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Comment by hoardack | Hacker News Reader

This is, like, the third time this month we’re seeing blah-blah-blah-sugar on the front page of HN.

I have a lot of fat friends, and I hate to say it, but I watched them over the years, and it wasn’t sugar that made them huge and unhealthy. It was indulgence, carelessness and zero motivation to exert will power.

And they were mostly really smart people. But they didn’t give a fuck. And I’m using past tense “were” because some of them lost that youthful glow as their circumstance became evident.

Sugar might cause some harm among the slower folk among us, but middling intelligence (or worse) is a hazard on its own, and changing the perception of sugar won’t fix stupid.

Obesity is a psychological side effect, just like hoarding. It’s not just one input, it’s a sustained habit of constant intake in general.

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The "selfish-lazy-greedy assholes" hypothesis doesn't do so well in the face of endocrinology.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15987666

I wish there was a definitive guide to how to respond to that hypothesis. Many many hn commenters and many outside of the internet normal people strongly align with the obese-are-lazy narrative and I’ve basically given up arguing with them.

"Lazy" obscures the addiction component, yes. But no other addiction has such an accessible and accepted narrative that the addiction is not your fault, there's nothing you can do about it, and so you shouldn't even try to change.

I'm not obese, but I was.

There is a weird Internet cult that celebrates obesity, but I think plenty who live in the "nothing you can do" camp internalized bad advice, got nowhere with it, and gave up.

I was in that "nothing you can do camp" for almost 30 years. Until I learned that I was a carbohydrate addict and carbohydrates are not necessary to live, I gave up completely.

Giving up is the only option after trying and failing diets and exercise programs your whole life. I started dieting when I was ~6 years old.

A generalized solution would be incredibly powerful for putting to rest these tired, ostensibly plausible clichés.

Related: Urban planning used to take human health into consideration as well and mostly has stopped doing do (at least in the US). People (in America) who can't find walkable neighborhoods with residential near their jobs end up spending unhealthy amounts of time behind the wheel and often hate it. There are lots of studies about how sitting too much, whether at a desk job or in your vehicle, does the things to you which are not adequately reversed by hitting the gym.

Desk jobs used to be uncommon back when most people worked on a farm. It is within my lifetime that this changed. When I was born, more than half of all people had physically hard jobs on farms, iirc.

Yes but it feels so good to repeat it.

How does your sugary endocrinology align with OTC NSAID use? Comorbid or nah?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29311296/

I think that there is no shortage of endocrine disruptors in our environment. Sugar is a good problem to have, as you can opt-out. It's a lot tougher to isolate yourself from pesticides, plastics, fire retardants, and the whole host of other modern pollutants.

This doesn't change the fact that the underlying mechanism of weight gain is a net caloric surplus over a given period of time, which is (hypothetically, at least) addressable without addiction ever coming into the discussion.

But if sugar/food addiction is relevant, there should be some data on its effects on non-obese, physically active individuals who maintain a lifestyle that allows them to burn enough calories to offset the caloric effects of sugar consumption. What you linked doesn't mention obesity, yet you're conflating addiction with obesity in your response.

> This doesn't change the fact that the underlying mechanism of weight gain is a net caloric surplus over a given period of time

That's a necessary condition, but it doesn't really represent a useful model of the system of interest. It's a bit like saying that a car moves forward because the engine is hotter than the surrounding environment.

I don't quite follow your analogy. I think everyone understands that the more you drive a car, the more fuel it consumes, and this being analogous to biological functions.

> That's a necessary condition

And addiction isn't, it's merely a contributing factor. Like I wrote, how do you factor in non-obese sugar/food addicts, and, vice versa, obese people who don't suffer from food addiction?

Obesity doesn't necessitate food addiction, it could be as simple as neglecting to be physically active or other poor lifestyle choices. Placing unsubstantiated importance on the role of addiction is just as baseless as disregarding all obese people as lazy. Any individual can take measures to improve their lifestyle habits and lose weight - how is this not of "interest"? Because a doctor can't prescribe it in a pill?

> I don't quite follow your analogy. I think everyone understands that the more you drive a car, the more fuel it consumes, and this being analogous to biological functions.

The point of my analogy isn't that I was crying out for a slightly better car analogy. My point is this: if there's a problem with someone operating a system, it's usually unhelpful to model the system as a black box that happens to follow some universal physical law. It's not necessarily useless to do that, but it's unlikely to capture the aspects of the system that people directly experience and care about.

> Obesity doesn't necessitate food addiction, it could be as simple as neglecting to be physically active or other poor lifestyle choices.

Nobody in this thread claimed (or even suggested, by my reading) that food addiction was necessary for obesity. The description of "poor lifestyle choices" elides any serious analysis of specifically which behavior patterns are involved and what factors drive them. This is especially true when obesity is increasing across large populations. I don't think it's remotely sufficient to suppose that the behavior of hundreds of millions of people changed in similar ways in the span of ~50 years simply because they all spontaneously made unrelated individual decisions to have different preferences. I doubt that you believe this either, so I don't understand why you've arrived at this description as though it's an alternative to addiction and not just a larger category or higher level of abstraction that includes it.

> Any individual can take measures to improve their lifestyle habits and lose weight - how is this not of "interest"?

Of course such measures would be of interest; my objection to your previous post is, in some sense, that it failed to describe any.

I like to think of sugar, fructose in particular, as a meta food. It directly affects how the body eats other foods. In particular quantities of other foods. Quite simply, it makes people eat more than they otherwise would. Coupled with its high reward factor, its addictiveness and a food industry that has pumped it, in large quantities, in practically every food you eat, it’s no wonder that it is a plague.

Its mean-spirited and somewhat ignorant to blame your fat friends who, along with you, have been deliberately lied to about the ill effects of the massive amounts of sugar you consume on a daily basis for the last half century.

First, they can’t fight what they don’t know is killing them because they’ve been lied to that it’s lack of exercise, it’s the steak and fat. That it’s a problem with them. How can they win when the ‘health food’ shoved in their faces is packed with more sugar?

Second, once they realize how to get out of the mess, they find out how nearly impossible it is to eat anything of what they are used to eating. Sugar is so prevalent in everything in the supermarket, from the obvious ice cream, ketchup, sriracha sauce to mayo, crackers, smoked fish, practically all frozen or canned items, pizza, bread and on and on.

The system is rigged against them.

It's more than obesity. Diet feeds your gut. Your gut biome, in turn, affects the rest of your body- including your mood, personality, and behavior, in ways you are not anticipating.

My son, if he has a single cookie, will develop raging athletes' foot and become a complete monster for days. When I say monster, I mean violent and completely uncontrollable. Maybe you don't have to deal with it, and for that you should be thankful, but for others, it's a no shit problem that they have to deal with day in and day out. Be thankful, but don't presume that your blessings are bestowed on the rest of humanity.

Yeah lately HN is high on sugar and obsessed with China.

Maybe the next article will be some conspiracy theory combination of the two.

"Buzzfeed report: Chinese scientists limit impacts of sugar consumption using blockchain"

I actually laughed at out loud at that one. The blockchain got me. Because of course. Brilliant.

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