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brazil84 comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong
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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.
And, to the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. Obese people don't have a hard time not-eating some foods, they have a hard time not eating in general.
Here's some research which may change your mind:
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/133/3/835S.full
By the way, is it a surprise to you that chocolate holds the spot as the most craved food as opposed to, say, raw cauliflower?
Here's another big surprise for you:
Since chocolate contains a stimulant/euphoric drug, no, this is not surprising, and I even mentioned it.
What would be surprising is if we could see a correlation between obesity and cravings for specific non-chocolate items, or even some way of showing that people who don't eat chocolate are massively less likely to be obese.
So are you conceding that at least chocolate is a specific food or type of food which many obese people tend to have difficulty resisting?
And what of the claim that "Women in particular report extreme liking of or craving for foods that are both sweet and high in fat (e.g., candies, cakes or pastries, ice cream)"
Do you dispute it? Is it a surprise to you?
No, I'm saying that people have some difficulty resisting chocolate. That includes thin people.
And "people" includes "obese people," agreed?
Also, please answer my other question:
Do you dispute the claim that "Women in particular report extreme liking of or craving for foods that are both sweet and high in fat (e.g., candies, cakes or pastries, ice cream)"?
Is it a surprise to you?
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?
This article contains links to several peer-reviewed research studies on the matter.