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Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

The advent of limitless food in the first world has created the need for a skill to focus on healthy food and ignore the junk. Those that can't slowly poison their bodies.

Now in addition to that for the first time in history we are presented with unlimited information. It will be interesting to see the negative effects that come about for those unable to focus on the right things and ignore the junk.

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The problem with unlimited information - it's getting harder and harder to tell what's good and what's bad for you:

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken

Take a look at the chart that's titled "Everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer". A picture that's worth a thousand words.

We need better science. But I don't know how that's going to happen.

We need corporations to stop funding shady research, or at least be more upfront when they do. You might be skeptical if the Association of Nebraska Corn Growers publishes a study saying HFCS is healthier than cane sugar, but you wouldn't bat an eye if they paid an organization named America First to publish it for them. And then paid the WSJ to put it on the front page. And then paid the FDA to put it into the food pyramid.

PG's "submarine" isn't a fiction piece (http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).

Very nice reading on PR. Thanks for sharing.

There wasn't exactly a food shortage in the 1980s either (and to take an extreme example, Japan has a food supply that's equally abundant and much lower rates of obesity). I think we need to look at more things to explain the current circumstances. For instance, how many households were traditional two-parent, single-earner homes in the past versus now? I would expect such households to eat fewer prepared foods. What about the kinds of foods supermarkets are selling? Ads? You get the picture. The abundance of food alone isn't enough to explain things.

Sure would be nice if that unlimited information was universally accessible and accompanied by unlimited opportunities to actually implement anything learned from said info... because it sounds to me like your comment is basically saying "It's their own fault, let's watch them fail" without offering up anyway to help correct the issue.

No, I think his point is before we had lots of food, but a lot of it was bad and because not everyone can tell the difference, we've paid a great price.

Now we have lots of information, and a lot of it is bad, and a lot of people can't tell the difference. What price will we pay for that?

Interesting analogy. But I was hoping that medicine and education would work against that trend.

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