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Comment by brianpbeau | Hacker News Reader

It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us. Even in my grandparents generation of family had issues as well, and they were all blue collar manual workers that lived before processed foods.

This is not to say you are wrong. The food supply in the US is not healthy. The bad news is that the same greed that destroyed our food will find ways to get around the ways GLP-1s work.

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> there is also a genetic struggle as well.

Weird that it virtually did not exist pre ww2 and that it now affects 75%+ of your population

I am not sure the genetic angle but there definitely is something happening at a craving level in the way the mind is responding.

On the flip side I don’t think your comment holds much weight either. A large portion of the population worked trade jobs and the access junk food was a lot less prevalent. You kind of have a good recipe for unhealthy population now. Low quality foods and less activity.

I have access to the same food as everyone else, I also have craving as everyone else, but as hairless monkeys we evolved a brain able to bypass instant rewards for future goals.

My step dad was obese and blamed everything and everyone but himself. We installed an app to count calories on his ipad, he lost 1/3rd of his bodyweight in less than a year and he's now cruising at an healthy weight, it really isn't rocket science

People who look for excuse will always find something, it's genetics, today is a cheat day, today was a bad day, I'm not feeling good, I crave chocolate, #healthyatallsizes, &c. people who stop making excuses get out of the hole surprisingly fast

You are blinded by your experiences. I don’t think it’s as clear as “stop making excuses”. Obviously there is a healthy portion that is probably this but I do believe there is a borderline if not full blown addiction that happens where people are not able to put it out of their thoughts.

I don’t think we fully understand why but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s a real problem. After all there is a reason that glp1 show efficacy with other addictions.

Accountability is important and I even think there is a healthy level of social shaming to be made, we should not be normalizing obesity. But I also realize that there is something at play that’s more than simply excuses.

What if some people's hunger is louder than others? What if your expended willpower to not overeat is a lot less than what is required by others?

I ask these as that is what the GLP-1's are showing. They change the hunger feeling and it might just be that you and others got lucky with a lower hunger feeling than others. There is no objective measure of food noise, but I think we all need to be open to the possibility that the food noise is different for different people and its not all willpower or laziness.

They still have a brain capable of complex thoughts and should be able to prioritise long term health over short term pleasures.

Again I don't really care, I managed to help people around me following this dead simple recipe, if you want to make excuses for yourself or others go ahead and suffer. Suffering from obesity is much harder on the body and soul than "suffering" from skipping a snack or counting calories

“Again I don’t really care”. Yet you keep coming back saying your way is the only way.

I'm convinced it is but you can't help people who don't want to be helped. People who want to be helped get out of the problem in a matter of months.

Fix your shit, it's much better than taking pills for life to fix your obesity, which is arguably the very last link of a long chain of problems. Eat clean, exercise, understand that food is fuel, understand how the fuel is used, learn discipline, learn timing, learn to recognise good and bad fuels... pills won't do any of this, and being skinny won't bring health if you don't do/learn the things I just enumerated. Obese people need a complete lifestyle overall, not pills. No amount of pills will help if they keep everything else the same, and if they implement the changes they don't need the pills to begin with

I have done that multiple times in the past but there came a point where I couldn't "white knuckle" my diet any more. GLP-1 has really helped a much better quality of life - lower cravings for food and alcohol, meaning that I am losing weight and feeling cheerful instead of gritting my teeth.

Why is that so bad?

What's your plan? pills for life? Life is tough, fighting cravings is on the easier side of what life's going to throw at us

Yes. What's wrong with that? There are large portions of the population that already do that for other health related issues.

natural selection. you can only cheat it so far.

We have decades of experience telling people to exercise more and eat better. If telling people those things worked, we would know by now. It doesn't. This is not in any way new.

Ah yes, the ever popular "they are just lazy or weak willed" rhetoric. Obesity is a disease just like addictions are. But I'm sure another round of "just try harder" pep talks and motivation posters will solve everything. Maybe stop for a moment and realize your perspective is narrow.

Wow, you have solved all mental illness. Just change the way your brain works so its normal. Brillant!

This is loser thinking: you are skinny because of luck. You are successful because of luck. You are rich because of luck.

> I also have craving as everyone else,

I laughed at loud at this. What an insane thing to claim. "I can experience the qualia of others, quantify it, and claim that mine is identical" lol

Also it's empirically false that all people experience the same level of craving. We have studies demonstrating different dopamine responses etc.

The obesity rate in the US tripled in 45 years... so clearly it's not about genetics or cravings. People had the same genetics, cravings and access to calories in 1980 USA as today, we're not talking 1580 here.

Your point about having the same cravings as others is exactly as stupid as it was before you made this unrelated point about obesity rates.

Yeah right, I'm obviously an elite genetical specimen and 75% of people are simply dumb animals with insane amount of cravings I cannot even begin to comprehend. And these people didn't exist 45 years ago.

Feel free to guide me to the literature explaining these phenomenons, it seems extremely interesting, I'm especially interested in knowing how the genetics of 3/4th of the population somehow converged to this "uncontrollable cravings" pattern over two generations

I'm not talking to you about obesity. I'm talking to you about the idiotic statement that you have insight into the qualia of other people. Everything else you're saying is irrelevant, I'm not trying to explain all obesity or whatever by appealing to cravings, I'm saying you're an idiot if you think you have insight into qualia.

But surely you realise something doesn't add up... Either cravings somehow automagically drastically changed in two generations or you're plain wrong.

> you have insight into the qualia of other people.

Yeah that's called statistics, averages, &c.

No, that's still really dumb. For example, maybe we always had radically divergent populations with regards to cravings but limited access to food. It's so easy to come up with situations to account for.

And again, you can not say your cravings are the same as others. I'm not going to explain qualia to you.

>I also have craving as everyone else

This is a pretty massive assumption that your "craving level" is the same as everyone else. This takes a complex process (the feedback from the body to the brain on feelings of hunger, satiety, etc.) and pretends that it is a simple A-B thing. Just for type 1 diabetics, their insulin levels have a huge effect on feelings of hunger, with hyperphagia (feelings of insatiable hunger) being common. Diabetes is just an extreme example of the spectrum of how individual bodies regulate insulin, and insulin is just one hormone effecting and effected by food.

> This is a pretty massive assumption that your "craving level" is the same as everyone else.

We didn't go from sub 10% obesity to 40%+ obesity in 50 years because of people cravings.

No, it was probably the incredible advances in everyday automation combined with massive increases in food availability. Survival is not nearly as physically demanding today as it was in the middle of last century.

It's also a matter of making foods more addictive to increase sales. And creating marketing to do the same thing. And then creating food deserts, etc.

It's almost like the difference in the way ultra processed foods are digested, absorbed, and the way hormones are released in response has something to do with that. It's almost like this is a biological process. It's almost like the brain is an organ and if its hormones and chemicals are messed with, that can have health implications. Or maybe it just "don't be lazy".

> also have craving as everyone else

How could you possibly know that? You don't even know how your brain works, let alone how other people's brains work.

I can drink alcohol and be perfectly fine, but a lot of people can't, because they're alcoholics. Similarly, Ive met people who have tried to smoke but couldn't pick it up, meanwhile for me it will be a lifelong, every day, struggle.

The mind is complex, have some humility. You are not necessarily a beacon of purity by your own doing.

> I also have craving as everyone else

No you dont. Have some epistemic humility. People experience reality in unique ways, you can not push your experience onto anyone else with any level of confidence. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

Or that it happens overwhelmingly in specific places with a very broad genetic mix.

Not remotely weird: people were poorer and food was more scarce across the board pre-WWII.

But how did people survive their craving, they must have all been completely on the verge of insanity right?

Are all these lean and healthy people from archive videos actually suffering and in distress? Poor souls...

“Eating disorders didn’t exist one century ago” is indeed some take.

> Are all these lean and healthy people

Vast numbers of these 'lean and healthy people' were suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies. Pellagra (generally caused by eating nothing but corn) wasn't really knocked out until around WWII, for example.

Because genetics alone aren't enough, you also have to have opportunity.

If you don't have enough food, no one is going to be fat. If you have plenty of food availability, then certain people are going to have genetics that make it more likely they end up fat.

Many people pre ww2 were perpetually hungry. Now they can afford as much food as they want

Obesity rate more than tripled since the 80s (1980s), people had already access to more than enough food to become obese in 1980 USA, so this alone doesn't explain much

It went up sharply in all countries. What is the common factor, if it is not the cultural moral failure you are painting it to be?

Genetic differences can exist and not be meaningful if the situation doesn't allow for them to be meaningfully expressed.

We know that people just have different metabolisms, different levels of hunger response, different levels of "food noise," etc.

We see obesity rates raising in nearly every country across the world as economic power and access to ultra-palatable hyper-calorie dense food increases. This is universal across the developed world with very few exemptions - Japan seems to largely be immune, but Korea and other portions of Asia aren't.

The growth curves look very similar, despite many of these cultures across the world putting even more emphasis on discipline and responsibility than America, things that in theory directly align with being more responsible about diet. If genetics weren't involved and it was all willpower (and where does the capacity for willpower come from? Is there no genetic component to it?) we wouldn't see these growth trends be so similar to America and each other.

There's negligible "genetic" difference between German and American gastrointestinal systems. No DNA mutations occurred in your grandparents that caused all of their children and children's children to be overweight.

There may be cultural or behavioral issues - attitudes and habits around cooking, expectations of what a meal includes or does not include, taste preferences on what's too sweet or too fatty, etc - but it's not genetic.

>> It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us.

It's not genetic, this is just your family refusing to take responsibility for their own eating habits. The proof is people who have bariatric surgery so that they can't eat as much, and people on GLP 1 drugs so they aren't hungry. Both groups lose weight. It's not your genes, it's the fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food). As an overeater myself, knowing this does not help reduce intake... People have to make changes and stop blaming genetics, or thyroid (there are drugs for that too) or whatever it is they think is beyond their control.

You're assuming something they didn't say. Genetics might mean a poorer response to GLP1, or a poorer metabolic response to specific hormones, or how we observe that people with ADHD have poorer eating habits, or if you're genetically smaller then your metabolism may be smaller, blah blah blah. There are many genetic factors that obviously impact weight.

We know that alcoholism is genetic, addition is genetic, etc, and those are just tiny subsets of problems that genetics are involved in.

> fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food)

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes five years ago. I radically changed my diet to a hard keto diet with a cap of 50g of net carbohydrate per day (carbs - fiber = net carbs). My caloric intake quadrupled due to fats being high calorie. My weight dropped by 48 pounds. In every measurement, I'm healthier despite being older. My diet is also expensive and difficult:

Most foods in the us are high in carbohydrate. Cereals, added sugars, fake sugar free (sugar alcohol instead of sugar), and foods that have lots of integrated carbs... sandwiches, tortillas, etc. There's a huge preference for bad foods baked into the culture. It's hard to eat well. So culture is as much of a problem as any other factor.

I’m sure in 5 years all processed microwave meals and fast food will be “fortified with GLP-1”.

Historically, this is called "fiber", and has already been regulated to be required in European breads

I find this humorous but I’m also genuinely curious what the analogy is between fiber and GLPs?

Fiber is essentially mass with little to no nutrition in it. So it makes you feel fuller without adding calories, like GLP-1 drugs.

I do think there's a strong argument that lack of fiber and protein are huge contributors to the world's obesity problems.

In most developed countries people eat lots of fiber. Like just unbelievable amounts of meat, more than ever before in human history and prehistory.

What are you talking about?? Meat contains no fiber. The primary fiber source is plant-based foods (e.g., vegetables). So modern populations eating lots of meat means they're getting little to no fiber.

Sorry, that was a mistype, I mean lots of meat, very little fiber.

"So it makes you feel fuller without adding calories, like GLP-1 drugs"

Nobody really knows how GLP-1 agonists work, but given the other effects (e.g. insulin stability, change in other addictive behaviours etc.) it's definitely not just this.

Probably simply "makes you feel full longer".

> and has already been regulated to be required in European breads

Source needed.

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