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Comment by projektir | Hacker News Reader

People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history. It's something we generally should know how to do automatically. It's very strange to compare it to spaceflight, as if we're only just now discovering how to do it. This just goes back to OP's point. There's a lot of energy being spent on making weight gain and loss be some mysterious, inscrutable thing. Now we're comparing it to space flight?

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The human body as a machine is actually quite a lot more complex than any current human invention. We're not even close to fully understanding everything. So, the analogy to space flight serves to show that it's as naive to imply there's no subtlety beyond "it doesn't matter what you eat, just the calorie count" as it would be to imply "it doesn't matter what rocket fuel you use".

> People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history.

A lot of food products highly available today would be rather foreign to most of human history: artificially high sugar, high cab, low fat, snacks everywhere, etc.

These trick our taste and hunger systems into eating more of less quality foods than we would "naturally" if exposed only to less "engineered" foods, like pure meat and vegetables.

> It's something we generally should know how to do automatically.

Maybe we should, but clearly we do not. At least with modern processed foods that are optimized and designed to maximally stimulate our flavor response while compromising nutrition/health (generally).

People, especially kids, have routinely died of hunger and gastrointestinal diseases for most of history. Availability of calories was the limiting factor on human numbers until the industrial revolution. Most people did manual labour of some sort and walked everywhere. And when a few people had enough status to get all the calories they wanted and didn't exercise .. they got fat.

Really the problem goes in the other direction: now we have food from the "space age", and labour-saving automation, we can accidentally eat far more calories than we need.

Yes, you are right. And humans commonly engaged in a feasting/fasting cycle of having too much/too little food. But we've pretty much stopped doing the fasting stage. Look up "autophagy". It's a beneficial bodily process that only seems to happen within a long-enough fast.

I believe research has shown that humans have been malnourished throughout most of human history, which would indicate that we haven’t had a stable weight throughout history.

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