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Those things aren’t even necessarily fixable by medical intervention, in fact I think in the case of mental health, better results would be had by de-medicalizing mental health in all but the worst cases. Therapeutic culture has somehow managed to turn 3/4th of ordinary human experience into trauma, while at the same time creating a culture hyper focused on feelings and especially negative feelings as facts. If I were to try to cure depression and anxiety I’d spend more time trying to get the person to understand that bad things happen to everybody, that you’ll get better with time, and that focusing on how broken you feel just makes things worse. And until you start living despite the hurt and the “trauma” (which unless you’re fleeing a literal war zone or horrific abuse, is probably something fairly normal to human life) you just aren’t going to heal.
As far as obesity, while I’d try to nudge our food manufacturers to make better quality stuff, the vast majority of obesity is caused by neglecting fork-put-downs and overeating. You, unless you have a severe medical condition, are capable of simply not eating at every opportunity. Likewise, a lot of other health issues are caused by basically not moving. None of this is mysterious, it’s just that following the treatment isn’t fun. You have to count calories and macros. You have to spend thirty minutes a day doing exercise.
The problem of course is that medicine as a practice cannot do much for these problems except mask the symptoms or do very crude repairs of the damage done. And until we can somehow rewind culture back to the point where people generally took responsibility for their lives rather than turning to others to fix the damage later, you simply cannot make a lot of progress here. The problems are cultural and social. Returning to the ethos of the past, where you learned to keep a stiff upper lip and carry on, and where you took a large degree of responsibility for things in your own life, I don’t see how the medical system can be blamed. It sounds very much like the parents who barely pretend to care about whether their kids put forth effort in school, then get mad when 12 years later, their kid can’t read or do basic math, and now they’re mad at the teacher. The teacher can’t make the child do homework, and unless the child does homework, he’s not going to learn much. It’s too late, the damage has been going on for 12 years and there’s no intervention that’s going to undo what’s been done.
I think most problems in America are not so hard to solve. We’re just losing our ability to knuckle down and actually do the work. We’re the people looking for ways around having to do work. We want gamification of education, because why should we study, it’s boring and feels like work. We don’t want to count calories and macros and stick to a healthy diet because it’s not as exciting as deep fried raviolis and white sauce pasta. We don’t want to exercise. Instead we’re looking for quick fixes.
Hard agree.
Hard disagree. While there's more room for gluttony now, and fat acceptance movements certainly don't help, I don't believe the people of today are fat while our people of the 1970s were thin because the people in the 1970s worked harder at being thin.
Also I'm pretty sure never-becoming-obese-and-staying-thin is a lot easier than becomes-obese-and-now-must-become-thin.
I don't have a study for this but I simply don't believe if you take two thin identical twins, force-feed one until they gain 100 pounds, and then challenge them to lose it, if they even succeed, the one that loses 100 pounds will not be the same as the one who never gained in the first place. The one who lost 100 pounds will almost certainly be ravenously hungry for ever. Like 95% chance of this. Maybe higher.
They probably didn’t think about food as much, but they also lived in a culture where physical activity was normal and expected. Kids were told to play outside, and often played youth sports as well. There were also norms around eating— smaller portions, less snacking, fewer fizzy drinks. A lot of foods are nearly double the size they were in 1970 which doesn’t help, but at the same time, it we had the same food norms as 1970, and cut portions to about 1/2 of what we eat now, ate three meals and a light snack per day, you’d look about like the average person in 1970. (https://www.yourweightmatters.org/portion-sizes-changed-time/)
I think some forms of processing change food such that it doesn’t trip your satiety system. It’s something I’ve observed. A potato is much more filling than the equivalent amount of potato chips. A chicken breast is more filling than the equivalent in nuggets, one homemade cookie is as filling as 4-5 Oreos. I can’t explain why that works, but it seems to.
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I'm not convinced that people even need to put down the fork. I can eat as much as I want and exercise very little but remain thin. Mostly I don't eat ultra-processed food, I just eat whole food.
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/5277b379-0acb-4d97-a6a3-602774104629/content
Doesn't sound very appetizing! But it obviously is, ultra-processed food is 60% of US calorie consumption: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ultra-processed-foods-calories-american-diet/
It seems very reasonable that eating things full of strange chemicals causes unusual health problems. Circus freaks from 1900 have nothing on the physiques you can see waddling around these days, they wouldn't even make it onto my 600 pound life. And the US is exporting this all around the world.
The obvious retort is that the amount you want to eat is less than the amount fatties want to eat.
Yes but why is that? I never bothered counting calories or exercising any restraint. My willpower is pretty low, all things considered. I barely do much exercise, I guess I walk longer distances than most people but that's about it, I don't go to a gym or anything. I occasionally do some bodyweight exercises, I can do sixty pushups but that's probably mostly because I'm thin. It takes only a few minutes each day for a few months to get to that level and I plateaued since.
My BMI is 20. Australia is a pretty fat country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Australia
I can only assume that a diet of fruit, good bread, milk and whole foods is superior to a diet of largely processed foods. I have chips and icecream sometimes, I'm not a puritan about these things.
This sounds like humblebragging and I guess it technically is but I think there must be something that can be learnt. Back in the 1960s everyone was like me. They could eat whatever they liked, drink a lot of alcohol and still not get fat like we see today. They were working desk jobs too! They just got sated. I get sated. When I eat a big dinner, I might not feel any need to eat even in the next morning, it doesn't cross my mind. I barely ever feel hungry.
I just don't see how I can be a genetic freak when this is how everyone used to live.
It's probably something in the water, given that obesity rates are lower in the mountains and highest at the mouths of long rivers....
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I mean, I think the steelman for chemicals causing obesity is 'endocrine disruptors changing desires' more than 'microplastics make you hold on to fat'. But for another, everyone in the sixties smoked cigarettes(which does control appetite). Everyone fatshamed. Snacking was very expensive so people didn't do a lot of it. People were just more active in general. Etc, etc.
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I am crazy overweight, I eat zero 'ultra-processed' food, and unless you count things like 'bread' and 'cheese' as processed, I eat basically zero processed foods.
Personally, I think I just enjoy food more than other people. God I love food. I love eating. It is basically the only thing I really enjoy in life. When I bite into a home made migas taco, the melted cheese, the crunch of the fried tortilla strips*, the creamy avocado, it makes my whole brain light up. I am salivating just writing this.
This is just a single datapoint though, maybe I am the weirdo and most people are like you.
*Does frying corn tortillas in some avocado oil count as 'processed'?
I run 6 days a week, lift weights 3 days a week and intermittent fast from 6pm to 10am. I don't eat "processed" foods either. I've still been gaining weight and DEXA scans confirm that it's actually fat that's being gained.
I've been struggling with obesity since I was a teenager[1]. I had a foothold on it in my 30s in that I was simply overweight and not obese but now it feels out of my control completely. Until...
Have you considered... Semaglutide!? I went on it recently and the effect is pretty interesting. Mostly it's a lot more psychological than "physical", for me, so far. I can feel hungry and be in the kitchen, and feel like snacking, but all of the snacks seem like too much work to get out and eat. So I don't.
Cue meme where person with ADHD does Adderall and they're bewildered at their insane focus and energy and cry that this must be how normal people feel all of the time. But non-ironically.
Yeah I am probably going to try to get on one of the GLP-1 drugs and see how it goes.
You might even want to try more than one, if the first one doesn't give you amazing results. My husband got okay results on semaglutide, then after several months tried switching to tirzepatide and it's doing a whole lot more for him.
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Bread is very processed. You take a wheat grain, remove the hull, and maybe the bran and germ, grind it into powder, mix with water, yeast, salt, and some sweetener (probably itself refined), and then you pound and roll that a few times and then cook it. That's a lot of processing.
Cheese is also very processed. It doesn't come out of the cow that way.
OK, so first you take corn. Remove the kernels from the cob, then soak it in alkali water. Then wash it, remove the hull, grind it, Mix with water to make dough. Make the dough into balls, flatten, and cook on a hot flat surface. Just because a Latin American peasant can do it the way she learned from her abuela who learned from hers all the way the back to when it wasn't abuela but na’chin doesn't mean it isn't processing.
Frying it again is also processing. Avocado oil is also processed, though fairly minimally by pressing it out of avocados.
The difference between traditional forms of processing and the modern is that the modern kind is hyper optimized by capitalism, through vast amounts of capital and chemical engineering, for addictiveness and thence profitability. Healthiness could also be optimized for, but unfortunately it’s opaque to most consumers and doesn’t function as a schelling point in any case.
While it is true that Communism in general causes weight loss, there is nothing about capitalism that makes processing worse for you. It's just that capitalism tends to make more food available to most.
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Sounds like I'm doomed.
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I believe that most American food, even seemingly normal food, is full of weird chemicals.
Brown bread with seeds that goes stale in a few days is better than the kind of cheaper, longer-lasting white bread. Why is white bread so much cheaper and longer-lasting? Because it's full of strange ingredients. I don't know what kind of bread you're getting of course but just look at what Walmart puts in theirs. This was the first American bread that came up in my search: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-White-Round-Top-Bread-20-oz/10315355?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1200
Likewise, there's cheese and there's cheese. Cheese can be minimally processed or intensively processed.
It all depends in what's in those corn tortilla chips. I reckon it would be processed, even ultra-processed depending on ingredients.
I just made myself dinner. I went through the ingredients, this is far and away my most common meal and I make this or a slight variation on this for probably 60% of my meals in a year. Butter - Cream(milk), Salt. Ground Beef - Beef, Barilla Brand Pasta - Semolina (Wheat), Durum Wheat Flour, Pasta Sauce - Water, Tomato Paste, Diced Tomatoes, Tomato Juice, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Garlic, Onions, Basil, Black Pepper, Oregano, Dried Basil. Extra Virgin Olive Oil - Extra Virgin Olive Oil. I also added up the calories, the whole thing comes out to almost 4000. I normally make this for lunch, eat half of it, and eat the other half for dinner. It should be obvious to anyone why this combined with a sedentary life style will result in my becoming very fat without the need for any weird chemicals (Although maybe Semolina is full of weird chemicals?).
I think it is highly unlikely that these chemicals are very important in the broader picture of American obesity. These chemicals are just as common in all of Latin America, who do about the same as most of the EU on obesity, and Japan (who does better than basically everyone on obesity?) also puts this junk in all their, enormously popular, convenience store bread products.
Semolina is coarsely ground durum wheat (as opposed to "durum wheat flour" which is finely ground durum wheat). No more weird chemicals than any wheat.
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I mean, all the ingredients and cooking seems perfectly fine here.
As a fellow food enjoyer, the obvious problem seems to be portion size. You're going to eat everything because it's delicious, so just make less of it.
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? Latin America is a very fat region. Mexico is literally the fattest country in the world, moreso than the US. And in any case, a region where food insecurity is an actual problem that needs to be worried about(albeit not the normative experience) is not a fair comparison to the second richest region in human history.
But to your point- yes, if you eat 4k calories a day before accounting for breakfast, drinks, snacks, and desert, it does not take 'chemicals' to explain obesity. I will make a similar dish to what you do and eat leftovers for lunch for an entire week(with sides, of course).
Also, I don't eat breakfast, snacks, desserts or drink anything other than water(but I would eat desserts if I kept them in the house).
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I just looked at the Wikipedia list of countries by obesity. Mexico is 36% of adults with obesity, Hungary (hah) is a slightly higher 36, Ireland is 30, El Salvador is 29, Germany is 24, Colombia is 23. It is possible this data is wrong or misleading though?
Mexico at 36% just seems shockingly low to me.
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Hmm, well, I guess I consider this good counter-evidence against my theory.
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What you're describing I totally understand. I call them "fat thoughts" and I live my day-to-day life suppressing them. I imagine that "fat thoughts" and "gay thoughts" are distinct categories of intrusive thoughts but I feel like I could understand one from having experienced the other.
I hear that the GLP-1 Agonist drugs make the fat thoughts go away, it would be super funny if they turned out to also make gay thoughts go away too, someone should test that.
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I think this is pretty true across most domains of enjoyment. I know people who weep at the sound of beautiful music or a great piece of art. Your thing is food. I don’t see that as a reason why you can’t try to keep things within reasonable limits.
Agreed, I think I can diet and lose weight, I just imagine it takes more of an effort of willpower for me (or someone like me) than for some other people.
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This seems more interested in figuring out where to allocate blame, or castigating people for not being virtuous enough, than concrete results. If you’re a government charged with increasing citizen health then you will get results by doing things like limiting the amount of hunger-inducing additives, sugar, empty carbs in mass market food products, removing junk food vending machines from school hallways and other public spaces, etc. Also, culture and behaviour doesn’t generate spontaneously. Policy choices in the past shaped human behaviours of today. There’s a conspiracy run by corporations focused on manipulating people into being degenerate hedonists.
I mean sure there’s a bit of blaming in that. But I think until the issues are actually understood, I don’t think you can make much headway. Yes corporations especially food corporations are trying to get people to eat more and eat worse food, and I think it certainly needs to be addressed. But tge interventions would rarely be medical. They’d be perhaps regulations on ingredients (all surprising amount of our food ingredients are illegal in Europe), or not allowing vending machines in schools. I think it might be well past time to get cooking taught in schools so people know how to people know how to cook healthy meals. I’d like to see recreational sports make a big comeback as I think it would help both the loneliness epidemic and the sedentary lifestyle problems we have.
We also have to essentially renormalize the concepts of portion control and self control. You simply cannot remove all temptations from the environment. You can’t make grocery stores not have candy and sodas at tge checkout. You can’t ban video games when everyone has the internet. At some point, the same issues come up and it’s something the rest of society cannot do for you. You have to learn self control. We can’t have it for you. We can possibly shame people for having an entire pizza to themselves, but it runs counter to what most people have been taught so it’s uphill.
The thing is that very little of that is medical. And blaming the medical system for an entire culture eating slop and not exercising is not only not going to help, but will probably drive people out of those jobs. Your doctor can’t undo decades of gluttony and a sedentary lifestyle in a couple of visits. Nobody can. And I don’t think blaming the medical system for social problems is a reasonable way to get good results. Fix the cultural problems.
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"We're" looking for ways to have the people who did the work to do the work for others, or at least pay them so they don't have to.
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