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Comment by visava | Hacker News Reader

The solution to obesity is simple. People want tasty food . It is possible to make it with healthy ingredients. But market is flooded with white flour,sugar,wheat and milk products. It takes effort to prepare it yourself.

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Lustig claims there was a catastrophic shift from fats to sugars due to blaming fats for obesity. Supposedly fructose doesn't trigger the satiation signals that fats do however.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Fats come with their own issues too, especially the shelf stable fats that processed food uses as opposed to a bit of real butter.

The truth is less exciting: avoid too much sugar or fat. Some is fine. Your "fine" and your "too much" may be different from someone elses.

Yeah, fats definitely have issues, but, they come with rate limiters - satiation triggers. Heart of his argument is that fructose triggers nothing, so you keep chugging it, and with almost identical stress to liver as alcohol, which also has a limiter for most people (you pass out :) )

Fructose also has different glycemic profile - it doesn't trigger the same big spike is blood sugar that glucose does. It has to be metabolized by the liver first, which is the rate-limiting step. Although, too much can lead to a cirrhosis-like condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease [1]. Sugar is bad, even fructose.

With that in mind, there's no such thing as a minimum required daily intake of carbohydrates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...

Satiation is more complicated then that. You can eat pure fat or pure sugar and neither option will make you feel full. Both will also cause malnutrition in you, no matter how much of them you consume.

The solution isn't simple, because the problem is that we have bodies that are evolutionarily designed for a world of extreme calorie scarcity that are living in a world of extreme calorie abundance.

Our deep genetic firmware hasn't been programmed to deal with this kind of extremely unnatural corner case, and we're collectively breaking because of it.

We just take 3 meals a day for granted without asking where this movement really came out of. Hint: agriculture/produce won't do well if people only eat 1 meal a day.

Eating one/two meals a day is something that nobody talks about as much as this other food conscious movements like gluten, carbs, now keto. All of this seems driven at pushing demand towards certain sector.

I think tasty food (regardless of composition) might be the problem. If food was less tasty people might moderate their consumption better.

hyper-palatable is the word that has come to be used

It's a sort of arms race. Unprepared plain raw organic produce is delicious, if you haven't been eating prepared food covered in salt and other seasoning for years. Once you start adulterating your food with flavor crystals, you require that stuff just to move the needle.

A flavor tolerance develops, similar to drug tolerance.

> Unprepared plain raw organic produce is delicious

Yeah, although I doubt it was as delicious before modern farming. Or even if it was, we didn't have most of it.

But an animal roasted over a fire is equally as delicious; just ask an Alone contestant. One woman ate the gut contents of a rabbit and said it was one of the best things she'd ever eaten.

Hunger is the best condiment, as the saying goes.

I don't think so, I think it's more that we grew to live in a "feast famine" environment, but suddenly we are now in an environment with infinite food. It goes against our instincts to not eat food that is there. Instead we have to hope we have the willpower to overcome it with our rational thought processes. Most people, if they are not busy with other things, will want to eat. "Thankfully" we have capitalism and so people are busy and pushed to be even busier. I think without that, if we really had time to sit and relax without those mental pressures of progression, we would be much fatter.

It is just one of the ways that human material conditions has quickly changed way faster than the human animal has managed to evolve for it, and so it is unsuited for such environments. I think we might eventually have a technological solution (everyone on appetite suppressants)

While eating healthier things would probably help to an extent, nothing's stopping people from just eating more of those healthier foods and still becoming obese. Healthy or not, food is calories and a surplus of those calories will lead to weight gain.

Technically correct but practically beside the point. That's not how humans work.

What stops people from just eating more of those healthier foods is that they make you feel full more quickly and longer with the same amount of calories.

I agree that they make you feel full more quickly and for longer but a good amount of obese people don't overeat because they're hungry, they overeat because it's their way of dealing with problems. It's an unhealthy coping mechanism like alcohol and drug abuse and should be treated as such.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for having higher food standards and healthier foods, I just don't think it'll help with obesity as much as you'd think.

I would be surprised if any of the large people in my life were overeating healthy foods like oats, chickpeas, bananas, lentils. Usually those were the things missing from their diet.

Frankly, it seems like low satiating, high dense foods are the only foods up to the task of making someone obese. e.g. The ease of drinking a liter of Coke vs eating that same amount of calories in beans.

I would be interested to see the food diary of someone who claims to overeat healthy food. I think it would illuminate our mass confusion about "healthy food". The healthy foods I think of are the kinds you can eat ad libitum without much consequence.

It’s not simple. Tasty food that has a considerable amount of water in it which can be produced and distributed on an industrial scale cheaply… is not an easy problem.

Really we just need to evolve so that these high energy density foods aren’t such a problem.

I agree if we can sustain these food levels that subtle genetic modification would likely be best long term.

Why not up regulate our energy usage and boost our bodies self-healing mechanisms, etc?

I don't think that's simple. People want tasty food with the least effort involved. This is a genetic programming. buffalo:bear::mcdonalds:healthy_cooking

It takes effort to make money to buy things we don’t prepare. Everything takes effort; it’s the trade off that needs evaluation. “Takes effort” is a given.

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