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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?
      • dragonwriter 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. Without getting into the discussion of whether or not your problem is simply equivocation because you are interpreting "unable" in a different sense than those using it (or, e.g., the medical community) would in this context, "eating less" in the context of this discussion was eating less volume of food with the same calorie density, and the post to which you responded was pointing out that that is, in practice, not as successful for some people as eating similar volumes of food with lower calorie content. Both of these methods are equally "eating less" in a caloric balance sense. The set of processes that affect processes related to wait loss (including both processes that control how much of that energy content is actually made available, and processes that might be viewed as compliance-related in terms of satiety triggers on the input side and processes that make people prone or resistant to activity on the output side) have substantial, well-known, biological variation between individuals, which have significant linkages to propensity for obesity. Treating the issue one of simply calories in vs. calories out with success outcomes differentiated only by moral features like willpower is a stupid statement which is proven false by a vast body of research on metabolism, obesity, etc.
  • 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.