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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

>"The issues are access, culture, education, and time constraints."

I respectfully disagree, because I believe the root issue is physiological/chemical rather than mental. Most obese people know they are living an unhealthy lifestyle and that what they eat is bad for them. Education can only do so much to counteract cravings. I believe the mind over matter approach works for some, but not for the majority of the population.

Beyond the fact that modern prepared and prepackaged food is often engineered to be as desirable as possible, I believe some of us are just naturally more prone to seeking calorie dense foods. This was probably a positive adaptation in past living conditions, but it is now maladaptive in a world of cheap and virtually unlimited calories.

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In addition, reasonably strong evidence points towards shifts in microbial communities that can induce cravings. Thus, your microbiome can be "addicted" to certain foods and pass that on to you. Intervention at the microbial level may be helpful for some people, including microbiome transplants. However, my impression is that we're still largely stumbling in the dark in this area.

I recall having this theory quite a while ago. Let's say your diet includes eating powdered sugar donuts in the morning. The gut microbes that feed on it become plentiful. Then when you switch out diets, that particular microbe starts to die out. Then as they die, they release a hormone that causes the gut to signal the brain to crave that particular food type, and this is an evolved behavior for that microbe. And after a while of switching up the diet, those microbes finally get purged, and you don't have as bad of cravings anymore.

At least this is the sequence of events that really makes sense (to me), but I haven't read this in any research yet.

I wonder if it is also the case that some feedback mechanism in our digestive tract exists in order to try and preserve those bacterial populations. Perhaps it works in tandem with the signalling you mentioned. The idea seems plausible, but this is just speculation on my part.

> but it is now maladaptive in a world of cheap and virtually unlimited calories.

I think that's the nice way to put it.

I think it's maladaptive in a world where brand food companies have developed rigorous approaches maximally exploit our normal systems for acquiring and consuming food, and are free to deploy them to increase sales.

To a degree, I can agree that there are likely a group of people more disposed to seeking calorie dense food do to some chemical balance, mental state.

That being said, the fact that there is such a large obesity disparity between various countries with equal enough access to food suggest to me that this may not be what is causing the population level obesity issues. Do these countries with lower obesity rates, but equal access to food, just have most of their population going around feeling hungry at all times? Or is the idea that the high obesity countries' populations have a genetic markup different from the low obesity countries'?

Our minds haven't changed. What has changed are external factors (e.g. culture and economic forces). So a causal sociological analysis would see those as the crucial factors here.

It's best, if possible, to attack causes or mechanisms behind problems.

I mean if we assume that we are impotent to change society (e.g. to regulate food companies and advertising companies from encouraging worse diets), then what you say is true. But we are only impotent if we make ourselves impotent, or fail to organize against such external forces.

Looking back on my comment, I feel like I should have clarified that I primarily disagree with the education aspect. Mainly because "education" is thrown around as a nebulous deficiency that implies other regulation/intervention will become unnecessary once people are taught how to eat properly. I agree with you that the causes need to be addressed, and it looks like the way to do that is through regulation of ingredients, additives, and advertising. But truth be told, I do not know what specifically those regulations should be.

From a regulatory standpoint, removal of tax policy which incentivizes corn production would be a start.

Well, I listed multiple factors because they work in conjunction with one another. I never said it was only education. But is education a huge factor? Yes. I can provide literature but a quick Google scholar search is probably faster.

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