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.
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).
> “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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.