Obesity Is Contagious (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Obesity Is Contagious (2007)

news.harvard.edu

27 pointsctoth15 comments

Speaking as someone who was born overseas in Asia, grew up in Northeast and went to a university in the deep south (Atlanta), this part does not surprise me:

> “What we see here is that one person’s obesity can influence numerous others to whom he or she is connected both directly and indirectly

I found that obesity becomes normalized once it reaches certain threshold in the population. "Everyone that I know is obese so this is ok."

It's very illogical that we as a society spent and are still spending so much to stop covid yet we spend little to nothing fighting obesity.

Banning soft-drinks entirely would have less of an economic impact than shelter-in-place and statistically would save more lives over the long term.

Solving or reducing obesity will also greatly decrease the amount of death caused by diseases like covid. It's crazy how okay we are with death/disease when it ramps up slowly instead of acutely.

At the very least, soft drinks should get the same age restrictions that we apply to alcohol.

We should have more data on their 2007 thesis now that visual social media is all pervasive with FB, Tik Tok and Instagram.

Humans are memetic in every sphere of life. If half the country is suffering from Obesity, I see no future where that gets below 10% without some no-effort miracle pill breakthrough.

If anyone has raised kids, you know how hard it is to get them to eat healthy when so many manufactured foods tastes 10x better.

There are zero low effort convenience foods. I have options everywhere for high calorie low nutrition foods. If I want something nutritious and tasty I have to cook it my self. As we get busier with work and entertainment we are going to reach more and more for the easy option.

How about fruits & nuts? Both are quick and easy to eat, I never feel compelled to gorge myself on em (unlike chips), and full of good stuff.

Also, I eat a lot of rice and lentils and veggies, and it is very easy to make. In 30 minutes of work (excluding boil time) I can make enough to feed myself one meal of this a day for a week.

I think people have a mental block around this. I don’t blame em, I encounter it myself, start eating out a bunch, start feeling crummy, then realize I gotta eat something healthy. Then I cook some good veggies filled food and life is good again.

Another aspect is wide ignorance of natural flavorful things. Fresh garlic, fresh ginger. Spices: cardamom, cumin, coriander, pepper powders, etc.

People can do this, it just takes investing a little effort to get started and maintain it.

Nutrition makes me think of Tolstoy's famous quote in reverse: every bad diet is the same, while every good diet is unique.

By that I mean that I have to be very careful with fruit and nuts - having them around the house means that I can mindlessly eat at least an entire extra meal worth calories a day, a handful at a time.

For me beans, lentils, and "veggies" more broadly are very helpful with appetite control though, I agree.. and are pretty easy to make unless you're on the go all the time.

Except when you eat fruits you eat a lot of fiber, which makes you less hungry. I can't see how you could get fat on fruits.

Agreed, excepting grapes, as long as you are eating fruit itself, not fruit juice, pulp, puree or something else made from fruit.

Fruits are MUCH better than nuts thanks to their lower caloric density. but it's still easy to mindlessly eat hundreds of calories of fruit if you're not careful.

Given that even a hundred calories of surplus a day will certainly make you fat over time... basically any mindless eating is dangerous, in my experience.

You're right fruit is the exception. I can only eat so much fruit.

If I want to buy lunch there is nothing within a 20min drive that is a reasonably healthy choice.

There may also be an issue with Palmitic Acid content in foods that hopefully can be addressed. If I remember correctly they increase inflammation, cause insulin resistance in all major insulin target organs (skeletal muscle, liver, endothelial cells) and have emerged as a major link between obesity, the development of the metabolic syndrome, and atherosclerotic vascular disease.

in certain quantities they disrupt the satiation mechanism, and a high intake of them could be one on the main causes of western obesity.

There is also a possibility that there is an obesity virus that works synergistically with elevated free fatty acids (FFAs) like Palmitic Acid that could be the culprit.

Either way it goes, there is a good chance that obesity is not solely the fault of the person suffering it and that there may be a medical or diet based solution that can resolve it discovered in the near future.

Yes, cooking takes a few hours out of my week that I could be using to do something else. But it's absolutely worth it and has saved me a lot of money and helped me lose weight in the past.

There is quite literally no free lunch. Fast food might be convenient in the short term but it has all kinds of hidden costs that people don't often consider. Sadly, a lot of people will turn their nose up at anything that doesn't give them instant gratification, instead of engaging in meaningful cost-benefit analysis. It can be very hard to reason with the "I want it and I want it now" mentality.

You have to travel abroad to eat well cheaply. Where a tomato tastes like tomato, and is shockingly inexpensive.

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