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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

I see this as another symptom of USA consumerism. Your feel a little stressed? Take this tranquilizer! You feel tired? Take these vitamins!

As a consumer the idea that you can let your problems go away by just swalling a couple of pills is tempting. And the doctor and the farmaceutical company are making some money on it as well.

The reality is that staying healthy and vital at an older age takes discipline and effort: you need to eat and drink moderately, keep a balanced diet, exercise regularly and get enough sleep. But that's a tough message to sell and nobody is making money on it.

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"I see this as another symptom of USA consumerism. Your feel a little stressed? Take this tranquilizer! You feel tired? Take these vitamins!"

On the selling and purchasing end, that may be the case. No sarcasm, I mean that.

But they still need something to get a hold of to work. I think if we dig down one layer farther, what they represent is Western science's tendency towards excessive reductionism. Reductionism has its place; it has been very powerful and we've done a lot with it. (A software engineer who thinks reductionism is all bad has not thought very carefully about their their job...) However, the 20th century in my opinion had a really bad run with reductionistic views of the human body. Hence, for instance, the continual flipflopping between eggs being bad or good for you, in an attempt to reduce "egg" to an atomic element and class "good" or "bad" on a single-dimensional scale, when in fact "eggs" are insanely complicated and goodness and badness are horrifyingly n-dimensional things hard to even characterize. Vitamins are clearly important, but science has tried too hard to reduce characteristics of the body to the impact of this one single chemical on this one single problem, or things like that.

I wouldn't even say the science was bad per se; if you only have access to enough computational power to build an 8-dimensional model of a thousand-dimensional process, the best you can do is get a very reduced-power model. It may still be better than nothing. But I do think there was a lack of deep understanding and proper humility in the 20th century, and ongoing into this one. Far too many scientists and science journalists drawing lines through single points, or n-dimensional hyperplanes through underconstrained data sets, filling in the direction of the lines with their own unscientific biases.

And that's before we discuss the reductionism of attempting to model everything as linear processes, because that the "bright spot of light under the lamppost" that we can be metaphorically looking for our keys because the math works nicely for those cases, despite the obvious and abundant evidence that our bodies can not be modeled via linear processes....

(And let me both start and end on the fact that I'm still not necessarily disagreeing with you about the consumerist aspect, just trying to dig one layer further down.)

"Balanced diet" is just a way of hiding the difficulty. How many dozens of ways does a diet have to balance, and how much leeway do you have on each one? Nobody really knows. A supposedly-balanced diet could still be lacking in vitamin D or iodine or...

If you can solve some of those factors with a pill, why not? Supplementation is not a cure-all but it can help in a lot of cases.

Note that I'm talking about small doses here, not taking tons and tons of arbitrary substances.

For most of the people with "dieting" problems, stop eating any junk food is a good enough "balanced" diet.

The attitude of "taking the pill" is very detrimental, because it typically mistakes solving the symptoms with solving the cause.

> For most of the people with "dieting" problems, stop eating any junk food is a good enough "balanced" diet.

That - naively - assumes that people know what / how to eat and cook when you take away junk food. I also gathered there's huge areas and neighbourhoods without access to a normal grocery store - you know, places where they sell vegetables and such.

And your comment - cynically - assumes that no one knows how to cook anything. A friend of mine who works in a VA hospital sends every patient home with a cheat sheet on how to cook vegetables to make them delicious and has seen fantastic uptake, especially when the card comes with an explanation of how much better your life can be if you'd stop eating refined sugars and pre-packaged foods.

I think you're making Cthulhu_'s point. People need external guidance to know how to eat well. It's not an innate skill.

I hate vegetables but force them down. I'd love a copy of this card.

I have been telling my spouse "stop buying junk food" for literally 15 years, without interruption. Every time, the response: "yes, I know" when agreeable, and "what constitutes 'junk food'?" when contrarian. It still somehow shows up in the house all the damned time. I'm not going to place the blame entirely on someone other than myself, because I do eat the crap instead of throwing it in the trash, but can I really threaten separation over one box of brownie mix? Is it any more reasonable to split over a thousand boxes of brownie mix?

We both know how to cook--perhaps a bit too well. Even if we didn't buy boxed brownie mix, we could still make brownies from staple ingredients and a bar of baker's chocolate. Or cookies. Or pies. The difference between us is that I refrain from doing so. You really have to take away the bag of refined sucrose, and the bag of white flour, too. And then you have to take away the corn, rice, and potatoes, because some impoverished ancestor figured out how to make "sweets" (read: black-market booze) out of the cheapest starch available, and if you stop short of the fermentation, it's still not-entirely-disgusting to eat as is. "Stop making junk food" is taken a bit too personally.

As I am not a peasant farmer that works heavy manual labor for 12 hours a day, there is no amount of exercise I could squeeze into my schedule that could compensate. I could stop myself from eating it, of course. I could quit at any time I wanted--probably without even checking in to rehab.

What you need is to know how to cook just enough to heat meats to the correct internal temperature, steam vegetables so they are neither crunchy nor mushy, and make vegetable soup, and then also not have the ability to make things more delicious with added fat, salt, and sugar.

Food deserts may be a thing, but that is also because the more nutritionally-dense-per-kcal fresh produce is expensive in relation to the boxed and canned junk foods. And some vegetables cost more than others. A 10# bag of potatoes can cost less than two heads of cauliflower. A 20# bag of white rice can be less than 2# of brussels sprouts. Carbohydrates are simply cheaper than vitamins-in-foods. If you can't afford a car to get to a grocery store on demand, you can't afford to replace all your junk food with fresh produce, either.

For me personally diets that switch between what I eat never work. My wife is an amazing cook, she cooks for fun more than as a sustenance which means there is always amazing stuff to eat around the house.

The only things I HAVE been able to do (I went from 223 to 152 now) are:

- track what I eat exactly without cheating.

- account for equivalent amount of base calories + exercise.

- control the # I eat of all the fancy stuff. If it is a brownie, I have to walk away after half a piece. If it is a couple of cookies, no lunch.

In general, there hasn't been an easy replacement meal. Thankfully I control breakfast and lunch (oats / skip it / replace with carrots/eggs etc. in office) and I ride over weekends.

There are entire industries based around selling dieting advice and health anxiety. I don’t buy that americans actually view multivitamins like this or I would stop seeing gluten free shit in whole foods.

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