I think it’s going to come out eventually that obesity is not a failure of willpower but a derangement of your metabolism caused by some environmental chemical such as PFAS, glyphosate, etc.
It's not black and white. It's both overeating, tendency to prefer unhealthy foods, and unhealthy processed food are just terrible for you for the reasons you've mentioned.
No one becomes obese eating natural food. But no one resorts to natural food if they use food as a coping mechanism either. Then when your body is out of whack, it is really hard to get back to a healthy metabolism, if not healthy weight. The idea that your gut flora triggers particular food cravings, for example, is still not common knowledge, so we hear dietary and nutritional nonsense spread by misinformed GPs and online articles.
Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980, when the deregulatory climate became entrenched in the US and UK and there is a proliferation of new chemicals. You might say corn syrup became popular then but cane sugar was around long before obesity became epidemic.
Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work, or rather they work temporarily. There seems to be a set-point for weight and you just won’t eat enough to go over it and have a very hard time to go under it. That set point seems to have gone up.
This is explained directly in the video I linked. Cane sugar is more expensive and less consistent commodity while corn syrup is cheap and consistent. Fat became demonized from bad science and sugar was added to almost everything.
Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work
They absolutely work individually. If someone changes their diet to cut out sugar they lose weight very consistently. Expecting that of people is not a systemic solution however. Watch the video I linked instead of trying to explain everything with looser correlations.
Weird then that Semaglutide is so effective for weight loss when it's mechanism of action is to reduce the amount you eat. Almost like that was the answer all along.
I wouldn't even know where to start deconstructing your argument.
If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
Your comment has to be made in bad faith and it's not even worth engaging with.
"No one becomes obese eating natural foods" That is the most hippy BS I have ever heard. Eat 10,000 calories of raw sugarcane a day for 1 year and get back to me on the results.
>If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
Yes, reducing the number of calories you eat is how you lose weight.
Show me someone that has become obese eating 10,000 calories of sugar cane for a year. Certainly not for the lack of trying, sugar cane is delicious.
We are not calorimeters, nor furnaces. There is a reason people get obese on 10,000 kcal of junk food and virtually no one ever on 10,000 kcal of sugar cane. Focusing only on the caloric figure is completely missing the point.
Yet the immensely reductive CICO bullshit is perpetuated, because "laws of thermodynamics." Simplify a model too much and you get nonsense.
I don't think anyone is disputing that? The challenge has always been getting people to eat less, not making them realize that is what they need to do.
Oh, but they do, even right here in this very thread!
I admit it's hard losing weight - I've been there. But there are some people who will compound the difficulty of following through by denying the reality of the conservation of mass.
> No, the challenge is recognising that food is not equal, and we have chemical and physical reasons why we overeat some and not others.
Those reasons still add up to Calories in - Calories Out. You need Out to be > than In or you will not lose weight. Eat all the kale and celery you want if you aren't burning more than you eat you won't lose weight.
it's getting them to eat less while not crashing the metabolism so that their "calories out" is constantly shifting downwards too.
and forcing people to exercise just gives them ravenous insatiable hunger. if they're not aware of this they'll reach for the carbs, ruining all their work.
