"if nobody could ever eat “ultra-processed” food but everything else was the same, they would overeat something else."
The whole point is that processed food reduces the amount of necessary mastication and digestion to consume the same amount of calories. You can theoretically eat as many calories of apples in a sitting as is found in a sleeve of Oreos, but the whole point is that people don't do that. Processed foods in particular sever the relationship between fiber and sugar, which means that you're eating a far higher amount of sugar before you reach satiety. That's why "calories in, calories out" is so misleading - the type of food you're eating deeply influences the amount of calories you eat! And we know that empirically.
What about a hand of bananas, though? That doesn’t require much work, you hardly need teeth to eat bananas. I think the point of ultra-processed foods (that is the big change from traditional) is that they are shelf-stable and can be kept around and available at all times. People didn’t used to eat while working, now everyone can have snacks at their desk. The idea of “intermittent fasting” is just a re-creation of what used to be normal, people not eating all the time.
Feel like it's a combo of quick, easy and tasty not necessarily how much fiber is in there. But lack of fiber probably doesn't help either with some of the foods.
Feel like it helps comparatively to other choices (with more sugar and fats) but feel like I could still be in the over eating range if I could open up a bag of cheap and tasty steak, brisket, or salmon bites whenever. But meat is expensive and has different storage needs.
You can absolutely, 100% overeat steak. When I was a kid, I could polish off an entire roast beef.
This stuff is idiosyncratic. I make myself a dessert of chocolate protein powder mixed with water. I love the taste, but it's impossible to eat more than a few hundred calories.
It’s true that ultra processed foods are often calorie dense, and not as satisfying. Also (1) they are cheap, and (2) they can be stored a long time on shelves or in cupboards. That makes it a lot easier to indulge whenever and wherever people get an urge.
That said, it’s loading the deck to compare a steak to bananas. It’s really easy to overeat, without resorting to overprocessed foods,if you don’t pay attention. Go to chipotle and try to have less than 1000 calories at lunch. Go to Five Guys - a burger and fries can get you to 2000. You have to pay attention. That’s not ultra processed, and it’s way too much for most people. When i was in the habit of eating as much red meat and cheese as I wanted, it took more and more to feel full, and I gained weight, even though I was exercising almost daily.
Nowadays, when I go to a restaurant that has calorie counts on the menu, an entree with red meat and a starch usually has about 1000 calories. Add a glass of wine or beer, add an appetizer or have a roll and butter, and you are way, way over what you should eat at one meal unless you’re 25 years old and training for the Tour de France. A 600-800 calorie meal, which is more in ballpark for most people (and even on the high side) requires careful choices and active restraint.
I think this gets at the bait & switch behind the ridiculous "ultra-processed foods" idea. The term is only defined as "food that's particularly easy to eat a lot of" or "particularly delicious foods" when it comes time to pretend it's useful (and obviously it wouldn't make sense to refer to either of those things as "ultra-processed"). The rest of the time it's just an incoherent jumble of things united only by a vague sense of what's natural.
This exactly. It's about feeling satiated. A 300 cal bag of chips will leave me wanting more whereas a 100 cal banana will satiate my need for snacks for a bit. Ultra processed foods are high calorie low satiation, which is a dangerous combination.
Personally I think this whole debate overcomplicates things. Everyone knows that overeating is bad. So just eat less. It’s not rocket science, it just takes some discipline.
Have you ever struggled with being overweight, Milan? (Serious question, if you have, my apologies for assuming). This is like telling someone who has a drinking problem that actually if they just drink a lot less they'll probably be fine. People who are chronically obese just do not have the capacity to resist overeating on a regular basis.
People who have always been on the smaller side (and like you, I'm not saying this is Milan, because I don't know) underrate the effect to which you have to learn to ignore your body's signals when you're trying to lose weight. My body will tell me I'm hungry when I know I don't need food, for example. Imagine if you got a solid 8-10 hours of quality sleep every night, but by noon every day you felt like you needed a nap. It seems like a matter of discipline to just say to yourself, "Oh, you don't need sleep, we got plenty of rest already", but the urge to give in to biological pressures can be overwhelming.
Honestly, I don't understand what's hard to understand. Like, if you're normal-weight and you don't get why people can't just eat less, let me suggest an experiment: try starving yourself down to an extremely unhealthily low weight, a cancer-patient/famine/hunger-strike weight, and keeping yourself there for a few years. If you can do that, then come back and talk about how easy it is to just eat less--because that's exactly what it feels like. That's what an overweight person's body thinks is happening when they try to lose weight--that they're dying by starvation, voluntarily, despite being surrounded by food. Don't wanna do that experiment? Then shut up.
Man that hunger pain is so real. I’ve been on Ozempic for a couple weeks now and I’m getting to the point where I almost miss the pain. Like you know how after a bad breakup your heart hurts so intensely and eventually the space that heartbreak took up just becomes a void and it is almost worse? That’s where I am right now.
It’s extremely strange to not feel like I am starving all the time. I also miss the dopamine rush after a binge, collapsing on the couch after eating a medium dominos pizza and begging god for forgiveness.
So glad that medication is working for you. I think the fact that it is some effective really speaks to how biologically based hunger really is and how little "will power" often refers to lucky genes or health and not moral fortitude.
I have ADHD and resisted taking meds for years because it felt like a crutch or shameful for some reason when it felt like I should be able to just muscle through things with grit. After starting Wellbutrin and having my dopomine and attention system actually process so that I would "see thing to do it" and do rather than "see thing to do, mean to do but get distracted, and then hate yourself later" was so freeing.
But after a few weeks I also had a period of mild rage that this was what so many people's lives were always like and that I had so much guilt and shame over something that really was a matter of brain chemistry and not virtue.
In a similar way, after always being quite thin, I started a new migraine medication that pretty universally adds 20 lbs to patients weight. Even with that weight gain, I still have a very healthy BMI. But it has taken my body from "society goal weight" to "society acceptable weight" and that has honestly been a little rough. It is made more frustrating by the fact that I have not changed how I eat or exercise. The medication has just adjusted my metabolism. Part of what sucks is having folks stop assuming that I must have great self control, which I never really did.
And people won't take no for an answer. I almost flipped out on someone last week who kept shoving a piece of cake in my face. I think it makes them self conscious about their own obesity when I turn it down. It took years though for me to get to this point, and it's still a struggle at times.
This is exactly it, but it goes beyond losing weight, and extends to not gaining weight as well. I am a pretty trim guy, and so is my entire family. I get SUPER uncomfortable when I overeat, to the point where I often won't have seconds if I take even a 2 minute break after eating firsts. I stopped going to all you can eat sushi in university because while my friends seemed to relish the food coma they would get into (and which you would have no choice but to do, as people always over ordered), I found it absolutely miserable.
Now, I think even for me, it is easier to overeat processed foods, and especially desert, which is why I try to not keep too many in the house. I also think intake regulation is a bit easier with even moderate exercise, which I get from walking the dog and playing sports 1-2 a week. So these are a couple behavioural modifications people can undertake pretty easily, but will still only take you so far if you are like at the 10th percentile of how quickly you feel full.
For a more scientific take that lines up with this theory, read the Hungry Brain.
I never understood how people could feel sick from eating too much until I got pregnant. Then I realized that of course other people find it easier not to overeat, if you feel this bad when you do you just stop! Unfortunately it didn't last after I had the baby.
For most of my life I have not in fact been on the smaller side, so I really am not all that sympathetic to complaints about how difficult it is to stick to a diet.
This is a remarkably self-centered view of a complicated issue that impacts tens of millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people around the world. Imagine if someone said "I've been sad/depressed before, so I am not really sympathetic to complaints about how hard it is to just snap out of a depression."
As I said I just do not think this particular issue is that complicated, unlike depression. Most people who are overweight are that way because they overeat.
I don't know what to tell you, man, but on this topic and, frankly, quite a few others, I've observed a pretty stark lack of empathy (or hell, even sympathy) on your part for others who seem to be struggling.
The ironic thing is that Milan will jump down the throat of anyone who he interprets to be speaking on issues that minorities, women, or college students have an interest in. But on this and (as you made) quite a few other topics he's willing to cast that aside and tell hundreds of millions of human beings that they're just too weak willed to put down the french fries.
This is such a callous thing to say lol. I'm happy for you that you lost weight. I also lost a lot of weight purely through diet/exercise, but it was hard as fuck. Nights spent awake trying to ignore pretty painful hunger pangs, being the odd man out at social functions when everyone else was eating, throwing away lots of food and dealing with the guilt of waste, etc. I don't know how you could've gone through that and come out with no sympathy for how difficult it is to do, especially for people who have a lot of other stuff going on in life.
Also just being honest, man, but while I'm sure 170lbs was significantly overweight for your age and obviously entitles you to an opinion, I don't think it really gives you a lot of insight into people who have struggled with chronic obesity their whole lives at 250+lbs.
WIth this worldview it seems like you should be a Republican, unless what applies to food doesn't apply to "we don't need to help unemployed people, they should just find a job," "we don't need to help people with learning disabilities, they should just try harder," etc.
Exactly my thought. For some reason, people who otherwise are aware of the complicated interplay of biology, psychology, social, cultural, genetic, and environmental influences in a vast array of arenas cannot for the life of them comprehend that those same factors combine to make the obesity epidemic more complicated than "just eat less". And when you tell them it's more complicated they respond, as Milan does, by saying "it just isn't. You really can just eat less."
If you've been small for your entire life, you've never had to maintain a serious caloric deficit over a serious length of time, so I'm not sure how that experience is relevant... Especially since you're in college, an environment far more conducive to keeping weight off than working a 9-5 with a family.
I lost a lot of weight and kept it off, which I'm very thankful for, but when I see people who haven't managed to, I don't think "what weak people," I think "but for the grace of God go I," because I know how hard that is. I also did it in college and probably would not be able to do it over again--and certainly would not be able to nearly as easily--now that my life is much more complicated.
Put another way, Milan is just restating the problem rather than offering a solution. The problem of obesity just is the problem that many people do not have and cannot gain the discipline to eat less.
My theory is that some people are more susceptible to a craving of sugar and salt, like some people are more susceptible to be addicted to opioids, etc. The food industry has unwittingly hacked them to be addicted to their products.
Yes, I have. I was very overweight as a kid; I think 90 something percentile for my age. January of 2021 I was like 170 lbs and not particularly muscular. Dropped down to 145 through diet and exercise and now I’m back at 170 but with a lot more muscle. So I do think I’ve earned the right to my opinion on this.
we’ll see how you’re doing with this when you’re 40. Edit: Well, actually we probably won’t see, because the entire population will be on GLP-1 drugs by then.
Oh, so I didn't just lose 60 pounds in the last year in my mid-40s without surgery or meds, just through tracking calories (and honestly exercising less because taking care of my toddler has dramatically decreased out-of-the-house exercise opportunities)? Well damn, my scale must be broken or something!
That's quite an accomplishment. I, too, lost a lot of weight doing 'eat less, move more'. 90 lbs, in fact, after my second child was born. But I can tell you that the trade offs and opportunity costs in terms of how much of my brain space went into that project was quite a sacrifice. It truly became a part-time job. I actually quit a full time one to do this (enormous privilege). Pandemic came, I regained some of it. Then I discovered keto/low carb/carnivore and while it's still an effort, it's a heck of a lot easier to lose or maintain by avoiding UPFs than just 'eat less, move more'. When the most easily available and accessible calories are UPFs, satiety is the key.
I think this is the issue with Milan's blanket 'just put the donut down' POV. When you're a child, and he is the same age as my first, your brain just doesn't have as many competing priorities so it is indeed easier to JUST eat less.
So I have. I was at a BMI of around 30 (border between overweight and obese) in my mid 20s. I decided that I hated feeling like garbage (and myself to be honest) so much that I had to make a change. I prioritized exercise and reasonable (but not perfect) eating over almost everything else. And it worked!* Both my parents also lost a lot of weight by making similar changes.
*I'm not saying it's easy - in fact quite the opposite. My relationship with food is still far from perfect, and it's challenging most days but worth it.
edit: so what am I trying to say we should do? I agree that saying "just stop overeating" isn't enough. But I think we shouldn't deny people's agency either. Try to give people encouragement *and* tools to help them control their eating (up to and including pharmaceutical!).
Fantastic comment. This is what is so promising about the new drugs on the market as they can really help install the needed discipline but essentially make it biological. There are some people that can muster the needed discipline to sustainably lose weight but it's extremely difficult. Certainly those people deserve a lot of credit and I damn well wish I was one of them. I just hope these drugs become cheaper, or at the very least, covered by more insurance plans sooner rather than later. I know they have been coming down in price but a lot of us still can't afford them while also paying a mortgage and other mandatory expenses. Hopefully Trump's massive tariffs will fix all this and I'll be able to get me some of that sweet Ozempic goodness!
I knew this comment section would get heated! My 2 cents (and this based on conversations with nutritionists and the studies they've pointed me too), is that so much of this comes down to the circumstances one was born into. And generally, poverty makes things like exercising and taking time to eat well very very hard.
But I think having that general macro sympathetic view for the obesity problem coupled with Milan's more micro view for improving one's own personal behavior is a neat combo!
Something Rory told me when we met up IRL is that he thinks working out makes people more right-wing.
The basic left-wing idea is that your outcomes are determined by factors outside of your control; the basic right-wing view is that your personal choices determine your outcomes. When it comes to exercise and fitness you can clearly see the results of your personal choices.
There is a bell shaped curve of exercise response. If you have 1000 people and all have them do the same muscle building exercises you’ll find at one extreme exercise non responders. They do the program and nothing happens. At the other extreme you have exercise hyper responders. They do the routine and make huge progress.
It’s obviously a lot easier to go to the gym every day if you see dramatic gains form the work you put in. But it’s also easy to be on the 95th percentile of excercise response and think it’s all due to your hard work .
I don't see how this tracks. The entire thrust of left politics is reform, amelioration, improvement... progress. Recognizing that many of life’s most important outcomes are determined by factors outside any person’s control is just accepting basic facts about human evolution and the laws of physics. Despairing about these facts and opposing attempts to change the “natural order” is right-coded, while striving (often impetuously and ineffectively) to improve the outcomes these facts generate is left-coded. The fact that “free will” is an illusion does not negate the ability of individuals or societies to change for the better. If it did then there would be no “left” politics at all.
Given what we know about educational polarization and given that working out actually comes with real cost (gym equipment at home, gym membership, trainers etc.), I suspicion is the correlation is actually opposite; people who work out more are more likely to be Democrats.
So, if we narrow just to weightlifting. The stat doing the work here is that men are much liklier to be weightlifters AND more likely to be Republican.
Working out is not that expensive. All you need is a flat surface to do some body weight exercises and a pair of running shoes to get your cardio in. A gym is nice but it’s not necessary.
It's true that you can work out with limited expenses. There is growing evidence that resistance training (using bands or weights) has such strong benefits everyone should be doing it.
"But I think having that general macro sympathetic view for the obesity problem coupled with Milan's more micro view for improving one's own personal behavior is a neat combo!"
This is so true. There are obvious systemic factors that have led to the rise in obesity, and at some level those might be addressable through work at the system level. Yet individual people can also have significant agency to change their own circumstances at least to some degree through their own personal choices regarding food and movement. The former has more explanatory power in most situations, but the latter is almost always the best personal advice to give to someone. The former gets coded as "progressive" and the latter as "conservative" or "reactionary", but they really work hand in hand but just need to be applied at the correct level of analysis.
Apply also to any number of hot button culture war issues of the day.
The problem for me though is that from a policy lens this "neat combo" isn't really useful. It reminds me of a internet food fight (sorry) from back int he day where a middle aged conservative white guy at Forbes wrote an essay about what he'd do "If I were a poor black kid." https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/12/14/trolling-the-internet-with-if-i-were-a-poor-black-kid/ The the thing is his advice on an individual level isn't wrong! It is in fact smart to stay clear of drugs and gangs and work hard in school and go to college and get a good job and not have kids until you're married and do all the things that Montel told you to do.
The problem, from a society wide and policy view, is that "just work harder and be more disciplined" isn't going to actually address the problem more than rounding off a few of the sharpest corners for a small group of people. After all if intergenerational poverty or being overweight were this easy to address, why do we see so much of it? And that's where I think a lot of the pushback to Milan is coming from, to many people he's doing the "just stay in school and be like Clarence Thomas!" thing but for overweight people, which actually isn't going to address the social problem we are talking about (even if it did work for him/Clarence which it did!) and clearly doesn't work for lots of people. It's not surprising people find this approach, well, annoying.
In some ways poverty probably makes exercise easier. E.g., you are more likely to walk or take the bus rather than drive.
But it definitely makes good eating hard, and that's an interesting public policy issue that politics writers like Matt ALMOST NEVER talk about. Like, we could actually stop subsidizing corn and tax it, and use the money to subsidize lettuce and apples. Obviously we can't do that because Iowa is super-important in presidential politics and California and Washington are blue states, but as a policy matter we COULD do that. There's no reason the cheapest food in my neighborhood has to be Little Caesar's Pizza. Public policy did that and we can change the subsidies!
Sure. But the fact that both Little Caesars and rice and beans are roughly equally cheap I think backs up my argument. The price isn’t the deciding factor; some people are choosing to make the less healthy choice and would benefit from making a different choice.
It's not *just* the money, though obviously that's important. My life as an affluent person is much easier than life for a low-income person, and I *still* occasionally just want to eat something that tastes really good, like pizza. I have the money and time to make salad, but I don't like salad as well as I like pizza. When your life is hard, it's easy to let yourself make bad choices just so you get a little relief.
If the 2021-22 inflation bump taught us anything it should be that "let's make food more expensive" is not going to fly with the electorate such that it is,
The only obesity problem that really gets my attention is that among the poor (and, to a certain extent, the question of why some working class folks just don't care if they develop huge guts from fast food and beer— but that could also be a byproduct of generational poverty culture.)
This is why addressing the processed foods issue (along with food deserts in poor neighborhoods and income inequality) might help people become more healthy.
The rest of us have the resources to do research and try stuff until something works. (BTW, you might have to do this over and over again as you age.)
What I said directly contradicts that, the science directly contradicts that, and of course the important moral point is that DIFFERENT PEOPLE METABOLIZE FOODS VERY DIFFERENTLY FOR REASONS THEY CAN'T CONTROL, INCLUDING GENETICS. It is profoundly immoral for you and your boss to be here lecturing people about how they should just eat less when a) you are not dietary scientists and b) he had bariatric surgery! The vast majority of our obese population does not have access to that surgery, or to semaglutide. You cannot find credible experts in the field who will tell you that ordinary people can just regulate their eating until they're thin. Our entire evolutionary history cuts against that. Modern life cuts against it.
It's JUST like the greedflation argument here - the argument is that corporations didn't just become greedy recently. OK, cool. Apply your own logic: is it remotely credible to suggest that our obesity crisis arose because everybody all of a sudden became feckless and lacking in will power? We're not even eating dramatically more calories than we used to!
Um, Matt didn't say that. He said that if we weren't overeating ultra-processed food, we'd most likely be overeating some other tasty food, because tasty food is tasty and we like to eat it more than is probably healthy for most moderns.
In fact, Yglesias very much said that the increase in weight has been going on for as long as we have records, as prosperity and nutrition increased.
In earlier phases this showed up as less malnutrition and increased height, now it's showing up as obesity but if you look at the increase in weight or calories it's pretty linear.
The problem of “ultra processed” foods is that they are salient, accessible, and cheap. Other foods are more costly and more difficult to overeat (fancy cheese and cured meats are quite calorie dense but much more expensive for example.)
"Ultra processed" foods may be unhealthy in other ways too, of course. Lacking in fiber and micronutrients, have chemicals that disrupt hormones / confuse the systems that regulate how much we eat / etc. I imagine someone who got fat on a diet of Pop Tarts, Twinkies, and potato chips would have worse problems than someone who got fat on a diet of cheese and bananas.
I really think "ultra processed" is a red herring.
It's probably making the obesity problem worse, but I just pulled a bag of store brand potato chips out of my pantry.
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil, salt. Not a lot of mutlisyllabic compounds there. These are NOT fancy-pants organic chips, they're the cheapo store brand.
But Freddie’s dishonesty is excused because of his targets are “profoundly immoral.”
It doesn’t matter if his accusation is blatantly false, because his is using bully logic to make the targets for his abuse the transgressors and to excuse his own conduct.
Milan is saying this, but Matt isn’t. Matt is ignoring important palatability factors and I think overestimates how easy it is to get fat eating apples and baked potatoes instead of pie and fries, but is still directionally correct that our food environment changing to have a ton of easy and tasty calories thrown at us all day is a likely cause of obesity, not a change in willpower.
Very much agree that this piece would have been more interesting if it had included a deeper discussion of the increasing incidence of hyper-palatable foods (which tend to be ultra-processed) but are specifically engineered to stimulate an addictive response to specific flavors/chemical combinations. This strikes me as exactly similar to modulating levels of nicotine in cigarettes to promote an unhealthy addiction.
I don’t think I claimed this, and don’t really know what UPF if it has some scientifically recent technical definition.
I do observe that these randomly chosen examples do definitely have a bunch of processing to make them very calorie rich and very tasty, especially the kind that comes on shelves in little boxes, which is the vast majority of what people meat. Fries, for example, are fried in industrially produced seed oils after being produced in large factories and frozen. I do not have home made wedges drizzled in EVO in mind. Even homemade pies will use a grocery store crust (e.g. graham cracker) crust and include a lot of added industrially refined sugar, and mostly people eat the stuff that comes in a bag or frozen box which has a ton of other stuff.
2. I’ve lost a bunch of weight without drugs or surgery and all it took was consistency and discipline
3. Read carefully and you’ll notice that I didn’t say the obesity crisis was caused by diminished willpower; I said that increased willpower is an underrated solution
4. Pretty sure average calorie intake has gone up over the last ~50 years
3) Please provide a citation to a study that demonstrated an effective mechanism for increasing willpower in general, as well as one that shows how that can be applied to people struggling with their weight in a way that will have broad based uptake to effectively reduce the obesity epidemic.
C'mon Milan, your espousing a shockingly simplistic view of this issue. Do you really think people struggling with obesity just aren't trying hard enough to get it under control? Do you really think nobody has thought to try and find a way to improve people's willpower so that this societal problem can be improved? Maybe this issue is just more complicated than your subjective experience would lead you to believe.
There is in fact some academic literature on the topic of “effortful control” and the benefits (and limits) of training oneself to cultivate it. There is also a big pop culture / Malcolm Gladwellian simplification engine that devolves into sloganeering and steams headlong into the replication crisis. I have never had the weight/obesity problems many here are describing, but I have several close relatives who do, and who have suffered their entire lives because of it. What strikes me most is the continuity of this problem with overcoming other addictions, including the very real and sometimes unbearable physical pain of it. So while I would never argue that “just eat less” is profound or useful advice for many or most life-long sufferers, it is also true that some people can overcome life-threatening addictions through sheer force
Some people can overcome poverty by winning the lottery. That's not evidence of the fact that the solution to widespread poverty is lottery tickets. You need to identify mechanisms that work for a broader swath of the population.
I mean, you are right and wrong. You are right in that it's not impossible to lose weight, plenty of people do it, willpower is a key part of it, etc. And there's a tendency-- especially on our side of the political spectrum-- to dismiss behavior-related descriptions of basically ANYTHING. So for instance, obviously long term homelessness contains a huge behavioral component; there are jobs available that people don't look for, there are apartments sometimes available that have rules that people don't want to obey, etc. And liberals and lefties don't like to talk about this stuff and it codes as victim blaming.
But at the same time, it isn't as simple as "well, you just stop eating". Compulsions are real. It's like Nancy Reagan saying "just say no to drugs". She was right that this was a good idea, but it's not so easy for an addict to do. And people really do have food addictions, they are difficult to kick, and one of the reasons we end up with Slow Boring pieces about Ozempic and bariatric surgery is precisely because tons of people find this a lot more difficult than you did.
Yes, but continuing the analogy, we try to offer people a hand up, like stable housing, clean clothes, guidance in applying for jobs, etc.
In the same way, we should try to give people tools and encouragement to improve their eating and exercise habits, not just say they are at the mercy of forces outside of them, which is where I think the pendulum has swung lately.
Milan, I think your dedication to a healthy lifestyle is admirable. Good for you! I don't know what good comes from telling people to buck up and be more disciplined, however. Does it really serve a purpose? It's like telling someone who lost a beloved spouse and is sunk into depression to just suck it up and feel better. What have you accomplished by so doing?
Freddie is emblematic of the moral decay we have seen in discourse. Rather than engage with what is said, he just assumes that something more convenient was said and hammers that.
It is lazy. It is nihilistic. It is unconcerned with knowing. It is the reason people here mock him.
Getting a job depends on someone else hiring you. Choosing to eat less is entirely up to you. Might not be easy to do consistently but it is in your own hands.
Milan, literally nobody who wants to lose weight is unfamiliar with the concept of willpower.
While I hope for your sake I'm wrong, the odds are overwhelming that you will gain the weight back. Not saying you shouldn't try, or to minimize your accomplishment. I have friends who lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off. But they are not the norm.
Or maybe it's that every American is pretty likely to have a close relationship with at least one person who has struggled with chronic obesity and, not being callous people, they have some sympathy and understand that it's pretty hard for them to lose weight? Or maybe some of us are former "fat slobs" and have lost the weight, but we experienced it as being vastly more difficult than Milan portrays it as being.
This is a misconception. Your metabolism doesn’t “slow down” in the sense that people think. What happens is that as people age they typically lose muscle mass and exercise less so they burn less calories but keep eating the same amount of food. You can combat this by working out.
Do you know any old people? My mom walks 5 miles a day she had a Fitbit and now has a Apple Watch and it’s clear that her pace has slowed from 12 minutes a mile to 17 minutes a mile over the 10 years from 60-70. That’s just the reality of aging. If you ran a 6 minute mile in high school you can’t train your way to a 6 minute mile at 70.
You are agreeing with me. She is burning less calories because she has less muscle mass and her heart can’t do the same output. So if she eats the same as when she was 25 she’ll gain weight.
There were some old guys doing 6 minute miles in a trial run with a club I was part of years ago. I did it in like 5:39. Now I am slow like an overweight corgi.
The way I understand it, a few of us are blessed with high metabolism for life, a few of us are cursed with low metabolism for life, but most of us have it slow down as you describe.
Yeah, my impression is that metabolism slowdown in one's 30s and 40s is driven more by muscle loss and a more sedentary lifestyle. If you hold those constant, then the metabolism slowdown is still non-zero but relatively minimal
I'm 68, been a cyclist all my adult life, and I'm here to tell you that you can't hold off the muscle loss with more exercise. That's something you can't hold constant. How I wish I could.
This is way too simplistic. I've noticed the effect when I switched from eating chips to eating cashews. It is much much easier to overeat on food like chips than it is to overeat on cashews.
>It is much much easier to overeat on food like chips than it is to overeat on cashews.<
Not remotely true for me. Mind you I could easily get through 3/4ths of a large size bag of Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream (pre-Ozempic, that is). But I could also absolutely gorge on cashews—and cashews are quite caloric—about 5% more calorie dense that a typical potato chip, in fact.
With cashews you are at least getting a more nutrient dense food so the overall effect will likely mean you eat less of something else. The challenge with low nutrient density in foods is that it also promotes overeating as your body is looking for those nutrients. Calories are not equal in terms of the effect on humans- there's plenty of evidence and research proving that.
You are describing executive function, which is often linked directly to clinical disorders like depression and ADHD, which you have admitted in other comments are very difficult to treat or change. If you accept that lack of this function is serious and resistant to simple fixes when it manifests in disorders, then you should also accept that 'just choose not to eat' is not a serious to weight problems.
Your should also do some reading about orthorexia, because people much smarter than you have done a lot of work in this area, and you should understand that work if you want to have an educated opinion on the subject.
Discipline is very easy to describe and quite hard to practice. You are young and will have much better opportunities with the co-eds if you have a nice body. Most of us are old. Many of us like our current partners and aren’t at risk of being dumped for a few extra pounds.
If my wife up and left me tomorrow, I’d lose 20 pounds in two months.
That’s fine but that just goes to show that, as you said, right now you are making choices that preclude you from losing 20 lbs but could make other choices that would cause you to lose 20 lbs if you chose to.
I strongly object to the word “choices.”. I am wholly material and my actions are merely the unfolding of physical processes, including especially evolution through natural selection. I have never made a choice in my life.
Still, my understanding of my incentives makes me confident that I would lose weight in the hypothetical world where my wife left me.
This may be a more philosophical disagreement but I don’t buy that you couldn’t just wake up tomorrow and decide you wanted to lose some weight and then change some of your eating habits accordingly to achieve the result
Could the average married 40 year old dad lose some weight if he blew off family dinner to go to a salad shop, and went to the gym instead of getting the kids ready for school in the morning? Sure he could.
Alternatively, he could just throw some cash at GLP-1 agonists and get the exact same results. Because it's not actually about willpower at all, it's about the particular constraints your life circumstances and metabolism impose.
It is definitely more complicated than that. At least for perimenopausal women. I eat fewer calories and exercise more than I did 10 years ago, yet I still gain weight. Related to what Geoffrey G says above, this may appear not to be true for rich women because they can pay for various sorts of cosmetic procedures or spend the time or not worry about lack of energy when doing things like "cleanses" which really is just not eating.
I'm glad you noted this because one thing I wanted to say very slowly to Milan is "You're a man. There's a reason men are more likely to hold this (wrong) opinion about losing weight than women"
YUP. I’ve always done a lot of aerobic exercise and avoided UPFs, courtesy mostly of a wise mother and healthy upbringing. But then I hit 40 and developed thyroid disease and it simply does not work anymore. I’m ten pounds heavier than I used to be without any lifestyle changes at all.
I’m sorry to hear that. But my observation is that obesity has increased by a lot over the last few decades while the rates of various health issues that cause weight gain have not comparably increased, and therefore cannot be driving the rise in obesity.
There’s also this whole idea of weight set points, where once your body gets used to being at a certain weight, it’s very resistant to change.
IIRC, researchers checked in on contestants of that show The Biggest Loser years later and found that people were really struggling to maintain weight loss—because their bodies seemed to be requiring fewer and fewer calories, more and more exercise, to maintain a steady weight lower than their previous set point.
As an engineer, the phrase "it just takes some discipline" is a giant red flag that an initiative has failed before it even started, and will continue failing until people stop substituting intensely fallible human discipline for an actual solution.
Milan is taking a lot of heat, but the fact is that irrespective of all the very real problems that people have which are given in the other comments and with which I have sympathy, in the end the only way to lose weight is to eat less than you're burning. You can do that in a number of ways some of which are harder than others, but it's up to each person and their health providers to figure out the right way for themselves.
I would note that many disagreeing with my take on choice and personal outcomes with regard to weight feel the opposite when it comes to choice and outcomes with regard to, say, gambling.
Yes but turn that around: I agree with you on the gambling posts, which makes me all the more puzzled you're taking this "it's personal willpower and that's all there is to it" line here.
Probably, but it's also true that the effects of overeating are visible to the world every time one is in public unlike gambling and some other vices so people naturally tend to take it a bit more personally.
Maybe you're referring to specific people, but I feel pretty much exactly about gambling as I do overeating. For many people, gambling is a fun and manageable vice. For an appreciable number of people, it's crippling, and it's profoundly stupid to make it much easier for those vulnerable people to destroy their lives.
Food is much more complicated, since nobody can simply swear off food.
The whole point of cutting out UPF is it makes it harder to overeat, between it taking longer to chew, lower calorie per volume and increased satiety it is much harder to overeat if you cut it out. Yeah sure some people can have the discipline to not overeat UPF but judging by the obesity epidemic most cannot.
>So just eat less. It’s not rocket science, it just takes some discipline<
Or some drugs.
I've been on the big O since mid January. It's truly not a magic elixir—you still have to be careful about your diet (at least I do). And I watch my weight like a hawk. But it does make eating a reasonable quantity of calories much easier.
It's *so* much easier. Milan's way of framing the issue is totally foreign to how it was when I was losing weight unassisted, it's so not just a matter of thinking to put down food you don't need. But that basically is how it works when you're on GLP-1s. You just think "wait, I probably shouldn't eat this," and then you just don't.
You're young. I used to think the same way. Think of something you have an addiction to and stop it for a month. If you have the will power, it likely wasn't an addiction to begin with. Lucky you. We need to stop shaming people.
I'd say you're doing the reverse. Pretty much nobody lives their life fully according to their values. That gap would disappear with more self discipline. But at some point, we recognize that the self discipline required so exceeds the average person's capacity that there's no point in demanding it. If a problem afflicting 70% of the country doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what does.
Just don't break the law, do drugs, start wars, or do other things that are harmful. Just do only things that benefit yourself. Congratulations, you've solved the majority of humanity's problems.
No, it really isn’t. How high your rent is depends on what your landlord charges you and what the local market is. Your employer has a great deal of leverage in determining your wages and hours. What does and doesn’t go into your mouth is by and large determined by you and people can choose to eat less.
Many people were calorie-constrained, and unable to become fat because they were closer to the malnutrition end of things, but those with effectively limitless access to food still often became fat.
Matt’s point is that it isn’t just about serious hunger - it’s also about food being cheap enough that people stop thinking about whether they feel like spending a bit of money on a snack at the movies or something from the vending machine or whatever.
Ryan that's an interesting chart and you are right that my "before Oreos" comment doesn't cover it.
But, does the rise of processed foods address that recent increase either? I mean the foods were already very very processed by the late 90s. I can't believe that expansions to the Oreo line or new flavors of Doritos really changed things that much.
This feels like another factor at work. (People sitting around on computers, perhaps?)
It’s the opposite especially for kids. The food people eat is a lot “healthier” and less processed today than say 1984. I mean just look at the collapse in soda consumption.
Interesting. I look at kids' food these days and am shocked. Some school require parents to only provide individually wrapped/sealed snacks etc, and that just tees them right up for processed foods. "Granola bars" are just candy bars, yogurts are basically ice cream with some probiotics, juice boxes, etc. etc.
My first reaction is very Principal Skinner: "Am I out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong."
But really, do you have examples that would help with the point? If anything I felt like there was a bit of a backlash against all the junk I grew up with. It is possible that my view is distorted by moving rapidly upward in socioeconomic status though. Brooklyn recently seemed a lot more healthy than the Midwest of the 80s & 90s, but perhaps the Midwestern food options got even worse since I left?
Yes! Freddie, you know I disagree with you a ton, but you are 100% right in this case! Hyper/processed food is DESIGNED to be super palatable, to make you want to eat far more than you need to.
My take is that, to a large degree, the brouhaha over "ultraprocessed" foods misses the forest for the trees. That is, it's a part and parcel with (or a direct development from) the "cheaper food" hypothesis, which in turn is ultimately a story of gigantic improvements in agricultural (and probably food-processing, too) productivity.
A frozen pizza and a sleeve of Oreos is a pretty calorie dense meal, sure! People shouldn't eat that crap on a regular basis. But a big part of the reason they do is it's comparatively cheap. If the above were a $20 meal, folks would eat it a lot less often.
It's probably true that people would lose weight if they ate more unprocessed fruits / veggies (like apples) and fewer high carb, high sugar foods (like oreos). However, humans have been experts at finding and cultivating foods that were high in calories and low in fiber / other macronutrients for a couple of hundred of years. Think white rice, or things like white bread and honey (later sugar) were also available, but expensive enough that only the wealthy could afford them in large quantities. Hence gout being called the "disease of kings".
I think the thesis behind "ultra-processed foods" is that food companies started adding insidious ingredients a few decades ago to make us addicted to their food, making us fat. Matt's thesis is that their main "invention" is getting high calorie / low nutrient + fiber foods into our hands extremely cheaply and conveniently. In other words, it wouldn't help much if they replaced high fructose corn syrup with something unprocessed like honey. It WOULD help if people had the discipline to eat mainly unprocessed foods despite high calories / low nutrient "junk" being so readily available. But this is not something our ancestors have ever achieved.
People were dying in molasses floods 100 years ago, when 1/3 of Americans were not waddling mounds. The casual availability is obviously the problem, not the bogeyman processing.
I think they go hand in hand. Like if there was nothing but whole foods (edit: the concept not the store). available I just wouldn’t eat 600 calories of watermelon like the volume of the stomach just isn’t that high.
It could rain strawberries and I wouldn’t match one gas station bag of Doritos.
Got it, thanks. A shame that Whole Foods took over the term whole foods, then.
And I've never liked the term processed as a pejorative either--a salad takes process to make. High caloric, as I said upthread, is the term I've found the most useful.
It’s not just high calories - it’s high calories per effort of eating and digesting. This is one of the values of the keto diet - fat and protein just feel a bit harder to eat than carbs, especially while your stomach already has some in them.
I think that’s mostly right but even like raw walnuts very few people are going to eat like a huge amount of them.
That highly palatable nature intersects with its high availability for being made of cheap ingredients and preserved to long stability.
Like when I make like 90 percent of my food myself and it’s basically just whole plants it’s actually close to impossible to gain weight no matter how often i eat vegan whole foods Foods made in factories make it easy.
It was the first example that came to mind. I actually think there’s not too little classism in the way Pollan beats up on convenience food type items and it’s not a view I endorse as any better.
Apple chips aren’t exactly bad but the reduction of water, and in some cases the addition other stuff and the speed at which they can be consumed makes them less good for over eaters like me.
Maybe so, maybe no, but either way, the responsible message still isn't "people just need to eat less." We literally do not have free will in any domain, but especially not in visceral needs like eating.
Great, next time a commenter disagrees with you on trans rights, don’t ban them or get angry with them. After all, they literally do not have free will, so they couldn’t have written anything else.
I guess the question is, what does "free" mean in "free will"? To have "free will," do you need to be free of social forces and stable personal traits? Do you need to be free of the wiring of your own brain? But on the other hand, choosing your actions by rolling dice does not strike me as an exercise of "free will" either, and not because the trajectory of the dice follows simple physics once they leave your hand -- to feel "free," it has to be "me" making real choices, but nothing "makes me" make those choices -- I am imagining myself as a sort of "unmoved mover," though I doubt that's possible.
I think in the colloquial sense, there isn't a clear distinction between "free will" and "volition," except that most people seldom use the latter word / maybe are not familiar with it. There's a colloquial sense where "having free will" means something like, "I feel like I'm making choices, and when I make a choice, nothing forces my mind and body to defy my choice." In this sense, I am a mover, and don't have to be unmoved by forces as long as they are ego-syntonic. The forces are allowed to shape my choice, but I am only unfree if, once my choice is made, I am unable to act on it.
We could have another conversation on, if the technical and colloquial meanings of a term differ, who is "really right" -- my own inclination is to prefer terms that allow precise distinctions, at least when I want to communicate precisely.
The tricky part is that if we don't all mean the same thing by the same words, we can think we disagree when our real disagreement is just what the words mean; or fail to communicate about what exactly we mean.
On the subject of "free will," though, I feel like it's a hard concept to understand clearly even if we agree on a definition-in-words. It should be something that is neither entirely trivial nor definitionally impossible, but I don't know what exactly.
What is this agency and volition that we have, and what makes it distinct from free will?
I think that we are very good at convincing ourselves that we are 'making choices', when in reality we are all just cogs in the unfolding of the great determinist path of the universe, but I am not sure that this sort of fiction is what you mean.
I think it's both. Certainly I could still overeat without consuming ultra-processed foods, but I could overeat even more if I consumed mainly ultra-processed foods vs healthier sources.
Personally I think the biggest culprit is calorie-dense drinks (soda, alcohol, etc)
Soda actually shows how the processed food thing is BS.
Diet soda is processed. And lots of Lefties are convinced it is terrible for you. But it isn't, and it specifically doesn't cause you to gain weight. The processing removes calories.
People weren't waddling from being fat, but they were waddling from being drunk off of rum from all that molasses. Then we tried prohibition, and the rest is history. But no one ever beat their wife because they ate too many Oreos, so the story isn't very analogous.
Yes, the combination of the human instinct to overeat; the availability/convenience of calorie-dense, ready-to-eat foods (i.e., highly-processed); and the relative cheapness of such foods in terms of people’s incomes and time constraints seem like a good explanation. So attributing the rise in obesity to highly-processed foods seemw like a reasonable shorthand explanation.
There’s no world where we ban processed foods, so I think Matt is basically right that it’s a red herring to focus on this as the issue. The facts are that food is abundant, people enjoy eating and will pay for tasty food, and this leads to the availability of processed and otherwise unhealthy foods.
The idea of Calories in, calories out obviously doesn't work if you eat a different amount of calories then you planned! The point is that by planning your meals a bit you can make a weight loss diet more sustainable and enjoyable and even include some processed foods within it.
I’ve surely eaten 100g of protein in one sitting before, but it requires a certain intentionality. As opposed to, say, soda and tortilla chips - you’re 100g of carbs in before the meal even arrives!
Agreed. I remember the New York Times number of years back a great piece on the food science that goes into snack food. You could almost hear one scientist tearing up as he described the beauty of the Cheeto: the way it melts in your mouth tricks your brain into thinking that you haven't actually consumed much. The industry term for this is "vanishing caloric density."
So while I agree with Matt that people would overeat regardless availability of ultra processed snack foods, his argument doesn't support the idea that ultra processed foods don't make it worse, but that seems to be his position.
This is similar to the point Richard Wrangham makes in his book “catching fire”, namely that cooking (various methods of applying heat or breaking down food substances) made chewing and digesting easier, enabling us to extract more calories from food. We essentially externalized some of the digestion process. He goes on to argue that this is partly what unlocked Homo sapiens’s bigger brains, etc
While the evolutionary angle might be debatable the general point that some foods lend themselves more to easily extracting calories seems definitely true, so maybe that would be the most useful lens to understand the “ultra processed” angle, as I think you’re saying.
Agree with everything you said except the bit about “calories in, calories out”
Yes it is true that it might be complicated to calculate either number, but that really, truly, is how it works. It’s exhausting to talk to people that do not get this. They constantly advocate for magic tricks instead of realizing that you do, in fact, have to measure your caloric intake and create a deficit.
And for 99% of people, exercise will not create a caloric deficit. If you aren’t running marathons/triathalons, swimming at a competitive level, training for pro basketball, etc, your exercise is going to consume maybe 100-200 more calories at most per day. If you aren’t counting calories, that’s going to get consumed by a protein bar (if you are eating healthy) or over-consumed by a donut. And how many people have you met who treat themselves to snacks on days where they worked out?
I think the other element that is missing from the analysis here is that ultra-processed foods aren't just plentiful and cheap, they are also delicious. And humans are extremely good at creating delicious foods, even under all kinds of restrictions. You can now get food with really incredible macronutrient profiles that are like 80% calories from protein and they still taste really good.
That hyper-palatability is the problem, because you'll always want to eat more. This is why a lot of fitness guys who are cutting weight swear by extremely plain meals like grilled chicken and rice with minimal seasoning and no sauce. They're not stupid, they know that it's possible to make that food tastier while adding very few additional calories. But by making it tastier they are going to want to eat more of it.
It’s not just pleasure either. Highly palatable foods interact weirdly with your hunger mechanism (especially for some people). Makes it harder to resist hunger, makes you hungrier to begin with, and is usually more calorie dense and easy to eat too much of when you fail to do so.
My intuition is that many people have ancient wiring that says "oh this is a chance to stock up on calories - you should eat as much of this as you can and we will store it as fat for later"
This would have been a solid survival technique for an ancient human encountering fully ripened fruit, for example. Take it all in now - leaving it for later doesn't work as it will rot or get eaten by someone/something else. NOW, take it all NOW, your body still tells you.
Does low fat/low protein/low fiber count as “hyperpalatable”? Or is that somewhat separate? (I think of “hyperpalatable” as being about first taste, while fat/protein/fiber are more about how they fill you up, which is about tenth taste or whatever.)
> Hyperpalatable food (HPF) combines high levels of fat, sugar, sodium, or carbohydrates to trigger the brain's reward system, encouraging excessive eating.[1] The concept of hyperpalatability is foundational to ultra-processed foods, which are usually engineered to have enjoyable qualities of sweetness, saltiness, or richness.
By that definition, homemade mashed potatoes and pie could be hyperpalatable… but Cheetos and Oreos are probably even more hyperpalatable.
Think of "food pleasure" as the addiction. You do not PLAY AROUND with the pleasures of addiction, for example enjoying just one cigarette. You clean up, avoid the trigger, stay on the safe side.
If food still makes you happy, you are likely to try to keep getting happy. (Same for drugs, booze, sex, etc.)
I just did a week scoring AP essays in a convention center, and as you can imagine, they plied us with snacks to keep us going. The cornucopia available was pretty remarkable, and everything was full of salt, sugar, or both. It was alarming how well the variety disguised how unhealthily I'd been eating for a week; I took a sugar fast for a few days afterwards.
Very true. The only way I've been able to move away from junk food (not entirely, but I eat a lot less of it than I used to) is by eating enough home-cooked food that the junk just tastes imbalanced, mostly from lack of acid. Quarter pounder or junior chicken? Not enough acid. Bacon sandwich or English breakfast? Not enough acid. Pizza overloaded with cheese? Not enough acid.
I just don't crave the junk like I used to cause there's usually something missing.
I'd add that I think there's a great case for better cooking and seasoning veggies, mainly by roasting and grilling. Sure the added fat makes the more caloric, but it's still really hard to overeat your veggies (same goes for legumes).
What I really want is a "sauce" that induces satiety. Like, make the delicious food, but include an additive that will induce satiety. Depending on whether you're a normal person, or one of those freaks who already gets sated with only the amount of food you need to maintain weight, not add any, you can sprinkle on the additive, as needed.
Until we get that, I'm expecting the market for GLP agonists will just keep growing.
My husband eats brown rice with chick peas and steamed broccoli covered pureed canned tomatoes for lunch every single day. It is a combination not endorsed by any food culture. It is bland and I think I have eaten less for lunch just being in its presence. He is also very fit.
My counterpoint to this is that nutrition science has optimized the taste of ultra processed foods to a far better degree than it could ever have done with foods found in nature. You can make ice cream hit a pleasure center better than the world’s greatest apple. Pringles have been engineered so you can’t stop at just one, and you get rage if someone lays a finger on your butterfinger. Ultra processed food has been designed to be craved.
I understand that argument, but I'd have to disagree. And I think it comes from a uniquely contemporary American place. Because the fact is that most fresh produce in the US is... not good. But that doesn't mean that the ideal type of that food isn't the most delicious thing you ever put in your mouth. And, yes, even MORE delicious than the most dastardly UPF!
For example, I grew up in the US Mid-Atlantic in the 1980s and 90s. Tomatoes: yuck. Like biting into a water ballon. And then I had a tomato in Southern Europe for the first time. I know I sound obnoxious saying this, but fuck it: it was a flavor revelation. I could pop those tomatoes like candy. I had also never tasted a non-frozen pea until adulthood. Then I had a fresh English pea. Holy fucking shit.
And you even see this in many processed (but not *highly* processed) foods where the ingredients and technique is fresher and better. I love Ben & Jerry's. But the best Italian gelato is better. I also love a good fast food hamburger. A freshly-made all-beef burger with fresh toppings and bread that doesn't have 20 ingredients in it is better. Pizza is great in most manifestations. But a Neapolitan margarita composed of fresh ingredients you can count on one hand is the Platonic ideal of pizza.
Americans used to have this kind of food. It was really between the World Wars that the food situation Stateside got so bleak. And it probably peaked in bleakness around the time I was born. Today, if you have the scratch, you can get heirloom tomatoes, and other fancy, fresh stuff like that that is legitimately good. But most Americans can't. So, when we're comparing UPF to fresh foods, we're basically saying that the most ingenious UBF is more toothsome than our fresh foods which have been optimized for cost, transport, storage, and shelf appeal rather than taste or nutrition.
Actually the vast majority of Americans never had access to heirloom tomatoes. Having plentiful fruit at any time other than the harvest is recent. Americans used to can fruit- a form of processing.
I would have thought the majority of late 19th century Americans had occasional seasonal access to heirloom tomatoes. Not if you lived out on the Great Plains, but the south and east all had good climates for garden tomatoes.
If they were claiming superiority, yeah it’s wrong. But if they were just claiming that most Americans in 1890 had access to better tomatoes than the average American in 1980, it’s surely true, even though Americans in 1890 had much less tomato access overall.
The situation we have today where the only food for human consumption is clustered in a few breadbaskets far from population centers is really unusual. You'd have, in my grandparents' time, had local farms who provided the produce. You had to, given the cost of transport and lack of refrigeration. That food was totally different than the varieties we grow now. It generally tasted better and was from "heirloom" varieties that are now lost. At one time, there were literally THOUSANDS of different apples grown in the United States!
That's an almost classic incorrect belief about the good old days.
Again, if you lived in Iowa back then you never ate a fresh peach because they didn't grow there. If you had an orange it would be in the form of orange juice that shipped on a Tropicana Juice Train.
Even your own fruits and vegetables were canned (processed) most of the year. What you are saying is at best highly selective. For a few weeks they got fresh heirloom fruits and veggies and only of the varieties that grew locally.
So, yes, you are right about one aspect: you just didn't get the *variety* of produce regardless of region or season as we do today. But your access to fresh produce that grew in your region was much more. And the local produce wasn't what we eat today, but was very diverse and abundance, especially in certain harvest seasons.
The industrial canning that really brought about the industrial way of eating that is dominant in America since was an Interwar innovation, as I said above. People canned their own produce in Bell-type jars, yes, especially from the latter half of the 19th Century, but you didn't buy stuff that didn't grow where you live shipped from far away until after 1917. And even then it didn't form a large share of the American diet for several decades thereafter. Other forms of processing and preservation (including and especially freezing or air-tight wrapping in plastic are so new that people alive today didn't have them in their own youth.
" And the local produce wasn't what we eat today, but was very diverse and abundance, especially in certain harvest seasons."
I think that's a silly way of looking at things. For a few weeks, they got SOME amazing fruits and vegetables (but far less variety than I can find at my local supermarket any time during the year). The rest of the year things were very monotonous. And that's before you get to things like not having access to ethnic foods and other ways in which the modern eating environment is amazing.
"The industrial canning that really brought about the industrial way of eating that is dominant in America since was an Interwar innovation, as I said above."
The word "industrial" is a very misleading word. Industrial canning is no different than home canning except being slightly more reliable in preventing botulism.. So the issue is canning. And your average farm family that you are celebrating ate a ton of canned food, and dried food, and frozen food, all year except during the harvest season. Far more than the average person eats now. And all that food was processed.
And in a way, "industrial" is giving away the game here. People insert their anti-corporate and anti-bigness and anti-"unnatural" feelings, all of which are more or less irrational, into discussions where they don't belong. Canned spinach is canned spinach, whether the canner is a homestead 19th Century farmer or the Del Monte Produce Company. It's the same thing. But somehow when it was done at home, it's old-timey and traditional and natural and nice, but when a corporation does it, the same thing becomes dangerous and scary.
So bottom line, for a few weeks every year, people ate some better fruits and vegetables, with an emphasis on "some". They lacked the variety we have now, and the rest of the year they ate unappetizing canned or otherwise preserved food. It wasn't better.
“Better” is subjective and multidimensional, but have you ever eaten 1000 calories of Honeycrisp apples in one sitting? I’m guessing no - I don’t think I have, and I love apples.
Conversely it’s really easy to eat an entire pint of ice cream, which is about 1000 calories
Personally, I agree with you that natural food, especially if it's high quality, often tastes better than processed food, but I think we're in the minority. The average US consumer in particular probably prefers a fast food hamburger over a fresh piece of fish or tater tots over a delicious salad, and those preferences will remain even if the quality gets better.
Partially true. But it’s also about habits and perhaps innate preferences. Some people naturally crave and enjoy fruits and vegetables more. Others are more partial to sweets or salty snacks. Of course the better the quality of the food the more appealing but you also have baseline preferences (innate or acquired) that play a large role.
Yes. It’s not that processed foods are per se more fattening than natural carbs; it’s that 1) they are engineered to be really yummy and 2) they are usually carb-based rather than protein and fat heavy, because carbs are cheaper and consumers can eat more without feeling satiated.
"...if nobody could ever eat “ultra-processed” food but everything else was the same, they would overeat something else". This is actually not true. Satiety is fundamentally different when consuming ultra processed foods vs whole foods. Or specifically, fats and proteins that aren't combined with carbs. Most people wouldn't overeat butter or steak in the same way they'd do chips or cookies. Or a bushel of apples. Freddie is right here. (And there's a lot of science behind how insulin is processed by different people, the threshold before it becomes diabetes, etc.)
There's an interesting question as to why the US has stopped converting extra food availability into greater height at a level lower than Denmark or the Netherlands.
I think this is largely correct. A map of which states have the tallest Americans, on average, is not a map of poverty or inequality, it's basically just a map of ethnic origins (and also recent immigration). Meanwhile, a map of heaviest states does look something like a map of poverty.
See also Colorado as an outlier within the US in this regard. Though with there, I'm curious if altitude is a factor, or if more fit people self select Colorado because of the altitude.
Yes, I live in the Netherlands and while I don't think Matt's overarching thesis - richer countries = less food constraint = obesity - is wrong, my experience here suggests that there is a bit more to it. The obesity rate where I live (out in the sticks) is genuinely a quarter or less of the American average, despite it being a very well off area, (with infinite access to yummy snacks). The Netherlands as a whole has much lower obesity rates - about 10% of the population, I think - than the US. And there's a very noticeable difference between 'native' Dutch, and those with an immigrant background (like in many western countries) with the latter having double the obesity rate.
This is just long-winded "I agree" - the obvious thing linking all of the above is that 'native' Dutch mostly live in suburbs and villages and the cultural expectation is that they move themselves constantly by bicycle or on foot. I myself struggle a lot with my weight, but the struggle is a yo-yo around a BMI of 24 - if I were to get to 30 I wouldn't be able to bike and walk so easily - my knees couldn't take it.
Couldn't cultural expectation around what to eat, especially as children, also be quite different?
I know people who think nothing of feeding their kids sodas near bed time or smothering every meal with ranch dressing (weird but true). And I know other people who talk about eating healthy all the time. It seems like this is the kind of thing that could vary a lot by country.
Varies per community, by school even. Our kids are at a school where I notice there's a really tough anti-snack culture. For example, it's Dutch tradition to treat all your classmates on your birthday, but at this school anything more than a very small piece of brownie, or a beaker with 20 grains of home-made popcorn, is considered unhealthy and unhelpful. At other places a small bag of candy or a bag of potato chips would be fine.
That seems to work through to outcomes- there are only two noticeably overweight children at a school with a 100 kids.
Right - so I'm wondering if the cultural expectations around what to eat play an even bigger role than activity levels or access to health care or incomes or whatever.
Obese children are usually taller for their age but also fatter and mature faster, but they do not tend to attain taller height as adults since excess adiposity during early childhood has an influence on the process of growth and puberty.
People have a hard time intuitively understanding how variability within a sample has a large effect on the average or the mean. So, the answer to this question is basically the same as when you ask related questions about any other HDI type measure that the US underperforms on: inequality. The US is really, profoundly unequal in a way that Denmark and the Netherlands are not. And the US, unlike Denmark or the Netherlands, makes access to social services and necessities for life and health largely contingent upon material wealth.
So, when it comes to average height, Americans are dealing with the effects of a lack of universal healthcare, malnutrition-driven stunting, and also the particular patterns and outcomes from immigration in the US vs. Europe. Immigrants to the United States come from extremely unequal societies and then they enter the lowest stratum of an extremely unequal society, compounding the effect on height.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest, most well-educated, well-paid professional Americans who have access to good food, healthcare, et al are as tall as wealthy Western Europeans, who have access to health- and height-maximizing factors no matter their station in life. But those towering yuppie Americans are the exception. And everyone else the share national borders with down the average.
It's a similar story with healthcare and education.
The tallest American states are places like Iowa, Idaho and Oregon. These aren't exactly filled with rich people. New York and California are close to the shortest despite having much better safety nets. And Hawaii seems to be the shortest of all. I think you're underrating genetic factors here.
It's not always the case that Blue States with a lot of transfers and social programs have the lowest inequality. Iowa is very much now a Red State, but it has one of the lowest Gini coefficients in the country. Ditto for Idaho. New York State has the single highest rates of inequality in the country, exempting Puerto Rico. And California isn't far behind, with one of the highest rates of absolute poverty, to boot! Hawaii isn't as unequal, but it does have a very high poverty rate.
So, yes, genetics play a factor, but the material conditions that the median resident faces and their access to social goods is likely more dominant.
When categorizing by census group and nativity, US-born Asian women are almost the shortest group, above only Hispanic immigrants, and despite being highest in terms of education.
All these things (except inequality) play some role, but I think you're overrating safety net and wealth and underrating genetics and probably lifestyle. When I go into poorer white neighborhoods in my area people don't seem shorter. They do seem fatter with more tattoos and cigarettes, though.
More food makes people grow taller, up to some limit, and then it makes them grow wider. That much is uncontroversial. The question is are we really still seeing stunting in the poorer groups of Americans? The answer seems to be largely no, or we wouldn't see non-immigrant Black and Native American women being as tall as and a little bit heavier than white women and way more of both than Asian and Hispanic women.
The issue is not the Gini coefficient. It is access to health insurance, etc, because that was the factor you claimed was driving lower heights. If states with more robust safety nets are shorter, that obviously casts doubt on your thesis.
This is an excellent point about immigrants, and I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before. It is obvious when I just look around at immigrants in my area. The parents tend to be a fair bit shorter (and have much worse teeth) than their US born kids even though both parents and kids are living close to the poverty line
Depending on the country much of this would have been true if they had stayed home. Average heights are rising in most of the world and Chinese teenagers in China are taller than their parents more often than not.
This is definitely true. My husband's Chinese students have gotten not only taller but more muscular over the past 20 years - so noticeably that he comments on it. I'm thinking more of students who go to school with my kids whose parents came her from places like Burma and Afghanistan, where it seems the same is not true judging from classmates who came here when they were tweens or teens. It is often hard to believe that the students from Burma/Myanmar are the same age as their classroom peers because they are so much smaller.
My experience is that spending time in high income, high status places in the US, you do not feel like the population is as tall as random parts of the Netherlands.
That's because most people aren't rich. Even in a rich place. And every community in the very wealthy United States has a lot of not-rich people. Most people walking around aren't rich, since the economy relies on low-cost labor to function from people who often can't even afford to live in a given place where they work. Retail employees, construction workers, servers, healthcare aids, etc. They're all diminutive, as a very physical manifestation of their lower social class and lack of access to the things that make people taller.
I'm American but live in Sweden, which is a tall place now (but, like the Netherlands, it didn't used to be - far from it!). Everyone around me has decent healthcare, access to food, etc. Most of them have an annual income that would make them lower-middle-class, at best, in the US. But they have the basic inputs they need to realize their height potential. So, there's not much noticeable variation in heights.
When I go to the US state of Maryland (the richest in the US) to visit my American family, many people are strikingly short and fat and visibly disabled and/or unhealthy in a way you just don't see in even the most working-class parts of Sweden. More striking is the variability in stature and evident health.
And I can easily pick out who is upper-middle-class by how they look. Not just (or even primarily) their clothes. It's how tall and thin they are! It's like something out of Brave New World, with genetically-engineered social castes. Whatever their ethnicity, if they're taller and thinner, it's generally the case that Americans you see are making six figures. And that includes a lot of successful immigrants from places not generally thought of as genetically tall. Chinese people, Indians, Koreans, Salvadorians, et al come to the very diverse state of Maryland and get tall as hell, towering like giants over their family members from back home. *IF* they make enough money to have proper healthcare coverage, healthy food, etc. Then, underneath them, are all the rest of the Americans who aren't so flush and have been shrinking, on average, my entire life.
This is a thing in the Netherlands too. I used to work in a managment consultancy company in Amsterdam which heavily hired out of the young upper-middle classes, and about 10-20% of the men were 6'4"/1.93m or taller - which is tall even for the Netherlands, with very few under 6"/1.8m
Not to resurrect the prescriptivist / descriptivist controversy from earlier in the week (especially because I fundamentally agree usage drives language change), but one annoying aspect of this topic is that sometimes you're talking to people deeply in thrall to the naturalistic fallacy while other times you're talking about caloric density and palatability, and it can take a while to figure out which conversation you're having.
I agree with that point. If the claim were merely "hey, our modern methods of food manufacturing allow us to pack a lot of bad stuff into a small package that tastes awesome", sure, that's part of the obesity story and that's a totally legitimate case to make (although Matt's right as to what the main cause of obesity is).
But as I said elsewhere in the thread, then you get the attacks on diet soda, which has 0 calories and 0 sugar. And you can tell from that, that this is really about the notion that artificial = bad. And a lot of the other attacks fit into that framework.
My wife stopped drinking Diet Soda, it was the only change she made to her diet and lifestyle, and she dropped 20 pounds in two months, and the weight has stayed off over a year now. Her acne improved significantly, as well.
Aspartame is terrible for you. It's not just weight. It leads to auto-immune dysfunction, diabetes, and cancer.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in this comments section. Most of you really seem to believe that the packaged American diet is no worse for you than meats, fish, vegetables, and fruits. Whatever.
Aspartame is on the market precisely because there's enormous evidence that it is safe and doesn't cause all that stuff.
Bear in mind, due to the naturalistic fallacy there's massive markets for anything claiming artificial stuff is bad, but as I say upthread, given the uptake rate of artificial sweeteners we basically know that almost all of those studies are either wrong or overclaimed. Because if the stuff was really dangerous it would be directly observable.
So no, you are wrong. You need to reconsider your beliefs that stuff is good if it is natural.
My highly annoying trigger in this regard is organic food. Organic means any compound that contains carbon. Thus, there is very little inorganic food. Water? Salt?
“Organic” is a word like “metal” that just has two different meanings. Chemists use “metal” to refer generally to elements on the left side of the periodic table with free electrons that can flow, while astrophysics uses “metal” to refer to every element heavier than helium. Similarly, chemists use “organic” to refer to compounds with carbon mainly bonded to other carbons and hydrogens (CO2 usually doesn’t count as “organic” for “organic chemistry”) while agriculturalists use “organic” to refer to foods that have been grown with a certain class of traditional techniques.
It’s confusing terminology, and the agriculturalist version is a bit arbitrary, but it’s not as wrong as you suggest.
Unprocessed sugars are just as bad. If the argument is they put more in with processing, fine, but "processing" also does stuff like making food safe and shelf stable.
No. Fruit sugars are great. Eat as many strawberries as you please. The fiber will stop you from over-eating and help you digest it normally.
HFCS is bad. You can consume mega-quantities of it in a matter of minutes because there's no fiber. Then it jacks up your insulin because it lacks fiber and goes straight to your bloodstream.
It's also worth noting the sheer quantity of sugars in processed American foods, which is extremely high relative to other places, and made possible by refined, concentrated sugar products like HFCS.
The sugar chemical is really no worse (in some cases better) it’s that you get an absolute ton of it without any of the fiber and water and other chemicals it is normally bundled with in fruit.
Drinking beat juice would get you just as fat, but you can pretty much eat as many beats as you want.
HFCS is the same chemically as sucrose. It is not wonderful because glucose and fructose are sugars. But claims that there is anything especially wrong with HFCS as compared to sugar are complete BS.
Yes that was part of my point. Sorry if it didn’t come across. I have read that glucose may actually be easier on your body than fructose in some ways (but you can still eat as many beets as you want). Eating large added amounts separated and refined sugar or any kind is a similarly bad idea (be it honey or HFCS or cane sugar) and eating whole foods that have such sugars is generally fine.
If you compare HFCS to cane sugar, sure. We eat too much of that, too. It is not the same as fruit sugar. The water and fiber is good. Insane that water and fiber from fruit would ever be considered a bad thing.
The main problem, however, is the quantity. There's just an absolutely enormous amount of sugar of all types in processed foods.
When the sugar is chemical, like aspartame, it's even worse. Aspartame is linked to auto-immune disorders, insulin disorders, cancer, you name it.
I feel like I am missing your point. If you extracted the fruit sugar and ate large quantities of that (like drinking fruit juice) that’s bad for you. I agree the water and fiber is good. My point is that the water and fiber (and relative quantity of sugar I.e. the ratio that determines how much sugar you are getting for a given amount of other stuff that fills you up and has nutrients etc) etc is what makes it different than sugar added desert treats, rather than the type of sugar. It doesn’t sound like you disagree with that but you keep saying I am wrong so I must be missing an element of your comment.
Yes, if you compare sugar vs HFCS directly, the response is the same. But very few people consume straight sugar and HFCS. If you get sugar from fruit, fiber naturally limits your intake and helps you digest it. Now you can inject 38g of sugar from HFCS into your bloodstream with one 12oz can of Mountain Dew. It's different.
Lol, look at you, throwing discrediting labels at people whose opinions don't fit your priors. Such enlightenment.
I'm reaching the unavoidable conclusion that this is the standard of debate in the SB comments section, which is... stunning. "You think fruits and vegetables are more nutritive than processed foods? Get out of here, anti-vaxxer!" Good one.
You've been proven wrong several times here, so watch out who you're labeling a broken clock. You tossed out one argument, that HFCS and sugar produce the same response, and used it as the foundation for an argument that natural foods are no better than processed foods.
This is obviously reductive. There are other physiological responses in the body that are not measured in the very narrow lab studies you referenced.
For example, diets high in processed foods with lots of fats and sugars eventually produce a gut biome dominated by microbes that prefer those foods, and demand them in the form of cravings. Diets with lots of fruits and veggies lead to microflora that create cravings for healthy foods low in sugar. There are so many far-reaching physiological effects of diet and watching you stand on these isolated research narratives to disprove that is comical.
A clock that occasionally runs a minute fast and occasionally runs a minute slow but is almost always within two or three minutes of the actual time is “broken”, but it’s still very useful.
That's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about something that entirely accidentally happens to be right once in awhile. Hence, a broken clock.
It is what we are talking about. Naturalness is a useful heuristic for identifying things that aren’t too bad for us. It’s not complete randomness. (Tasting good is also a good heuristic, and these two heuristics compete with ultra processed foods.)
I’m not sure it is useful. There are loads of really toxic and poisonous plants (most mushrooms for example). The entire evolution of bitter taste is mostly to prevent us from eating all of the natural things that are going to kill us. BUT most of the things we buy in a grocery store have already prefiltered those types of foods out (no poisonous mushrooms) so it leads to a bias that these things are always good rather than that we’ve simply already done thousands of years of “research” (aka people dying from eating poisonous shit) to tell us which natural things are better avoided.
Arsenic is natural. It isn't a measure for anything and indeed is a very dangerous belief that policymakers need to repudiate. Artificial stuff is great. It's progress.
Food grown in rich soil vs. NPK-enriched dirt are substantially healthier with much better nutrient profiles, because of the amount of natural life in the soil, from worms to microbes to composting organic matter. There are numerous studies proving that natural is better.
All you have done is take studies directly comparing HFCS to sugar in a lab to substantiate your claim. This is incredibly flimsy evidence that I have repeatedly proved does not support the claim that processed foods are equally healthy to natural foods. Natural, less processed foods are generally better, with exceptions.
I think there are a couple of other factors: calorie density and tastiness. When you are relatively full, you stop wanting salad but still seem to have room for dessert, or chips, or a delicious restaurant dish. Tastier food offsets feelings of fullness. And of course if you eat very calorie dense food, you will feel fuller after more calories than eating, say, salad. “Ultra processed foods” tend to be both very tasty and calorie dense. But as pointed out here, there are many other foods available that fit that description.
Agreed, I phrased my comment unclearly. Basically there is a level at which you feel sated. That level is raised by particularly tasty food. You are willing to feel more full (you still desire food) when the food is particularly tasty, but if it is bland your fullness level will offset your desire to eat. All that has nothing to do with calorie density. But separately, you can feel the same level of fullness for two vastly different amounts of caloric intake, if in one case you eat calorie dense food and in another you eat food with lots of fiber (for example) which leads to lower calorie density.
Sure, but "bland" is very relative. I used to think high-sugar high-fat foods tasted good, because that's what I ate; my gut microbes demanded it, because the dominant strains ate what I ate to become dominant. That's what they like.
After a year of growing my own food and eating lots of salads and veggies, those rich processed foods started tasting bad, and the salads taste amazing. My microflora are now composed of strains that feast on fruits, vegetables, fish, and meats. That's what I crave, and that's what tastes good.
These insults against Polish cuisine will not stand. Have you never gorged yourself on pierogi?! Seriously though, when I visited Poland, I was surprised how much they ate. Business meetings had a huge breakfast spread, lunch was a full sit-down meal where the cafeteria servings were bigger than I ever eat for dinner (whole 14” pizzas, or entree with multiple saucy sides). I’m surprised the Poles aren’t heavier.
I dunno, potstickers are usually better, I’ll grant, but pierogi are still GOOD, good enough to gain a lot of weight if you want to! Also more diverse… went to a restaurant in Warsaw that specialized in them- meat, veg, cheese, fruit- pierogi for appetizer, entree, and dessert! 😋
Yeah, Polish food is actually pretty good! When Tyler Cowen interviewed Jacob Mikanowski, he actually asked a "why is Polish food so good?" question.
I came to Poland 2 days ago and have already had some "it's going to be hard to not eat too much" thoughts. It's a struggle every time I come here.
As far as pierogi, I think it depends on the actual quality of the dumpling (from any culture). I find the frozen pierogi in US grocery stores closer to 'inedible' than 'good', and think they're not great in most restaurants here. Get some made properly by a Babcia, and it's a very different story.
I went to Warsaw for a week in February and had it almost every day. The best ones were from a caterer at work, but I enjoyed Zapiecek (in Old Town) as well.
Man I do not agree with this as someone who's lived in Japan for 15 years but is from a city with a huge Polish community. Gyoza can obviously be incredible but good pierogi easily reaches the same heights.
On a dollar per calorie basis upf is amazingly cheap. Yes, there are other reasons why bmi is a function of upf, but if you aren't talking about the price as a cause, you aren't talking about 90 percent of it. Decades ago the discussion was people were switching from beef to poultry for health reasons. That story has legs and was true too, but the price of chicken relative to beef plummeted starting in the mid 70s. The price story was bigger...but boring. HFCS is bad? Sorry. Same deal. Companies switched to sugar as the price of previously cheaper HFCS went up. Food companies were happy to join the already existing anti-HFCS bandwagon. But, again, price was the biggest reason for the switch...just the boring one.
The primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that processing food—cooking—played a decisive role in human evolution. By improving access to calories, our ancestors changed their environment: they reduced the amount of energy required to digest food. That change externalized the energy-intensive operation that used to take place inside the human body, opening up a new evolutionary frontier.
Previously, having a smaller gut would have been a disadvantage, but once the technology for cooking spread, different body configurations could survive or even thrive in that environment. The eventual result was Homo Erectus, with smaller, more efficient digestive tracts and _much_ bigger brains (to say nothing of the wild social changes that ensued).
Wrangham's historical hypothesis is heterodox, to say the least,* but the process he describes is evolutionarily plausible, and suggests that the story of humanity's current caloric revolution is unfinished.
* The book is fascinating. "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human" is mainly speculative biological archeology, but it's also a polemic against the once-fashionable raw food diet. It's a bit like "the Take Bakery": Wrangham is aware that his hypothesis doesn't fit the standard interpretation of the archeological record, which is that control of fire seems to have emerged *after* the relevant evolutionary changes. But he makes a solid case that we should be less certain about the current consensus and makes a strong case for his theory.
It makes me wonder whether there was an early period after cooking emerged when hominids were obese, until they evolved to make more effective use of the spare calories.
When I grew up in Los Angekes during the 1980s, the people in my neighborhood were a lot thinner than Americans are now, and it's not because the people who lived there couldn't afford to be fat.
I don't believe that in the absence of processed food, people would overeat apples and carrot sticks.
Some foods really are just bad for you. I believe that high-calorie, low-nutrition processed foods should be taxed at a high rate. Like cigarettes, the actual cost of those items, both to individuals and to consumers, is not reflected in the price.
D) Calories used in the metabolic processes of microorganisms living inside your body, mainly gut bacteria.
E) Calories used fighting infections.
F) Calories still present in waste when it leaves the body.
G) Calories expended to deal with non optimal temperatures.
Most people discussing CICO only count A and B, we have no idea how the others vary. I expect C, D and F vary depending on what food types we eat and how they are prepared not just their calorie content while D,E and G have changed a lot in the last 50 years. I expect UPFs if they are a real category change C) significantly.
D also includes sleep and stress, which could also work in contradictory ways. Being under-rested and stressed probably means you don't digest food as well, but it could also interfere with processes that build muscle and burn fat. It also probably makes you hungrier in general, so you can more than compensate for the digestive slowdown in a food rich environment.
Given its Juneteenth - how can we upend some of the inequalities found in food access today, especially quality fruit and vegetables. Free school lunches? Fight against super market deserts? Should we be relying on non profits or government support here.
The supermarket desert problem kind of baffles me. Everywhere else in the world has figured out how to do small grocery stores where there is limited selection of any particular item but lots of variety. Meanwhile 7/11 has 50 varieties of soda and 50 varieties of chips, but they have 2 frozen meal options and they're both bad. They could use their space better. The best US version of a small grocery store is Trader Joe's. I think we need a public/private partnership to get a Trader Joe's into all of America's food deserts.
I think when people (not you or anyone here necessarily) are upset about this they put a little too much of the blame the companies. They probably do deserve some blame, but we can't forget they are responding to demand. There are no Whole Foods type grocery stores in the worst neighborhoods in my city. But there aren't any in the less-educated non-white collar neighborhoods either. There's mostly no demand.
I agree about the demand point. But the reason I find the problem baffling is that even if there isn't demand for fresh cucumbers or whatever, there's gotta at least be unmet demand for things like frozen chicken breast that are hard to come by.
While it may be that these experiments were done with produce, rather than chicken breast, there have been attempts to help stores in poor neighborhoods to offer higher quality food. It simply isn't purchased.
I no longer really buy food desserts. There's probably a complicated relationship between what types/amount of food people grew up on, at what point they find their weight an unacceptable burden, how much stress they're under, etc, that drives food choices.
I can see your point, but I think the most likely, simple explanation is it just boils down to demand. I'm sure there's more than zero demand, but it needs to be a lot more than zero to sustain a business. Plus there are issues with security, staffing, etc that are also harder in the worst neighborhoods. So you have to hit a high threshold and that's easier for fast food and 7-11 to hit
That make sense when I think about but it still surprises me. I’m wondering how much food waste there is and how can this be reallocated to maybe meet some health priorities. I’m thinking matching up with the free universal school meals idea.
I feel like forcing particular businesses is the worst way to do things. Why should Albertsons be punished and not Whole Foods or whatever else. At least incentivize the whole industry somehow
Education, awareness and cultural change. I've been around plenty of middle class families that practice and preach healthy eating all the time, and others that don't even give it a second thought despite having the same access to good food, and surprise surprise the latter are suffering from diabetes and obesity.
I'm aware there are other factors that effect individuals like genetic predispositions, and factors that impact communities like food deserts. But those food deserts are there in part because there's less cultural focus on healthy food, so you have to find a way to break that cycle.
Yglesias never bothers to define "ultra-processed foods". Does UPF mean only what it literally says (many processing steps), highly engineered (for taste, mouth feel, shelf life...), or consisting of unnatural ingredients? He follows a single crude factor: food quantity, as if the composition were irrelevant (truly incredible--ask any farmer or athlete). Over the past century, the American diet has changed *dramatically* in composition. For example, seed oils--virtually absent for all of human history--now account for nearly 20% of US calories--and that is to say nothing of animal feed in our factory farms. Americans ingest insane amounts of free sugar, e.g. in juice and in children's breakfast cereals.
It's astounding that anyone today could still be attributing obesity to simple CICO. For a more curious and less Dunning-Kruger treatment, check out Slime Mold Time Mold's "A Chemical Hunger".
Experts have an incredibly hard time defining "ultra-processed foods." Also, seed oil's are tik tok hocus pocus. I bet I could drink 3 cups of excess cottonseed oil a day, and as long as I continued to exercise, I'd be fine. There's nothing magical about them being bad, other than just being another form of empty calorie.
"I bet I could drink 3 cups of excess cottonseed oil a day, and as long as I continued to exercise, I'd be fine."
Not to get too graphic, but while your weight might be fine, I suspect your gastrointestinal system would have some issues with that volume of straight oil. (Just guessing from some comments I saw/heard years ago from people doing something similar with drinking olive oil.)
As if "oil" were just one thing, a primitive element like earth, air, water, and fire. These various oils have very different fat profiles, and the seed oils are not like the fruit oils (olive, avocado, red palm), let alone those of animal products. Vastly more omega-6 than omega-3. No one would argue that other animals don't have a natural diet, and that the natural diet isn't optimal, but humans will eat anything as long as it has the right look and mouth feel.
Yes, most people *would* argue that omnivorous animals like rats and raccoons don’t have a “natural diet”. They are opportunistic and eat different foods in different parts of their ranges - and of course they have expanded their range with the expansion of humans.
A broad diet does not mean that omnivores can eat anything, let alone that their health outcomes will be the same independent of diet. I'll bet that even omnivores with the broadest of diets still have "natural" optimal diets. But it seems that pet raccoons eating dog food live far longer than raccoons in the wild. So go for it--you bet the health of you and your kids on humans being like raccoons. Me, I'm not giving UPFs to my kids.
Oils are fats, not carbs. What’s more, fat (as opposed to carbs or even protein) is the only macro that doesn’t spike our blood sugar, and in fact keeps our blood sugar from spiking higher if eaten with carbs—an important factor for type two diabetics.
Strange that I learned about seed oils without watching TikTok. You do your cottonseed-oil experiment, and while you're at it mix in some trans-fats--until recently, those were considered healthy.
"There's nothing magical about them being bad, other than just being another form of empty carb." Following the principle of charity, I'll assume that your calling oils a "carb" rather than a calorie was a typo rather than a symptom of general nutritional ignorance, though even that would be a howler. The two essential fats (omega-3 and omega-6) are not "just" calories, or they wouldn't be essential. Omega-6 is far more prevalent in seed oils, and unbalanced omega-3:6 intake is implicated in various ills. One RCT, published in the BMJ, has shown that excess omega-6 contributes to migraine.
The interested reader can easily find more info. The uninterested reader... Whether or not you care about natural selection, it doesn't care about you.
I was obviously kind of being a clown in my original seed oil comment. But from my understanding it's usually the food that they're in, rather than the actual seed oils themselves. Like cooking healthy lean proteins and vegetables in seed oils might be a bit unhealthier than olive or avocado oil, but ultimately the problem is bad snacks that have hydrated oils in them.
The problems are manifold: seed oils as cooking oil, food (e.g. mayonnaise) ingredients, and in animal feed. Your factory-farmed animals (famously salmon) are not providing traditional nutrition. But yes, there are better and worse ways to eat seed oils: cold-pressed rapeseed oil is almost certainly not as bad as the highly processed stuff that goes into European mayonnaise. All these different sources add up, and the total now for Americans is something near 20% of total calories. That's a huge shift in diet to something historically unprecedented--do you want to bet the health of you and your kids on it? Decisions have to be made, whether or not large-scale replicated RCT-based studies are available.
"Debunk" is a red-flag term, like "The Truth about...."--big epistemological minus points. There is an underlying religious divide, with people opposed to eating animal products favoring plant-based alternatives. I subscribe to Harvard's health mailings, and notice a strong bias in that direction. Google "medical journal omega 6 3 ratio" or "medical journal seed oils". I found a gem that reflects my experience:
Americans use soy oil, whereas Canadians and West Europeans use rapeseed oil. In today's massive quantities, this could explain the two population's different health outcomes. But factors are no doubt many.
The detrimental effects associated with a high 6:3 ratio are entirely mediated by low omega 3 levels. That is, if you isolate the cases where people have a high ratio AND high omega 3 levels (so they have very very high omega 6 levels and you’d expect to see the worst effects if omega 6 fats were really so terrible) actually do not show the negative impacts. It’s only cases where absolute omega 3 levels are low. The takeaway is not that omega 6 or omega 6:3 levels are important but that having sufficient omega 3s is very very important.
That sounds plausible, but a simple web search on "omega 6 3 ratio", as well as searches prefixing that phrase with "health/nutrition/medical journal", produce overwhelming results stating the ratio is important. Could you provide some guidance on where one might find papers supporting your statements?
The video started off promisingly, but the speakers fell on their faces. First, they failed to even mention, let alone refute, the hypothesized mechanism for the omega-6:3 ratio importance. Conversion of both omega-3 and omega-6 relies on the same two enzymes, delta-5 (D5D) and delta-6 desaturases (D6D), so that consuming an excess of one oil might crowd out the metabolism of the other.
Blind to the irony, the guy said that people tend to see things in black and white--love omega-3, hate omega-6--and did the same thing himself: love total omega-3, hate the omega-6:3 ratio. It's possible to pursue both, and it's not even hard. We're not talking about eliminating dietary omega-6 (an essential fat), which we get in a natural diet. The issue is the massive, recent introduction of seed oils into the Western diet, particularly in America, particularly in UPFs and as cooking oils.
So I agree with the speakers: if the majority of unsophisticated people are inevitably going to fix their omega-6:3 imbalance by eliminating omega-6 entirely, even eggs and nuts, then better just tell them to eat more omega-3 as fatty fish. But we can easily do better than that.
Fat. Carbs. Air conditioning. Seed oils. Automobiles. ULTRA processed foods. We come up with new theories on weight gain with admirable regularity and creativity.
You ought to give that theory a catchy name, like "calories in, calories out". Maybe CICO for short. Write it up as an article and publish it in the Dunning-Kruger Journal of Health.
The classification is unscientific. At what point, with which additives does it become ‘ultra’? It reminds me of Justice Stewart being unable to define pornography but saying “I know it when I see it.” The analogy to pornography seems apt in that it seems mixed up in puritanical standards about judging what is good for people. If pornographers make it difficult for people to control their sexual appetites and adhere to bourgeois standards of sexual appetites, leading to disease, dissolution and ruin, food manufacturers make it difficult for the lower classes to control their diets in the way that we know is good
His worst take by far was his recent, rather rude one about Boston sports teams. By contrast this take of his highlighting a particularly insightful and interesting question from a subscriber was without a doubt one of his best.
Maybe y’all could weigh in on a dispute between my wife and I. We’re both tall, I’m 6’2+, she’s 5’10. We’ve both struggled with our weight but neither of us are currently obese. Our 10 year old son is in the 50th percentile of height for his age and quite skinny, he’s 4’7 and weighs 64 pounds.
Obviously, we want him to grow to his full potential height, height gives men more sexual opportunities and higher incomes. But we don’t want him to be fat for similar reasons.
My wife is pushing him to eat more. I object to this. I think the risk of any human being with ready access to delicious calories becoming stunted as quite small. I think his modest interest in food is a huge, unexpected win and I want to roll with it. Any thoughts?
Do not make your kid eat more! Do make sure he consumes some protein. As he enters puberty he will naturally eat more. Make sure he's physically active, as well. Given access to appropriate food, rest, and activity, your kid will naturally be tall, given his genetics. Even if you leave his appetite alone, he may naturally get a little chunky before he hits a pubertal growth spurt.
He may also be a late bloomer. The tallest people in my family have been. Average or below average through middle school then shot up.
I let my kids eat as much as they want (at meal times, of whatever we're having), but I always tell them that if they're not hungry, they shouldn't eat. I think telling kids to eat more than they want is a terrible idea.
generally agreed. But at times I have to insist they eat more protein and veggies. They swear they are full but that seems to be very food specific. If I offer something different they are suddenly hungry again
There's also the kid trick of claiming that they're not hungry when there's food they don't like, in hopes of getting food they do like at a different time.
Yeah, absolutely. If they aren't hungry for what's for dinner, they generally aren't allowed snacks or anything later that night--but I'll offer them what we had for dinner!
That’s very dangerous as you don’t want to pressure someone to eat when they aren’t hungry. It can lead to a lifetime weight problem and any benefit to being tall in terms of mates and career will be reversed by being overweight.
I'm not going to give an actual opinion but thought I'd offer some points to consider:
- Off the top of my head, 5'10" for women is ~99th percentile. I'm 6'3" and I think that's ~98th percentile, so 6'2" would be just under that. 50th percentile is obviously a bit lower, although that could change a lot through puberty
- Do you know his "weight-for-height" percentile? If not then I would find out. His BMI is definitely underweight, but I think BMI is supposed to be for adults only and is flawed anyway
- I'm sure you both want him to have a healthy relationship with food, so you probably don't want to encourage anything too drastic. If you decided you wanted to encourage him to eat more, I would recommend starting small (maybe encourage him to eat an additional 100-calorie snack on top of what he is already eating, see how that goes, increase further if necessary)
- I presume you either have discussed or are planning to discuss with his pediatrician at some point
We're tall too, and have 4 kids (inc a 10yr old boy who's 5' & skinny). We never push our kids to eat more but they're welcome to consume as much simple food (nuts, fruit, milk, bread, cheese, etc) as they keep down. We never give them sweetened drinks, especially soda (not really out of principle, just turned out that way), and limit them to a snack or two or day. My own experience is that kids get hungry eventually during growth spurts and you just have to make sure they get plenty of good stuff to eat then, but for the rest, the more fuss you make about food the more trouble it will be.
I really don't think any parent should look at their young son and think, "how can I maximize his future sexual opportunities?"
If you want to be really lame, you could say something like, "I want him to be fit and healthy." Next tier, "I want him to be able to get a girlfriend." Then there's "I want him neck deep in strange."
Over the past few years I lost 55 pounds and decreased my body-fat percentage by about a third. Still have more work to do to get to where I want to be but am happy with the progress and lifestyle changes I made.
Matt's point that humans are conditioned to over-eat is an important one. This is why it is so crucial to establish systems that make it easier to diet and to create an environment where you are more likely to succeed in your dieting. Count calories (or ideally, plan your calorie consumption ahead of time) and protein using a good app, make time for the gym 3-5 times per week, meal prep so that you have no excuse to go out for lunch or dinner, don't buy unhealthy snacks to keep in your cupboard, and try to get most calories from high-quality sources. It's hard work to diet and to lose weight, but if you're unhappy with your weight and body, then prioritize it, and make it as easy as possible.
I think many people underrate the extent to which you have to do the above FOREVER. Like, whatever you do to lose weight (which I have done in the past), you gotta keep it up forever, which is daunting. Meal prep, the gym 3-5 times a week, those things are a little bit of an easier mental lift when you think you're only doing them to lose whatever amount of weight you think you need to lose, but once you lose the weight, if you ease back on that routine, the weight just starts going back on and you realize that this is just your life now if you want to be that way.
Agree. I’ve lost, and then regained, 40+ lbs at least 4 or 5 times in my life. (So can I claim I’ve lost 200 lbs?!?!) Every time I reach a point where I’m pretty happy with my weight and I “just want to be a normal person” who doesn’t have to pull out a food scale at every meal or research on a restaurant website before I go out. Then I go freakin nuts. The (sometimes literal) bean-counting does get tiresome. But so does waking up one day and getting over your fear of the scale and realizing it’s all back. I’m in the middle of another effort to bring it back down, and I’m already strategizing about what a proper maintenance phase (aka “the rest of my life”) will need to look like. Daily weigh ins at the very least, I’m hoping I can avoid meticulous calorie counting unless my weight creeps up a couple pounds. But I’ll need a very firm ceiling where counting kicks back in, for sure.
I think part of the reason it feels tedious is that it’s embarrassing. It feels like “normal” people don’t have to do this. (Then again, it’s “normal” to be obese in the US.) Something like working out or taking up running, or even going vegetarian or vegan, those are things that can become a positive part of your identity, not embarrassing but something you could be proud of. Someone who has to weigh and measure all their food is considered- I dunno, no one is like “wow that’s so cool.” Even if it’s what Milan’s aforementioned “discipline” looks like in practice. I go out to eat and people subtly (or explicitly) judge me about ordering a salad or passing on drinks or appetizers- like, “what, you think you’re better than us?” Whereas if I order the vegetarian option and they happen to notice/ask “are you vegetarian?” they think it’s cool/interesting that I am.
I’ve considered them. I’ve always had success with calorie counting/food tracking, and I can do it without feeling ravenous, it’s just annoying. So if I have to do something annoying every day for the rest of my life to reach/stay at a healthy weight, for now I think I prefer the one that is free/non-medicinal/doesn’t involve injections. (bad IVF flashbacks, ha…)
Yes and no. Once you're done dieting to lose weight, you can increase your calories somewhat to maintain. And some people won't have to count calories forever, only long enough to understand what X calories looks like. And if you gain 10 lbs over the holidays, for example, it's not the end of the world.
But yes, some these changes are lifestyle changes, not just short-term changes. And that's a good thing.
I think the calorie counting is much more important than the exercise. It is incredibly easy to consume a surplus of calories and even more so after a good workout. There is literally no way to keep track of it without keeping track of it.
But people were thin in 1979 and all that was far less common. This despite the fact that you could eat as many twinkies and bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Oreos as you wanted.
The food landscape was really different then though. Servings were *much * smaller. People weren’t eating all the time. I was growing up then, as a latchkey kid whose mother hated cooking; we ate plenty of processed junk but in much smaller quantities. I eat very well now and I’ve never had a weight problem - I’ve been lucky that’s way - but I am very short!
"if nobody could ever eat “ultra-processed” food but everything else was the same, they would overeat something else."
The whole point is that processed food reduces the amount of necessary mastication and digestion to consume the same amount of calories. You can theoretically eat as many calories of apples in a sitting as is found in a sleeve of Oreos, but the whole point is that people don't do that. Processed foods in particular sever the relationship between fiber and sugar, which means that you're eating a far higher amount of sugar before you reach satiety. That's why "calories in, calories out" is so misleading - the type of food you're eating deeply influences the amount of calories you eat! And we know that empirically.
What about a hand of bananas, though? That doesn’t require much work, you hardly need teeth to eat bananas. I think the point of ultra-processed foods (that is the big change from traditional) is that they are shelf-stable and can be kept around and available at all times. People didn’t used to eat while working, now everyone can have snacks at their desk. The idea of “intermittent fasting” is just a re-creation of what used to be normal, people not eating all the time.
I think 800 calories of chips, pretzels or pastries are vastly more palatable than 800 calories of bananas. And I like bananas!
Feel like it's a combo of quick, easy and tasty not necessarily how much fiber is in there. But lack of fiber probably doesn't help either with some of the foods.
I think fiber, and also the keto focus on fat and protein, are relevant because they make it “less easy” to keep eating.
Yep, try overeating on just steak. Its almost impossible. You will quickly hit satiety and be done.
You can also add regular salad stuff and get the same effect. It's win you start adding sugar, bread etc that the overeating starts
Feel like it helps comparatively to other choices (with more sugar and fats) but feel like I could still be in the over eating range if I could open up a bag of cheap and tasty steak, brisket, or salmon bites whenever. But meat is expensive and has different storage needs.
You can absolutely, 100% overeat steak. When I was a kid, I could polish off an entire roast beef.
This stuff is idiosyncratic. I make myself a dessert of chocolate protein powder mixed with water. I love the taste, but it's impossible to eat more than a few hundred calories.
It’s true that ultra processed foods are often calorie dense, and not as satisfying. Also (1) they are cheap, and (2) they can be stored a long time on shelves or in cupboards. That makes it a lot easier to indulge whenever and wherever people get an urge.
That said, it’s loading the deck to compare a steak to bananas. It’s really easy to overeat, without resorting to overprocessed foods,if you don’t pay attention. Go to chipotle and try to have less than 1000 calories at lunch. Go to Five Guys - a burger and fries can get you to 2000. You have to pay attention. That’s not ultra processed, and it’s way too much for most people. When i was in the habit of eating as much red meat and cheese as I wanted, it took more and more to feel full, and I gained weight, even though I was exercising almost daily.
Nowadays, when I go to a restaurant that has calorie counts on the menu, an entree with red meat and a starch usually has about 1000 calories. Add a glass of wine or beer, add an appetizer or have a roll and butter, and you are way, way over what you should eat at one meal unless you’re 25 years old and training for the Tour de France. A 600-800 calorie meal, which is more in ballpark for most people (and even on the high side) requires careful choices and active restraint.
Bananas are shiny baubles for the capitalist imperialist dogs and a symbol of how they oppress the workers of the world!! 🤣
I think this gets at the bait & switch behind the ridiculous "ultra-processed foods" idea. The term is only defined as "food that's particularly easy to eat a lot of" or "particularly delicious foods" when it comes time to pretend it's useful (and obviously it wouldn't make sense to refer to either of those things as "ultra-processed"). The rest of the time it's just an incoherent jumble of things united only by a vague sense of what's natural.
This exactly. It's about feeling satiated. A 300 cal bag of chips will leave me wanting more whereas a 100 cal banana will satiate my need for snacks for a bit. Ultra processed foods are high calorie low satiation, which is a dangerous combination.
Personally I think this whole debate overcomplicates things. Everyone knows that overeating is bad. So just eat less. It’s not rocket science, it just takes some discipline.
Have you ever struggled with being overweight, Milan? (Serious question, if you have, my apologies for assuming). This is like telling someone who has a drinking problem that actually if they just drink a lot less they'll probably be fine. People who are chronically obese just do not have the capacity to resist overeating on a regular basis.
People who have always been on the smaller side (and like you, I'm not saying this is Milan, because I don't know) underrate the effect to which you have to learn to ignore your body's signals when you're trying to lose weight. My body will tell me I'm hungry when I know I don't need food, for example. Imagine if you got a solid 8-10 hours of quality sleep every night, but by noon every day you felt like you needed a nap. It seems like a matter of discipline to just say to yourself, "Oh, you don't need sleep, we got plenty of rest already", but the urge to give in to biological pressures can be overwhelming.
Honestly, I don't understand what's hard to understand. Like, if you're normal-weight and you don't get why people can't just eat less, let me suggest an experiment: try starving yourself down to an extremely unhealthily low weight, a cancer-patient/famine/hunger-strike weight, and keeping yourself there for a few years. If you can do that, then come back and talk about how easy it is to just eat less--because that's exactly what it feels like. That's what an overweight person's body thinks is happening when they try to lose weight--that they're dying by starvation, voluntarily, despite being surrounded by food. Don't wanna do that experiment? Then shut up.
Man that hunger pain is so real. I’ve been on Ozempic for a couple weeks now and I’m getting to the point where I almost miss the pain. Like you know how after a bad breakup your heart hurts so intensely and eventually the space that heartbreak took up just becomes a void and it is almost worse? That’s where I am right now.
It’s extremely strange to not feel like I am starving all the time. I also miss the dopamine rush after a binge, collapsing on the couch after eating a medium dominos pizza and begging god for forgiveness.
Down 10 pounds now though.
So glad that medication is working for you. I think the fact that it is some effective really speaks to how biologically based hunger really is and how little "will power" often refers to lucky genes or health and not moral fortitude.
I have ADHD and resisted taking meds for years because it felt like a crutch or shameful for some reason when it felt like I should be able to just muscle through things with grit. After starting Wellbutrin and having my dopomine and attention system actually process so that I would "see thing to do it" and do rather than "see thing to do, mean to do but get distracted, and then hate yourself later" was so freeing.
But after a few weeks I also had a period of mild rage that this was what so many people's lives were always like and that I had so much guilt and shame over something that really was a matter of brain chemistry and not virtue.
In a similar way, after always being quite thin, I started a new migraine medication that pretty universally adds 20 lbs to patients weight. Even with that weight gain, I still have a very healthy BMI. But it has taken my body from "society goal weight" to "society acceptable weight" and that has honestly been a little rough. It is made more frustrating by the fact that I have not changed how I eat or exercise. The medication has just adjusted my metabolism. Part of what sucks is having folks stop assuming that I must have great self control, which I never really did.
not to mention EVERY holiday, birthday, celebration or event of any kind has at it's core the eating of unhealthy food.
So you are a recovering crack addict where crack is on display EVERYWHERE you go.
That's what it's like.
And people won't take no for an answer. I almost flipped out on someone last week who kept shoving a piece of cake in my face. I think it makes them self conscious about their own obesity when I turn it down. It took years though for me to get to this point, and it's still a struggle at times.
Cake at a birthday party is not crack man c’mon
This a great way to describe the experience of losing/trying to lose weight!
This is exactly it, but it goes beyond losing weight, and extends to not gaining weight as well. I am a pretty trim guy, and so is my entire family. I get SUPER uncomfortable when I overeat, to the point where I often won't have seconds if I take even a 2 minute break after eating firsts. I stopped going to all you can eat sushi in university because while my friends seemed to relish the food coma they would get into (and which you would have no choice but to do, as people always over ordered), I found it absolutely miserable.
Now, I think even for me, it is easier to overeat processed foods, and especially desert, which is why I try to not keep too many in the house. I also think intake regulation is a bit easier with even moderate exercise, which I get from walking the dog and playing sports 1-2 a week. So these are a couple behavioural modifications people can undertake pretty easily, but will still only take you so far if you are like at the 10th percentile of how quickly you feel full.
For a more scientific take that lines up with this theory, read the Hungry Brain.
This is me as well, the feeling of being overfull is literally one of my least favorite things. Just enormously uncomfortable.
I never understood how people could feel sick from eating too much until I got pregnant. Then I realized that of course other people find it easier not to overeat, if you feel this bad when you do you just stop! Unfortunately it didn't last after I had the baby.
For most of my life I have not in fact been on the smaller side, so I really am not all that sympathetic to complaints about how difficult it is to stick to a diet.
This is a remarkably self-centered view of a complicated issue that impacts tens of millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people around the world. Imagine if someone said "I've been sad/depressed before, so I am not really sympathetic to complaints about how hard it is to just snap out of a depression."
Exactly, stop feeling sad, just decide to feel happy, what's so hard about that? [Pounds head on desk]
As I said I just do not think this particular issue is that complicated, unlike depression. Most people who are overweight are that way because they overeat.
Unlike depression you really can just eat less.
I don't know what to tell you, man, but on this topic and, frankly, quite a few others, I've observed a pretty stark lack of empathy (or hell, even sympathy) on your part for others who seem to be struggling.
The ironic thing is that Milan will jump down the throat of anyone who he interprets to be speaking on issues that minorities, women, or college students have an interest in. But on this and (as you made) quite a few other topics he's willing to cast that aside and tell hundreds of millions of human beings that they're just too weak willed to put down the french fries.
This is such a callous thing to say lol. I'm happy for you that you lost weight. I also lost a lot of weight purely through diet/exercise, but it was hard as fuck. Nights spent awake trying to ignore pretty painful hunger pangs, being the odd man out at social functions when everyone else was eating, throwing away lots of food and dealing with the guilt of waste, etc. I don't know how you could've gone through that and come out with no sympathy for how difficult it is to do, especially for people who have a lot of other stuff going on in life.
Also just being honest, man, but while I'm sure 170lbs was significantly overweight for your age and obviously entitles you to an opinion, I don't think it really gives you a lot of insight into people who have struggled with chronic obesity their whole lives at 250+lbs.
The simple fact is that 97% of people who lose weight gain it back after a few years.
I think sometimes people are in denial about that because they hate the idea that all their hard work will be moot.
Get back to us in 10-15 years when you don't have the metabolism of a college kid :)
It’s not clear that metabolisms change so much as people become more sedentary as they get older.
WIth this worldview it seems like you should be a Republican, unless what applies to food doesn't apply to "we don't need to help unemployed people, they should just find a job," "we don't need to help people with learning disabilities, they should just try harder," etc.
Exactly my thought. For some reason, people who otherwise are aware of the complicated interplay of biology, psychology, social, cultural, genetic, and environmental influences in a vast array of arenas cannot for the life of them comprehend that those same factors combine to make the obesity epidemic more complicated than "just eat less". And when you tell them it's more complicated they respond, as Milan does, by saying "it just isn't. You really can just eat less."
Key difference is factors that are or are not in your control. Whether someone else hires you ultimately isn’t. What you eat ultimately is.
If you've been small for your entire life, you've never had to maintain a serious caloric deficit over a serious length of time, so I'm not sure how that experience is relevant... Especially since you're in college, an environment far more conducive to keeping weight off than working a 9-5 with a family.
I lost a lot of weight and kept it off, which I'm very thankful for, but when I see people who haven't managed to, I don't think "what weak people," I think "but for the grace of God go I," because I know how hard that is. I also did it in college and probably would not be able to do it over again--and certainly would not be able to nearly as easily--now that my life is much more complicated.
Put another way, Milan is just restating the problem rather than offering a solution. The problem of obesity just is the problem that many people do not have and cannot gain the discipline to eat less.
Freddie in the comments, hide your kids, hide your wife!
Give him credit, he is absolutely correct this time.
I can’t credit him, he doesn’t have free will, his choices are predetermined 😃
Mic = dropped
Yes, it kills me to admit it, but Freddie actually made some good points here.
And then he had to ruin it with his “no free will” nonsense.
And hide your husband too because Freddie's commenting on everyone out here!
My theory is that some people are more susceptible to a craving of sugar and salt, like some people are more susceptible to be addicted to opioids, etc. The food industry has unwittingly hacked them to be addicted to their products.
Yes, I have. I was very overweight as a kid; I think 90 something percentile for my age. January of 2021 I was like 170 lbs and not particularly muscular. Dropped down to 145 through diet and exercise and now I’m back at 170 but with a lot more muscle. So I do think I’ve earned the right to my opinion on this.
we’ll see how you’re doing with this when you’re 40. Edit: Well, actually we probably won’t see, because the entire population will be on GLP-1 drugs by then.
7/11 is gonna sell dollar a dose GLP-1's right next to the slushee machine. It's gonna be a glorious future for all.
There would be a great Kwik-E-Mart joke here if the Simpsons are still around then, and if Apu is able to be uncontroversial again.
"Spandex jackets, one for everyone."
It might not change when he's 40. I'm 48 and still don't really gain weight. I've come to appreciate how lucky I am that way.
Oh, so I didn't just lose 60 pounds in the last year in my mid-40s without surgery or meds, just through tracking calories (and honestly exercising less because taking care of my toddler has dramatically decreased out-of-the-house exercise opportunities)? Well damn, my scale must be broken or something!
Honestly I did something similar when I was 38. The weight loss part works about the same, the muscle building is much tougher.
Just watch me ;)
Congrats on getting Josh to comment
That's quite an accomplishment. I, too, lost a lot of weight doing 'eat less, move more'. 90 lbs, in fact, after my second child was born. But I can tell you that the trade offs and opportunity costs in terms of how much of my brain space went into that project was quite a sacrifice. It truly became a part-time job. I actually quit a full time one to do this (enormous privilege). Pandemic came, I regained some of it. Then I discovered keto/low carb/carnivore and while it's still an effort, it's a heck of a lot easier to lose or maintain by avoiding UPFs than just 'eat less, move more'. When the most easily available and accessible calories are UPFs, satiety is the key.
Bravo to you. Losing weight post kids is insanely hard. When you’re exhausted and watching little ones, the urge to munch is intense.
I think this is the issue with Milan's blanket 'just put the donut down' POV. When you're a child, and he is the same age as my first, your brain just doesn't have as many competing priorities so it is indeed easier to JUST eat less.
I agree the tradeoffs are tough. It's not something I could have done if my life was really stressful.
I’m happy for you Milan and I hope your health and fitness journey continues to be rewarding.
Thanks and to you as well
> Have you ever struggled with being overweight
So I have. I was at a BMI of around 30 (border between overweight and obese) in my mid 20s. I decided that I hated feeling like garbage (and myself to be honest) so much that I had to make a change. I prioritized exercise and reasonable (but not perfect) eating over almost everything else. And it worked!* Both my parents also lost a lot of weight by making similar changes.
*I'm not saying it's easy - in fact quite the opposite. My relationship with food is still far from perfect, and it's challenging most days but worth it.
edit: so what am I trying to say we should do? I agree that saying "just stop overeating" isn't enough. But I think we shouldn't deny people's agency either. Try to give people encouragement *and* tools to help them control their eating (up to and including pharmaceutical!).
Fantastic comment. This is what is so promising about the new drugs on the market as they can really help install the needed discipline but essentially make it biological. There are some people that can muster the needed discipline to sustainably lose weight but it's extremely difficult. Certainly those people deserve a lot of credit and I damn well wish I was one of them. I just hope these drugs become cheaper, or at the very least, covered by more insurance plans sooner rather than later. I know they have been coming down in price but a lot of us still can't afford them while also paying a mortgage and other mandatory expenses. Hopefully Trump's massive tariffs will fix all this and I'll be able to get me some of that sweet Ozempic goodness!
I knew this comment section would get heated! My 2 cents (and this based on conversations with nutritionists and the studies they've pointed me too), is that so much of this comes down to the circumstances one was born into. And generally, poverty makes things like exercising and taking time to eat well very very hard.
But I think having that general macro sympathetic view for the obesity problem coupled with Milan's more micro view for improving one's own personal behavior is a neat combo!
Something Rory told me when we met up IRL is that he thinks working out makes people more right-wing.
The basic left-wing idea is that your outcomes are determined by factors outside of your control; the basic right-wing view is that your personal choices determine your outcomes. When it comes to exercise and fitness you can clearly see the results of your personal choices.
There is a bell shaped curve of exercise response. If you have 1000 people and all have them do the same muscle building exercises you’ll find at one extreme exercise non responders. They do the program and nothing happens. At the other extreme you have exercise hyper responders. They do the routine and make huge progress.
It’s obviously a lot easier to go to the gym every day if you see dramatic gains form the work you put in. But it’s also easy to be on the 95th percentile of excercise response and think it’s all due to your hard work .
I don't see how this tracks. The entire thrust of left politics is reform, amelioration, improvement... progress. Recognizing that many of life’s most important outcomes are determined by factors outside any person’s control is just accepting basic facts about human evolution and the laws of physics. Despairing about these facts and opposing attempts to change the “natural order” is right-coded, while striving (often impetuously and ineffectively) to improve the outcomes these facts generate is left-coded. The fact that “free will” is an illusion does not negate the ability of individuals or societies to change for the better. If it did then there would be no “left” politics at all.
Given what we know about educational polarization and given that working out actually comes with real cost (gym equipment at home, gym membership, trainers etc.), I suspicion is the correlation is actually opposite; people who work out more are more likely to be Democrats.
Now the caveat is that men workout more than women on average. https://www.mdlinx.com/article/who-exercises-more-men-or-women/1TK8wn2e1IPcZYwBFE1cqC And men are way more likely to lift weights. Which given what we know about gender breakdown in voting means weight lifters are going to be a pretty conservative group.
So, if we narrow just to weightlifting. The stat doing the work here is that men are much liklier to be weightlifters AND more likely to be Republican.
Working out is not that expensive. All you need is a flat surface to do some body weight exercises and a pair of running shoes to get your cardio in. A gym is nice but it’s not necessary.
It's true that you can work out with limited expenses. There is growing evidence that resistance training (using bands or weights) has such strong benefits everyone should be doing it.
We need a video of you and Ben doing prison work outs, Shot Caller style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNmPznRYMjs
This has 100% been my experience. I think there’s an element of coincidence there but it’s an interesting coincidence.
Walking down the street in liberal NYC vs conservative Dallas, the evidence points toward right-wingers eating a lot more donuts on the couch.
It has been notable to see people like Paul Ryan and Marjorie Taylor Greene be super workout freaks.
Jamaal Bowman can put up numbers, but he does not seem to be long for this political world.
"But I think having that general macro sympathetic view for the obesity problem coupled with Milan's more micro view for improving one's own personal behavior is a neat combo!"
This is so true. There are obvious systemic factors that have led to the rise in obesity, and at some level those might be addressable through work at the system level. Yet individual people can also have significant agency to change their own circumstances at least to some degree through their own personal choices regarding food and movement. The former has more explanatory power in most situations, but the latter is almost always the best personal advice to give to someone. The former gets coded as "progressive" and the latter as "conservative" or "reactionary", but they really work hand in hand but just need to be applied at the correct level of analysis.
Apply also to any number of hot button culture war issues of the day.
The problem for me though is that from a policy lens this "neat combo" isn't really useful. It reminds me of a internet food fight (sorry) from back int he day where a middle aged conservative white guy at Forbes wrote an essay about what he'd do "If I were a poor black kid." https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/12/14/trolling-the-internet-with-if-i-were-a-poor-black-kid/ The the thing is his advice on an individual level isn't wrong! It is in fact smart to stay clear of drugs and gangs and work hard in school and go to college and get a good job and not have kids until you're married and do all the things that Montel told you to do.
The problem, from a society wide and policy view, is that "just work harder and be more disciplined" isn't going to actually address the problem more than rounding off a few of the sharpest corners for a small group of people. After all if intergenerational poverty or being overweight were this easy to address, why do we see so much of it? And that's where I think a lot of the pushback to Milan is coming from, to many people he's doing the "just stay in school and be like Clarence Thomas!" thing but for overweight people, which actually isn't going to address the social problem we are talking about (even if it did work for him/Clarence which it did!) and clearly doesn't work for lots of people. It's not surprising people find this approach, well, annoying.
In some ways poverty probably makes exercise easier. E.g., you are more likely to walk or take the bus rather than drive.
But it definitely makes good eating hard, and that's an interesting public policy issue that politics writers like Matt ALMOST NEVER talk about. Like, we could actually stop subsidizing corn and tax it, and use the money to subsidize lettuce and apples. Obviously we can't do that because Iowa is super-important in presidential politics and California and Washington are blue states, but as a policy matter we COULD do that. There's no reason the cheapest food in my neighborhood has to be Little Caesar's Pizza. Public policy did that and we can change the subsidies!
Rice and beans are not that expensive https://www.slowboring.com/p/americans-have-been-gaining-weight?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&publication_id=159185&post_id=100006765&triedRedirect=true
True! But Little Caesar's is also not expensive! And it should be!
And at least where I am, fresh fruit is VERY expensive. And shouldn't be!
Sure. But the fact that both Little Caesars and rice and beans are roughly equally cheap I think backs up my argument. The price isn’t the deciding factor; some people are choosing to make the less healthy choice and would benefit from making a different choice.
And you're saying that second line as a Southern Californian!
Have you actually lived on rice and beans? If you haven't, try it for 3 months, then get back to me about your recommendation to do that for longer.
There's a reason every culture in the world that lives on the basics expands their diet as soon as they get any money.
I'm allergic to beans 😳
Yes I have, that is what I am doing this summer and what I did last summer
It's not *just* the money, though obviously that's important. My life as an affluent person is much easier than life for a low-income person, and I *still* occasionally just want to eat something that tastes really good, like pizza. I have the money and time to make salad, but I don't like salad as well as I like pizza. When your life is hard, it's easy to let yourself make bad choices just so you get a little relief.
If the 2021-22 inflation bump taught us anything it should be that "let's make food more expensive" is not going to fly with the electorate such that it is,
How about making salads cheaper?
"Biden wants to TAX YOUR BURGERS and subsidize SOCIALIST SALAD!"
Again a red meat VAT and cheaper salads is a good policy idea but basically politically impossible.
"Iowa is super-important in presidential politics"
Is this going to hold true much in the future? Iowa hasn't been a swing state for a while, and the Democrats junked their caucus.
One can only hope. But so far I've seen no movement from politicians on ethanol and other favorite son Iowa issues.
Is that a solely Iowa thing or more a broader Plains States thing?
The only obesity problem that really gets my attention is that among the poor (and, to a certain extent, the question of why some working class folks just don't care if they develop huge guts from fast food and beer— but that could also be a byproduct of generational poverty culture.)
This is why addressing the processed foods issue (along with food deserts in poor neighborhoods and income inequality) might help people become more healthy.
The rest of us have the resources to do research and try stuff until something works. (BTW, you might have to do this over and over again as you age.)
Running is fast and the most efficient exercise. But the hardest for people to get into.
It's not practical for older people, or anyone who has trouble with their joints.
What I said directly contradicts that, the science directly contradicts that, and of course the important moral point is that DIFFERENT PEOPLE METABOLIZE FOODS VERY DIFFERENTLY FOR REASONS THEY CAN'T CONTROL, INCLUDING GENETICS. It is profoundly immoral for you and your boss to be here lecturing people about how they should just eat less when a) you are not dietary scientists and b) he had bariatric surgery! The vast majority of our obese population does not have access to that surgery, or to semaglutide. You cannot find credible experts in the field who will tell you that ordinary people can just regulate their eating until they're thin. Our entire evolutionary history cuts against that. Modern life cuts against it.
It's JUST like the greedflation argument here - the argument is that corporations didn't just become greedy recently. OK, cool. Apply your own logic: is it remotely credible to suggest that our obesity crisis arose because everybody all of a sudden became feckless and lacking in will power? We're not even eating dramatically more calories than we used to!
"It is profoundly immoral for you and your boss"
Um, Matt didn't say that. He said that if we weren't overeating ultra-processed food, we'd most likely be overeating some other tasty food, because tasty food is tasty and we like to eat it more than is probably healthy for most moderns.
In fact, Yglesias very much said that the increase in weight has been going on for as long as we have records, as prosperity and nutrition increased.
In earlier phases this showed up as less malnutrition and increased height, now it's showing up as obesity but if you look at the increase in weight or calories it's pretty linear.
The problem of “ultra processed” foods is that they are salient, accessible, and cheap. Other foods are more costly and more difficult to overeat (fancy cheese and cured meats are quite calorie dense but much more expensive for example.)
"Ultra processed" foods may be unhealthy in other ways too, of course. Lacking in fiber and micronutrients, have chemicals that disrupt hormones / confuse the systems that regulate how much we eat / etc. I imagine someone who got fat on a diet of Pop Tarts, Twinkies, and potato chips would have worse problems than someone who got fat on a diet of cheese and bananas.
I really think "ultra processed" is a red herring.
It's probably making the obesity problem worse, but I just pulled a bag of store brand potato chips out of my pantry.
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil, salt. Not a lot of mutlisyllabic compounds there. These are NOT fancy-pants organic chips, they're the cheapo store brand.
Matt wrote exactly the opposite of what you say he wrote.
But Freddie’s dishonesty is excused because of his targets are “profoundly immoral.”
It doesn’t matter if his accusation is blatantly false, because his is using bully logic to make the targets for his abuse the transgressors and to excuse his own conduct.
Milan is saying this, but Matt isn’t. Matt is ignoring important palatability factors and I think overestimates how easy it is to get fat eating apples and baked potatoes instead of pie and fries, but is still directionally correct that our food environment changing to have a ton of easy and tasty calories thrown at us all day is a likely cause of obesity, not a change in willpower.
Very much agree that this piece would have been more interesting if it had included a deeper discussion of the increasing incidence of hyper-palatable foods (which tend to be ultra-processed) but are specifically engineered to stimulate an addictive response to specific flavors/chemical combinations. This strikes me as exactly similar to modulating levels of nicotine in cigarettes to promote an unhealthy addiction.
Pie and fries are not ultra processed foods
I don’t think I claimed this, and don’t really know what UPF if it has some scientifically recent technical definition.
I do observe that these randomly chosen examples do definitely have a bunch of processing to make them very calorie rich and very tasty, especially the kind that comes on shelves in little boxes, which is the vast majority of what people meat. Fries, for example, are fried in industrially produced seed oils after being produced in large factories and frozen. I do not have home made wedges drizzled in EVO in mind. Even homemade pies will use a grocery store crust (e.g. graham cracker) crust and include a lot of added industrially refined sugar, and mostly people eat the stuff that comes in a bag or frozen box which has a ton of other stuff.
Regardless I think you take my point.
1. Not my boss anymore
2. I’ve lost a bunch of weight without drugs or surgery and all it took was consistency and discipline
3. Read carefully and you’ll notice that I didn’t say the obesity crisis was caused by diminished willpower; I said that increased willpower is an underrated solution
4. Pretty sure average calorie intake has gone up over the last ~50 years
3) Please provide a citation to a study that demonstrated an effective mechanism for increasing willpower in general, as well as one that shows how that can be applied to people struggling with their weight in a way that will have broad based uptake to effectively reduce the obesity epidemic.
C'mon Milan, your espousing a shockingly simplistic view of this issue. Do you really think people struggling with obesity just aren't trying hard enough to get it under control? Do you really think nobody has thought to try and find a way to improve people's willpower so that this societal problem can be improved? Maybe this issue is just more complicated than your subjective experience would lead you to believe.
>3. Please provide a citation to a study that demonstrated an effective mechanism for increasing willpower in general,
We have this now! It comes in a lovely syringe and costs way too much money ;)
Exactly. And it's entirely divorced from the notion that people can just will their way to better habits.
There is in fact some academic literature on the topic of “effortful control” and the benefits (and limits) of training oneself to cultivate it. There is also a big pop culture / Malcolm Gladwellian simplification engine that devolves into sloganeering and steams headlong into the replication crisis. I have never had the weight/obesity problems many here are describing, but I have several close relatives who do, and who have suffered their entire lives because of it. What strikes me most is the continuity of this problem with overcoming other addictions, including the very real and sometimes unbearable physical pain of it. So while I would never argue that “just eat less” is profound or useful advice for many or most life-long sufferers, it is also true that some people can overcome life-threatening addictions through sheer force
of will.
Some people can overcome poverty by winning the lottery. That's not evidence of the fact that the solution to widespread poverty is lottery tickets. You need to identify mechanisms that work for a broader swath of the population.
I mean, you are right and wrong. You are right in that it's not impossible to lose weight, plenty of people do it, willpower is a key part of it, etc. And there's a tendency-- especially on our side of the political spectrum-- to dismiss behavior-related descriptions of basically ANYTHING. So for instance, obviously long term homelessness contains a huge behavioral component; there are jobs available that people don't look for, there are apartments sometimes available that have rules that people don't want to obey, etc. And liberals and lefties don't like to talk about this stuff and it codes as victim blaming.
But at the same time, it isn't as simple as "well, you just stop eating". Compulsions are real. It's like Nancy Reagan saying "just say no to drugs". She was right that this was a good idea, but it's not so easy for an addict to do. And people really do have food addictions, they are difficult to kick, and one of the reasons we end up with Slow Boring pieces about Ozempic and bariatric surgery is precisely because tons of people find this a lot more difficult than you did.
Yes, but continuing the analogy, we try to offer people a hand up, like stable housing, clean clothes, guidance in applying for jobs, etc.
In the same way, we should try to give people tools and encouragement to improve their eating and exercise habits, not just say they are at the mercy of forces outside of them, which is where I think the pendulum has swung lately.
> I’ve lost a bunch of weight without drugs or surgery and all it took was consistency and discipline
lmao you're not even old enough to rent a car, let's see how it's going when you have a few kids, a mortgage and a desk job
Somehow I get the sense that it will still be simple to not eat too much
And I get the sense you're smug and unimaginative 🤷♂️
Milan, your old boss is a smart guy with a good work ethic. Why isn't he smart enough to just eat less?
You’re 21? We will revisit this conversation when you’re 42.
Milan, I think your dedication to a healthy lifestyle is admirable. Good for you! I don't know what good comes from telling people to buck up and be more disciplined, however. Does it really serve a purpose? It's like telling someone who lost a beloved spouse and is sunk into depression to just suck it up and feel better. What have you accomplished by so doing?
I don’t think the depression/obesity comparison makes sense because the causes of depression are complicated and the causes of obesity aren’t really.
What I have accomplished is explaining why I think a certain argument on this topic is wrong.
Depression is just caused by not having the willpower to get up and do stuff every day.
For example: I was feeling bad this morning. But then I exercised willpower and got up and felt better. Same thing you did with weight loss!
Freddie is emblematic of the moral decay we have seen in discourse. Rather than engage with what is said, he just assumes that something more convenient was said and hammers that.
It is lazy. It is nihilistic. It is unconcerned with knowing. It is the reason people here mock him.
He's wrong about Matt but he's right about Milan, here. "More willpower is a solution to obesity" is like "getting a job is a solution to poverty."
Getting a job depends on someone else hiring you. Choosing to eat less is entirely up to you. Might not be easy to do consistently but it is in your own hands.
Milan, literally nobody who wants to lose weight is unfamiliar with the concept of willpower.
While I hope for your sake I'm wrong, the odds are overwhelming that you will gain the weight back. Not saying you shouldn't try, or to minimize your accomplishment. I have friends who lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off. But they are not the norm.
Or maybe it's that every American is pretty likely to have a close relationship with at least one person who has struggled with chronic obesity and, not being callous people, they have some sympathy and understand that it's pretty hard for them to lose weight? Or maybe some of us are former "fat slobs" and have lost the weight, but we experienced it as being vastly more difficult than Milan portrays it as being.
You don’t seem to care what was actually written, only what is rhetorically easy to hammer against.
Freddie was elected to LEAD, not READ.
I forgot that he heads the Freditburo.
Cool use of all caps. Also, pretty sure holding strong opinions disagreed with by you is very far indeed from "immoral."
Oh god you’re so young. Wait till your metabolism slows down and we will talk again.
This is a misconception. Your metabolism doesn’t “slow down” in the sense that people think. What happens is that as people age they typically lose muscle mass and exercise less so they burn less calories but keep eating the same amount of food. You can combat this by working out.
Do you know any old people? My mom walks 5 miles a day she had a Fitbit and now has a Apple Watch and it’s clear that her pace has slowed from 12 minutes a mile to 17 minutes a mile over the 10 years from 60-70. That’s just the reality of aging. If you ran a 6 minute mile in high school you can’t train your way to a 6 minute mile at 70.
You are agreeing with me. She is burning less calories because she has less muscle mass and her heart can’t do the same output. So if she eats the same as when she was 25 she’ll gain weight.
I’m disagreeing with your assertion that she could get back to 12 minutes by working out more.
There were some old guys doing 6 minute miles in a trial run with a club I was part of years ago. I did it in like 5:39. Now I am slow like an overweight corgi.
Well, there is such a thing as getting old.
So I have read that our metabolism really starts slowing in our 60s. The biggest driver is people become more sedentary as they age (desk jobs.)
The way I understand it, a few of us are blessed with high metabolism for life, a few of us are cursed with low metabolism for life, but most of us have it slow down as you describe.
Yeah, my impression is that metabolism slowdown in one's 30s and 40s is driven more by muscle loss and a more sedentary lifestyle. If you hold those constant, then the metabolism slowdown is still non-zero but relatively minimal
I'm 68, been a cyclist all my adult life, and I'm here to tell you that you can't hold off the muscle loss with more exercise. That's something you can't hold constant. How I wish I could.
Do you lift weights?
This is way too simplistic. I've noticed the effect when I switched from eating chips to eating cashews. It is much much easier to overeat on food like chips than it is to overeat on cashews.
>It is much much easier to overeat on food like chips than it is to overeat on cashews.<
Not remotely true for me. Mind you I could easily get through 3/4ths of a large size bag of Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream (pre-Ozempic, that is). But I could also absolutely gorge on cashews—and cashews are quite caloric—about 5% more calorie dense that a typical potato chip, in fact.
With cashews you are at least getting a more nutrient dense food so the overall effect will likely mean you eat less of something else. The challenge with low nutrient density in foods is that it also promotes overeating as your body is looking for those nutrients. Calories are not equal in terms of the effect on humans- there's plenty of evidence and research proving that.
Yes but at the end of the day you can make the decision to put down either
You are describing executive function, which is often linked directly to clinical disorders like depression and ADHD, which you have admitted in other comments are very difficult to treat or change. If you accept that lack of this function is serious and resistant to simple fixes when it manifests in disorders, then you should also accept that 'just choose not to eat' is not a serious to weight problems.
Your should also do some reading about orthorexia, because people much smarter than you have done a lot of work in this area, and you should understand that work if you want to have an educated opinion on the subject.
Discipline is very easy to describe and quite hard to practice. You are young and will have much better opportunities with the co-eds if you have a nice body. Most of us are old. Many of us like our current partners and aren’t at risk of being dumped for a few extra pounds.
If my wife up and left me tomorrow, I’d lose 20 pounds in two months.
If your wife left you, you would lose more than 100 pounds immediately.
That’s fine but that just goes to show that, as you said, right now you are making choices that preclude you from losing 20 lbs but could make other choices that would cause you to lose 20 lbs if you chose to.
I strongly object to the word “choices.”. I am wholly material and my actions are merely the unfolding of physical processes, including especially evolution through natural selection. I have never made a choice in my life.
Still, my understanding of my incentives makes me confident that I would lose weight in the hypothetical world where my wife left me.
This may be a more philosophical disagreement but I don’t buy that you couldn’t just wake up tomorrow and decide you wanted to lose some weight and then change some of your eating habits accordingly to achieve the result
Could the average married 40 year old dad lose some weight if he blew off family dinner to go to a salad shop, and went to the gym instead of getting the kids ready for school in the morning? Sure he could.
Alternatively, he could just throw some cash at GLP-1 agonists and get the exact same results. Because it's not actually about willpower at all, it's about the particular constraints your life circumstances and metabolism impose.
we can only know the answer tomorrow. until then, it’s stochastic.
It is definitely more complicated than that. At least for perimenopausal women. I eat fewer calories and exercise more than I did 10 years ago, yet I still gain weight. Related to what Geoffrey G says above, this may appear not to be true for rich women because they can pay for various sorts of cosmetic procedures or spend the time or not worry about lack of energy when doing things like "cleanses" which really is just not eating.
I'm glad you noted this because one thing I wanted to say very slowly to Milan is "You're a man. There's a reason men are more likely to hold this (wrong) opinion about losing weight than women"
YUP. I’ve always done a lot of aerobic exercise and avoided UPFs, courtesy mostly of a wise mother and healthy upbringing. But then I hit 40 and developed thyroid disease and it simply does not work anymore. I’m ten pounds heavier than I used to be without any lifestyle changes at all.
I’m sorry to hear that. But my observation is that obesity has increased by a lot over the last few decades while the rates of various health issues that cause weight gain have not comparably increased, and therefore cannot be driving the rise in obesity.
I think the consensus is that the number of heavy people is steady, but those heavy people are getting heavier.
There’s also this whole idea of weight set points, where once your body gets used to being at a certain weight, it’s very resistant to change.
IIRC, researchers checked in on contestants of that show The Biggest Loser years later and found that people were really struggling to maintain weight loss—because their bodies seemed to be requiring fewer and fewer calories, more and more exercise, to maintain a steady weight lower than their previous set point.
As an engineer, the phrase "it just takes some discipline" is a giant red flag that an initiative has failed before it even started, and will continue failing until people stop substituting intensely fallible human discipline for an actual solution.
Milan is taking a lot of heat, but the fact is that irrespective of all the very real problems that people have which are given in the other comments and with which I have sympathy, in the end the only way to lose weight is to eat less than you're burning. You can do that in a number of ways some of which are harder than others, but it's up to each person and their health providers to figure out the right way for themselves.
People want to make hard things into complicated things, as a way of explaining the difficulty. But some things are simple and also hard! So it goes.
I would note that many disagreeing with my take on choice and personal outcomes with regard to weight feel the opposite when it comes to choice and outcomes with regard to, say, gambling.
Yes but turn that around: I agree with you on the gambling posts, which makes me all the more puzzled you're taking this "it's personal willpower and that's all there is to it" line here.
Probably, but it's also true that the effects of overeating are visible to the world every time one is in public unlike gambling and some other vices so people naturally tend to take it a bit more personally.
Maybe you're referring to specific people, but I feel pretty much exactly about gambling as I do overeating. For many people, gambling is a fun and manageable vice. For an appreciable number of people, it's crippling, and it's profoundly stupid to make it much easier for those vulnerable people to destroy their lives.
Food is much more complicated, since nobody can simply swear off food.
In any of these discussions, there’s always one comment like this.
I thought this comment section was above it, but apparently not.
The whole point of cutting out UPF is it makes it harder to overeat, between it taking longer to chew, lower calorie per volume and increased satiety it is much harder to overeat if you cut it out. Yeah sure some people can have the discipline to not overeat UPF but judging by the obesity epidemic most cannot.
>So just eat less. It’s not rocket science, it just takes some discipline<
Or some drugs.
I've been on the big O since mid January. It's truly not a magic elixir—you still have to be careful about your diet (at least I do). And I watch my weight like a hawk. But it does make eating a reasonable quantity of calories much easier.
It's *so* much easier. Milan's way of framing the issue is totally foreign to how it was when I was losing weight unassisted, it's so not just a matter of thinking to put down food you don't need. But that basically is how it works when you're on GLP-1s. You just think "wait, I probably shouldn't eat this," and then you just don't.
Yep, just some $1,200/month injectable discipline!
You're young. I used to think the same way. Think of something you have an addiction to and stop it for a month. If you have the will power, it likely wasn't an addiction to begin with. Lucky you. We need to stop shaming people.
A degree of shaming may be helpful. Should we shame drunk driving?
If shaming worked, nobody would be fat.
Maybe shaming works in some cases. It definitely doesn't for overeating.
“If it’s a real addiction it can’t be cured via willpower” is a weird no true Scotsman argument
I'd say you're doing the reverse. Pretty much nobody lives their life fully according to their values. That gap would disappear with more self discipline. But at some point, we recognize that the self discipline required so exceeds the average person's capacity that there's no point in demanding it. If a problem afflicting 70% of the country doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what does.
Shame on you for telling us not to shame others.
Just don't break the law, do drugs, start wars, or do other things that are harmful. Just do only things that benefit yourself. Congratulations, you've solved the majority of humanity's problems.
Bizarre oversimplification, akin to saying "you can't afford your rent/childcare/healthcare"? Just work more hours!
No, it really isn’t. How high your rent is depends on what your landlord charges you and what the local market is. Your employer has a great deal of leverage in determining your wages and hours. What does and doesn’t go into your mouth is by and large determined by you and people can choose to eat less.
Counterpoint: there were fat people before Oreos.
Many people were calorie-constrained, and unable to become fat because they were closer to the malnutrition end of things, but those with effectively limitless access to food still often became fat.
I think the more relevant comparison is post 90s or even post 2000s, when serious hunger was quite low, but obesity rates continued to rise.
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/-/media/Images/Health-Information/Weight-Management/Graph-7rev.jpg
I don't think the rise of super processed foods is the only explanation, but certainly seems to be a plausible one.
Matt’s point is that it isn’t just about serious hunger - it’s also about food being cheap enough that people stop thinking about whether they feel like spending a bit of money on a snack at the movies or something from the vending machine or whatever.
Ryan that's an interesting chart and you are right that my "before Oreos" comment doesn't cover it.
But, does the rise of processed foods address that recent increase either? I mean the foods were already very very processed by the late 90s. I can't believe that expansions to the Oreo line or new flavors of Doritos really changed things that much.
This feels like another factor at work. (People sitting around on computers, perhaps?)
I think you might be underestimating the changes in processed food over the last 25 years even, and how much more of it Americans eat today.
It’s the opposite especially for kids. The food people eat is a lot “healthier” and less processed today than say 1984. I mean just look at the collapse in soda consumption.
Interesting. I look at kids' food these days and am shocked. Some school require parents to only provide individually wrapped/sealed snacks etc, and that just tees them right up for processed foods. "Granola bars" are just candy bars, yogurts are basically ice cream with some probiotics, juice boxes, etc. etc.
My first reaction is very Principal Skinner: "Am I out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong."
But really, do you have examples that would help with the point? If anything I felt like there was a bit of a backlash against all the junk I grew up with. It is possible that my view is distorted by moving rapidly upward in socioeconomic status though. Brooklyn recently seemed a lot more healthy than the Midwest of the 80s & 90s, but perhaps the Midwestern food options got even worse since I left?
Yes! Freddie, you know I disagree with you a ton, but you are 100% right in this case! Hyper/processed food is DESIGNED to be super palatable, to make you want to eat far more than you need to.
My take is that, to a large degree, the brouhaha over "ultraprocessed" foods misses the forest for the trees. That is, it's a part and parcel with (or a direct development from) the "cheaper food" hypothesis, which in turn is ultimately a story of gigantic improvements in agricultural (and probably food-processing, too) productivity.
A frozen pizza and a sleeve of Oreos is a pretty calorie dense meal, sure! People shouldn't eat that crap on a regular basis. But a big part of the reason they do is it's comparatively cheap. If the above were a $20 meal, folks would eat it a lot less often.
It's probably true that people would lose weight if they ate more unprocessed fruits / veggies (like apples) and fewer high carb, high sugar foods (like oreos). However, humans have been experts at finding and cultivating foods that were high in calories and low in fiber / other macronutrients for a couple of hundred of years. Think white rice, or things like white bread and honey (later sugar) were also available, but expensive enough that only the wealthy could afford them in large quantities. Hence gout being called the "disease of kings".
I think the thesis behind "ultra-processed foods" is that food companies started adding insidious ingredients a few decades ago to make us addicted to their food, making us fat. Matt's thesis is that their main "invention" is getting high calorie / low nutrient + fiber foods into our hands extremely cheaply and conveniently. In other words, it wouldn't help much if they replaced high fructose corn syrup with something unprocessed like honey. It WOULD help if people had the discipline to eat mainly unprocessed foods despite high calories / low nutrient "junk" being so readily available. But this is not something our ancestors have ever achieved.
People were dying in molasses floods 100 years ago, when 1/3 of Americans were not waddling mounds. The casual availability is obviously the problem, not the bogeyman processing.
I think they go hand in hand. Like if there was nothing but whole foods (edit: the concept not the store). available I just wouldn’t eat 600 calories of watermelon like the volume of the stomach just isn’t that high.
It could rain strawberries and I wouldn’t match one gas station bag of Doritos.
Plenty of high caloric foods can be found at Whole Foods.
Sorry that wasn’t supposed to be capitalized. I mean like unprocessed food items not things from the grocery store.
A lot of sort of food writing uses this term like some Michael Pollan as an alternative to processed. I’m not sure if it’s a real term of art.
Got it, thanks. A shame that Whole Foods took over the term whole foods, then.
And I've never liked the term processed as a pejorative either--a salad takes process to make. High caloric, as I said upthread, is the term I've found the most useful.
It’s not just high calories - it’s high calories per effort of eating and digesting. This is one of the values of the keto diet - fat and protein just feel a bit harder to eat than carbs, especially while your stomach already has some in them.
I think that’s mostly right but even like raw walnuts very few people are going to eat like a huge amount of them.
That highly palatable nature intersects with its high availability for being made of cheap ingredients and preserved to long stability.
Like when I make like 90 percent of my food myself and it’s basically just whole plants it’s actually close to impossible to gain weight no matter how often i eat vegan whole foods Foods made in factories make it easy.
The wallet would be thinner for the same amount of calories though!
Cheese and cured meats.
Wholefoods has lots of snacks. Like spicy cheeseballs.
I’m sorry it autocorrected to capitals. I meant whole food the way Michael Pollan use the word to mean like a literal food
Item that your ancestors would recgonize like an apple and not say something like a bag of apple chips despite the similarities.
But they would understand the concept of baked apples and sliced baked apples.
It was the first example that came to mind. I actually think there’s not too little classism in the way Pollan beats up on convenience food type items and it’s not a view I endorse as any better.
Apple chips aren’t exactly bad but the reduction of water, and in some cases the addition other stuff and the speed at which they can be consumed makes them less good for over eaters like me.
See Andrew's reply to me.
Maybe so, maybe no, but either way, the responsible message still isn't "people just need to eat less." We literally do not have free will in any domain, but especially not in visceral needs like eating.
> We literally do not have free will in any domain
This explains so much of why, uh, why you are the way you are.
I don't want to do it, but something compels me to type LOL
Great, next time a commenter disagrees with you on trans rights, don’t ban them or get angry with them. After all, they literally do not have free will, so they couldn’t have written anything else.
Freddie, I thought you were a Communist, not a Calvinist ;).
But the theology of Marx is deterministic. There is not room for individual agency. History’s path is predetermined by material forces.
Nobody expects the Calvinist Inquisition!
Max Weber would be rolling in his grave.
https://imgflip.com/i/8uecnx
But people have agency and volition, which is not free will.
I guess the question is, what does "free" mean in "free will"? To have "free will," do you need to be free of social forces and stable personal traits? Do you need to be free of the wiring of your own brain? But on the other hand, choosing your actions by rolling dice does not strike me as an exercise of "free will" either, and not because the trajectory of the dice follows simple physics once they leave your hand -- to feel "free," it has to be "me" making real choices, but nothing "makes me" make those choices -- I am imagining myself as a sort of "unmoved mover," though I doubt that's possible.
I think in the colloquial sense, there isn't a clear distinction between "free will" and "volition," except that most people seldom use the latter word / maybe are not familiar with it. There's a colloquial sense where "having free will" means something like, "I feel like I'm making choices, and when I make a choice, nothing forces my mind and body to defy my choice." In this sense, I am a mover, and don't have to be unmoved by forces as long as they are ego-syntonic. The forces are allowed to shape my choice, but I am only unfree if, once my choice is made, I am unable to act on it.
We could have another conversation on, if the technical and colloquial meanings of a term differ, who is "really right" -- my own inclination is to prefer terms that allow precise distinctions, at least when I want to communicate precisely.
The tricky part is that if we don't all mean the same thing by the same words, we can think we disagree when our real disagreement is just what the words mean; or fail to communicate about what exactly we mean.
On the subject of "free will," though, I feel like it's a hard concept to understand clearly even if we agree on a definition-in-words. It should be something that is neither entirely trivial nor definitionally impossible, but I don't know what exactly.
What is this agency and volition that we have, and what makes it distinct from free will?
I think that we are very good at convincing ourselves that we are 'making choices', when in reality we are all just cogs in the unfolding of the great determinist path of the universe, but I am not sure that this sort of fiction is what you mean.
We have free will in some relevant sense, but that doesn’t mean that we have the ability to do anything other than what we actually do.
I think it's both. Certainly I could still overeat without consuming ultra-processed foods, but I could overeat even more if I consumed mainly ultra-processed foods vs healthier sources.
Personally I think the biggest culprit is calorie-dense drinks (soda, alcohol, etc)
I long cut out soda pop, juice, and creamy drinks just so I could be able to fit in enjoying some booze.
Soda actually shows how the processed food thing is BS.
Diet soda is processed. And lots of Lefties are convinced it is terrible for you. But it isn't, and it specifically doesn't cause you to gain weight. The processing removes calories.
Or even flavored carbonated water, which doesn't get the same bad rap diet soda pop gets.
Absolutely.
Diet soda is bad for your teeth and causes cancer in California.
No it isn't (it's not GREAT but it is much better than sugared soda( and no it doesn't cause cancer. Total naturalistic fallacy and conspiracy theory.
If it actually caused cancer given the number of people who drink it you would see obvious spikes in cancer rates. You don't because it is safe.
Both are factors. Highly processed foods AND sugar and other high calorie sweeteners (which are quite often part of the processed foods)
Aspartame, the sweetener in most diet soda, has no effect on diabetes.
https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/aspartame-diabetes#risks
People weren't waddling from being fat, but they were waddling from being drunk off of rum from all that molasses. Then we tried prohibition, and the rest is history. But no one ever beat their wife because they ate too many Oreos, so the story isn't very analogous.
Yes, the combination of the human instinct to overeat; the availability/convenience of calorie-dense, ready-to-eat foods (i.e., highly-processed); and the relative cheapness of such foods in terms of people’s incomes and time constraints seem like a good explanation. So attributing the rise in obesity to highly-processed foods seemw like a reasonable shorthand explanation.
There’s no world where we ban processed foods, so I think Matt is basically right that it’s a red herring to focus on this as the issue. The facts are that food is abundant, people enjoy eating and will pay for tasty food, and this leads to the availability of processed and otherwise unhealthy foods.
The idea of Calories in, calories out obviously doesn't work if you eat a different amount of calories then you planned! The point is that by planning your meals a bit you can make a weight loss diet more sustainable and enjoyable and even include some processed foods within it.
Indeed. I’ve never accidentally eaten 100 grams of protein!
Thanksgiving?
(Maybe that's just me)
I’ve surely eaten 100g of protein in one sitting before, but it requires a certain intentionality. As opposed to, say, soda and tortilla chips - you’re 100g of carbs in before the meal even arrives!
Amateur.
Agreed. I remember the New York Times number of years back a great piece on the food science that goes into snack food. You could almost hear one scientist tearing up as he described the beauty of the Cheeto: the way it melts in your mouth tricks your brain into thinking that you haven't actually consumed much. The industry term for this is "vanishing caloric density."
So while I agree with Matt that people would overeat regardless availability of ultra processed snack foods, his argument doesn't support the idea that ultra processed foods don't make it worse, but that seems to be his position.
This is similar to the point Richard Wrangham makes in his book “catching fire”, namely that cooking (various methods of applying heat or breaking down food substances) made chewing and digesting easier, enabling us to extract more calories from food. We essentially externalized some of the digestion process. He goes on to argue that this is partly what unlocked Homo sapiens’s bigger brains, etc
While the evolutionary angle might be debatable the general point that some foods lend themselves more to easily extracting calories seems definitely true, so maybe that would be the most useful lens to understand the “ultra processed” angle, as I think you’re saying.
Agree with everything you said except the bit about “calories in, calories out”
Yes it is true that it might be complicated to calculate either number, but that really, truly, is how it works. It’s exhausting to talk to people that do not get this. They constantly advocate for magic tricks instead of realizing that you do, in fact, have to measure your caloric intake and create a deficit.
And for 99% of people, exercise will not create a caloric deficit. If you aren’t running marathons/triathalons, swimming at a competitive level, training for pro basketball, etc, your exercise is going to consume maybe 100-200 more calories at most per day. If you aren’t counting calories, that’s going to get consumed by a protein bar (if you are eating healthy) or over-consumed by a donut. And how many people have you met who treat themselves to snacks on days where they worked out?
Agreed to all of this. I would add that I support a really high tax on sugar and other high calorie sweeteners.
Raise the cost of a coke up to about $10. Use the tax money to offer health insurance discounts to people that are fit and at an appropriate weight
It might not need to be that high. Seattle's tax is apparently impactful. https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattles-once-controversial-soda-tax-may-be-paying-off
I think the other element that is missing from the analysis here is that ultra-processed foods aren't just plentiful and cheap, they are also delicious. And humans are extremely good at creating delicious foods, even under all kinds of restrictions. You can now get food with really incredible macronutrient profiles that are like 80% calories from protein and they still taste really good.
That hyper-palatability is the problem, because you'll always want to eat more. This is why a lot of fitness guys who are cutting weight swear by extremely plain meals like grilled chicken and rice with minimal seasoning and no sauce. They're not stupid, they know that it's possible to make that food tastier while adding very few additional calories. But by making it tastier they are going to want to eat more of it.
I never understood the bland fitness bro meal prep. This makes so much sense (even if I could never bring myself to make that particular trade).
It’s not just pleasure either. Highly palatable foods interact weirdly with your hunger mechanism (especially for some people). Makes it harder to resist hunger, makes you hungrier to begin with, and is usually more calorie dense and easy to eat too much of when you fail to do so.
My intuition is that many people have ancient wiring that says "oh this is a chance to stock up on calories - you should eat as much of this as you can and we will store it as fat for later"
This would have been a solid survival technique for an ancient human encountering fully ripened fruit, for example. Take it all in now - leaving it for later doesn't work as it will rot or get eaten by someone/something else. NOW, take it all NOW, your body still tells you.
Thats why pie is more addictive then anything. Hyper ripe fruit (with added sugar)
Does low fat/low protein/low fiber count as “hyperpalatable”? Or is that somewhat separate? (I think of “hyperpalatable” as being about first taste, while fat/protein/fiber are more about how they fill you up, which is about tenth taste or whatever.)
Wikipedia says:
> Hyperpalatable food (HPF) combines high levels of fat, sugar, sodium, or carbohydrates to trigger the brain's reward system, encouraging excessive eating.[1] The concept of hyperpalatability is foundational to ultra-processed foods, which are usually engineered to have enjoyable qualities of sweetness, saltiness, or richness.
By that definition, homemade mashed potatoes and pie could be hyperpalatable… but Cheetos and Oreos are probably even more hyperpalatable.
Yes this!
Think of "food pleasure" as the addiction. You do not PLAY AROUND with the pleasures of addiction, for example enjoying just one cigarette. You clean up, avoid the trigger, stay on the safe side.
If food still makes you happy, you are likely to try to keep getting happy. (Same for drugs, booze, sex, etc.)
I just did a week scoring AP essays in a convention center, and as you can imagine, they plied us with snacks to keep us going. The cornucopia available was pretty remarkable, and everything was full of salt, sugar, or both. It was alarming how well the variety disguised how unhealthily I'd been eating for a week; I took a sugar fast for a few days afterwards.
Very true. The only way I've been able to move away from junk food (not entirely, but I eat a lot less of it than I used to) is by eating enough home-cooked food that the junk just tastes imbalanced, mostly from lack of acid. Quarter pounder or junior chicken? Not enough acid. Bacon sandwich or English breakfast? Not enough acid. Pizza overloaded with cheese? Not enough acid.
I just don't crave the junk like I used to cause there's usually something missing.
I'd add that I think there's a great case for better cooking and seasoning veggies, mainly by roasting and grilling. Sure the added fat makes the more caloric, but it's still really hard to overeat your veggies (same goes for legumes).
What I really want is a "sauce" that induces satiety. Like, make the delicious food, but include an additive that will induce satiety. Depending on whether you're a normal person, or one of those freaks who already gets sated with only the amount of food you need to maintain weight, not add any, you can sprinkle on the additive, as needed.
Until we get that, I'm expecting the market for GLP agonists will just keep growing.
"swear by extremely plain meals like grilled chicken"
This would help explain Dan Orlovsky's weird and hot food takes.
If you season it well, or have very high quality chicken (Bell Edwards Farms), then chicken can be great with just salt. (I season it though.)
Picking chicken is fun too.
My husband eats brown rice with chick peas and steamed broccoli covered pureed canned tomatoes for lunch every single day. It is a combination not endorsed by any food culture. It is bland and I think I have eaten less for lunch just being in its presence. He is also very fit.
My counterpoint to this is that nutrition science has optimized the taste of ultra processed foods to a far better degree than it could ever have done with foods found in nature. You can make ice cream hit a pleasure center better than the world’s greatest apple. Pringles have been engineered so you can’t stop at just one, and you get rage if someone lays a finger on your butterfinger. Ultra processed food has been designed to be craved.
I understand that argument, but I'd have to disagree. And I think it comes from a uniquely contemporary American place. Because the fact is that most fresh produce in the US is... not good. But that doesn't mean that the ideal type of that food isn't the most delicious thing you ever put in your mouth. And, yes, even MORE delicious than the most dastardly UPF!
For example, I grew up in the US Mid-Atlantic in the 1980s and 90s. Tomatoes: yuck. Like biting into a water ballon. And then I had a tomato in Southern Europe for the first time. I know I sound obnoxious saying this, but fuck it: it was a flavor revelation. I could pop those tomatoes like candy. I had also never tasted a non-frozen pea until adulthood. Then I had a fresh English pea. Holy fucking shit.
And you even see this in many processed (but not *highly* processed) foods where the ingredients and technique is fresher and better. I love Ben & Jerry's. But the best Italian gelato is better. I also love a good fast food hamburger. A freshly-made all-beef burger with fresh toppings and bread that doesn't have 20 ingredients in it is better. Pizza is great in most manifestations. But a Neapolitan margarita composed of fresh ingredients you can count on one hand is the Platonic ideal of pizza.
Americans used to have this kind of food. It was really between the World Wars that the food situation Stateside got so bleak. And it probably peaked in bleakness around the time I was born. Today, if you have the scratch, you can get heirloom tomatoes, and other fancy, fresh stuff like that that is legitimately good. But most Americans can't. So, when we're comparing UPF to fresh foods, we're basically saying that the most ingenious UBF is more toothsome than our fresh foods which have been optimized for cost, transport, storage, and shelf appeal rather than taste or nutrition.
Actually the vast majority of Americans never had access to heirloom tomatoes. Having plentiful fruit at any time other than the harvest is recent. Americans used to can fruit- a form of processing.
I would have thought the majority of late 19th century Americans had occasional seasonal access to heirloom tomatoes. Not if you lived out on the Great Plains, but the south and east all had good climates for garden tomatoes.
Sure, but "occasional seasonal access" to one type of really good food is a really odd claim of superiority for the 19th Century.
Indeed, it's literal cherry picking, really.
If they were claiming superiority, yeah it’s wrong. But if they were just claiming that most Americans in 1890 had access to better tomatoes than the average American in 1980, it’s surely true, even though Americans in 1890 had much less tomato access overall.
The situation we have today where the only food for human consumption is clustered in a few breadbaskets far from population centers is really unusual. You'd have, in my grandparents' time, had local farms who provided the produce. You had to, given the cost of transport and lack of refrigeration. That food was totally different than the varieties we grow now. It generally tasted better and was from "heirloom" varieties that are now lost. At one time, there were literally THOUSANDS of different apples grown in the United States!
That's an almost classic incorrect belief about the good old days.
Again, if you lived in Iowa back then you never ate a fresh peach because they didn't grow there. If you had an orange it would be in the form of orange juice that shipped on a Tropicana Juice Train.
Even your own fruits and vegetables were canned (processed) most of the year. What you are saying is at best highly selective. For a few weeks they got fresh heirloom fruits and veggies and only of the varieties that grew locally.
So, yes, you are right about one aspect: you just didn't get the *variety* of produce regardless of region or season as we do today. But your access to fresh produce that grew in your region was much more. And the local produce wasn't what we eat today, but was very diverse and abundance, especially in certain harvest seasons.
The industrial canning that really brought about the industrial way of eating that is dominant in America since was an Interwar innovation, as I said above. People canned their own produce in Bell-type jars, yes, especially from the latter half of the 19th Century, but you didn't buy stuff that didn't grow where you live shipped from far away until after 1917. And even then it didn't form a large share of the American diet for several decades thereafter. Other forms of processing and preservation (including and especially freezing or air-tight wrapping in plastic are so new that people alive today didn't have them in their own youth.
" And the local produce wasn't what we eat today, but was very diverse and abundance, especially in certain harvest seasons."
I think that's a silly way of looking at things. For a few weeks, they got SOME amazing fruits and vegetables (but far less variety than I can find at my local supermarket any time during the year). The rest of the year things were very monotonous. And that's before you get to things like not having access to ethnic foods and other ways in which the modern eating environment is amazing.
"The industrial canning that really brought about the industrial way of eating that is dominant in America since was an Interwar innovation, as I said above."
The word "industrial" is a very misleading word. Industrial canning is no different than home canning except being slightly more reliable in preventing botulism.. So the issue is canning. And your average farm family that you are celebrating ate a ton of canned food, and dried food, and frozen food, all year except during the harvest season. Far more than the average person eats now. And all that food was processed.
And in a way, "industrial" is giving away the game here. People insert their anti-corporate and anti-bigness and anti-"unnatural" feelings, all of which are more or less irrational, into discussions where they don't belong. Canned spinach is canned spinach, whether the canner is a homestead 19th Century farmer or the Del Monte Produce Company. It's the same thing. But somehow when it was done at home, it's old-timey and traditional and natural and nice, but when a corporation does it, the same thing becomes dangerous and scary.
So bottom line, for a few weeks every year, people ate some better fruits and vegetables, with an emphasis on "some". They lacked the variety we have now, and the rest of the year they ate unappetizing canned or otherwise preserved food. It wasn't better.
“Better” is subjective and multidimensional, but have you ever eaten 1000 calories of Honeycrisp apples in one sitting? I’m guessing no - I don’t think I have, and I love apples.
Conversely it’s really easy to eat an entire pint of ice cream, which is about 1000 calories
So true about American produce vs. that of Europe. Ours tastes like nothing, and produce in Europe has flavor and scent.
Personally, I agree with you that natural food, especially if it's high quality, often tastes better than processed food, but I think we're in the minority. The average US consumer in particular probably prefers a fast food hamburger over a fresh piece of fish or tater tots over a delicious salad, and those preferences will remain even if the quality gets better.
Partially true. But it’s also about habits and perhaps innate preferences. Some people naturally crave and enjoy fruits and vegetables more. Others are more partial to sweets or salty snacks. Of course the better the quality of the food the more appealing but you also have baseline preferences (innate or acquired) that play a large role.
I think a lot of that is acquired by being properly exposed to the stuff and having habits of eating it!
Yes. It’s not that processed foods are per se more fattening than natural carbs; it’s that 1) they are engineered to be really yummy and 2) they are usually carb-based rather than protein and fat heavy, because carbs are cheaper and consumers can eat more without feeling satiated.
Butterfingers were introduced in 1923 Pringles have been on the market for half a century. None of this is new.
Yes, but their formulas have changed considerably throughout history to make it tastier and less expensive.
"...if nobody could ever eat “ultra-processed” food but everything else was the same, they would overeat something else". This is actually not true. Satiety is fundamentally different when consuming ultra processed foods vs whole foods. Or specifically, fats and proteins that aren't combined with carbs. Most people wouldn't overeat butter or steak in the same way they'd do chips or cookies. Or a bushel of apples. Freddie is right here. (And there's a lot of science behind how insulin is processed by different people, the threshold before it becomes diabetes, etc.)
agreed. try overeating on just steak. Basically impossible. Same with low carb veggies, salad etc.
But you start to add in some carbs and/or a bit of processing and now you're getting somewhere
I've overeaten steak, what are you talking about?
There's an interesting question as to why the US has stopped converting extra food availability into greater height at a level lower than Denmark or the Netherlands.
I assume it's because the maximum potential height is genetically encoded. Dutch and Norwegian people in the U.S. are probably just as tall.
I think this is largely correct. A map of which states have the tallest Americans, on average, is not a map of poverty or inequality, it's basically just a map of ethnic origins (and also recent immigration). Meanwhile, a map of heaviest states does look something like a map of poverty.
At 5'10.9" I am the shortest man in Minnesota, but East Coast "tall".
I know a certain New Mexican that contradicts this...
Hey now.
The Dutch, for one, are far more active than Americans. Obesity is compounded by inactivity which we know slows growth.
See also Colorado as an outlier within the US in this regard. Though with there, I'm curious if altitude is a factor, or if more fit people self select Colorado because of the altitude.
I suspect the majority of New Mexicos population lives at a higher elevation than Colorado’s!
Yes, I live in the Netherlands and while I don't think Matt's overarching thesis - richer countries = less food constraint = obesity - is wrong, my experience here suggests that there is a bit more to it. The obesity rate where I live (out in the sticks) is genuinely a quarter or less of the American average, despite it being a very well off area, (with infinite access to yummy snacks). The Netherlands as a whole has much lower obesity rates - about 10% of the population, I think - than the US. And there's a very noticeable difference between 'native' Dutch, and those with an immigrant background (like in many western countries) with the latter having double the obesity rate.
This is just long-winded "I agree" - the obvious thing linking all of the above is that 'native' Dutch mostly live in suburbs and villages and the cultural expectation is that they move themselves constantly by bicycle or on foot. I myself struggle a lot with my weight, but the struggle is a yo-yo around a BMI of 24 - if I were to get to 30 I wouldn't be able to bike and walk so easily - my knees couldn't take it.
Couldn't cultural expectation around what to eat, especially as children, also be quite different?
I know people who think nothing of feeding their kids sodas near bed time or smothering every meal with ranch dressing (weird but true). And I know other people who talk about eating healthy all the time. It seems like this is the kind of thing that could vary a lot by country.
Varies per community, by school even. Our kids are at a school where I notice there's a really tough anti-snack culture. For example, it's Dutch tradition to treat all your classmates on your birthday, but at this school anything more than a very small piece of brownie, or a beaker with 20 grains of home-made popcorn, is considered unhealthy and unhelpful. At other places a small bag of candy or a bag of potato chips would be fine.
That seems to work through to outcomes- there are only two noticeably overweight children at a school with a 100 kids.
Right - so I'm wondering if the cultural expectations around what to eat play an even bigger role than activity levels or access to health care or incomes or whatever.
Does inactivity slow growth? From a quick search, I don't see any conclusive results on that.
It's the obesity.
from the NIH:
Obese children are usually taller for their age but also fatter and mature faster, but they do not tend to attain taller height as adults since excess adiposity during early childhood has an influence on the process of growth and puberty.
People have a hard time intuitively understanding how variability within a sample has a large effect on the average or the mean. So, the answer to this question is basically the same as when you ask related questions about any other HDI type measure that the US underperforms on: inequality. The US is really, profoundly unequal in a way that Denmark and the Netherlands are not. And the US, unlike Denmark or the Netherlands, makes access to social services and necessities for life and health largely contingent upon material wealth.
So, when it comes to average height, Americans are dealing with the effects of a lack of universal healthcare, malnutrition-driven stunting, and also the particular patterns and outcomes from immigration in the US vs. Europe. Immigrants to the United States come from extremely unequal societies and then they enter the lowest stratum of an extremely unequal society, compounding the effect on height.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest, most well-educated, well-paid professional Americans who have access to good food, healthcare, et al are as tall as wealthy Western Europeans, who have access to health- and height-maximizing factors no matter their station in life. But those towering yuppie Americans are the exception. And everyone else the share national borders with down the average.
It's a similar story with healthcare and education.
The tallest American states are places like Iowa, Idaho and Oregon. These aren't exactly filled with rich people. New York and California are close to the shortest despite having much better safety nets. And Hawaii seems to be the shortest of all. I think you're underrating genetic factors here.
It's not always the case that Blue States with a lot of transfers and social programs have the lowest inequality. Iowa is very much now a Red State, but it has one of the lowest Gini coefficients in the country. Ditto for Idaho. New York State has the single highest rates of inequality in the country, exempting Puerto Rico. And California isn't far behind, with one of the highest rates of absolute poverty, to boot! Hawaii isn't as unequal, but it does have a very high poverty rate.
So, yes, genetics play a factor, but the material conditions that the median resident faces and their access to social goods is likely more dominant.
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/mother_trends_race
When categorizing by census group and nativity, US-born Asian women are almost the shortest group, above only Hispanic immigrants, and despite being highest in terms of education.
All these things (except inequality) play some role, but I think you're overrating safety net and wealth and underrating genetics and probably lifestyle. When I go into poorer white neighborhoods in my area people don't seem shorter. They do seem fatter with more tattoos and cigarettes, though.
More food makes people grow taller, up to some limit, and then it makes them grow wider. That much is uncontroversial. The question is are we really still seeing stunting in the poorer groups of Americans? The answer seems to be largely no, or we wouldn't see non-immigrant Black and Native American women being as tall as and a little bit heavier than white women and way more of both than Asian and Hispanic women.
High SES = cultural expectations around fitness. Being tall = people listen to you more.
(And don’t tell me it’s about fewer gyms in poor areas. Running is by far the most efficient calorie burner.)
The issue is not the Gini coefficient. It is access to health insurance, etc, because that was the factor you claimed was driving lower heights. If states with more robust safety nets are shorter, that obviously casts doubt on your thesis.
Utah is the king of dominating the Gini coefficient.
Lowest Gini coefficient and wealthiest are far from the same thing. You're mixing your stories.
This is an excellent point about immigrants, and I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before. It is obvious when I just look around at immigrants in my area. The parents tend to be a fair bit shorter (and have much worse teeth) than their US born kids even though both parents and kids are living close to the poverty line
Depending on the country much of this would have been true if they had stayed home. Average heights are rising in most of the world and Chinese teenagers in China are taller than their parents more often than not.
This is definitely true. My husband's Chinese students have gotten not only taller but more muscular over the past 20 years - so noticeably that he comments on it. I'm thinking more of students who go to school with my kids whose parents came her from places like Burma and Afghanistan, where it seems the same is not true judging from classmates who came here when they were tweens or teens. It is often hard to believe that the students from Burma/Myanmar are the same age as their classroom peers because they are so much smaller.
My experience is that spending time in high income, high status places in the US, you do not feel like the population is as tall as random parts of the Netherlands.
That's because most people aren't rich. Even in a rich place. And every community in the very wealthy United States has a lot of not-rich people. Most people walking around aren't rich, since the economy relies on low-cost labor to function from people who often can't even afford to live in a given place where they work. Retail employees, construction workers, servers, healthcare aids, etc. They're all diminutive, as a very physical manifestation of their lower social class and lack of access to the things that make people taller.
I'm American but live in Sweden, which is a tall place now (but, like the Netherlands, it didn't used to be - far from it!). Everyone around me has decent healthcare, access to food, etc. Most of them have an annual income that would make them lower-middle-class, at best, in the US. But they have the basic inputs they need to realize their height potential. So, there's not much noticeable variation in heights.
When I go to the US state of Maryland (the richest in the US) to visit my American family, many people are strikingly short and fat and visibly disabled and/or unhealthy in a way you just don't see in even the most working-class parts of Sweden. More striking is the variability in stature and evident health.
And I can easily pick out who is upper-middle-class by how they look. Not just (or even primarily) their clothes. It's how tall and thin they are! It's like something out of Brave New World, with genetically-engineered social castes. Whatever their ethnicity, if they're taller and thinner, it's generally the case that Americans you see are making six figures. And that includes a lot of successful immigrants from places not generally thought of as genetically tall. Chinese people, Indians, Koreans, Salvadorians, et al come to the very diverse state of Maryland and get tall as hell, towering like giants over their family members from back home. *IF* they make enough money to have proper healthcare coverage, healthy food, etc. Then, underneath them, are all the rest of the Americans who aren't so flush and have been shrinking, on average, my entire life.
This is a thing in the Netherlands too. I used to work in a managment consultancy company in Amsterdam which heavily hired out of the young upper-middle classes, and about 10-20% of the men were 6'4"/1.93m or taller - which is tall even for the Netherlands, with very few under 6"/1.8m
In addition to what Matt writes, the hatred of processed foods is an obvious example of the naturalistic fallacy.
Not to resurrect the prescriptivist / descriptivist controversy from earlier in the week (especially because I fundamentally agree usage drives language change), but one annoying aspect of this topic is that sometimes you're talking to people deeply in thrall to the naturalistic fallacy while other times you're talking about caloric density and palatability, and it can take a while to figure out which conversation you're having.
I agree with that point. If the claim were merely "hey, our modern methods of food manufacturing allow us to pack a lot of bad stuff into a small package that tastes awesome", sure, that's part of the obesity story and that's a totally legitimate case to make (although Matt's right as to what the main cause of obesity is).
But as I said elsewhere in the thread, then you get the attacks on diet soda, which has 0 calories and 0 sugar. And you can tell from that, that this is really about the notion that artificial = bad. And a lot of the other attacks fit into that framework.
My wife stopped drinking Diet Soda, it was the only change she made to her diet and lifestyle, and she dropped 20 pounds in two months, and the weight has stayed off over a year now. Her acne improved significantly, as well.
Aspartame is terrible for you. It's not just weight. It leads to auto-immune dysfunction, diabetes, and cancer.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in this comments section. Most of you really seem to believe that the packaged American diet is no worse for you than meats, fish, vegetables, and fruits. Whatever.
And thankfully these sorts of anecdotes (which are often disproven by later studies) are not the way we conclude that things are dangerous or not.
There are loads of studies linking aspartame to obesity, cancer, auto-immune dysfunction, and more.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9301525
Have fun living in cherry-picked-science land.
Aspartame is on the market precisely because there's enormous evidence that it is safe and doesn't cause all that stuff.
Bear in mind, due to the naturalistic fallacy there's massive markets for anything claiming artificial stuff is bad, but as I say upthread, given the uptake rate of artificial sweeteners we basically know that almost all of those studies are either wrong or overclaimed. Because if the stuff was really dangerous it would be directly observable.
So no, you are wrong. You need to reconsider your beliefs that stuff is good if it is natural.
My highly annoying trigger in this regard is organic food. Organic means any compound that contains carbon. Thus, there is very little inorganic food. Water? Salt?
“Organic” is a word like “metal” that just has two different meanings. Chemists use “metal” to refer generally to elements on the left side of the periodic table with free electrons that can flow, while astrophysics uses “metal” to refer to every element heavier than helium. Similarly, chemists use “organic” to refer to compounds with carbon mainly bonded to other carbons and hydrogens (CO2 usually doesn’t count as “organic” for “organic chemistry”) while agriculturalists use “organic” to refer to foods that have been grown with a certain class of traditional techniques.
It’s confusing terminology, and the agriculturalist version is a bit arbitrary, but it’s not as wrong as you suggest.
No. Refined sugars and carbs are really, really bad for you. It's a science-fact.
Unprocessed sugars are just as bad. If the argument is they put more in with processing, fine, but "processing" also does stuff like making food safe and shelf stable.
No. Fruit sugars are great. Eat as many strawberries as you please. The fiber will stop you from over-eating and help you digest it normally.
HFCS is bad. You can consume mega-quantities of it in a matter of minutes because there's no fiber. Then it jacks up your insulin because it lacks fiber and goes straight to your bloodstream.
It's also worth noting the sheer quantity of sugars in processed American foods, which is extremely high relative to other places, and made possible by refined, concentrated sugar products like HFCS.
The sugar chemical is really no worse (in some cases better) it’s that you get an absolute ton of it without any of the fiber and water and other chemicals it is normally bundled with in fruit.
Drinking beat juice would get you just as fat, but you can pretty much eat as many beats as you want.
HFCS is the same chemically as sucrose. It is not wonderful because glucose and fructose are sugars. But claims that there is anything especially wrong with HFCS as compared to sugar are complete BS.
Yes that was part of my point. Sorry if it didn’t come across. I have read that glucose may actually be easier on your body than fructose in some ways (but you can still eat as many beets as you want). Eating large added amounts separated and refined sugar or any kind is a similarly bad idea (be it honey or HFCS or cane sugar) and eating whole foods that have such sugars is generally fine.
People have a real difficult time understanding this from my experience, and it's frustrating trying to pierce through that appeal to nature.
Wrong.
If you compare HFCS to cane sugar, sure. We eat too much of that, too. It is not the same as fruit sugar. The water and fiber is good. Insane that water and fiber from fruit would ever be considered a bad thing.
The main problem, however, is the quantity. There's just an absolutely enormous amount of sugar of all types in processed foods.
When the sugar is chemical, like aspartame, it's even worse. Aspartame is linked to auto-immune disorders, insulin disorders, cancer, you name it.
All sugar is chemical. Everything we eat is a chemical.
I feel like I am missing your point. If you extracted the fruit sugar and ate large quantities of that (like drinking fruit juice) that’s bad for you. I agree the water and fiber is good. My point is that the water and fiber (and relative quantity of sugar I.e. the ratio that determines how much sugar you are getting for a given amount of other stuff that fills you up and has nutrients etc) etc is what makes it different than sugar added desert treats, rather than the type of sugar. It doesn’t sound like you disagree with that but you keep saying I am wrong so I must be missing an element of your comment.
Yes, if you compare sugar vs HFCS directly, the response is the same. But very few people consume straight sugar and HFCS. If you get sugar from fruit, fiber naturally limits your intake and helps you digest it. Now you can inject 38g of sugar from HFCS into your bloodstream with one 12oz can of Mountain Dew. It's different.
Uhh few people consume orange juice? Apple juice? They absolutely do.
Let me guess, you're an anti-vaxxer, too?
Lol, look at you, throwing discrediting labels at people whose opinions don't fit your priors. Such enlightenment.
I'm reaching the unavoidable conclusion that this is the standard of debate in the SB comments section, which is... stunning. "You think fruits and vegetables are more nutritive than processed foods? Get out of here, anti-vaxxer!" Good one.
I notice you didn't answer my query.
Broken clocks are right twice a day, but they are still broken clocks.
You've been proven wrong several times here, so watch out who you're labeling a broken clock. You tossed out one argument, that HFCS and sugar produce the same response, and used it as the foundation for an argument that natural foods are no better than processed foods.
This is obviously reductive. There are other physiological responses in the body that are not measured in the very narrow lab studies you referenced.
For example, diets high in processed foods with lots of fats and sugars eventually produce a gut biome dominated by microbes that prefer those foods, and demand them in the form of cravings. Diets with lots of fruits and veggies lead to microflora that create cravings for healthy foods low in sugar. There are so many far-reaching physiological effects of diet and watching you stand on these isolated research narratives to disprove that is comical.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/where-cravings-are-bred
A clock that occasionally runs a minute fast and occasionally runs a minute slow but is almost always within two or three minutes of the actual time is “broken”, but it’s still very useful.
That's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about something that entirely accidentally happens to be right once in awhile. Hence, a broken clock.
It is what we are talking about. Naturalness is a useful heuristic for identifying things that aren’t too bad for us. It’s not complete randomness. (Tasting good is also a good heuristic, and these two heuristics compete with ultra processed foods.)
I’m not sure it is useful. There are loads of really toxic and poisonous plants (most mushrooms for example). The entire evolution of bitter taste is mostly to prevent us from eating all of the natural things that are going to kill us. BUT most of the things we buy in a grocery store have already prefiltered those types of foods out (no poisonous mushrooms) so it leads to a bias that these things are always good rather than that we’ve simply already done thousands of years of “research” (aka people dying from eating poisonous shit) to tell us which natural things are better avoided.
Arsenic is natural. It isn't a measure for anything and indeed is a very dangerous belief that policymakers need to repudiate. Artificial stuff is great. It's progress.
Food grown in rich soil vs. NPK-enriched dirt are substantially healthier with much better nutrient profiles, because of the amount of natural life in the soil, from worms to microbes to composting organic matter. There are numerous studies proving that natural is better.
All you have done is take studies directly comparing HFCS to sugar in a lab to substantiate your claim. This is incredibly flimsy evidence that I have repeatedly proved does not support the claim that processed foods are equally healthy to natural foods. Natural, less processed foods are generally better, with exceptions.
I think there are a couple of other factors: calorie density and tastiness. When you are relatively full, you stop wanting salad but still seem to have room for dessert, or chips, or a delicious restaurant dish. Tastier food offsets feelings of fullness. And of course if you eat very calorie dense food, you will feel fuller after more calories than eating, say, salad. “Ultra processed foods” tend to be both very tasty and calorie dense. But as pointed out here, there are many other foods available that fit that description.
Actually you will feel more full eating salad because of the fiber. That's one of the main reasons it's better for you.
Agreed, I phrased my comment unclearly. Basically there is a level at which you feel sated. That level is raised by particularly tasty food. You are willing to feel more full (you still desire food) when the food is particularly tasty, but if it is bland your fullness level will offset your desire to eat. All that has nothing to do with calorie density. But separately, you can feel the same level of fullness for two vastly different amounts of caloric intake, if in one case you eat calorie dense food and in another you eat food with lots of fiber (for example) which leads to lower calorie density.
Sure, but "bland" is very relative. I used to think high-sugar high-fat foods tasted good, because that's what I ate; my gut microbes demanded it, because the dominant strains ate what I ate to become dominant. That's what they like.
After a year of growing my own food and eating lots of salads and veggies, those rich processed foods started tasting bad, and the salads taste amazing. My microflora are now composed of strains that feast on fruits, vegetables, fish, and meats. That's what I crave, and that's what tastes good.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/where-cravings-are-bred
These insults against Polish cuisine will not stand. Have you never gorged yourself on pierogi?! Seriously though, when I visited Poland, I was surprised how much they ate. Business meetings had a huge breakfast spread, lunch was a full sit-down meal where the cafeteria servings were bigger than I ever eat for dinner (whole 14” pizzas, or entree with multiple saucy sides). I’m surprised the Poles aren’t heavier.
Sorry, but the constellation of Asian pierogi cousins (gyoza, goonmandu, potstickers, momos, etc.) put the Polish version to shame.
I dunno, potstickers are usually better, I’ll grant, but pierogi are still GOOD, good enough to gain a lot of weight if you want to! Also more diverse… went to a restaurant in Warsaw that specialized in them- meat, veg, cheese, fruit- pierogi for appetizer, entree, and dessert! 😋
Yeah, Polish food is actually pretty good! When Tyler Cowen interviewed Jacob Mikanowski, he actually asked a "why is Polish food so good?" question.
I came to Poland 2 days ago and have already had some "it's going to be hard to not eat too much" thoughts. It's a struggle every time I come here.
As far as pierogi, I think it depends on the actual quality of the dumpling (from any culture). I find the frozen pierogi in US grocery stores closer to 'inedible' than 'good', and think they're not great in most restaurants here. Get some made properly by a Babcia, and it's a very different story.
I went to Warsaw for a week in February and had it almost every day. The best ones were from a caterer at work, but I enjoyed Zapiecek (in Old Town) as well.
I would take frozen store pierogis over frozen store potstickers! (Neither is obviously the height of cuisine)
Man I do not agree with this as someone who's lived in Japan for 15 years but is from a city with a huge Polish community. Gyoza can obviously be incredible but good pierogi easily reaches the same heights.
On a dollar per calorie basis upf is amazingly cheap. Yes, there are other reasons why bmi is a function of upf, but if you aren't talking about the price as a cause, you aren't talking about 90 percent of it. Decades ago the discussion was people were switching from beef to poultry for health reasons. That story has legs and was true too, but the price of chicken relative to beef plummeted starting in the mid 70s. The price story was bigger...but boring. HFCS is bad? Sorry. Same deal. Companies switched to sugar as the price of previously cheaper HFCS went up. Food companies were happy to join the already existing anti-HFCS bandwagon. But, again, price was the biggest reason for the switch...just the boring one.
The primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that processing food—cooking—played a decisive role in human evolution. By improving access to calories, our ancestors changed their environment: they reduced the amount of energy required to digest food. That change externalized the energy-intensive operation that used to take place inside the human body, opening up a new evolutionary frontier.
Previously, having a smaller gut would have been a disadvantage, but once the technology for cooking spread, different body configurations could survive or even thrive in that environment. The eventual result was Homo Erectus, with smaller, more efficient digestive tracts and _much_ bigger brains (to say nothing of the wild social changes that ensued).
Wrangham's historical hypothesis is heterodox, to say the least,* but the process he describes is evolutionarily plausible, and suggests that the story of humanity's current caloric revolution is unfinished.
* The book is fascinating. "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human" is mainly speculative biological archeology, but it's also a polemic against the once-fashionable raw food diet. It's a bit like "the Take Bakery": Wrangham is aware that his hypothesis doesn't fit the standard interpretation of the archeological record, which is that control of fire seems to have emerged *after* the relevant evolutionary changes. But he makes a solid case that we should be less certain about the current consensus and makes a strong case for his theory.
It makes me wonder whether there was an early period after cooking emerged when hominids were obese, until they evolved to make more effective use of the spare calories.
When I grew up in Los Angekes during the 1980s, the people in my neighborhood were a lot thinner than Americans are now, and it's not because the people who lived there couldn't afford to be fat.
I don't believe that in the absence of processed food, people would overeat apples and carrot sticks.
Some foods really are just bad for you. I believe that high-calorie, low-nutrition processed foods should be taxed at a high rate. Like cigarettes, the actual cost of those items, both to individuals and to consumers, is not reflected in the price.
I was saying that high-calorie, low-nutrition processed foods should be taxed in the same way that we tax cigarettes.
Calories Out consists of:
A) Energy used in normal body processes
B) Calories used in physical activities
C) Calories used in digestion
D) Calories used in the metabolic processes of microorganisms living inside your body, mainly gut bacteria.
E) Calories used fighting infections.
F) Calories still present in waste when it leaves the body.
G) Calories expended to deal with non optimal temperatures.
Most people discussing CICO only count A and B, we have no idea how the others vary. I expect C, D and F vary depending on what food types we eat and how they are prepared not just their calorie content while D,E and G have changed a lot in the last 50 years. I expect UPFs if they are a real category change C) significantly.
D also includes sleep and stress, which could also work in contradictory ways. Being under-rested and stressed probably means you don't digest food as well, but it could also interfere with processes that build muscle and burn fat. It also probably makes you hungrier in general, so you can more than compensate for the digestive slowdown in a food rich environment.
It's really complicated!
Probably D and F as well! (Though non-ultra-processed ones also have a lot of variability on those.)
Given its Juneteenth - how can we upend some of the inequalities found in food access today, especially quality fruit and vegetables. Free school lunches? Fight against super market deserts? Should we be relying on non profits or government support here.
The supermarket desert problem kind of baffles me. Everywhere else in the world has figured out how to do small grocery stores where there is limited selection of any particular item but lots of variety. Meanwhile 7/11 has 50 varieties of soda and 50 varieties of chips, but they have 2 frozen meal options and they're both bad. They could use their space better. The best US version of a small grocery store is Trader Joe's. I think we need a public/private partnership to get a Trader Joe's into all of America's food deserts.
I think when people (not you or anyone here necessarily) are upset about this they put a little too much of the blame the companies. They probably do deserve some blame, but we can't forget they are responding to demand. There are no Whole Foods type grocery stores in the worst neighborhoods in my city. But there aren't any in the less-educated non-white collar neighborhoods either. There's mostly no demand.
I agree about the demand point. But the reason I find the problem baffling is that even if there isn't demand for fresh cucumbers or whatever, there's gotta at least be unmet demand for things like frozen chicken breast that are hard to come by.
While it may be that these experiments were done with produce, rather than chicken breast, there have been attempts to help stores in poor neighborhoods to offer higher quality food. It simply isn't purchased.
I no longer really buy food desserts. There's probably a complicated relationship between what types/amount of food people grew up on, at what point they find their weight an unacceptable burden, how much stress they're under, etc, that drives food choices.
I can see your point, but I think the most likely, simple explanation is it just boils down to demand. I'm sure there's more than zero demand, but it needs to be a lot more than zero to sustain a business. Plus there are issues with security, staffing, etc that are also harder in the worst neighborhoods. So you have to hit a high threshold and that's easier for fast food and 7-11 to hit
Frozen food is expensive to stock - you want your freezer to be full of the highest profit per volume items!
So, ice cream?
That make sense when I think about but it still surprises me. I’m wondering how much food waste there is and how can this be reallocated to maybe meet some health priorities. I’m thinking matching up with the free universal school meals idea.
Isn’t Kroger and Albertsons merging? If so (or whoever it is) could they be forced to provide Kroger Express in areas defined as food deserts?
I feel like forcing particular businesses is the worst way to do things. Why should Albertsons be punished and not Whole Foods or whatever else. At least incentivize the whole industry somehow
Regulation of zoning and cheap rent and tax breaks would probably be helpful.
Education, awareness and cultural change. I've been around plenty of middle class families that practice and preach healthy eating all the time, and others that don't even give it a second thought despite having the same access to good food, and surprise surprise the latter are suffering from diabetes and obesity.
I'm aware there are other factors that effect individuals like genetic predispositions, and factors that impact communities like food deserts. But those food deserts are there in part because there's less cultural focus on healthy food, so you have to find a way to break that cycle.
Universal free school meals for sure
Yglesias never bothers to define "ultra-processed foods". Does UPF mean only what it literally says (many processing steps), highly engineered (for taste, mouth feel, shelf life...), or consisting of unnatural ingredients? He follows a single crude factor: food quantity, as if the composition were irrelevant (truly incredible--ask any farmer or athlete). Over the past century, the American diet has changed *dramatically* in composition. For example, seed oils--virtually absent for all of human history--now account for nearly 20% of US calories--and that is to say nothing of animal feed in our factory farms. Americans ingest insane amounts of free sugar, e.g. in juice and in children's breakfast cereals.
It's astounding that anyone today could still be attributing obesity to simple CICO. For a more curious and less Dunning-Kruger treatment, check out Slime Mold Time Mold's "A Chemical Hunger".
Experts have an incredibly hard time defining "ultra-processed foods." Also, seed oil's are tik tok hocus pocus. I bet I could drink 3 cups of excess cottonseed oil a day, and as long as I continued to exercise, I'd be fine. There's nothing magical about them being bad, other than just being another form of empty calorie.
"I bet I could drink 3 cups of excess cottonseed oil a day, and as long as I continued to exercise, I'd be fine."
Not to get too graphic, but while your weight might be fine, I suspect your gastrointestinal system would have some issues with that volume of straight oil. (Just guessing from some comments I saw/heard years ago from people doing something similar with drinking olive oil.)
Hahahaha. You’re probably right
As if "oil" were just one thing, a primitive element like earth, air, water, and fire. These various oils have very different fat profiles, and the seed oils are not like the fruit oils (olive, avocado, red palm), let alone those of animal products. Vastly more omega-6 than omega-3. No one would argue that other animals don't have a natural diet, and that the natural diet isn't optimal, but humans will eat anything as long as it has the right look and mouth feel.
Yes, most people *would* argue that omnivorous animals like rats and raccoons don’t have a “natural diet”. They are opportunistic and eat different foods in different parts of their ranges - and of course they have expanded their range with the expansion of humans.
A broad diet does not mean that omnivores can eat anything, let alone that their health outcomes will be the same independent of diet. I'll bet that even omnivores with the broadest of diets still have "natural" optimal diets. But it seems that pet raccoons eating dog food live far longer than raccoons in the wild. So go for it--you bet the health of you and your kids on humans being like raccoons. Me, I'm not giving UPFs to my kids.
Sir, this is an Arby's . . . .
Oils are fats, not carbs. What’s more, fat (as opposed to carbs or even protein) is the only macro that doesn’t spike our blood sugar, and in fact keeps our blood sugar from spiking higher if eaten with carbs—an important factor for type two diabetics.
Strange that I learned about seed oils without watching TikTok. You do your cottonseed-oil experiment, and while you're at it mix in some trans-fats--until recently, those were considered healthy.
"There's nothing magical about them being bad, other than just being another form of empty carb." Following the principle of charity, I'll assume that your calling oils a "carb" rather than a calorie was a typo rather than a symptom of general nutritional ignorance, though even that would be a howler. The two essential fats (omega-3 and omega-6) are not "just" calories, or they wouldn't be essential. Omega-6 is far more prevalent in seed oils, and unbalanced omega-3:6 intake is implicated in various ills. One RCT, published in the BMJ, has shown that excess omega-6 contributes to migraine.
The interested reader can easily find more info. The uninterested reader... Whether or not you care about natural selection, it doesn't care about you.
I was obviously kind of being a clown in my original seed oil comment. But from my understanding it's usually the food that they're in, rather than the actual seed oils themselves. Like cooking healthy lean proteins and vegetables in seed oils might be a bit unhealthier than olive or avocado oil, but ultimately the problem is bad snacks that have hydrated oils in them.
Anyway, my opinion has always been shaped by this article: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/scientists-debunk-seed-oil-health-risks/ as well as friends who are nutritionists who say reputable studies haven't been done on humans at a scale where we can say anything definitively.
The problems are manifold: seed oils as cooking oil, food (e.g. mayonnaise) ingredients, and in animal feed. Your factory-farmed animals (famously salmon) are not providing traditional nutrition. But yes, there are better and worse ways to eat seed oils: cold-pressed rapeseed oil is almost certainly not as bad as the highly processed stuff that goes into European mayonnaise. All these different sources add up, and the total now for Americans is something near 20% of total calories. That's a huge shift in diet to something historically unprecedented--do you want to bet the health of you and your kids on it? Decisions have to be made, whether or not large-scale replicated RCT-based studies are available.
"Debunk" is a red-flag term, like "The Truth about...."--big epistemological minus points. There is an underlying religious divide, with people opposed to eating animal products favoring plant-based alternatives. I subscribe to Harvard's health mailings, and notice a strong bias in that direction. Google "medical journal omega 6 3 ratio" or "medical journal seed oils". I found a gem that reflects my experience:
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/widely-consumed-vegetable-oil-leads-unhealthy-gut
Americans use soy oil, whereas Canadians and West Europeans use rapeseed oil. In today's massive quantities, this could explain the two population's different health outcomes. But factors are no doubt many.
The detrimental effects associated with a high 6:3 ratio are entirely mediated by low omega 3 levels. That is, if you isolate the cases where people have a high ratio AND high omega 3 levels (so they have very very high omega 6 levels and you’d expect to see the worst effects if omega 6 fats were really so terrible) actually do not show the negative impacts. It’s only cases where absolute omega 3 levels are low. The takeaway is not that omega 6 or omega 6:3 levels are important but that having sufficient omega 3s is very very important.
That sounds plausible, but a simple web search on "omega 6 3 ratio", as well as searches prefixing that phrase with "health/nutrition/medical journal", produce overwhelming results stating the ratio is important. Could you provide some guidance on where one might find papers supporting your statements?
This is a good quick overview
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/omega-6-omega-3-ratio
The video started off promisingly, but the speakers fell on their faces. First, they failed to even mention, let alone refute, the hypothesized mechanism for the omega-6:3 ratio importance. Conversion of both omega-3 and omega-6 relies on the same two enzymes, delta-5 (D5D) and delta-6 desaturases (D6D), so that consuming an excess of one oil might crowd out the metabolism of the other.
Blind to the irony, the guy said that people tend to see things in black and white--love omega-3, hate omega-6--and did the same thing himself: love total omega-3, hate the omega-6:3 ratio. It's possible to pursue both, and it's not even hard. We're not talking about eliminating dietary omega-6 (an essential fat), which we get in a natural diet. The issue is the massive, recent introduction of seed oils into the Western diet, particularly in America, particularly in UPFs and as cooking oils.
So I agree with the speakers: if the majority of unsophisticated people are inevitably going to fix their omega-6:3 imbalance by eliminating omega-6 entirely, even eggs and nuts, then better just tell them to eat more omega-3 as fatty fish. But we can easily do better than that.
This is a good quick overview.
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/omega-6-omega-3-ratio
Fat. Carbs. Air conditioning. Seed oils. Automobiles. ULTRA processed foods. We come up with new theories on weight gain with admirable regularity and creativity.
No, couldn't possibly be that we eat too much.
You ought to give that theory a catchy name, like "calories in, calories out". Maybe CICO for short. Write it up as an article and publish it in the Dunning-Kruger Journal of Health.
yes but the eating too much is largely driven by WHAT we are eating.
The classification is unscientific. At what point, with which additives does it become ‘ultra’? It reminds me of Justice Stewart being unable to define pornography but saying “I know it when I see it.” The analogy to pornography seems apt in that it seems mixed up in puritanical standards about judging what is good for people. If pornographers make it difficult for people to control their sexual appetites and adhere to bourgeois standards of sexual appetites, leading to disease, dissolution and ruin, food manufacturers make it difficult for the lower classes to control their diets in the way that we know is good
Yeah this was the single worst Yglesias take I think I've ever read, which is quite a bar.
Thank you for tuning in!
His worst take by far was his recent, rather rude one about Boston sports teams. By contrast this take of his highlighting a particularly insightful and interesting question from a subscriber was without a doubt one of his best.
Maybe y’all could weigh in on a dispute between my wife and I. We’re both tall, I’m 6’2+, she’s 5’10. We’ve both struggled with our weight but neither of us are currently obese. Our 10 year old son is in the 50th percentile of height for his age and quite skinny, he’s 4’7 and weighs 64 pounds.
Obviously, we want him to grow to his full potential height, height gives men more sexual opportunities and higher incomes. But we don’t want him to be fat for similar reasons.
My wife is pushing him to eat more. I object to this. I think the risk of any human being with ready access to delicious calories becoming stunted as quite small. I think his modest interest in food is a huge, unexpected win and I want to roll with it. Any thoughts?
Do not make your kid eat more! Do make sure he consumes some protein. As he enters puberty he will naturally eat more. Make sure he's physically active, as well. Given access to appropriate food, rest, and activity, your kid will naturally be tall, given his genetics. Even if you leave his appetite alone, he may naturally get a little chunky before he hits a pubertal growth spurt.
He may also be a late bloomer. The tallest people in my family have been. Average or below average through middle school then shot up.
I let my kids eat as much as they want (at meal times, of whatever we're having), but I always tell them that if they're not hungry, they shouldn't eat. I think telling kids to eat more than they want is a terrible idea.
generally agreed. But at times I have to insist they eat more protein and veggies. They swear they are full but that seems to be very food specific. If I offer something different they are suddenly hungry again
There's also the kid trick of claiming that they're not hungry when there's food they don't like, in hopes of getting food they do like at a different time.
Yeah, absolutely. If they aren't hungry for what's for dinner, they generally aren't allowed snacks or anything later that night--but I'll offer them what we had for dinner!
So much this. Teaches one to override satiety signals and get in the habit of eating more than is needed.
I'm completely with you. It's hard to imagine he won't eat more on his own if he's hungry. Why push him?
“ My wife is pushing him to eat more.”
That’s very dangerous as you don’t want to pressure someone to eat when they aren’t hungry. It can lead to a lifetime weight problem and any benefit to being tall in terms of mates and career will be reversed by being overweight.
I'm not going to give an actual opinion but thought I'd offer some points to consider:
- Off the top of my head, 5'10" for women is ~99th percentile. I'm 6'3" and I think that's ~98th percentile, so 6'2" would be just under that. 50th percentile is obviously a bit lower, although that could change a lot through puberty
- Do you know his "weight-for-height" percentile? If not then I would find out. His BMI is definitely underweight, but I think BMI is supposed to be for adults only and is flawed anyway
- I'm sure you both want him to have a healthy relationship with food, so you probably don't want to encourage anything too drastic. If you decided you wanted to encourage him to eat more, I would recommend starting small (maybe encourage him to eat an additional 100-calorie snack on top of what he is already eating, see how that goes, increase further if necessary)
- I presume you either have discussed or are planning to discuss with his pediatrician at some point
We're tall too, and have 4 kids (inc a 10yr old boy who's 5' & skinny). We never push our kids to eat more but they're welcome to consume as much simple food (nuts, fruit, milk, bread, cheese, etc) as they keep down. We never give them sweetened drinks, especially soda (not really out of principle, just turned out that way), and limit them to a snack or two or day. My own experience is that kids get hungry eventually during growth spurts and you just have to make sure they get plenty of good stuff to eat then, but for the rest, the more fuss you make about food the more trouble it will be.
I don't think you should be trying to get your son laid.
>> height gives men more sexual opportunities
I really don't think any parent should look at their young son and think, "how can I maximize his future sexual opportunities?"
If you want to be really lame, you could say something like, "I want him to be fit and healthy." Next tier, "I want him to be able to get a girlfriend." Then there's "I want him neck deep in strange."
Over the past few years I lost 55 pounds and decreased my body-fat percentage by about a third. Still have more work to do to get to where I want to be but am happy with the progress and lifestyle changes I made.
Matt's point that humans are conditioned to over-eat is an important one. This is why it is so crucial to establish systems that make it easier to diet and to create an environment where you are more likely to succeed in your dieting. Count calories (or ideally, plan your calorie consumption ahead of time) and protein using a good app, make time for the gym 3-5 times per week, meal prep so that you have no excuse to go out for lunch or dinner, don't buy unhealthy snacks to keep in your cupboard, and try to get most calories from high-quality sources. It's hard work to diet and to lose weight, but if you're unhappy with your weight and body, then prioritize it, and make it as easy as possible.
Thanks for the bonus post, Matt!
I think many people underrate the extent to which you have to do the above FOREVER. Like, whatever you do to lose weight (which I have done in the past), you gotta keep it up forever, which is daunting. Meal prep, the gym 3-5 times a week, those things are a little bit of an easier mental lift when you think you're only doing them to lose whatever amount of weight you think you need to lose, but once you lose the weight, if you ease back on that routine, the weight just starts going back on and you realize that this is just your life now if you want to be that way.
Agree. I’ve lost, and then regained, 40+ lbs at least 4 or 5 times in my life. (So can I claim I’ve lost 200 lbs?!?!) Every time I reach a point where I’m pretty happy with my weight and I “just want to be a normal person” who doesn’t have to pull out a food scale at every meal or research on a restaurant website before I go out. Then I go freakin nuts. The (sometimes literal) bean-counting does get tiresome. But so does waking up one day and getting over your fear of the scale and realizing it’s all back. I’m in the middle of another effort to bring it back down, and I’m already strategizing about what a proper maintenance phase (aka “the rest of my life”) will need to look like. Daily weigh ins at the very least, I’m hoping I can avoid meticulous calorie counting unless my weight creeps up a couple pounds. But I’ll need a very firm ceiling where counting kicks back in, for sure.
I think part of the reason it feels tedious is that it’s embarrassing. It feels like “normal” people don’t have to do this. (Then again, it’s “normal” to be obese in the US.) Something like working out or taking up running, or even going vegetarian or vegan, those are things that can become a positive part of your identity, not embarrassing but something you could be proud of. Someone who has to weigh and measure all their food is considered- I dunno, no one is like “wow that’s so cool.” Even if it’s what Milan’s aforementioned “discipline” looks like in practice. I go out to eat and people subtly (or explicitly) judge me about ordering a salad or passing on drinks or appetizers- like, “what, you think you’re better than us?” Whereas if I order the vegetarian option and they happen to notice/ask “are you vegetarian?” they think it’s cool/interesting that I am.
The amount of judgment you can get for ordering healthy food when other people want to eat junk is so frustrating.
I have literally worn out multiple kitchen scales. Nothing to be ashamed of. People are just jealous.
My trusty Cuisinart has lasted me almost 20 years now!
Hope you can find a place that's satisfactory for you. Have you considered any of the GLP-1 medications yet?
I’ve considered them. I’ve always had success with calorie counting/food tracking, and I can do it without feeling ravenous, it’s just annoying. So if I have to do something annoying every day for the rest of my life to reach/stay at a healthy weight, for now I think I prefer the one that is free/non-medicinal/doesn’t involve injections. (bad IVF flashbacks, ha…)
I too prefer non-medical interventions if practical. Again, rooting for you get to a place you're happy and content with.
Yes and no. Once you're done dieting to lose weight, you can increase your calories somewhat to maintain. And some people won't have to count calories forever, only long enough to understand what X calories looks like. And if you gain 10 lbs over the holidays, for example, it's not the end of the world.
But yes, some these changes are lifestyle changes, not just short-term changes. And that's a good thing.
I counted calories pretty religiously for about 10 years, but now I've developed a decent intuition about it.
I think the calorie counting is much more important than the exercise. It is incredibly easy to consume a surplus of calories and even more so after a good workout. There is literally no way to keep track of it without keeping track of it.
Yes, weight loss is definitely 80-90% diet
I think it's funny how gamification works as a diet strategy. Diet apps like Noom are also "ultra-processed" so that you can fight fire with fire.
But people were thin in 1979 and all that was far less common. This despite the fact that you could eat as many twinkies and bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Oreos as you wanted.
You couldn’t - you were poorer and the foods were more expensive.
The food landscape was really different then though. Servings were *much * smaller. People weren’t eating all the time. I was growing up then, as a latchkey kid whose mother hated cooking; we ate plenty of processed junk but in much smaller quantities. I eat very well now and I’ve never had a weight problem - I’ve been lucky that’s way - but I am very short!
Not meaningfully. Someone could have bought a Chevy instead of an Oldsmobile and had extra food if they wanted.
But every car was more expensive, so there was more trading off at the margin for more people.