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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Avoiding manufactured food is absurd to a level I didn't think needed explanation.

Even from a logistics POV we're 8 billion on this planet, concentrated in cities. Everyone following that philosophy would bring a food chain collapse.

Good thing you don't need to follow what everyone else does :)

If we were on less censored forums would just ask you to "post body". Since that's not considered a valid argument here instead i'll just gesture to the countless innovations that have been developed by humans that turn out to have massive negative health consequences. What gives you the confidence that our current food manufacturing techniques won't turn out to be one of those things? Would you have made this argument about cigarettes in the 20s?

People are forgetting we had famines a few centuries ago in the west, and still have famines in many places. Sure, they are also usually associated with governing issues and other complicating factors, but still. The number of peoole being alive is my answer to whether food manufacturing is a net negative or not.

While the pendulum has swung way past the equilibrium for us, rejecting whole categories of food that tend to be nutrious, easily preserved is just not realistic.

To me there are dozens of other levers we can pull to deal with health improvement. As pointed out in the other threads, not all OECD countries are facing what the US are facing.

PS: do I get all my points accepted as truth if I can prove a BMI that satisfies you ? Would 22 do it ?

Not necessarily since BMI doesn't take into account muscle mass. But, 22 does mean that we can't just discard your opinion out of hand

Always using the appeal to nature is a fallacy, but a more refined heuristic is to simply consider that the burden of proof for a processed meal is much greater than that for an unprocessed one.

I remember a movie from the 1950s, where a character was arguing that "margarine is just like butter", and the response was that "butter needs no explanation".

When industrial food producers decided their priorities are making stuff extremely cheap that appeals to our more addictive side so they can make as much money as possible, without any regard for our health, this is quite obviously going to create a problem.

Good thing I didn't make that argument :)

I'm not sure what argument you were making then.

Assuming your point isn't that you used the "factory" terminology instead of calling it "unnatural", so it's not an appeal to nature.

I'd actually be pleased to dig on the deeper part you were pointing to.

PS: the "we are not adapted" to part of your post is the crux of it in my eyes: we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic. We're not adapted to receiving MRIs, wearing glasses or looking at imaginary landscapes in VR, and that's totally fine in my book .

If I wanted to say unnatural I would have said unnatural. I said factory.

Factories come with a mountain of lubricants, plastics, metals, agents, colorings, flavorings, etc that are poisonous. They are poisonous because we were not evolved to consume them. That's just 1 of many reasons factory made foods are bad.

> we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic

These things would be good for you in spite of the fact that you're not adapted to it.

There are far more many things that you are not adapted to that would kill you. Your list is hilariously arguable (VR might actually be bad for you lol). My list would consist of basic inarguable things like, fish can breathe underwater naked, humans cannot, and my list would be inexhaustibly long.

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