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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

nytimes.com

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Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#61

Post by wpietri »

crazygringo wrote: post #30

It's so funny how, over the past couple of years, good-tasting food is now a "conspiracy". When a Michelin chef meticulously constructs a dish to give you pleasure, he's a creative genius whose dedication to his art is applauded. But when the people behind Snickers do it to give you pleasure, they're nefarious conspirators trying to manipulate you and keep you addicted. Yes, people who make food are trying to make it…

If you learn one lesson from The Great Recession, it should be that nefarious conspiracy is not necessary for horrific outcomes. You just need the correct arrangement a lot of self-focused, insufficiently thoughtful people trying to push a graph up and to the right.

If you talk to a chef who makes a tasty dish, they understand a lot about their influence on people's health, and the ones I know feel responsible for it. A human's evolved moral mechanisms work in that context.

But if you look at the property bubble and the related financial engineering, every individual had plausible deniability. They were just following orders/incentives/the market. They had no direct moral connection to the outcome of their actions, and by and large refused to think hard enough that they could see one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The same applies to the modern epidemic of diabetes and obesity. The human cost of that is incredible, and we will be dealing with it for decades, possibly generations.

Many processed foods are engineered, and they are addictive. The way they are created, marketed, and evaluated isn't materially different that how tobacco products were made and sold. The only real difference is how society's attitude to those products has shifted.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#62

Post by rwallace »

DanBC wrote: post #48
rwallace wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Carbohydrate' is a fine chemical term, but it is not a useful nutritional category. A plate of steamed vegetables and a can of Coke both contain carbohydrate, but they are at opposite poles in nutritional terms. The most useful nutritional term is 'junk food', and the most useful advice for most people is, instead of trying to fine tune the amount of this or that chemical substance, just stop eating/drinking junk fo…

> 'Carbohydrate' is a fine chemical term, but it is not a useful nutritional category That's why we have simple carbohydrates (sugars) and complex carbohydrates (starches). > The most useful nutritional term is 'junk food', That's not a useful term. Most people wouldn't think freshly squeezed orange juice is junk food, yet it contains a lot of sugar.

Again there's a distinction between a chemical analysis perspective and a practical nutritional perspective. Freshly squeezed orange juice contains sugar to be sure, but in practice very few people guzzle the stuff to the point of destroying their health, whereas lots of people do precisely that with Coke.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#63

Post by pvnick »

MDS100 wrote: post #38
pvnick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're right that fat in and of itself does not lead to weight gain, it's the combination with sugar that absolutely, 100% leads to weight gain. Sugar and other high glycemic index foods (eg white bread) causes an insulin spike and puts your body into an anabolic, "building" state in which it will assimilate whatever it has lying around. Usually, if you're eating something with high amounts of sugar, it will al…

Yeah, you are referring to insulin sensitivity and calorie partitioning. Still depends on genetic makeup (insulin sensitivity can vary 10-fold). P-ratio isn't the same for everyone. So not correct what you are saying (energy does not only go into muscle cells). You can still get fat(ter) with such a diet. Muscle and liver glycogen will be full at some point and more and more fatty acids will be stored in adipocytes.…

Then exercise with weights at high-speed on an empty stomach (empty glycogen supplies) and wait for a couple hours before enjoying your large amount of carbs and protein. Maybe consume some branched chain amino acids to signal to your body not to break down any muscle. You'll enjoy all the benefits of interval training and your body will tap directly into your fat for energy at this point to burn through whatever small amount of spillover you're speaking of.

Obviously if you eat far more than your body needs you will get fat because that's how your body's efficient machinery works. But it's quite hard to do when your stomach physically only has enough room for so much and you'll throw up before consuming that many calories.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#64

Post by NoPiece »

enraged_camel wrote: post #39
pm90 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Whenever I see an ad for cola with some variant of 'delicious and refreshing' I feel 'Well, why don't you just drink water? Sure its not delicious but certainly refreshing'. One thing that genuinely does refresh is lemonade; I wonder why that hasn't caught up though.

>>One thing that genuinely does refresh is lemonade; I wonder why that hasn't caught up though. When was the last time you saw a lemonade ad?

Lemonade tastes great fresh, but it very noticeably tastes worse when canned/bottled. I think that disparity keeps it from being able to challenge carbonated sodas on a large scale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY_JKz9detM

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#65

Post by omegaworks »

crazygringo wrote: post #30

It's so funny how, over the past couple of years, good-tasting food is now a "conspiracy". When a Michelin chef meticulously constructs a dish to give you pleasure, he's a creative genius whose dedication to his art is applauded. But when the people behind Snickers do it to give you pleasure, they're nefarious conspirators trying to manipulate you and keep you addicted. Yes, people who make food are trying to make it…

You fail to address the points the article presents about politics and media. The Michelin Chef is not pausing the children's favorite television show to inform them of the New COOL WAY To Eat Lunch! The chef is not bribing my representatives in Congress to get more obscure labeling so he can misrepresent what actually composes the product he's trying to sell me.

The Michelin Chef cares about the quality of the ingredients that goes into what he serves me. If he tries to pass off "Cheese Food" as cheese, a human enterprise that has existed on this planet for centuries, he will be rightly ridiculed and stripped of any credibility.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#66

Post by bitsoda »

MDS100 wrote: post #27
Ixiaus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A colorie is a calorie (in the sense that a unit of energy is a unit of energy); however, there are some (I don't have science to cite, so I won't say it is factual) people that say fructose is worse for you than glucose (the two monosaccharides). Here's an interesting article you can read: http://www.eatingrules.com/2011/05/introduction-to-sugar/ In this sense, a calorie is not a calorie - but to be precise it's mor…

Oh god. What the hell does "clean" mean. That's orthorexic nonsense. Unprocessed foods can be very helpful, but they aren't magically different kcal, If you eat too much potatoes and nuts (instead of cake) you'll still gain the same amount of fat (controlling for fiber and protein energy loss). http://www.wannabebig.com/diet-and-nutrition/the-dirt-on-cle... Regarding fructose: http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29…

Because the term "unprocessed" carries its own ambiguities. Is cooking a steak a form of processing? I would say so. What about the mashing of potatoes? Ultimately, processed and clean are largely subjective.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#67

Post by ImprovedSilence »

fusiongyro wrote: post #51
jrockway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that 70% of adults are overweight because of Coca-Cola and Doritos, not because of fancy French restaurants. The scale is the problem, not the unhealthiness of a single serving of their product.

No, we're overweight because we overeat and don't exercise.

This, plus a million. Nobody wants to take responsibility for their own diet these days. Stop feeding your kids luncnables and prepare them a damn lunch! Put the chips down, and don't buy shit with HFCS in it. Make your own damn pasta sauce (Crushed tomatoes, green onion, and garlic, it's about as easy at buying prego, but with a million less sugars/salts) Walk places and take the stairs. (brief side note, living in the burbs forces one to drive to the front door of wherever your going. it sucks, I crave either urban walkability, or rural space to move)

Everybody wants to blame Kraft, and Nestle, and Coke for being fat. It's up to you, not some company, to decide what you eat.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#68

Post by aaxe »

anon1385 wrote: post #57
MDS100 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://examine.com/faq/is-saturated-fat-bad-for-me.html

>Meta-analysis of effect of saturated fat intake on cardiovascular disease: overadjustment obscures true associations http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/92/2/458.long I find it hard to take that site seriously when they call fish oil a "brain booster" next to a great big affiliate link to buy fish oil supplements on Amazon [1]. Also they don't seem to have a page about trans fats at all. Are they pushing an agenda thr…

Is Glen Beck a rapist? I'm just asking questions.

That is the exact equivalent of what you did. They clearly say "Why the buy link" right next to that link.

And if you actually tried reading it, right here: http://examine.com/supplements/Fish+Oil/#summary7-1 - "brain boosting"

So no time or energy for anything but wild accusations.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#69

Post by glenstein »

enraged_camel wrote: post #34
3am wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is great, but could you elaborate on how you read the article as pushing, "fat makes you fat"? I read it much more as saying that large food companies have developed deep expertise in tuning the quantity of sugar, salt, fat, and texture to make their products bypass our body's natural mechanisms for feeling full. I think if you're reading this through some kind of paleo/non-paleo lens, then you're missing…

>>Your point is great, but could you elaborate on how you read the article as pushing, "fat makes you fat"? Yeah, I didn't get that message either. I think the parent is reading too much into it (a.k.a. projecting).

Same here. I read this whole article a few days ago, and discussed it with friends. The main takeaway for me is the incredible complexity and subtlety that goes into researching the "perfect" junk food.

In particular, the term "bliss point" which seems to apply to a number of properties that food can have. For one example, a "bliss point" as applied to the "crunch" a food should have, ie the most satisfying amount of resistance for a cracker or chip to have is apparently 4 lbs of pressure.

But often there isn't just one single answer- sometimes there are multiple mutually exclusive, highly optimal combinations of preferences, as with spaghetti where you have plain, spicy and chunky. And sometimes, the most satisfying flavor preference is not the most optimal result for profitability- snacks with too strong a flavor will "oversaturate" the brain and you will not have a strong desire to keep eating them after a few samples. In these cases it's better to have a subtle taste that never leaves the consumer feeling quite fully satisfied.

So yeah. It's not really about "fat makes you fat" -- though perhaps there is an aside to that effect -- it's more about corporate junk food researchers foraging their way through a world of data on consumer preferences and designing the most efficient products.

Re: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

#70

Post by lukifer »

crazygringo wrote: post #30

It's so funny how, over the past couple of years, good-tasting food is now a "conspiracy". When a Michelin chef meticulously constructs a dish to give you pleasure, he's a creative genius whose dedication to his art is applauded. But when the people behind Snickers do it to give you pleasure, they're nefarious conspirators trying to manipulate you and keep you addicted. Yes, people who make food are trying to make it…

Engineering food to be "addictive" is no different than vendor lock-in. It's either a normal result of incentives, or a sinister Borg plot, depending on your perspective/narrative.
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