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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I've heard the same thing, but for Japan and Vietnam. It's worth noting that obesity in Europe is climbing rapidly as well. They are about 20 years behind the U.S.

Even Japan/Vietnam is seeing rising obesity but they seem to be much more resistant.

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity. Areas where drinking water comes from agricultural runoff such as the Mississippi Delta have extremely high obesity while high altitude areas have less than would be expected from socioeconomic conditions. As far as I know, no one has adequately explained this phenomenon.

It seems relevant that adults living in the Mississippi delta basically don’t go outside for 4-5 months of the year.

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity.

And they dismiss that people eat more calories and move less - and look for some grand mystery. There is none, CICO is the solution.

Of course CICO "works". No one is claiming that the laws of physics don't apply. It's just not a useful abstraction for maintaining weight in the real world.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite. Imagine being hungry and tired all the time. But that is what required for these people to maintain a healthy weight. Naturally, they can't do it.

In the past, people maintained their weight with less effort than today. Willpower didn't magically collapse in the 1970s. There has been a change in the natural environment.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite.

At the levels of cutting they're doing to become a television star (in that article), absolutely. For most people, you can get pretty deep into a cut before you start feeling physical/mental effects. They do come as you continue to cut; as the saying goes, "...cut until you hate your life." These things can be expected; they should be expected; thus, you can plan for them if you're properly educated on the reality of things (i.e., CICO works) and on how to make an appropriate plan.

What absolutely doesn't work is just lying to people and saying that it just doesn't work because it's hard. Of course people are going to give up when everyone is lying to them and saying that it doesn't work. Of course people are going to not remain at maintenance after a cut when everyone is lying to them and telling them that it just magically comes back after a cut, no matter what you do. Of course people aren't even going to try when everyone is lying to them and telling them that you have to constantly feel like shit to make any progress ever.

I've told the story here before, but I'll say it again. My wife was someone who heard all those lies all her life. She believed them, and of course, wouldn't have been successful if she had just tried on her own. When she had tried in the past, it was always some fad diet about how you need to cleanse this or remove that chemical. I got her to be at least willing to try, and armed her with the ability to actually plan. Even then, after she saw it slowly working for months, she would still be like, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE! MAYBE [insert some silly fool other idea here] INSTEAD!" And if I hadn't been there every time to essentially say, "Shut up. Keep doing it. You'll see in a week or two that it's still working," then she absolutely would have failed, specifically because people have been lying to her for her entire life.

So if you want an explanation for what's changed, there's at least two things. 1) The absolutely insane abundance of extremely high-calorie, low satiety foods and just calories in general, and 2) We started just lying to people over and over and over again. We shouldn't be surprised when people start believing the lie.

There has been a change in the natural environment.

Food become more available, more palatable and cheaper.

Note that curiously in Poland people have not become fatter in 1970s - it started to happen later.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite.

Well, why they have gained weight? Maybe restoring health weight is extremely hard, but you get there by overeating.

There has been a change in the natural environment.

not exactly natural one, but I agree (but it almost certainly was not lithium pushed by SM)

Agree on all points. Preventing weight gain is easier than weight loss.

My guess is that the causes of obesity are multifactorial: sugar, seed oils, soft hyperpalatable foods, and chemicals all seem likely. Lack of exercise and collective loss of willpower can be ruled out safely, I think. I agree that Lithium hypothesis is not 100% explanatory, but the high altitude anomaly sill hasn't been adequately explained.

I would definitely include people getting richer. It is no wonder that people eat more when food got many times cheaper (per hour of work).

I mean, lots of things could be the cause. But I'd say the lowest of hanging fruit is the fact that everything has way too much sugar.

Like, I just finished a killer workout. I went to make myself a post workout snack, protein, banana, got out some bread, Pepperidge Farm 15 Grain Whole Wheat, and the third ingredient is sugar. It has 4 grams of added sugar per serving. A fun size Snickers has 8g of added sugar.

You know... maybe I should start baking my own bread from week to week.

When I bake bread I put 7g (one teaspoon) of sugar in ~400ml of water with 600g of flour.

That Pepperidge loaf seems to be 624g, which at the same 1:0.66 ratio would make it roughly 380g flour, 250ml water, of which some part is 48g of sugar.

7/600 = 0.01g sugar per g flour
48/380 = 0.12g sugar per g flour

So roughly 10x as much sugar.

For comparison a can of Coke has 35g of sugar in 330ml. They're making bread with water that is more sugary than Coke.

Everything is sweeter in the US - that's true. But it's not the HFCS, it's just that there's more sugar (including hfcs) in everything, so people get more food energy.

Mind you, you can buy decent bread in the US. Not sure about Walmart, but when I visited New England the local supermarket chain's bakery was producing fairly decent ciabatta bread. I think it was called 'Market Basket'?)

IIRC Mexicans bake bread too. Also 'German bakeries' maybe ?

It does seem obvious, but sugar consumption hasn't grown in the last decade while obesity continues to rise. I'll concede that it could be a delayed effect from childhood consumption.

You know that flour has just as many calories as sugar, gram per gram, right?

Also, it's not for flavor that most bread recipes (except ones that use chemical leavening) call for added sugar. Yeast cannot thrive on flour alone.

In fact I’m pretty sure refined flour has a higher glycaemic index than sucrose, owing to the fructose part of sucrose being more difficult to metabolise by humans.

That said putting extra sugar in surely doesn’t help

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