result, with an oscillation. (which would suggest that our research results are biaised by our perception) An outright ban on caffeine, like on LSD, even if it might be a) coherent with my refusal, and b) more comfortable to me since I know I wouldn't be accidentally exposed to coffee (ex: in a soda), would certainly hamper further research, which would be detrimental if there was after all a positive health benefit on average - ie it would deprive me of future data which could help me change my mind. IMHO, with bad data, taking bet with one's health is acceptable (if at no cost for the health system). Taking bets with the other people health - aka banning or mandating, is wrong. EDIT: I just noticed your answer. Sorry if I improperly stated my intend. The goal was not to enter into a philosophical debate, but to have counter arguments. I am interested in either proving or disproving my thoughts - both are fine. Therefore, to avoid sparking a debate, I will not reply to your comment. Your answer however was very helpful and helped me clarify my thoughts. I agree with your points. Thanks a lot, thanks also for telling me your position and your data on coffee. For my position on coffee, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632696 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632995 - I'd rather not say more, or a coffee fanboy may start a debate.
wtallis 13y ago
Your biggest complaint seems to be that nobody is using sample sizes that are large enough to satisfy you. What is your justification for setting the bar so high? Just what kind of confidence levels are you looking for before you think a public health intervention is justified? 10 million people may be only 0.14% of the world population, but the total size of the world population has basically nothing to do with what constitutes a healthy diet for most people - human biology hasn't changed much in the past 300 years even though the population grew by a factor of 10. Huge sample sizes are only necessary if you're trying to study something rare (which is almost by definition not public health), or if the population is very inhomogeneous: an assumption you're making without supplying much evidence. And the first two paragraphs of your comment read like a conspiracy nut's rant. It significantly lowers your credibility and quite justifies downvoting you for making assertions that contradict scientific consensus without providing any supporting evidence.
danmaz74 13y ago
"The proposal mandating 50% of something in food marketed to kids is stupid nonsense" + "Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health?" = flamebait => downvote
nl 13y ago
So why bother increasing the costs - besides for control and power? Because it is killing people Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't. We may not know what is best, but we do know some things that are extremely harmful. We know that eating extremely calorie-dense foods is a contributing factor to obesity. Beside the many studies that show this (which may or may not meet your somewhat unusual standards) we can rely on chemistry and biology. It's easy to calculate how many calories someone eats based on their diet. It's easy to calculate how many calories they burn based on their lifestyle. If the amount they eat is in excess of what they burn, they gain weight. In children some of that goes towards growing, but it's easy to calculate that too based on average growth weights.
almaIV 13y ago
> Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health? Yes. You don't need to look at the effects of a particular diet because you can be reductionist as a proxy. For example, examining the effect of a meat-heavy diet on people is difficult, as you said. But if you know what meat does in a diet (correlates with high cholesterol, e.g.) you can examine the effect of high cholesterol on a diet, and if you find out it's bad you could determine that eating in a way which contributes to high cholesterol is generally a bad idea.
icebraining 13y ago
Obviously the person downvoting you is a Knuth fan ;)

by guylhem 13y ago

skylan_q 13y ago

Most researchers who publish studies are unfamiliar with the scientific method and hypothesis nullification. Either that, or it's not in the interests of the publishers to properly apply these concepts in their studies. We've gotten to a scary point where "science" is now getting more and more into the hands of the public and become a consumer good purely for consumption in the form of news. People love studies that confirm something they already believe. It's bad for business to dispel myths that people have an emotional investment in.

srl 13y ago

Yes, it's hard. We can't experiment directly on humans - we can only look for correlations, which always causes trouble with determining causality. Biological questions are inherently complicated, so any hypothesis is necessarily little more than a stab in the dark, even if we had the ability to compensate for genetic variation et cetera, which we most certainly don't. Large-scale studies are expensive, time-consuming, difficult to organize, and would inevitably end up politicized from 200 different directions, and then driven into the ground in the next campaign season. In short, any and all dietary studies are doomed to be 99% failures. But that 1% is important. I don't think there's much question that we have a better understanding today, of what constitutes healthy food, than we did 50 years ago. We know, in particular, that foods rich in certain substances (I don't want to try to classify them all in one or two words, because I don't study this stuff and would get it wrong - I'm talking about tradition "junk foods" and sweets, like cupcakes and potato chips.), are strongly correlated with a wide variety of health issues, the incidence of which has increased over the last several decades. Furthermore, these foods are inherently attractive to children, and (perhaps more controversially?) display limited addictive properties. Yeah, our knowledge is limited, and yeah, we'll have missteps. But I don't think this is "premature optimization" - the program's running really slowly, and everyone's complaining about it. We don't understand a lot of why it takes so long to finish, but there is something we can do that would probably make it at least 5% faster. Why not give it a shot, and then go back to profiling? Oh, and have an upvote, for contributing to the conversation. Because that's the etiquette around here, although some seem to have forgotten.

guylhem 13y ago
Thanks for this interesting counter argument (and for the upvote, although the effect was quite short - I guess there are more emotional than rational voters). It is quite valid - if we have a strong suspicion on something, it could be helpful to give a shot. I'm just concerned we don't know how strong our suspicion is, which turns that into a bet (more on that later) The real problem IMHO is that this bet will certainly prevent or stall proper studies for a long time afterwards. Take for example LSD - there are many results suggesting it might be effective on depression. Yet it was banned, which means once we have the technology to conduct a real large scale study, we may not have enough data points as we would have if it had not been banned (thanks to recreational users) I mean, it is not ethical to willfully expose human to known dangerous drugs, yet if they take it wilfully by themselves or by mistake, it's a great source of data: for example, pharmacovigilence collects accidental use of drugs by pregnant mothers to guesstimate the toxicity on the fetus or the LD50 on humans) This is just an example, but you can see how it might scale, basically we are taking bets, and it hampers research. Also, it is quite philosophical. Personally, I'm against coffee due to its addictive potential and it's social image, yet it would be wrong for me to say there are no positive outcomes linked to it, or that on average it might have positive health benefit. I just don't know. There are many contradictions and I remember reading an article on how there seems to be time trends in negative or positive studies result, with an oscillation. (which would suggest that our research results are biaised by our perception) An outright ban on caffeine, like on LSD, even if it might be a) coherent with my refusal, and b) more comfortable to me since I know I wouldn't be accidentally exposed to coffee (ex: in a soda), would certainly hamper further research, which would be detrimental if there was after all a positive health benefit on average - ie it would deprive me of future data which could help me change my mind. IMHO, with bad data, taking bet with one's health is acceptable (if at no cost for the health system). Taking bets with the other people health - aka banning or mandating, is wrong. EDIT: I just noticed your answer. Sorry if I improperly stated my intend. The goal was not to enter into a philosophical debate, but to have counter arguments. I am interested in either proving or disproving my thoughts - both are fine. Therefore, to avoid sparking a debate, I will not reply to your comment. Your answer however was very helpful and helped me clarify my thoughts. I agree with your points. Thanks a lot, thanks also for telling me your position and your data on coffee. For my position on coffee, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632696 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632995 - I'd rather not say more, or a coffee fanboy may start a debate.

wtallis 13y ago

Your biggest complaint seems to be that nobody is using sample sizes that are large enough to satisfy you. What is your justification for setting the bar so high? Just what kind of confidence levels are you looking for before you think a public health intervention is justified? 10 million people may be only 0.14% of the world population, but the total size of the world population has basically nothing to do with what constitutes a healthy diet for most people - human biology hasn't changed much in the past 300 years even though the population grew by a factor of 10. Huge sample sizes are only necessary if you're trying to study something rare (which is almost by definition not public health), or if the population is very inhomogeneous: an assumption you're making without supplying much evidence. And the first two paragraphs of your comment read like a conspiracy nut's rant. It significantly lowers your credibility and quite justifies downvoting you for making assertions that contradict scientific consensus without providing any supporting evidence.

danmaz74 13y ago

"The proposal mandating 50% of something in food marketed to kids is stupid nonsense" + "Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health?" = flamebait => downvote

nl 13y ago

So why bother increasing the costs - besides for control and power? Because it is killing people Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't. We may not know what is best, but we do know some things that are extremely harmful. We know that eating extremely calorie-dense foods is a contributing factor to obesity. Beside the many studies that show this (which may or may not meet your somewhat unusual standards) we can rely on chemistry and biology. It's easy to calculate how many calories someone eats based on their diet. It's easy to calculate how many calories they burn based on their lifestyle. If the amount they eat is in excess of what they burn, they gain weight. In children some of that goes towards growing, but it's easy to calculate that too based on average growth weights.

almaIV 13y ago

> Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health? Yes. You don't need to look at the effects of a particular diet because you can be reductionist as a proxy. For example, examining the effect of a meat-heavy diet on people is difficult, as you said. But if you know what meat does in a diet (correlates with high cholesterol, e.g.) you can examine the effect of high cholesterol on a diet, and if you find out it's bad you could determine that eating in a way which contributes to high cholesterol is generally a bad idea.

icebraining 13y ago

Obviously the person downvoting you is a Knuth fan ;)