This drug is a net good for society, but we have to fix the root problem. Much of the food we eat is filled with addictive ingredients (sugar, excess fats/oils, etc) that provide little nutritional value but are highly addictive.
We’re subsidizing companies that create unhealthy addictive food and subsidizing companies to create drugs to counter the unhealthy addictive food. This is an enormous waste of resources.
Disagree. People genuinely enjoy those foods, because they're tasty and flavorful. And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus. We know this because we have hunter-gatherer populations who consume 50% of their diets in sugar (e.g. the Hadza) or fats (e.g. Intuit), and they have none of the diseases of abundance found in modern populations because they have near zero obesity.
The problem is not the food. The problem is obesity. The food is only an issue because some people have overly strong appetites relative to the abundance of food. If we can cure obesity, then we can literally have our cake and eat it too.
Humans obviously value tasty and flavorful food, and its existence adds joy to people's lives. That's why they'll pay hundreds of dollars per meal for the best restaurants. In sum total the development of GLP-1 agonists has maybe cost $20 billion in research at most. That's literally less than 0.1% of global GDP, hardly an "enormous waste of resources".
There are randomised controlled trials of diets (without caloric restriction). They show that some diets are better than others for real clinical endpoints, eg mediterranean vs low fat diet for secondary prevention of cardiac events [1]. The effect size in that example is not small, it is large, despite most participants already being on a statin. This data shows that diets are biologically active and significantly impact health. Therefore, the philosophy you espouse cannot be correct, or at least needs to be heavily modified.
You haven't controlled for body weight changes though. Nobody doubts that diets (if adhered to) can reduce weight. So if biomarkers improve relative to an alternative diet, the question is it because A) the Med diet is more effective at weight loss, or B) the Med diet has benefits outside weight loss. The research you linked is interesting, but confounded by weight loss. Research that has directly tried to control for this has generally found that the health benefits of the Med diet are mostly or wholly attributable to the mediating impact of weight/fat loss.[1]
This is a critical question, because GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide are far more effective at weight loss (with much lower dropout rates) than any diet known to mankind. So if the benefit of the Med diet is mediated by weight loss, who cares in the age of GLP-1 agonists? It's like arguing about the fastest hot air balloon after the invention of the jet engine.
You just forget that there might be side-effects showing up in the long-run that we simply don't know yet (and possibly), why the mediterrean diet has been tested for a few hundred years already (where "diet" means what we have access to and eat, and not a small subset of foods forced on us that relies on a lot of mental effort to follow)
GLP-1 agonists were discovered in the 1980s, and there are already statistically significant population samples who have been using them to treat T2D for decades. Any serious common side effect would have been already discovered from the large-scale clinical trials that have been repeatedly conducted.
> The problem is not the food. The problem is obesity.
Junk food corporations make profit by selling food, and they are extremely good at this. They rely on intense advertising, making the food addictive, targeting children. As a side effect, people get obese since they consume more calories that what they need.
I don't know about GLP-1, but my intuition tells me that no drug is going to make eating Mac Donald's and drink Coke healthy, even if it doesn't make you obese.
Non-obese people who eat McDonalds and drink Coke are unequivocally healthier than obese people who adhere to the healthiest diets. There's absolutely zero academic research that disputes that obesity (and exercise) by far is the largest risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, etc.
This is pseudoscience. As long as you consume a certain amount of calories and get your daily nutritions, you can eat whatever you want without getting obese. You can still become obese eating 3000 kcals of salad every day without exercising. Of course, healthy caloric intake will only ensure you don't become obese, you'll still be consuming way more fat/carbs than you should if you eat McDonalds, but it is certainly possible to create a "healthy" everyday-McDonalds diet (but you would be changing the meal to the point it won't be recognizable)
Not sure if you're being purposefully ignorant or not so I'm not going to engage this discussion, but for anyone reading, this should be basic dietary knowledge
That "calorie is a calorie", or "every calorie counts", is not a basic dietary knowledge, it's a myth/lie promoted by a food industry.
You can keep believing the ads, or just search the term in google/duckduckgo and spend 5
minutes reading different sources.
Just a few examples (first link from a search engine):
"Fiber. You eat 160 calories in almonds, but you absorb only 130. The fiber in the almonds delays absorption of calories into the bloodstream, delivering those calories to the bacteria in your intestine, which chew them up. Because a calorie is not a calorie.
Protein. When it comes to food, you have to put energy in to get energy out. You have to put twice as much energy in to metabolize protein as you do carbohydrate; this is called the thermic effect of food. So protein wastes more energy in its processing. Plus protein reduces hunger better than carbohydrate. Because a calorie is not a calorie.
Fat. All fats release nine calories per gram when burned. But omega-3 fats are heart-healthy and will save your life, while trans fats clog your arteries, leading to a heart attack. Because a calorie is not a calorie.
Sugar. This is the "big kahuna" of the "big lie." Sugar is not one chemical. It's two. Glucose is the energy of life. Every cell in every organism on the planet can burn glucose for energy. Glucose is mildly sweet, but not very interesting (think molasses). Fructose is an entirely different animal. Fructose is very sweet, the molecule we seek. Both burn at four calories per gram. If fructose were just like glucose, then sugar or high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) would be just like starch. But fructose is not glucose. Because a calorie is not a calorie."
I'm very fascinated by the idea that part of the issue with ultra-processed foods is that the calories are more bioavailable due to the lack of fiber and protein.
3000 kcals of salad is huge in terms of volume, so getting obese is practically impossible on such a diet unless it was drowned in dressing. Bodybuilders that are on a cutting phase actually consume higher volume / lower calories foods to still feel satiated.
Kale is one of the most calorie dense leafy greens and it tops out at 80 kcal per 100 grams, meaning you'd need to eat about 3.7 kilograms of kale to get 3000 kcal.
You're strawmanning here. Parent commenter clearly meant healthy as in containing only "healthy" foods. If you eat 4,000 calories of brown rice, chicken and broccoli a day you will get fat. Colloquially, though, their diet would be called healthy because of it's constituent foods.
Edit: you will get fat assuming you are like most people and do not expend greater than 4k calories / day in total
You're fat because of what you're eating, and how little your moving, sorry dude but that's 100% true. Some of that might be out of your control, but it's reality...
While those are indeed major factors, there are others that come into play. For example, a change in your thyroid behavior can cause a loss/gain in weight without changing anything else.
It was not my intent to say that it's not possible to lose weight when you have a thyroid issue. Rather, my point was that your weight loss/gain is not determined solely by the amount of food and activity in your life. You can maintain the same amount of each and suddenly start gaining/losing weight because of a thyroid issue; or some other reason. But yes, the fact that there _are_ other factors doesn't mean you can't do things to combat/mitigate them. You're right, there.
It’s still early days, but there’s very compelling research around unhealthy gut flora being a significant factor in uncontrollable weight gain. Current hypotheses are essentially that certain bacteria, given free rein in the GI tract, are able to over-signal impulses for nutrition which typically leads to low satiation and high calorie intakes. It’s also hypothesized that gut flora can play a major role in suppressing satiation.
Again, only hypotheses at this time, but the existing data is far from fluffy and there’s a lot more in the pipes.
The most compelling research I’ve seen used various semi-controlled diets (unfortunately diet was indicated but ultimately self reported by subjects, as it didn’t occur strictly in a controlled environment) with some subjects receiving fecal transplants. Those receiving diverse flora from transplants succeeded much better in losing weight and keeping it off some months later. The study needed stricter controls and more subjects, but it’s a fascinating start.
I’ll point out that the cause of the differences in results isn’t necessarily gut flora alone, too — it’s all super preliminary. This comment is mostly just to say “there are other factors, we just aren’t sure what yet but we have some interesting leads”.
I didn't say that all fat people ate junk food, and I didn't say that obese people shouldn't take medication if that could help. Obesity rate in the US didn't got from 10% to 40% in a few decades simply because suddenly everybody started to develop thyroid issues or other condition.
No, what you said is that food marketing and the amount of sugars and fats in purchased foods are the cause of obesity.
Before the 80s, food also was packed with fat and sugar, and advertised constantly. I subjectively feel that people saw far more food advertising in the 80s and before than they do now. And the government diet suggestions were to increase your consumption of carbs and reduce fats.
edit: and people definitely drank far more Coke, and McDonald's meals were far less healthy.
> what you said is that food marketing and the amount of sugars and fats in purchased foods are the cause of obesity.
Yes, I mean the cause of the obesity epidemics we're witnessing. Not the reason why every single obese person is obese.
My subjective feeling as a European traveling to the US is that it's extremely hard to eat healthy food there. In some states, it seems everybody is obese, including children, and I myself need to fight actively not to gain weight there. People there don't seem to realize that their diet is very unhealthy, and I'm not even sure they make the connection with their obesity. And this trend is happening in Europe too, with a few years lag behind the US.
But this is only my conviction and I didn't find the data to back up my intuition. How do you explain why obesity rate went from 10% to 40% in a few decades?
Trying getting fat by eating healthy food instead of burger/fries/coke. Drink alone make a huge difference. On the long run, drinking soda instead of water can make you obese.
The magic trick is eating greens and high-water content foods, but they offer so little wow-factor that most people can’t keep it up long enough for it to become their normal food.
You know that if you cut all sugar for just 2 days things with very little sugar will taste very sweet?
We do not need the excessive amount of sugar in our food to fully enjoy it. The general public is just totally numb to it because of over consumption and companies are literally competing on having the sweater product.
> ... there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus. We know this ...
Disagree.
> who consume 50% of their diets in sugar (e.g. the Hadza)
"Their diet is made up almost exclusively of food that they forage on the forest and includes fiber rich and highly nutritious berries, bananas and honey while any meat they eat is hunted and caught wild." (https://healthyfocus.org/the-hadza-diet-and-the-key-to-a-hea...)
They don't eat sugar. Fruits & vegetables with lots of fiber, wild game. Nothing like westerners diet ... so not really comparable, imho.
"... the Inuit's bodies have adapted to better handle the process of gluconeogenesis, in which the body turns fat and protein into useable glucose. The Inuit have larger livers and a larger volume of urine than the average human, which helps their bodies to process the byproducts of their diet." (https://oureverydaylife.com/486115-the-inuit-diet.html)
Also ... not applicable to a typical westerner.
> The problem is not the food. The problem is obesity.
The food is the problem.
Eat whole foods, mostly plants, minumum fats & sugar, and obesity is problem no more.
> the development of GLP-1 agonists has maybe cost $20 billion
What's the total cost of obesity? The cost of diabetes ? It is an enormous waste of resources.
Quality of food is certainly declining, but we are also seeing weight increases in lab rats with extremely controlled diets, so food probably isn't the entire story. There's no accepted explanation for this, but good candidates that might apply to humans are: subtle toxicity by microplastics, and changes in gut microbiomes.
I don’t think anyone claims that obesity is only achievable with modern processed food. At the end of the day it’s calories in, calories out.
That said, there’s more to the story. For instance, type 2 diabetes in children did NOT EXIST before ~1980, even though there was plenty of abundance and environmental contaminants. This suggest that there is a major issue with the food itself. If you look at where there is the most obesity, within the US or in the world, you also find a strong correlation with processed food. For instance, the Pacific Islanders who suffered obesity epidemics which coincided with processed food replacing their traditional diets.
I think "people value tasty food" is an oversimplification. It feels good but we regret it when we get fat, our health deteriorates, and with our health goes our participation in and contribution to everything and everyone we love. For many people, junk food starts to feel more like an addiction than a choice in line with highest values.
Sadly, this means it can be a problem when food tastes too good. The term of art is "hyperpalatable". Studies have shown that even lab animals gorge themselves and get fat and unhealthy when they get human junk food.
I think many people would be grateful to have hyperpalatable food restricted or limited or less visible to them, so the temptation is removed or moderated. How we implement that in society, in a liberal or authoritarian way or somewhere in between, is a separate question.
Also there is plenty of tasty food that isn't hyperpalatable. Those foods are more difficult to overeat because they're very filling. The problem with hyperpalatable junk food is that it's both especially pleasurable to eat and especially good at overriding our natural satiety cues. There's a world of difference between eating 1,000 calories of cheetos and 1,000 calories of brie cheese: one of them will make you incredibly full and the other will make you feel like you could just keep on crunching forever.
> And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus.
I have a hard time believing this without some very strong evidence for this claim. There's already existing evidence for greatly varying health effects of differences in cooking method, oil-type, omega ratios in fats, amino-acid ratios in proteins, glycemic index of carbs, sodium content, etc etc. It's hard for me to reconcile the suggestion that the content of food does not affect whether it is "substantially unhealthy"...
Try to find any major research showing either diet has a significant health impact on either 1) non-overweight individuals who remain non-overweight; or 2) has a health impact after controlling for changes in weight/obesity/body fat. It's virtually non-existent. Perhaps there are small differences on the margin, but all dwarfed by the impact of obesity.
Again this shouldn't shock us, because we know hunter-gatherers across the globe eat tremendously varied diets that come in all sorts of extremes. Yet, modern diseases of affluence (heart disease, diabetes, etc.) are virtually non-existent in these populations. The only thing they have in common is a lack of obesity and non-sedentary lifestyle.
> Try to find any major research showing either diet has a significant health impact on either 1) non-overweight individuals who remain non-overweight; or 2) has a health impact after controlling for changes in weight/obesity/body fat. It's virtually non-existent.
It's common sense.
And also easily provable at the limit: whose healthier at the end of 10 years, subject A consuming 2k calories of salad and lean meat per day, or subject B consuming 2k calories of vodka per day?
At least we know they'll both weigh the same, because thermodynamics, right?
The point is that certain diets are more likely to prevent non-overweight individuals from remaining non-overweight. Example study where participants ate two different diets, one highly processed and one less processed, that were matched for macronutrient and calorie content: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248...
No, I don't agree. We have evidence to suggest that a large number of normal weight people have poor metabolic health, likely due to diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30484738/
Not sure about the drugs, particularly if treatment has to continue indefinitely in order for people to keep the weight off. Someone else on here linked to a blog post about how those drugs increase the number of fat cells in the body but prevent fat cell hypertrophy, suggesting that rebound weight gain after the drugs are stopped could potentially leave patients worse off than they started. Most adults do not gain new fat cells when they gain weight, their existing fat cells merely get bigger. Leaving people with more fat cells than they had to begin with might make it even harder for them to maintain a lower weight without the drugs, given that fat cells are metabolically active. Who knows how many people may end up stopping them due to side effects or complications like the thyroid tumors these drugs are known to cause in mice. We know very little about the potential unintended consequences of these drugs.
Does the type of sugar, or type of fat not play a part here?
HFCS is notorious for the bad effects on the body, versus something like honey.
Same for the Intuit, simpler animal fats vs hydrogenated "trans" fats?
I feel like the key difference in their diets is it's not overly processed and full of things we've decided to put in there for cost reasons (corn subsidies making HFCS cheaper than cane sugar, and trans fats are cheaper than more expensive animal products).
Trans fats are indeed unhealthy, but 1) it's been nearly a decade since they were basically removed from fast food, and 2) they don't contribute to obesity.
As for HFCS, there's basically zero evidence that they're a major contributor to obesity versus other types of sugar. (In fact, honey consumed by the Hazda has almost the same balance as sugar as HFCS). We have multiple points of evidence to counteract this. 1) Mexico uses substantially less HFCS compared to other types of sugar, but Mexican obesity rates are as high as the US. 2) HFCS, and sugar in general, consumption has declined over the past 20 years. Yet obesity continues to increase. 3) HFCS was widely consumed in the 1980s, when the obesity rate was de minims.
There is almost no difference between sugar and HFCS. Sugar is 50/50 glucose/fructose. HFCS is maybe 45/55 glucose/fructose. Fructose can only be metabolized by your liver into inflammatory fat cells in your belly. Glucose can be metabolized by every cell in the body. HFCS would only be worse because it has more fructose but it's barely any worse than sugar. The whole hysteria over HFCS is a joke because sugar is nearly just as bad.
> Disagree. People genuinely enjoy those foods, because they're tasty and flavorful. And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy
I mean, there are responsible/functioning heroin users, it doesn't mean heroin is safe for everyone
> If we can cure obesity
Or you know, practice self control, which is easily in the top 3 of good traits to have and practice. But that's only a part of the equation, the other being the food industry abusing our monkey brains by adding all kind of additives to their food to trigger the right pathways so that we keep consuming their products.
I for one am happy that I escaped this hellish cycle and mostly consume fresh products, but I completely understand how people get tricked into eating heavily processed food and basically slowly sabotage their whole body
> Humans obviously value tasty and flavorful food, and its existence adds joy to people's lives.
We also enjoy all kind of things that cause harm to ourselves or others, this is an extremely weak argument, maybe the weakest of all concerning that topic
This analysis lacks proper understanding of the role that hunger and food drive plays.
Imagine that you are at the beach, and you can choose how deep you want to wade or how far you want to swim. If you like the water and the sun and the waves, this is very pleasant to imagine.
Now imagine that you are dropped into the ocean at night 200 meters from shore and you can't see land, you can't see lights. This is very unpleasant to imagine.
Our current food system is much like the second scenario.
Instead of framing it as whether or not it is possible to be healthy in this system, ask if the system is consistent with the goals of being healthy. Is a candy bar and a bag of chips consistent with the goals of being healthy?
If you are dropped in the ocean in the middle of the night, it is possible to swim to land. But it is also very likely that many people will not be able to swim to land in that scenario.
> The food is only an issue because some people have overly strong appetites relative to the abundance of food.
Then why is it advertised? Are food advertisements consistent with the goal of health?
Something can be true, satisfying, and incomplete. Why do they eat too much? Because of moral failing? Or because a system designed to maintain energy balance in only one direction is incomplete in our modern environment.
Hunger is not a moral failing, it is a physiological system.
I don't know you or where you are coming from, but it seems like you want people to take personal responsibility.
That's fine. People do need to take personal responsibility.
The answer can be more than that.
When I was younger, I wondered how any smart person could ever be obese. It did not make sense to me how someone could not figure out how to solve this problem. It did not seem at all complicated to me. Through my 20s and mid 30s, I was able to maintain a healthy weight, but increasing over time.
There are two different problems here that get lumped together: Why do people gain weight, and Why is it so hard for people to lose weight even after it's obvious that they should.
Maybe you want the world to be simple. That's fine. That's normal. It's hard to understand a complicated world.
Everyone understands that their own life is complicated, their own job is complicated, their own problems are complicated. Maybe other people also have complicated problems. Maybe.
> We know this because we have hunter-gatherer populations who consume 50% of their diets in sugar (e.g. the Hadza) or fats (e.g. Intuit), and they have none of the diseases of abundance found in modern populations because they have near zero obesity.
The often-cited studies suggesting Inuit populations were protected from heart disease (Bang and Dyerberg, Feldman et al) comes from limited data which has since been refuted as unreliable and insufficient. The hypotheses they generated don't hold up to the greater balance of data we have, and despite attempts to confirm findings, it simply hasn't happened.
Some studies have suggested to a lesser degree that Inuit populations have marginally smaller rates of coronary artery disease (and other cardiovascular complications), but far more have determined that rates are the same or in some cases/time frames even worse, and risk of stroke has generally trended higher as well. These are all incidents of mortality which have a very, very high correlation with diets which are high in animal fats (as well as salt, regarding strokes).
I agree that obesity is a major issue (especially in the case of sugar; it appears less harmful to the body when the sugar is needed and thus used immediately, but harmful when it hangs around and gets turned into fat. This is the main cause of the surge in fatty liver disease, for example), but there is very little and often very poor evidence that obesity is what causes atherosclerosis to occur and become a mortal danger. It seems to be dangerous regardless of weight, and exercise doesn't appear to be wholly protective against it either.
Inuits have actually served as a good example as to why this is true. Even when their obesity rates were lower, their lifestyles required more activity than average, and when studies accounted for BMI, their CAD rates were still on par with western populations according to most data.
I think the only way you can make this argument is to have a completely value agnostic perspective and believe that any individual value curve is good. Is Meth good because people clearly value it enough to destroy their lives to get more? No. It isn't - we know individual value assessment isn't always right.
People genuinely enjoy those foods because they're closer to their bliss point than natural analogues. Increasing salt, fat and sugar content of processed foods doesn't mean they're better for consumers. They just mean they're more addictive. People consume more of them and are more likely to purchase them in the future.
We have no issues identifying that restrictions on tobacco are acceptable from a public health standpoint - the same chemical reward hijacking is being done with food.
It appears that limiting these bliss-factor ingredients would have a major impact on processed food sales, and as such, lobbying will continue to prevent governments from implementing and maintaining a meaningful reduction.
Interestingly, a reduction in consumption of processed foods would also likely have a significant impact on the need for health interventions with drugs. We have massive industries propped up by people’s cravings for junk.
I disagree. Low quality processed foods, typically found in western diets, glysophates, high in industrial seed oils, processed sugars, and salts, are likely one of the biggest reasons for all the negative health effects we are seeing in the western diet, calorie numbers be damned.
Any quantity of this food, long term, is likely the reason for the explosive amount of health issues in the population, including many cancers we now commonly deal with.
One of the biggest changes to my health I ever noticed was a switch not in how I ate, but in WHAT I ate.
When I switched my diet over to high quality foods, organic and garden grown, meat I purchased from a local hunter, it made a substantial impact on my health, helped to fix a lot of my cholesterol and blood sugar numbers, and my overall health shot through the roof. No pills required, just decent ingredients, garden grown food, high quality meat.
Peoples appetites are larger than their physical ability level provides for.
We transitioned from a hunter gatherer, to an agrarian, to an industrial society - because most people needed to do much physical activity to survive, even when food was plentiful.
The information age is much more sedentary, but people have evolved needs to eat a certain amount of volume to feel satiated. The fact that our foods are super nutritious/calorie dense makes matters worse.
> Disagree. People genuinely enjoy those foods, because they're tasty and flavorful. And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus.
People enjoy drugs, I agree. Some get addicted and die though.
> believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus.
They are, im not fat (visible flexed abs) I did a blood test and found some issues. I cut out the saturated fats I was eating. Brownies, butter, slow cooked meats. tests were normal again.
The existence of (active) hunter-gatherer societies living heavily on (natural) fats and sugars seems completely irrelevant to the problem of obesity in sedentary societies eating many processed foods.
I don't think it's half-plausible to compare Hadza or Intuit diets to a Big Mac and a soda. Neither transfats nor processed sugars are in the Hadza diet, just for example.
By this "reasoning", all food is processed amino acids and related elements. But despite such sophistry, there's a measurable difference between a human-machine-processed diet and an animal-processed diet. Good figure.
Uhhh you're a little disillusioned to think that a very very small subset of humans paying hundred of dollars for a meal is a baseline for why "humans value tasty and flavorful food". Just because some people drive 160mph on a highway does not mean its a good idea. The fact that you're arguing a box of oreos is equally nutritious to a calorie equal amount of say protein and/or vegetables is actually baffling.
While we are drowning in quick to consume, non-nutritious, calories, we also have higher levels of anxiety, stress and more distractions.
To your comment, maybe more countries should attempt to implement programs similar to the UK's success in lowering sodium intake by slowly adjusting the sodium content of all manufacturered foods. https://www.nature.com/articles/jhh2013105
Why should that be true? Your kids aren't going off to WW2 to die. You aren't going to starve if bugs ate your crops. You aren't going to get clubbed and robbed if you follow a forest path.
I would say our 'actual' stressors are far less, but our contrived stressors are far more.
The fact I'm not going to die tomorrow from starvation is an actual reduction in stress.
The fact that someone on the TV is screaming 24/7 that I'm going 'fucking die because THEY are out to get me' is a contrived stressor that has a real effect on everybody in society.
Maybe that's the point. A lack of overt threats leads to greater trepidation over covert threats. Wouldn't you think that there was more anxiety and stress in the Cold War among the civilian population than in WWII? Certainly societal upheavals seem to indicate so.
> Wouldn't you think that there was more anxiety and stress in the Cold War among the civilian population than in WWII?
No. I lived through part of the cold war.
In WW2 everybody knew families with dead sons or sons that came back in pieces or sons that just disappeared. My neighbor in the 60s was a paratrooper, who came back missing a leg.
I agree that we have incredible waste on both sides, but there is an even greater culprit: people are lacking true meaning and purpose in their lives and are indulging in these foods to distract themselves from their inner emptiness.
This is a pretty big leap, what is even "true meaning and purpose"? The culprit is that this food is literally everywhere and billions of dollars are poured into research everywhere to design systems that entice humans to take the convenient way out. If I was to go along with your hypothesis, I would alter it to say that poor nutrition is what contributes to a person's lack of "true meaning and purpose".
I agree that society has been designed to make things more and more convenient in the name of progress and that we haven't made the nutritious food convenient yet. Stated another way, poor nutrition is the default choice in most of the western world.
Still, I think its possible to make the idea of "purpose" more concrete. You could define "true meaning and purpose" to be goals that are greater than oneself that require one's full potential in mind and body and sacrifice of immediate pleasures for long-term gain. The widespread nature of obesity indicates that many people don't consider a healthy body as necessary for their goals and hence don't sacrifice immediate food gratification for those goals. Hence most people don't have goals that require their full body potential.
> what is even "[lacking] true meaning and purpose"?
Perhaps the alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor? It's underrated how depressing it is to not get to eat the sausage you broke your back making.
When we talk about things, we sometimes use their relationship to other things to define them rather than talking about them directly. I'm not sure how my answer is irrelevant and deserving of your snark.
If we're going to treat calories as addictive and addiction as a disease rather than a personal failing it should follow that we treat the disease with a drug.
The problem is that we are plausibly looking at the result of a change over the last thirty or fifty year in the quality of what's considered the normal diet, notably normalizing calories through the consumption of sugary drinks but also a variety of other things. This has had the side-effect of an obesity epidemic.
Now, what are we doing?
* Getting people to stop consuming sugary drinks and other very unhealthy items (maybe that would require drugs at this point)?
* Or offer people drugs so this side-effect of an unhealthy diet can be avoided?
If we're offer a way to continue a bad diet without this effect, it seems very likely further bad effects will appear X many years from now from a combination of the drugs and the bad diet. Because virtually all drugs taken forever accumulate side-effects over since the body did evolve to process them (these drugs may indeed be needed at times but the point remains).
This class of drugs does address the bad diet though, doesn't it?
Anyway, 'getting people to stop' turns out to be impossible for some. The drugs are meant to help with that.
Diet soda and bottled water exist and somehow people still keep choosing sugary drinks. In fact people often have a ready excuse for why they consider diet soda more unhealthy!
If we assume addictions as a disease then we mostly treat them with regulation. Smoking companies would have loved if we just made a pill that mitigates tar in your lungs instead of all but legislating them into obscurity.
At the end of the day you don't have to smoke, not that people won't.
At the end of the day, or maybe week, or possible even month you have to eat or you're going to die. Simply put you require caloric intake to survive. Yea, you can ban coke and candybars, and hell that's a good idea. But what about bread? Or do you monitor and watch to make sure everyone only eats two slices? Make sure foods at restaurants only have so many calories per serving and ensure they people can only buy one meal per meal?
At some point it still falls apart because it is human nature to massively overconsume since the vast majority of history we've been calorie short. You're dealing with an animal response here that is going to be very difficult to override to the under/normal consumption side.
Jury is still out on how food companies will take a situation where people can be prescribed a pill to be less hungry. I imagine they'd be more scared if it was OTC though.
They didn’t say calories are addictive. They clearly said certain foods are addictive. Those foods should be more regulated like cigarettes and companies take more responsibility as a first or at least concurrent step to everyone taking more drugs.
As far as I can tell, our social policies don't really work for managing addiction. We just hook up a vacuum cleaner to people's pockets and suck the money out of them if they smoke. Call it a "sin tax". But the problem is that people prioritize their next fix above other things; would you rather get some cigarettes or pay your rent, many people choose the cigarettes. I'm not sure how that helps anyone, and I'm not sure how expanding it to sodas or doughnuts would help anyone.
Regressive taxes also don't work well. I don't always eat super healthy. Making unhealthy food cost more wouldn't have any measurable impact, except maybe tanking my 401k because half the Fortune 500 goes out of business.
I'm not sure I buy that argument though. The idea that you can squarely blame the obesity epidemic on some foods and not others.
Hell I'd be ok with banning all forms of food advertising and requiring that all foods be blank packages with nothing but the ingredients, nutrition facts, and a short description of how they were prepared. I'd prefer that world on general principle. But I don't think it would fix the obesity epidemic.
That really is the core of the issue, and furthermore once you've used to a sugar diet you crave it more and regular food starts tasting worse in comparison somehow. I bet it's something to do with the gut-brain connection and a large glut of sugar eating bacteria signalling it's time to feed them. Just a theory, but there is some kind of correlated process there.
And the reverse is also true, if you go a while without eating anything high in sugar, what used to taste normal can taste almost unbearably sweet. Exceedingly hard to do with it added to just about all things in absurd amounts though.
The first time I tried ketchup after strictly avoiding added sugars for several weeks was a WILD experience. It tasted sweeter than maple syrup. I used to douse my food in ketchup and now I can't even eat it on fries because it's so sickeningly sweet. I noticed the same with most bottled salad dressings and sauces (barbecue sauce and honey mustard being even more egregious than ketchup).
Is it?! Maybe I need to order some tomato sauce from Australia. I miss ketchup, I just want it to taste like salt/vinegar/tomato like it used to before I noticed the sugar.
> We’re subsidizing companies that create unhealthy addictive food
People love to bitch about the "diet industry" (which as a whole, seems to be almost entirely bro-science and snake oil), but the profits made there pale in comparison to fast food and processed food. It's really something that we should fix, like we did with tobacco and alcohol.
Fixing food deserts, even though they are not really widespread enough to entirely account for the obesity epidemic, needs to happen as well.
And taking subsidies away from animal products like meat, dairy and corn (specifically for HFCS) would go a long ways to improving the standard American diet (aka, SAD).
Even healthy, nutritious food is packed with calories. Anything that is not a fruit or vegetable can easily cause weight gain. Before civilization, humans had to expend a lot of energy just to get food, what little they could obtain.
Of course it is, which is fantastic for the economy. Like the Industrial War Complex, it's horrifically bad for people and resources, but does wonders for the pockets of those in power
Carbohydrates, fat and protein are the 3 main classes of molecules humans need to survive. Sugar is simply a fast absorbed carbohydrate, glucose is basically the very thing that keeps us alive 99% of the time. We are literally build around glucose. Marking it as "addictive" and without nutritional value is idiotic.
A choice of a particular diet high in sugar can have negative affects, but guess what, you can chose a different diet and stop being obese instead of asking for one of the most important nutrients that exist to be banned.
Isn't all food addictive? Is there something more specific you mean about addition when it comes to these foods? It seems like it may be more about caloric density than addiction.
If you just mean "if you don't eat, you die", I don't think that qualifies as an addiction.
If you mean "if you suddenly eat a lot more for some meal than you usually do, you will likely be more hungry the next day than usual", I also don't think that really qualifies. It's not the same kind of thing?
It's not just "if you don't eat, you die". It's that you have a strong yearning to eat. Now that's probably an evolutionary adaptation to "if you don't eat, you die", but nevertheless I want to eat pretty consistently every day. Again, how is that different than a nicotine addiction? The only difference is that if I don't smoke, I won't die...
I think it is possible to make a coherent distinction between what has been termed “psychological addiction” and what has been termed “chemical addiction” without denying that the brain works by transport of, and reactions between, chemicals.
I don’t know how to precisely make this distinction because I am not a neuroscientist (neurobiologist?) .
But I’m still fairly confident that this distinction can be made in theory, and not just in practice.
Probably something about how some compounds (that generally aren’t present in the brain in substantial quantities) bind to some receptors, and this has such and such consequences, and then later when said compounds are not present, either some other receptors are plugged or inactive or are active, or some other chemicals are present in higher or lower than normal concentrations, in ways that cause problems which would in some ways be alleviated by the aforementioned compounds that are not typically in the brain in large quantities, and which would not be alleviated by whatever other compounds that would activate reward centers or whatever.
When someone is addicted to nicotine, they are addicted to specifically nicotine. When someone is addicted to alcohol, they are addicted to specifically alcohol.
What does "specifically addictive" mean though? People keep saying it, but give no definition for it.
And you needing water every three days is meaningful. In fact, that's a great definition! Its clear what the meaning in the case of water is. I'm not sure what saying "Doritos" is addictive means? I love Doritos, but when I traveled abroad I went six months without seeing a bag and never thought of them. What exactly does "specifically addictive" mean?
Once you start eating them it's difficult to stop because they override normal satiety mechanisms. Foods like Doritos are quite literally engineered for maximum pleasure (dopamine) and minimum satiety. I'm sober now and I've noticed that it's incredibly hard for me to drink more than one or two glasses of juice but incredibly easy for me to drink alcohol indefinitely - it feels similar to the difference between eating Doritos and eating nuts or cheese, where one promotes satiety while the other actively drives overconsumption. Relevant article: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
> Once you start eating them it's difficult to stop because they override normal satiety mechanisms
But it's not difficult to stop. From a volume/mass perspective I eat fairly small amount of Doritos in sittings compared to most "healthy" food. Its just that Doritos are super calorie dense. I definitely eat a higher mass of eggplant in a sitting than Doritos. And when I don't have access to Doritos, I don't ever think of doing anything unethical or illegal to obtain access.
Also addiction is not defined by unethical or illegal behavior - it's about continuing to do something even when you know you're harming yourself by doing it (and even when you actively want to stop). People go to great lengths for things they're addicted to without doing anything remotely unethical or illegal but while still doing things you'd probably consider totally insane.
That was just an example. Often people will do unethical or illegal things to feed an addiction. Rarely, do people do things, like prostitute themselves for junk food.
Now your point is that people may eat themselves into unhealthy situations and want to stop. That is probably true, although I wonder how much of that is convenience, rather than addiction.
Not OP but I do. If I had a plate of steamed or roasted broccoli available on demand at any time, I would eat it like most people do chips. Broccoli tastes great, but requires a lot more prep than “junk food” to get there.
I eat junk food mainly because it takes me no effort and still tastes good: for me the addiction is not having to put in any effort to be satiated, more than the taste itself.
And when I do eat junk food I don't eat a crazy amount in volume. But the calorie density of them makes it such that I ate a crazy amount of calories. It's not that I eat a bag of chips per day. But a small bag of chips is 240 calories, while carrot chips of the same mass/volume are 20 calories.
Do I prefer junk food over some healthy food -- yes, probably so (but I love broccoli). But I don't know that my eating habits are drastically different between the two. To put it another way, if the junk food I ate suddenly became healthy for you, I think people say I was just eating a healthy diet.
I am the opposite - my eating habits are drastically different between the two. I find it very easy to eat reasonable amounts of healthy, whole foods and stop eating when I'm full. I find it virtually impossible to self-regulate my consumption of junk food. I will eat it when I'm not hungry, I crave it at odd times, I start eating it and I can't stop. I used to crave specific junk foods to the point that it was all I could think about and I'd leave my house in the middle of the night to walk 20 blocks through NYC to the one bodega that I knew would be open and would have the thing I was craving. On more than one occasion I have thrown a half-full bag of chips in the trash and then fished it out a couple hours later to finish it. It's disgusting.
I may have an unusually addictive personality given that I've had issues with abusing other substances, but I noticed these addictive food behaviors in myself from a very young age before I'd ever touched alcohol or drugs. They bear little resemblance to how I eat when presented with fresh foods. We probably all have varying degrees of susceptibility to addictive junk foods and I'm just more susceptible than you (though also lucky enough to be very energetic and active so I haven't actually ended up overweight).
I guess we all have our differences. Part of the reason why I do eat junk food is largely the opposite reason compared to you. I'm too lazy to go get something I want to eat, so I'll just eat what is easiest to consume right now -- and it'll be something sitting in a bag in the pantry, rather than something I have to chop up or cook. But if I could afford a chef, ohh... I'd do that in a minute!
I only let myself eat junk food in a situation where I'm comfortable going way overboard because it's somehow self-limiting without requiring much willpower on my part. I can't keep it in my house for regular consumption because the convenience isn't worth the downsides of overeating and making myself feel like crap. I do keep easy snacks on hand - things like blocks of cheese and olives and deli meat and fruit. Even homemade popcorn with real melted butter is fine. I find all of those things difficult to overeat, unlike chips or cheetos or ramen noodles. I, too, wish I could afford a chef though!
Hell yes. Have you ever roasted it with some lemon slices? Or broken up all the individual florets with a mandolin and tossed it as a salad? Whirred it into a soup? Broccoli is incredible.
I think that toxin exposure - unavoidable in the modern world - is likely the biggest culprit here. There are plenty of ideas about which toxins are causing the problem, but there are so many that it would be nigh on impossible to regulate them all out of the environment.
I would think you're completely wrong. The green revolution was the first time in history that we were able to continually produce excess food for (excluding distribution issues) the entire earths population. Even more so, the new foods we are able to supply via processing are highly calorically dense.
Simply put if you take mammalian models and allow them to eat all they want they blow up like little balloons. This is no different from bears feasting on salmon for the last millions of years. Creatures are designed to overconsume because the ones that didn't in the past didn't make it thru the lean times.
We’re subsidizing companies that create unhealthy addictive food and subsidizing companies to create drugs to counter the unhealthy addictive food. This is an enormous waste of resources.