[fanboy123]

I think the real answer is because it is more systematically profitable to sell carb products and (food) companies are really really good at selling things to people.

It is interesting to see comments on this forum that involve the strategy of reasoning with the public to get them to accept their idea.

Next time you see somebody drinking a soda explain to them what fructose does metabolically to their bodies. Your message is a lot less effective than seeing a polar bear mommy drinking a coke on a wintery day or seeing kobe bryant dunk a basketball and popping open a bottle of sprite.

[patrickk]

"...it is more systematically profitable to sell carb products and (food) companies are really really good at selling things to people."

Apart from the cheap, unhealthy ingredients and slick marketing, modern processed food is also engineered to be appealing; and for the want of a better word, addictive. Prehistoric man would have to do a lot of hunting and gathering before he would consume the equivalent amount of carbs, sugar and salt that one could quickly and easily consume in a single meal from a fast-food restaurant. Humans never evolved to be able to cope with the amount of crap in modern food.

We also evolved to hunt or farm our food before we could eat. Now with the internet, you can order your groceries with the barest physical exertion - the click of a mouse.

[fanboy123]

While all of that is true I think the real story is one of economics.

It is VERY easy for me to eat as much swine as I feel like nowadays. If we assume that saturated fat/protein isn't bad for you then the fact that I can, in modern times, acquire the pig with less effort than my ancestors doesn't appear to harm me very much. It is tasty pretty much right out of the farm. I imagine it is difficult to make the margins on livestock very high.

Carbs have brands. They have business moats. They have high margins and great psychological keys that make selling them a great business (helps to be addictive). So they push and we buy.

Anyways my thought was that the obesity epidemic has less to do with how we are more sedentary than before but rather the peddlers of PROFITABLE products just got better at their jobs over time.

[warmfuzzykitten]

I think, first, one should differentiate between the part of the food industry that is actually the sugar industry - products like Coke and Gatorade and Snickers - and the part that is packaged convenience food that also contains a lot of sugar. (High-fructose corn syrup is just another sugar with 5-10% more fructose.)

The convenience food industry is highly motivated to sell what the public wants to buy. They follow food fads assiduously. When fiber was in, suddenly all products had added fiber. When that fad (which was actually a mildly good thing) passed, the fiber went away. Now that partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is out of fashion, packaged foods remove it and advertise "0% Trans Fat!"

There was a time when carbs were bad and there were plenty of packaged foods that upped the fat and protein and advertised "Low Carb!" When Dr. Atkins died of heart failure and overweight, the steam went out of low-carb. Now low-fat is ascendant, and packaged foods trumpet "Low Fat!"

The problem with this latest fad is fat makes food taste good. When you take it out, recipes taste like crap. Try a spoonful of fat-free cream cheese and tell me what you think. So the packaged food industry has to add something else that makes the low-fat garbage palatable: sugar!

It's evil, but it's not a conspiracy. People buy packaged foods because they're convenient and taste ok. They do this in preference to cooking, which may or may not taste better, because they're lazy or too busy. That's human nature. The problem is the low-fat food fad.

If the culture turned a corner and demanded low-sugar food, the food industry would fall all over itself taking sugar and corn syrup out and adding back in fat and protein to make the stuff taste better. They did it in the low-carb era and they'd do it again in a heartbeat.

[fanboy123]

I don't really think its a conspiracy unless you consider advertising to the public to be very secretive and back-room.

I agree mostly with what is said above but I think it is important to emphasize that what the public wants to buy is heavily influenced by what they see on TV.

[learc83]

Wow, where did you get the Dr. Atkins died of heart failure? He slipped on ice, hit his head and died as a result.

Do people really believe that this is how he died?

[babblefrog]

One correction: Atkins died of head trauma after slipping on the ice, not heart failure. I guess you can call every death heart failure, though ;-)