We're also trying to figure out how to increase the nutritional values of foods that tend to be available to areas where inadequate food supplies are problematic (e.g., cassava.) Different groups of people have different, and often opposite, problems, and research can be directed at more than one of them at a time.

> At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods.

I've yet to see any coherent explanation of how a heavily processed food like Soylent can be anything but an increase in the resources to produce food. Might, optimistically, reduce the resource cost to deliver and store food compared to some other alternatives. Mostly, though, its seems to be an attempt to make money by selling convenience to people with who aren't particularly concerned for other features of food (other than perhaps a certain very broad nutritional profile.)

> Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice.

A number of people find it much easier to reduce calories first (by eating less calorie-dense foods, but with similar volumes) and then reduce volumes (potentially adding back more calorie-dense foods in the process, or perhaps further reducing calories in the process.)

You can address real people's problems more effectively when you deal with them being how they are rather than how you would wish them to be.

I'm sitting here trying to think of recipes other than blindingly obvious (like fried rice) that must contain heaping piles of rice and can't simply just have more "good stuff" piled on the rice.

Its the same way with unhealthy flavored sauces. I know general tso sauce is nearly pure corn syrup and therefore is bad for me so I use the stuff like people use hot sauce, a taste is enough, a couple drops on each bite and I'm smiling. There's no reason I have to dump the entire bottle of sauce on a couple pieces of grilled chicken.

Given that the "good stuff" tastes better than the rice itself I'm not seeing an appetite or self control problem? Go ahead torture me with extra homemade lemon pepper steamed fish and less of bland tasteless blah rice?

Likewise, eating can be fun and pleasurable, but be aware of the risks and make sensible decisions.

Deliberately making food less nutritious so that you can shovel more of it into your mouth is akin to bulimia without the vomiting. Doing it should be a big loud alarm inside someone's head, but if they're damaged enough already to seriously consider it, it probably doesn't. Helping these people indulge themselves is grotesque.

By their nature of being underage, they cannot understand the risks and be sensible. We can help so they won't have completely crazy ideas such as Mnt. Dew being a contraceptive, but they cannot be fully informed nor make the best decisions.

>Likewise, eating can be fun and pleasurable, but be aware of the risks and make sensible decisions.

Considering the multi-billion dollar industry making it as fun and pleasurable as possible so you won't make sensible decisions, this doesn't seem like a fair challenge.

They can already do that. There already exists high-volume , low-calorie food. The target market here is clearly not the people making that choice.

I genuinely have trouble caring about people whose problems are caused by making the active choice to keep putting food in the hole in the front of their head. Unpopular view, I expect, but true. Absolutely a self-inflicted injury, and making less nutritious food to indulge these people is sickening, and frankly insulting to them. They've made their choice.

Yeah, sure, maybe it IS a medical condition, and there is something massively wrong with these people's brain chemistry that means they're physically incapable of telling when they're not hungry, and they're too stupid to realise that eating five kilos of rice every day and being horrifically overweight is a clue that they're doing something wrong, or maybe they're masively emotionally damaged and stuck in some kind of self-loathing spiral that makes them eat more and more in some kind of slow suicide, but deliberately making food less nutritious is grotesque, and indulging these people in entirely the wrong way.

I suspect that they'll simply eat twice as much of this new half-calorie rice, or just top it up with a big loaf of bread.

When I want to lose weight, I just eat much less--typically ~800 calories per day. But that's a struggle to beat hunger. And yes, I'm hungry--I have no idea why you would think people aren't hungry just because they're overweight. I like to feel satiated, and maybe that means something different to me than it does to you. But when I need to lose weight, I just ignore hunger. Not everyone is blessed with that kind of willpower.

When people ask me "how can I do what you did and lose 40lbs in 2 months?", my answer is just like yours--quit eating so much.

However if they had the choice to feel as satiated for half the calories, I expect they'd lose weight. I don't know why you imagine they'd eat twice as much--they have no idea how many calories are in the food, typically. They eat and drink as much as they want to each day without respect to any calories. Changing diet to an already-existing high-volume, low-calorie food is not nearly as good of a solution as modifying people's existing diet. It's also not making it "less nutritious,"--in fact, for these people, it's more nutritious in a sense--at least better for their health.

Your whole stance is basically a "fuck those people, I don't have that problem" stance. If you're a programmer, it'd be similar to "Vim is the best text editor, so I have no sympathy for anyone who can't use it properly. We shouldn't develop other editors, deliberately making people less productive is grotesque..." etc.

Obesity is an epidemic and any progress to thwart it is good, necessary work. It improves people in so many ways--physical health, self-esteem, career, relationships, etc.

In this part of the thread it has gone that way, although I wouldn't word it as "fuck those people", but that they're people capable of making choices, and they're choosing to eat too much. "Fuck those people" is more emotive than I feel about it. It's their choice. What problem? There's no problem. If they want to eat less, they can. Barring brain damage or serious psychological disturbance, they're human and humans are more than capable of deciding what to eat. It's not "fuck those people", it's "they're making a choice and it's none of my business".

I do genuinely believe that. I wouldn't even call it willpower. I'm not convinced any such thing really exists; people make choices. That's all there is. I feel hungry, but I know I don't actually need to eat this. Make a choice and in doing so pick how I'm going to feel; I can keep feeling hungry, or I can not keep feeling hungry, weighed up with factors and knowledge I possess.

My stance in the bigger thread is that the idea of deliberately removing nutritional content from food is grotesque. Sure, we in the rich world have never known hunger (not the kind you feel when you haven't had anything with sugar in it for a few hours, but the kind that grinds people into dust over years and ends up with people selecting which of their family should die first), but it's still a real thing and yes, sure, it's just about free market economics and if the rich world can afford to deliberately destroy nutritional value to make life a little bit more convenient for themselves that's just how international trade goes, but nonetheless it makes me sick. That's what I feel is fucking grotesque; so much of humanity's history has been a struggle to get enough food and famine was a perpetual real issue, and sure, this is modern times in the first world and now we can just destroy the calorie content of food for our own convenience, but still, what the fuck.

Addendum: I have no idea why you would think people aren't hungry just because they're overweight. Is that from what I said about some people not able to tell when they're not hungry? I understand that's a real medical issue some people have. Their body/brain doesn't work right in that sense and when they've eaten enough, the hunger doesn't fade as it should.

We can employ in all sorts of use cases:

* Solve global hunger problems? Give starving people more food. * End crime? Just everybody stop committing crimes. * Debilitating OCD? Just stop washing your hands.

Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.

The advice "eat less move more" is a proven loser. Not really even a question. Time to move on. Maybe low carb/IF/less time-consuming HIIT will do better. But we know move more, eat less has failed. Being more smug about the fact it would work if only all these dummy pilots would use it right isn't going to improve the public health success rate.

If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them.

So the two halves of this statement are opposed.

If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.

Without getting into the discussion of whether or not your problem is simply equivocation because you are interpreting "unable" in a different sense than those using it (or, e.g., the medical community) would in this context, "eating less" in the context of this discussion was eating less volume of food with the same calorie density, and the post to which you responded was pointing out that that is, in practice, not as successful for some people as eating similar volumes of food with lower calorie content.

Both of these methods are equally "eating less" in a caloric balance sense. The set of processes that affect processes related to wait loss (including both processes that control how much of that energy content is actually made available, and processes that might be viewed as compliance-related in terms of satiety triggers on the input side and processes that make people prone or resistant to activity on the output side) have substantial, well-known, biological variation between individuals, which have significant linkages to propensity for obesity.

Treating the issue one of simply calories in vs. calories out with success outcomes differentiated only by moral features like willpower is a stupid statement which is proven false by a vast body of research on metabolism, obesity, etc.