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Comment by claar | Hacker News Reader

After following his rules for a year now and losing 50 pounds with literally no exercise, I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed.

It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy. Perhaps the science is thin on things like caloric sources (quality vs quantity), preservatives, complexity of sugars, the effects of high processing of food, etc., but my anecdotal evidence and growing intuition aligns with the author's opinions.

For me personally, removing added sugars and processed foods and moving to a more "real foods" meal plan (meat, veggies, fruit) has been transformative.

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> It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy.

There are two sides to this: it's cheaper to supply unhealthy food, but only when people buy it. Other brands (Whole Foods, Amy's frozen foods, arguably the entire "cooking show" industry) are built around fetishization of the healthy eating. This is why the recent ruling on displaying "added sugars" is so important, even if many more similar steps are necessary for people to make educated, healthy decisions when hungry. If we can convince corporations it is in their profit margins' interest to provide healthier food—ideally because consumers assign value to the nutritional content instead of just calories—we'll see widespread health benefits.

That said, you're completely correct, which is why there are systemic problems with the diets of the lower class. Why buy real food when you can feed yourself (or your kids, or your relatives) with cheaper food that is easy to eat? There's simply no reason for those brands to invest in cheaper, healthier food when it would be harder to sell and couldn't piggyback off shared food processing (e.g. processed sugars, grains, meats, proteins).

This seems similar to the guidelines from the book "Diet Cults" called "agnostic healthy eating" which is a list of foods with the better foods to eat at the top of the list.

Essential foods (eat more of these than the other types of foods):

1. vegetables

2. fruits

Recommended foods:

3. nuts, seeds, and healthy oils

4. high-quality meats and seafood (by this he means "wild-caught fish and shellfish, only the highest-quality farm-raised seafood, the leanest meat cuts, and meats from wild game and free-ranging animals fed natural diets". Also eggs.)

5. whole grains

6. dairy

Acceptable foods (eat less of these than the other types):

7. refined grains

8. low-quality meat and seafood ("all processed meats and all but the leanest cuts of unprocessed meats" as well as "seafood that does not meet the quality standards of watchdog organizations such as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council" are in this category)

9. sweets

10. fried foods

No particular category is required if you don't want to eat them, as long as you eat more of each grouping than the one below it.

Some of the differences between the two are that the linked article would allow "low-quality" meat as long as it isn't processed, but doesn't include as much "healthy oil" or dairy. Another difference is the article would consider a whole grain cereal to be "highly processed" whereas it would be "whole grains" in the book (the appendices have more details on which foods go in which categories). Same for 100% whole grain bread. So the only qualm I might have is it could be healthier to include more healthy oil and less meat.

The article adds behavioral guidelines to cook at home and eat with people to get you to cook more. These guidelines seem both slightly more strict yet also makes the whole list easier to follow. I lost weight on the list I wrote above (agnostic healthy eating), but stopped following it after a while. Your success on the article's guidelines makes me want to try it.

I make an effort to a avoid foods made with biodiesel, as I am of the opinion that deodorized polyunsaturated oils are not appropriate for human consumption.

If I'm sort of lazy, I'll eat something made with palm oil, even though there is a lot of Omega 6.

> I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed.

I dunno- the longer you live, the longer I can sell shit to you.

Corporations - especially publicly traded ones - are not exactly known for their long-term planning. Quarterly reports on the other hand...

It's a prisoner's dilemma. Lacking government regulation, investment will always flow to the food companies willing to sacrifice the longterm health of consumers in exchange for higher revenue.

That is, food corporations that practice methods that increase consumption to unhealthy levels - high sodium, high sugar, low satiating and cheap to produce foods (high-carb, high-yield meat products due to growth hacks like bovine growth hormone).

The food companies that choose not to play along are either niche health food companies, or they will go bust by not being able to compete in a commodity market.

Sarah Palin (1) would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream. We are "free" to eat whatever is available, and baring government intervention what is available is subject to the forces described in my previous paragraph (ie garbage optimized to make us over-consume).

The obesity epidemic WILL NOT be resolved until heavy government regulation comes into play in the food industry. Pretending otherwise is no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex.

1. Obviously I'm just using her here as poster child for a certain political ideology.

> Sarah Palin would have you believe we should have the "freedom" to eat what we want. However, for the vast majority of Americans that's a straight up pipedream.

I don't know, in every town there is a grocery store that sells produce, raw meat, and other unprocessed foods. If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism.

Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed.

> no different than those who pretend abstinence education prevents pre-marital sex

May I suggest you look into that more?

>If your argument is that the shopper is so overwhelmed by advertising that he just can't help but choose poorly --- well, that's the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism.

You're free to believe that most humans are capable of making healthy eating choices by their own free will if you want (not trying to be catty, and I'm not sure that was the point you were communicating, just how I interpreted your comment), but the data overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/US...

At a certain point I believe it is important to protect people from themselves. Being too proud to admit that "humans can be taken advantage of using certain hacks/tricks" makes society as a whole weaker.

>Actually I believe that there is truth to both sides, but either side taken to the extreme leads to absurdity. Full faith in the individual, and full faith in government, are each flawed.

You and I agree on this point 100%. Currently I believe the FDA has allowed too much leeway with the food industry. I'm not foolish enough to think that it couldn't easily swing too far in the other direction as well.

But long term returns almost always have a lower priority to short term returns in a company's balance sheets.

sigh... lemme tell ya what they taught us in finance theory class: rich investors are not stupider than average investors; in fact, if investing "for the long term" is the right thing to do, rich investors actually have the resources, wherewithal and the time to do it.

The problem is, as hard as it is to predict the future, it is harder to predict farther into the future; and, once you set up a pot of "long term" honey, people have a chance to reorganize their affairs to siphon off said honey and if your idea is to not pay attention to their short term results, you set yourself up for a big long term surprise. Publicly traded companies are mostly companies that have products, markets, customers, service, etc. Generally, when they are losing money compared to other companies, it does not scream "we're pouring money into R&D, great things are around the corner!"

This boils down to, statistically speaking, short term results are actually the best indicator of long term results. You'd be foolish (statistically) to overemphasize long term hypotheticals in the face of short term losses.

TL;DR that financial markets are too tilted in favor of "short term" results is largely a myth. if it were not a myth, wealth would shift from the majority people who supposedly pay attention to short term results and toward people who ignore short term results leading to the end of the myth.

edit (couple above and): I'm not saying that long term projects and ideas and thinking don't ever pay off; I'm saying that saying that they are undervalued and therefore represent an opportunity is a stretch and requires proof that you most likely will not find if you look because others have looked.

Algorithmics would disagree with you: the greedy algorithm, or trying to find a global maximum from local maxima, usually fails as a method. It's usually a "stupider" way of doing things :P

My own experiences, especially related to corporations, seem to corroborate this.

I think it's a mistake to apply ideas from the mathematics of functions (other than statistical functions) to "trendlines" observable in financial market data. The idea of local maxima, for instance, suggests to most people who've heard the term that you could find a maximum by finding roots of a derivative function, the proof of which is based on the dynamics of the underlying processes being discernable or model-able as a function.

To convey the intuition I'm trying to describe as quickly as possible, I think you're thinking of market data being useful to help you find the Old Faithful geyser, and once you find it you just need to hang around and scoop up the reliable expulsions. Coupled with the even worse idea that you can see it where nobody else can :) To continue the analogy, I think it's not Old Faithful you found, but a solar flare on the surface of the sun, and while waiting for the next one you are more likely to get scorched.

We aren't going to debate technical analysis here (or resolve it), the point I'm making overall is that people persistently believe that financial markets are leaving money lying around, that these people can see where nobody else can see it, and that is easy to bend over and pick up. I'm trying to use some fairly simple logic and explanation to say, "it's not that easy; if it was, how can you think an entire financial industry somehow can't see what you can see? Wall street hires people just like you."

I'm not sure where you're going with this, but it's digressed far from what I was talking about. To paraphrase your argument, you're talking about assuming convexity, which is a big deal in financial modeling.

If convexity isn't assumed, you're right back to my original point.

the observation that "the markets are too short term focused" is not a useful starting point for a moneymaking strategy because it can be shown with a simple explanation to a layperson that it isn't even an observation, it's a myth... is where I started and where I'm going.

I don't think using terms such as convexity explains anything to anybody, but if it indicates to you that the market is too short term focused, you should just print money with a derivative security that prefers companies that lose money in the short term because that will with no effort uncover all the long term strategies...

But isn't that shift in wealth actually happening? My understanding is that the richest investors are increasingly moving their capital from publicly-traded stocks to privately held companies (venture capital and private equity) exactly because they earn higher long-term returns. Those private companies don't have the same pressure to pay attention to short term results. Average investors can't make the same investments because they are largely locked out of those private markets. This is a market inefficiency, but it's likely to persist for a long time.

There are other explanations for such a trend as you describe that do not hinge on long term vs short term thinking.

For example, if you have control over a golden goose asset and managing it to maximize wealth is best achieved by sitting in a room with other oligopolists and carving up markets, that (1) may be best accomplished "in private" and (2) why share unfairly high profits if don't need to? This type of thing has occurred for example in the growth of cable TV companies, go public (yet maintain control) to get access to the capital necessary to grow your networks, then go private again (you already have control) to not have to dilute profit over and in the face of inefficient public regulation.

In any case, the idea that the market is too focused on the short term has been around for decades, and if the shift had occurred as you propose, then we wouldn't still be hearing it.

Did they teach you that a group of completely rational short-term thinkers can get stuck at a local maximum that's way below the optimum for people who are thinking ahead? Or that irrational behavior can emerge from groups of smart, rational individuals in competition?

Theory aside, here's a thing that doesn't fit into any short-term models I know: Bell Labs. Take a monopoly business with a ton of spare cash, and throw that cash into a well. Build a city full of comfortable middle-class researchers and their families with no need to produce anything of immediate value, and keep it going for decades. Watch them invent a million amazing things that change the world, and then, once they get splintered into a bunch of smaller, short-term focused groups, watch them fade into insignificance.

I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with me or agreeing and adding on.

If you are suggesting that rational behavior is emerging every time, or even much of the time, somebody says "Wall Street is too focused on the short term", I shake my head in sadness at the money you are planning to lose.

It already has. It's the reason that one of the richest people in the world is Warren Buffett.

> This boils down to, statistically speaking, short term results are actually the best indicator of long term results. You'd be foolish (statistically) to overemphasize long term hypotheticals in the face of short term losses.

Amazon is an apt antithesis ... though obviously an outlier.

Amazon is not an antithesis at all, it's in my column! look, language is imprecise and none of us are writing encylopedias here that we reedit till they are perfect, so to keep it short:

Amazon is pursuing a long term strategy, and it's a public company, and it's getting funded, it's not getting starved for capital. i.e. the market is working, its strategy is being valued, there is no evidence of a market failure. (that is why I covered myself in my previous comment by saying "overemphasize" rather than simply saying emphasize.)

what would be your "antithesis" example would be other similar ideas that were floated and funding dried up because investors "stupidly" didn't get what a great long term idea it was. Of course, nobody can know what woulda coulda, and I'm not saying anybody can; what I'm saying is, if somebody thinks that markets don't properly weigh the long term over the short term, they are essentially saying that they want to sink more of their money into these (hypothetical) "losers" and I'm saying, please don't, it's a bad idea to assume that you know more than people actually in that industry.

I'm also not saying "don't think you have better ideas" and I'm not saying "don't pursue your good ideas" etc. I'm saying, don't think that financial markets are stupider than you. Don't think that the world is this hugely unfair place where all the people with money don't know a good idea when they hear about it, and that all these people with no money have all these great ideas that money seems to make people blind to (which is what "markets just don't get long term like I do" is saying)

Or the issue that often the real costs aren't on the companies balance sheet at all. The cost of type II diabetes notably does not show up on food industries balance sheet. Just like the cost of smoking didn't show up in the tobacco companies balance sheets.

> I'm (further) convinced that healthy eating and corporate interests are completely opposed.

This is touched on a bit in the Omnivore's Dilemma, people without heavy encouragement otherwise, have a rough limit on how many calories they will consume in a day. As a food company that has sufficient market penetration, you're stuck growing your profits at the same rate as the population. To get around this, you'll either need to increase your profits per calorie (sell less for more, cheaper ingredients, etc) or increase the amount of calories people are eating, through marketing and/or formulating your foods in such a way to encourage more consumption.

I think most companies opt for both, there's a lot of limits/diminishing returns on the making food cheaper side of things, but on the human consumption side, there's a lot of room for growth until everybody is morbidly obese. The bigger you are, the more calories you need to consume to keep that weight. More calories consumed is more money for food producers.

I totally agree with you, but surely some food companies are taking a different approach and that is to charge more for high quality food?

Personally I'm very happy to pay a premium for food I know has been prepared with good ingredients.

Having stopped consuming processed sugar a few years ago, I can easily say this was the single change I've made with the largest impact on my health and quality of life.

When I started reading labels and stopped buying anything with sugar, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice etc., I automatically eliminated processed food.

As for food companies, their responsibility is to maximize profit which usually involves selling as much as possible at the highest profit margin possible.

Given that high profit margin excludes the possibility of expensive quality ingredients, the variables that remain are taste and perception. Thus, food commercials, stories, "healthy food fetishism" (and pushing same crap as such) and taste laboratories where scientists focus on making said crap palatable, tasty and if possible addictive.

Sugar is an addictive substance so it is almost always a part of this formula.

What would you recommend for breakfast and lunch? Mine have always been based on bread and I can't find a good alternative.

Yogurt + granola for breakfast

Salads for lunch

I'm not afraid of carbs, so my usual bread replacement is potato or sweet potato. My usual lunch is a potato & meat & fruit. I'd probably add broccoli or something to that if I weren't lazy/cheap. I'm also not afraid of oil/butter/salt, so it's not hard to make the veggies taste good.

Ideal breakfast for me is eggs & meat & perhaps fruit, though I currently have only black coffee for breakfast on weekdays (mild intermittent fasting).

I might add that feeling "full" at meals has been a huge motivator for me. Skipping breakfast and not placing limits on what I eat otherwise so long as it's real food has worked extremely well psychologically; I don't feel deprived, and I can see myself continuing this for life.

The food industry is close to absurd. To cut costs the makes things barely edible, then spend a few millions in marketing[1] and another load of money in chemically compensated taste (fancy name to mean sugar+fat+salt, and colors).

ps: said that earlier, my body made me change diet, you discover a lot of sensations you don't sense with the average industrial diet (everything is fuzzed by sugar and fat). It's not easy though because you lack all the hoops all these sweet meals gave you before, and your brain crave them a lot. Without a change in culture/lifestyle and real constraints (disease) it seems impossible to achieve on long term.

[1] there's a research department in some English univ. dealing with consumer buying reflex optimization, they investigate the package-sound-crispiness / buying ratio

Hopefully you include the government into those corporate interests.

They are the one that pushed the food pyramid and all the anti-fat craze.

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