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Unfortunately this is the truth about just about the entire western food industry. I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy

• lukifer 12y ago
  After breaking the cycle of fake food, the body's satiety signals are surprisingly effective at calorie/portion control. It does makes more sense to model something like Doritos Loaded as an addictive drug rather than a foodstuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus > the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against. I don't think it's primarily consumers that would fight against this; rather, the food industry will. At the moment, not only do we not "sin tax" sugar the way we do tobacco, we actually subsidize artificially cheap corn starch and syrup. And unfortunately, eliminating these subsidies is a complete political non-starter.
  • baddox 12y ago
    Do you think that any "treat" that is unhealthy should be considered an addictive drug rather than a foodstuff? Everyone I know, regardless of how health-conscious they are, will at least occasionally partake in some candy, or fried food, or chips, etc. even if it's very rare. Personally, I don't think that's a big deal.
    • billmalarky 12y ago
      It's not a big deal to enjoy junk food sparingly. The problem is these foods are made to be addictive and the data suggests that more and more people are crossing that health boundary. Just look up global obesity trends - it's not just a "'Murican" problem anymore. Food addiction is real, and ask any addict how hard it is to stay on the wagon when their drug of choice is constantly shoved in front of their face. "Personally, I don't think that's a big deal." You may live a healthy life so out of sight out of mind, but the obesity epidemic is a huge issue (no pun intended) in regards to quality of life, healthcare costs, etc.
    • lukifer 12y ago
      You're completely correct; however, the occasional partaking you describe is equally applicable to other addictive activities, be they substances like alcohol or marijuana, or purely behavioral addictions like gambling or MMOs. Some people can do it once in a blue moon, some people can sustain doing it every weekend, and for some people it becomes an unhealthy dependency. In all cases, I don't think there's anybody who wouldn't benefit from additional mindfulness. If such behavior becomes problematic, it's a case-by-case determination as to whether moderation or elimination is the better strategy. (I personally find it easier to eat zero junk food than to eat it occasionally, but I certainly don't begrudge anyone who can moderate successfully.)
• xcubed 12y ago
  I agree that it's hard to make healthy choices, but I think it's a bit more complex than that... I packed on an extra 20-30 pounds working in a catered, snack-heavy silicon valley company. I decided to change my diet completely. I slowly cut out all processed food from my diet, and then all snacks, so that everything that I ate was homemade by myself, typically "healthy" (similar to mediterranean diet), with no sugar, no juice, lots of vegetables and fish, some fruit, and relatively portion-controlled (eyeballed.) I lost 8 pounds but then plateau-ed - I continued to be overweight. I also exercised 4 times a week. I started monitoring calories for a couple months and realized I was eating at a slight "calorie deficit" - I should have been losing a pound every week or two but I wasn't. Only when I cut my calories and STRICTLY portion-controlled my healthy food (to a calorie deficit where I should have been losing 2-3 pounds a week), did I finally start losing 2/3 pound a week. I'm proud to say I'm now a healthy weight but I eat FAR less and exercise FAR more than I should "need" to. The journey really helped me realize there's something wrong with our food (not just the processed food but the ingredients themselves) and that there are some environmental factors involved (something in the water? the environment? pesticides? I really don't know. I'm not sure what it is.)
  • oblio 12y ago
    American food is crap. I don't know what they add in the US, but a lot of stuff seems artificial. Even the milk seems over-processed. Source: European who had 2 trips to the US, in supposedly healthy states: California, Washington.
    • trentmb 12y ago
      Euro milk always tasted burnt to me. I assume it's the UHT vs. HTST pasteurization.
      • thomasahle 12y ago
        Burnt, as in boiled?
    • pm90 12y ago
      I feel more like American milk is extremely homogenized, so all milk tastes exactly the same. However, I really enjoy the taste of it, so I haven't had any problem so far. In contrast, Indian milk tastes different when you buy from different vendors. You also have a choice between cow and buffalo milk.
• VLM 12y ago
  "Without the intensely pleasurable flavors that drive you" Try to get fat eating steak or carrots. More or less on a dare I found I started feeling sick after the second pound of steak couldn't finish the third, and a daily diet of that doesn't contain enough calories to fatten me, only 1500 for two. Ditto the carrots, I've done the "orange skin" thing on a dare (so I'm an idiot, whatever) but again its literally not enough calories to fatten me and my stomach feels really sick after maybe two pounds of carrots. Maybe the fundamental problem is my stomach only holds two pounds of solid food, and two pounds of healthy food can't fatten you up, but two pounds of junk food most certainly can.
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • billmalarky 12y ago
    The caloric density of junk food really is incredible. There's this restaurant I use to like to eat at that served these honey biscuits before every meal. I used to eat ~4 of them every time I went since they were pretty small. Then I found out each one was 200 calories! So I was pounding down 800 calories BEFORE eating a large burger with mashed potatoes on the side. I don't do that anymore but come on I would have never assumed I was eating that many calories worth of biscuits. The entire meal was probably ~1800 calories or more!
    • VLM 12y ago
      There is also a velocity contribution where after 800 calories of carrots I wouldn't feel like immediately eating another meal, but as you wrote 800 calories of pastries is just an appetizer. The problem with donuts is not necessarily that they're a huge number of empty calories, but that I can eat perhaps two per hour all day long and wash them down with a can of Mt Dew and never feel full and still feel hungry for dinner in an hour. I don't think I ate for about 24 hours after I ate two pounds of grilled steak. Just wasn't hungry. Couldn't eat another bite and didn't feel like more food for a day. Don't think I could have pulled that off with honey biscuits, I'd be ravenous again by the next meal time. This whole topic fits in with the stereotype of "ate Chinese-American style take out, got hungry again in two hours" That stuffs actually pretty good food, other than added corn syrup and the lack of long term satiety resulting in eating more. I mostly eat paleo-type food but I'll socialize and eat junk food occasionally, and it never fails to amaze me that I'll have a piece of cake and feel like I'm starving even though its more calories than my entire salad lunch or a medium sized bag of pecans.
• RichardFord 12y ago
  I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against People rightfully should fight against that heavy regulation. You don't want to go down that road. Whatever unhealthy dietary choices that people are making is a much better alternative to government regulating people's diet. Think about it for a while.
  • jonrimmer 12y ago
    Regulation is the reason you can buy food and feel safe that it won't poison you. It's why you can buy a house and feel safe that the ceiling won't collapse on top of you. It's why you can visit a cinema and feel safe that there are enough fire exits and alarms and a sensible evacuation plan. All of these regulations aren't in place just because officious bureaucrats wanted to clog up the smooth workings of a free, capitalist society, they exist because historically, when they weren't, people died. For proof, go and read about some of the nightclub and theatre fires that happened a hundred years ago, in which hundreds of people burned to death. When there's a immediate link between malfeasance and harm, it's easy to see that the government should step in, introducing building codes and hygiene standards to ensure it can't happen again. When the harm is delayed, the link feels more tenuous, even if it's really not. Companies that pollute are contributing to potentially catastrophic disruption of the biosphere and global warming, but it doesn't happen overnight, so people treat it as less wrong than building a nightclub with no fire exits. It isn't. Likewise, food companies who aggressively promote nutritionally dangerous foodstuffs cereals at children, while promoting them as healthy, are doing harm. They're doing it knowingly, and they're paying to distort scientific and political processes in order to keep doing it. It's easy to trumpet individual choice as all important, but reality is not an individualist pipe dream. The average person is not well informed about dietary science and never will be, and many children cannot make a choice at all, let alone an informed one. In the face of the wealth and marketing power of large food companies, people have no chance on their own, and they levels of obesity in modern societies are clear proof of that. Food regulation isn't about the government telling people what they can eat. It's about the government telling food companies that they can't produce food that's dangerous, in the long term as well as the short term. Just like the government tells companies they can't produce cars that fly apart on the highway, or buildings that fall down in a strong wind. Regulation of dangerous business practices is exactly what government should be doing it. It's the reason why all the other nonsense governments do is worth putting up with. It protects people from irresponsible companies, and it protects responsible companies from being undercut by irresponsible companies.
• StavrosK 12y ago
  As a Greek, I can safely say you don't know what you're talking about. My favorite foods are beans, lentils, peas, etc. I will happily eat them until I burst, and they aren't processed at all and don't contain much more than salt/pepper/oil/tomato. They are delicious.
  • billmalarky 12y ago
    "As a Greek, I can safely say you don't know what you're talking about." I'm going to start using this appeal to authority from now on. It's hilarious.
    • StavrosK 12y ago
      It's not an appeal to authority (Greeks aren't dietary authorities), it's "Greeks have very tasty food that's also non-processed, hence I can say you don't know what you're talking about".
• cpursley 12y ago
  So, basically you're suggesting massive scale nanny-statism. Do we really want a world where government can tell us what to eat and not to eat, what we can smoke and not smoke (etc)? What if instead of being reactionary and waging another war (War on Drugs, War on This, War on That), we step back and think about what caused this phenomenon in the first place. Cereal, junk food, cheap low-quality meat all point towards the same culprit: farm subsidies - esp. corn and soybeans. It's time we phase them out and start eating real food again.
  • Renaud 12y ago
    There are things that regulation can do that go counter to what the market want. Forbidding snack and soda vending machines in schools, mandating healthy and balanced meals in school's cafeterias, making it mandatory for kids to receive an education on food that allows them to understand their choices, ... There doesn't need to be a lot of regulation. At least just enough to protect and educate kids to become better informed adults.
  • billmalarky 12y ago
    "farm subsidies - esp. corn and soybeans. It's time we phase them out and start eating real food again." I'm open to many solutions, this included.
    • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      They'll be replaced by crop insurance. Different math; same result. Anyway the solution to diet isn't to fool with the supply; its to change folk's ideas about food.
• narag 12y ago
  I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against. I suspect that all it's needed is preventing the huge load of disinformation that we suffer. Most people that I've known that were trying to lose weight (and failing) were totally clueless, parroting cliches from tv. Then, maybe forbid (or even better, criminalize :-) adding any kind of sugar to packaged food or to meals where it doesn't make sense. Tax heavily sugar.
• drdaeman 12y ago
  Such intensely pleasurably flavored foods are actually useful for a minority who are underweight, feel full before they really get the necessary amount of energy (just have to keep an eye on nutrients, though, as such foods are lower on them), and have to "overeat" to not starve themselves.
  • thomasahle 12y ago
    Being underweight is not a reason to eat sugar. There's simply nothing good in it. Instead drink cream, eat potatoes, oats and other things with lots of healthy calories.
    • drdaeman 12y ago
      Obviously, foods are not only about energy supply. One needs all sorts of nutrients, so just eating lots of Doritos is a terrible idea. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but isn't every calorie source fairly acceptable if one hadn't got enough yet, and they're still far from a limit on how many one should get? I.e. a slice of pizza isn't "healthy" (nutritionally dense) but brings more good (+200-300 Kcal, and some protein from cheese and meat, and possibly some vitamins from vegetables if topping contains fresh ones) than bad (possible excess supply of triglycerides and some gastritis risk) if one had only consumed 1500 Kcal today and they really should get at least 2500. Especially if one has to force themselves to eat oatmeal, but would happily eat some tasty "junk food".
• baddox 12y ago
  I think that government regulation is at least as likely to result in less healthy diets than in healthier diets.
• Zelphyr 12y ago
  I tried one of the Doritos Loaded's recently. It tastes exactly what you'd think a cheese filled, Doritos covered turd would taste like.