olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old

Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and easily.

Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store.

There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response.

if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it

conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola

your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it

in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely

The amount of calories available per capita has gone up by c. 20% over the last 60 years.

Meanwhile, the amount of fat available has gone up 40%, while protein supplies have risen closer to c. 10%.

It is absolutely anti-data to imply that previous generations had access to the same amount/mix of food/calories as we do today.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply

> Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access.

It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

people hoard good food in their vaults while giving other people their bad food as quickly as they can, because the government has decreed that bad food is equivalent to good food?

that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food

It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther.

The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.

>It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s.

You probably need to define what you mean by average blue collar worker as there are many ways of looking at this data (and it is often difficult to even find the estimated levels of transfer payments being given). For example, this Fed chart shows CPI adjusted median household income rising from around 57 thousand to around 75 thousand today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’ve always assumed the problem is that price increases don’t count as inflation if they come with a “quality” increase, but that doesn’t help someone who now needs to spend more to survive.

So it can both be true that inflation-adjusted wages are rising and it is becoming harder to make ends meet.

A wage that supported a cowboy with two sets of clothes, a house that wouldn’t pass any building codes, a horse instead of a car, and no phone is not going to support a modern worker even if “adjusted” for inflation.

Your comment makes me wonder what the relative total cost of a horse vs a car is.

historical norms were that workers were slaves with no civil rights that nobles or citizens could kill or rape with impunity

so fuck historical norms actually

> Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items.

That "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Where I grew up we rarely use “real” for food. We take it for granted it is : butter, mayonnaise, mustard.

But they were relatively expensive and scarce.

And no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil or eating tubs of butter.

It's a combination of more high-calorie convenience foods and a more sedentary lifestyle than even just 50 years ago.

the fact that no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil would seem to conclusively disprove your hypothesis as previously stated

the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia

clearly the proximate cause of obesity is eating more and metabolizing less (both by way of lower exercise and lower basal metabolism). but why are people doing that? did they lose the gene for willpower in a single generation? it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't

Olive oil is a natural laxative. If you're gaining weight on olive oil, I'd be impressed, beyond how one would keep it down due to taste and texture.

People aren't gaining weight on olive oil because people aren't consuming it in mass quantities required to gain weight, if one could even do so after having your intestines coated by oil. But many are consuming highly processed foods which is shown to lead to less optimal health outcomes.

> clearly

Clearly a post on HN doesn't make for a scientific study!

clearly

it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat

but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic

None of those would have been common as we know them today. Refined sugar was expensive until ~industrialization. And HFCS simply didn't exist, which is what people are really discussing when they talk about sugar, refined foods, and the obesity epidemic.

industrialization was still 100 years before the obesity pandemic

the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far

'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead

Right, no one is getting fat because of fat! It's the catbohydrates that make you fat! And humans eat butter and olive oil since climbing down the trees. Eating fruit and cane is a world domination scheme by the oppressing caste.

Let's be real though - sugar tends to be a lot more palatable than butter, especially when baked or dissolved in acid. I could eat an entire bag of crunch bars, but set me down with a box of sticks of butter and I'm not going to make much progress.

Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar.

So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before.

The closest I can think of is fruits, and they come with a lot of fiber, and again if you make it into juice, it tends to still not be palatable to drink gallons of it. Whereas people will literally drink a 2 liter of coke in a single sitting.

i think it's almost certainly something about industrially-mass-produced food that tubs of butter don't share, so i think you're a bit closer to the mark. and sugary drinks are surely an especially bad food even among industrially-mass-produced foods

clearly calorie density alone is not it. and i don't think it's even as simple as 'palatability'. even if you mix cacao, butter, sugar, vanillin, and citric acid into candy, you can't get people to live off the candy

and brown sugar mixed with dried lemon juice and oil has been cheap for... significantly longer than the 50-year-old obesity pandemic

so, what changed? why is food now so addictive?

You can get fruits and fruit juices in your winter months, that is newer. OJ came in small glasses because it too was a luxury.

But HN linked an article a few years back about some research indicating that in the 1980s people ate as many or more callories, and got on average less physical activity, but were significantly less overweight. They reaction was that it was wrong, because thermodynamics, but the thermodynamic argument is a vast oversimplification. We can and do excrete plenty of energy such that other organisms post process our waste. Fat in particular can go unused with little notice. We can burn or conserve energy in ways that are hard to measure by just observing behavior. Given that complexity, it wouldn't surprise me that chronic inflammation could be a culprit. It could be the removal of a burden too, such that we are more efficient at processing calories. The food equivalent of meth amphetamine being available everywhere and cheaply doesn't help either, but enough people are studying it that I don't think it will be one simple thing.

do you have a link to the article or remember the authors

this is fantastic, thanks

10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007

Food is part of the equation (marketing and availabity as well as ingredients)

But then there's the rise of the car, and of screen-based jobs/lifestyles, and other little conveniences that remove any last little bits of physical effort from life, from takeaway delivery to dishwashers to power tools.

Exercise used to be an unavoidable part of life.

Modern fast food is deliberately engineered to make it as addictive as possible while still being palatable and cheap to produce, in order to maximize sales.

That sounds more nefarious than I intended, so let me rephrase it. Modern fast food is the result of rapidly iterating, debugging, and optimizing recipes in a huge market for the last 70 years, leaving only the best selling, low cost, consistently reproducible recipes and discarding the rest. This process naturally selects recipes that contain lots of junk calories and bring in the most repeat customers.

Although many of the ingredients and similar foods have been around for centuries, it wasn't possible to do this kind of agile cooking on a massive scale until after WW2.

this is clearly a thing that has happened, and it is a crucial link in the chain, but there's still a missing link.

wouldn't it be more profitable if those recipes happened to have low caloric density, like coca-cola? then you could sell each customer six meals a day instead of three, and they'd be more profitable because they'd mostly be made out of water, which is cheaper than deodorized canola oil and palm oil, much less potatoes, texturized soy protein, mechanically separated chicken, and beef. you'd maybe have to include enough cellulose and xanthan gum to make it seem solid, but that wouldn't overcome the cost savings from removing the expensive calorie-bearing ingredients. it's even legal!

yet fast-food consumers have been gravitating to the macronutrient-rich menu items, not texturized carboxymethylcellulose jello, which would undoubtedly be widely available if it sold well. so they are following their homeostatic regulatory system to seek calories

their homeostasis is just broken

what broke the homeostasis?

i don't think it's an intentional thing or even a means to improve sales. if wendy's breaks your homeostatic feedback and mcdonald's doesn't, will that help them competitively? no, because their metabolically damaged customers will still eat at mcdonald's, except for the most loyal ones. if wendy's goes out of business, it'll take a generation for mcdonald's to see the result in terms of declining sales. even then, they're unlikely to be able to recognize that the demise of wendy's is the reason for their troubles

it's plausible that it's nothing more than 'ultra-palatable food makes you overeat, which disrupts your homeostasis'. but i'm skeptical of that because people seem to be able to eat very palatable food occasionally, or even often, without disrupting it

Coca-Cola is indeed highly profitable, but American consumers have indicated time and again that they want some real bread and beef to go with that Coca-Cola. They want to feel reasonably full, and they can't come back 6 times a day no matter what, because they have to work in order to pay for your burger.

You're not going to make a large profit if you diverge too far from this social norm. Don't think like a startup, because we're talking about traditional multinational businesses here.

i don't think it's a question of social norms. if people were adhering to pre-mcdonalds social norms, they wouldn't be going somewhere besides their house (a restaurant, but one without waiters) and sitting on brightly colored plastic benches eating mechanically separated chicken glued together with modified food starch cut with texturized soy protein

people's appetite is evidently for calories, and they commonly regulate their caloric intake or metabolic rate to within 0.5% in order to maintain their level of obesity. social norms are not capable of that kind of precision

consider, if you gain only 5 kg in ten years, which many obese mcdonalds eaters in the usa do, that's a caloric excess of 5 kcal per day. half a gram of fat per day. that's 0.3% of a metabolic rate of 1666 kcal per day or 0.2% of 2500 kcal/day. if they were to eat 0.3% less calories than they were burning instead of 0.3% more, they'd be losing 5 kg every ten years, not gaining it

so the homeostatic feedback mechanism is almost working. it's clearly not completely broken. its error is well under 1%. but it does evidently have a systematic error across the population. and fast-food optimization for profit by itself is an insufficient explanation for that

For me, soda with hugh fructose corn syrup is way easier to drink a lot of than soda with sugar too.

In my mind, the industry trend of 'reduced fat' products that tend to have increased sugar, and the substitution of HFCS for sugar both contribute towards easier over consumption of calories.

> I'm not going to make much progress

Not with that attitude you're not.

> So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before.

I was just thinking about this earlier today.

I had a friend whom I would swear was actually, literally addicted to McDonald's burgers and fries. He wouldn't usually go seek out just any old burgers and fries, so I have a hard time saying he was addicted to them in general. I think that McDonald's (and to be clear, I am not blaming the Golden Arches here) had just some right taste that he could not help himself.

I don't like food particularly much at all, so I have never really felt like "oh that was so good I want more," but I can kind of see what you are saying here.

Fruits are not calorically dense. A huge ripe pear can be incredibly delicious and sweet, and only has like 100 calories. The best peach you've ever eaten is like 60-80. It would be pretty challenging to eat a calorically problematic portion of them.

A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.

not if you have to shell them yourself

Yeah that's what I meant by the fiber - they cut the density substantially and would fill you up super fast. And just juicing them gets you into palatability problems - try drinking a gallon of raw apple juice. (Vs drinking a 64oz large coke).

The issue is mostly sugars i'd guess. Not fats.

False equivalence. This doesn't help advance the debate. The amount of olive oil in the average diet is minuscule relative to the amounts of sugar or palm oil.

Nuance is important.

it helps advance the debate by conclusively showing that caloric density is not the only relevant factor, or even a dominating one, and that in fact nuance is important, which is my point

there are lots of simple, well-known explanations, and they are all wrong. that was one of them. 'it's sugar' and 'it's hfcs' are two others that have popped up in this thread

I get your point but olive oil is nowhere near as prevalent as sugar. Some products even market themselves as "premium" for containing olive oil.

sesame oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, and palm oil have the same caloric density as olive oil, are roughly as digestible, and have been cheap and cultivated by humans for far longer than the obesity pandemic. i'd mention suet and lard, too, but it turns out that those have somewhat lower digestibility, so i don't want to confuse the discussion

by contrast, sugary foods commonly have about the same caloric density as healthy foods

so i think caloric density is clearly an important factor (you won't get fat by pigging out on lettuce and tomatoes unless you add salad dressing) but the comment i was rebutting gave the following simple, clear, and wrong explanation of the obesity pandemic

> I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find

and that just isn't an accurate description of the situation

> olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years

no it hasn't. for most of that timespan approximately no-one outside of the eastern Mediterranean even knew what an olive was

the eastern mediterranean didn't have widespread obesity

Why mention butter? It is delicious in morning tea or coffee and somewhat pricey having been imported from Ireland. I'm in the recommended weight, while some of the fattest people I know consume loads of low-fat products.

because butter's caloric density is 7-9 kcal/g, higher than the 'cheap calorie dense food' being blamed for the obesity pandemic, yet the widespread availability of butter (in some societies) starting ten thousand years ago did not cause widespread obesity, even when it wasn't pricey

this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity

probably the loads of low-fat products you're talking about are packed with sugar and modified food starch, though, as well as xanthan gum, guar gum, carob bean gum, dibutylhydroxytoluene, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, polyethylene glycol, all kinds of novel food colorings including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, antifungal additives like propionate, and so on. some of these don't occur naturally, and others aren't traditional food ingredients. it wouldn't be very surprising if one or more of those novel additives affected hormone balances, inflammation levels, or intestinal microbiota in a way that promoted overeating and inactivity. some of them are well-known to affect intestinal microbiota

this is the first time i've seen one that provoked an antibody response, though

i think i'm going to go buy a delicious, cold coca-cola now

Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie-dense and engineered to be highly palatable. This is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around.

It is probably the sugar/highly refined carbs: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.023...

Then you dump calories on top of those metabolic changes (and appetite stimulation by the carbs) and you pack on the weight.

the point you think everyone else is making that i am missing is actually the point that i have been trying to make

you say

> the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite

while, although you think i'm the one in this conversation that disagrees with you, the comment that i've written all this verbiage to rebut says exactly the opposite

> I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find

i agree with you that the obesity pandemic is almost certainly due to modern processed food, which is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around

your hypothesis is that palatability (of calorie-dense food) is the relevant difference; i think that's a plausible hypothesis. but i'm not sure that modern industrial food is more palatable than the calorie-dense elements of traditional diets (elsethread i mentioned halvah, but we could also mention longaniza, pizza, ham, bacon, cheese, funnel cakes, pepperoni, buttered pancakes with syrup, onigiri with katsuobushi and so on), and even if it is a difference, that doesn't prove that it's the relevant difference

there are a lot of other differences, and i think we should investigate them, because your hypothesis is far from the only plausible hypothesis

The concept of beauty has changed a lot also. Many sex symbols in Rubens age would be seen as clearly obese today.

But I agree that the obesity could be boosted by chemical contamination. It should be treated as a disease and not as just a sin.

People are reaching for expense, but I think that's the wrong explanation, it's cost/availability + palatability + caloric density. Olive oil has maybe one or two of those, but it's missing the key ingredient of palatability. Not many people want to guzzle olive oil.

> Not many people want to guzzle olive oil.

I myself find good olive oil to be quite tasty, far more so than soybean or canola, and I don't think I'm in a tiny minority there. Dipping bread directly in olive oil (sometimes seasoned with a little garlic or whatever) is very common in Mediterranean diets.

Absolutely, olive oil, garlic and salt is my snack.

This is extremely disingenuous. You cannot drink anything more than a little bit of olive oil without serious gastric consequences, which is why most of history involves using a little bit of vegetable oil here and there for the other desirable properties. Nevermind the fact that nobody could afford large quantities of ANY food, and even after we brought the potato, a way more efficient means of growing calories, to europe, most people still couldn't afford more than sufficient quantities of calories. Even then, there are arguments to be made that such potato growing was an important element of significant population growth after it became popular.

Meanwhile, you average normal person nowadays CAN eat a bag of potato chips in one sitting, without gastric consequences. Then they can compensate for eating half a pound of salt by following it up with half a candy bar for something sweet. Or maybe they got a milkshake with their burger or something.

the quality of your comment is not up to even the fairly low bar set by the rest of this thread

That's probably because people don't chug olive oil. It's more of a food ingredient than a food itself.

Have you tried gulping down olive oil...? And marvel at what happens later...? :D

It could be a mix of different effects. Mostly processed food, food available everywhere at any time plus changes in everyday life.

People eat when they are stressed. Eating, filling your stomach helps to soothe you. It acts like taking a xanax pill. So lots of people are in a food coma most of the time. Their body tries to digest the food that was sent inside, effectively shutting down their brains. Not thinking that much about bad things and the like. But when you have to work with a full stomach that makes thinking about things really hard. You feel drowsy, so you drink coffee. Mmmm, coffeee, that brings people out of the food coma like state, they become alert. But when the effect falters they come crashing down and eat mooore food. And they don't like to exercise. And their stomach is already expanded, so in order to satiate themselves they need moooore food. Mmmmm moooore refined food.

You get fat.

... Right around the green revolution where we figured out that we can pour fertilizer and water on crops and they grow really well, which lead to high fructose corn syrup in everything and its sugar composition (high fructose) leads to obesity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522469/

It's really not that deep. Anybody tracking calories and logging food will quickly realize that the comment you're replying to is correct. You have to make very thoughtful choices when choosing your foods because it's easy to eat 2-3x your TDEE with the current available foods that are sold. Most of it is calorically dense junk.