[dschobel]

"I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong, or rather that the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions, which have changed drastically in the last 100 years. I doubt controlling marketing material will have a long-lasting effect, but anything is worth a shot. It is a very serious problem."

Which is it then, 'nothing wrong' or 'serious problem'?

[DanielBMarkham]

Nothing structurally or behaviorally unusual. There has been no new change in the species or some external factor that has caused the obesity epidemic. It's all based on changing external conditions, mostly food availability.

So there's no "disease" to cure, and no mastermind manipulation of the population by forces using [insert latest ideas here].

If anything, this leads me to believe that we'll need to take evolution into our own hands to fix this. Various measures like this could be a useful stopgap. Like I said, beats me. Happy to confess ignorance here (as opposed to seemingly most every other commenter who speaks on this topic) If pressed, however, also happy to provide more speculation.

As an obese person, I can definitely add that the disease metaphor, like the "moral blemish" metaphor before it, in my opinion does more damage than good. People come up with these ideas, then start wrapping them in the conspiracy theory of the month garb. Enough with the evil corporations, corrupt governments, sick people, lazy no-goods. These highly emotionally-charged models of analysis are not helping the public conversation.

For the entire history of the species nobody has had to worry about obesity until very recently. It follows that social structures and the physiology of humans are not the changing variable. The only obvious changing variable is food availability. So yes, obesity is a public health hazard, but it's not one based on some fault with people or social structures. It's simply the result of changing environmental conditions for which the species is ill-prepared.

[doctorpangloss]

>The only obvious changing variable is food availability. So yes, obesity is a public health hazard, but it's not one based on some fault with people or social structures.

Okay, but it's people growing and selling all that food. Social structures subsidize most of our foods. Sure, food availability is the "only variable," but it's a variable highly caused & correlated to people and social structures.

>physiology of humans are not the changing variable

Of course the physiology of humans are a changing variable. African Americans did not exist as a physiological idea 400 years ago, but today they represent a medical population that's much differently susceptible to disease, especially obesity, than Africans living in America or white Americans.

>no "disease" to cure

Similar language was used by the tobacco industry to argue against the link between tobacco marketing, tobacco use and ultimately lung disease. [0]

http://archive.tobacco.org/resources/history/strategieslb.ht...

[6d0debc071]

If the only variable you're going to invoke is food availability, why isn't everyone - or near enough everyone - obese?

Also:

You'd expect, if food availability was the sole variable, for things like pasta to be the ones best correlated with obesity. (Well, no, actually you'd expect wheat flour at $0.07 to be, but you'd expect pasta to correlate better )

So, how comes Coca Cola is $0.46 per 200 calories while pasta is $0.21 per 200 calories, and yet it's the consumption of sweetened beverages that correlates so well with obesity? How comes so much of our energy comes from fast food, (a Jack in the Box burger is $0,57 per 200 calories) rather than wheat flour based products?

[VLM]

Confusing availability solely with cost and not time.

Flour costs about 3 to 4 hours to bake some bread or at least an hour to make a homemade cake or cookies. That's the most expensive.

Pasta will cost me 1/2 hour absolute minimum to make spaghetti and meatballs. Cheaper, but still expensive.

Next cheapest is garbage grade fast food. Well, you're in for a long walk or a short drive, I figure I can get to the closest McD and get served "something" in less than 10 minutes. Cheaper yet...

Cheapest of all is a can of soda. I can hit the vending machine at work and walk back to my desk in about 3 minutes.

Hmm and the cheaper they are on this list, the more blame they get for making people fat. Some of it is the hair shirt brigade with the usual claim that if we had to raise our own apple orchards we would be holy enough, err, good enough, err whatever we'd be thin.

I will say that a significant medically diagnosed food allergy in the family is probably the most effective weight loss plan I've ever heard of. No wheat ever again, you say? Well that eliminates 90% of the grocery store's processed/junk food right there.

[6d0debc071]

It's not time-consuming to eat healthy. So much of what you're talking about doesn't require you to be standing anywhere near the thing. Breadmakers for instance - flour does not cost you 3-4 hours to make bread, it costs you more like a minute to stick the things in the machine and press the button.

Pasta's about 20 minutes - which doesn't need you to be standing there. Bolognese sauce is about 20 minutes, regardless of the amount you make. Make a bunch of the things up and stick them in the freezer. - 4 minutes in the microwave, only a few seconds of which need you to be standing there.

Rice, similarly, doesn't need you to be standing there while it boils. Heck you can get rice-cooking machines. Anything made in a slow cooker pretty much by definition doesn't need you to be standing there....

[VLM]

Its a skinner box reward training system rather than anything else. Like a MMORPG grind game but with real food. I'm talking about the timestamp delta between "I'm hungry (or bored, or its a habit, or whatever)" and "I'm eating".

Its not that it takes 3 hours of work to make bread, its that it takes 3 hours from "I'm hungry and I'm going to do something about it" to the reward of gulping down fresh bread. So its harder to get fat off homemade bread, than, say, a can of corn syrup soda. 20 minutes for bolognese sauce (only outta a can I'm thinking, unless you're an iron chef or something) vs 3 minutes for a chocolate bar and a can of coke from the vending machine.

I'm not arguing its right. I have a totally different diet and I mostly raid the fruit bowl and eat an apple or banana or some nuts or fresh grapes or berries or generally speaking something vaguely paleo diet ish as much as reasonably possible. But people consider my diet to be really weird and un or outright anti american so I don't count. When someone opens a drive thru fruit stand (now there's a startup idea?), then we'll see how much weight I gain.

This is an important part about the debate. Obesity is not about the food. Some slightly more intelligent dietary changes and we'd be complaining about Americans being fat because they go thru the drive-thru wheatgrass juicer fast food joint every day for a snack and the drive-thru fruit stand for lunch every day and eat a whole package of dehydrated bananas outta the vending machine and a whole pint of blueberries all at once while watching TV on the couch or whatever. Americans would in general be a whole lot healthier, but still just as fat, and we'd still be listening to psuedo-dietary complaints about rich corporations screwing us over, because its really all about the latter economic part of the story rather than the dietary former part. Roll the presses with "They are intentionally addicting us to dehydrated blueberries!!!"

[6d0debc071]

If you store your food the time between being hungry and eating should be minutes at worst. You're not going to put the bread on when you're hungry, you're going to put the bread on earlier in the day, or the day before even, and just cut a bit off when you want a sandwich. Similarly for anything you can cook without being there or store. Stick the slow cooker on before you go to work and come back to a lovely stew or something. That sort of thing.

It should not take you 3 hours to make a sandwich from the time you decide you're hungry. If it does, then there's something fairly seriously wrong about the way you plan and/or execute procedures. To the point where it seems you end up assuming that their horizon for meaningfully planned actions is less than 3 hours.

> 20 minutes for bolognese sauce (only outta a can I'm thinking, unless you're an iron chef or something)

Dice and fry an onion, fry some minced beef, pour a can of chopped tomatoes into it. That should have taken you 10-15 minutes to do all three, tops. The tomatoes will boil pretty much instantly, maybe throw in a handful of chopped mushrooms, bit of bazil, bit of oregano. Drop of tomatoes purée, maybe a little bit of gravy to thicken if you added too much moisture earlier on.

It's not hard to do in 20 minutes.

If you fry onions for 15 minutes or meat for 15 minutes, getting you up to a 30 minute sort of time span, then you're going to be getting dessicated husks out at the other end. You only fry onions for a handful of minutes with hot oil, 'till they start to go transparent, any longer than that and they start to crisp and blacken. As for meat - it'll just go increasingly rubbery. Yuck. Fry it until you can't see any pink bits left, continually spreading it around with the spoon to make sure it's done all the way through, and then it's pretty much done - get your tomatoes in.

[enduser]

> It's all based on changing external conditions, mostly food availability.

Most people given access to unlimited lentils would not become obese. Food availability is NOT the only factor.

A core message of the article is that the food industry has lobbied against restrictions on advertizing to children food with habit-forming non-nutritive calories. The food industry is built around cheap production of highly-processed ingredients that addictively fuel consumption and sabotage health.