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by orly_bookz 3502 days ago
Honestly, I don't believe that anyone in the modern era really got fat because they were following guidelines.

I think it's much more likely the fact that we put sugar into just about everything, portion sizes having gone up, edibility of foods having gone WAY up (texture, taste, sugar/oil/salt portions), manual labor decreasing, sedentary habits increasing (tv, movies, video games)...

The first world and especially the West faced a storm of changes which individually might be fine but which together form a nightmare health scenario.

1 comments

And "putting sugar in everything" as a way to make it taste better is completely unrelated to the government scoring this as "good", whereas using fat scores as "bad"?

There are also those who thing the portion size issue might have to do with a too carb rich diet not satiating appetite as well as a more or fat rich diet.

Edibility has gone way up? I don't think so, the old stuff tasted damned good, and often better (I'm of an age where I've tasted a lot of it made by old fashioned grandparents). And many of the changes pushed by this directly make foods taste not hardly so good, e.g. McDonalds let themselves get pushed into removing beef tallow (rendered fat) from their fry oil, their french fries aren't worth much anymore.

I've also been trying some Cambells Chunky Soups for the first time in many many years, and some of the old favorites don't hold a candle to when they came out in the '70s.

Less manual labor doesn't explain why those who didn't do a lot of it didn't used to get fat like they do now.

More sedentary habits, that's a possible cause, but the evidence for it is shaky, and still has to be balanced against calorie inputs.