more seriously, i wonder if something like this is a cause of the obesity pandemic: an unrecognized widespread immune response to a novel food additive provoking continuous low-level inflammation
though probably not peg itself; e1521 is not in that many foods, not like xanthan gum or nanoparticles of titanium dioxide
And no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil or eating tubs of butter.
It's a combination of more high-calorie convenience foods and a more sedentary lifestyle than even just 50 years ago.
the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia
clearly the proximate cause of obesity is eating more and metabolizing less (both by way of lower exercise and lower basal metabolism). but why are people doing that? did they lose the gene for willpower in a single generation? that seems implausible
it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't
People aren't gaining weight on olive oil because people aren't consuming it in mass quantities required to gain weight, if one could even do so after having your intestines coated by oil. But many are consuming highly processed foods which is shown to lead to less optimal health outcomes.
> clearly
Clearly a post on HN doesn't make for a scientific study!
it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat
but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic
the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far
'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead
Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar.
So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before.
The closest I can think of is fruits, and they come with a lot of fiber, and again if you make it into juice, it tends to still not be palatable to drink gallons of it. Whereas people will literally drink a 2 liter of coke in a single sitting.
clearly calorie density alone is not it. and i don't think it's even as simple as 'palatability'. even if you mix cacao, butter, sugar, vanillin, and citric acid into candy, you can't get people to live off the candy
and brown sugar mixed with dried lemon juice and oil has been cheap for... significantly longer than the 50-year-old obesity pandemic
so, what changed? why is food now so addictive?
That sounds more nefarious than I intended, so let me rephrase it. Modern fast food is the result of rapidly iterating, debugging, and optimizing recipes in a huge market for the last 70 years, leaving only the best selling, low cost, consistently reproducible recipes and discarding the rest. This process naturally selects recipes that contain lots of junk calories and bring in the most repeat customers.
Although many of the ingredients and similar foods have been around for centuries, it wasn't possible to do this kind of agile cooking on a massive scale until after WW2.
wouldn't it be more profitable if those recipes happened to have low caloric density, like coca-cola? then you could sell each customer six meals a day instead of three, and they'd be more profitable because they'd mostly be made out of water, which is cheaper than deodorized canola oil and palm oil, much less potatoes, texturized soy protein, mechanically separated chicken, and beef. you'd maybe have to include enough cellulose and xanthan gum to make it seem solid, but that wouldn't overcome the cost savings from removing the expensive calorie-bearing ingredients. it's even legal!
yet fast-food consumers have been gravitating to the macronutrient-rich menu items, not texturized carboxymethylcellulose jello, which would undoubtedly be widely available if it sold well. so they are following their homeostatic regulatory system to seek calories
their homeostasis is just broken
what broke the homeostasis?
i don't think it's an intentional thing or even a means to improve sales. if wendy's breaks your homeostatic feedback and mcdonald's doesn't, will that help them competitively? no, because their metabolically damaged customers will still eat at mcdonald's, except for the most loyal ones. if wendy's goes out of business, it'll take a generation for mcdonald's to see the result in terms of declining sales. even then, they're unlikely to be able to recognize that the demise of wendy's is the reason for their troubles
it's plausible that it's nothing more than 'ultra-palatable food makes you overeat, which disrupts your homeostasis'. but i'm skeptical of that because people seem to be able to eat very palatable food occasionally, or even often, without disrupting it
You're not going to make a large profit if you diverge too far from this social norm. Don't think like a startup, because we're talking about traditional multinational businesses here.
people's appetite is evidently for calories, and they commonly regulate their caloric intake or metabolic rate to within 0.5% in order to maintain their level of obesity. social norms are not capable of that kind of precision
consider, if you gain only 5 kg in ten years, which many obese mcdonalds eaters in the usa do, that's a caloric excess of 5 kcal per day. half a gram of fat per day. that's 0.3% of a metabolic rate of 1666 kcal per day or 0.2% of 2500 kcal/day. if they were to eat 0.3% less calories than they were burning instead of 0.3% more, they'd be losing 5 kg every ten years, not gaining it
so the homeostatic feedback mechanism is almost working. it's clearly not completely broken. its error is well under 1%. but it does evidently have a systematic error across the population. and fast-food optimization for profit by itself is an insufficient explanation for that
But HN linked an article a few years back about some research indicating that in the 1980s people ate as many or more callories, and got on average less physical activity, but were significantly less overweight. They reaction was that it was wrong, because thermodynamics, but the thermodynamic argument is a vast oversimplification. We can and do excrete plenty of energy such that other organisms post process our waste. Fat in particular can go unused with little notice. We can burn or conserve energy in ways that are hard to measure by just observing behavior. Given that complexity, it wouldn't surprise me that chronic inflammation could be a culprit. It could be the removal of a burden too, such that we are more efficient at processing calories. The food equivalent of meth amphetamine being available everywhere and cheaply doesn't help either, but enough people are studying it that I don't think it will be one simple thing.
10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007
But then there's the rise of the car, and of screen-based jobs/lifestyles, and other little conveniences that remove any last little bits of physical effort from life, from takeaway delivery to dishwashers to power tools.
Exercise used to be an unavoidable part of life.
In my mind, the industry trend of 'reduced fat' products that tend to have increased sugar, and the substitution of HFCS for sugar both contribute towards easier over consumption of calories.
Not with that attitude you're not.
> So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before.
I was just thinking about this earlier today.
I had a friend whom I would swear was actually, literally addicted to McDonald's burgers and fries. He wouldn't usually go seek out just any old burgers and fries, so I have a hard time saying he was addicted to them in general. I think that McDonald's (and to be clear, I am not blaming the Golden Arches here) had just some right taste that he could not help himself.
I don't like food particularly much at all, so I have never really felt like "oh that was so good I want more," but I can kind of see what you are saying here.
A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.
Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store.
There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response.
Edit: to refute some other points downthread.
> the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia
I believe this to be false. Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. Crisco started to exist because it was cheap. It took hours of work to turn these items into palatable calorie-dense foods, if that was even the outcome.
Today? The average working class person goes out to fast food multiple times per week. This was a luxury even in my time growing up. Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access.
> it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't
I'm not sure how you could come to such a conclusion? That is pretty much the sole feature of those foods. Readily available highly-addictive and highly calorie dense foods fit for immediate (or near it) consumption. No magic woo-woo explanations needed. We simply teleported society into a place literally surrounded by cheap easy to access food typically hundreds of feet away at any given time and then wondered what happened to "willpower" as if it ever existed in such a manner.
conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola
your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it
in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely
Meanwhile, the amount of fat available has gone up 40%, while protein supplies have risen closer to c. 10%.
It is absolutely anti-data to imply that previous generations had access to the same amount/mix of food/calories as we do today.
It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food.
that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food
The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.
You probably need to define what you mean by average blue collar worker as there are many ways of looking at this data (and it is often difficult to even find the estimated levels of transfer payments being given). For example, this Fed chart shows CPI adjusted median household income rising from around 57 thousand to around 75 thousand today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
So it can both be true that inflation-adjusted wages are rising and it is becoming harder to make ends meet.
A wage that supported a cowboy with two sets of clothes, a house that wouldn’t pass any building codes, a horse instead of a car, and no phone is not going to support a modern worker even if “adjusted” for inflation.
so fuck historical norms actually
That "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Nuance is important.
there are lots of simple, well-known explanations, and they are all wrong. that was one of them. 'it's sugar' and 'it's hfcs' are two others that have popped up in this thread
by contrast, sugary foods commonly have about the same caloric density as healthy foods
so i think caloric density is clearly an important factor (you won't get fat by pigging out on lettuce and tomatoes unless you add salad dressing) but the comment i was rebutting gave the following simple, clear, and wrong explanation of the obesity pandemic
> I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find
and that just isn't an accurate description of the situation
no it hasn't. for most of that timespan approximately no-one outside of the eastern Mediterranean even knew what an olive was
this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity
probably the loads of low-fat products you're talking about are packed with sugar and modified food starch, though, as well as xanthan gum, guar gum, carob bean gum, dibutylhydroxytoluene, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, polyethylene glycol, all kinds of novel food colorings including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, antifungal additives like propionate, and so on. some of these don't occur naturally, and others aren't traditional food ingredients. it wouldn't be very surprising if one or more of those novel additives affected hormone balances, inflammation levels, or intestinal microbiota in a way that promoted overeating and inactivity. some of them are well-known to affect intestinal microbiota
this is the first time i've seen one that provoked an antibody response, though
i think i'm going to go buy a delicious, cold coca-cola now
Then you dump calories on top of those metabolic changes (and appetite stimulation by the carbs) and you pack on the weight.
you say
> the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite
while, although you think i'm the one in this conversation that disagrees with you, the comment that i've written all this verbiage to rebut says exactly the opposite
> I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find
i agree with you that the obesity pandemic is almost certainly due to modern processed food, which is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around
your hypothesis is that palatability (of calorie-dense food) is the relevant difference; i think that's a plausible hypothesis. but i'm not sure that modern industrial food is more palatable than the calorie-dense elements of traditional diets (elsethread i mentioned halvah, but we could also mention longaniza, pizza, ham, bacon, cheese, funnel cakes, pepperoni, buttered pancakes with syrup, onigiri with katsuobushi and so on), and even if it is a difference, that doesn't prove that it's the relevant difference
there are a lot of other differences, and i think we should investigate them, because your hypothesis is far from the only plausible hypothesis
But I agree that the obesity could be boosted by chemical contamination. It should be treated as a disease and not as just a sin.
I myself find good olive oil to be quite tasty, far more so than soybean or canola, and I don't think I'm in a tiny minority there. Dipping bread directly in olive oil (sometimes seasoned with a little garlic or whatever) is very common in Mediterranean diets.
Meanwhile, you average normal person nowadays CAN eat a bag of potato chips in one sitting, without gastric consequences. Then they can compensate for eating half a pound of salt by following it up with half a candy bar for something sweet. Or maybe they got a milkshake with their burger or something.
People point out all these other secondary factors but we should really focus on the 80%, the big ticket item.
It's damn near impossible to find nutritiously acceptable breakfast, lunch and dinner choices near the office in big cities in America. From the American perspective, the choices are all fine because that's all people know. But relative to what you can find in Europe or even Latin America, the alternatives are downright appalling.
"Food manufacturing" should be a banned term.
There is a ridiculously strong correlation between sedentariness and obesity. We our more sedentary than ever before and then remote work/school increased it again.
I believe a person struggling with weight is basically determined in their childhood. Only in childhood will the body build new fat cells and the number of fat cells determines hormonal production of leptin and others which trigger hunger cues for the rest of life. Basically a fat child will permanently be hungrier for the rest of their life due to increased numbers of fat cells. If you’re a skinny and active kid you will permanently have an easier time to keep weight off. And before you blame food again sedentariness has increased among children immensely as well.
Off the top of my head I know there’s a speech of JFKs where he advocates for child health saying quote “there’s nothing more unfortunate than fat chubby children”
However, I can't find trustworthy original academic research on it, which makes it difficult to draw any firm conclusions. In any case, it doesn't appear that sugar consumption has risen dramatically in the last 50 years in the UK, yet obesity rates (and associated metabolic diseases) have continued to rise. Most research seems to suggest sugar is a marker of an unhealthy lifestyle rather than the cause, but the cause still seems to be essentially unknown. It is true that countries that eat very little sugar tend to have lower obesity rates, but that seems mainly to be because they are usually extremely poor.
In my opinion, there's more evidence that low fibre and easily digestible food is a bigger culprit than sugar, but the evidence is very poor quality on all sides.
it would be pretty surprising to find that, say, propionate intake suppressing intestinal yeast growth was a major cause of the obesity pandemic. but it certainly seems to be something about industrial food manufacturing that goes beyond just caloric density and macronutrient balance, and additives seem like a promising place to look
i mean the village baker a century ago didn't put calcium propionate in his bread so it wouldn't get moldy, he just threw the moldy bread out
As an example, let’s say you go from a healthy adult at 18 years old and 160 lbs, to an obese adult at 40 and 300 pounds. That’s 140 pounds over 22 years. If a pound of weight is gained after 3,500 excess calories, then this person only consumed roughly 60 extra calories a day. If they consumed only 20 excess calories a day, they would be 195. Overweight, but still relatively healthy. It doesn’t take a lot of sugar to add 40 or 60 calories to someone’s diet and leave everything else unchanged.
clearly diet and exercise are the proximate causes of obesity, but what has so deranged our diet and exercise?
Our individual choices are ours to make, but they don't happen in a vacuum. Cultural signals, environmental factors, biological processes, uncritically reinforced habits, etc all shape what choices we're inclined towards and what choices look implausible or untenable.
There's been a shocking shift in weight management and general wellness over the last hundred years, that seems to creep into every country that assimilates with " modern" culture, and it's prudent that we collectively understand why, because we probably should do something about it on that same collective scale.
Labor intensive jobs(also calorie intensive) are down. Even the jobs that remain have more of the physical demands taken out i.e. using an airgun to frame up a house instead of a hammer.
Not a big mystery there. Food used to be expensive and cakes only available in special occasions. Now I can get a cake delivered to my home within half an hour without getting up from my chair and it costs me about 15 minutes worth of paid work.
Most thin people aren't just thin because they eat less, they are thin because they don't have a disposition for binge eating. They just aren't as hungry.
Cake and Ice cream 50 years were ago were likely healthier and would have been healthier still going farther back. They'd have likely used fewer ingredients, less sugar (and less HFCS), and contained fewer microplastics/PFAS. Much of the ice cream sold in stores today can't even legally call themselves ice cream! They're "Frozen dessert products"
[1] https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1412827749828513800?s=2...
I see what you did there. :-) I myself was momentarily confused when I saw "PEG".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammation#Interleukins_and_... is probably a good place to start reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infectobesity
the cure you suggest fails on 95% of obese people, though like many pseudoscientific quack cures, it does appear to work at first, and actually does work in a few cases
the implied etiology doesn't hold up to the most casual critical thinking: resting and eating have been part of every human life since long before there were humans, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old. this is like attributing deaths from dengue to "bleeding" and recommending that people bleed less
diet and exercise is clearly the proximate cause of obesity, but the question is what drives diet and exercise, and what changed so suddenly?
The “sudden” change is easy to see in the supermarket. Most people don’t shop at Whole Foods, Sprouts, or Central market. Go to Walmart and admire all of the densely caloric colorful boxed foods.
Did you know young people actually use door dash/uber to get their fast food? It’s wild. So not even expending a few calories to get it but also wasting a bunch of cash.
The drive to eat and what is strongly influenced by gut biome. Fecal transplants have created new food preferences.
Even saying diet and exercise are the proximate cause may be an oversimplication. We know that the same level of activity and food intake can produce different results in different people. That doesn't violate thermodynamics. There are caloric expenditures that are not measured in such studies, like incomplete digestion and thermal regulation.
People shouldn't eat what they are eating, and they should have alternatives that are healthy for them (which also varies by person, but is almost never equal parts transfat and fructose with a petroleum based dye to make it pretty and to cut the sweetness, enough salt to cure a whole pig).
I've been around people who made legitimate good-faith efforts to diet and eat "healthy", but have no idea that "just a bowl of rice to go with it" and "I need my afternoon milk tea" and maybe another snack are like 500+ extra calories each day, that hardly even leave you full.
An accepted rule of nutrition/diet/physiology is that an excess of 3,500 calories will lead to a gain of 1lb of fat.
The basal metabolic rate for an adult in the United States is 1,731 calories (numbers based on averages returned in google, 38.1 years old, 5’11, 181 lbs).
So 1,731 calories for a sedentary person is really easy to surpass. If they surpass that by a few hundred calories a day then they’ll gain a pound every 10 days(ish). After ballooning up they can jump on the ozempic train and lose weight. Or just stay obese.
If you don’t know anyone on ozempic then I’ll share - the weight loss appears mostly due to discomfort. Eating what they used to do becomes very uncomfortable due to abdominal pain/nausea and constipation. So they calorie restrict and they start to lose weight because they’re below their BMR.
But again the calorie counting is an oversimplication as mentioned in other posts. Elegantly simple, and so attractive. Caloric restriction will always work in the absence of the endocrine issues you mention. And in the absence of other issues we haven't discovered or don't understand yet. The vast majority of hypothyroidism is due to autoimmune related inflammation (Hashimoto's). The normal cause for that is childbirth related immune response. But plenty of other autoimmune diseases are virally triggered, quite possibly even diabetes. Combining that with the way gut biome impacts appetite and processing efficiency, we can't just pretend telling people to eat less and better and exercise will matter no matter how hard we work on education. Ozempic is a bandaid that rich people will use and will slow down discovery of all the multitudes of ways modern life has conspired to cause obesity.
This has nothing to do with "Diet and exercise don't work" and everything to do with the fact that every single fat person KNOWS they are fat, already KNOWS diet and exercise are the solution, and has likely already tried diet and exercise in some way and couldn't manage it. People usually get fat because eating calorie dense foods feels good and people are desperate for anything to feel good because the average person has spent the last 6 decades being squeezed for every last drop of wealth by the ownership class, which it turns out is a very stressful experience.
Diet and exercise are extremely difficult to tack onto your existing life if you aren't already predisposed to it, and if you are already predisposed to it, you probably aren't fat because you have a healthy diet and exercise!
My mom's family grew up eating fried lard(!) as a regular food. Not a single one of them got overweight because they had regular exercise when they played with friends or did chores like tending the garden or worked the potato fields, and because they literally could not afford to eat enough lard to get fat
The reason that food insecure households are fat is not some magic bullet substance that we will be able to remove from our life, but because for a lot of Americans, you buy your groceries at dollar general or walmart and the frozen nuggets are cheaper than a pound of chicken thigh.