There are a lot of people who basically believe in a conspiracy of stupid people while at the same time believing anyone who believes in a conspiracy is stupid.
It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.
It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.
Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024, you are highly under estimating the devastation of our gluttonous foodie culture.
All the factors you mention I suspect are completely meaningless in comparison to consuming excess calories and I am pretty sure research would back this up.
I was starting to have various health problems a year ago this time that have all gone away literally like magic.
I think what you are talking about is actually a form of denial. Blaming meaningless variables we can't control so we can ignore the fat elephant in the room right in front of us.
Don't be so sure. We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals.
"our gluttonous foodie culture."
Our which one? Obesity is a global problem, not a specifically American one. You will meet a lot of obese people in Brasilian favelas or rural Serbia, not exactly places that have "foodie culture".
"Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024"
I am not trying to discourage you, but the main stumbling stone with obesity is not losing the weight, but keeping it off for years. Your comment would carry a lot more weight (pun intended) if you lost that weight in 2020 and kept it off until today.
> We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals
Opinion: nothing. Our hunger/satiety signals are normal and evolutionarily advantageous. What changed was the access, and composition, of food.
Food is tasty. Like really tasty these days. High fat, sugar, salt. And it's super duper easy to get. This stuff is designed to perfect target your brain and make you say "mmm".
You wanting to eat more makes sense because these foods are highly, or over, nutritious. Cavemen didn't have fried chicken, they barely had chicken - they had nuts. This wanting to eat more and more is evolutionarily advantageous. Because you don't know when your next meal is. You should be greedy, eat as much as you can and as often as you can. I mean, look at dogs. Give them infinite access to foods and they will eat themselves to death. Sure we're smarter but much of this stuff is at a level below the brain.
For all of human history I'm sure this functionality was a very good thing. Now that we have food surplus... not anymore. And to top it off, for the first time ever, we don't need to move to live. People are sedentary. So we don't even offset this effect with movement.
It seems to me the human brain/body is incompatible with modern human life. We're broken. We're exploitable by addiction at every turn. The solution might be to change our brains. Ozempic seems to help a lot - less drinking and smoking too.
I 100% agree - I just wanted to add that processed food also plays a huge role. Our ancestors didn't eat canned fish dipped in high calorie oils or snacks / junk food with no fiber. White bread is used commonly throughout many households but whole-grains are a lot healthier. Eating food which has a high degree of high fructose corn-syrup or sugar with no added fiber has a detrimental effect on health and is not something that our bodies are used to. The high-glycemic index spikes our bodies go through when you combine these factors does a ton of damage to our health and yes - I believe it does have a role in triggering auto-immune reactions. Type 1 diabetics as an example are diabetic due to their own immune systems falsely labelling the pancreas beta-cells as enemies and triggering an auto-immune response -- the reason I believe this happens is due to the high-inflammatory reaction our pancreas go through when we eat extremely highly processed foods (i.e. high sugar / glycemic index items with high insulin spikes & lacking fiber). I don't have a lot of data to prove any of this - so this is my hypothesis but I can confirm that ever since I started staying away from processed foods, I've been in amazing health and I feel much better than when I was slightly over-weight and consuming processed junk.
The interesting thing is that Vietnamese food is really tasty (I love it at least), but Viet Nam is something like 2 per cent fat. And they don't suffer from shortages of food.
Vietnamese people in Czechia are also usually thin, even though they make more than average money, being either business owners or skilled professionals. The contrast with Czechs is visible.
Probably not, since carbs have always been the easiest food to get and they didn't have this problem. Protein, and especially meat, was always rare and a minority of diet. But greens, fruits, nuts (ish, they have fat) are plentiful.
Having worked at large corporations and now a small company, I think the reason for this is so no one can be blamed for anything when things go wrong at a large corporation.
The main function is that it insulates upper management from any responsibility of what is going on the ground. They don't even really know. If something goes wrong you can fire some useless cog in the machine 3 links below but they still have an important title so the optics hold.
Without all these layers then upper management has to actually take responsibility for the operation of the company. Instead, they get a nice asymmetrical bet with looking like a genius if things go well but plenty of fall guys if things go bad. It mirrors the pay out of their stock options. If things go well they make a killing, if things go horribly bad they only collect their inflated salary.
The asymmetrical bet is well worth all these useless meetings to them. It is just an operating cost of the rules of this game.
You are absolutely right. The layers are useful for upper management and C-Suite. They are not useful for any actual work, actual workers, or productivity.
In a way, it is an abuse of organizational authority. The company might need more engineers so as to reduce the burden on existing engineers. But the upper management wants to more managers to build their empire to shield themselves from any work. Thus, what gets hired is managers after managers - completely against what the company needs.
As someone who doesn't use social media this analogy strikes me as a rationalization for something you know is bad for you and a waste of your time but you can't stop so you make up this fiction about how you would lose more by stopping.
An alcoholic who can't stop going to the bar because they will lose their drinking buddies is not a dollar auction.
As someone who doesn't use social media this analogy strikes me as a rationalization for something you know is bad for you and a waste of your time but you can't stop so you make up this fiction about a dollar auction.
An even more fundamental problem is in trying to judge something completely subjective like how good food tastes.
I assume you believe you have good taste in food and I very well might find what you think is good to be terrible. It is not impossible the majority finds what you think is good to be terrible too.
My experience is that the only way to know if I like a dish is to eat it and reviews are completely useless.
It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.
It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.