How the Food Industry Engineers the Need to Eat
hereandnow.wbur.org
hereandnow.wbur.org
This is why is now really hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in everything.
> It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much?
Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
With some willpower and practice, I can now eat nothing but a single bowl of cereal in a 24hr period, including 60m of hard exercise, without anything remotely like hunger pangs. It takes getting used to not constantly rewarding the thought of food with food.
It's sort of a drastic measure, but the only one that has enabled me to lose real weight - plus there are purported health benefits: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-benefits-of-occasion...
Ohh, what I'd give for full(even extra!) fat yogurt with not a lot of sugar. : (
The best yogurt I have had, by far, far, is Juju Dhau, from Nepal. It's so heavy and creamy, it feels like a meal in itself.
Hey investors, ya hear me? Juju dhau might be the next Chobani!
http://tasteofnepal.blogspot.com/2012/02/juju-dhau-king-of-y...
But you probably mean making it for personal use. I'm not the original poster, but I'm going to have to look into that.
The low fat ones are marketing BS—loaded with sugar so they don't taste like nothing. Unfortunately that's very nearly the only thing available at most stores. Misleading advertising/labelling defeats good food yet again.
http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whol...
That said, my local Safeway does stock 4% Darigold cottage cheese.
Edit: I should be more clear - avoid foods with high glycemic indexes prior to the fast. In fact, just avoid them generally; they're usually empty calories.
I did this and felt waaaaaaaaay better than normal mood- and concentration-wise. Realizing that I have blood sugar issues is the most important thing that's happened to me in the last five years except for having a kid.
At Wal-Mart, they sell a glucometer called ReliOn. It's the cheapest strips of the ones out there, 50 for $21.
Start testing your blood sugar. Test it when you wake up. Test before you eat, and then 30 minutes after you eat (up to 4 tests) and look at the carb count on what you ate.
A healthy human should be between 85mg/dL and 100 mg/dL. Numbers over that show "something". Over 140mg/dL causes nerve death. We think that over 100 mg/dL causes pancreatic beta cells to die or mutate.
Then start playing around with how much carbs you eat. Dow what's called, "Eating to the Meter".
Also analysing what you're eating may give you a strong answer why you're feeling bad by 11.
Also, look in my history for what I'm doing (from yesterday).
On my fast days (Tues/Thur/Sun) I eat a decent breakfast, but I don't pig out. Then I just don't worry about food until breakfast the next day (when breakfast tastes particularly delicious btw).
To be honest, the biggest factor tied to failure for me is mood. If I'm in a poor mood, I'm 1000% more likely to feel like I can give in and grab lunch on a fast day. And then once I've had lunch...
The next biggest challenge is other people, especially on Sundays. I might eat fruit salad at brunch, b/c it's both hard and weird to not eat in the company of eating friends.
One thing I try to keep front-of-mind is how awesome it feels to wake up in the morning after a fast day with a sense of accomplishment. And how satisfying it was to need to take 2-inches off the waist of the suit I got married in. Success is addictive.
Edit: I allow myself as much coffee/tea with milk as I feel I need. Yeah, it's not fasting, but it's not eating either.
Be careful not to go too far then.
The downside is that you are much more likely to cheat if you do this, because now you have to go all afternoon and evening without eating, and then go to sleep. Psychologically it's much easier to wake up and be able to say "only 6 more hours to eat" and go to bed a few hours after your last meal than it is to eat your last meal, have 12 waking hours left, then try to go to sleep with a grumbling belly.
Edit: A lot of people practice IF without even realizing it. The most popular form (mentioned in rob_61's linked article) is 16/8. If you don't eat until lunch and don't do a late dinner, it's very likely you fall in the 16/8 window.
http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/
btw, I've been practicing IF for 2+ years and love it.
My understanding is that the gut and vagus nerve are very sensitive to disruptions, any changes in routine have large initial perceived effects, until a new equilibrium is established. I think this mechanism is why diets are so faddish and people think they have food allergies when they actually don't.
So, mitigate the worst of the symptoms, be willing to accept some temporary discomfort, and iterate towards a better diet over time.
(Travelling and hiking on rice and vegetables seems to be very good for weight loss without hunger.)
Not as extreme, but recently started to eat less for lunch(before: eating out, burger/sandwich + fries + drink, etc, now: homemade food, fruits) and already I don't get the afternoon snooze, and haven't needed coffee in a long time!
also haven't been to any fast food restaurants or had soda in a few months, hopefully I can break the one-year mark!
In college at one point, I was drinking soda almost every day. It was bad for me and I knew it, but couldn't help.
So one day, I froze a bottle of some soda, and then let it thaw, sipping it after. It was the nastiest, sweetest, most awful-headaching thing I've ever put in my mouth. Having discovered what soda 'really' was, I stopped drinking it. I drink it maybe once in a year at most, but that's about it.
some people get offended if you ask them if they know how to cook. i don't know how american culture got to this point. it's insane.
Time. People don't think they have time to cook, and they may not. They also don't know how to reclaim their time for themselves from various work and social obligations.
Advertisement. Starting with TV dinners in the 60s (?) and fast food restaurants (also 60s), we have "cheap" and quick ways to get meals that don't require a great deal of personal effort, and it's shown to us constantly on television.
EDIT: Words. I can use the right ones sometimes.
I also have a belly that needs to go, so I decided to start counting calories and staying completely out of the drive-thrus. This has been a real eye-opener! By best estimate is that my former diet was probably about 3,000 C a day. Now that I'm watching what I eat, I'm easily running at 1,800 and not feeling hungry.
prep and cleanup is literally 2 or 3 minutes. you don't even have to wash cast iron, you just wipe it off. ~500 calories even if you douse everything in olive oil, and filling.
i do this like 3 or 4 nights a week. it's SO much better than a sad sack of takeout.
The only fear I have now is that this is some sort of phase and that I'll slowly revert to my old ways in a few months. I've been eating like shit for my entire adult life (~20 years now), so I know I'm going to have to be vigilant for a while to make the new habits stick. On the other hand, I was genuinely ignorant to the amount of calories I was eating before. I had greatly underestimated it. Now that I know what 2,000 C really looks like, my perspective has changed. And that's something that is impossible to unlearn.
i think 3k is where most people in the US eat at. it's basically the pointless snacks and carby/sugary crap that make the difference between 2k and 3k. that extra 1k calories is easy to eat, and hard to cut.
quite honestly it's amazing i didn't weigh 300 pounds... a lot of people do weigh 300+. being overweight (and i still am over by about 15 lbs, slowly losing the rest) gave me a serious appreciation for the bad psychological state one must be in to really let it get that bad.
I'm the same way. I'm not hugely overweight (6'0", skinny frame, 188 lbs). I'm also using MFP to track this stuff, and I had the same appreciation about truly obese people the moment I saw how much I was really eating. I had that same, "wow, I should be much fatter than I am!" thought.
The only reason it has taken me this long to change is because my 20's body was able to handle whatever I threw at it. My 30's body now is not so capable.
it was basically the 'am i or am i not going to seriously be a lifelong fatass. like for real though.' point in my life. like you kind of know, if i let this slip a few more years, there's probably no going back.
i'm also doing weights with a trainer and that has drastically improved my general appearance, especially in my upper body/shoulders. simply losing weight would have produced a weak and skinnyfat version of myself.
When I have a friend house sit, he complains because I "don't have any real food [in the freezer]" despite cabinets full of pasta/rice, a freezer full of chicken, and dairy products and vegetables in the refrigerator.
I made apple/orange juice from concentrate and my gf of the time (we're late 20s) had never seen it done before (she had only bought bottles of juice).
Don't be so sure. Stress also causes the body to start hoarding more calories. And if you think about it, people have been working longer and longer hours, and have a lot less job security than they used to in the past. So it is possible that all that extra stress is contributing to the rising obesity rates.
As long as you spend more calories than you eat (even if you feel shit from that), the energy stored in the fat in your body will go down.
With eating, while it isn't as drastic an effect, having high stress and having the body demanding calories will alter how your mind makes choices related to food. It takes higher levels of willpower to not gain weight when you have more stress. And many people can't just increase their willpower to compensate.
I think @kuschku got the (slightly tongue-in-cheek) intent behind my original comment, but you're right, and the choice/willpower problem is there, and it ranges from difficult to impossible to overcome for many people!
This is actually a big part of why the food industry's actions putting sugar and fat in everything in order to make it sell more, regardless of the health effects, is being seen more and more as bordering on malicious and being considered for oversight and regulation. Food manufacturers, as businesses, should be doing whatever they can to sell more, but as providers of basic human needs, their sales tactics are now actively working against our interests. Our physiologies are built to take more food than necessary when its available, so these perfectly engineered high calorie bliss-point foods make willpower harder to fight than ever before!
The food manufacturers make it very easy to overeat, by providing cheap low-quality food that is full of sugar.
I’ve seen myself the issue that, if I buy groceries based on what I feel like, I tend to end up buying premade food.
So, I consciously avoid that. If I have no frozen pizza, no chips, no peanuts, I can’t eat them either. And I’m too lazy to go to the store right now to buy those, so I instead end up making a healthy meal.
The "but it’s healthy!" ads don’t make it easier, as they try to trick your mind, too.
Honestly, if everyone would have the willpower to only buy what is good for them, the food market and the ad business would not be able to exist anymore.
Coca Cola would be bought almost never, except maybe for parties or during holidays or on birthdays (like my parents used to do when we were kids – softdrinks only on these special occasions).
But it would also affect a lot of the "healthy" food that isn’t actually healthy, like "low fat" yoghurt (20% sugar content), or "fruit juice" (with 10% added sugar), etc.
High-caloric drinks
Could be stress levels, perhaps due to imprisonment of family members or economic inequality, both of which have skyrocketed in the US in recent decades. Other aspects of economic inequality, such as a shift toward emergency medical treatment, are also possible causes. It's observable that the social classes most affected by obesity in the US (and, now, worldwide) are the poorest; this might be due to food, but it might not be.
Could be infectious diseases, which are always changing, or more generally, microbiome changes. Diet changes (e.g. increase in sugar, or increase in usage of emulsifiers such as methylcellulose: http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obes...) are one possible cause of microbiome changes, but far from the only one. For example, obesity-associated intestinal microbiomes have been shown to be contagious under some conditions: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature0...
Another possible cause, though: antibiotics are well known to cause microbiome changes (although maybe this is still "has something to do with food", since most of the antibiotics you consume during your lifetime are in meat.) And antibiotics are also known to induce weight gain — that's why they get put in the meat in the first place, to induce the meat animals to gain weight faster, reducing the time to slaughter. Maybe they make you gain weight too, and they might do that by means other than changing your gut microbiome. Antibiotic use, both in humans and in livestock, has undergone substantial changes over the past decades, and their possible effects on obesity are not well understood.
Another possible cause: dramatically increased air travel and the ensuing jet lag; circadian rhythm disruption has been shown to induce metabolic dysfunction in a wide variety of animal models. http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647
For the same reason: artificial lighting. Artificial lighting color temperature as we switch from incandescent to fluorescent, LED, and computer and TV screens.
Sedentary lifestyles are a possible cause — rates of "exercise" are only going up if you don't count manual labor as "exercise", and rates of manual labor are going way down.
Worldwide testosterone levels are falling for unknown reasons; testosterone is very well known to reduce body fat. http://www.globalresearch.ca./health-and-the-environment-tes...
One possible hypothesis advanced for the dramatic testosterone level drop is exposure to environmental contaminants such as pesticides; the pesticides we use, the amount we use, and the places we use them have changed dramatically over the last few decades. Whether or not this affects our testosterone levels, it could easily affect our bodies in other ways, possibly promoting obesity.
(Other factors that are known to lower testosterone levels include stress and lack of exercise.)
Other environmental contaminants with dramatically changing exposure levels over time and that might reasonably be endocrine disruptors include PCBs, phthalates (as the above article mentions), bisphenol-A, lead, and the halogenated flame retardants used in polyurethane foam, which have been circumstantially implicated in the modern epidemic of feline hyperthyroidism. The lower levels of lead and PCBs in the environment are probably good for us, but sometimes there are surprising interactions.
> the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
You, you are an arrogant, pompous idiot, too ignorant even to begin to imagine the extent of your own ignorance.
Come on kragen, you can't post like that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now that you've said that, I realize you're right. In all seriousness, I am in fact fairly ignorant. (Aren't we all, really?) I do try not to be arrogant or pompous, but it does happen. Thank you for your honest feedback.
I would also like to thank you for the well-researched analysis. Everything you've brought up are important and serious considerations, and they are all in fact not just possible, but probable magnifying factors in the serious issue of increasing obesity.
A final thought. Since you're demonstrating to me possibilities that I might not have considered before my ignorant comment, please also consider the possibility that you may not have understood exactly what I meant, or evaluated all the possibilities behind the intent or tone of what I said originally before you chose to try to insult me.
My original comment was a bad combination of geeky and joking. It was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and I think the mistake I made was using the word "due", as in obesity is 100% due to food. When I wrote it, I was thinking, and should have written, to mirror the author's original wording "something to do with food".
The gist of my comment is that I thought the opening line was funny, because obviously it has "something" to do with food. It has, again tongue-in-cheek, but also quite literally, everything to do with food. My silly nerd point of clarification being that the issue to discuss is what causes us to eat too much, not whether to eat.
What I didn't mean to say, but I actually did say through poor word choice, was that food was the one and only cause of these problems. I realize I also implied that personal responsibility and self control are the one and only cause and solution. On the contrary, my true opinion is that I quite agree with the article's author that the food industry is deliberately causing widespread over-eating, and the effect is then magnified by the use of excessively caloric ingredients. And that's just one of many problems we have.
Human physiology, culture and habits are also massive influences and are extremely hard to overcome. We have evolved to eat more than we need, for good reason, because historically humans didn't have food availability at all times. Now that we have 100% availability of food, and now that almost all of the available food presented to us is both excessively caloric, and being scientifically engineered to cause extra craving, its really no surprise that obesity is a widespread issue. While I'm not always pro regulation, this is one area where I think more regulation is in order and overdue.
I also know personally that there are many factors making diet really incredibly difficult to control. I've been trying to control my weight my entire life, with varying levels of success, or lack thereof. I've had jobs & friends where the socializing made it nearly impossible to control my weight. I've hung around with people that don't hesitate to chastise me if I don't eat & drink the same way they do, and I frequently chose to eat, drink, and have a good time over suffering through a discussion drawing attention to my eating.
I have had more success in the last year than ever before, and its because I quit my job and lost most of the friends that hassled me about eating while socializing. (Though nearly all my friends and family still do, in at least small amounts.) I also discovered for myself a couple of things I didn't know before, that going to the gym wasn't the answer to losing weight, and that for me personally, I'd had a mental block surrounding calorie counting, and when I actually tried it for an extended period, it worked, and was not as hard as my mind tried to make it seem. That's just me, and its not necessarily the same, or easy, or even possible for everyone. I also couldn't have done it (and didn't) at my previous job, so my situation is a factor. If there was a tinge of me being pompous, this is why, my current personal understanding of diet & fitness may have been leaking into my comment.
Funny enough, I actually wrote a paragraph worth of edit to explain myself a little better right after I posted, but then decided I'd let it be short and hope that people understood. Now I regret not having edited my comment, but I hoped this helped, I hope what I added here is more thoughtful and less stupid.
Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop metabolic and other health problems. Those problems arise from lack of activity, diet composition, and other factors beyond simply weight. Those problems are also the core plague of the "obesity epidemic", so it would behoove society not to focus so narrowly on weight and to focus on overall health (of which weight is a component).
Tobacco use (and actually, all forms of smoke inhalation) has a specific, acute mechanism whereby use increases the chances of lung cancer and other respiratory problems. We do not have that kind of causal link for obesity-related diseases. There is a correlation between weight and several so-called lifestyle diseases, but the causal link is fuzzy.
That lack of causation is why reducing the obesity problem to a simple matter of weight control is a bad idea. There are other mechanisms at play, particularly related to body composition, that appear to be sensitive to diet composition and activity levels. Telling people they can be sedentary as long as they don't eat too much (which is basically what the original post I was replying to was saying) is dangerous.
You are absolutely correct in the same way that saying "there do exist conditions that cause twins to be born such that their bodies are fused together at one or more points." It's true but the vast majority of the time it is an irrelevant fact.
I don't think many people assume all problems are purely a result of weight. That being said if your knees bother you and you're clinically obese, perhaps tracking your calories and getting on a stationary bike occasionally is probably a better long-term decision than double knee replacement surgery.
> Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop ... health problems.
I'm curious how you think most diagnosed cases of hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes are caused, then.
Vast majority is not 100%. As I replied elsewhere, I was reacting to the laziness of the statement more than trying to assert it is not generally the case.
> I'm curious how you think most diagnosed cases of hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes are caused, then.
That is a good, unanswered question. Along with why people who have never been overweight in their life also develop hypertension and Type 2 diabetes and why so many obese people never do. There is certainly a correlation, but there is no causal link as yet to anything in particular.
The hormone resistin links obesity to diabetes[1]
Excerpt:
Type 2 diabetes...is strongly associated with obesity; however, the mechanism by which increased adiposity causes insulin resistance is unclear. Here we show that adipocytes secrete a unique signalling molecule...increased in diet-induced and genetic forms of obesity.
Pigment Epithelium-Derived Factor Contributes to Insulin Resistance in Obesity[2]
Excerpt:
Herein, we show that the noninhibitory serine protease inhibitor, pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF), plays a causal role in insulin resistance. Adipocyte PEDF expression and serum levels are elevated in several rodent models of obesity and reduced upon weight loss and insulin sensitization.
[0] http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/43/11/1271.shor...
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v409/n6818/full/409307a...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413109...
Then they should eat less than a normal diet. You can get all the right nutrients without as many calories.
(1) The big fat truth "More and more studies show that being overweight does not always shorten life — but some public-health researchers would rather not talk about them."
(2) Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health
(1) http://www.nature.com/news/the-big-fat-truth-1.13039
(2) http://qz.com/550527/obesity-paradox-scientists-now-think-th...
But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up.
I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.
As long as you don't find a way to kill the yeast, even your bad bread will taste better than store bought bread.
I know we've supposedly got some of the lowest food prices in the developed world, but buy like-for-like with a typical (say) Parisian's shopping basket and I bet we don't do so well.
If you buy the bread you find at ALDI for half a dollar, that’s made in factories in Poland, that won’t be any better. But most people don’t.
Go to a local brick & mortar bakery, usually there’s a bakery that makes fresh bread next to most stores in the suburbs, or, if you’re in a city, at every street corner.
Go there, and you’ll find fresh bread, rolls, crossaints, sandwiches, etc. A mix of a bakery, a starbucks, and a subways, but cheaper and better.
And of course, fresh, handmade quality bread will be better – as these bakeries’ only selling point is quality. If their quality would not be far above the factory bread, they wouldn’t exist anymore.
Things like panda express and Hawaiian onion chips are way too salty... silk soy milk is way too sweet, even when unsweetened. And forget about popular cereal brands... geesh, it's like drinking sugar water. Then there are Starbucks drinks... man, those things are super sweet. Not sure how other people drink it.
I also like what you said about capitalism. As you can see by my food choices, I am not a vegan hipster or anything. But I definitely feel that corporate America does not cater to my taste buds.
I have a hard time believing there's no market for this.
They sold it all over the place in Chicago when I lived there.
They should also know what they're getting to make an informed choice. Sadly, most ways of selling or advertising are about lying through omission.
Which doesn't sound that great if you didn't live in a centrally planned economy where you can't buy woolen socks nor wool so what you do is you buy a woolen sweater and you make woolen socks out of that. That's the sort of unarguably idiotic waste of resources that free markets eliminate. Of course it's easier to appreciate that if you've spent thousands of hours queuing to buy some bread, any bread, than it is when the bread you can most easily buy doesn't taste as you'd want it to.
1. The Botany of Desire [1]
See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple cider vinegar.
2. That Sugar Film [2]
This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and "healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers.
It's sad... the saddest thing is the loss of variety. There is such an amazing variety of wild apples, berries, rice, potatoes out there, each with unique flavors and nutritional qualities, yet 99% of grocery stores carry the same bland, overly-sweet varieties that look like they came out of an assembly line.
And it's not even about the bottom line: farms throw away tons of "imperfect" produce every day. It's about re-educating people.
Lately for example I have found that corn can be nearly too sweet to eat, I mean, plain steamed sweet corn, some varieties are extremely extremely sweet to my tastebuds; when reading that every year corn is engineered to be sweeter and sweeter I can definitely see why, it honestly tastes as sweet as ice-cream did when I still ate it.
Plain carrots are fairly sweet tasting, some brands more than others, but a lot more than I had expected; plain potatoes are salty, not too strong, but definitely noticeable, things like clementines / tangerines / mandarins / pomegranates taste way absolutely amazing, much much much better than any dessert I had when I was still eating processed food.
As much as I theoretically now could eat oil and sugar (there was a period of time where they really did not sit well with me) I honestly don't miss them, especially the sugar / syrups which nowadays taste way way too strong.
I doubt anybody nowadays would want to eat 100% unprocessed as honestly it can be a bit of a drag having to cook from scratch every meal starting from unprocessed ingredients and not adding any salt etc., not to mention it definitely will impact your career to not be able to go out to eat with coworkers, but if you find yourself concerned about having to have a lot of processed food for taste reasons, when you are on vacation it might be a worthwhile investment for you to try to eat this way for a few weeks to "reset" your tastebuds a bit.
It's amazing just how one can go from eating 5000mg of sodium a day and foods tasting "normal" to 500mg and after a period of adaptation them tasting "normal" as well, same deal for sugar.
(edit) and btw, as another interesting n=1 datapoint, although that was not the reason for the low sodium, going from 5-6000mg/day to 400-500mg/day my bp went from 135/85 to 105/65 over a few years, without really changing how I felt, and without taking any medications, that was surprising as I always thought that bp would not vary that much just due to diet.
When my mum, due to medical condition, had to switch to low iodine diet, we could just switch our salt we used, and it was easy to adapt.
But I can say, you’re right – I hate corn. Literally, I can’t deal with the annoying sweetness of it. It’s horrible.
Carrots are the perfect level of sweetness, we used to grow them ourselves, but don’t do that anymore.
But, still, doing this myself without having any medical need myself, I obviously still add nutella to my pancakes, or so on.
To me it’s just surprising how many people in this thread don’t make their food on their own. Even if you just boil a pot of potatoes and put some onions in the frying pan in a bit of olive oil, you can quickly make some neat food. Or scrambled eggs with Bratkartoffeln and bacon, or noodles with your own sauce, and so on. Making your meals yourself is so easy, and quick.
I’m literally disgusted by the whole Soylent movement. NO! instead of spending less time for food, just spend less time for work! Unionize, damn.
Opting out of this is hard, expensive and against our natural desires. Or, to reiterate my other post, "Soylent, FTW."
This is the same justification for every consumable. If people didn't want X, companies wouldn't make X.
Calling companies out for increasing our desire for their products, especially when that desire goes against our better interests (mental and physical health, in particular), is not unfair, it's smart. It gets people thinking about what they're doing and why so they can make better decisions, even when all the advertisement (obvious or not) is directing them away from what they should be doing.
What is High Math, exactly?
This book is old news.
See dang's reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200
The thing that keeps me coming back to hacker news are posts about cutting edge engineering/science, how to be a better hacker/maker/productive person in general, and interesting new perspectives on life/politics/social institutions.
But every post from the beginning is still available. It wouldn't be too hard to write an app to research that question if you are.
A fairly recent archive: