this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record at this point.
Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning.
That I believe we can all agree on.
There is a bigger question than that though. Too many people assume that by default that it is the obese person's I don't know moral failings that lead to their obesity and that a simple rectification of their moral weakness would reverse the obesity.
And that is what I take umbrage with. It's not a moral failing to become obese in a society where all of the food that is available to you has two or three times as many calories as the version your ancestors ate did while simultaneously providing less nutrition per serving size then the food that your ancestors ate did.
There is more to food than calories.
There is more that your body needs out of food than raw calories.
Your body needs nutrition and it will tell you to continue eating until it has met your nutritional needs.
If you shore up the nutritional deficit in the average Western diet then a large percentage of obesity would be dealt with. The way to do that is different from person to person because the nutritional needs of each person is slightly different.
For instance, if you are deficient in magnesium your body may tell you to eat potatoes because potatoes have plenty of magnesium in them.
But if you are eating potatoes that have been turned into potato chips and french fries to try to get the magnesium content out of them you're going to eat way too many fucking potatoes that are also deep-fried in oil and doused with salt.
Multiply this by the number of nutrients that your body needs and the number of foods that have the nutrients in them and the number of ways those foods can be processed to turn healthy foods into unhealthy foods.
If you do that then you may start to understand that the obesity epidemic is not just about fat people stuffing their greedy gullets.
Our ancestors ate, in flush times, 3,000 to 5,000 calories a day while working hard and met their nutritional needs and now we have obese people who do not work as hard as our ancestors did trying to make it on 2500 or 3500 calories who are not getting the non-caloric nutrients they need to satisfy their nutritional needs.
And the nutritional drop off per calorie of the food available in the 1940s versus the food available today is not in a straight line with the decrease in caloric intake.
You may get 30% to 80% of the non caloric nutrition out of the calorie that your ancestors did, so even though you were eating fewer calories than them you are getting vastly fewer non caloric nutrients then they did, things like potassium, and magnesium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, molybdenum, selenium, all of the various trace elements that all life on this planet subsists on.
To add to that, there's no good way to determine what nutrition your body currently has or that it might need other than spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars at the hospital to get a full blood draw and panel done.
If you want to solve the obesity crisis you must first solve the issue of what nutrition a body needs and how to provide that to not just one person but to every person all 8 billion of us on the entire planet.
I apologize for going into a rant about this but I've spent a good while learning how to lose weight and I've lost over a hundred pounds.
I've dealt with being obese my entire life.
I was given poor instruction as a child.
I was told to continue eating when even when I was already stuffed because my mother grew up in a poor household and she didn't understand that when a child says they are full that you do not need to feed them anymore and you do not need to manipulate them into thinking that they are bad people for not eating until they physically cannot eat anymore for every single meal.
I've been dealing with the compulsion, the almost OCD unwilling desire mandate that I have to eat all of the food in front of me every single time I sit down to eat for my entire life.
And while I have been working and struggling and striving to break that compulsion I've also been trying to learn what it is about food that leaves me so unsatisfied when I eat.
And so I get a little upset when I hear people say any variation of, "put down the fork fatty" even when the concept is couched in an inoffensive phrasing, because every single person that says this has no idea what the actual struggle of being obese is.
It's not an issue of one specific chemical in the food that makes people obese.
It's an issue of the entire available Western diet
combined with the entire Western ideology about food
combined with the post world war II necessity of feeding as many people as possible using the new fertilizers that change the structure of the plants that they are sprinkled on, causing them to grow far faster than they ever did in nature
Combined with the selective breeding of plants to get the largest size and most fat protein and carbohydrates that you possibly can out of every single grain and every single animal that is grown
combined with food companies hiring scientists running an entire industry to make food as unsatisfying as possible so that you never get tired of eating it
combined with the nutrition of food decreasing even as the calories in food increase
combined with every single minor drop of comprehension about food itself and the foods effects on the human body being amplified all out of proportion by the news empire looking for a click-worthy headline
Combined with the fact that tasty food releases dopamine even as being obese causes you to be depressed and therefore want to eat more food to get more dopamine to deal with the depression that eating the more food caused
And once again I apologize for going on a rant about this but I wish I could just shake every single person on the planet until they understood that there is far more going on than just the inability of putting the fork down that causes obese people to be obese.
I just wanna give you a huge hug of support. I'm in the 100lb club too (and still well overweight personally) and so much of what you said is very familiar. Thank you for saying what I wanted to say better than I could say it.
No, we can't. Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning or excreting.
That's why (for example) the difference between fiber and simple carbs matters.
More to the point, there's also evidence that one reason skinny people are skinny might be that they have less efficient gut microbiota: they're not burning more calories, they're excreting more.
I think we still can agree. It just would require that me saying the word "eating" be changed to the word absorbing, and I'm fine with that adaptation.
I still strongly believe that if obese people were given healthy nutritious diets that were available and convenient and financially affordable, obesity would decrease.
I do not think that that single thing by itself would completely solve the obesity crisis in the western world, but I think that it would do a lot to remediate it.
The problem is not just money, although money is a large portion of the problem, it is also the fact that the world that we live in is currently not equipped to provide healthy and nutritious food to every person on the planet.
Even in today's world we have people who go hungry. People who cannot afford a pack of ramen noodles or do not have access to ramen because they live in a food desert or they simply do not have the money needed to purchase a 25 cent pack of calories.
However, for the people who are obese and who do not wish to be obese anymore I believe their primary objective should be to find low calorie, high nutrient density foods and eat those first before eating anything else.
Good examples are bananas, berries, avocado, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and potatoes.
If you are a breakfast eater I believe that you should eat a banana and then wait 15 to 30 minutes before eating the rest of your breakfast.
For lunch I think you should eat brussel sprouts or broccoli or a baked potato with maybe a little butter or a little salt but a full serving of this vegetable and then wait 30 minutes before eating your burgers or sandwiches or whatever else you're eating for lunch.
(And ideally you should make the baked potato the day before and stick it in the fridge and then reheat it because that changes the starch structures to be a type of starch that feeds your gut microbiome more than a normal baked potato would)
And then you should repeat this process for dinner.
I'm telling obese people to eat more food in order to lose weight.
And I believe that will work for multiple reasons.
One, the 30-minute gap gives your hormones, ghrelin and insulin, time to react to the food that you have eaten and to begin processing it and to send signals to your brain that you have eaten and that everything is okay.
Two, eating non-processed or lightly processed foods that you prepared yourself is going to be more nutritionally dense on a per calorie basis than any food that is already prepared and prepackaged and ready for you to eat.
Three, giving your body the opportunity to absorb nutrition when it is hungry before flooding it with calories will give your body time to absorb the nutrients that it needs before it has to start spending energy processing the huge amount of calories that you have eaten.
Further, picking a vegetable or a low sugar fruit or berry as your kickstarter for every meal will also help ensure that you get more fiber in your diet, and will help your body eliminate more unprocessed calories that you have consumed.
Finally, the last portion of this diet plan is to listen to your body and to stop eating when you feel satisfied.
That is the tricky part for many people who like me have a compulsion to eat all of the food in front of them and will feel bad for leaving two bites of a hamburger behind.
But it is much easier to retrain yourself to allow yourself to leave food on the plate when you are actually satisfied and full then it is for you to engage in a year-long slog of denial and feeling hungry or eating strange diets that trick your body into not feeling hungry under any circumstance.
You're mixing obvious truths(nutrition is important) with materially irrelevant anecdotes and easily disprovable absolutes(if you want to solve the obesity crisis, you must...).
Nope. Some countries have obesity "crises", and others do not.
We know the basics of nutrition and the basics that people can avoid, and while metabolisms and hormones and gut health depend on a nutritional spectrum and so many other factors, that is a different matter entirely than an obesity "epidemic".
Those people are eating too much.
To solve obesity, eat less.
You can figure out the holistic solution to obesity(TLDR: apparently it's "fructose") on your own time, but if anybody wants to solve obesity, they have the solution.
I am not talking about any holistic nutritional grail and neither is this article, I'm speaking to the useless nature of a study that suggests a significant result is "Ackshually, this one sugar is ackshually the real reason you are fat", which is a counterproductive and insignificant claim that money and time was wasted on.
You say to solve obesity eat less. What you're actually saying is that people should starve.
And not starve on a calorie basis, you're fine with meeting the calories they need to function, you're telling them to starve nutritionally.
You're telling them to ignore their bodies number one desire, which is to live, in order to meet an aesthetic.
I'm telling you that that will not work.
That will not work because the food that is available in the caloric amounts available is nutritionally insufficient to survive on for many people.
And you ignore the mind body connection, assuming that it's simply a matter of thought to tell your body that no you have eaten enough food and you're not going to eat anymore that's all you fucking get when your body is telling your mind that it is starving and it needs more food and it's not going to function until you provide it for me
The human diet is not a solved equation.
If all food were the same then how can you starve to death with a full belly of rabbit meat?
If all food were the same, how can you die of malnutrition eating only fish?
I'm telling you the root cause of modern-day obesity is that obese people have either a natural predisposition or a genetic requirement for a different nutrient profile than the foods that are commonly available in the western diet provides.
The foods of the last 80 years are vastly different than the foods of the hundred thousand years available prior to that.
The crops that we grow have been optimized to grow quickly and to provide a lot of calories. Our grandparents would get one crop of corn per year. Modern Farmers May grow two, three or four crops of corn in the same field per year.
It takes time for plants to absorb nutrients from soil.
Even when you supplement with fertilizers, not every fertilizer is optimized to perfectly recreate ideal soil substrates.
Fertilizers typically prioritize nitrogen as nitrogen causes plants to grow quickly.
So the fast food that is grown in the soil does not have the same nutrient profile as the slow food grown in the soil.
We then feed our cows and chickens the fast farmer food and then we eat those cows and chickens and the fast farmer food but we further break those down and reconstitute them into things that do not spoil easily.
Canned foods, for instance, we're developed so that the beans that you harvested in October could be eaten in February. Now, canned foods are meant to be one of the primary Staples of the western diet. Everything about whatever was put into those cans has been sterilized and optimized for shelf longevity.
I'll stop that rant to start a different one and this one will be quicker. The best meal I've ever had in my life was at a farm to table restaurant.
I was out visiting this place with my girlfriend at the time and she saw this little restaurant by the side of the road and we decided to stop in.
It was fairly pricey but reading their menu they mentioned that all of the food that they were serving there that day that could be grown locally was harvested this morning and prepared for you today.
I spent $100 for the two of us to eat. I had meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans and it was $40.
I thought that for $40 I would get a gargantuan portion and instead it was actually a very small portion compared to what I would normally eat. The serving of meatloaf was about the size of a deck of cards. The mashed potatoes were about the size of my fist, and I probably got maybe 25 green beans.
I was somewhat upset because my expectations based off of my normally available foods would say that a dinner of meatloaf would cost less than $20 and would fill the plate but there was a lot of plate available and visible on this $40 serving.
But, I said fuck it we ball worst case I can go and get some other fast food elsewhere if I still feel hungry afterwards.
And let me tell you, I honestly cannot remember the last time I was so satisfied with a meal. The taste was not twice the price worth but when I finished eating I kind of felt tingly.
My stomach was sending waves of pleasure through my body, it was a sensation that I have never felt before.
My stomach was telling my entire body that I was full, and I was satisfied, and that I had eaten exactly the right amount of food and that feeling continued for the remainder of the day.
We had this meal at like 1:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday and I did not want to eat again for the rest of the day.
The freshness of the food. The nutritional quality of that meal was so far above the available nutritional quality of any other food that I can personally locate that I got physically high off of eating fucking meatloaf.
I am not rich.
I cannot afford to eat $40 meals for every meal. I do not have access to a farm to provide me with fresh vegetables to eat every single day.
But that one experience highlighted to me how important nutrition is when fighting obesity.
That is why I feel confident in saying that obese people are not obese because they just love eating so much and they are fat little piggies that can't control themselves.
I feel confident in saying that the grand majority of obese people who eat the Western diet are obese because the food that they have available does not have the nutritional profile that their body is craving, and because of that, their bodies compel them to continue eating until they meet their nutritional baselines.
If that is the case the best solution for obesity is to first nourish the body and then allow them to eat whatever they want on top of that.
And you can say it's all calories in calories out that you want but not every calorie is the same because once again, if they were, how can you starve to death with a belly full of rabbit meat?
No, you are saying people should starve, and pretending I am saying it.
And then you say people should ignore their bodies and pretend that I am saying it.
You then try to talk about ascetics, I guess? Which no, you eat a healthy amount of healthy food, and not more. Have a treat, it's fine.
Don't eat much more than you need to and you will not be obese.
You've already stated that ingesting more calories then you burn causes obesity. This is correct.
Nobody is arguing that all food is the same either, this is another thing only you have brought up.
You're making all these facetious arguments you're shooting down yourself, so be sure to pat yourself on the back for surmounting the obstacles you constructed.
And no, the root cause of modern-day obesity is not body type and metabolism. Everyone has minutely different nutritional requirements, not just obese people, their nutritional requirements are not the root cause of their obesity, that claim is absurd on its face.
People are obese at different relative weights, and it's natural to have different body types, and it's equally natural to carry too much extra weight because you eat too much.
You know how to make fat ducks and geese? Feed them more calories than they need. Know why some dogs and cats are way fatter than the others? They get way more food than the skinny dogs and cats. Know why humans get fat? They eat more food than they burn.
As you've already stated.
It's good that you're learning about nutrition, but try expressing your nutritional tidbits to someone who asked you about them.
None of your anecdotes are related to the direct cause of obesity, which is eating too much.
As you've agreed to.
Let me ask you this, if it's so easy for you to solve it and your solution is the absolute correct solution, then why is it still a problem?
Remember, you're saying obese people are obese because they eat too much.
I'm saying obese people eat too much because they are nutritionally deficient.
I think that you think that I'm saying that obese people are not obese because they eat too much. I agree with you that obese people are eating too much.
However, my argument is the "why are they eating too much" argument. You have not touched on nor addressed any portion of my argument.
You are stuck in the "calories in calories out is the entire equation and everything else is irrelevant" portion of the argument, which is the ABCs of human nutrition.
I'm telling you that LMNOP is also part of the human nutrition alphabet and that it is an important portion of the conversation that is often overlooked.
Can you debate me on the topics I am mentioning, or are you still stuck in the ABCs?
The solution to obesity is simple, but not easy.
My solution to obesity is correct(as you've stated, we can all agree on it); obesity is still a problem largely because of an overabundance of available food coupled with a lack of personal discipline, seasoned with capitalist production and marketing.
I believe this will mark the end of this particular conversation, not because I won, and not because you won, but because we cannot debate on the same level.
If you ever do learn about what I'm calling the LMNOPs of the human nutrition alphabet then definitely feel free to express your new thoughts to me anytime you want to.
Since the article in question is discussing obesity and I named the root cause of obesity and then you immediately agreed that nobody can argue with that root cause(consuming more calories then you burn), we'll say I "won" for the sake of accuracy.
Following your concession , you propped up unrelated tangential anecdotes about nutrition that you quicotically argued against.
It is not a matter of debate; you are bringing up and answering your own straw man arguments that I have not engaged with because they are your own questions and answers you have made up in your meandering monologue unrelated to the undisputed fact that obesity is caused by eating too much food.
The problem with poverty is easily solved: people just need to earn more. Easy!
The problem of depression is easily solved: people just need to be happier. Easy!
The problem of obesity is easily solved: people just need to eat less. Easy!
I can solve war too - people just need to fight less! And death: people just need to age less!
Man, someone get me a McArthur genius grant already!
Your third point is largely correct(cheers), but it's not as easy to solve poverty, depression, or war as you think it is.
If you want to lose weight, all you have to do is stop putting food in your mouth, or put less food in your mouth each day. Simple, but not easy for many people.
Clinical depression, on the other hand, is caused by various complex chemical imbalances influenced by various environmental and social factors, so you can't simply disentangle yourself from those chemicals and circumstances the same way that you can choose to stop putting food in your mouth.
Wait, you're saying that there are nuances and subtleties that my simple solutions don't take into consideration?!?
/s (I didn't think this was necessary, but given your response...)
Yep, exactly!
Do you seriously think that eating - arguably one of the most fundamental and instinctual things that living things do - is not subject to complex chemical, environmental, and social factors? Really?
The solution "don't eat so much" really is as naive as telling a clinically depressed person "just be happier" or telling a poor person "just go earn more" or telling Israelis and Palestinians "just don't fight do much".
Yes, the solutions really are that simple, at one level, but pretending like the knowledge of this solution gets us anywhere in terms of actually addressing the problem is just silly.
Misattributing your own false arguments to others doesn't prove you any less wrong.
I'm not talking about eating, I'm talking about the solution to obesity.
They are not the same.
The difference between eating less food is much simpler and has fewer steps(one, if you are having difficulty counting) than the solutions to a war or depression.
The solutions for war and depression are not as simple as that of obesity.
Obesity? Eat less.
War? Stop selling Israel weapons from the US. But where does Palestine get their weapons? Issue a UN resolution. But nobody is bound to follow that resolution. Declare two states. But does each country agree to that? What about boundaries? And on and on. Every proposed solution comes with multiple various considerations that you haven't taken into account.
Obesity? Eat less.
The facetious solutions you're proposing to stopping a war or ending clinical depression are not as simple as you imagine, are actually impractical and will not work, while eating less is a practical and simple solution to obesity.
And continuing to push your facile argument doesn't make you any more right.
Fight less.
Of course not! That's what makes them facetious! But "fight less" is as useful a solution to war as "eat less" is a solution to obesity. Which is to say it's trivially right, but not actually a solution at all.
Right. It's the same with obesity. Do you honestly think that obese people don't understand the link between eating and weight gain? Do you think that they don't spend their entire lives with people admonishing them for their weight?
If you're aware that you're making facetious arguments, then stop being facetious and implying false equivalents and try a practical solution.
Eating less will solve obesity.
You're wrong in equating war with someone carrying extra weight, they are not the same situation at all.
War is often a very complex problem without a simple solution.
Eating less is a practical and simple solution to obesity that unarguably works.
What obese people understand and whether they get admonished is immaterial to solving their obesity.
Eating less is a practical and simple solution to obesity.
Not fighting would solve war. Wouldn't it?
Right. Exactly! And obesity is a complex problem without a simple solution. Eating less is a trivially correct solution to obesity just as not fighting is a trivially correct solution to war. Please see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/
My point is that if it were actually so easy, it wouldn't actually be a problem, would it?
I'm not implying anything, I'm offering analogies. And the sarcasm is a rhetorical device that seems to have flown right over your head. I'm sorry about that. I didn't think you would actually believe I thought that the solution to war and poverty and depression was easy. They're not. I'm trying to get you to see (argument by analogy, check the link again) that the solution to obesity is not either.
If your response is just "yes it is," if you think that the trivial solution hasn't been tried over and over again by millions of people who have desperately wanted to lose weight and keep it off, but have failed, you're being willfully ignorant.
Hunger is a primal urge. It's governed by a complex series of hormonal and neurological feedback loops. It's influenced by sociological and psychological factors as well as the non-caloric nutritive content of available and tolerated foods. Those factors are shaped by culture and economics and history etc etc
When I say all this and you say "eating less is the solution", it sounds just as silly and naive as when you talk about war being the result of historical factors, religious animosity, geopolitics etc, and I say the solution is not fighting. Which is to say, very silly and naive.
There's nothing silly about the complexity of war, what is silly is you equivocating a complex situation like war with being obese
If you stop eating or eat less, you will lose weight.
Inarguably, eating less solves obesity and is simple to do. It is not as easy to eat less as it is to eat more, but it is much easier to stop eating food than it is to stop a war.
It is within most people's personal power to control their appetite, it is not within most people's personal power to stop systems of war, poverty or depression.
You're promoting an absurd false equivalence.
Don't worry, everyone understood your attempt at sarcasm, but the simplest way to help you understand how ridiculous your ambiguous inaccuracies are was to respond to them at face value, which obviously worked, as you're now aware of how silly the arguments you were making were.
It's good you understand that a war is a complex situation now. Next, you just have to wrap your head around how simple eating less food is, and how the characteristics that complicate issues like depression or war or poverty do not similarly complicate a basic symptom of overeating like obesity.
War, poverty, depression require complex solutions. Obesity requires a simple solution.
This has nothing to do with your tangents about nutrition or false equivalences or false claims about eating less not resulting in losing weight, this is about solving obesity which only requires a simple solution that can be implemented at any time without any preparation.
Stop eating or eat less.
Of course you will. This does not mean it's a solution to obesity.
Except it's not. It's not sustainable. Even with medical intervention, the vast majority of weight is regained.
Except it's not. The long term success rate of dieting (again, in the context ofa medical study) is 15%
Except it's not. And the repeated weight loss and regain experienced by most dieters is arguably worse for health than just being overweight.
You can keep simplistically stating that it's easy, despite all the evidence, and you will continue to sound as idiotic as a rich person floating on their inheritance and saying that poverty would be solved if people just weren't so lazy.
No, poverty is another complex issue that does not have a single, simple solution, like obesity does.
You agree that if you stop eating or eat less, you will lose weight. Great. We'll have to disagree on the definition of a solution, because you do not find a method that solves a problem to be a solution.
I know Americans think it's difficult to stop eating, but this is a localized problem in wealthy countries with a lot of food and marketing.
Also, you keep pretending that it's easy, I keep saying that it is simple. Those aren't the same word, if you're confused.
Cutting off someone's leg will also cause them to lose weight. This is pretty simple. Is it a solution to obesity?
A large nuke dropped on Gaza would end the fighting there. Also simple. Is it a solution?
No, no, I hear you saying, these actions would lead to other problems, don't solve the underlying complexities etc etc.
I'm having trouble believing that you can write in complete sentences but are too thick to understand how "just eat less" suffers from the same problems. So you must be trolling me - congrats! I'm ashamed it took me so long to recognize you're just playing dumb.
I've cited a bunch of scientific papers showing why just eating less isn't a solution. It may lead to temporary weight loss, but doesn't solve the issue long term, and causes other harms. If you want to provide any evidence for your claims or to dispute mine, go for it. Otherwise, cheers! The solution to your ignorance is you just need to learn more. Simple!
Eating less food does not suffer the same considerations or consequences as cutting off a limb or dropping a nuclear weapon on a country undergoing a genocide.
These are further immaterial false equivalences.
If you temporarily eat less food but regularly eat too much food, you will gain weight. Similarly, if you temporarily eat too much food, but regularly eat less food, you will lose weight. This can be connected back to our earlier agreement that it is excess food you put in your body and do not burn that causes weight gain.
If you regularly eat enough, but not too much or too little, food for your body long-term, you will maintain a healthy weight long-term.
Now we have a simple solution to obesity and, at your prompting, a simple solution to long-term weight maintenance.