https://www.sciencealert.com/major-study-claims-to-identify-the-root-cause-of-obesity-fructose
Fructose, a new paper proposes, is the pernicious little demon driving so many human metabolisms towards obesity.
I don't know why y'all are arguing about fruit. I have a hunch that there's some fructose in high fructose corn syrup, which is in just about every processed sweet tasting thing made in the USA. That's probably contributing to obesity a bit more than peaches, ffs.
@qyron fruit is healthy.
The fructose in fruit isn't as easily absorbed due to fibre. Also there's a natural limit to how much we can consume, no one eats 20 oranges in one sitting.
@FleetingTit I'm still haunted by that scene in Se7en where the guy has "striations" in his stomach from being forced to over eat.
no one eats 20 oranges in one sitting
Unless they are looking for a serious case of the runs.
But I admit to have over indulged on this particular fruit more than once.
@qyron grapefruit is my particular achilles heel!
Nevertheless we are physically limited by our stomach capacity and would be very unlikely to consume bioavailable fructose at the rates made possible by industrial fructose such as HFCS.
@Mr_Blott thanks but I find it easier this way because I'm on kbin.social and when some lemmy threads get big they don't nest properly for me.
Cool but clearly that's a problem with your browser or client because nobody else on kbin is doing this
@Mr_Blott yeah it quite possibly is my browser. Will check sometime. Anyway, whatever the reason, it's helpful to me when I'm on big threads.
It's easy to do - kbin pre-populates the comment reply button with your name so it's not like I have to type it out. (I think this feature is here because we also interact with Mastodon, but it's also useful over here).
@msage even that isn't as hard on the liver as processed orange juice that has no fibre in it. But it's the things that have extra fructose added into them that I would be wary of.
An Australian guy did a documentary where he ate the exact same number of calories he'd eaten before, and worked out just as much, but he went for food with added fructose. It's really interesting.
No, the study is talking about other sources of fructose:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/oby.23920
The study is not saying that fructose is the root cause of obesity from what I see (search doesn't work properly there). I'm not sure if in such a complex mechanism as a human body a single cause of obesity can exist. Additionally, our bodies differ and a single mutation can change the outcome of the whole process from what I know.
The title is so misleading that it borders on lying.
The root cause of all obesity everywhere is not fructose. That implies that if you don't eat fructose or generate fructose, you will not be obese. Fructose might be contributing factor to obesity, but it is hardly a root cause or "the" root cause.
No, the title is completely correct - but you should read the article accompanying it ;) Have you tried it?
I overstepped on my comment but after years of being vehiculated as an healthy sugar, this is the kind of title capable of triggering that sort of thought.
And agreed. It may be a part of the problem but it is risky to say this or that is the root of the obesity problem.
Treat drinking any kind of juice - even orange juice - as if you are splurging on a dessert. That's the best way to frame it as part of your diet
Yeh juice is just a softdrink with a good marketing team (fruit). Fruit is good though, save yourself the effort of juicing it :)
I personally aim for under 10g refined sugar / day and find that works well for me. If juice is something that is important to you, a glass a couple times a week is probably fine. Drinking it with or shortly after a meal might help by slowing digestion.
I used to drink orange juice every day - it's so good ... but after stopping and starting many times, I realized how much worse I feel when I'm less disciplined about sugar. My doctor was actually suggesting I consider surgery to relieve pain in my wrists, but I've been largely pain free since I started watching sugar intake (~8 years).
Try fruit nectars. The entire fruit is used and water is added to dilute the puree to a more liquid state.
Regardless of method, weight always boils down to a balance of calories consumed vs calories burned.
Your control of calories burned is limited - outside of physical exercise, your body does a lot of crap on its own, and finding the number of calories you passively burn on an average day is a major hurdle.
To do that, log and calculate the caloric value of everything that goes into your mouth; and your weight. If your weight is trending up, reduce your intake and keep checking. Once it stabilizes, you've got your number. If your baseline is weird, something's fucking with your metabolism - see your doctor (for real, that could be a sign of some really bad shit).
From there, you can either further decrease calories consumed by eating/drinking less, or increase calories burned by cranking up the exercise, or a combo of the two. You'll be more comfortable/satiated if you limit things like processed shit, but you can literally eat nothing but Twinkies and still lose weight if you stay within your caloric budget (you'll also be starving all the time, pissed off, and unless you're a fucking robot, give in and eat some actual food, breaking your caloric budget and thus your goals, so don't actually try the Twinkie thing, but it's 'technically' possible).
Any and every diet that actually works does so via a caloric deficit. Maybe fructose is the biggest enemy; maybe it's other sugars; or fats; but keep your caloric consumption-to-burn ratio in the negative regardless of source, and you WILL lose weight.
This.
It's crazy, the science on processed fructose vs glucose is clear
but people still cling to old ideas about all calories all being the same.
I think you’re arguing different things, or you don’t understand the top comment. They are explaining that gaining weight is a function of net calories. The article you linked is effectively explaining glycemic index, or the rate at which food can be converted into energy by the body. Both of these are compatible. It’s wise to eat low GI food so that you feel sated for longer, but you don’t have to. You can eat exclusively white bread and lose weight if your net calories are negative.
@JasSmith hmm maybe I linked to the wrong thing. I was trying to find one that pointed out the difference between glucose metabolism and fructose metabolism, as an illustration of how calories are not all treated the same way by the body, but I was in a hurry. This might be better.
This intra-hepatic lipid will promote the production and secretion of very low-density lipoprotein 1 (VLDL1) leading to an increase in post-prandial triglycerides. A vicious cycle occurs effecting insulin resistance as well. The lipid in the liver will increase insulin resistance resulting in increases in circulating diacylglycerol. Additionally, the insulin resistance will lead to further lipid deposit in the liver with sugar having a greater propensity to turn to fat (3). A downstream effect of increased apoCIII and apoB will lead to muscle lipid accumulation, and end in whole body insulin resistance. All of this metabolic dysregulation results from the direct route fructose initially takes to the liver.
Thanks for the link. If proven this would definitely be a bad outcome, but it doesn’t mean that a calorie deficit becomes a calorie surplus depending on the nutrient. If one is burning more than they’re consuming, the above is irrelevant insofar as weight gain is concerned. It’s relevant either way for diabetes.
you people
Which "people" would those be?
I thought literature.cafe was a normal instance but your comment sounds a bit troll-like? Have added a link to my comment to show what I mean.
@DragonTypeWyvern ha ha that link was meant as an illustration not a proof. It's not even a scientific paper, it's Harvard Health.
I seriously doubt that fructose is the "root cause of obesity" like this article claims. But @AnaGram is right, all calories are not equal and the science has been clear for a long time when it comes to metabolic differences between how the body processes, say, fructose vs glucose.
I think there are probably a bunch of TOFI addicted to HFCS who don't want it to be true though!
An illustration that you don't understand what calories in equals calories out means lul
And for a very short summation of the small novella I've written in other comments, not every calorie has the same amount of nutrition in it.
There are non caloric nutrients in food that are absolutely vital for human health and happiness and when you are deficient in those nutrients your body will compel you to continue eating until you have met your baselines.
Solve the nutritional problem and you will most likely go a long long way towards solving the obesity problem.
I've had the theory that people in the US are a lot more malnourished than we realize. All that low quality food means they're probably missing something essential, or only getting it alongside a ton of sugar (aka HFCS).
HFCS is evil and outlawed in a lot of the civilized world. It's a known cause of cancer and tricks the brain into eating more.
It has such a high caloric density, a survival instinct inside the human brain kicks in. It says: wow this is really good, we don't get many opportunities to eat something this good, eat as much of it as you can. This makes sense in a cave man survival scenario, where you happen on some honey or sugary fermented fruits. Then you have a bigger chance of surviving if you eat as much of it as you possibly can. But in modern life where we have an infinite supply of these things it's a killer.
They don't, there's a million little things that depend on what you eat, but regarding weight this is how it works.
Yeah, the key word there is "calories out" -- as in, not all calories get absorbed equally well by the body, so some get excreted. "Calories out" does not just mean burning them with metabolism and exercise. "Eat less and exercise more" is a gross oversimplification.
I've always personally believed in low-carb diets, but I still agree that calories in/out is the main factor for weight gain. That being said, some calories are not calculated right. I remember reading a study on Almonds that said something like 33% of the calories from Almonds are not absorbed, so "100-calorie" packs of almonds are only 66 calories. In this way, not all calories are the same because the way we calculate them isn't right all of the time. Also, calories in/out doesn't account for foods that are unhealthy for other reasons, or could cause you to eat more than you would otherwise, like HFCS.
Very true. I like to reduce the complexity of foods. Just getting someone to eat the correct amount of calories is more than 1/2 the battle. Getting them to eat healthier food is the next huddle.
The thing that this perspective doesn't take into account is hunger. It's all fine and well to say control your calorific intake, but willpower is a finite and limited resource and if it's the mechanism used to manage calorific intake it will inevitably fail you. Especially when self-control relies on glucose levels in the blood and the aforementioned willpower is being used to reduce those glucose levels.
In the absence of fructose, fat consumption is controlled through the suppression of hunger by the CCK feedback loop. In the absence of fructose, carb consumption is controlled through the insulin/glucagon feedback loop.
Fructose just gets converted into fatty acids without any control loop, leaving you laden with excess fatty acids and still hungry.
Sucrose, which is sugar, is 50% fructose. So it's not just Americans with their high fructose corn syrup who are being bombarded with calories that our hunger can't see, it's anyone eating foods sweetened with sugar.
High fructose corn syrup, by the way, is up to 55% fructose, with the rest being glucose. So it's not thaaaat different than sucrose in overall composition. That's not saying anything about how it's absorbed though.
"Any and every diet that actually works"
So none? Pretty sure the vast majority of people who do any diet end up putting the weight back on. The metabolism literally slows down during a caloric deficit and it doesn't rebound to the same level.
Basically our bodies are good at dealing with 50/50 G:F ratios, but HFCS is more like, 40/60 so it doesn't know what to do with that excess F which is known to cause all sorts of health problems. This is why fruit and table sugar are fine but most processed food is not. If you know how to avoid it you can end up a lot healthier overall. And no, the meme of "the fiber of the fruit prevents absorption" that doesn't stop it, just smooths down the sugar spike over a larger time. All of it that was diversion tactics to distract people from the real source of health problems: HFCS and overconsumption, because health science in the US is notoriously bought and paid for and they're not about to blame capitalism.
Basically I wanted to see if it would be possible to survive off of nothing but energy so I experimented on myself and short of some minor issues (malnutrition and something I learned about called protein starvation) it caused me to be healthier and happier once I knew what I was doing.
EDIT: Have to explain protein starvation because google's dogshit algorithm thinks you mean protein toxicity which his the literal exact opposite of what protein starvation is and because it's so confident that's what you want to see it won't actually tell you: So like humans need protein and we can generate it from energy, but the rate is way too low for our bodies to function so you're only getting like a 10th of what we need, meaning you can starve to death while having more than enough calories otherwise.
Also while I'm here I may as well also go further into what I meant by "good at dealing with G:F at a 50/50 ratio" on the cellular level we have little factories pumping energy across a barrier so that it can later spin a literal turbine and generate ATP, and they're built out so that sugar comes in, gets broken into Glucose and Fructose and like Factorio the ratios are set to fit that. Start producing too much Fructose and now you have an imbalance and like Factorio causes things to back up a bit. This is also why I was at half energy when I did Glucose-only; I had all the energy I needed but the rate I could access it was half of what it should have been. TL;DR Our cells are designed to reverse the effects of photosynthesis, converting sugar into energy, everything else is on top of that is ultimately in service of that goal.
Takeaway: Sugar is good, potatoes and PB toast are great, HFCS are bad, and capitalism is to blame for the health problems in america.
As an old, I never heard of anyone getting pancreatic cancer when I was young.
Then all of a sudden pancreatic cancer is something that everyone gets.
Correlation is not causation, but there is correlation.
Well, part of that is also because we know more about pancreatic cancer now, enough to call it that. Just because diagnoses goes up does not necessarily mean that rate is going up.
Yeah, and the world around you and the food that is consumed and human knowledge and medicine have all changed as much as you have, probably even more.
Your take on this is ignoring all of that.
Fun fact: HFCS is identical to honey, to the point that many honey manufacturers will add some because it is cheaper and impossible to detect.
It would be amazing if we found that just one ingredient could be traced to all the suffering from obesity.
I really, really hope you understand that your comment is entirely useless and just spamming.
No, their comment is correct. Water is indeed wet.
If you take issue with them stating an obvious fact, perhaps instead you could take issue with the OP, which did the same thing.
why is this downvoted ? do people not understand that water is wet, or that large amounts of sugar is bad for you ? sand is considered sandy, so why wouldnt water be considered wet ?
It's downvoted because the research is much more nuanced than "too much sugar bad". And because those kinds of comments reek of know-it-all attitude through oversimplification.
It is already specifically about fructose. That in itself is a distinction that is swiftly overlooked in the comments. Not to mention that what is discussed is more about the action of the substance, and not necessarily the amount.
Uhhhhhhhh. Okayyyy. Or maybe eating too much. Goddamn how is there money for these studies and we still can't feed everyone in this country.
Also, the study says that fructose is the problem but they have no idea how to deal with it. So this is just so you know that maybe something else instead of eating too much makes you fat.
"No, no it isn't that you didn't apply the brakes through that intersection, it is one wire leading to the calipers that is made of the wrong material. What is the correct material? I dunno."
Just hit the brakes.
I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record at this point.
Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning.
That I believe we can all agree on.
There is a bigger question than that though. Too many people assume that by default that it is the obese person's I don't know moral failings that lead to their obesity and that a simple rectification of their moral weakness would reverse the obesity.
And that is what I take umbrage with. It's not a moral failing to become obese in a society where all of the food that is available to you has two or three times as many calories as the version your ancestors ate did while simultaneously providing less nutrition per serving size then the food that your ancestors ate did.
There is more to food than calories.
There is more that your body needs out of food than raw calories.
Your body needs nutrition and it will tell you to continue eating until it has met your nutritional needs.
If you shore up the nutritional deficit in the average Western diet then a large percentage of obesity would be dealt with. The way to do that is different from person to person because the nutritional needs of each person is slightly different.
For instance, if you are deficient in magnesium your body may tell you to eat potatoes because potatoes have plenty of magnesium in them.
But if you are eating potatoes that have been turned into potato chips and french fries to try to get the magnesium content out of them you're going to eat way too many fucking potatoes that are also deep-fried in oil and doused with salt.
Multiply this by the number of nutrients that your body needs and the number of foods that have the nutrients in them and the number of ways those foods can be processed to turn healthy foods into unhealthy foods.
If you do that then you may start to understand that the obesity epidemic is not just about fat people stuffing their greedy gullets.
Our ancestors ate, in flush times, 3,000 to 5,000 calories a day while working hard and met their nutritional needs and now we have obese people who do not work as hard as our ancestors did trying to make it on 2500 or 3500 calories who are not getting the non-caloric nutrients they need to satisfy their nutritional needs.
And the nutritional drop off per calorie of the food available in the 1940s versus the food available today is not in a straight line with the decrease in caloric intake.
You may get 30% to 80% of the non caloric nutrition out of the calorie that your ancestors did, so even though you were eating fewer calories than them you are getting vastly fewer non caloric nutrients then they did, things like potassium, and magnesium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, molybdenum, selenium, all of the various trace elements that all life on this planet subsists on.
To add to that, there's no good way to determine what nutrition your body currently has or that it might need other than spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars at the hospital to get a full blood draw and panel done.
If you want to solve the obesity crisis you must first solve the issue of what nutrition a body needs and how to provide that to not just one person but to every person all 8 billion of us on the entire planet.
I apologize for going into a rant about this but I've spent a good while learning how to lose weight and I've lost over a hundred pounds.
I've dealt with being obese my entire life.
I was given poor instruction as a child.
I was told to continue eating when even when I was already stuffed because my mother grew up in a poor household and she didn't understand that when a child says they are full that you do not need to feed them anymore and you do not need to manipulate them into thinking that they are bad people for not eating until they physically cannot eat anymore for every single meal.
I've been dealing with the compulsion, the almost OCD unwilling desire mandate that I have to eat all of the food in front of me every single time I sit down to eat for my entire life.
And while I have been working and struggling and striving to break that compulsion I've also been trying to learn what it is about food that leaves me so unsatisfied when I eat.
And so I get a little upset when I hear people say any variation of, "put down the fork fatty" even when the concept is couched in an inoffensive phrasing, because every single person that says this has no idea what the actual struggle of being obese is.
It's not an issue of one specific chemical in the food that makes people obese.
It's an issue of the entire available Western diet
combined with the entire Western ideology about food
combined with the post world war II necessity of feeding as many people as possible using the new fertilizers that change the structure of the plants that they are sprinkled on, causing them to grow far faster than they ever did in nature
Combined with the selective breeding of plants to get the largest size and most fat protein and carbohydrates that you possibly can out of every single grain and every single animal that is grown
combined with food companies hiring scientists running an entire industry to make food as unsatisfying as possible so that you never get tired of eating it
combined with the nutrition of food decreasing even as the calories in food increase
combined with every single minor drop of comprehension about food itself and the foods effects on the human body being amplified all out of proportion by the news empire looking for a click-worthy headline
Combined with the fact that tasty food releases dopamine even as being obese causes you to be depressed and therefore want to eat more food to get more dopamine to deal with the depression that eating the more food caused
And once again I apologize for going on a rant about this but I wish I could just shake every single person on the planet until they understood that there is far more going on than just the inability of putting the fork down that causes obese people to be obese.
I just wanna give you a huge hug of support. I'm in the 100lb club too (and still well overweight personally) and so much of what you said is very familiar. Thank you for saying what I wanted to say better than I could say it.
Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning.
That I believe we can all agree on.
No, we can't. Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning or excreting.
That's why (for example) the difference between fiber and simple carbs matters.
More to the point, there's also evidence that one reason skinny people are skinny might be that they have less efficient gut microbiota: they're not burning more calories, they're excreting more.
I think we still can agree. It just would require that me saying the word "eating" be changed to the word absorbing, and I'm fine with that adaptation.
I still strongly believe that if obese people were given healthy nutritious diets that were available and convenient and financially affordable, obesity would decrease.
I do not think that that single thing by itself would completely solve the obesity crisis in the western world, but I think that it would do a lot to remediate it.
The problem is not just money, although money is a large portion of the problem, it is also the fact that the world that we live in is currently not equipped to provide healthy and nutritious food to every person on the planet.
Even in today's world we have people who go hungry. People who cannot afford a pack of ramen noodles or do not have access to ramen because they live in a food desert or they simply do not have the money needed to purchase a 25 cent pack of calories.
However, for the people who are obese and who do not wish to be obese anymore I believe their primary objective should be to find low calorie, high nutrient density foods and eat those first before eating anything else.
Good examples are bananas, berries, avocado, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and potatoes.
If you are a breakfast eater I believe that you should eat a banana and then wait 15 to 30 minutes before eating the rest of your breakfast.
For lunch I think you should eat brussel sprouts or broccoli or a baked potato with maybe a little butter or a little salt but a full serving of this vegetable and then wait 30 minutes before eating your burgers or sandwiches or whatever else you're eating for lunch.
(And ideally you should make the baked potato the day before and stick it in the fridge and then reheat it because that changes the starch structures to be a type of starch that feeds your gut microbiome more than a normal baked potato would)
And then you should repeat this process for dinner.
I'm telling obese people to eat more food in order to lose weight.
And I believe that will work for multiple reasons.
One, the 30-minute gap gives your hormones, ghrelin and insulin, time to react to the food that you have eaten and to begin processing it and to send signals to your brain that you have eaten and that everything is okay.
Two, eating non-processed or lightly processed foods that you prepared yourself is going to be more nutritionally dense on a per calorie basis than any food that is already prepared and prepackaged and ready for you to eat.
Three, giving your body the opportunity to absorb nutrition when it is hungry before flooding it with calories will give your body time to absorb the nutrients that it needs before it has to start spending energy processing the huge amount of calories that you have eaten.
Further, picking a vegetable or a low sugar fruit or berry as your kickstarter for every meal will also help ensure that you get more fiber in your diet, and will help your body eliminate more unprocessed calories that you have consumed.
Finally, the last portion of this diet plan is to listen to your body and to stop eating when you feel satisfied.
That is the tricky part for many people who like me have a compulsion to eat all of the food in front of them and will feel bad for leaving two bites of a hamburger behind.
But it is much easier to retrain yourself to allow yourself to leave food on the plate when you are actually satisfied and full then it is for you to engage in a year-long slog of denial and feeling hungry or eating strange diets that trick your body into not feeling hungry under any circumstance.
You're mixing obvious truths(nutrition is important) with materially irrelevant anecdotes and easily disprovable absolutes(if you want to solve the obesity crisis, you must...).
Nope. Some countries have obesity "crises", and others do not.
We know the basics of nutrition and the basics that people can avoid, and while metabolisms and hormones and gut health depend on a nutritional spectrum and so many other factors, that is a different matter entirely than an obesity "epidemic".
Those people are eating too much.
To solve obesity, eat less.
You can figure out the holistic solution to obesity(TLDR: apparently it's "fructose") on your own time, but if anybody wants to solve obesity, they have the solution.
I am not talking about any holistic nutritional grail and neither is this article, I'm speaking to the useless nature of a study that suggests a significant result is "Ackshually, this one sugar is ackshually the real reason you are fat", which is a counterproductive and insignificant claim that money and time was wasted on.
You say to solve obesity eat less. What you're actually saying is that people should starve.
And not starve on a calorie basis, you're fine with meeting the calories they need to function, you're telling them to starve nutritionally.
You're telling them to ignore their bodies number one desire, which is to live, in order to meet an aesthetic.
I'm telling you that that will not work.
That will not work because the food that is available in the caloric amounts available is nutritionally insufficient to survive on for many people.
And you ignore the mind body connection, assuming that it's simply a matter of thought to tell your body that no you have eaten enough food and you're not going to eat anymore that's all you fucking get when your body is telling your mind that it is starving and it needs more food and it's not going to function until you provide it for me
The human diet is not a solved equation.
If all food were the same then how can you starve to death with a full belly of rabbit meat?
If all food were the same, how can you die of malnutrition eating only fish?
I'm telling you the root cause of modern-day obesity is that obese people have either a natural predisposition or a genetic requirement for a different nutrient profile than the foods that are commonly available in the western diet provides.
The foods of the last 80 years are vastly different than the foods of the hundred thousand years available prior to that.
The crops that we grow have been optimized to grow quickly and to provide a lot of calories. Our grandparents would get one crop of corn per year. Modern Farmers May grow two, three or four crops of corn in the same field per year.
It takes time for plants to absorb nutrients from soil.
Even when you supplement with fertilizers, not every fertilizer is optimized to perfectly recreate ideal soil substrates.
Fertilizers typically prioritize nitrogen as nitrogen causes plants to grow quickly.
So the fast food that is grown in the soil does not have the same nutrient profile as the slow food grown in the soil.
We then feed our cows and chickens the fast farmer food and then we eat those cows and chickens and the fast farmer food but we further break those down and reconstitute them into things that do not spoil easily.
Canned foods, for instance, we're developed so that the beans that you harvested in October could be eaten in February. Now, canned foods are meant to be one of the primary Staples of the western diet. Everything about whatever was put into those cans has been sterilized and optimized for shelf longevity.
I'll stop that rant to start a different one and this one will be quicker. The best meal I've ever had in my life was at a farm to table restaurant.
I was out visiting this place with my girlfriend at the time and she saw this little restaurant by the side of the road and we decided to stop in.
It was fairly pricey but reading their menu they mentioned that all of the food that they were serving there that day that could be grown locally was harvested this morning and prepared for you today.
I spent $100 for the two of us to eat. I had meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans and it was $40.
I thought that for $40 I would get a gargantuan portion and instead it was actually a very small portion compared to what I would normally eat. The serving of meatloaf was about the size of a deck of cards. The mashed potatoes were about the size of my fist, and I probably got maybe 25 green beans.
I was somewhat upset because my expectations based off of my normally available foods would say that a dinner of meatloaf would cost less than $20 and would fill the plate but there was a lot of plate available and visible on this $40 serving.
But, I said fuck it we ball worst case I can go and get some other fast food elsewhere if I still feel hungry afterwards.
And let me tell you, I honestly cannot remember the last time I was so satisfied with a meal. The taste was not twice the price worth but when I finished eating I kind of felt tingly.
My stomach was sending waves of pleasure through my body, it was a sensation that I have never felt before.
My stomach was telling my entire body that I was full, and I was satisfied, and that I had eaten exactly the right amount of food and that feeling continued for the remainder of the day.
We had this meal at like 1:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday and I did not want to eat again for the rest of the day.
The freshness of the food. The nutritional quality of that meal was so far above the available nutritional quality of any other food that I can personally locate that I got physically high off of eating fucking meatloaf.
I am not rich.
I cannot afford to eat $40 meals for every meal. I do not have access to a farm to provide me with fresh vegetables to eat every single day.
But that one experience highlighted to me how important nutrition is when fighting obesity.
That is why I feel confident in saying that obese people are not obese because they just love eating so much and they are fat little piggies that can't control themselves.
I feel confident in saying that the grand majority of obese people who eat the Western diet are obese because the food that they have available does not have the nutritional profile that their body is craving, and because of that, their bodies compel them to continue eating until they meet their nutritional baselines.
If that is the case the best solution for obesity is to first nourish the body and then allow them to eat whatever they want on top of that.
And you can say it's all calories in calories out that you want but not every calorie is the same because once again, if they were, how can you starve to death with a belly full of rabbit meat?
No, you are saying people should starve, and pretending I am saying it.
And then you say people should ignore their bodies and pretend that I am saying it.
You then try to talk about ascetics, I guess? Which no, you eat a healthy amount of healthy food, and not more. Have a treat, it's fine.
Don't eat much more than you need to and you will not be obese.
You've already stated that ingesting more calories then you burn causes obesity. This is correct.
Nobody is arguing that all food is the same either, this is another thing only you have brought up.
You're making all these facetious arguments you're shooting down yourself, so be sure to pat yourself on the back for surmounting the obstacles you constructed.
And no, the root cause of modern-day obesity is not body type and metabolism. Everyone has minutely different nutritional requirements, not just obese people, their nutritional requirements are not the root cause of their obesity, that claim is absurd on its face.
People are obese at different relative weights, and it's natural to have different body types, and it's equally natural to carry too much extra weight because you eat too much.
You know how to make fat ducks and geese? Feed them more calories than they need. Know why some dogs and cats are way fatter than the others? They get way more food than the skinny dogs and cats. Know why humans get fat? They eat more food than they burn.
As you've already stated.
It's good that you're learning about nutrition, but try expressing your nutritional tidbits to someone who asked you about them.
None of your anecdotes are related to the direct cause of obesity, which is eating too much.
As you've agreed to.
Let me ask you this, if it's so easy for you to solve it and your solution is the absolute correct solution, then why is it still a problem?
Remember, you're saying obese people are obese because they eat too much.
I'm saying obese people eat too much because they are nutritionally deficient.
I think that you think that I'm saying that obese people are not obese because they eat too much. I agree with you that obese people are eating too much.
However, my argument is the "why are they eating too much" argument. You have not touched on nor addressed any portion of my argument.
You are stuck in the "calories in calories out is the entire equation and everything else is irrelevant" portion of the argument, which is the ABCs of human nutrition.
I'm telling you that LMNOP is also part of the human nutrition alphabet and that it is an important portion of the conversation that is often overlooked.
Can you debate me on the topics I am mentioning, or are you still stuck in the ABCs?
The solution to obesity is simple, but not easy.
My solution to obesity is correct(as you've stated, we can all agree on it); obesity is still a problem largely because of an overabundance of available food coupled with a lack of personal discipline, seasoned with capitalist production and marketing.
I believe this will mark the end of this particular conversation, not because I won, and not because you won, but because we cannot debate on the same level.
If you ever do learn about what I'm calling the LMNOPs of the human nutrition alphabet then definitely feel free to express your new thoughts to me anytime you want to.
The problem with poverty is easily solved: people just need to earn more. Easy!
The problem of depression is easily solved: people just need to be happier. Easy!
The problem of obesity is easily solved: people just need to eat less. Easy!
I can solve war too - people just need to fight less! And death: people just need to age less!
Man, someone get me a McArthur genius grant already!
Your third point is largely correct(cheers), but it's not as easy to solve poverty, depression, or war as you think it is.
If you want to lose weight, all you have to do is stop putting food in your mouth, or put less food in your mouth each day. Simple, but not easy for many people.
Clinical depression, on the other hand, is caused by various complex chemical imbalances influenced by various environmental and social factors, so you can't simply disentangle yourself from those chemicals and circumstances the same way that you can choose to stop putting food in your mouth.
Wait, you're saying that there are nuances and subtleties that my simple solutions don't take into consideration?!?
/s (I didn't think this was necessary, but given your response...)
Clinical depressionObesity, on the other hand, is caused by various complex chemical imbalances influenced by various environmental and social factors, so you can't simply disentangle yourself from those chemicals and circumstances
Yep, exactly!
Do you seriously think that eating - arguably one of the most fundamental and instinctual things that living things do - is not subject to complex chemical, environmental, and social factors? Really?
The solution "don't eat so much" really is as naive as telling a clinically depressed person "just be happier" or telling a poor person "just go earn more" or telling Israelis and Palestinians "just don't fight do much".
Yes, the solutions really are that simple, at one level, but pretending like the knowledge of this solution gets us anywhere in terms of actually addressing the problem is just silly.