111–120 of 169 posts
Footnote: PEG = polyethylene glycol in this context. So the study is related with people developing allergy to cosmetics and industrial products.
It's also in candy and medicine (and antifreeze and ...)
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i think it's almost certainly something about industrially-mass-produced food that tubs of butter don't share, so i think you're a bit closer to the mark. and sugary drinks are surely an especially bad food even among industrially-mass-produced foods clearly calorie density alone is not it. and i don't think it's even as simple as 'palatability'. even if you mix cacao, butter, sugar, vanillin, and citric acid into ca…
Modern fast food is deliberately engineered to make it as addictive as possible while still being palatable and cheap to produce, in order to maximize sales. That sounds more nefarious than I intended, so let me rephrase it. Modern fast food is the result of rapidly iterating, debugging, and optimizing recipes in a huge market for the last 70 years, leaving only the best selling, low cost, consistently reproducible r…
wouldn't it be more profitable if those recipes happened to have low caloric density, like coca-cola? then you could sell each customer six meals a day instead of three, and they'd be more profitable because they'd mostly be made out of water, which is cheaper than deodorized canola oil and palm oil, much less potatoes, texturized soy protein, mechanically separated chicken, and beef. you'd maybe have to include enough cellulose and xanthan gum to make it seem solid, but that wouldn't overcome the cost savings from removing the expensive calorie-bearing ingredients. it's even legal!
yet fast-food consumers have been gravitating to the macronutrient-rich menu items, not texturized carboxymethylcellulose jello, which would undoubtedly be widely available if it sold well. so they are following their homeostatic regulatory system to seek calories
their homeostasis is just broken
what broke the homeostasis?
i don't think it's an intentional thing or even a means to improve sales. if wendy's breaks your homeostatic feedback and mcdonald's doesn't, will that help them competitively? no, because their metabolically damaged customers will still eat at mcdonald's, except for the most loyal ones. if wendy's goes out of business, it'll take a generation for mcdonald's to see the result in terms of declining sales. even then, they're unlikely to be able to recognize that the demise of wendy's is the reason for their troubles
it's plausible that it's nothing more than 'ultra-palatable food makes you overeat, which disrupts your homeostasis'. but i'm skeptical of that because people seem to be able to eat very palatable food occasionally, or even often, without disrupting it
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olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old
Let's be real though - sugar tends to be a lot more palatable than butter, especially when baked or dissolved in acid. I could eat an entire bag of crunch bars, but set me down with a box of sticks of butter and I'm not going to make much progress. Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar. So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making hug…
A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.
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I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.
olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old
i guess they'll just have to use lalr(1) more seriously, i wonder if something like this is a cause of the obesity pandemic: an unrecognized widespread immune response to a novel food additive provoking continuous low-level inflammation though probably not peg itself; e1521 is not in that many foods, not like xanthan gum or nanoparticles of titanium dioxide
I see what you did there. :-) I myself was momentarily confused when I saw "PEG".
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olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old
People are reaching for expense, but I think that's the wrong explanation, it's cost/availability + palatability + caloric density. Olive oil has maybe one or two of those, but it's missing the key ingredient of palatability. Not many people want to guzzle olive oil.
I myself find good olive oil to be quite tasty, far more so than soybean or canola, and I don't think I'm in a tiny minority there. Dipping bread directly in olive oil (sometimes seasoned with a little garlic or whatever) is very common in Mediterranean diets.
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Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and easily. Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store. There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response. Edit: to refute…
> Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access. It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law
that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food
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Let's be real though - sugar tends to be a lot more palatable than butter, especially when baked or dissolved in acid. I could eat an entire bag of crunch bars, but set me down with a box of sticks of butter and I'm not going to make much progress. Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar. So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making hug…
Fruits are not calorically dense. A huge ripe pear can be incredibly delicious and sweet, and only has like 100 calories. The best peach you've ever eaten is like 60-80. It would be pretty challenging to eat a calorically problematic portion of them. A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.
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I get a colonoscopy every n years. Where n is some number between 1 and 5, depending on whether they found polyps or something the previous time. It's not that onerous, except that I assume going under propofol + midazolam comes with cognitive risks each time, and this might be cumulative. With that in mind, no idea how the risk/reward math of regular endoscopy/colonoscopy checkups works out.
Having seen now 3 people die of colon cancer in their early 30s, I can see why early and frequent detection makes sense.
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I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.
olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old
Meanwhile, you average normal person nowadays CAN eat a bag of potato chips in one sitting, without gastric consequences. Then they can compensate for eating half a pound of salt by following it up with half a candy bar for something sweet. Or maybe they got a milkshake with their burger or something.