It's a knowledge problem Or is it? | Hacker News Reader

It's a knowledge problem Or is it?

josvisser.substack.com

53 points0xKelsey17 comments

> the color coding program was completely misguided because it assumed that we didn’t know what healthy food was. I challenged the nutritionist to an experiment: Make two plates of food, go into the restaurant at lunch time, and ask people to point out the healthier plate. My bet was that if you did not purposefully make it very tricky, people would unfailingly point to the right plate.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I used to struggled with weight most of my young years. No matter what I did I achieved incremental advances at best. At some point I decided to start "counting calories", something that I used to frown upon.

To my shock some foods that I ate that I considered "healthy" weren't so much so. This isn't even counting the fact that most experts can't even agree what is healthy or not, and opinions change over time.

Just like with coding, there are some black/white examples where the average person could make an easy distinction, but then there is a wide range of greys in the middle where people might not really know what's "good/bad".

Is a three-colour code going to tell you what's healthy?

I think I'd prefer a standard nutrition label, since I'd guess that a mushroom battered in almond meal and deep fried in olive oil is probably made of three green ingredients but will end up red in combination.

I had a similar experience. I think counting calories really does help in recalibrating your instincts around food. It even pushes you toward healthier options. It also naturally pushes you toward less calorie dense food. I remember a conversation with myself where it really clicked “I could eat this massive salad with ground beef and balsamic and feel full for hours or I can eat two microwave burritos and still feel hungry.”

I think part of the problem here is that “healthy” in a nutritional quality sense is orthogonal to “healthy” in a caloric density sense.

This is the problem. We use “healthy” interchangeably and it really depends upon your goals.

For example, I would label peanut butter as a healthy snack, but you really need to keep an eye on your portions because it is wildly calorie dense and excess calories is usually unhealthy.

It depends, really.

Some people genuinely don't know what's healthy and what's not. Some people know what's healthy but having trouble resisting these temptation. Usually it's a mixture of both.

“Healthy” is meaningless. You should provide calorie counts and strive for nutritional balance.

If I have a “healthy” 300 calorie salad before a 3 hour run, I will crash very hard. Instead I will eat a high sugar and high fat candy bar.

If I have two “healthy” 800 calorie quinoa and chickpea salads when I am trying to lose weight, I will gain weight. Instead I could even eat a 500 calorie burger and lose weight.

Frankly if you are interested in your health, you have to understand how it all works. Sometimes you need carbs, sometimes you need fat, and sometimes you need protein. The amount that you need today depends on what you are planning to do this week. You need to know your own schedule and feed yourself accordingly.

Most of the “changing opinions over time by health experts” is because they are trying to answer “what one advice works for everyone” which is a non-starter question to begin with.

But losing weight is a somewhat unhealthy condition, so you have to eat slightly unhealthy with as little side effect as possible to achieve that, no?

As in, preferably taking as much vitamins and micronutrients as practical, with less calories than your body burns within reasonable range.

OP indeed misunderstood the color coding program by treating it as a knowledge problem. Looks to me like it was much more about "nudging": It's one thing to decide for yourself, in your head, whether to have the tofu bowl or the fries for lunch. It's another to have both next to each other in the cafeteria, one authoritatively labeled with a green, the other with a red dot. Sure you can still choose the fries, but it will feel much more directly like "bad choice" than without the markers.

It could have been combined with calorie counting and exercise/steps efforts too

Hasn't the nudging theory been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point?

It hadn't yet been at the time this program was in practice. I wager the enthusiasm for nudging was probably around its peak at the time we're talking, somewhere early 2010s?

The nutritionist probably isn’t an idiot, and didn’t assume the developers lacked the knowledge or intellectual capacity to determine the nutritive and caloric density of food. People choose convenience foods for two reasons: a) they’re usually delicious in the least healthy ways, and b) because they’re convenient. The nutritionist likely understood that people choosing unhealthy convenience foods because they were delicious and didn’t care if they were healthy— such as the author— were going to do that anyway. They were probably trying to even out the cognitive load required to make healthy choices for the people that did want to make better choices but were just grabbing whatever was convenient while running to a meeting or as a quick break without losing their flow and didn’t really have time to think about it.

There might be a knowledge problem here, though: perhaps the author, a bit arrogantly, incorrectly assumed they understood the nutritionist’s ostensibly simple-minded intent and strategy on-sight, and dismissed it out-of-hand instead of considering its utility for differing goals, challenges, and motivations.

Blog makes some good points with limited application of this knowledge problem. Sometimes it is a a knowledge problem like not having the knowledge (read: experience) or critical skills to make the time to research or do a trade study on the right approach. Even if given the time, the wrong decision or action might still be taken. But then you have the knowledge for next time.

I love how this ended about the color coding of food and not the valid points about code quality being a byproduct of mental status.

There are better indicators for healthy food that many aren't so aware of.

How many ingredients, how processed, amount of sugar/salt/worse etc.

I'm all for informing people. A lot of people (myself included) are generally pretty ignorant.

As to traffic light systems: I think they should be transparent, and linked to easy-to-verify information.

An example of a good food one is the UK: They have a traffic light system for various macros. For each of the chosen macros (fat, sugar, etc...) the symbol displays the macro amount along with an associated colour.

This system is great because it is a systematic and consist visualization of an objective fact (e.g., more than 20 grams of sugar is always red). While the consumer might be influenced by the colour, it is extremely clear what the colour means and they can make up their own mind (e.g., how much fat do I want to consume?)

An example of a bad one: Germany has a traffic light system for food too. But here it is just a colour (with no clarity as to how the colour/rating is calculated). The rating seems arbitrary and strange (for example smoked salmon gets a red rating, while a slice of pizza might get a yellow rating, etc...). The consumer has no insight into what the rating truly means and hast to either trust it, or ignore it.

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