Hacker News Reader

Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

Americans are overweight.

Our entire food chain is full of preservatives, carcinogens, and things that should not be consumed by living beings .

I've spent small amounts of time in Europe, and each time literally just eating whatever junk food I wanted, I came home losing 10 or 20 pounds. The food outside of the US is just fundamentally better.

Let's say you're a teenager and you want to buy yourself some soda, in America the vast majority of the time you're not getting real sugar, you're getting hyper processed corn syrup. Before you know it all types of weird crap isn't everything you eat. And this has disastrous effects .

Ozempic is really a shortcut to an extremely complicated problem. Realistically if you want to eat quality food you have to move to another country, it's that bad.

View on HN

This is basically a meme at this point -

Sandwich, US >:|

Sandwich, Japan :O

I don't know what to believe anymore. I think sugar isn't good for you, whether it's "real" processed sugar, or HFCS which is a fructose ratio that is the same as honey, or agave syrup which has even more fructose.

And, other countries have obesity problems too - e.g. Mexico and the UK. Are they tainted by... whatever... is the actual problem (or problems) with the US's food supply?

In mexico (and south and Latin americas) case it’s primarily due to taking our obsession with sugar and multiplying it. They drink even more sugary soda than we do, and their deserts like tres leche cake are so delicious because they are diabetes on a plate.

There’s some misinformation here.

The US does use more additives like BHA or potassium bromate (possible carcinogens—can you name others you’re thinking of?), but their link to obesity isn’t clear. As for soda, ‘hyper processed corn syrup’ I suppose just means high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—what’s the big difference you see from sugar? Research, like this meta-analysis (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/), shows HFCS and sugar are metabolically similar in typical amounts, no disaster there.

Your weight loss in Europe might be more about activity than food quality. Short trips often mean more walking and exploring, which burns calories, even if you’re eating junk.

> junk food I wanted, I came home losing 10 or 20 pounds.

Maybe you caught some bug or something?

> The food outside of the US is just fundamentally better.

Meh... I'm from Europe and it's about the same, if you are at least somewhat selective about what you eat (and it might be much harder and/or expensive to do that in some places).

This is the truth - and it’s infuriating that assholes like RFK purport to want to remove nasty stuff from our food supply, but outside of total meme shit like a few red dyes and fake nonsense about seed oils being uniquely bad, he’s doing nothing to fix our insanely low quality and under regulated food supply.

I have had exactly the same experience as you every time I travel outside of the USA (luckily I’m already in good shape). I always come back skinnier than I left.

It’s infuriating that the only politicians who I can rely on to significantly regulate the ingredients in our food supply to remove slop will be hard left folks like Bernie Sanders - a breed of politicians which are going extinct.

But yes RFK, moving us to butter and tallow instead of fking seed oils will fix everything!!! (eyeroll)

I think there's just too much money in the way things are set up .

And that goes for almost everything in the United States. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to say food created using natural ingredients is probably better for you than something that came out of a lab. In the name of extending shelf life, everything is just saturated with as many preservatives as possible.

While this is great for something like emergency rations you shouldn't eat this stuff every day.

It's all about maximum profit. They sell us food that's optimized to remain sellable later.

Then this food makes you sick and depressed, so they sell you a bunch of drugs to "treat" that. The goal isn't healthy happy people. It's all about return customers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com