Hacker News Reader

Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

I do think there is something there, maybe time is just not ripe. The "eat, sleep and work out properly and naturally"-conservatives are currently winning and dominating the zeitgeist. Science must eventually win, and produce foods that are healthier than the natural ones. But there is no telling when that happens, and even after it has happened, it may take a long time to prove itself.

Edit: Personally I think the key to fast progress is better and better whitebox modelling of the body. More diagnostics and sensors to rapidly detect and respond to issues. When that is in place, we can do more fearless experimentation, secure in the knowledge that if something trends bad we can catch it quickly and abort / reverse.

View on HN

> Science must eventually win, and produce foods that are healthier than the natural ones.

I do not share your optimism, because you forgot about economy, investors and shareholders driving science forward, not viceversa. The primary goal for public companies is to increase revenue and market share, not creating healthier food than nature, if unhealthier food sells more.

Also, I do not share the hubris that science wins over nature. We have evolved to thrive on what exists in nature, it is not logical to assume we would thrive more with something we are not evolved for. Especially when profit, not health, is the primary driving force.

I guess I'll keep eating real meat and real vegetables.

I don't know why we need science to make healthier versions of food that naturally is healthy.

Unless it's science to scale up tradition food systems and abandon the unhealthy food system we have today.

Creating these foods is engineering, we shouldn't conflate it with science or medicine. Engineering can serve a lot of functions in society no doubt, but the price signal baked into the engineering process often makes it so that long-term human welfare is averaged out to matter very little.

Whew that was taxing to write in HNglish.

My man, look at your second paragraph, even the high tech mitigation strategy you came up with is what can be done in short enough term to be part of a product development process, it won't change anything from the situation now.

The problem is not acute toxicity that is measurable in the short term, we have that nailed down or else people would be dropping dead fulminated from new Oreo flavors, but rather very long-term effects, sensors to respond rapidly will do nothing when the problem is what your diet does to you over the course of years.

Well there must be something happening in the short term, that then leads to long term harm. For instance, in smokers it takes a long time to kill you, but in the short term you can see that the lungs become unhealthy. Or with Oreo likewise, but you can see that the scale is showing an unhealthy weight. These are obvious things, but there may be many more subtle signs to look for.

But we only notice that these are the signs to look for once people got hurt from the long term effects. There's suspicions in recent years that seed oils cause cognitive decline and adverse metabolic effects, I don't think it's the consensus yet but the studies are out there.

The culprit is being pinned down as the high concentrations of linoleic acid, but this is all in hindsight, after decades of having people consume these things, there's absolutely no way you'll be able to run a controlled experiment for something like this even with gizmos that measure everything that you, right now, think you should measure.

Heck how are you going to know which of the technological marvels that people are consuming all the time is the one to blame?

Yeah the idea is to catch earlier then "after a few decades of having people consume these things". I'm not saying it's easy of course. But there must be a causal chain, a mechanism by which these acids lead to harm. And if we can find an earlier link in the chain maybe we can find the issue after just a few months of consumption. Or maybe even a week. If we can shorten the timeframes this much then attribution becomes much much easier.

The body is remarkably resilient, and constantly bombarded by toxins, viruses, and other issues. Our immune system is constantly fighting pre-cancerous cells because of background radiation, mutation, or other factors, until it can't any more. Good luck telling if you product causes long term health effects just by analysing short term biology. Too much statistical noise.

Nature's food is the thing our bodies adapted to for millions of years. It is the gold standard of what is considered food, it is the grading rubric.

when I first started learning about, I was not aware of all the intricacies of food: all the minerals, and vitamins and flavanols, fiber and countless other things that make up "real food". I think people tend to simplify food into just a few small variables (like protein and vitamin C) and think that's all there is to it. And it's nowhere near that simple. No matter how much I dig, there's more and more things to understand about a given food. Asking industry to produce better food than nature is like saying, I want to score higher on this test than the grading rubric. It just doesn't make sense.

I think the future should be making normal natural healthy foods accessible to more people. Why don't we have apple trees, fruit trees and citrus trees in every park and next to every sidewalk? this shouldn't be hard thing to accomplish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com