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Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

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Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#141
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. That "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Where I grew up we rarely use “real” for food. We take it for granted it is : butter, mayonnaise, mustard.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#142
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Absolutely, olive oil, garlic and salt is my snack.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther. The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.

historical norms were that workers were slaves with no civil rights that nobles or citizens could kill or rape with impunity

so fuck historical norms actually

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther. The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.

Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’ve always assumed the problem is that price increases don’t count as inflation if they come with a “quality” increase, but that doesn’t help someone who now needs to spend more to survive.

So it can both be true that inflation-adjusted wages are rising and it is becoming harder to make ends meet.

A wage that supported a cowboy with two sets of clothes, a house that wouldn’t pass any building codes, a horse instead of a car, and no phone is not going to support a modern worker even if “adjusted” for inflation.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#145
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because butter's caloric density is 7-9 kcal/g, higher than the 'cheap calorie dense food' being blamed for the obesity pandemic, yet the widespread availability of butter (in some societies) starting ten thousand years ago did not cause widespread obesity, even when it wasn't pricey this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity probably the loads of low-…

Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie…

the point you think everyone else is making that i am missing is actually the point that i have been trying to make

you say

> the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite

while, although you think i'm the one in this conversation that disagrees with you, the comment that i've written all this verbiage to rebut says exactly the opposite

> 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

i agree with you that the obesity pandemic is almost certainly due to modern processed food, which is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around

your hypothesis is that palatability (of calorie-dense food) is the relevant difference; i think that's a plausible hypothesis. but i'm not sure that modern industrial food is more palatable than the calorie-dense elements of traditional diets (elsethread i mentioned halvah, but we could also mention longaniza, pizza, ham, bacon, cheese, funnel cakes, pepperoni, buttered pancakes with syrup, onigiri with katsuobushi and so on), and even if it is a difference, that doesn't prove that it's the relevant difference

there are a lot of other differences, and i think we should investigate them, because your hypothesis is far from the only plausible hypothesis

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#146
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it helps advance the debate by conclusively showing that caloric density is not the only relevant factor, or even a dominating one, and that in fact nuance is important, which is my point there are lots of simple, well-known explanations, and they are all wrong. that was one of them. 'it's sugar' and 'it's hfcs' are two others that have popped up in this thread

I get your point but olive oil is nowhere near as prevalent as sugar. Some products even market themselves as "premium" for containing olive oil.

sesame oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, and palm oil have the same caloric density as olive oil, are roughly as digestible, and have been cheap and cultivated by humans for far longer than the obesity pandemic. i'd mention suet and lard, too, but it turns out that those have somewhat lower digestibility, so i don't want to confuse the discussion

by contrast, sugary foods commonly have about the same caloric density as healthy foods

so i think caloric density is clearly an important factor (you won't get fat by pigging out on lettuce and tomatoes unless you add salad dressing) but the comment i was rebutting gave the following simple, clear, and wrong explanation of the obesity pandemic

> 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

and that just isn't an accurate description of the situation

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#147
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get fruits and fruit juices in your winter months, that is newer. OJ came in small glasses because it too was a luxury. But HN linked an article a few years back about some research indicating that in the 1980s people ate as many or more callories, and got on average less physical activity, but were significantly less overweight. They reaction was that it was wrong, because thermodynamics, but the thermodynam…

do you have a link to the article or remember the authors

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18714...

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#148
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

... Right around the green revolution where we figured out that we can pour fertilizer and water on crops and they grow really well, which lead to high fructose corn syrup in everything and its sugar composition (high fructose) leads to obesity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522469/

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#149
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a link to the article or remember the authors

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18714...

this is fantastic, thanks

10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’ve always assumed the problem is that price increases don’t count as inflation if they come with a “quality” increase, but that doesn’t help someone who now needs to spend more to survive. So it can both be true that inflation-adjusted wages are rising and it is becoming harder to make ends meet. A wage that supported a cowboy with two sets of clothes, a house that wouldn’t pass any building codes, a horse instead…

Your comment makes me wonder what the relative total cost of a horse vs a car is.
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