[001sky]

Americans are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. But they eat too much and exercise too little because they’re addicted to sugar, which not only makes them fatter but, after the initial sugar rush, also saps their energy, beaching them on the couch. “The reason you’re watching TV is not because TV is so good,” he said, “but because you have no energy to exercise, because you’re eating too much sugar.”

Pretty sure the reason for the is also the do-gooders. For 40 years people have been preaching "low fat" and "no animal fat" to kids.

Now, wanting to be healthy...they eat "low fat" diets. Diets that are full of Carbs (because protein is expensive). Its a zero sum game.

And what's funny is that "low fat" foods are almost always high in sugar. Because starch is unappetizing. And protein is not an ingredient you can sprinkle into skim-milk yoghurt.

Don't get me started on 'gluten free', its just as bad. You know what's gluten free? Sugar. And stuff full of sugar (raisins!).

And while we're at it lets look at replacing "sugar" with Juice because its healtier. Oh, wait...its full of sugar.

If you want to eat healthy just pick a balanced diet.

[MisterBastahrd]

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed that a balanced diet includes 5-7 servings of rice and grains a day, 2 servings of fruits and veggies, 2 servings of protein, and a small amount of fat.

That's one of the biggest problems here. What people have been taught is patently incorrect. It's a recipe for riding a blood sugar roller coaster.

We teach our kids from an early age to eat sugary foods. We use cartoon characters to goad them into begging their parents for them. What's cereal and milk? Most of the time, it's a sugar coated grain-based product soaked in a sugary liquid that is somehow healthier when you remove all the fat from it and add more sugar. What do kids want for a drink? Sunny Delight, a half-artificial sugar bomb which is nutritionally not much better for you than a can of soda. What do most kids get at school for lunch? Two enriched slices of bread surrounding a small piece of meat and some fried starch on the side. And more milk, because you can't ever have enough sugar to drink.

I can go on and on, but the point is, this starts with parents getting educated and taking charge of the eating habits of their kids.

[crusso]

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed

This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the extent that they received media attention, they were ridiculed or held up as misguided or frauds.

It was an extremely painful and costly example of top-down, politically motivated, government funded "science". Although we learned some lessons about sugar vs fat vs protein, society learned almost nothing about avoiding this kind of trap again in the future.

[sparkie]

I see quite a striking parallel in the way AGW "denialists" are treated similarly to how the likes of Yudkin were treated for speaking out against the dogmatic ideas of health "science".

Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (although little of it gets into established journals). There's no such thing as "settled science", and the term alone should set alarm bells ringing.

[sparkie]

Of course, it's always easier to bury dissenting views - it makes it look like there's a "consensus".

[eropple]

Peer reviewed denialist science? Links please. (And this isn't a joke--I very much want to read this, but it looks like downvotes are easier than substantiating.)

[pdonis]

http://nipccreport.org/

Note that "denialist" is a very broad (not to say loaded) term. A better term would be: skeptical of the claimed "consensus" that we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, even if the economic costs are huge, or else the planet is doomed.

[eropple]

I'm sorry, maybe I was unclear. I'm talking about peer-reviewed work (which the NIPCC stuff is not) that is being trumpeted by people who are, like, not being funded by a libertarian think tank. I mean, NIPCC is bankrolled by the Heartland Institute (a Cato-alike wishcasting group) and two advocacy groups that won't reveal their funding, one of which was headed by Fred Singer (who to this day is trying desperately to make people think that the University of East Anglia emails are actually a thing).

I wanted to give you a chance to show me something I hadn't seen before, on the off chance that maybe somebody, somewhere, was actually doing intellectually defensible work that wasn't being publicized...and you bilged it by bringing up the same utterly discredited junk that's in the denialist toolbox. I mean, you do realize why it's named the NIPCC, right? It's named that to confuse people with the IPCC, an actual scientific organization that does not lead off their papers with statements about how politically independent they are.

The mindset that compels one to the false equivalency you are choosing to employ between a policy group's own paid-for studies and the peer review process of, like, actual science is exactly why I use the term "denialist".

(For folks interested in a pretty good rundown of exactly why I and folks who pay attention to this may react in this manner towards the NIPCC, I recommend this as a great summary: http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/09/09/heartland-inst... )

[cbhl]

This is why I love the work of Dr. Maya Adam out of Stanford; I took the 1.0 verison of her "Just Cook For Kids" MOOC[0][1] and found it really beneficial.

Granted, getting parents to sit down and spend an hour or two a week watching videos on eating right (and then spending more hours buying groceries and cooking at home) is difficult if they're working minimum-wage jobs and barely making ends meet, and the children of those parents seem like they'd be most vulnerable.

Government initiatives in Canada to improve healthy eating in Nunavut, for example, ended up with passion fruit and coconuts[2] being shipped up to the arctic. I'm not convinced that resulted in better diets for children.

[0] http://justcookforkids.com/

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/childnutrition

[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/why-i...

[grannyg00se]

"Parents getting educated"

I think most of us know that sugar cereals are bad, sunnyd is fake and disgusting, and soda is poison. The problem is we just don't care. At least that's what it looks like. When you see an obese child whose parents are also obese and they're all happily consuming their favorite poisonous snack do you see that as an educational challenge? I see it more as a discipline problem.

[prawn]

Potentially a combination of things. Education and reinforcement, discipline, opportunities, etc. All would surely help. On the last item, at a servo (what an Australian generally calls a "gas station") soft drinks and energy drinks are often cheaper than water or promoted in two-for-one deals. They're also always at eye level, leaving milk and water on lower shelves of the display fridges.

When you reach the counter (and the same thing happens near supermarket checkouts), there is literally shelving with hundreds of chocolate bars between you and the attendant.

And this is where you're filling the car that enables you to avoid walking a distance instead.

Another opportunity example is fast food. The 24-hour shops will be Hungry Jacks (Burger King in AU), McDonalds and so on, or servos. Supermarkets will generally have shut by 9pm.

[doesnt_know]

> If you want to eat healthy just pick a balanced diet.

If people could easily do that we wouldn't be facing an epidemic of obesity. It's sort of crazy you're so willing to ignore the major point of the article and blame those have historically tried to enact change.

As far back as 1675, when western Europe was experiencing its first sugar boom, Thomas Willis, a physician and founding member of Britain’s Royal Society, noted that the urine of people afflicted with diabetes tasted “wonderfully sweet, as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”

Tasting sick peoples urine is definitely not my idea of a dream job.

[benjohnson]

The possibility of saving life tends to override squeamishness.

[syntheticnature]

The whole gluten free kick fries my brains. It exists because some people have an actual problem with gluten, but lots of people have jumped on the bandwagon since if it's on the label it must be for general health reasons. (Where are the "nut-free" folks? How about the folks that only eat things labelled "New and Improved?") Actual gluten issues have existed for a while -- I found a cookbook for those with Celiac disease from the 70s at a used book sale, but now it has a lot more attention.

This, of course, muddies the waters for those with an actual issue, as a bandwagoner gone gluten free won't have a reaction if they accidentally consume gluten. This leads to erroneous beliefs about what is/isn't gluten free.

Of course, this isn't unique to gluten. One can find plenty of people claiming to be vegetarian, even vegan, who solely refuse to eat red meat.

[Psyonic]

While you may find it annoying, the upside of this is awareness. More people are aware of gluten intolerance than ever before, and for people with celiac's and serious gluten intolerance, life is now much easier.

[ebrenes]

As many things, this is now a double-edge sword. As gluten-free is getting mixed signals as a fad diet and as a serious medical condition. For celiac's it's in their interest that it be viewed as a serious condition, that could be life threatening.

I've come across accounts of celiacs who are concerned that the rise of gluten-free options while expanding their menu options, has also raised their level of anxiety. Because some places might just be trying to adapt to a fad diet, but aren't taking enough precautions to avoid food cross-contamination, such as re-utilizing utensils to cook "gluten free" foods.

I think part of the concern is that "gluten intolerance" as a serious medical condition is getting overshadowed by the flaky diet mumbo jumbo.

[beloch]

Not all "balanced" diets are created equal. You can read the labels on all food you buy and balance the amount of protein, fat, and carbs you get according to the latest science, but you'll likely do far better by eating food that doesn't come with labels.

This article highlights one of the many possible reasons why this is so. Refined fructose is absorbed by the body almost instantly and hits your liver like a freight train. The same amount of fructose eaten in the form of raw fruit takes longer to absorb and trickles into your liver, giving it time to cope. The same nutrients ingested in different forms have different health impacts. Never mind that it's also easier to eat far more sugar when it's refined! e.g. A 590 mL bottle of coke contains about the same amount of sugar as a half dozen apples.

What's the lesson learned? Try to let your body do some of the processing itself. That's what it has evolved to do. We will most probably continue finding ways in which highly processed foods are bad for us. Perhaps it's not a good idea to let industrial processes pre-digest your food for you. We are finding out that how we get our nutrients is as important as what those nutrients are.

[ehsanu1]

Define a "balanced diet". For most, and in the conventional formulations, it's chock full of carbohydrates, and not much better than a "low-fat diet".

[InclinedPlane]

Good points. Though it's actually not a zero sum game, it's worse than that. When you get down to it there's a very important link between the satiety/calorie ratio of food and weight gain. Sure you can talk about will power and so on, but those are higher order effects, it should be obvious that if there's a zero will power diet that frequently results in obesity and a zero will power diet which doesn't that's significantly more important than the idea that people can potentially starve themselves thin. The same sort of thing applies to wealth, for example, but nobody tells the poor to just acquire some will power and start spending less than they earn.

A lot of low fat foods end up being high in sugar and end up having lower satiety than "regular" foods. The perfect example being skim milk vs. whole milk. That's super important because it means that people can consume the same calories but still feel hungry with a "low fat" food. And then they are faced either with persistent feelings of hunger or to eat more until they feel full. Also, high sugar foods are easily converted into body fat, which just makes the problem that much worse.

[pinealservo]

> The same sort of thing applies to wealth, for example, but nobody tells the poor to just acquire some will power and start spending less than they earn.

Maybe you've been reading particularly good advice about wealth, but I can assure you that far more than "nobody" tell the poor to just acquire the willpower to spend less and earn more.

I agree with your overall point, but I think the same issue plays out in the field of economic behavior of individuals as well as the eating behaviors. People who are advantaged in either scenario don't realize it and don't understand their own advantages, thus giving bad advice to the less-advantaged even when they mean well.