I knew HN is auti-China but this is just ridiculous. I have no idea what country China is in your imagination.
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.
How else am I supposed to learn about life in China without speaking Chinese? There's not a go-to source in English for this sort of thing. Of course I'll click on top search results and receive their biased version.
The Great Firewall works both ways. On one side Chinese citizens can't learn about the western culture without putting in some effort. On the other, western people can't learn shit about the daily life in China.
An approach might be taking in multiple sources of diferent biases. If you want a Youtube channel that is heavily biases against the CN government (spinning all news negatively, but digging up a lot of relevant dirt), have a look at China Uncensored.
What I can say that a foreigner living in China will experience is 9/10 hotels and apartments refusing to let you stay there, even had landlord call my friend to kick me out of the apartment (happened twice, separate occassions). I also had a female foreign friend who got into trouble because she refused to sleep with a visa officer. It's possible to live in China for several years without problems, but it's only a matter of time before something happens, and then your whole world falls apart, because according to their laws a minor offense (e.g. something equivalent to jaywalking) that might result in a 50-100 dollar fine for Chinese people, can result in a foreigner getting deported and banned for 1-5 years, and it's something that happens a lot even if the foreigner lived in China for several years with no issues. And there's no process of appeal. It's also important to remember that pretty much every foreigner is breaking some silly laws, even if they don't realize it (e.g. by not going to the police when you move to a new place).
I also had multiple Chinese friends who weren't allowed to get visa to travel abroad to western countries, it was funnily enough always the 20-something girls, so I presume it's because the government fear they'll try to escape.
Also, in China you have no freedom of speech, no freedom of movement, no freedom of association, no religious freedom, no political freedom.. punishments include being sent to prison, concentration camps, murdered and having organs harvested. Overall, it's quite the shithole, and as we can see with Tibet, Hong Kong, South China Sea, Taiwan, etc. Xi appear to have similar ambitions as Hitler did, so it's not like the rest of the world can just ignore the shithole.
So naturally, China have a terrible view among pretty much everyone outside of China, especially those who care about human rights.
really? so ban rice and wheat production? I'm pretty sure I can get fat on natural foods. There have been fat people long before Coke. Japanese Sumo get fat on chanko nabe. Nothing artificial about it.
I've seen a Beverage Marketing Corporation graph that shows a 1% decline in soft drinks, but a 4-5% increase in ready-to-drink tea, sports drinks, and energy drinks. The raw Excel data is sold for $3000, so I don't know what the absolute values are, but it seems likely the decline is soda is largely being offset by equivalently bad/sugary replacement drinks.
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.
Even whole grains?
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.
At the same time, obesity and diabetes rates have rocketed.
Of course, this is the only cause, but we had similar campaigns in the west against butter and lard, steering people towards vegetable oil.
Since then, I observed that I don't really get fat on pasta or rice. Eating lots of meat seems to be much worse for my body, and also sweets and sugar, but not carbs from pasta or rice.
People tell me that one shouldn't eat pasta for dinner, that now carbs are bad, fat is the way to go, etc... and I shrug. It doesn't work that way for me.
And let’s not even start with hotpot.
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.
I suppose you're primarily basing this on Dr. Robert Lustig's claims, correct me if I'm wrong. You should know that his claims are questionable, containing a lot of spurious speculation and dubious interpretations of statistics.
>"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"
You need to bring some citations to the table, particularly for this claim, because it is factually incorrect. Those compounds that are found in edible grains are not harmful to humans.
>"white flour is stripped of any micro-nutrients or fiber, being just empty calories, but with toxins."
White flour has less fiber and a worse nutritional profile when compared to whole grain flour, but to claim that it is "just empty calories" is factually incorrect. Even the whitest white flour naturally contains vitamins, minerals and protein, among other useful nutrients.
Do we westerners consume way too many empty calories in the form of sugar-laden drinks and candy? Yes, absolutely. But that does not make sugar a poison, it is merely a highly non-optimal source of nutrition.
We're hard-wired by evolution to consume energy-rich foods and only slowly get sated by them, because food used to be a scarce resource. So when a bush brimming with sweet berries was available, it was best to eat as much as possible, to build up energy reserves. We don't need to do this anymore, but we're fighting a natural impulse.
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.
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.
Obesity is 90% diet (and avoiding sugars) and 10% exercise because the body is extremely efficient.
So choose your starches smartly so that you don't get the large spike in blood sugar that can lead to health problems.
You can eat thousands of calories of candy or drink a similar amount of calories from soda in a day, and not feel particularly sated. Try doing that with rice and you'll feel bloated in no time.
A ~200g bag of peanut M&M's can easily be eaten by most people, during the ads in a cinema before the movie even starts. That's over 1000 calories right there, consumed in 10-15 minutes.
Actually, obesity seemed pretty rare when I first came to Thailand about 20 years ago. One rarely saw a truly big person when out shopping or dining. In fact, there used to be "jumbo" contests which were beauty pageants for obese women. Really large girls were considered sort of cute, and there really were not very many of them. Hence the contests. But that has changed and now the trend is the same as western countries with many obese young people indulging in modern junk food. They still eat the high GI rice-based diet, but now have added on sodas and all the other sugar-loaded junk food. The future is bleak.
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.
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).
even the term "obesity" itself is used entirely too much to cover a massively wide rage of different issues.
I do, however, worry about the damage I might be causing my body without realising. All my research seems to point to obesity being the main cause of diet-related health issues -- but I'm not obese. I fast for most of the day, so I don't imagine I'll develop insulin sensitivity anytime soon. I walk for over an hour a day, so I don't imagine I'm at a high risk for heart disease. I lift weights twice a week, so I don't have a disproportionate amount of fat on my frame. Is there something I might be doing to myself without realising? I really just eat this way out of convenience. I'd hate to think I was going to die 30 years early because of it.
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...
To be fair to me, though, the study doesn’t say that specific foods make you gain or lose weight. It says that an overall trend in one’s diet does.
I was thinking more in terms of how the general public seems to think “if I eat salad, I will lose weight” and “if I eat fried chicken, I will gain weight”, which I still don’t think is correct. Sorry if I wasn’t very clear about hat.
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?
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...
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.
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.
Obesity is a result of genetics and the very simple, battle tested equation of: if calories_consumed > calories burned then x_amt_weight_gain.
That's it.
You can shift the scale in your favor by being born with the right genes, by not consuming as many calories, or burning more calories.
Obviously the most effective one is simply not putting those calories in your body to begin with.
So yes, it really is that hard.
And mostly because it isn’t as simple as the calories in/calories out model. Lots of things contribute in various way. And if anything dieting and exercise can actually make things worse if done wrong. In the “biggest loser” approach, f.ex, all contestants, ended up with a lower metabolic rate, and of course all but one ended up gaining more weight than before the show.
Wait, shit. So what should one do?
The obesity code referenced in a sibling comment is an interesting read absolutely, fasting is the authors suggestion. It doesn’t talk much of gut microbiome, which seems like a big factor from recent studies, but mentions a very interesting connection to fiber intake though which the author (at that time) interprets simply as a means, to lower GI.
Edit: My take - Avoid sugar and sweeterners (Probably want at least 14-days between servings) - Avoid highly processed grains, treat them as sugars, go for whole grains and things with husks instead - In general avoid things that trigger cravings - Healthy fats (nuts, virgin olive oil) are an excellent source of calories, don’t go hungry - Eat lots (lots) of different vegetables - (for adults) Take longer fasts from time to time (3+ days, but probably no more than a week without proper guidance) - East at most two times a day
People can't stay healthy their whole life if they only eat healthy for a few months.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the...
But I agree, a healthy diet probably could help them, the one they tried wasn’t it though.
As a kid i was always told to finish my plate, then the usual "think of the starving kids" guilt trips, and whatever else.
As an adult, I just eat smaller portions of the same garbage I ate before, and I started to lose a bit of weight. I didn't change anything else (at the time).
Now I'm working on the rest, but the biggest stepping stone for me was literally just eating smaller portions.
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.