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passive_fist comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong
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Except that, empirically speaking, there are lots and lots of people who actually can and do consume candy bars, soda pop, or pizza in moderation.
Which makes me wonder about the actual mind-mechanisms behind "superstimulus", since we seem to be so very good at learning to deal with it.
(Yes, I do have a hypothesis regarding obesity epidemics that's more complex than "Everyone in whole countries is getting caught in a superstimulus feedback loop with their eating habits.")
It strikes me as an overstatement to say that "we" seem to be very good at dealing with it. In most Western countries, the rates of overweight and obesity are quite high and/or rising. Surely a large majority of those people are failing to eat some kinds of food in moderation. And I doubt those people are overconsuming fresh vegetables and oatmeal.
Anyway, do you agree that there is a problem with a decent percentage of people overconsuming foods which tend to be far richer in calories/salt/fat/sugar/etc. than what was typically available in the ancestral environment? And if you agree, what do you think is the cause of the problem?
I think that "decent percentage" is imprecise, but there's definitely something going on that's making people fatter.
It could be bad habits. It could be superstimulus effects (though I'm suspicious regarding the lack of professional literature on a concept that primarily seems to be LessWrongian rather than empirically studied). It could be food additives.
I don't know yet; I need to see some actual studies to make a judgement.
Putting aside the "why" question, do you agree that if you look at people who are overweight or obese, their overconsumption problems tend to focus on certain types of foods, which tend to be very high in calories?
Overconsumption means "high in calories" almost (if not quite) by definition. Someone who eats raw cabbage nonstop simply isn't going to get to overconsumption levels.
So that means your answer is "yes"?
Also, it sounds like you are saying that among people who have difficulty resisting the urge to eat, there is no particular preference for foods like ice cream, french fries and cookies over foods like cabbage, tomatoes, and broccoli, it's just that the former foods are more likely to cause obesity because they are higher in calories.
Do I understand you correctly?
I'm saying that I don't know of particular preferences within the set of high-calorie foods. There is also the problem of consuming mid-calorie foods like bread or pasta (which humans did for millenia without getting too damn fat until about the 1990s) in completely excessive amounts, for instance.
So basically, I don't think you can yell "COOKIES ARE SUPERSTIMULUS, REDUCE COOKIE PRODUCTION NOW!" when in fact lots of fat people are consuming massive amounts of pasta while plenty of thin people consume small amounts of cookies. The picture is much more complicated than simply assuming some arbitrarily constructed reference class of "things not in the ancestral environment" (besides, ancestral hunter-gatherers often got plenty more calories than ancestral peasant farmers, despite coming earlier: which one is our "ancestral environment" here?), which we choose to label as "superstimulus" (does that term have a scientific grounding?), will automatically short-circuit people's decision making.
This bears repeating. Also keep in mind, many people with western European ancestry have a much higher threshold for diabetes, due to that ancestry's post-agricultural dietary habits. After several thousand years, agriculture becomes part of the evolutionary environment.
(In the long view, I often stop and ponder whose ancestral environment and population we are, and how the cultural and environmental choices we're making today will shape the genetic predispositions of our 61st century descendants.)
Maybe our 61st century descendants will have genes, but if we haven't managed to beat the crap out of evolution and impose our own life-optimization criteria by the year 6000, I will be extremely disappointed.
That doesn't seem to contradict my point. It sounds like you do agree with me that there are certain foods or types of foods which (generally speaking) tend to be difficult for obese people to resist eating.
Right?
Once again, no. Please attempt to understand my view here instead of trying to force your own. I do not necessarily believe, in the absence of evidence, that the obesity epidemic arises from certain foods (tasty, unhealthy, or otherwise) drugging people into addiction just by being more intense than prehistoric foods.
No, food is not in and of itself a drug that can magically alter our decision-making apparatus in some way that doesn't wash out when placed next to the other elements of individual lifestyle.
Some foods may contain drugs. Chocolate, for instance, contains theobromide, a mild stimulant and euphoric I find quite enjoyable. Beer contains alcohol, a fairly strong depressant. Some cheeses are said to contain opiates, which supposedly explain the "addictive" quality of cheeseburgers (though studies don't seem to indicate very much evidence beyond that expected of motivated reasoners). Yet nobody eats or drinks chocolate-laced beer with cheese in it.
I think that attempting to talk about the obesity epidemic as a failure of rationality due to superstimulus in foods is an attempt to kick a sloppy variable and turn it into a stiff one. I think we need a competing alternate hypothesis.
For one thing, it's not as if healthy foods are all dull! A simple chopped-vegetable salad made with fresh ingredients is tasty and healthy, for instance. (Of course, this assumes you live somewhere in which fresh, nutritious veggies are affordable in bulk.... hmm, another contributing factor to the obesity problem?)
I am trying to understand your view, and you are not helping things by evading my questions. The question I asked you said nothing about the obesity epidemic or the causes of obesity. You read that into the question yourself.
I will try one last time: Put aside the causes of obesity and the obesity epidemic.
I'm simply asking if you agree with me that for obese people, there tend to be certain foods or types of foods which are difficult to resist eating. It's an extremely simple yes or no question.
That's the really mysterious bit to me.
I don't think excessive quantities are likely to be the problem, though. I read a caloric breakdown once of the lifestyle of a 10th-century Scandinavian farmer; the energy requirements turn out to be absurd by modern standards, something like six thousand kcal just to stay upright at the end of the day in peak season. (Winter life was a bit more sedentary, but still strenuous by modern standards.) If you're consuming that much food regularly, an extra five hundred kcal here or there is a rounding error; it's implausible that everyone back then just happened to manage their consumption to within a few percent. Nor was the civilization as a whole calorie-bound, as best we can tell. But judging from skeletal evidence, they didn't suffer from many of the diseases of civilization that we do.
The obvious diff here is exertion, but the nutritional literature I've read tends to downplay its role. Or you could blame portion sizes relative to exertion, but larger portions are only fattening because of the excess calories, which brings us back to the original mystery. So either some novel aspect of the post-1900 diet is making modern Westerners fat, or the archaeology or the nutritional science is wrong, or I'm missing a step. And I don't think I'm missing a step.
If I had to venture a guess, I might blame lots of simple sugars in the modern diet -- honey was the only sweetener available for most of human history, and it was rare and expensive. But that's extremely tentative and feels a little glib.
The really creepy part? Whatever it is, it's making Western animals fat. Including the ones that aren't fed scraps of human food.
That is remarkably interesting-if-true. Data?