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I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising

I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising in 3-6 year olds. The point being that children in that age group are no less active today than in the past, so something else is causing obesity, type II diabetes and other problems. The most likely culprit is processed food, where nutrients are not used in their natural form, but instead converted into something else. So using corn to make high fructose corn syrup, soy and cottonseed to make oil, or feeding animal protein to herbivores are a few examples of where the food supply is getting contaminated. For example, cottonseed oil is not only a relatively unhealthy oil, but it also contains one of the highest concentration of pesticides (because cotton was not traditionally a food crop). Not to mention that plastics contain hormone-like chemicals like BPA, they use preservatives in things like canned food that don’t need them, and add animal byproducts like pork lard to foods like refried beans that don’t need them. So our immune systems are getting bombarded by substances we either have no evolutionary history with or simply don’t need to be eating in the quantities that we are. So that inhibits aspects of our immune systems and metabolism (triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, asthma, arthritis and metabolic syndrome). I could literally go on forever about this, so the gist of it is “it’s the food supply, stupid”. Yes, being more active helps a great deal, but without proper nutrition we’re looking at a modern form of the wasting diseases similar to the ones they used to get in the 1800s before they understood vitamins and minerals, except it’s masked by obesity. I think if we didn’t have the social stigmas around laziness and the political monkeying of the farm and retail lobbies, we would have recognized obesity as an epidemic the way we did with polio and done something about it decades ago. Nothing short of going back to the foods we ate before about 1980 is going to work for the vast majority of the population. And that’s going to start with campaigns to inform people about what’s in their food and reform the way we design cities so that food centers are near where people live. TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.

twobits 12y ago
TL;DR: Capitalism solves everything. /sarcasm. Some day humanity will realize that the freedom to say and pursue a different opinion, is not the same as "competition". The freedom to a diff opinion, and pursuing it, is good. Cooperation and sharing, is good. Competition, is bad. It focuses on "wining" and not on solutions and improvement. PS: Yeah, I know, I live in a wrong, fucking, century :-(
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  Bah to your sarcastic pessimism. Doesn't help you, doesn't help the world. Here, read this and upgrade your thinking on the subject of failings of capitalism and why they are so: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    Could we please not pretend the failings of capitalism are entirely coordination problems and/or eldritch abominations? I mean, come on, your average capitalist society is actually very well-coordinated when it comes to the interests of big banks or agribusiness.
onewaystreet 12y ago
> The most likely culprit is processed food Food doesn't jump into kids' mouths and eat itself. If there's a problem with what kids are eating then it's their parents who are to blame.
- rtpg 12y ago
  access to fresh food is more expensive now that the industry has gone more and more into processed foods. People have to eat, and if you can't afford to get high-quality food, you're gonna buy low-quality food.
  - kaybe 12y ago
    Only in terms of time, at least here in Europe. If you get noodles, flour, rice and in-season vegetables and fruit (and don't choose these for wants but for price, there are some ridiculous deals sometimes), plus some more expensive ingredients such as eggs and milk sparingly, it is very cheap. There's no way processed food can beat that.
    - ryanobjc 12y ago
      See, you are assuming that noodles, flour, rice are healthy for you. There is good evidence that in fact, it is not. Many of those things are inflammatory. Also, following advice they get from doctors, they are using more and more poly-unsaturated fats. Which as we are discovering are actually substantially LESS healthy for you than saturated fat! And in terms of time, you are ignoring the only thing people have a fixed amount of. By ignoring that, you're ignoring a very important factor that causes people in to bad eating choices. Not that they even know what good vs bad are (as I hinted above, so-called 'healthy' food for you isn't!)
      - kaybe 12y ago
        Well, you can also get lentils, whole-grain bread/noodles/rice/flour, chickpeas and other things as cheap staples (if one leaves the meat out as in my example it's not even optional), but I guess that's not what you mean? What would be your suggestion as staple? There's a problem with nutrition research in that it changes recommendations every once in a while. The only constant seems to be 'Eat food, mix it up - naturally colourful things are good, don't eat too much of it', so I'm going with that for now. Concerning time.. it's maybe more of a knowledge and organisation thing, which takes time to aquire. Unless you want really fancy food like sushi.
com2kid 12y ago
> TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it. Some of this is cross generational. Children born to obese parents have a much higher likelihood of lifetime obesity. Wikipedia lone has a lot of good info on this.
sorbits 12y ago
> The most likely culprit is processed food […] Processed food alone does not seem to explain all data (though you do mention “plastics contain hormone-like chemicals”): - Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades. - Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented. Source: http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.htm http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht...

twobits 12y ago

TL;DR: Capitalism solves everything. /sarcasm. Some day humanity will realize that the freedom to say and pursue a different opinion, is not the same as "competition". The freedom to a diff opinion, and pursuing it, is good. Cooperation and sharing, is good. Competition, is bad. It focuses on "wining" and not on solutions and improvement. PS: Yeah, I know, I live in a wrong, fucking, century :-(

ryanobjc 12y ago
Bah to your sarcastic pessimism. Doesn't help you, doesn't help the world. Here, read this and upgrade your thinking on the subject of failings of capitalism and why they are so: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Could we please not pretend the failings of capitalism are entirely coordination problems and/or eldritch abominations? I mean, come on, your average capitalist society is actually very well-coordinated when it comes to the interests of big banks or agribusiness.

onewaystreet 12y ago

> The most likely culprit is processed food Food doesn't jump into kids' mouths and eat itself. If there's a problem with what kids are eating then it's their parents who are to blame.

rtpg 12y ago
access to fresh food is more expensive now that the industry has gone more and more into processed foods. People have to eat, and if you can't afford to get high-quality food, you're gonna buy low-quality food.
- kaybe 12y ago
  Only in terms of time, at least here in Europe. If you get noodles, flour, rice and in-season vegetables and fruit (and don't choose these for wants but for price, there are some ridiculous deals sometimes), plus some more expensive ingredients such as eggs and milk sparingly, it is very cheap. There's no way processed food can beat that.
  - ryanobjc 12y ago
    See, you are assuming that noodles, flour, rice are healthy for you. There is good evidence that in fact, it is not. Many of those things are inflammatory. Also, following advice they get from doctors, they are using more and more poly-unsaturated fats. Which as we are discovering are actually substantially LESS healthy for you than saturated fat! And in terms of time, you are ignoring the only thing people have a fixed amount of. By ignoring that, you're ignoring a very important factor that causes people in to bad eating choices. Not that they even know what good vs bad are (as I hinted above, so-called 'healthy' food for you isn't!)
    - kaybe 12y ago
      Well, you can also get lentils, whole-grain bread/noodles/rice/flour, chickpeas and other things as cheap staples (if one leaves the meat out as in my example it's not even optional), but I guess that's not what you mean? What would be your suggestion as staple? There's a problem with nutrition research in that it changes recommendations every once in a while. The only constant seems to be 'Eat food, mix it up - naturally colourful things are good, don't eat too much of it', so I'm going with that for now. Concerning time.. it's maybe more of a knowledge and organisation thing, which takes time to aquire. Unless you want really fancy food like sushi.

com2kid 12y ago

> TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it. Some of this is cross generational. Children born to obese parents have a much higher likelihood of lifetime obesity. Wikipedia lone has a lot of good info on this.

sorbits 12y ago

> The most likely culprit is processed food […] Processed food alone does not seem to explain all data (though you do mention “plastics contain hormone-like chemicals”): - Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades. - Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented. Source: http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.htm http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht...