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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

The fact that drugs that work for obesity are broadly effective against addiction suggests to be that obesity is often essentially a food addiction- e.g. possibly using food as a way to escape negative feelings or a response to emotional trauma.

Could the obesity epidemic have been all along downstream of a mental health epidemic that hasn’t been appreciated or acknowledged yet?

This would jive with my personal experience logging my weight with a digital scale for years. I tend to gain weight during or after stressful and traumatic events, and lose it when I am feeling mentally well.

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>The fact that drugs that work for obesity are broadly effective against addiction suggests to be that obesity is often essentially a food addiction- e.g. possibly using food as a way to escape negative feelings or a response to emotional trauma.

Or that both addiction and obesity are downstream of dysfunctional satiety sensors, leading to a "void" that the body-mind system attempts to "fill" in one way or another.

> A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.

You could both be right. Perhaps addictive behaviors are just maladaptive surrogate activities that are the result of humans being intrinsically compatible with contemporary societies.

What about play and fun? I’m not inclined to take advice from that person you quoted on how best to spend ones time.

However I agree that the response above is not mutually exclusive with mine.

The term predates usage by Kaczynski.[0]. He just happens to provide the most succinct definition of it that has been popularized in modern society.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surrogate_activity

That's awfully ironic considering that spending one's time thinking about how we'd all be better off in a primitive, pre-industrial lifestyle is very clearly a "surrogate activity" enabled only by one's lack of backbreaking farm labor to do.

It would probably be best if we didn't stray too far from the original topic at hand which is prescription drugs that affect various addictions and why they do so.

I don't think the concept of a "surrogate activity" is meaningful... the whole concept seems predicated on the idea that humans should forever be stuck on the lowest level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and there is no intrinsic value in anything not essential for physical survival.

Kaczynski was intelligent, but also a joyless, evil, and bitter person that couldn't even comprehend why people do things like love or play, so came up with elaborate but very much off base intellectualizations of why other people do things.

He is flat out wrong about why people are motivated to do those activities he mentioned. For example, I lift weights because it feels good, its fun, and I like (and find it practically useful) to be physically strong. I do it alone in a garage- no other people or society are telling me it is important, or even noticing I am doing it. I would still do it if I was the last person on earth and there was nobody to approve or disapprove of it.

or has the fast food industry and unhealthy eating habits in general, which lead to obesity, been the instigator of the mental health epidemic? Fix the food, fix the epidemic?

This is one of those cases where I think it's not one creates the other. But I assume they have a strong feedback mechanism. It's the combination that makes it a lot stronger. 2 + 2 = 5 in such cases

Yes, probably a feedback loop. There is lots of research showing modern food is engineered for high "food reward value" which overcomes our satiety mechanisms, and is essentially addictive (e.g. https://www.stephanguyenet.com/thehungrybrain/). Not to say that modern processed food isn't also quite unhealthy - with mental health implications, I suspect it is the food reward aspect itself that is mostly responsible for what you are talking about.

This I think has simply caused food to essentially replace alcohol as the default way to escape painful emotions- whereas the men traumatized in the big wars of the 20th century often became regular binge drinkers afterwards, I think food has largely replaced that.

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