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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

It's obviously not trivially preventable on the personal level - otherwise people would be losing weight and keeping it off when they try. The reality is that almost everyone really struggles to lose more than about 15 pounds.

Perhaps it would be easy to prevent on a societal level by getting rid of endocrine disruptors, taking junk food out of grocery stores, or something similar.

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Much like the smoking kills campaign it wouldn't be terribly difficult to have a similar campaign for sugar, fake foods, etc. You don't have to eat like a rabbit to stay a healthy weight, but certainly you shouldn't be eating microwave dinners and candy. The problem is sugar itself is analogous to a drug. Moreover, the food lobby is infinitely more powerful than phillip morris could even be in their wildest dreams. We are being poisoned by policy. Unfortunately the solution will remain personal responsibility until our policy makers stop allowing companies to poison us for profit.

The triviality of the solution is that to lose weight you simply eat less. Thermodynamics is all you need for that. 80% of the battle is won and lost here.

The complication is food is designed in laboratories to be addictive as possible. Even vegetables are harvested in such a way they contain extra chemicals and far fewer nutrients. The result is your monkey brain is drawn to Big Gulps and candy because they give you a dopamine release, whereas a steak and vegetables does not. Pair this with food that is deliberately designed to be less satiating and more addicting and you have the recipe for an obesity epidemic.

I think we're mostly agreeing. I do think that calorie for calorie not all foods are equal, and simply eating less is not quite the right thing to focus on. Eating 100 cals of sugar will do different things to your body that 100 cals of protein. Sugar signals the body to store fat. It also makes people crave more food. It is difficult to avoid added sugar these days. I do think people would naturally eat less if there were less sugars in food.

I mean, it's kind of trivially preventable on the personal level:

* Eat mostly non-processed meats/proteins, low-starch vegetables, low-sugar fruits, and non-polyunsaturated cis fats

* Eat high-starch vegetables and high-sugar fruits sparingly

* Generally avoid most other foods

* Generally avoid harmful drugs such as nicotine and alcohol

* Incorporate some light physical activity into your daily routine (walking is an easy one)

* Ideally, lift every now and then

All of this should be within reach of most Americans. If someone accepts it as a viable strategy and commits to it, they can maintain or trend toward a healthy body composition.

Applying this on a societal level seems like a much bigger challenge to me. So much terrible nutritional advice is ingrained in the minds of the public (e.g. the food pyramid), so many terrible dietary choices are normalized and made convenient, and the whole "standard American diet" has so much economic momentum that convincing the public to change their lifestyles all at once might be a disaster in and of itself.

Imagine an alternate reality where the only soft drinks were La Croix and Zevia, McDonald's only served stir-fried meats and veggies with sides of berries, Dunkin' Donuts only served watermelon slices and coconuts, cereals and oatmeals were replaced with low-sugar trail mixes, etc. The obesity epidemic wouldn't exist.

Well, to be fair, that's partly because the trick is to not become overweight in the first place.

That said I agree. It's clear most people don't have the means and/or ability to do that without policy level help.

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