As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice

I feel like food advice has always been a lie. It's just meeting us where we are now, on social media.

Sugary cereal has always been advertised as "part of a balanced breakfast", but if we had time to prepare the other parts of that balanced breakfast, no one would eat cereal.

Orange juice was advertised as a healthy drink, when it's got as much sugar as a can of soda.

The original food pyramid was introduced in 1992 by the US Government, heavy on breads and rice and pasta. Obesity increased even more dramatically afterwards.

If you want to lose weight then consume less calories than your body burns. It really is that simple. Yeah, you probably won't be comfortable, but that's the trick to losing weight. You could do it eating nothing but Twinkies, you won't be healthy, but your weight will drop.

Surprised to see that this article mentioned "portion" or "serving" a total of zero times. That's the trick with cereal. Taking cocoa puffs as an example, 50g of them is 200 calories. 50g is probably 4 spoonful's (no source just my opinion).. very little, if you just pour an amount that looks good to you into your bowl, yeah it's going to easily add up to an 800 calorie meal when you add milk.

I would agree that it's deceptive, but you can't blame them for making you fat. All the information you need is right there on the label. This is just for managing weight, getting proper micro and macro nutrients takes a little more research.

In my local supermarket there are aisles and aisles of food squirted out of machines in factories.

Anti-diet, Big-food corps most probably, used millions to lobby government so the general public still eat food squirted out of machines. The status quo of excess carbohydrates.

In my lifetime have seen the world get fatter and fatter.

I have never seen a slim weight watchers customer. Why? because they promote carbohydrates, even their own low fat food has the fats removed and refilled with carbohydrates.

Just like Alcoholics Annonymous, fat people are only ever in recovery.

No profits from those who have recovered from overeating carboydrates.

Low fat = higher calories.

When thinking about fat people I am always reminded of Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom.

Until the US learns to effectively legislate, I feel this will continue to be a problem. Of course food companies want you to follow "anti-diet" advice because they want to sell you more food. Junk food is ultra palettable and super cheap to manufacture.

At the end of the day, food companies and citizens treat the effects of sugar as an entirely unavoidable externality. Tax the crap out of junk food, subsidize the cost of vegetables, and watch how usage goes down.

Sure, people won't like it, but people also don't like it when their neighbor gets a new car in a color they think is ugly.

Data point of one, but lost 20% of my weight (235 lb to 180 lb) over six months just by cutting out all sugar, alcohol, and anything that came from a factory. I didn’t even have to cut back on volume. That came naturally since I no longer craved snacks, and my appetite decreased. the only part that was difficult was stopping which took a while.

People eat their sugar-rich meals 10 times a day and are surprised by becoming fat.

Of course Big Food prefers this to be the norm.

Lest people put the fork down. Practice fasting. Discover that eating so much per day, or so frequently, is actually bad for them.

Any chance this marketing campaign is related to the increasing popularity of semaglutide weight loss drugs?

At least 85% of the edible products in a supermarket are actually not.

Imagine if cereal companies spent this same money on raising fiber in sugar, or adding protein, or reducing sugar with a stevia hybrid.

Even imagine most milk switching to ultra filtered (lactose converted to sucrose, 50% more protein).

"Small" changes like these would make our food actually better for us.