Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

I cant help but think when reading another paper with a "think of the diabetic masses" spin on it, how much pain an suffering could be avoided if as much focus was put on improving peoples nutrition at market scales.

We know now that highly refined carb and sugar based food that makes up 95% of what is sold in the west is pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes, and the more we learn about the effects of the clever substitutes we come up with like sweeteners the more we realise that these are as bad if not worse at increasing insulin resistance. We've created our own diabetes epidemic through technology, using the cost function of yield and profit for food processing, and it feels like we are reaching for technology to also treat the myriad symptoms instead of challenge that cost function to include human health.

I'm sure this technology has broad utility beyond diabetes, but people keep including it in every medical paper, maybe it's not really the authors focus.

[edit]

Judging by votes I seem to have offended people, to be clear I don't blame people for poor diets, and I don't blame diabetics for becoming diabetic, I blame industry. Of course if it's food industry people that I've offended then fuck you :) if other reasons, do explain.

If you look at the food production industry as a whole in the US, the picture of why funding and effort is not put into fixing nutrition becomes very clear.

It's extremely profitable AND nearly risk-proof to run monocrop farms to produce varieties of corn, which can be grown as necessary to sell based on what has higher demand in the current season: sweetener, meal, whole ears, biofuel, cattle feed, etc. It's much less profitable to run a farm full of different types of crops that must be grown, harvested, watered and cared for in different ways - and have 1 or 2 markets at most.

If you were to create a venn diagram of the share holding firms in major farming operations compared to the shareholders in major food production companies, it would be very close to a circle. Thus, it's in the best interest (as far as turning short-term profits) of those shareholders to ensure high corn production and high corn use, filling our shelves with high-calorie, low-nutrition products.

There are many more tangents to go on that end in a similar "hooray, short-term profits" conclusion. To name a few:

Heavily-preserved food that can stay on shelves longer, and thus contains too much sodium.

Long commutes and work hours that benefit corporations, resulting in high demand for pre-packaged food that has lost many essential nutrients in its preparation method.

High rents and housing costs from real estate speculation leading to people having small, inadequate kitchens and ordering food more.

Yes, these are all fair points, in a nut shell you could blame market forces and say industry behaviour is inevitable, which is what I was alluding to as the cost function.

In other areas where this becomes a problem government intervene to change intensives, e.g the total cost of continuous alcohol consumption is not included in the sticker price, so some governments add a tax, same with tobacco... ideally such taxes would be directed to public spending on the medical costs, but that depends on the country.

The same could be done far more broadly with food, not just a mere sugar tax, but taxing foods that are known to be product placements as poor substitutes for a full meal, that are too nutritionally devoid and contain too many substitutes. Just like alcohol, an occasional ready meal or highly refined cake isn't going to kill you or give you chronic disease, in which case it can be expensive to dissuade you from making it a regular thing and disincentivise industry from focusing on producing that type of food..

> Just like alcohol,

Alcohol fucks with DNA. It is neurotoxic.

Let's not lie to ourselves, the safe amount of booze is 0 booze.

I'm not saying don't drink, just that we should be 100% honest with ourselves.

Yes, however it's the consistent consumption of high quantities of alcohol that cause chronic illness, and it's the same behaviour that is problematic in food, this is what diabetes is, sugar ends up being toxic (glucotoxicity). Even short term high sugar intake causes cell stress, it's not as toxic as alcohol, but long term consumption of either is problematic.

You should clarify, refined sugars.

There is also the ongoing debate of why the hell consuming white rice, which is instantly broken down into large amounts of glucose, doesn't have the same negative health impact. Lots of investigations around fructose vs glucose and biological pathways of how straight fructose is processed and so on and so forth, but feel free to visit any SE Asian country where rice is well over 50% of meals by volume and obesity levels are low.

I read a good series of investigative articles that posited it is contamination of our food supply from one or more unknown sources that explains why a diet consisting of highly processed food causes more chronic health conditions than a diet consisting of fresh foods even if the macro nutrient content is the same. (Wish I had bookmarked it...)

> feel free to visit any SE Asian country where rice is well over 50% of meals by volume and obesity levels are low.

Hello from a SE Asian country. Not much obesity here. Huge amount of diabetes though.

I've heard it's genetic - European and African ancestry puts on fat externally, while Asians tend to store fat internally (visceral fat) which is invisible but just as dangerous.

Corn syrup has rapidly been vanishing from foods based on consumer demand. A decade ago buying bread without corn syrup in it was a challenge, now days all but the cheapest bread in stores proudly had "no corn syrup!" printed on the label.

> leading to people having small, inadequate kitchens and ordering food more.

Friend of mine has been undergoing a kitchen remodel and cooking for a family of 4 using a plug in induction burner for the last 5 or 6 months. Historically kitchens were small and families were big. Outside of kitchens that only have a microwave, even a small 2 burner range will suffice, although it will strongly limit what dishes can be prepared in reasonable time.

> thus contains too much sodium

Sodium is an often blamed boogie man, but undeservedly so. Outside of people with chronic health conditions, it is really hard to intake so much sodium such that it has a negative impact on health.

The problems in the US food supply are likely a lot more subtle and nuanced than too much fat or salt. People have been eating salted fatty cuts of meat for thousands of years w/o the health problems we see now days.

You are completely wrong about corny syrup and sodium.

> Judging by votes

You are mostly off topic. :)

Likely no one will disagree with you that the standard American diet is a ultra processed chemical trash heap, just, that is not related to super cool wound healing tech.

Diabetes isn't the topic of the article, diabetic ulcers were used in the clinical trial, but otherwise the story is about using electricity to heal open wounds.

The paper targets diabetic ulcers... it's literally a band aid on diabetes.

This is the trend in medical papers currently, target diabetics, which there are so many of. It's really not much of a tangent.

> pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes

1. You should say Type 2 Diabetes when you're talking about it. Type 1 and Type 2 are vastly different things. Diet and exercise help with making Type 1 easier to manage, but they don't "fix" it in any way.

2. There exist people for whom reducing the effects of Type 2 diabetes is harder than just a simple diet change. Things to help Type 2 can help these people make their lives better.

What you're referring to is a political and economic problem, not a medical or technical problem.

This is true, but it is a problem enabled by technology at the industrial level. Science could at least help reframe what has come to be accepted as "food".

I agree with the thrust of your point and said something similar in the previous discussion.

But there's a lot we don't understand about diabetes. It's more complicated than just sugar and there's a lot of room to improve our understanding.

Sure, I think we're all agreed nowadays that drenching everything in corn syrup isn't going great.

The answer we don't have is: What's actually better, at the same scale?

All the current offerings are for people who want to eat tofu-and-beet-juice patties, or eat lentils everyday, or drink some ever-changing goop of "meal replacement shakes." No one's really cracked the code on finding foods that are both healthy and scalable.

Aren't ya'll subsidizing the crap out of corn? This seems kinda "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" to me.

Widespread use of semaglutide might cure metabolic syndrome.

Nutrition is not that simple, you cannot trick the body with a miracle cure chemical. If you cheat the body of nutrients there will be long term consequences.

Early time restricted feeding (eTRF - eating only from morning until 2PM) has shown promising results in very small studies, but it seems there is no widespread interest in doing more expensive studies.

There's far more money to be made running dialysis centers in every strip mall than selling more carrots and broccoli.

And don't you dare obstruct the fast path to dialysis because FREEDUM!!!

I'll be even more cynical and say that the "upper middle class on up" who's whims drive political policy actively DGAF because exercise and eating healthy are a lifestyle thing that separate them from the people below them.

Except there are plenty "upper middle class on up" who don't take care of themselves either...

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