Hacker News Reader

Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

And yet most people continue to see it as a character flaw rather than as a disease or the symptom of one.

They repeat "calories in, calories out", as if excessive hunger wasn't central to weight gain. We aren't rats in a lab being fed a limited amount of food, we all eat until we are satisfied.

So what are the factors that contribute to so many people these days being too hungry relative to the amount of calories they actually need? And what can we do collectively to mitigate the exposure of people to those risk factors? It's a tragedy.

View on HN

Olive Garden marinara sauce contains grape jelly. A strawberry milkshake from McDonald’s contains something like 75 grams of sugar. Kids are fed Mac and Cheese from a box…its like 3 ingredients to make fresh…A “healthy” salad is lathered in sugar laden sauce worth 10x the calories of the leafy greens it sits on. Ultimately I think the nation is suffering from poor food quality standards combined with corrupted messaging surrounding nutrition and health. Most Americans I meet have skewed perceptions of what a healthy diet looks like. “Eat less, move more” is a convenient mantra suspiciously funded by the likes of Coca Cola. Maybe some things are just straight up unhealthy for you regardless of how much you exercise.

Excessive hunger is not central to weight gain. Most obese people overeat due to habit, boredom, or psychological trauma. People eat all the time when they're not even hungry.

Hunger is just another sensation, like pain or cold. Within certain reasonable limits a disciplined mind can ignore those stimuli. But discipline is not often taught as a distinct and necessary skill in our soft modern society.

The half-a-pack-a-day smoking crowd from before the war on tobacco have some pointed questions for you regarding your "discipline" theory.

We used to, as a society, consume a huge amount of appetite suppressants. We stopped doing that, while simultaneously revolutionizing sanitation and healthcare and applying optimizing chemistry to most food that goes in a box or carton.

> Hunger is just another sensation, like pain or cold. Within certain reasonable limits a disciplined mind can ignore those stimuli. But discipline is not often taught as a distinct and necessary skill in our soft modern society.

Are you saying that the reason there was hardly any obesity among three-year-olds fifty years ago is because those toddlers were "disciplined" and "not soft" and thus able to ignore hunger?

Or is it possible that they were more satiated with the amount of calories they were consuming?

People are too hungry because processed food generally fails to trigger the fullness response properly. This is an obvious target for regulation which could address the obesity problem, assuming we can come up with a way to roughly quantify fullness (doesn’t seem impossible).

Is it eat until satisfied or eat until full? Food tastes good. Plenty of people, myself included, often go well beyond full as the food is an experience in itself.

Also here not in USA we are trained not to "waste" food. That is to eat everything. In some context it make sense to not take more than you are going to eat, but at the same time not eating everything on plate is pretty simple solution.

I think it could be sensible part of solution. To make it okay to leave food on plate specially when you have not served yourself.

Maybe less excessive hunger than excessive calories to satisfy normal hunger due to low quality foods.

It's so incredibly easy to eat excess calories nowadays.

Yeah, you and others raise a good point. It could be that the food people consume isn't enough satiating relative to the calories it contains, it could be that people are hungrier than they should be relative to their caloric needs, or a combination of the two.

If you have a caloric surplus and start doing resistance training then you will gain muscle mass.

If you try to eat healthy, non processed foods, vegetables, etc, your food budget doubles if not triples.

This absolutely is not true. Vegetables are some of the cheapest things you can eat. Certainly cheaper than dairy and meat, which is heavily subsidized.

https://thebeet.com/is-it-expensive-to-be-plant-based-quite-....

You can just google this, or, you know - try it.

The vegetarian stuff that costs a lot is:

- If you shop at WholeFoods, but their prices are insane anyway

- If you only eat Organic AND are picky about what you eat if you're ONLY ORGANIC. Organic has HUGE price swings, so if you're only organic you need to swap out what you want to eat, if you care about cost.

- Meat substitutes - which can be good, but don't fit your bill generally - they are often heavily processed.

Yes, it takes a GOOD amount more effort. You have to literally eat more, yes. That means you have to cook more. If you are cooking, the cooking is often more involved. Of course. But you also don't have to go full veggie either.

correct. it’s a cultural and parenting issue. People simply aren’t taught the importance of eating healthy, it’s not a habit in the household, etc. Or their understanding of healthy is wrong. And then of course the issue of self control (so much temptation in commercials, ads, etc)

This is absolutely not true. I lived in the US (midwestern food desert) for half a year and absolutely made do with fresh tomatoes, ground beef from the counter, bell peppers, fresh garlic, onions etc. I didn't even have a car and had to walk over 30 minutes to the nearest store.

The people in my apartment were all pretty young and were surprisingly confused every time I was making something fresh from scratch. And I am by far not a good cook by any standard in Europe - I'm far from average probably.

I did the math (because I was broke) - on my "lazy" weeks where I didn't cook much fresh I spent much more money on average. I had access to 10 different fast food locations before I hit the first grocery store, this is the actual problem.

Well, currently cooking for 5 and if I shop in the produce department, getting fresh vegetables, etc, I'm paying a lot more than if I don't, or get some premade stuff with a higher shelf life.

Only if you're one person who wants to eat one meal (which to be fair happens a lot).

If you cook for two and/or reheat the leftovers the next day, I think you come out ahead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com