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Comment by stdbrouw | Hacker News Reader

If I eat a snickers bar and afterwards I'm still hungry, I'm not necessarily going to eat another snickers bar. If I eat a very flavorful salad but perhaps am not feeling quite satiated, next time I'm not necessarily going to order the competitor's product that is drenched in olive oil.

I'm sure there is some truth to these sorts of "survival of the fittest" arguments, but you can only simplify how people reason about food or how they consciously or subconsciously decide what to eat so much before it becomes a parody of itself.

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So you agree with me, but still want to ridicule my argument ("parody of itself")? I'm also quite surprised to see a statistician use anecdata as arguments.

Humans are predictably irrational, there are mountains of scientific evidence on the topic [0, 1].

The industry plays us like fiddles to get us to consume ever more. There are more parameters than the ones I described above (socialization and long term hormonal effects come to mind), but the growth of the food industry is the main driver behind the obesity epidemics.

All that food has to be bought, otherwise there's no growth, and investors are not happy and they put their money elsewhere.

The easiest way to convince people to buy food is to make them want to eat it. Modern food has been engineered and optimized to be deceptive and take advantage of our instinctive and cognitive biases, in order to get us to eat more than we need to be healthy.

0. https://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/

1. https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...

For all these market forces that are making profits off addictions it is interesting to see how they manage to get away with it in public perception by addressing personal responsibility - while their products are engineered to induce addictions and diminish will power.

I found this study about the tobacco industry's use of the personal responsibility rhetoric: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318333/

Coca Cola and Nutella seem to do a lot of advertising through sports. They are like parasites living off the idea of rationality and personal responsibility that humans need to live a successful, self-determined life.

I'm not claiming that personal responsibility is no factor here, but it would be just as wrong (and pretty bad for the affected people's mental health) to assume it is the only one.

The fantasy that humans have unbridled free will is both pervasive and highly toxic.

It conveniently ignores piles of neuropsychological studies on the topic and it is also used to justify "tough on crime" policies that do more harm than good.

I'll put it aletrnatively:

Since 1) we eat too much and 2) we're not being force-fed, what drives the food down our collective throats?

How do you explain the obesity epidemics which is a very recent phenomenon, if not through perverse market forces?

Laziness. Supermarkets still sell raw food (vegetables, meat, etc) that can be used for cooking. But it takes time and effort to do it (+washing) so buying already made but unhealthy dishes is appealing for a lot of people.

That explains why we buy ready-made meals, but not why we buy unhealthy rather than healthy ones.

But why are the ready made meals unhealthy? It’s not because they’re ready made rather than fresh cooked.

Ready made meals are usually higher in sodium and fats than fresh cooked meals.

Edit - https://www.consumerreports.org/food-shopping/supermarket-pr... The article doesn't call out higher amounts of fat in prepared food, but does mention higher cost and added preservatives.

I don't know the exact reasons why, but food made in large batches tends to be less tasty than food made in smaller batches at home. if the food is made in large batches and it's not fresh, it takes another "tastiness" penalty. adding excessive fat and/or salt is an easy hack to make ready made meals a bit more palatable.

I suspect it would be very difficult (ie expensive) to make ready made meals anywhere near as appealing as home cooked without using these tricks.

"Laziness" - non-explanation word is not an explanation.

> How do you explain the obesity epidemics which is a very recent phenomenon, if not through perverse market forces?

- Extremely high levels of food security in developed nations. It's hard to get fat when food isn't available.

- Related, nutritionally-questionable food products that were used to achieve this food security (primarily mass-preserved and processed foods).

- A transition from jobs requiring large amounts of physical labor to those that require little or none.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head. Like most societal problems, the causes are myriad and complex.

Additives for food security is an intetrsting angle, thanks. That being said, I'm not convinced that it requires making fattening products, but it was in part the outcome.

Your last point is at least partially mitigated by the fact that food intake regulation factors in physical activity in most people.

From an evolutionary standpoint, less eating restraint may be linked to increased survival rares in times of scarcity, as stored energy in fat provides a clear advantage. Nowadays, in first world countries, food is everywhere and "overeating" becomes much easier.

>How do you explain the obesity epidemics which is a very recent phenomenon, if not through perverse market forces?

When you put it that way, I feel like asking how could the obesity epidemic possibly be blamed on perverse market forces? It's not like the food markets of the past were any less competitive, greedy or unregulated than they were when the obesity epidemic took hold.

I will weakly float two hypotheses that I've heard to explain it: technological change that made certain types of food cheaper (the bad ones), and government regulation that subsidized corn production which of course subsidized corn syrup based foods.

You are correct that the market forces were there before, and that the epidemics couldn't have occurred without industrial food transformation. Before that, how fattening food was was limited by biology and I suppose that it was slow enough for human populations to adapt.

Also, the "artificial = good" meme mid-20th century probably helped bootstrap the whole thing by disrupting otherwise conservative feeding habits.

Corn syrup is a positive factor, but the obesity epidemics also occurred in other industrialized countries where it is far less prevalent.

Thus the driving force is growth seeking beyond reason (through both the market and (corrupt?) subsidies). Technology just gave it leverage.

Sure you are. Are you buying an individual snickers bar or a 5 lb bag of Mars, Inc confections?

Also, the use case and marketing strategy for your two scenarios are different. A product like Snickers is a quick on-the-go fix of food. The marketing connection for a salad is different -- the money and full feeling is in the dressing. Many people translate "salad" as leaves with goops of fat/sugar on them. If you are a oil/vinegar person, you're an awful customer for Kraft.

The food industry is attacking traditional, lower margin foods to make more $. The best example is the push against milk in favor of nut and grain based white liquid. All of the substitute products are mostly water and corn syrup, but are sold at dairy prices.

A lot of plant milks are unsweetened, and there is a high and growing demand for these products—yes these companies want to make money, but it's not as if they were manufacturing the demand, they're merely capitalizing upon it.

Better yet is to make one's own oat milk; I agree that they're exorbitantly expensive, albeit (here in the US) the dairy industry is immensely subsidized and so we consumers don't see the true cost of our cow's milk.

Subsidies for milk benefit processors, not producers. Producers today are going bankrupt left and right as they are forced to sell at fixed prices unless they go direct to consumer.

It's all the same problem. Allowing a cartel of dairy processors to control to production and delivery of dairy products is equivalent to allowing a cartel of producers (in the case of almonds) and big food is the same.

All benefit from extensive subsidy (that corn syrup isn't market-based), with the added risk of food security issues, especially for nut milks that are exclusively sourced from a few counties in California.

Oh, I was bringing up the price in comparison to the price of plant milks from a consumer's standpoint—while plant milks seemingly have a high markup from raw materials to product (transportation and storage costs aside), our perception of what makes it expensive has an unrealistic anchor in the subsidized cost of cow's milk. Paying $12 for a gallon of cow's milk vs. $5 for a gallon of oat milk changes the picture a bit.

I get your point, but it's much more complex than that.

Leaving aside the issues with directly comparing plant milk with actual milk, the economics are not what you lay out. Oat milk is really yet another industrial corn product. The caloric content isn't cloudy stuff squeezed into water, it's fructose from corn. In the quest for price stability, corn subsidy is one of the main knobs used by USDA from a subsidy and policy standpoint.

I haven't done a deep analysis of this, but I do buy milk from a farm with a smallish herd and a direct-to-producer model that allows the farmer to actually operate his own dairy and sell milk at a profit. Even with the small scale of the operation, milk costs about $6/gallon. When you buy milk from a scaled dairy operation, the economies of scale are massive... you have 1-2 processing plants handling the milk of tens of thousands of cows.

The plant milk phenomenon is all about allowing massive agribusiness to take over a big product category that has remained regional.

> Oat milk is really yet another industrial corn product. The caloric content isn't cloudy stuff squeezed into water, it's fructose from corn.

This is just factually untrue. Here's the ingredients for the most popular oat milk brands, found from a Google search:

1. Oatly: Oat base (water, oats 10%), rapeseed oil, calcium carbonate, calcium phosphates, iodised salt, vitamins (D2, riboflavin and B12).

2. Califia: Oatmilk (Water, Oats), Sunflower Oil, Minerals (Dipotassium Phosphate, Calcium Carbonate, Tricalcium Phosphate), Sea Salt

3. Pacific Foods: WATER, OATS, OAT BRAN, CONTAINS 1% OR LESS OF: GELLAN GUM, SEA SALT, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, VITAMIN D2. *ORGANIC

4. Silk Oat Yeah: Oatmilk (Filtered Water, Oat Extract), 2% or less of: Sunflower Oil, Vitamin and Mineral Blend (Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Vitamin D2, Riboflavin (B2), Vitamin B12), Malt Extract, Dipotassium Phosphate, Gellan Gum, Sea Salt, Sunflower Lecithin, Locust Bean Gum, Ascorbic Acid (to protect freshness).

None of these have corn syrup or added fructose.

> The plant milk phenomenon is all about allowing massive agribusiness to take over a big product category that has remained regional.

You don't need plant milk for that. For proof just see Fairlife, the Coca-Cola Company's attempt to turn milk into a branded good.

I think marketing plays a huge role here. Being told again and again that you "need/want" it might act on your subconscious at one point.

And people tend to trust the marketing and the big text on the label more than anything sometimes. The label says it's healthier, that promo on TV said cool young people consume it, etc. So you won't stop to "objectively" evaluate the product. Many blind tests for products turned over results that were completely the opposite of what the market was saying via sales numbers. Because without the label and the marketing driving the decision people had to fail back to good old fashioned taste (ex: this tastes better) and common sense (ex: this offers more for the same taste / price).

When a person is struggling to even pay his bills, which most of the Americans are, then tactics like these from food companies does have lots on influence on what such people decides to eat.

Maybe not in the individual instance, but in the aggregate, sure you will.

Humans eat foods that reward them, because that's how dopamine works. We've figured out how to optimize the rewards, too: Salt. Fat. Sugar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

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