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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the issue the huge numbers of people who are obese, not their gender.

Sure, but for understanding any issue, looking at demographics is helpful.

Once we see that in some countries one gender is more likely to be obese we can look for reasons. If we're lucky there's something that causes women to become obese that we can eliminate.

...and that thing is almost certainly "Diet food"

It's not an issue either, it's a business opportunity.

Well if you are cynical I guess. The food scientists are far too good at their job. I have a dream that they will agree in the spirit of humanity to detune the taste of food to get the population's weight down.

It is quite the opposite. They compensate lack of flavor with pumping up the calories. They increase salt/sugar and fat until the bland food tastes like something.

If you want to see food scientists at work - look at modernist cuisine - where the goal is to pump the flavor to the max while keeping the calories in check.

The food scientists work within a budget to achieve maximum consumption. The local optimum is to pump up the calories and salt levels. Modernist cuisine is far too expensive and complex to be an option for industrial production.

Seriously if the food scientists made cheap industrial food with lower levels of sugar, fat and salt it would stop people eating so much and as a population we would be much thinner and healthier. The trouble is each food company is competing against each other leading to them creating an outcome which is sub-optimal for us all.

Is it really the evil corporations behind all this? If so, how does a country like Japan get away with a 3~5% obesity rate when junk food is so prevalent in modern Japanese society? Taking responsibility works.

It is not the food being junk, but how tightly tuned it is to hitting the reward centres in the brain. My experience of Japanese junk food is limited, but it does not appear to have the level of calories packed into it that western junk food does.

That isn't the case for Japan. Overweight people are required by the government to attend dieting classes and take personal responsibility. The policy is successful. There's little concrete evidence that cracking down on "tuning food to reward centers" will curb obesity.

you may find this book very interesting [1].

1. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/uiuc-food-networks/media/Michael...

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