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There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of

by zdean 12y ago

There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. What a strange set of circumstances. Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice.

Splendor 12y ago
While simply eating less works for most people I think this is a little dismissive of other factors at work in the obesity epidemic.
- zdean 12y ago
  Such as food subsidies that make high calorie/low value foods cheaper than they otherwise would be? Or the over-availability to the most at-risk populations of these high calorie/low value foods? I'm not sure how lowering the caloric density of a food is going to lower the incentive to eating too much food. In fact, I could easily see it doing the opposite.
- dublinben 12y ago
  >eating less works for most people Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them. So the two halves of this statement are opposed.
    - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
      The problem is when some people claim that they just become overweight because of their genes, and are unable to lose weight by eating less. This is a stupid statement which is proven false by basic thermodynamics, and this should be pointed out. If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.
      - jessaustin 12y ago
        I don't think your proposal to fight more wars to destroy the global economy and make food scarce will appeal to many people outside the armaments industry.
      - oldmanjay 12y ago
        Did you have a point or were you just posting to feel superior to strawman fat people?
        semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        I was replying to parent who was basically saying that a process does not work if people are unwilling to try the process. This statement is false. If I am unwilling to replace the broken on exhaust on my car, it does not mean that it's impossible for me to fix my car.
        npsimons 12y ago
        Exactly. You can't beat the second law of thermodynamics. I'm really disappointed in the level of fatlogic in the comments here, and the downvotes for pointing out simple facts.
      - oldmanjay 12y ago
        Did you have a point or were you just posting to feel superior to strawman fat people?
      - 12y ago
  - rayiner 12y ago
    I had a professor in college whose field of expertise was designing cockpits. She liked to say that if the pilot pushes the wrong button and crashes the plane, it's your fault as the cockpit designer that it was possible to make that mistake.
    - npsimons 12y ago
      I like to say if a pilot (person) starts firing bullets into the engines (eats too much) and crashes the plane (suffers the effects of ill health), then it's probably the pilot's fault for thinking the laws of physics don't apply to them. Unfortunately, our bodies aren't designed, and while they evolved many failsafes, it takes some conscious control not to mess them up.
      - delg 12y ago
        That's a terrible analogy. A huge proportion of well-intentioned pilots are crashing their planes.
        npsimons 12y ago
        I wouldn't call firing bullets into the engine (overeating on a regular enough basis to get obese) well intentioned.
        delg 12y ago
        Okay, so instead let's look at people who have lost weight (well-trained pilots) trying to maintain their loss. They fail miserably. Very low success rate. Among a large population. So not a rogue pilot with a machine gun, instead the majority of successful weight losers. The advice "eat less move more" is a proven loser. Not really even a question. Time to move on. Maybe low carb/IF/less time-consuming HIIT will do better. But we know move more, eat less has failed. Being more smug about the fact it would work if only all these dummy pilots would use it right isn't going to improve the public health success rate.
- digikata 12y ago
  We are also living in a world economy which is constrained (among other factors) by energy inputs, water, and arable land. So a method of reducing calorie intake of a food after you've spent the resources to produce a crop seems... well, wasteful.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. We're also trying to figure out how to increase the nutritional values of foods that tend to be available to areas where inadequate food supplies are problematic (e.g., cassava.) Different groups of people have different, and often opposite, problems, and research can be directed at more than one of them at a time. > At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. I've yet to see any coherent explanation of how a heavily processed food like Soylent can be anything but an increase in the resources to produce food. Might, optimistically, reduce the resource cost to deliver and store food compared to some other alternatives. Mostly, though, its seems to be an attempt to make money by selling convenience to people with who aren't particularly concerned for other features of food (other than perhaps a certain very broad nutritional profile.) > Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice. A number of people find it much easier to reduce calories first (by eating less calorie-dense foods, but with similar volumes) and then reduce volumes (potentially adding back more calorie-dense foods in the process, or perhaps further reducing calories in the process.) You can address real people's problems more effectively when you deal with them being how they are rather than how you would wish them to be.
- EliRivers 12y ago
  Real people are eating too much rice. This problem can be addressed by eating less rice.
  - mod 12y ago
    (Many) Real people are not good at controlling themselves and eating less volume of food. This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume.
    - EliRivers 12y ago
      This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume. They can already do that. There already exists high-volume , low-calorie food. The target market here is clearly not the people making that choice. I genuinely have trouble caring about people whose problems are caused by making the active choice to keep putting food in the hole in the front of their head. Unpopular view, I expect, but true. Absolutely a self-inflicted injury, and making less nutritious food to indulge these people is sickening, and frankly insulting to them. They've made their choice. Yeah, sure, maybe it IS a medical condition, and there is something massively wrong with these people's brain chemistry that means they're physically incapable of telling when they're not hungry, and they're too stupid to realise that eating five kilos of rice every day and being horrifically overweight is a clue that they're doing something wrong, or maybe they're masively emotionally damaged and stuck in some kind of self-loathing spiral that makes them eat more and more in some kind of slow suicide, but deliberately making food less nutritious is grotesque, and indulging these people in entirely the wrong way. I suspect that they'll simply eat twice as much of this new half-calorie rice, or just top it up with a big loaf of bread.
deeviant 12y ago
What amazingly useful logic. Why didn't somebody think of that before. We can employ in all sorts of use cases: * Solve global hunger problems? Give starving people more food. * End crime? Just everybody stop committing crimes. * Debilitating OCD? Just stop washing your hands.
delg 12y ago
You saw the part where part of the obesity problem is actually in the developing world right

by zdean 12y ago

Splendor 12y ago

While simply eating less works for most people I think this is a little dismissive of other factors at work in the obesity epidemic.

zdean 12y ago
Such as food subsidies that make high calorie/low value foods cheaper than they otherwise would be? Or the over-availability to the most at-risk populations of these high calorie/low value foods? I'm not sure how lowering the caloric density of a food is going to lower the incentive to eating too much food. In fact, I could easily see it doing the opposite.
dublinben 12y ago
>eating less works for most people Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them. So the two halves of this statement are opposed.
  - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
    The problem is when some people claim that they just become overweight because of their genes, and are unable to lose weight by eating less. This is a stupid statement which is proven false by basic thermodynamics, and this should be pointed out. If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      I don't think your proposal to fight more wars to destroy the global economy and make food scarce will appeal to many people outside the armaments industry.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      Did you have a point or were you just posting to feel superior to strawman fat people?
      - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        I was replying to parent who was basically saying that a process does not work if people are unwilling to try the process. This statement is false. If I am unwilling to replace the broken on exhaust on my car, it does not mean that it's impossible for me to fix my car.
        npsimons 12y ago
        Exactly. You can't beat the second law of thermodynamics. I'm really disappointed in the level of fatlogic in the comments here, and the downvotes for pointing out simple facts.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      Did you have a point or were you just posting to feel superior to strawman fat people?
    - 12y ago
- rayiner 12y ago
  I had a professor in college whose field of expertise was designing cockpits. She liked to say that if the pilot pushes the wrong button and crashes the plane, it's your fault as the cockpit designer that it was possible to make that mistake.
  - npsimons 12y ago
    I like to say if a pilot (person) starts firing bullets into the engines (eats too much) and crashes the plane (suffers the effects of ill health), then it's probably the pilot's fault for thinking the laws of physics don't apply to them. Unfortunately, our bodies aren't designed, and while they evolved many failsafes, it takes some conscious control not to mess them up.
    - delg 12y ago
      That's a terrible analogy. A huge proportion of well-intentioned pilots are crashing their planes.
      - npsimons 12y ago
        I wouldn't call firing bullets into the engine (overeating on a regular enough basis to get obese) well intentioned.
        delg 12y ago
        Okay, so instead let's look at people who have lost weight (well-trained pilots) trying to maintain their loss. They fail miserably. Very low success rate. Among a large population. So not a rogue pilot with a machine gun, instead the majority of successful weight losers. The advice "eat less move more" is a proven loser. Not really even a question. Time to move on. Maybe low carb/IF/less time-consuming HIIT will do better. But we know move more, eat less has failed. Being more smug about the fact it would work if only all these dummy pilots would use it right isn't going to improve the public health success rate.
digikata 12y ago
We are also living in a world economy which is constrained (among other factors) by energy inputs, water, and arable land. So a method of reducing calorie intake of a food after you've spent the resources to produce a crop seems... well, wasteful.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. We're also trying to figure out how to increase the nutritional values of foods that tend to be available to areas where inadequate food supplies are problematic (e.g., cassava.) Different groups of people have different, and often opposite, problems, and research can be directed at more than one of them at a time. > At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. I've yet to see any coherent explanation of how a heavily processed food like Soylent can be anything but an increase in the resources to produce food. Might, optimistically, reduce the resource cost to deliver and store food compared to some other alternatives. Mostly, though, its seems to be an attempt to make money by selling convenience to people with who aren't particularly concerned for other features of food (other than perhaps a certain very broad nutritional profile.) > Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice. A number of people find it much easier to reduce calories first (by eating less calorie-dense foods, but with similar volumes) and then reduce volumes (potentially adding back more calorie-dense foods in the process, or perhaps further reducing calories in the process.) You can address real people's problems more effectively when you deal with them being how they are rather than how you would wish them to be.

EliRivers 12y ago
Real people are eating too much rice. This problem can be addressed by eating less rice.
- mod 12y ago
  (Many) Real people are not good at controlling themselves and eating less volume of food. This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume.
  - EliRivers 12y ago
    This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume. They can already do that. There already exists high-volume , low-calorie food. The target market here is clearly not the people making that choice. I genuinely have trouble caring about people whose problems are caused by making the active choice to keep putting food in the hole in the front of their head. Unpopular view, I expect, but true. Absolutely a self-inflicted injury, and making less nutritious food to indulge these people is sickening, and frankly insulting to them. They've made their choice. Yeah, sure, maybe it IS a medical condition, and there is something massively wrong with these people's brain chemistry that means they're physically incapable of telling when they're not hungry, and they're too stupid to realise that eating five kilos of rice every day and being horrifically overweight is a clue that they're doing something wrong, or maybe they're masively emotionally damaged and stuck in some kind of self-loathing spiral that makes them eat more and more in some kind of slow suicide, but deliberately making food less nutritious is grotesque, and indulging these people in entirely the wrong way. I suspect that they'll simply eat twice as much of this new half-calorie rice, or just top it up with a big loaf of bread.

deeviant 12y ago

What amazingly useful logic. Why didn't somebody think of that before. We can employ in all sorts of use cases: * Solve global hunger problems? Give starving people more food. * End crime? Just everybody stop committing crimes. * Debilitating OCD? Just stop washing your hands.

delg 12y ago

You saw the part where part of the obesity problem is actually in the developing world right