Hacker News Reader

Comment by pieter_mj | Hacker News Reader

Currently a perfect diabetes, obesitas (and also cancer & alzheimer's) storm is brewing.

My gut instinct (pun intended) tells me it mainly has dietary causes which are not limited to increased portions alone.

Processed foods + sedentary lifestyles = perfect storm.

Pretty obvious "something" happened in the 70s and we've been on this ride ever since: https://nchspressroom.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/obesity.gi...

Realizing one 2 tablespoon serving of peanut butter was half a full meal was a wakeup call. It turns out 1/4 or less of a "serving" of most processed things works the same taste-wise and doesn't lead to insatiable hunger later.

Interestingly, peanut butter is near the bottom of the scale for being insulinogenic (the food insulin index). That means it's less likely to be put away as fat according to The Personalized Diet by Drs Segal and Elinav [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1478918802

Does this factor in the added sugar in most peanut butters? I can't find any without it around here.

Switch to unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter. It's amazing - after 2 weeks I stopped noticing the difference. The amount of sugar in most peanut butter is absurd.

Once you kick the sugar taste, oh wow do you realize its got a much more interesting and involved flavor.

It probably does. Colloquially when one says peanut butter, people think of Jiff, which can be best described as a disgusting peanut-flavored spread product. Go with natural peanut butter (i.e. where the only ingredient is peanuts and it must be stirred) and you're all good.

Peanut butter without sugar is labeled as "natural peanut butter" in the US.

I'll keep this in mind to help reduce the guilt I feel after eating an entire jar with a spoon.

A full meal is 380 calories?

If someone is sick, they'll become slow. All they'll want to do is lie down some place quiet.

Watch kids, healthy kids. After a meal, all they want to do is run, talk, jump - move. Sitting still is the last thing they want to do.

My point is perhaps, sedentary behavior is caused by something, a symptom outside the control of those afflicted by it.

Here are some culprits we could explore:

Schooling: Being trained, forced to sit in a spot for hours could train people to be sedentary.

Processed food: Maybe its doing something to the body. Like how zombie ants are controlled by fungi.

Aging process: All animals become less active with age... Even snails.

Environment: Tech makes it harder to be active physically. A tv remote, car, internet for shopping...

Poverty: There's a proven link between experiencing poverty at a young age and inability to control food intake, and spend responsibly.

Genes: People used to bulk up for winter hunger. Now there's food all year round. But the lizard brain is still in control.

There might be more reasons why people binge eat, and remain sedentary such as processed water, poor air quality, domestication (The more Wolf gene a Dog has, the more active it is)...

I think it is largely about the environment in which people live and kids are raised. Losing energy as we age has always been true. The lizard brain hasn't changed.

The environment has changed significantly.

The availability of food, especially cheap sugar and processed foods.

Tech to occupy our time and not letting kids play outside.

Kids that grow up eating McDonalds every meal and Soda with every meal. That is normal to them and very difficult to ever break from that if that's been your entire life and if the people around you are functioning that way.

Refined oils, fat, and animal protien cause arterial hardening immediately, lasting for several hours. Keep ingesting and you end up with heart disease....arteries filled with plaque restricting blood flow, raspiration, mental function. Ingesting refined sugar and flour causes an insulin spike (make fat out of carbs!) that lasts for hours causing a crash and repeated cravings for...more carbs. This leads to diabetes. Cancer needs sugar and animal protien to live.

Check out China study.

Fat is slept on macronutrient because of the misguided idea that increased fat = increased cholesterol in arteries. Vitamin K2 is an important vitamin that isn't metabolized well from foods containing K1 (vegetables). Animal sources and natto (fermented soy beans) are the best sources of it. It has been shown to help with heart disease, cancer and bone health.

The interesting thing with animal protein is that no study has shown a dose dependent increase in cancer when consuming more of it. Chronic inflammation from gluten, processed foods, pesticides, refined carbs, and refined sugars are the biggest culprits in dietary endorsed cancer.

So you are denying that endothelial dysfunction and it's triggers exist? Interesting.

Its triggers are high insulin, high fasting blood sugar, high triglycerides and low ldl. These are all caused by the food types I listed. High fat low carb diets have been shown to reduce all of these symptoms.

Citation for proof that arterial hardening happens immediately, and that animal protein specifically causes this (vs plant protein)? I've not seen this specific claim before.

I've seen the claim about animal protein many times before, never the sources.

It seems to be part of some pseudo-vegan zeitgeist. The denaturation process in cooking and digestion makes animal protein practically indistinguishable from plant protein. If there is any measurable dietary effect, it would be in the nutritional factors closely associated with those protein sources--for instance, the heme iron in animal meats, and the porphyric magnesium in green vegetable chlorophyll.

The proteins themselves are unlikely to have an effect beyond the ratios of their specific amino acid components, and the potential for indigestible misfolded prions. Animals are loaded with pepsins in their guts and proteases in the rest. By the time an amino acid reaches your arteries, if has already been broken down and built back up into something else.

A simple web search turns up pseudoscience and broscience everywhere. If there ever was a real dietary health study, it's now buried in the noise.

You are looking for reasons outside of "me". It's "they" (aka school), caused by "that" (food/chemical) and so on.

Not that it might not contribute, actually I would be surprised if it didn't somehow, but - its "us". You, me, everybody. We are lazy, we are overworked, we just sit on our asses whole day, lack sleep, eat junk food, drink crappy drinks, we know damn well we should exercise often but still we don't because blah blah. All these are personal decisions.

Anybody can look for excuses to feel a victim of the evil world and genes, or one can do something about it. Steps are crystal-clear these days, and super simple. Results are 100% guaranteed to get your life better, live longer etc. No excuse is good enough.

Depression is a hell of a drug. Add in constant doom and gloom from every corner of society (why live to be 120 if it's all downhill from here?), a bit of apathy, and a dash of hedonism (with unlimited distractions-you can have endless entertainment without leaving the house) and you've got a potent cocktail.

I'm not sure most humans are built to overcome these hurdles, and they're just becoming larger as time goes on.

By this rhetoric, a lack of obesity and obesity-related illness in a population indicates that the population has consciously decided to be healthier, eat healthier, exercise more, and work less. In short, they are morally superior entities with stronger wills.

Since obesity and obesity-related illnesses spiked in America in the 1970s, and the rhetoric here implies that such illnesses are primarily about conscious choice and will, the conclusion is that humans in america before 1970 were stronger people- in will, mind, body. They were a more disciplined, moral people, who had the will to resist all unhealthy and processed foods, sleep properly, and work reasonable hours doing active labor.

I find that quite confusing, because I don't recall that ever being the case.

the rhetoric here implies that such illnesses are primarily about conscious choice and will, the conclusion is that humans in america before 1970 were stronger people

No, that conclusion is incorrect. And equally valid hypothesis is that "industries" have become much better at making people choose against their own interest (and against their health). Maybe television has played a big part in that?

This hypothesis ignores that the post I am analyzing is against attributing external factors as a primary cause for obesity and obesity-related illness.

Agreed. It's something environmental. People did not suddenly change in the 70's. Some of us are old enough to have been around then :-)

Some books I've read say increased portions are a symptom of something else. E.g. Inability to feel satisfied.

So, tying it back to artificial sweeteners, there's a fair bit of research to suggest that consuming them causes you to feel more hungry.

Just the taste something sweet spikes insulin levels[1], and as you said at least some artificial sweeteners don't cause fullness[2] (I am amused that is not the major finding there, heh).

It makes sense, the body releases insulin in expectation of nutrition coming in, but no nutrition comes in, so the end result is feeling hungrier than before.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17510492 [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21255472

The real question is, are they still preferable to sugar anyway given the lower caloric value? My experience is yes.

Already been proven. The problem now is getting the government to change thier food recommendations based on the findings. The fight has been going on since the 1970s. We are talking about a fundamental change to society here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com