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Obamacare Calorie Count Rules Ushered In

scientificamerican.com

28 pointsmgdo108 comments

As a skinny young man with a big appetite I've found myself using these calorie counts as a way to maximize calories for the lowest price.

I use to be like that (the snickers bar had the best calories/price ratio in the office vending machine), but I'm not any more (the popcorn has the lowest calories in the office vending machine).

Something very unfortunate happened to my metabolism in my 30s... do enjoy it while you can :)

As a formerly obese person and big loser with almost infinite capacity for stress eating, I love the calorie counts for all of the times they've helped me when I've been in calculation mode (which is healthy, for my personality dynamic). Sometimes a vague-sandwich is all it takes to get off the rails and put my old, bad habits in the driver's seat again.

BTW back when I weighed around 300 lbs. I remember buying a box of Little Debbie's peanut butter snacks for the exact reason you stated (and eating it all). Major calorie density for cost. That became a sort of pornographic activity for me, building up energy stores outside of any real energy-risk context.

This is the point I made below, whole foods are superior to calorie counts

No one eats a grass-fed steak and goes into a downward spiral.

Tons of people spiral out of control if they consume even small amounts of junk food.

WHAT you eat matters more than HOW MUCH you eat long term.

Calories matter, but different foods affect your body differently!

As another former >300lbs man, let me politely suggest that you are completely full of shit. Calories are by far and away the most important metric when losing weight. Controlling food addiction is an issue too, but you're not going to solve it by eating "whole foods".

Why were people before the 1950s almost completely unaware of calorie counts but almost all lean?

They ate fewer calories, but still had lots of starch.

They did a lot more physical labor and food was much more expensive, for starters.

That sounds true but the evidence shows otherwise.

Women in the 1950s were mostly lean and did almost no exercise.

Look around at the people who are the most physically active today (day laborers/construction workers). They’re active all day, and yet most are still overweight.

It’s not about activity, it’s about consuming quality food to fix your hormone levels.

Please provide evidence that hormonal balance or other endocrine mess is involved.

I'm quite interested in such.

I think it is combination of both increased calorie intake and somewhat reduced physical work thus caloric demand - mostly sitting (in car, at work) instead of walking or standing.

Having food be more palatable and caloric plays into this too but seems secondary.

There is absolutely nuance to it, I’m certainly not a proponent of a sedentary lifestyle or not working out. But if people just start exercising without also switching to whole foods, they will never out-exercise their diet — in fact many people end up losing muscle (because they’re running a lot and not eating enough protein), which slows down your metabolism even further.

I great book for you to checkout is Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf — it talks about how different foods affect insulin differently while also including the nuance of differences between people, as well as a way to test your personal response to certain foods to determine your optimal macronutrient intake.

I suspect insulin is only a small part of the story in obesity and other hormones are more important, esp. growth hormone family (e.g. ghrelin) and steroids - in starting the cascade that leads to metabolic syndrome. We do not know nearly enough and any book is liable to be outdated by at least 10 to 20 years and trying to sell something.

Otherwise diabetics with insulin replacement wouldn't go fat - but instead even controlled type 2 diabetes is highly linked to obesity. (Both ways!) Likewise type 1 diabetics are somewhat more likely to be obese despite tight control on insulin levels.

Here's a very interesting but not quite in depth study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159079/

This book is cutting edge science, with ample references to recent studies. It came out last year and is written by someone who has personally helped hundreds of thousands (if not millions of people) to lose weight and keep it off long term, I highly encourage you to read it before making judgments about the motives of the author.

This means it is only 5 years out of date then?

Unless it is one of those scalping Springer research books there is really no way for it to match latest research...

And just do you know, most books are made to sell and this one does not strike me as a technical (enough) one. Though it is well written (based on the preview), I would not trust the conclusions. It really tries to sell a paleo diet which is an instant red flag because we do not have good evidence for efficacy of any diet, even less so for so-called paleo.

Nutrition science is finally starting to move fast beyond preconceptions hopefully.

This is simply not true, there is ample evidence for Paleo diets, read the book and it references the studies.

What is your theory for why the entire western world is suddenly obese? Why were people not obese even 70 years ago?

People today eat more calories, because technological advances have made food more accessible and convenient.

Cus you had to be a lot richer to have access to shit tons of calories. The meme of the rich fat person goes way back in time; it's only very recently that food is so cheap and calorically dense.

Exactly. I am a strict calorie counter and I am not overweight. (155# 5’10” 55 year old man). Sometimes I have hostess cupcakes for breakfast. (330 calories). Sometimes I have a Big Mac for lunch (550 calories). It’s hilarious when fat people talk about ‘whole foods’ and ‘mindful eating’. It’s calories.

I wouldn't call it hilarious, but as Mel Brooks once said "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die".

When you're that obese, food is an addiction in the literal sense. There is a ghrelin/dopamine feedback loop at work and it is not at all fun to break that. People are lured in by these schemes because the addict part of their mind is desperate for excuses not to stop eating. I know how this feels, because I fucking lived it. You wouldn't believe the things you can convince yourself of as an addict. Not to mention that lowered blood sugar is directly correlated with decreased willpower.

It's calories. We know it's calories. We know we shouldn't eat so many calories. That's not the hard part.

But this law is all about calories. And counting calories works. If you’re unable to count calories then of course you need some remedial help. But pretending that it’s about “eating the right foods” is lying to yourself.

Every obese person needs "remedial help", that's the definition of treatment. Even attacking the problem from multiple angles may not be enough. Counting calories combined with accurate monitoring helps but is very often insufficient. And even from just that the drop out rates are big - even without actual caloric restriction.

Increasing base metabolism is known to not work as it does not suppress the appetite or fix reward loop. Though thyroid therapy may be needed for some cases.

Dopamine uptake inhibitors exist but they have other side effects, petty bad. (Among them addiction.) SSRI make the problem worse, as do certain antipsychotics.

Direct appetite suppressants have not been invented yet though you can cheat some with special diets. (Well there are some but they're not stable and pain to inject. Could be done like insulin injections but somehow not considered cost effective and unsafe as ghrelin has additional functions.)

Having accurate data on food contents (including caloric) is vital but insufficient.

This is overly reductionist and places the blame on people attempting diets.

Most people I’ve found have simply been given terrible dietary advice (like eat high carb, low fat), which doesn’t work for the vast majority of people (because it elevates insulin levels, making them hungrier), and then they’re blamed later for not sticking to the program.

It’s completely ridiculous, it’s like putting a faithful man in a whorehouse and forcing him to ingest 4 doses of ecstasy. Sure it’s still his fault if he cheats, but are we going to pretend that the context doesn’t matter?

Ecstasy and whorehouses are a poor plan for fidelity, high-carb low-fat is a poor plan for fat loss.

This would be a lot better without the rudeness.

When you've had to put yourself through the things I've had to put myself through to lose, and keep off, half of my body weight, it becomes a bit difficult not to be rude to some conman trying to sell convenient lies.

Losing large amounts of weight is plenty hard enough without having to wade through misinformation.

Calories matter more than anything when discussing weight. Nutrition matters when discussing health. You can eat too much of almost anything.

Technically correct, but most people don’t overeat when consuming whole foods — just like they didn’t before the 1950s.

This might be an issue of caloric density and fibre content. Volume is a reasonably strong appetite inhibitor.

Not long term it’s not, the studies that show that are short term in nature, like most diet studies.

Fiber is a double edge sword, some people do great with more, some people do terrible with more — it’s highly dependent and the only way to know is experiment. The book Health Gut, Healtby You by Dr. Ruscio is the most up to date book on gut health.

Not quite up to date anymore I'm afraid.

In general I agree. There is a major confounder that the best source of fiber are raw vegetables which have other beneficial properties - but most studies of it tended to use something much simpler than actual fiber combinations found in foods.

We do not know nearly enough about how diet impacts gut microbiome, nor how the environment does. It is really hard to study anyway.

Please provide a resource that is more up to date.

Heh, I occasionally shop at 99¢ stores, and am often amazed at how many calories one can buy for a dollar.

Chocolate pound cake is the clear winner (not counting items that are just ingredients like cooking oil etc.): 900kcal/99¢! (~1.09 after tax where I live)

Is vegetable oil better? Or what about sugar or syrup?

Sure but eating cake is much less likely to make you sick than drinking vegetable oil

Do you sit down to a nice meal of sugar and vegetable oil often?

Well I don't sit down to a meal of chocolate pound cake either.

...but people do. No one does the former... pretty sure you understand that and are just being purposely dense.

A 10oz jar of creamy peanut butter from the dollar store has ~1700 Calories.

Agreed, but if we count ingredients then a jug of cooking oil wins hands down.

Peanut butter isn't an ingredient. I usually just eat it out of the jar with a spoon.

> Restaurants will also have to provide on-site additional nutritional information, such as fat and sodium levels.

Can we please talk about sugar? It's objectively worse than just "fat" as not all fats are created equal and certain kinds are actually really important.

Sugars are really important too, if that's your metric. That's why they taste good.

Lead tastes good too, taste is not equivalent to importance.

But it remains true that

1. Sugars are extremely important to your basic biological functioning.

2. Their extreme importance is the reason they taste good.

Many people get by on diets with very little sugar. In the past when calories were harder to come by, the sweetness made sense as it indicated calorie-dense food. The sweetness is a proxy for calories. It would be more accurate to say that calories are extremely important. You can get calories from a variety of sources (starches, fats, and protein), however, not just sugar.of calories

You get calories from starches by metabolizing them into sugar.

There are plenty of people who eat low-carb diets. Glycolysis isn't the only metabolic pathway to produce energy. Your argument seems based on the macronutrient, not its metabolites, particularly as you're focussing on the taste. If the taste were driven by the metabolites, starches would taste sweet as sugar.

Sugar (and carbs) aren't intrinsically crucial as a macronutrient. They're calorically dense, which is important when calories are scarce. When calories are plentiful, their importance wanes.

You can (and should) say the exact same thing about sugars as you did about fats. There is a healthy way to eat sugars, fats, and proteins. They are all important and what it usually comes down to is the age old saying "all things in moderation."

Fat and protein are healthier for you than sugar. Sugar should be your least consumed macro. All things in moderation is a cop out.

Focusing on one "evil" is as much of a cop out. Sugar isn't the only way you can be overweight or unhealthy.

Yes, there is a healthy way to eat sugar: limit it to waaaay below what you think a low level is. Max ~30g per day from complex carbs is a good rule-of-thumb. That's what you'll get from eating a banana, one serving of 0% greek yogurt and a handful of carrots.

Nutrition is a field, from the science perspective, that does not work in absolutes. It is too complex of a field for us to really pin anything down for populations or individuals. That is why we as individuals have to find a way to tune it, ideally with expert input. That is why I take issue with statements like "objectively worse," which is really the only reason I commented in the first place. But I would like to see where you are getting 30g because everything I have seen (we'll include [1] link but my quick googling brought up comparable results) puts sugars, combined complex and simple, at ~40% to 65% of your daily diet. It is often quoted at about ~200g to 300g. Yes, people over-do their sugars, yes people think that eating all the fruit is healthy when in fact it is still a bunch of sugar, but in the end a body with moderate activity needs carbs to break down for quick energy. It would be inefficient for our bodies to go into fat stores or slow-burn protein every time we need energy.

[1]https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

You’re mixing up sugar and carbs.

It’s fine to eat 250g of carbs, though that seems high if you’re trying to be as far from obese as possible without being unhealthy.

It’s not fine to eat 250g of sugar. You’ll likely get diabetes.

Also not all carbs are made the same. Eating bread is not the same as eating sweet potato, as suprising as that may seem. Few carbs are good for you and you should make a concious decision about which ones to eat. Not to mention everything that usually gets added to carb-heavy food as those tend to be highly industrialized. Due to their convenience factor they’ve effectively replaced home-cooked carbs.

But perhaps most importantly, carbs have been showed to be linked to Alzheimer’s Disease though this isn’t yet mainstream knowledge:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15082091/

The cynical in me thinks “big food” must be trying really hard to hide this fact from society.

Carbs and sugars are (almost, but obviously with nuances) interchangeable in the way I am using them, from the bio-chem sense. I do see what you are saying and see where this back and forth is coming in. No, there is absolutely no reason to eat a big 250g spoon of table sugar. As for Alzheimer's you are seeing more work around diet in general and the link to aging. It just takes awhile, I don't think it has to be a conspiracy(of course it could be, there is a lot of money in carbs). You are seeing some of these findings move from academia into public consumption reporting [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-start... [2] https://www.aarp.org/health/brain-health/info-2017/foods-dec...

Either way, I think this thread has run its' course. I will probably not respond anymore but I'll leave with this: I agree sugars should also be talked about, we generally consume way too many in a day but I take issue with ranking basic nutritional building blocks because they are all important and we would be in trouble if we took one out. But have a great day, always good to have a little internet back and forth.

There's also a healthy way to eat arsenic - in moderation - about 12.5 μg/day

Sorry but even that amount will accumulate and cause serious kidney problems in late age.

It is one of those things where we do not know any safe dose.

In new zealand we have http://www.foodstandards.govt.nz/consumer/labelling/panels/P...

and Mcdonalds for instance... https://mcdonalds.co.nz/sites/mcdonalds.co.nz/files/Nutritio...

which is great if you care about it. But generally if you care about such things you have a pretty good idea for most foods anyways. Though, there are a few foods that it's not entirely obvious there's lots of sugar in them.

Maybe it's just me because I don't know how the US works, but when trying to find the official information for this, it seems like none of the news agencies I found via googling reference official information, they just reference their own news about things officials said. Eventually I found a reference to a fda document. Seemed painful to find though.

https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/Guidan...

The USDA already keeps a publically available food database (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list) of most of this information. Its just that now restaurants need to make it more prominent at the time of order.

Yeah, I remember when US products like Dr Pepper first started showing up in NZ they would have a sticky label over the top of the nutrition info with a more compliant one.

The most effective labels we could have are "Added sugar" and "Added corn starch".

If you show exactly how much extra sugar and corn starch you're consuming, it's much harder to get fat by accident.

Do you mean added corn syrup? Cornstarch is useful in the kitchen, but isn't super common in processed food (I assume they have better thickeners!).

Eh, if we're being precise:

dextrose, maltodextrin, pretty much anything that's -ose or dex-, corn starch, corn syrup, added sugar, wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, legumes, dairy.

I cut all of those and ended up losing weight without exercising. YMMV.

A decent rule of thumb is that if a 5yo can pronounce all the ingredients, it's probably ok.

Calorie counts are all that really matters when it comes to "getting fat" - while obviously that doesn't mean healthy - sugar isn't any more relevant to getting fat than anything else.

Now, there are easy wins from sugars - particularly if you are drinking lots of regular soft drinks, you can reduce your calorie intake relatively easily by cutting them out, but everyone's diet is different.

>sugar isn't any more relevant to getting fat than anything else.

That's not quite true. High sugar intake results in an insulin spike, which in turn results in more fat being stored than would be had you eaten the same number of calories in the form of e.g. protein. Sugar also results in more net calories per calorie as it takes very little energy to digest.

From a behavioral perspective (this matters!), sugar does not leave you feeling full. You can talk calories all day, but when it comes to weight loss you have to factor in how people actually work. A full person is less likely to overeat than a hungry one.

Calorie count gets you most of the benefit with a small fraction of the cost--in compliance as well as in information overload.

California's Proposition 65 is a great example of how detail and context matter. The carcinogen warnings are so ubiquitous that they've become meaningless if not counterproductive.

Don't overlook the fact that people aren't stupid. A sugar label for soda or ice cream has little value. A sugar label for a burger bun is almost equally useless in terms of epidemiological impact because of the relatively minimal amount, especially once you consider how it would effects the signal/noise ratio of all mandatory disclosures taken together.

You also have to consider other avenues for messaging. What was most effective in reducing smoking (directly or indirectly--i.e. shifting the culture): labels on cigarette packs, early interventions, or public marketing campaigns. I would argue the latter.

I think a good proxy for what you should and should not be eating is how much you enjoy the food. If you really enjoy it a lot, then it is easy to over do it. However if it is mostly palatable, but doesn't give you that feeling of bliss (compare salad without dressing vs. pizza or chocolate cake), then you won't be necessarily going back for seconds/thirds once full.

Of course, this can be mitigated if the food has a negative feedback cycle. I'm that way with shellfish, after a certain amount it becomes nasty tasting. Same with a good steak, after I've eaten enough I can't imagine shoving more down. But with pizza, I always go back for that second or third slice.

Outsider's view:

As a Norwegian, when I visited Boston in 1999 for an Allaire dev conference I saw more grossly fat / obese people in the _hour_ spent switching flights at Newark airport than I had in my (then) home country in the preceding year. I was really taken aback.

There's clearly a lot of things the US is not doing right on many, many levels. This could help chip (sorry) away at that.

As someone who is starting to watch what they eat, and try to watch calories as well as other nutrition things, I'm glad this is happening, but I wish it was possible for it to apply more broadly, too. For that, I guess, it would need to be easier/cheaper to get the nutrition of a recipe than it is now.

Congrats on starting! That’s the hardest part. As someone who helps people lose weight professionally, I’m curious to hear what program, if any, you found and how did you decide to do it? (I’m not selling anything, just curious).

I had been going to the gym, but I was frustrated with the crappy heart rate monitors on the cardio machines there. I was also looking for a replacement for my Pebble Time, so I got the new Fitbit Versa. It works pretty well, and has a nice feature of giving me a "calorie budget," telling me about how much I can eat.

So far, though, the hardest part is estimating how many calories are in something, and how much of something I'm eating.

If you stick with properly raised proteins, healthy fats (no trans fats), and low-carb veggies you don’t have to keep track of anything, the calories take care of themselves.

Limit starchy carbs and treats to one meal after your workouts.

People love to downvote me on this thread but that advice is essentially what people pay me thousands of dollars to get them lean.

> "Daren Bakst, a fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the law equates to government overreach.

'It’s not up to the government to influence what people eat — that should be left up to each individual,' he said."

I wonder if he has the same 'feels' about legalizing all illegal drugs? Seems most conservatives only support laws that fit their 'narrative'.. I'm obese, I sit and code all day, and I don't think people 'should' do lsd/weed/heroine/etc... but I don't think they should go to jail if they end up in the rat-trap of addiction. It's a mental health issue, and the distribution lines should be only ones policed imho..

But why is the DEA not government overreach for enforcing 'possession' but listing calorie counts so people can purposefully limit intake is?

As someone who helps people lose fat professionally, I can say with near 100% confidence this will have almost zero effect on the vast majority of people.

People were lean long before calorie counts were readily available, the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food.

The problem is philosophical — if you think all edible substances qualify as “food,” you’re never going to lose weight and keep it off.

If you think you should only be consuming whole foods the VAST majority of the time, then you will lose weight and keep it off relatively effortlessly.

As someone who has lost 20 pounds since the new year, I can say with near 100% confidence that it would not have happened for me without obsessive calorie tracking. Can't recommend MyFitnessPal enough.

It won’t last, calorie counts are not reliable indicators of how many calories you’re actually digesting (look up the thermic effect of food), and long term you will not keep it off if you focus solely on calories, quality whole foods come first.

That just makes no sense, unless you are suggesting that we magically generate matter, calorie counts are an upper bound on how many calories you are actually digesting.

That’s not what I’m suggesting.

Certain foods generate more heat while being digested (like protein) than others (like sugar and white flour).

Consuming 100 calories of protein results in fewer calories digested than consuming 100 calories of sugar.

Sure, but how does that in any way make calorie counting less effective? It's an upper bound. Sure, you could maybe eat a little more protein than you would otherwise budget for, but if you are aiming to lose weight, overestimating the count of an item a little isn't going to hurt.

The broader point I’m trying to make is that calorie counting DOES NOT work long term.

It’s exhausting. It’s monotonous. It’s inaccurate. It’s impossible to do unless you’re eating at chain restaurant all the time.

And we are not robots where ONLY calories matter.

In the short term people can willpower themselves to do almost anything.

In the long term WHAT we eat has a bigger affect than HOW MUCH we eat.

Different foods affect our hormones differently.

You can’t eat 1,200 calories of sugar a day and expect to feel satiated from your diet, you will feel starving all the time.

You can eat 1,200 calories of protein/veggies/healthy fat and feel satiated from your diet.

Hormones drive our long-term hunger levels, and foods affect our hormone levels.

People before the 1950s were almost all lean and they had no calorie counts.

People have all the calorie counts they can stand today and most people are overweight in the West.

The difference is people eat WAY more junk food now than they did before the 1950s, it wasn’t even available back then.

Dude, I can see what you're saying, but as somebody who apparently does this professionally you need to work on how you get your point across.

I've lost over 15KG/35 pounds since the start of the year doing nothing but CICO - it's not incorrect to say that Calories is the king when it comes to how to lose the weight.

For everything else you are saying, it's not wrong either - anybody who starts CICO pretty quickly discovers that "Yes I can eat anything, but my god I will be hungry at 7pm if I used all my Calories on KFC and Donuts" - but don't keep saying simply that "Counting calories is not going to work".

Edit to add: and my wife and I have done this all with cooking home made meals at least 5-6 nights a week. It only takes a minute to enter a recipe in a calculator app.

Appreciate your comment.

To be clear the population of people on HN is a self-selecting, techie group of ppl. Most people cannot do CICO long term. And even if you can you’ll realize it doesn’t work the leaner you get, quality becomes increasingly important at that point.

The GP said UPPER BOUND. Sure, protein and fibrous foods require more energy to digest. Great, that's a nice bonus. However, if your counting calories then you're not taking that into account, therefore you're over counting. That leads to _more_ weight loss, never less.

I’ve yet to see the caloric intake which cuts off 500-600 cals of your BMR which for most non bedridden people equates to about a 1000 calories daily deficit that wouldn’t result in weight loss regardless of the nutritional makeup of said calories.

Can you clarify your statement? I don’t understand what you’re saying.

What I’m saying is that while eating 1500 cals of pure sugar a day might not be good for your long term insulin sensitivity you’ll lose weight at about the same rate as eating 1500 “well balanced” cals of fat/protein/complex carbs a day.

This is a statement that’s technically true but misses the most important point — sourcing your foods from fat/protein/veggies will naturally take care of the calories piece.

All mammals, including humans, have the ability to naturally regulate their energy balance when they eat the foods they evolved to eat.

No it won’t if you eat a ribeye for lunch every day you’ll be hard pressed to lose weight unless you are The Rock.

If your goal is to lose weight tracking calories is by far the most important factor in achieving that goal.

You can’t just say eat meat and veggies and expect people to lose weight without enforcing a caloric restriction.

That is exactly how I get my many, many clients to lose weight — eating meat and veggies naturally causes people to reduce their calorie intake by increasing their feelings of satiety from the foods they’re eating.

No, how you make your clients lose weight is by restricting their caloric intake that’s it.

The fact that’s is more easily achieved by saying that you can eat 3 chicken breasts a potatoe and a bucket of kale a day than 5 large cookies, isn’t exactly ground breaking nor does it have anything to do with what humans evolved to eat because we’ve been eating processed sugar for far longer than we were eating meat.

In fact scratch my first comment that started this I would rather see a menue that is at or over your daily caloric requirement which magically makes you lose weight.

Are you claiming that ALL foods — whether they’re sugar or grass-fed beef — affect your hunger-related hormones the same?

Also, where’s the evidence for people consuming processed sugar longer than meat?

Never seen that claimed before.

Great job. Don’t listen to the haters. :)

I am not a hater, I do this professionally

And especially don’t listen to anyone who is overweight. They are like crabs in a bucket and will try to pull you back in.

Restaurants being required to show calories may change menus in a way that cannot help but have an effect for everybody. It incentivizes having lower calorie options, disincentives healthy sounding but not really items like some salads and disincentives really over the top items.

Even if that doesn't pan out, it certainly makes life easier for the millions who do count calories.

> the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food

Maybe that's not the problem but it could be part of a solution. Don't underestimate gamification and feedback loops.

What type of awareness are we talking about? I imagine a progress bar telling you precisely where you are for the day and the week, now you have to consciously break the ceiling if you want to eat too much.

I’m all for anything that helps people, including gamification.

But if your focus is calories, and not the quality/source if your food, then you’re not solving the REAL problem which is distorted hormone levels affecting how full you feel. Junk food causes you to be hungrier than you should be.

Look around, no other mammal is overweight other than humans, and most humans weren’t overweight until junk food wasn’t invented.

You keep throwing out all of this talk of "hormones" and "look at people pre-1950!" Without providing any real evidence. Where's the data on hormones?

Check out the book Good Calories, Bad Calories which looks at the subject in depth (specifically the role of insulin)

Why just eat whole foods when you could mostly eat dank foods?

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