olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.