How Coca-Cola shaped obesity science and policy in China

Why do you think that seed oils are unhealthy fats? Are you maybe referring to processed (refined) oils? For all I know, eating raw sunflower seeds, almonds, hazelnuts, cashews etc. is quite beneficial for one's health.

I agree that this separation is nonsense. However I don't really see much reason to call seed oils unhealthy. However, its not something I have researched much.

> I don’t find sugar addictive

Try eliminating it from your diet and see if you still think the same! Seriously, for a few days you will crave carbs if you stop eating them altogether.

> Red meat, I suspect, transmits all kinds of...horomones, to antibiotics, to persistent organic pollutants...

Surely you could say the same about non-red meats such as chicken, pork and lamb?

> Red meat, I suspect, transmits all kinds of...persistent organic pollutants...

You could also argue this for just about any vegetable, legume, fruit or grain crop too.

I have never claimed that these things have no effect on the body or are THE ideal foods.

However there is a long, long step of blaming them for all the major public health disasters, ie heart disease, cancer and high blood pressure.

And these things were made responsible those things with STRONG support and push from government and non-profits. Such strong was this believe that alternative theories had little chance of getting anywhere, specially on an institutional level.

In what way is salt an “implement of suicide?” Do you mean literally that consuming a very high dose would be fatal?

Caffeine in top three of the worst offenders in terms of seriously augmenting an unhealthy diet?

Do you mean if you have an unhealthy diet, these three can fuck it up way more?

The world is anti-China, you know, with putting millions of innocent muslims in concentration camps, harvesting organs, building a surveillance state and whatnot.

Once the social credit score is fully rolled out then it should be trivial to get rid off (argubly before that as well), put increased tax on unhealthy food and "encourage" companies and supermarkets to sell less unhealthy/more healthy, deduct points for eating unhealthy, ban companies from selling certain products (e.g. give Coca Cola a year to replace their drinks with healthy alternatives). It's difficult to imagine any resistance from the citizens considering what they've gotten away with already, and considering they have full control over media and social networks.

Rice isn't obesogenic. There are Asian cultures for which rice has been a staple food and that are lean. Wheat on the other hand is fairly toxic and eliminating grains from the diet is one of the best things you can do for your health.

That said, here we aren't talking carbohydrates, but rather sugar, as in sucrose or HCFS. The problem with sugar is that it contains fructose and the problem with fructose is that it gets metabolized completely in the liver, competing with other nutrients, like the poly-unsaturated fats from vegetable oils (ironically misnamed the "healthy fats"). And when the liver's glycogen store is full, that fructose gets deposited as fat, on the liver, on the pancreas, wherever it can. And a fatty liver or even worse, a fatty pancreas, is the best predictor of obesity or diabetes.

Interestingly medical professionals advise people to cut the fat from the diet in order to treat a fatty liver. It is true that it can help, however a much more effective strategy is to cut the sugar ;-)

N.B. the fructose we eats from fruits and sugary vegetables like carrots is in much lower quantities than the fructose we get from industrially processed foods. And processed food usually doesn't have fiber either, or if it does, it has the wrong kind of fiber. As usual "the dose makes the poison".

So yes, as a matter of fact beverages like Coca-Cola are toxic in a way that rice isn't.

Yes, you can get fat on rice, but it's much easier to get fat on sugar. Sugar messes with your body's signaling causing you to consume more than if you were just eating carbs. If we outlawed sugar today, I would place all my savings on the obesity rate declining.

I lived in mainland China for over 4 years. I lost weight switching from a typical American diet to Chinese one. I don't claim to know the cause, but the standard drink with meals was unsweetened tea, not soda. Yes, the meals were carb heavy, but these carbs were primarily vegetables. Rice was always served at the end, only to fill up, if you were still hungry.

From the hundreds of local restaurants to Foxconn's cafeteria, I am sure of a few things. Compared to Americans, they eat a higher percent of vegetables and fat and less meat. For example ordering a pork dish, might actually be chunks of pork fat that Americans would never eat.

As far as sweet foods, I only observed that when I was in Shanghai. Most Chinese do not like main courses to be sweetened.

The difference now is that China struggled for a long time to feed it's population. It' just last two generations (or even just one in some places) who can eat until they're full.

Some of my Chinese friends living in the West were still underfed in their childhood, where they parents were definitely eating lean most of their lives.

> "you could avoid processed and fast food and still have a problem."

Citation needed.

In general cultures that don't eat much processed food are very lean compared with the West and there are dozens of indigenous populations studied that were lean and free of chronic diseases and that got sick and obese after being switched to a Western diet.

N.B. science has been very reductionist. People are waking up to the fact that not all calories are equal, but now we need to wake up to the fact that not all carbohydrates are equal either.

There is a huge difference between glucose and fructose and how our body reacts to them. Fructose gets harmful and fast. There is also a huge difference between safe starches like potatoes versus grains such as wheat. Seeds have natural toxins in them to protect against insects and animals that can be toxic for us too and wheat is one of the worst offenders, not to mention the fact that white flour is stripped of any micro-nutrients or fiber, being just empty calories, but with toxins.

No, I don't believe that traditional Chinese food is as obesogenic as Western diets are.

The body processes sugar/high glycemic index food calories in a very different way. Also, sugar is a highly addictive drug, on par with tobacco.

Obesity is 90% diet (and avoiding sugars) and 10% exercise because the body is extremely efficient.

> If that's true it doesn't matter what's available unless you straight up introduce ban on buying excess calories. On the other hand more exercise and other lifestyle changes could help with the problem.

Stimulants both raise your metabolic rate and lead to higher activity levels. Even just being a twitchy fidgety person (like you are on strong stimulants) is enough to offset the balance.

Feeling well/sleeping well is a great way to stay clear of unhealthy food/lifestyle.

Generellay speaking there's papers that describe posigive effects on weight loss when sleeping properly and eating at regular intervals.

Stress hormones are introduced by the body when tired (to keep us going when we are searching for food so we don't lay down and die).

> The idea that there are types of foods which make you gain weight is incorrect.

I'm sorry but you are wrong. Calories-In and Calories-Out might be the main proponent, but it is just not the whole story. And you can find tons of research on it.

A link to a recent one, done by Harvard Medical School: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc11121...

If you’re literally just eating pizza, fried chicken, and Coca Cola it seems like you might be missing out on some essential vitamins and minerals.

There’s also the concept of “skinny fat” but if you’re doing stuff like weightlifting I’m not sure that can happen.

Why not make a doctors appointment and have them test your blood and physical response if you’re concerned your diet may be damaging?

It's possible. Let's ban them in a few cities and see what happens. All technology creates a certain order, change or eliminate the technology and all of reality changes... Whether that change is overall positive or negative is difficult to predict without going all in.

Our approach to technology is stupid because it relegates the decision of which technology is created or destroyed to human desire... which is open to all sorts of corruption and addiction. People will pay for the worst and most addictive thing because it appeals to their psychology not because it's something actually positive.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/28/car-free-belg...

I don't know about "mitochondrial disturbances", however fructose gets metabolized only in the liver, so very unlike glucose or saturated or monounsaturated fat.

Fructose competes in the liver with other nutrients and in large quantities it becomes toxic, leading to a fatty liver, or a fatty pancreas. And as I wrote elsewhere, a fatty liver or a fatty pancreas are the best predictors of obesity or diabetes.

Our body is very efficient at processing glucose, so glucose is very different from fructose. This is why honey is much healthier than table sugar, because of the glucose/fructose ratio.

Also "the dose makes the poison". Eating a banana or two per day won't screw your liver, but drinking Coca Cola daily will.

Fructose is literally poison. Also not being more harmful than sugar is not much of a compliment, there are very few things that brought more harm to humans than sugar.

> Especially when one is poor, one is not educated about the impact food choices have on their health. That’s why there is a high degree of correlation between being poor and obesity.

In addition, healthy fresh food is expensive, especially more expensive than pre-made food, and poor persons are more likely to work two jobs and/or to raise a child alone, which means that they do not have the time to prepare a meal themselves.

Taxing sugar is nothing more than another tax on being poor or otherwise disadvantaged in life.

I think you're both saying the same thing here. The key point is that nutrition can change the weights of your equation, which must be accurate even if by appealing to the conservation laws of the universe, in ways that are not obvious to many people. For instance aspartame, a fake '0 calorie' sugar, has been shown to have a relationship with weight gain by numerous studies including some controlled experimental studies. In other words it's not confounded by the fact that overweight/obese are likely substantially more likely to consume aspartame infused products than others.

But there's no magic there. While the exact mechanism isn't known (it's not that it simply makes you eat more food) it's going to come down to something that impairs your ability to burn calories. So the equation still stands. It just means that if you consume aspartame you need to eat even less to see weight loss (or not weight gain) than somebody who does not. In practice the exact opposite happens, and then people try to blame things outside their control - such as genetics. But such arguments hold little weight. Obesity has skyrocketed exponentially in just the past several decades. People didn't suddenly all spontaneously change their genetics. But nutritional standards, and indeed calories consumed, both radically changed for the worse.

Do you ever find yourself thinking, "that looks easy, but maybe there's more nuance here?"