Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start eating healthfully
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actaully have less obesity than skim milk drinkers.
If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.
Subjectively it would vary according to cultural norms and personal opinions, for example.
Additionally people can be accustomed to certain foods regardless of such measurements.
There is some serious interest in diets like Ketogenic or Paleolithic, which espouse similar dietary requirements to what the parent suggested (eg: whole milk has significantly more fat than skim milk, as such they affect satiation and satiety differently from each-other).
I think it's fair to say that the entire medical profession has in the past suffered from a tendency to convince people to maximize their health, rather than maximize the combination of their health, and whatever other outcomes people desire, such as eating tasty food or feeling satiated. This tendency is flawed because it is not consistent with what people want to do, and is always therefore an uphill battle.
As the field matures, this is definitely changing, but the discussion around nutrition shows there is still a long way to go.
As a tweak to my general food lifestyle, it's far easier to maintain than a diet or cooking for myself consistently.
With the exception of candies, those are nog bad options per se. The problem with all those options is the way they are packaged: Companies put a lot of salt (in nuts) or sugars (yogurts, oatmeal bars) to 'enhance' the flavour. Unfortunately there seem to be very few options (and usually more expensive) for 'ready made' health-ish food, but it can be made.
The palm sized Fage yogurts packages are almost 300 calories, and wouldn't fill me up. The Fage yogurts have no real additives to them. 300 calories of carrots is a stomach straining 730g. The oatmeal bars are 150 calories each and might as well be air. 1 M&M is 9 calories alone! 5 M&Ms exceed my small bowl of carrots! I can go on and on about how insidious the snacks are at my work.
The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. The obesity epidemic is a direct result of sitting in an office 9 to 5 (or 6,7,8,...) and making two meals a day full of fat and sugar, because you're craving.
When you have a better lifestyle, you naturally gravitate towards better food, because you have time to cook (as opposed to pizza/snacks) or look for good dinner (as opposed to drive-thru), have time to go to the grocery store buy vegetables/fruits more frequently (as opposed to industrialized food which doesn't spoil), and even time to appreciate food itself making various small meals a day.
EDIT: I would like to know why the downvote. The correlation between obesity and office workers is a recurrent research topic.
Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it.
The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result.
I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things:
1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible.
2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero.
3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often.
#2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism.
My plan attempts to address this problem.
The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood.
While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today.
You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
My contention is that pizza doesn't have to be junk food, it just is most of the time in the US. Choose a better restaurant or make your own.
What the OP was implying is that fast/junk food is inherently irresistible and that's why more people are obese. What I'm saying in turn is that it's today's lifestyle which makes people find it irresistible and that nothing else satisfies.
Pizza can be massively unhealthy if you buy from somewhere that's full of sodium and soaked in grease, but there are plenty of ways of making pizzas that are fine to eat every day even.
Heck, squid works just fine on a thin pizza base too, as do mussels and prawn if you want a nice seafood mix.
Well yes, but solving problems like depression, stress, and overly-long working hours is much tougher than just blaming food executives.
Donald Thompson looks like he might have a BMI above Larry Page.
http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/leadership/don...
http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/
Also not sure how the price of food is near zero? Are you implying that the cost now is near zero because I don't have to go out and kill a cow, nor do I have to farm and scavenge? So cost as in physical cost? Because breakfast and lunch today were not near zero and I have noticed the cost of milk and eggs going up, not down.
This is unfortunately true, as in it will take probably another 20 to 30 years for the majority of Western men to realize that they can cook, too, and that cooking is not only a "woman's job". Coming from a family where both my parents worked full-time jobs and where my dad was actually cooking tastier meals than my mum it surprised me when I grew up and saw that in other families the husband wouldn't approach the kitchen even if he would be starving to death.
Otherwise I cannot really understand why a majority of people have starting seeing cooking a healthy meal as a "waste of time". This is something so ingrained in our well-being, I'd say is almost quintessential to who we are as a species, that it baffles me when I see so many people relying only on pre-processed food that comes packaged in cardboard boxes.
Got any source for that?
I worked for 3 years in a European Union Scientific project (FP7) of Rural Development and Agriculture in 6 countries (Germany, Czech Republic, UK, France and Bulgaria). The findings we got (including direct interviews with farmers, Eurostat data and other panel data) contradict your claim.
Specially if we consider that one of the main requirements of food is land (either for crops, trees or pasture for animals), and if anything, fertile land is getting more expensive.
Sure: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.aspx...
Download Table 7 (Food expenditures by families and individuals as a share of disposable personal income), and you will see a steady march from 24% of disposable income to 9%.
Is that the case? Many countries that have much stricter cultural traditions about when and how much to eat (the French, the Italians) eat 2-3 meals a day. They don't eat when they feel hungry, the eat when it is eating time.
Now compare that to having to lunch in 15 minutes when you are starving. You want to swallow a Whooper and grab a Coke that you can drink while walking back to the office.
Is there any research that actually shows that?
My own personal experience with leangains (intermittent fasting; taking all my calories in an 8 hour window with lunch being my first and biggest meal) is that I find it far harder to overeat that way than with smaller meals. It's "easy" to fit in a snack between small meals, but after lunch I'm totally sick of food, and it's hard for me to even meet my macro nutrient goals (I lift weights; my protein intake is high). Often I have to force myself to take in a second meal to meet my calorie needs (edit: because I simply often don't want to eat again before the end of my eating window, around 8pm, after my massive lunch at noon).
On the opposite end, I see very few people around me that eat "only" two meals. My co-workers for example, might very well only sit down for a meal twice, but they snack constantly. And their "snacks" are often substantially higher calorie than their main meals. When I did try to diet with many small healthy meals, it was a nightmare - I was constantly hungry and constantly craving food.
When I do intermittent fasting, I have hunger pangs in the mornings 2-3 days, and then I stop being hungry in the mornings.
You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. As long as you don't go lunch with a blackhole in the stomach and are mindful about what you're eating, it's fine. Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
When I eat more meals a day and then suddenly have a longer gap than I'm used to, I find it easy to do that.
When I systematically east 1-2 meals a day, I adapt to that pattern in 2-3 days, and then have no problems eating a diet where getting sufficient fat is actually hard, and where I often find I have to add some "easy" carbs to meet my calorie requirements because the sheer volume of food I am due to eat for my lunch makes it an annoying chore.
Part of the reason I don't like the "many small meals" approach is because I then quickly adapt to getting hungry many times a day, and the chance of getting hungry at a time I can't eat makes it very easy to snack on unhealthy foods.
> You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule.
Exactly. With no need for many meals a day.
> Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
Not my experience at all. I get the "wild sugar peaks" when I eat irregularly and/or when I consume lots of easily digested sugars. But since I don't get hungry very often while do intermittent fasting, I have no problems eating a lot of my fat and protein first, at which point I don't generally want much sugar, and my diet ends up being foods that are digested fairly slowly. I do get a bit tired shortly after lunch, but I quickly get more energy again and conversely my mornings are generally far more alert than they used to be with lots of small meals.
I am not sure if this is true. I think in people without diabetes, insulin does it's job and regulates your blood sugar pretty well during a fast and I think cognition is better when a large amount of your body's resources are not being used to digest food.
Without snacking during the day, it is far easier to quantify exactly what I am putting into my body and it is easier to make sure whatever it is, is of a higher quality and is actually what I need (or feel that my body needs). In addition to this, big meals in the late afternoon or evening are a lot more satisfying to me than multiple small meals that just leave me wanting more.
I would highly recommend this way of life to anyone struggling with what they are eating.
The "snacks" between meals is for eating something like a fruit, yogurt, nuts... not french fries. Without eating fruits throughout the day you probably don't even meet the minimum fruit intake recommendation. Depending on the country, the average intake is half than the recommended.
This way I know that I'll be completely satisfied at least once per day, and of course there are limits of what I can eat in a single meal (and not much time left in the day for eating more).
I found out that this is what works best for me, my personality and my relationship with food. I can do this indefinitely, while in the past, I would eat healthily for maybe weeks or months, but then I would go back to the same old habits.
For other people it would not make sense, or be a bad fit. My point is that, in the end, nutrition is something very personal and has heavy psychological implications, and should be treated case by case, there is not a "silver bullet" working for everyone.
But surely there is such a thing as food that is more filling and food that is less so, and how hungry you are (or how happy) will lead to deviations from that baseline, but it won't cause that baseline to magically disappear, I would think?
That's an assertion without provenance and a contentious assumption to make.
but more importantly
b) price
-> I once saw a very fat boy (12-14) and his very fat mother (cant guess age) in a very poor neighborhood as I was taking a bus to college.
"Mom, can I eat vegetables today?"
"No, you're eating pasta tonight! We don't have no vegetables"
"AWWWWWWWW!!! No fair!"
"Shut up"
McDonalds is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Most shit food is cheap and easy. Non-shit food is not cheap nor is it easy. We must make a tax to make shit food as pricy as non-shit food. Then people will start making better decisions.
Now going back to hcarvalhoalves' point -- 9-5 schedule gives us that 1 hr lunch. We cannot spend our time preparing food so we can eat during that one hr. We go for fast-food lunch. Usually that means high sugar, or high something not great for you. If its good for you and can fit that 1 hr schedule, its usually very pricy and most people can't afford to spend say $20 per meal 5+ times a week.
Raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and lean meat all contain a high ratio of micronutrients to calories. Ignorant consumers could finally stop avoiding cashews and avocado, and start avoiding low-fat pop tarts and cereals.
I consume a lot of milk but whole milk can be unpalatable so I mostly drink low-fat, which still has some fat and a lot of protein:
There are 102 calories in 1 cup of 1% Fat Milk.
Calorie breakdown: 21% fat, 47% carbs, 32% protein.
http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/milk-cow...
I think a huge part of the problem in general is large packs of food. Ready-made sandwiches in packs with 800-900kcal, for example, or nuts or high-calorie drinks sold in quantities that ought to be anywhere from 2-3 to 10+ servings. Ready-meals that comes only in massive portions that might work ok if you're buying it to split 2 or 3 way, but that are often horribly oversized if you eat alone.
It's all great and economical when you're buying stuff to put in the cupboard and have the willpower to resist eating larger quantities, but clearly we can see that people don't. And unfortunately there's little reason for most manufacturers or supermarkets to offer smaller alternatives, as we're too easily seduced into buying the larger packs.
Personally I found my soda intake dropped substantially after I started buying my weekend soda "allowance" in 250ml bottles instead of 0.5l or 1.5l bottles, for example. And a lot of my other diet maintenance boils down to picking smaller containers, smaller plates, smaller glasses for everything except water.
Instead of thinking about whether something is "high carb" or not, it's better to think about the digestibility of the carb. Kidney beans, for example, are high-carb and high satiating. Sugar is all-carb and not satiating at all. You can find the satiation relative to carbs by examining the food's glycemic index.
40/20/40 or relatively close to that is a common split. Many will up the fat too (at the expense of carbs). At 60/20/20, there's absolutely no way I'd manage keeping up my lifting program.
say you need 2700 calories on a workout day => 1080 protein calories => 250g of protein per day. that's more than 1kg of lean meat/fish a day?
I do end up with a lot of chicken and prawn, and a lot of jerky, as well as milk, and various protein supplements (shakes with up to 90% protein by dry weight, mixed with water - generally tastes foul; people writing sales copy for protein products are the most blatant liars in the world).
It's not unusual for me to eat a lunch consisting of 400g of lean chicken breast (ca. 100g of protein), ca. 600g of chicken drumsticks (ca. 70g of protein), a small-ish sausage and egg sandwich (~25g protein), a yoghurt drink and a flapjack. The rest I'll make up with a small meal in the evening.
My intake on exercise days is actually ~2800kcal so you hit pretty much where I am. But note that 2800kcal on exercise days is above my maintenance level at 103kg, at relatively advanced (but not competitive) levels on most my lifts.
Most people will need less than that, and you can get by on substantially less - you will just see less progress. It is fairly self-limiting. A lot of people you see struggling with the same weights in the gym over and over are simply eating too little.
The evidence for very high protein diets goes in all kinds of directions, though the evidence for increasing protein to support muscle growth is fairly good as far as I know. There's evidence for various degrees of beneficial (from a muscle building perspective) effects of up to 3g-4g of protein per kg of lean body weight depending on who you ask.
Though the main reason to aim for that kind of level simply "in case" it makes a difference, and because it allows for slip-ups without affecting the gym routine much, and unless you have kidney problems there are few to no negative effects.
Note that even a lot of gym goers would qualify as relatively sedentary...
[cue jokes about mixing systems of measurement]
Your nutritional recommendations gave me cravings and hypoglycemia in the past.
No one talks about it?
It seems you have missed the keto bandwagon.
Over the years, this is the third or fourth version of this same story that I've read.
Read one on low carbs. Read one on low fat. Now this one.
The assumption here, as it was in the others, is that we now know what works and what doesn't. And that forces beyond our control conspire to keep us fat. In this version, the thesis is that some form of certification system for marketing to children can cure the obesity epidemic.
Beats me. But I'll bet twenty bucks that a decade or two from now we'll be reading the same type of article, only with different kinds of suggested cures.
I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong, or rather that the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions, which have changed drastically in the last 100 years. I doubt controlling marketing material will have a long-lasting effect, but anything is worth a shot. It is a very serious problem.
Looking at the recent past, I'd be just a bit more humble about it.
Which is it then, 'nothing wrong' or 'serious problem'?
So there's no "disease" to cure, and no mastermind manipulation of the population by forces using [insert latest ideas here].
If anything, this leads me to believe that we'll need to take evolution into our own hands to fix this. Various measures like this could be a useful stopgap. Like I said, beats me. Happy to confess ignorance here (as opposed to seemingly most every other commenter who speaks on this topic) If pressed, however, also happy to provide more speculation.
As an obese person, I can definitely add that the disease metaphor, like the "moral blemish" metaphor before it, in my opinion does more damage than good. People come up with these ideas, then start wrapping them in the conspiracy theory of the month garb. Enough with the evil corporations, corrupt governments, sick people, lazy no-goods. These highly emotionally-charged models of analysis are not helping the public conversation.
For the entire history of the species nobody has had to worry about obesity until very recently. It follows that social structures and the physiology of humans are not the changing variable. The only obvious changing variable is food availability. So yes, obesity is a public health hazard, but it's not one based on some fault with people or social structures. It's simply the result of changing environmental conditions for which the species is ill-prepared.
Okay, but it's people growing and selling all that food. Social structures subsidize most of our foods. Sure, food availability is the "only variable," but it's a variable highly caused & correlated to people and social structures.
>physiology of humans are not the changing variable
Of course the physiology of humans are a changing variable. African Americans did not exist as a physiological idea 400 years ago, but today they represent a medical population that's much differently susceptible to disease, especially obesity, than Africans living in America or white Americans.
>no "disease" to cure
Similar language was used by the tobacco industry to argue against the link between tobacco marketing, tobacco use and ultimately lung disease. [0]
http://archive.tobacco.org/resources/history/strategieslb.ht...
Most people given access to unlimited lentils would not become obese. Food availability is NOT the only factor.
A core message of the article is that the food industry has lobbied against restrictions on advertizing to children food with habit-forming non-nutritive calories. The food industry is built around cheap production of highly-processed ingredients that addictively fuel consumption and sabotage health.
Also:
You'd expect, if food availability was the sole variable, for things like pasta to be the ones best correlated with obesity. (Well, no, actually you'd expect wheat flour at $0.07 to be, but you'd expect pasta to correlate better )
So, how comes Coca Cola is $0.46 per 200 calories while pasta is $0.21 per 200 calories, and yet it's the consumption of sweetened beverages that correlates so well with obesity? How comes so much of our energy comes from fast food, (a Jack in the Box burger is $0,57 per 200 calories) rather than wheat flour based products?
Flour costs about 3 to 4 hours to bake some bread or at least an hour to make a homemade cake or cookies. That's the most expensive.
Pasta will cost me 1/2 hour absolute minimum to make spaghetti and meatballs. Cheaper, but still expensive.
Next cheapest is garbage grade fast food. Well, you're in for a long walk or a short drive, I figure I can get to the closest McD and get served "something" in less than 10 minutes. Cheaper yet...
Cheapest of all is a can of soda. I can hit the vending machine at work and walk back to my desk in about 3 minutes.
Hmm and the cheaper they are on this list, the more blame they get for making people fat. Some of it is the hair shirt brigade with the usual claim that if we had to raise our own apple orchards we would be holy enough, err, good enough, err whatever we'd be thin.
I will say that a significant medically diagnosed food allergy in the family is probably the most effective weight loss plan I've ever heard of. No wheat ever again, you say? Well that eliminates 90% of the grocery store's processed/junk food right there.
Pasta's about 20 minutes - which doesn't need you to be standing there. Bolognese sauce is about 20 minutes, regardless of the amount you make. Make a bunch of the things up and stick them in the freezer. - 4 minutes in the microwave, only a few seconds of which need you to be standing there.
Rice, similarly, doesn't need you to be standing there while it boils. Heck you can get rice-cooking machines. Anything made in a slow cooker pretty much by definition doesn't need you to be standing there....
Its not that it takes 3 hours of work to make bread, its that it takes 3 hours from "I'm hungry and I'm going to do something about it" to the reward of gulping down fresh bread. So its harder to get fat off homemade bread, than, say, a can of corn syrup soda. 20 minutes for bolognese sauce (only outta a can I'm thinking, unless you're an iron chef or something) vs 3 minutes for a chocolate bar and a can of coke from the vending machine.
I'm not arguing its right. I have a totally different diet and I mostly raid the fruit bowl and eat an apple or banana or some nuts or fresh grapes or berries or generally speaking something vaguely paleo diet ish as much as reasonably possible. But people consider my diet to be really weird and un or outright anti american so I don't count. When someone opens a drive thru fruit stand (now there's a startup idea?), then we'll see how much weight I gain.
This is an important part about the debate. Obesity is not about the food. Some slightly more intelligent dietary changes and we'd be complaining about Americans being fat because they go thru the drive-thru wheatgrass juicer fast food joint every day for a snack and the drive-thru fruit stand for lunch every day and eat a whole package of dehydrated bananas outta the vending machine and a whole pint of blueberries all at once while watching TV on the couch or whatever. Americans would in general be a whole lot healthier, but still just as fat, and we'd still be listening to psuedo-dietary complaints about rich corporations screwing us over, because its really all about the latter economic part of the story rather than the dietary former part. Roll the presses with "They are intentionally addicting us to dehydrated blueberries!!!"
It should not take you 3 hours to make a sandwich from the time you decide you're hungry. If it does, then there's something fairly seriously wrong about the way you plan and/or execute procedures. To the point where it seems you end up assuming that their horizon for meaningfully planned actions is less than 3 hours.
> 20 minutes for bolognese sauce (only outta a can I'm thinking, unless you're an iron chef or something)
Dice and fry an onion, fry some minced beef, pour a can of chopped tomatoes into it. That should have taken you 10-15 minutes to do all three, tops. The tomatoes will boil pretty much instantly, maybe throw in a handful of chopped mushrooms, bit of bazil, bit of oregano. Drop of tomatoes purée, maybe a little bit of gravy to thicken if you added too much moisture earlier on.
It's not hard to do in 20 minutes.
If you fry onions for 15 minutes or meat for 15 minutes, getting you up to a 30 minute sort of time span, then you're going to be getting dessicated husks out at the other end. You only fry onions for a handful of minutes with hot oil, 'till they start to go transparent, any longer than that and they start to crisp and blacken. As for meat - it'll just go increasingly rubbery. Yuck. Fry it until you can't see any pink bits left, continually spreading it around with the spoon to make sure it's done all the way through, and then it's pretty much done - get your tomatoes in.
> the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions
is the same as, or even necessarily implies, this:
> there is nothing wrong
I would say we're surviving rather sustainably right now, in the sense that we've adapted to our environment well enough where it isn't really a hindrance to our propagation as a species; but I highly doubt it's even close to being optimal. In the same sense that having long life expectancy doesn't necessarily imply having a good quality of life.
The problem is that we're too quick to assume that we're already living in a 'future' where we know everything, and that things have been distilled to be so convenient, that it all had to be 'proven' or something by now, right? It plays out all the time: "Oh look, this conveniently packaged product has 0 carbs! Awesome, I can eat a ton of this now, cause I just heard of a study that said carbs are bad." Except that the product label is misleading because it only accounts for one tiny serving that was specifically chosen to fall below the "0 carb" requirement guidelines (which do have a bit of wiggle room), and that study was actually sponsored by the company who made that product you're now looking at. And this happens all over the place.
It's unfortunate, but it does seem the whole setup we have going right now might be a bit too shaky to really say much conclusive about nutrition. Nutritionists aren't necessarily doctors; Doctors aren't necessarily scientists; and Scientists could always be swayed by the entities funding their research -- research which can go on to live safely in journals probably without many attempts at reproduction, so it's ok to fudge the numbers a tiny bit if you need things to work out a bit more.
Despite what it sounds like, I'm actually not very cynical; I just think we need to gain a bit of perspective about where we are as a species right now. We'll figure it out eventually, but it is admittedly kinda tough to navigate the seas of nonsense out there right now.
>> the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions
> is the same as, or even necessarily implies, this:
>> there is nothing wrong
I think by "nothing wrong" GP meant "people are behaving exactly to specification", not "people are behaving in a way that benefits them". Lots of adaptations are quite wrong for life in XXI century, but humans executing them are acting correctly, with respect to the way their hardware is wired.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...
It doesn't take a conspiracy, or especially evil actors, or even the population acting unnaturally (WTF would that even mean?). All it takes is millions of local optimizations to get us into the state we're in now: optimize a marketing campaign for profitability, optimize a snack for deliciousness, optimize what you stock based on what sells and what takes the longest to spoil, optimize what you eat based on price and healthiness judged on limited and flawed information ("low in fat! just ignore the rest of the ingredients...").
Lots and lots of evidence out there for you on the malleability of the human appetite, from people changing the portions that they eat based on the size of the plate they have in front of them, to the absurd effectiveness of rearranging grocery stores to sell snack food, children's food, etc on top of what people would already buy. We are complicated creatures, and you only need a few percentage points from each of these things to justify doing them.
And again, there is nothing evil in saying "I will make a packaged children's lunch that kids will actually love", and there's nothing wrong with a parent deciding to get that lunchable for their kid. We could try to demonize both parties there (good luck with that), or we could try to change the fitness landscape and figure out ways to at least better stack the odds in favor of healthier eating.
Marketing at kids might not be the best lever, but it is one of the easiest, as it is extremely effective (again, see that article), children are already acknowledged as a protected class when it comes to some types of speech (definitely when regulated by the FCC, and narrowly-defined laws like COPA have been upheld by the supreme court, for better or worse), and there's precedent that the public will accept this (parents are already harried enough by requests for specific brands, and the cigarette ad bans in the 90s have shown that there could easily be support for this sort of thing).
This is so true, not just in this situation, but in many others.
> “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”
I'm not claiming this true or false. However, if this isn't blaming, then what is ?
From the article in Scientific American:
> According to the General Mills letter, if everyone in the US started eating healthfully, it would cost us $503 billion per year! That might affect our ability to pay CEOs like General Mills’ Ken Powell annual compensations of more than $12 million.
Same.
My beefs here: 1) this guys' job is not to keep America thin or healthy. That's the job of Americans. I especially do not want government to dictate what is acceptable food (beyond verifying it is safe - as in not poison or rotten) 2) that $503 billion has to come from somewhere. Given the margins on food companies, that money is not coming from their profits, because it just isn't there. So this is another tax on the poor.
This is nothing but another case of rich people "wondering" why everyone doesn't eat according to the very latest trends that they currently consider in vogue. I know why. So does everyone else. The question is not more interesting than why everyone seems to prefer non-Ferrari cars.
From the same article: > Of course, we don’t necessarily want you to be unhealthy. It’s just that it’s so much more profitable to provide foods that happen to be unhealthy. We’ve been able to industrialize the food system so that we can produce massive amounts of the cheapest ingredients available, in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.
I wonder why we have industrialized the food system ... It happened at the same time starvation disappeared in America, probably just a coincidence.
Oh noh!, that snack is so delicious that I cannot stop eating it.
It really puzzles me that, in America, the 'vote with your wallet' place, people who care to be healthier doesn't just start buying healthier foods.
After all, the USA is characterized for a strong free market no? as soon as demand for healthier food increases, companies surely would start selling this kind of food I think.
The truth is that people don't care (and not only Americans... in Mexico we have the same problems).
And yes, you can overpower those triggers, but we're talking about over a nation's population. Plenty of people care and still end up gaining 2-3 pounds per year, which is really not that much (20-30 calories over your expenditure per day, on average), but 3 pounds a year really adds up over a decade or two or three.
As for increases in the demand for healthier food, I urge you to read that article for how that demand is met, often in ways that are not substantially healthier (if at all).
I'm not convinced you did read the article. It actually mentions the previous health trends. This doesn't push any single health trend. So what exactly do you mean by:
>Now this one.
How does this article relate to the health fads over the years?
UK advice is to give children full fat milk until they are 2, and not skimmed until they are 5, and only then if they have a good diet. This is because of the fat soluble vitamins, and also because children need the energy. As part of a sensible diet full fat milk is fine.
This advice is part of the healthy drinking stuff. Children should have water or full fat milk. If you give them fruit juice dilute it at least 10 parts water to 1 part juice. Use a free-flow beaker, or a straw cup, or a regular cup, rather than a sippy cup.
All this advice from government sounds a bit preachy. But tooth removal is a significant cause for hospitalisation for UK children under 5.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/apr/10/tooth-health-p...)
Tooth care (http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2366.aspx?CategoryID=62&SubC...)
squash and fruit juice better than fizzy drinks? (http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/are-squash-and-pure-fruit-juice-...)
Cups and beakers (http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/pages/drinks...)
I've never received a convincing explanation of why advertising to children shouldn't be generally banned.
(I wish I could say I was wholly joking...)
One uses "think of the children" as an excuse to enact broader control over society. Witness kiddie porn being the argument against P2P and PGP, or trying to censor "satanic" or sexually explicit lyrics, or any of a litany of other such nonsense claims.
The other uses it to remind people that this shit actually, you know, affects the children.
With the kiddie porn issues, generally the number of children being talked about is a very small minority of the total, and usually the issue under discussion has only indirect possibility of helping those children.
However advertisement of poor food choices to children is something almost all children are subjected to on a daily basis, therefore when discussing regulation we can see that the majority of children will be beneficiaries.
Also you can create free speech zones on TV akin to the ones where the security herded protesters while Bush was showing on public events.
You are free to tell whatever you want except in these time slots when you must shut up.
Sometimes these people have the audacity to believe that businesses should be permitted to voluntarily exchange with broadcasters and that parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the content their children consume.
Anyway, I agree. I don't buy this whole "liberty" nonsense either.
If your counter-argument is predicated on businesses freely exchanging with parents to convince them what products to feed their children, I fully agree that they should be free to do that, but that's distinct from advertising to children directly.
Is it really so much to ask that we be allowed to make our own decisions about food? Come on, we're talking about food! Not medicine. Not heavy machinery or automobiles or airplanes or nuclear energy. Food!
I'm not talking about limiting anybody's decisions. I'm talking about regulating interactions between businesses and people who are incompetent to make their own decisions.
You don't have to accept the position of the documentary, that the corporate form is intrinsically a bad thing. But tell me that the marketers behind the "Nag Factor" report don't disgust you.
It is nice to imagine that each family is an island of rationality, well-informed about choices and their eventual effects, never choosing the easy path, immune to marketing and peer pressure. In the real world, things are a little more complex. And the marketers behind reports like "The Nag Factor" make millions by subverting family relations to serve their purposes.
It is good to be skeptical of regulation, but this is so clearly a case where more good can be done than harm.
This is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Just food? Food is something that can be as deadly as drugs, yet is as accepted as air.
>Not medicine.
It's worse than medicine exactly for the sentiment you are expressing. No big deal right? It's so normal it couldn't possibly be abused, right? It's exactly the opposite. We can push poison and it's no big deal because it's "just food".
It's not about forcing people to make decisions. It's about deceiving people into make the wrong decisions for your own profit. That is not innocent business. That is fraud.
Parents who do not wish their children exposed to advertising could use the same rules they would use to prevent their children from being exposed to violent media and profanity.
I think the solution is for parents to simply start thinking of media portraying drug consumption and media portraying Twinkie consumption as logically equivalent, and for parents to stop paying for an information service to deliver them such media (television), and to demand the market provide a new information service which more adequately matches their preferences for media (a kid-oriented Netflix?).
This solution does not require a state to monitor and decode the nutritional value of information transfers.
There are many forms of advertisement which do not assert facts or even include language. An advertisement could simply consist of a graphical fictional portrayal of consumption or brand usage done in a glamorous light.
If something does not include a representation of facts, it does include a potential for fraud, and it would not make sense to regulate it as such solely on a principle of equivalence.
That's sort-of fine, again, when dealing with competent adults. Though plenty of research demonstrates that even competent adults are incapable of avoiding being influenced by good advertising in ways that may very well be against their own interests.
But when targeting children, it takes very little before your slight manipulation gets treated as if it was fact by young children. That it isn't "asserting something as fact" by adult standards is meaningless when discussing advertising that is targeting children.
And as a parent: Short of locking my child in the house with no access to any media, there is no way I can prevent my son from being exposed to advertising that he (at 4 years old) is in no way prepared to objectively assess the fact content of.
That doesn't fly. The nature of advertising is intrusive. I have to sign up for porn cable channel. I have no control about what goes on air on Discovery Kids at 10 PM between the shows. I can choose what magazine I buy. I can't choose which ads are printed between the articles. It goes on...
Dumb mass media advertising could die tomorrow. Every advertising should be like AdWords (query initiated suggestions curated by the channel, not nagging driven by the advertisers). Unfortunately we still have mass media since that's profitable for the agencies mafia, they still get away selling impressions/exposure, not real results.
Children can't consent. So the state has to protect them. One way to do that is by shielding them from things that hurt them.
It happens that junk food hurts them, and a lot of the reason why they eat junk food is because of television ads. Since they can't consent and the state must protect them, we ought to limit advertising unhealthy things to kids.
Or, ya know, their parents.
I'm sure 99.9% of parents, if properly educated, would agree that an overweight or obese child is a bad thing. They might not know what to do about it, and TV ads might turn out to be more powerful than parent's routine meal planning.
It might turn out that asking them to turn off the TV is impractical. Maybe telling them what to feed their kids is even worse. In terms of practical means to reduce obesity, most parents would not oppose limiting TV advertising to children.
Besides, the state is parents. No big deal.
While I'm for reducing the power of the state, protection of children is not something society can abdicate from without severe negative effects.
Sadly I don't think there is any way to come to any real, objective answer on this issue. It is one, IMO, that will cause conflict as long as there are people.
But isn't it still up to the parents to decide what to buy?
There's a campaign in my country (Brazil) to ban/regulate all sorts of advertising to children, and I've heard some parents who support it claim (essentially) that they can't say "no" to their children. As someone who grew up in a lower-middle-class family and understood very early that I couldn't have all the toys, or even all the toys my slightly higher-middle-class classmates had, I find that trend rather bizarre.
Why should it be illegal for children to drink alcohol? Their parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the beverages their children consume.
Why should it be illegal for an adult to have sexual intercourse with a minor? The parents should be permitted to make their own choices with regard to the sexual behavior of their own children.
Down with the meddling of the state! Our freedom is at stake!
I think you mean this to be sarcastic and obviously wrong, but many states in the US permit parents to give minors alcohol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Underage_consumption_map_2...) Some states permit this anywhere (including in pubs), others restrict it to the home. This is considered entirely reasonable by many, dare I say most, people.
The point, of course, is that parents can make a meaningful decision about whether they'll give booze to their kids a lot more easily than they can do the same for exposing their kids to advertisement.
Plus, I'm pretty sure that, even in those states, you could get in some sort of legal trouble for giving whiskey to a 2-year old. Obviously, we can't claim similar level of damage when it comes to advertising, but we don't seem to be willing to look more closely into it, either.
Yes, it is a damn shame when reality gets in the way of your strawmen...
Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and South Carolina all allow minors to drink alcohol on private property without the consent of their parents.
In several states the only way you could get in trouble for giving whiskey to a 2-year old is if you gave it in sufficient quantities that child endangerment became clear. Letting your kid to take a small sip of whiskey under supervision to convince the kid that he wants nothing more to do with it is reasonable and legal in many areas.
I'm not disagreeing with you; what annoys me is that the people who suddenly claim to support business independence from heavy government regulation remain silent until some new law is proposed.
If there is a problem with banning businesses from advertising from children, then there is a problem with the FTC today, not tomorrow, because they already heavily regulate advertising, including what you can show to children. In the US government agencies have vast reaching legal authority to create and enforce their own rules. When there is a scandal they answer to elected representatives, but otherwise? Not so much.
I know I cannot already, since I grew up without cable television and had most of my childhood televised entertainment provided for me through public broadcasting and rented/bought VHS. I'll admit that my circumstances were unusual though.
Look, shared cultural nostalgia is great, and all, but I'm not sure that makes for a good reason to allow advertizing to kids.
That's not to say good kids' stuff doesn't exist, but I see nothing wrong with just murdering the whole model of Media-Driven Consumption, from food to toys to fashion, in its sleep. With a knife.
It's bad, and society should feel bad for allowing it.
Does that mean that TV shows targeted to children can't have advertising? Goodbye kids TV (not all of it is bad). Venue aside, what are the signs of being targeted to children? Show too many kids in the frame, the wrong color scheme, the wrong narration style or fonts? How close can you get?
We talked about "airtightness" in the taxation thread, but I'm realizing there's another issue. If the law isn't carefully defined, it could be possible to interpret nearly any advertising as being targeted, in part at least, to children. This is the kind of thing that will slide toward more restriction under the pressure of various kinds of activists, once we get the idea that we can ban advertising based on its audience.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/fastfood-logos-...
Anyway, "advertising to children" is already specifically defined and regulated in many countries. The question is simply how far to take those regulations under existing definitions.
Plenty of kids' TV is decent stuff, but almost all of it is still obnoxiously commercial. I remember thinking so as a child (the tendency of plastic toys to break into shitty little useless pieces probably helped make me an anti-capitalist, down the line).
So I see very little wrong with just outright banning advertising to children and shifting the creative effort over into "whole family" genres that don't just make up a new way to babysit your kids without paying a babysitter.
Do you have any reason to believe the experts know better what is good for one's health? Do they have large scale studies properly done? (I mean not on rats but on humans - it's kinda tough to force them to eat only what's prescribed during a study, and you can't follow them all day long for years) Do you want so much to reduce customer choice and force your thoughts on them? This is the polar opposite to freedom, and based on a flawed methodology.
There are some evidence that a given regime or another may be beneficial for a given disease, but nothing convincing yet to the best of my knowledge when taking into account all the diseases (you don't get to hand pick the diseases you'll get).
IMHO, the proper methodology would require a large scale datamining operation along with biological tests and proper outcome monitoring. We just don't have all the technology to do that yet on say at least 10 million humans for 10 years (and that wouldn't be large scale - there are 6 billions of us, and with a longer lifespan!).
10 millions over 6 billions would be a 0.0016 ie 0.16% sample - with such a small sample on only 1/7 of the human lifespan, I wish you good luck to anyone willing to take into account genetic polymorphism, intolerance to some food (milk, gluten) etc. It will just be an exercice in "manually correcting" so many things that the end result should not be trusted.
Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't.
To quote Djikstra, I'd say such laws and rules are just the root of all evil - premature optimization!!!
EDIT: Downvotes as always. I find that downvoting for a disagreement is not fair play. You don't like my opinion? I would be delighted to be proved wrong, with facts please.
We can't experiment directly on humans - we can only look for correlations, which always causes trouble with determining causality. Biological questions are inherently complicated, so any hypothesis is necessarily little more than a stab in the dark, even if we had the ability to compensate for genetic variation et cetera, which we most certainly don't. Large-scale studies are expensive, time-consuming, difficult to organize, and would inevitably end up politicized from 200 different directions, and then driven into the ground in the next campaign season.
In short, any and all dietary studies are doomed to be 99% failures.
But that 1% is important. I don't think there's much question that we have a better understanding today, of what constitutes healthy food, than we did 50 years ago. We know, in particular, that foods rich in certain substances (I don't want to try to classify them all in one or two words, because I don't study this stuff and would get it wrong - I'm talking about tradition "junk foods" and sweets, like cupcakes and potato chips.), are strongly correlated with a wide variety of health issues, the incidence of which has increased over the last several decades. Furthermore, these foods are inherently attractive to children, and (perhaps more controversially?) display limited addictive properties.
Yeah, our knowledge is limited, and yeah, we'll have missteps. But I don't think this is "premature optimization" - the program's running really slowly, and everyone's complaining about it. We don't understand a lot of why it takes so long to finish, but there is something we can do that would probably make it at least 5% faster. Why not give it a shot, and then go back to profiling?
Oh, and have an upvote, for contributing to the conversation. Because that's the etiquette around here, although some seem to have forgotten.
It is quite valid - if we have a strong suspicion on something, it could be helpful to give a shot.
I'm just concerned we don't know how strong our suspicion is, which turns that into a bet (more on that later)
The real problem IMHO is that this bet will certainly prevent or stall proper studies for a long time afterwards.
Take for example LSD - there are many results suggesting it might be effective on depression. Yet it was banned, which means once we have the technology to conduct a real large scale study, we may not have enough data points as we would have if it had not been banned (thanks to recreational users)
I mean, it is not ethical to willfully expose human to known dangerous drugs, yet if they take it wilfully by themselves or by mistake, it's a great source of data: for example, pharmacovigilence collects accidental use of drugs by pregnant mothers to guesstimate the toxicity on the fetus or the LD50 on humans)
This is just an example, but you can see how it might scale, basically we are taking bets, and it hampers research.
Also, it is quite philosophical. Personally, I'm against coffee due to its addictive potential and it's social image, yet it would be wrong for me to say there are no positive outcomes linked to it, or that on average it might have positive health benefit. I just don't know. There are many contradictions and I remember reading an article on how there seems to be time trends in negative or positive studies result, with an oscillation. (which would suggest that our research results are biaised by our perception)
An outright ban on caffeine, like on LSD, even if it might be a) coherent with my refusal, and b) more comfortable to me since I know I wouldn't be accidentally exposed to coffee (ex: in a soda), would certainly hamper further research, which would be detrimental if there was after all a positive health benefit on average - ie it would deprive me of future data which could help me change my mind.
IMHO, with bad data, taking bet with one's health is acceptable (if at no cost for the health system). Taking bets with the other people health - aka banning or mandating, is wrong.
EDIT: I just noticed your answer. Sorry if I improperly stated my intend. The goal was not to enter into a philosophical debate, but to have counter arguments. I am interested in either proving or disproving my thoughts - both are fine. Therefore, to avoid sparking a debate, I will not reply to your comment. Your answer however was very helpful and helped me clarify my thoughts. I agree with your points. Thanks a lot, thanks also for telling me your position and your data on coffee. For my position on coffee, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632696 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632995 - I'd rather not say more, or a coffee fanboy may start a debate.
> I mean, it is not ethical to willfully expose human to known dangerous drugs, yet if they take it wilfully by themselves or by mistake, it's a great source of data: for example, pharmacovigilence collects accidental use of drugs by pregnant mothers to guesstimate the toxicity on the fetus or the LD50 on humans)
The issue at hand isn't the subject's consent, I assume - the issue is our act of encouraging an individual to do something that might be harmful. Otherwise, there would be nothing wrong with performing studies on heroin use, as long as the appropriate warning labels were affixed. (I'm just assuming you're not a hard-core libertarian. If you are: just have a private company enforce the ban, and all will be well ;P )
I think, though, that it's also unethical to allow /others/ to knowingly encourage an individual to do something harmful. I recognize this is pretty controversial (if I were religious, I'd be a pain in the ass), but it means that if we are reasonably certain that item X is harmful, banning or restricting advertising is a must.
I also think it's ethically preferred to, where feasible act to discourage others (without coercion) from doing things harmful to themselves. Government- and charity-run nutrition programs, PSAs, etc.
That's our ethical dilemma, I guess, or at least mine. On the one hand, long-term scientific knowledge may be more rich and valuable if nothing is done. On the other, there is a moral imperative to take actions which might limit that long-term knowledge.
I'm inclined to assert, boldly and without factual basis, that there will be "enough" people who disregard the advertisements and PSAs, that scientists won't be much bothered by the missing data. Remember it's not like LSD; we're not banning the substance, just the encouragement. People smoke plenty of cigs, even though they're not advertised (and there's abundant negative advertising).
(By the way, I'm also very against coffee, having bad personal experiences with an individual who's behavior was/is noticeably negatively affected by the stuff. I'd support normalizing drug laws by lumping hyper-junk foods, caffeine, alcohol, cigs, pot, and other mildly harmful items of varying addictiveness into one big "restricted advertising" category, and using the taxes to send out occasional PSAs.)
And the first two paragraphs of your comment read like a conspiracy nut's rant. It significantly lowers your credibility and quite justifies downvoting you for making assertions that contradict scientific consensus without providing any supporting evidence.
Because it is killing people
Basically, at the moment we don't know for sure what's best, and we can't.
We may not know what is best, but we do know some things that are extremely harmful.
We know that eating extremely calorie-dense foods is a contributing factor to obesity. Beside the many studies that show this (which may or may not meet your somewhat unusual standards) we can rely on chemistry and biology.
It's easy to calculate how many calories someone eats based on their diet. It's easy to calculate how many calories they burn based on their lifestyle.
If the amount they eat is in excess of what they burn, they gain weight. In children some of that goes towards growing, but it's easy to calculate that too based on average growth weights.
Yes. You don't need to look at the effects of a particular diet because you can be reductionist as a proxy. For example, examining the effect of a meat-heavy diet on people is difficult, as you said. But if you know what meat does in a diet (correlates with high cholesterol, e.g.) you can examine the effect of high cholesterol on a diet, and if you find out it's bad you could determine that eating in a way which contributes to high cholesterol is generally a bad idea.
They're not. Wheat contains gluten, a known gastrointestinal irritant, and celiac and IBD patients know that wheat is one thing you want to stay away from. It can also trigger inflammation and cause serious health problems for anyone with an inflammatory condition.
Perhaps proposing gluten-free foods is a better idea.
In addition, the guidelines for "advertising to children" are quite peculiar, and I don't know why children should be advertised to at all. What even constitutes advertising to children is not quite clear either.
Most people just live with the stomach discomfort because it's difficult to try a gluten-free diet. And dismissive comments like yours also aren't helpful in motivating people to experiment.
I lived with stomach issues for 30+ years, and after trying a myriad of solutions, from eliminating dairy to exercise, I finally tried eliminating gluten from my diet. That did the trick.
A second problem is that there is a whole spectrum of how intolerant people can be to gluten. Some people will simply find they are a little more constipated or gassy the next day if they eat gluten and some will find that they need to urgently visit the restroom 30 minutes after consuming it. Neither of those groups of people would be considered celiacs. Many of the people in those groups go through live oblivious as to the cause.
Unfortunately, ignorance like that of lysol's grandparent comment dominates this debate. It's amazing and a bit scary the number of otherwise intelligent people who blindly assume that what is true for them is true for everyone. It's as if the mere fact that some people prefer to avoid gluten in their diets is a personal affront to them. It baffles me.
I thought I didn't have any issues with gluten until I stopped eating it for a month. Now if I eat gluten I get a headache almost immediately afterwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet#Popularity_and...
"One study examined the effect of ω-5 gliadin, the primary cause of wheat dependent exercise/aspirin induced anaphylaxis, and found increased permeability of intestinal cells caused by this gliadin and another wheat albumin."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_sensitivity#Gluten_toxic...
"Another line of research shows gliadin binds a chemoattractant receptor and causes increases of a factor that destroys tight junctions. These junctions prevent leakage around the cells that line the small intestine, resulting in the leaking of food proteins into the body."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_sensitivity#Gluten_toxic...
> A 2011 panel of celiac experts concluded that there is a condition related to gluten other than celiac disease and named it "non-celiac gluten sensitivity".[51] however, for those without celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, the diet is unnecessary.
The second and third studies are a bit too specific. Can you break this down into a list of effects on every day people?
I think this quote sums it up best: "Gluten intolerance is one of the most popular self-diagnoses because of its over-expanded list of potential symptoms. The gluten scare is mostly an overblown hippy-fueled movement."
Gluten causes gastrointestinal symptoms in subjects without celiac disease: a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21224837
On a visual analog scale, patients were significantly worse with gluten within 1 week for overall symptoms (P=0.047), pain (P=0.016), bloating (P=0.031), satisfaction with stool consistency (P=0.024), and tiredness (P=0.001).
http://fox13now.com/2013/04/26/boy-11-dies-after-severe-alle...
Anaphylaxis from food can take a while (up to an hour or two I believe) to set in. When it does, it can cut off an airway, and then you're basically racing against suffocation with an epipen. If the kid's outside at recess or in the bathroom alone or just slow to tell a teacher, you're in a bad situation.
I don't know how much gluten it takes to trigger some of the scarier symptoms of IBD or if any of them are lethal in children. My guess is they're not, just because I haven't heard of gluten bans in schools.
It was... bad. Another classmate also ended up hospitalized with a celiac diagnosis. Whether it was brought on by food, I don't know, but the prevalence of wheat in a standard American diet could lead one to believe so.
It definitely shouldn't.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10200001
This includes tree nut allergies as well. The short of it is that 0.6% of children under 18 in this study were found to have peanut or tree nut allergies. If this is true, that means many schools will probably have fewer than 5 students with the allergy.
In this case, outright bans seem to be more about reducing potential liability in the face of activist or litigious parents than they are actually addressing a student health issue.
My understanding of this type of reaction is that it doesn't require a large volume of the allergen to cause a very serious response. Trace amounts can be very dangerous. So it seems impossible to guarantee prevention by banning foods.
In my opinion, kids need to be aware of what they can and cannot eat, and the school must be prepared to actually deal with a reaction situation instead of just saying 'look, we banned peanut butter, what else do you expect?'
Even with celiac disease: that just eliminates certain grains.
Comparative vitamin B-6 bioavailability from tuna, whole wheat bread and peanut butter.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6655507
the high phytate content of whole grains binds to minerals such as iron, calcium, magnesium, and zinc in the gastrointestinal tract, significantly reducing their absorption by the body
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673673...
EFFECTS OF PURIFIED PHYTATE AND PHYTATE-RICH BREAD UPON METABOLISM OF ZINC, CALCIUM, PHOSPHORUS, AND NITROGEN IN MAN
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1657026
Effects of dietary fiber and phytic acid on mineral availability
It has long been recognized that high cereal grain consumption induces vitamin D deficiency in various animal species, including primates, our closest animal relatives. By studying the fate of radio-labelled vitamin D, researchers observed significantly increased excretion of vitamin D in healthy human volunteers fed sixty grams of wheat fiber daily.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6299329
Reduced plasma half-life of radio-labelled 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in subjects receiving a high fiber diet.
Full analysis:
I'd definitely be interested in a citation if you have one! I find this really interesting, especially since I've accidentally cut red meat out of my diet recently (despite enjoying it quite a lot, so I don't want to be ill next time I have it!), so I'm wondering on what sort of timescales these effects happen (both losing and gaining the ability to digest a certain food group).
Lots of people aren't like me though, and for them I do not believe there is any particularly well documented issues when it comes to gluten.
^Where 'seems to have' is self-produced anecdata: I spend months working through food group diet permutations (starting with removing basically except lightly cooked vegetables, miso soup and congee :-/) in an attempt to zero in on what was causing near-permanent (~10am->sleeping) acid reflux I had developed. Conclusions point fairly strongly to gluten, which I now mostly stay away from (I still eat it occasionally, zomg burgers, I just make sure breads/pasta/etc isn't the base of my diet).
But both problems happen all over the world.
The last time I saw my cousin she looked and acted anorexic, meanwhile raving about her new gluten free vegan lifestyle. She looked terrible. My other cousin who suffers from narcolepsy was on the same diet raving about all her new energy while falling asleep at the table. Meanwhile I went from being the fattest person in the family to the most in shape in less than 10 months. I usually jokingly order a side of gluten these days, just to piss the gluten freers off.
Tip for American grocery shoppers: Don't hit the isles. Stay within the vegetable and fruits section, shop there, only there, then leave. That is a healthy diet. Usually there are nuts and meat in that section. Don't be looking for the gluten free potato chips and cookies, that isn't healthy.
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"The current international Codex Alimentarius standard allows for 20 parts per million of gluten in so-called "gluten-free" foods" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet
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It's enough to prevent exacerbation of symptoms for those with gluten sensitivity, but it's not a complete removal.
Celiacs don't even eat food prepared in the same production environment as foods that contain gluten. The sentiment that these people are deluding themselves because their very careful planned and meticulously controlled gluten free diets still contain gluten is preposterous.
I think you just contradicted yourself entirely.
As someone who has tried to hack his way out of unhealthy eating (and succeeded somewhat), I've found that the biggest grocery shopping tip is to go to the store just after a meal.
I really couldn't say it any better than this. Vegetables people. Get more of them. Fresh ones. Learn to enjoy onions and mushrooms.
Yes, and anyone allergic to strawberries know they should be avoided as well.
Apparently a journalist asked one family in each of 20 different countries to gather all of the food they bought in one week and take a picture. It's a fascinating look at global diets. The UK is even more disturbing than the US.
On the USA table, there is literally nothing fresh. Every food is packaged, plus McDonalds, Burger King, 2 pizzas... Plus Diet Coke of course.
And in Germany, again looks like a lot of healthy food there but then there's like 4 bottles of wine and 30 bottles of beer. Uh, that's a weeks worth of booze is it?
And finally, with Chad. Three bags of something (rice I suppose) and a bottle of water. No fresh food, like the Americans. But compare the two pics side by side - wow.
But it's very interesting anyway, thanks for the link!
There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is caused by the government. We subsidize the growing of industrial corn, soy, and wheat. These are the primary ingredients of junk food -- and junk food is significantly cheaper because of these subsidies.
The subsidies provided for growing fruits and vegetables are extremely low compared to the subsidies for these big '3' ingredients.
There are reason Coca Cola is made with corn syrup in the US, and real sugar in Mexico. The reason is farm subsidies, which make the cost of corn significantly cheaper, and thus make the cost of a can of Coke much less to produce.
A very simple step to fixing the obesity issue is to change the farm subsidies. The artificial government role in the market should be modified to support the growth of healthy foods, instead of supporting the growth of corn and soy.
Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen due to the political climate that has existed for a long time.
However, in my dream world, here's what I would do:
Gradually transition farm subsidies away from big industrial farms, to small local farms that produce a variety of crops. Over 10-15 years, all farms over a certain size would no longer be eligible for subsidies. Instead, small farms that produce and sell food to their local population would be eligible for subsidies. And they would get more for producing a diverse crop, and for certain organic practices. Ideally the cheap food would eventually be produced by tens of thousands of small farms that serve their local communities and are accountable to their local communities.
Plus, a huge network of local farms would result in a very resilient food system -- one of the primary goals of food subsidies.
The chips will last a few weeks. Vegetables will last a few days.
Neither of these are nearly as big of a concern if you get your food from a local farmer. The health of the consumer is not much of a concern, except in terms of marketing.
Right now, it is more expensive to buy local food from a farmers market than it is to buy industrial produced shipped from thousands of miles away. This should change, and it should change by shifting subsidies away from large industrial farms to small local farms.
Full stop.
The more you read about this, the more you realize it is so. Government advice and regulation about healthy eating has likely been a contributing factor to a huge explosion in chronic disease. Enough is enough, improve and expand mandatory food labeling and stay out of the rest.
Meanwhile, no one should market anything to kids, if you really think about it.
For instance, we know that carbohydrates consist of a ton of readily available energy. And if you eat more energy than you burn, you store the energy as fat. Bad? Maybe not, but it can easily get you to a bad state of health.
We also know that there are vitamins and minerals in leafy greens that we really do need. Since they are easy to eat and also contain fiber, yet are low in energy, they are very healthy.
My best advice is to pick up on these sorts of tidbits, not the latest diet/trend/fad.
We actually do. In simple terms, if you eat more than you can use, you will gain weight. It is slightly more complicated. I can explain more, but the web will do a better job than I can.
The talk about leafy greens is that, we know they are low calorie, have essential vitamins and minerals, and provide fiber. Thus, they are definitely good for you. They don't harm you, they provide sustenance and other benefits and so your statement that we don't know what is healthy is just false.
There are a small number of people with a bacteria that helps them gain weight. There are people with a bacteria that helps them not gain weight. There's a small number of endocrine disorders that make weight gain easy. There are some medications (eg some anti-psychotics) that increase weight gain (and it's not just increasing input).
But even with all of that most weight gain is simple: people eat more calories than they use.
The stuff about satiety doesn't address calories in, it just talks about feelings of fullness.
What we don't know so much about is why some people over eat, and over eat to the extent they do. When a bariatric patient in a specialist weight-loss hospital smuggles in packets of crackers and jars of peanut butter (by hiding them under the folds of fat on their bodies) we can say that there's something weird going on.
But again, 500 lb patients are not the norm and that kind of eating isn't the norm.
Most people just don't know how much they're eating; don't know how many calories they're eating; and don't get enough exercise.
And yeah, some friends and I have tested on ourselves eating 4,000 calories without significantly altering exercise levels, and anecdotally have not gained weight.
There is a difference between protein calories and carbohydrate calories and how each is processed, but beside that, calories represent energy. Energy that must be used. Otherwise, it will be stored.
Thank you. Much appreciated.
>Just because something works doesn't mean your hypothesis as to WHY it works is true.
But in general, it actually does. This is how science works. You get an idea that doing something will produce a result. If you do that thing and see the expected result, that indicates a successful hypothesis. After that the conversation devolves into existential questions on whether humans can really know.
Well to get initial data, you must have some guidance in the data you decide to collect. There must be structure, a control, standardized values. You can't form a proper experiment without first having a hypothesis. Your goal is not to prove it correct regardless of the results, your goal is to gain insight on your hypothesis base on the results. I never said you must prove your hypothesis correct. But the goal is certainly to assess the accuracy of your estimation.
Your comment is really just a strawman tactic anyway. Thread derailed.
The other issue is a crude engineering rule of thumb (why isn't it a dietary rule of thumb?) is something like one hundred calories per day, every day, equals one hundred pounds of fat per decade, either plus or minus. Very few people get fat (or thin) in a week or a month or even a year. It takes a fairly heroic effort for a woman to just gain baby weight in 9 months. Try four thousand calories per day for a decade and get back to us, if someone can roll you to the keyboard at that time (unless you're all pro atheletes or lumberjacks or something).
Example. Given gluten-intolerant subject. Feed them 4000 calories of whole wheat bread and they lay on the couch all day feeling kinda "off" and only burn 2000 calories BMR so they get fat. How did you feel today? "Eh about normal". Didn't you lay around all day and take an afternoon nap? "Well, yeah, now that you mention it..." Then feed them 4000 calories of steak and they get all hyper and burn 5000 calories going on a marathon bike ride or whatever and get thin. How did you feel today? "Eh about normal". Didn't you get all hyper and exercise all day like a madman? "Well, yeah, now that you mention it..."
Obviously the real world delta is not 2000 calories a day. But a delta of 100 calories a day, which is NOT a heck of a lot, adds up over a year to 35 thousand calories or a delta, plus or minus, of about 10 pounds of fat per year. Repeat for a couple decades and you get either really fat or really skinny.
You then give two examples. The first is where someone eats more calories than they burn, and gain weight. The second is where they eat less calories than they burn, and lose weight.
Please, how does this mean that calories in vs calories out is useless?
You appear to be ignoring the part of my post where I say that satiety is important for losing weight, but that it doesn't change the basic calories in vs calories out.
> But a delta of 100 calories a day, which is NOT a heck of a lot, adds up over a year to 35 thousand calories or a delta, plus or minus, of about 10 pounds of fat per year. Repeat for a couple decades and you get either really fat or really skinny.
Yes. We seem to agree? Eating more calories than you burn means you put on weight. Eating less calories than you burn means you lose weight.
(In) - (out) = (delta aka gain/loss)
Some background is that both are about the same, it takes a decade or so to swing from anorexia to the worlds fattest man. Lets say the (delta) represents a percentage of (In) / (Out) of perhaps 110% for a pregnant woman with quadruplets to maybe 99% very long term for an anorexic.
Watch the error propagation. The order of the (delta) error percentage is roughly equal to the order of whichever error is bigger, in or out.
I claim the percentage error of (Out) greatly exceeds 10%. Saying more than 50% makes me uncomfortable. Probably the true value is well in excess of 25%. This means any estimation or modification of (In) less than 25% is lost in the noise of the (Out) signal making the calculated delta meaningless. Garbage in equals garbage out.
Very few people screw around with their diet on a long term average more than 25%. Therefore any change they make will be lost in the noise of output energy level.
The way you get thin is by altering your diet so you are more active. Some diets screw around with your blood sugar, insulin levels, inflammation levels, all that is going to screw around with energy out flow. Large amounts of dairy products make me kinda queasy, so rather than going out for a walk or yard work, its sit on the couch. Large amounts of protein make me feel pretty darn energetic so I walk about more. Certainly the swing exceeds that experienced with having a cold vs being healthy. For some people with gluten issues its probably more like having the flu vs being healthy.
The TLDR is (in)-(out)=(delta) is useless because you need to characterize (delta) to pretty high accuracy to even figure out if your gaining or losing, and outside of a medical facility under observation you cannot characterize (out) accurately enough, or frankly, probably not characterize (in) well enough either unless you stick to industrially produced hyper consistent super processed foods, like all TV dinners every day, or always and only fast food or vending machines.
Rats on a treadmill hooked up to a timer with analytical balance measured food intake and no free will WRT activity, yes that equation could have low enough error bars on both (in) and (out) to be usefully applied to get a realistic value for (delta). Average american diet and lifestyle? Naw all you're going to get as an output is a white noise source, on a medium term large population average anyway.
(Ah I edit in this "real world-ish" example. Lets say skinny 20 yr old dude turns into fat 30 year old dude and he burns about 3000 calories per day to make the math easy. That means he averages a mere 103% of his perfect ratio of (In) vs (Out) where 100% would have resulted in no gain or loss over a decade. I theorize the error bars on (In) exceed three percent unless under constant medical supervision (every apple you ever ate was within 3% of spec? Really?) and the error bars on (Out) exceed twenty five percent, so the delta is meaningless WRT getting this dude either fat or thin. What does work is if his diet makes him sleepy / lazy / queasy / slow / blood sugar high or crash / whatever that screws up his (Out) enough to make him fat. And any change in (Out) is going to be more effective than any change in (In). So eat what makes you healthy, as long as you define healthy as "active" not necessarily classical stereotypical exercising)
Thanks.
Big corporations can make lots of money selling expensive salad dressings if I'm convinced to buy icky tasteless styrofoam iceberg lettuce. Therefore the intense push to get people to eat veg/fruit in the form of salad. "They" might not be selling profitable wheat flour in the form of twinkies anymore, but "they" are selling salad dressing for about the same cost per pound as chicken/beef (depending on dressing and meat cut, etc), gross fake bacon bits, etc.
I occasionally eat salads but eventually I get burned out on the salad dressings (there really aren't that many) and stop for awhile.
The most revolutionary thing you can do is just eat an apple or gnaw on a carrot or bake a potato. No dips or crusts or toppings or any other profit centers. Assuming you already have enough fiber in your diet, run your veg thru a juicer. That really pisses "them" off.
>The most revolutionary thing you can do is just eat an apple or gnaw on a carrot or bake a potato.
Not if your goal is to lose weight. Those three plants are extremely high energy (carbs). If you want to do something "revolutionary", grow your own. Raise your own chickens. Pasture feed them. Eat their eggs. Butcher them. Feed them your vegetable scraps. Plant some apple trees. Eat a dandelion. Your brain is trained to rebel against these companies. All they have to do is encourage you to eat right and soon you'll be eating unhealthy just to "piss them off".
I don't know about "healthy" food, but I'm pretty certain that Cap'n'Crunch Oops All Berries! (which contains 50% sugar and—oops—no berries whatsoever) is the opposite of that.
Better labeling is nice, but I'd rather have a law that says that breakfast cereals should contain at least 50% of cereals.
People instinctively know what's healthy and what isn't. They just have no self-control to pick the healthier one over the unhealthy one.
No study ever has concluded that more information on labels helps people make better decisions.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...
Overwhelmingly I've been amazed to see that most people seem to have no regard whatsoever for their nutrition. Things go into their body but it often has 0 nutricional value.
Also - it's actually really really hard to eat well. Since so many restaurants cater to what people are familiar with, there's next to no alternative for people trying to eat nutritious food.
Not to mention it's expensive. I spend about $1200 a month just at Whole Foods, mostly on organic and raw foods. And that's just for myself.
Pesticides scare me. Especially since I can't be bothered to wash my food before eating it. But as I understand it, if you use pesticides, then the plants don't produce their own natural chemicals that fight off pests and other symbiotic organisms. I don't remember where I read it but according to my research those chemicals are very beneficial part of the total nutriment.
Also, organic foods are nutritionally equivalent to conventionally grown foods according to the most recent research; you may want to reconsider your budgeting on that front.
[1] I've been told this is not the politically correct term, but I'm not sure what the right one is; suggestions welcome! What I mean by this in reality is usually something like "Indian/Chinese/Mexican grocer."
Address the socioeconomic and political factors that create so much poverty in our country, and which also depress income in general.
We evolved to eat meat. The ethics of this I won't touch but the economics are only a sticking point if you assume we must have a poverty-stricken underclass in our country. And by poverty stricken underclass I mean anyone who can't afford a couple of lbs of free range organic meat per day.
Do the math. Because most of our pre-civilization ancestors ate like that all the time. Why can't we afford the same?
And don't say overpopulation. Back of the envelope math says the US could easily produce meat at those levels for around 600 million people. And modern societies have negative population growth in the wealthy demographics.
So isn't the problem just the ever increasing number of people who are being dragged in to poverty?
Then in the 1990s something changed instead of being about new discoveries it began to cover news and to advocate for various causes, even political positions. Then they dropped the Amateur Scientist column.
Why couldn't they stick to science instead of snarky articles like this hectoring every American to eat better? Were they afraid of Omni, Popular Science or Time?
Perhaps this was a good business decision but I have no regrets about canceling my subscription.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/healthful http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/healthy
Kinda/sorta like the difference between affect and effect.
Personally I've never heard of 'healthful'. Looking around Fowler's Modern English Usage suggests preference for 'healthful' is a U.S. thing (an even there it seems people are unaware of it, judging by the comments at a U.S. dictionary site). Fowler's also notes 'healthful' is considered 'old-fashioned and literary' or 'formal' by some teaching dictionaries.
- exercise some. doesn't have to be gym. even walking 30min a day is fine.
- eat fresh food rather than frozen or processed food (hint: it requires cooking)
- drink water, not soda or beer
- Keep things balanced. Ying & yang principle applies basically everywhere. Including food types, salting, sweetening, etc.
then you generally don't need to force diet upon you. you don't need medication. you don't need a "diet plan". you don't need to "hit the gym". you don't need to make extra efforts that you'll revert in 3month. you're also not going to get bulky or a skeleton. you're just going to get normal and healthy.
of course, all the above take some effort. and its true that it's harder to find fresh food or proper food in general in the US than elsewhere, actually.
Going to the gym for an hour, burning a measly 400 calories walking on a treadmill, and then celebrating that with a 800 calorie Smoothie after, is actually making people gain weight not lose.
You can certainly lose weight by doing exercise and keeping your caloric intake constant. It might as well be that out of all people who want to lose weight, only a small % of people have the discipline/volition to follow such a plan. But that's a far cry from "you can't lose weight with exercise".
You called it "caloric intake constant", but that's counting calories, and sounds like a diet to me. And most people unconsciously eat more after a workout. They don't think they do, but they do.
[1] http://www.fitsugar.com/Why-Exercise-Makes-You-Eat-More-2272...
One of my friends is morbidly obese, it's quite tragic. And her nutritionist keeps telling her to "do more exercise". It's such a terrible idea, it would put a lot of stress on her body, be extremely extremely hard work and all for mediocre benefits.
The bulk of weight loss is from correcting your diet. Again the nutritionist advice for her is generally along the lines of allowing her to eat as much sugar (carbs) as she wants but try and stay below some arbitrary limit, which is difficult.
Exercise is necessary for general well being. It doesnt have to be the gym. Walking around is ok.
I also think that people who are extremely overweight generally (unless they have a specific sickness causing this) are simply too weak minded to over come this. For these, the only way I know of is to educate them as young age. Ie, the ones that are lost are already lost. Some will overcome their weak mind and eventually get healthy again, but a vast number will not. And facts will back this up, unfortunately - I don't even think this needs a citation :/
Let's also ignore the fact that most of the food industry's processed low-fat crap was a direct result of the government's earlier attempts to tell us that fat was evil and shove the food pyramid down our throats.
There is a point here lots of people, especially western countries, and most especially Americans miss. So many people think government regulation takes away freedom and unfettered capitalism gives it. People whose own interests aren't even represented by that idea. And we all suffer because of this.
1) eating a plant-based diet is healthier (Mark Bittman), or at the very least, eating natural things (Michael Pollan) 2) eating meat costs more, and it threatens the environment (http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/commentary/...), including in China (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/11/china-meat.html) 3) for that matter, others foods besides meat that come from animals (ex: dairy) have the same effect. Roughly 75% of the world has some degree of lactose intolerance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance) 4) nutrition is more than calorie counting -- it is about getting nutrients in the diet (http://supplementsos.com/blog/how-to-actually-eat-healthily-...) Lentils play an important part as a quality, cheap source of protein. 5) there are ways to make good food affordable to the people who can least afford it (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/jul/28/new-mobile-food-truck-s...) In fact, the idea (or 'business model') of making necessary things affordable to the people who can least afford it as been around for 50 years (http://infinitevisionaries.com/) 6) a very important factor to incentivize people to switch diets is knowing that the food will taste good. While it might involve a slight change in cultural diet, this is absolutely possible (http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-dos...) 7) the vegetarian diet of Tamils in Tamil Nadu (India) and Tamil Eelam (Ceylon) is wide & varied, largely dairy-free, and mostly gluten free. This largely applies for the other South India states, too. The diet consists in large parts of lentils, leafy greens, vegetables, and spices. 8) in particular, the diet in Tamil Nadu/Tamil Eelam of 50 years ago should be examined, which is before the Green Revolution occurred in India. Back then, many of the healthier grains eaten in large quantities by a large swathe of people (millet, sorghum, finger millet, etc.). 9) An unintended consequence of the Green Revolution in India and China in the 1950's is that, at least in India, many of the healthier grains eaten in large quantities by a large swathe of people (millet, sorghum, finger millet, etc.) were dropped in favor of the far less nutritional white rice, which was for many just a once-in-a-while treat. In North India, the favored, newly-proliferated crop of choice was wheat. (Both rice and wheat are dreadfully water-intensive.) Brown rice doesn't exist there, but in the region, only people in Kerala and Tamil Eelam eat a red rice that is similarly nutritious. Of course, this is said to be not as nutritious as things like finger millet or "thinai" (similar to quinoa). 10) People talk about the importance of vitamin B12, and that you can only get it from animal based sources. But this diet has been around for 4,500 years, people have been just fine. (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/01/indus_civili...) I'm sure people have been vegetarian for at least 2,000 years of that, if I judge based on the Thirukkural (2,000 year old literature of virtuous maxims, of which 10 talk about not eating meat). There are athletes and body-builders in America who are vegetarian and vegan.
So I really think that a restaurant (or at the least, food truck) should pop up selling a variety of vegan Tamil food at a very low price. This would solve so many problems. I've been thinking of this for a long while now, but I would be just happy if someone 'steals' the idea and runs with it.
(note: I'm sure there are other ways to achieve low cost, high nutrition, vegan diets in varied, tasty ways, but this is part of my birth tradition. You can treat that as a disclaimer / proof of authenticity. For me, personally, I'm fairly lactose-intolerant, and I'm wondering now that I might be gluten intolerant. I've been trying to be more vegan/vegetarian for the past 5 months, and it's helped a lot in my finances. It hasn't negatively impacted exercising. I'm hoping to see more change once I start cooking!...)
http://saywhatmichaelpollan.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/in-defe...
> Pollan’s central thesis is that introducing science into our food system has done more harm than good and that the best thing for all of us would be to go back to eating a more traditional diet. It’s fair to point out that nutritional science has led to some mistakes (such as recommendations to replace saturated fats with hydrogenated oils), but Pollan devotes too much of his effort to dismantling his own shallow caricature of science.
It is, in short, the Naturalistic Fallacy run wild, which is quite common when the topic of nutrition comes up. In short: Something being 'natural' is orthogonal to it being 'good' or even 'good to eat'.
http://courses.csusm.edu/fallacies/naturalistic.htm
> Roughly 75% of the world has some degree of lactose intolerance
Which means nothing to the people who don't have it, whose ancestors evolved to retain lactose tolerance into adulthood for the simple reason that milk is good food, full of proteins, fats, sugars, and vitamins that are just as important to an adult as a child. Just because the default First World diet induces a calorie surplus at this point instead of a calorie deficit does not negate any of milk's benefits.
> nutrition is more than calorie counting -- it is about getting nutrients in the diet
Everyone knows this. That doesn't mean most First World people need supplements, because they don't.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/supplements/NU00198
> If you're generally healthy and eat a wide variety of foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, low-fat dairy products, lean meats and fish, you likely don't need supplements.
> Which means nothing to the people who don't have it
So in the case of lactose intolerance, what's interesting, in fact, is the environmental impact of the fact that the people in the Western world are largely fine with lactose. As the PBS NewsHour story about the causes and effects of China's meat consumption habits shows, Western habits are having a significant influence in the diets of the younger generation in developing countries. The effects of large-scale pollution of water resources is horrific, and competition for water resources is, after oil, the next source of conflict in the world. So yes, it will affect everyone.
> Everyone knows this. That doesn't mean most First World people need supplements, because they don't.
Sure, First World people don't need supplements, if they have a varied diet. In North America, that's a big if. There are cultural impediments to that varied diet, even for those with the means to afford it. But for many lower-income families, and especially those living in low-income neighborhoods, they experience the "food desert" problem. And they lack the same access to quality foods as more affluent people. That is a systemic issue related to how society (via government) deals with the problem. And the economics of the prices of foods is, in some part, related to the energy requirements which is related to the 90% energy loss up each level of the food chain. There is an environmental impact there.
btw: I just threw in the names of Bittman and Pollan as representatives of the ideas of plant-based and natural diets. It's not like they invented the ideas; they're just the most recognizable cheerleaders for them at the moment.
The discomfort stemming from lactose intolerance comes from bacteria digesting the sugar and making gas, etc. The discomfort (and further problems) from gluten is well understood to be an immune response in some instances (Celiacs, wheat allergies), and still thought to be an immune response in most remaining cases.
It reminds me a little bit the situation with the banks. Somehow when times were good and everybody and their uncle could get a loan everybody loved Goldman Sachs CEO. But now, when it is pay off time people just hate the banks. Just shows a hell lot about people's attitudes (me! me! me!)
The same with the food industry. It's not my fault I eat like pig day and night, it's because the commercial on TV told me to do it. Sure, and if they told you to eat shit, you would eat shit, right?
Socialism is the love of blaming somone for your own failures. Free people not only make decisions, but also take responsibility for them. People who don't, should live for some time in a country where 'Dear Leader' will decide for them how they should live their lives because there is no difference to them anyway.
I'm tired of this BS. Used to have a coworker who was eating all the time. She had a small refrigerator in her cubicle. And of course, yeah, she wants universal healthcare. So I and others will pay for her bad choices. This is just immoral.