Amusingly, by accident, I started losing weight a month later, because I bought a kegerator, and I had up to 10 gallons at a time of Diet Coke in the kegs. Suddenly, I almost completely lost my urge to go to Taco Bell for every meal.
I guess it turns out that I wasn't addicted to fast food, I was addicted to "unlimited soda", and Taco Bell is the closest place to my house that had free soda refills. When I made it so that I could get as much cold soda as I wanted directly in my house, I completely lost the urge to go to Taco Bell, and I would eat comparatively-healthier stuff in my house. Within about a month, I had lost about 10lbs, and completely lost my cravings for real sugar.
After that I started more aggressively counting calories and ended up getting to about 191lbs, which is more or less in the "normal" range for someone my height.
I guess I thought that caffeine addiction didn't affect me, somehow, but I'm pretty convinced I was wrong about that. The kegerator more or less worked like a nicotine patch, but nowadays I've transitioned to the caffeine-free versions of soda now.
ETA: Just looked it up, it actually was just barely on the "obese" side.
I also had a habit of doing a small splash of sugary soda, with with the remaining ~95% as diet, which in a vacuum is probably medically insignificant but I think it was enough to keep sugar cravings going.
That said, I will acknowledge that the relatively-consequence-free nature of Diet Coke makes it a lot more addictive to me. It's much easier for me to drink Diet Coke every day, and lots of it, because I know that the likelihood of me actually facing a short-term consequence from it is relatively small.
At least now, I've transitioned away from the caffeine, so the only thing I really need to worry about is the sweeteners, which seem to be "mostly harmless" from the research I've done, so maybe I don't need to go any further.
If you have diet sodas on one hand and obesity on the other, they're definitely the lesser evil. But that's also a pretty low bar, since obesity is THE co-morbidity factor for just about everything.
That said, if you can develop a taste for coffee or tea, that's definitely the cheaper option.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmi...
That's obese! I'm always amazed how may fat people are walking around who think they're athletic, buff, and fit.
I'm 5'10" 155# at age 61. I count every calorie. It's the only way today with so much convienient, calorie laden, "addictive" food. The body-positivity folks would tell you that it's a mental illness and obsessive to track every calorie, but if I didn't, I'd gain wait. The calories-in/out formula for weight gain and loss is simple, a law of physics, and works for everyone.
I never thought I was “healthy” at that weight, to be clear.
I'm fairly sure it acts as my source of caffeine, because on days that I don't drink it in the morning, I get headaches. (It took me a while to connect this, I happened to be reading that headaches are a common symptom of caffeine withdrawal.)
Though he was shorter, natural bodybuilder Sean Connery was 6’3” and 190lbs at the start of his bond run. That’s a useful data point. Not only is he close to an ideal male physique for non bodybuilders, he was also very fit. Ad an inch and a half to him and 35lbs and that’s not “zero fat”.
Similarly I was once depressed and 260lbs. I was definitely obese.
Things are distorted in the US. We consider fat to be morbidly obese and dismiss fatness as normal now. Look at Trump. That’s normal obesity. Loot at Musk. That’s overweight.
If you are not cooking it from scratch yourself, it is almost guaranteed to be brimming with fat, salt, and sugar. This is true regardless of the source. Whether it be a frozen meal from the grocery store, a sandwich from the local deli, a dish from the bistro, or a quick bite from the coffee shop.
All of it is maximized fat, salt, sugar.
Seriously, I live in a major metro are and if you put a gun to my head and said "You have 20 minutes to pick-up an unmodified meal that is filling, mildly flavored, and healthy", I'd have to eat the bullet.
(And this doesn't even get into all the processed food ingredients)
In that sense, the 10% of people who aren't that busy, should be cooking.
Very few people are that busy. It's just not a priority.
Americans spend an astonishing 4 hours and 37 minutes looking at our phones every day.
I can't cook meals while on the subway, or in between meetings at work, or waiting in a doctors office / car repair / bus stop / etc.
but I can sure as hell be on my phone.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635574128/
And even extra salt isn't necessarily a problem for most people with typical genetics, either. The issue with hypertension is more to do with osmolality than absolute quantity. A lot of people have taken the "low sodium" fad a little too far.
I really don’t understand this “I don’t have a choice all fast food is bad” some are pretty healthy even if they are less tasty. I think the real discussion is how addictive the trash foods are.
I agree with you, but when you factor in cost, availability, familiarity, and other psychological factors, you end up with people instinctively choosing really unhealthy options.
There's an acculturation issue IMO. I grew up white trash, while my wife grew up wealthy in an Asian household. I cook lots of healthy food, and even wrote a nutrition app before they really existed and hosted it locally, tracked my food, have spent months where I cooked everything I ate from scratch so I knew there was no added salt (I've had hypertension since I was 16yo, even though I was an elite high school athlete with a six pack and everything).
Despite all this, when under time pressure, I will instinctively prep unhealthy food because that's what I was raised with. It's completely mindless. One less thing to stress about, pure muscle memory taking over.
EDIT: My wife, OTOH, will throw stuff together that is so insanely health and based on random vegetables lying around, because that's what she grew up learning to cook.
It's not even conscious. I don't want to prep that food. It just happens because the stress of devoting even one brain cell to planning something that I didn't spend nearly two decades surrounded by just adds to the stress, even after all the deprogramming I've done the two decades since.
The issue here though is that no place ever subtracts cost as you cut ingredients. Add extra bacon? +$1.75. Subtract bacon? -$0.00. Chipotle prices in you getting a bunch of extras off the bat.
So you end up getting bent over for trying to be health conscious. All the junk is already priced into the cost, so you become the sucker for leaving it out.
I personally cannot eat dairy, so every sandwich I get I still pay for the cheese, and every coffee I get I still have to pay for the oat milk (despite not getting any sugar or pumps or whatever). I could rant a lot about this, as my girlfriend knows well, hah
As another comment mentioned, this particular dish has >2000mg of sodium, the recommended intake is to keep under 1500mg per day.
People would gasp if they prepared that food for themselves.
When I finish a steak with 2 tbsp of butter it tastes luxurious, and any respectable steakhouse is finishing a steak with a stick of butter and garnishes it with an ice cream scoop of butter.
I tried Cava once and it was expensive for what it was and did not taste as good.
That being said, I still would prefer Cava over other fast casual places for sure.
[1]https://assets.ctfassets.net/kugm9fp9ib18/20WmUiLdcxokvsfq8I...
However, don't we grow tolerant to pleasures? For instance, the first time you have a salty chip, its great. The 100th time you had one, its not great.
Also, curious if you are limiting it to processed foods, or are making claims that potatoes are more addictive than before.
The first, obvious, but it has manufacturing and inventory costs. The latter is happening on such a tiny scale, its not noteworthy.
Danes do drink a lot of beer though and they start early. There's no "drinking age" and teens can buy beer/wine at 16 and booze at 18.
> Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?
Not enough fiber (fruits, veg).
Fats demonized for a long spell.
No time for preparing whole foods in daily lives.
No easy access to cheap, prepared whole foods.
Edit: car-focused culture and zoning laws/planning that result in more sedentary day-to-day lifestyle that magnifies the effect of the poor diet.
Apples, Bananas, Carrots, Milk.
I imagine there are other foods too. But its weird to see people think they don't exist.
If you go to Asia -- Japan, Taiwan for example -- you'll find cheap, fresh, prepared whole foods everywhere to the extent that many households have very small refrigerators and many families have access to prepared whole foods even without having to expend the time cost of cooking at home.
For a dual-income household, this is a big win.
There's various reasons for this: lower labor costs, smaller land mass/higher density, better access to local/fresh ingredients, more favorable climate and longer growing seasons, etc.
Those you listed also aren't prepared.
Also, with a pinch of pedestrian-hostile design, where some places don't even have sidewalks.
Yes, if you cut the carbs the problem is solved, but there are different kinds of carbs and some kinds in moderation can be eaten regularly without causing big glucose spikes and metabolic disease.
Personally I go for low carb to make it easier, but I still eat limited fruit and starchy vegetables and rice and beans. (Some kinds of fruit do spike glucose and I need to be careful with.)
I'm not sure why people think fiber is great. Yes it pushes things through. Yes there are bacteria that eat it. So does other food.
But it also makes you go poop more often, which is bad for your body.
I mostly eat meats and relatively low fiber food. I don't track it closely, so occasionally I'll eat corn and it passes through.
---
My point:
"Why fiber?" Actually prove that the generic intake of 'fiber' is good. There are so many different types of fiber, the macro size of the fiber matters(ground pinto beans has a different gastro effect than whole), the actual molecules its made of, etc..
Fiber is good for me because it acts as a stool softener.
In my 40's, I had several bouts of diverticulitis. Hard stool may have been a contributing factor in developing the underlying issue, diverticulosis. I suspect more fiber would have made this less likely.
Later, due to the recurring diverticulitis, I had elective surgery to remove the problematic section of my colon. The surgeon cautioned me to ensure my stool stays soft, so that the place where he stitched my remaining colon back together are at lower risk of opening up. This is a long-term concern, so I'll be careful about it for the rest of my life.
Also, IIUC, straining to pass hard stool increases the risk of swollen hemorrhoids, which nobody enjoys.
Because a diet rich in fiber has been repeatedly found to significantly reduce the chance of early death?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026156142...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25552267/
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
(You can find many more)
Literally thousands of studies with one of the clearest results in nutritional science, frankly.
If you’re straining to crap because you don’t eat enough fibre, sure.
> I mostly eat meats and relatively low fiber food.
Are you Hank Hill? Pooping in a choleric or diarrhea sense is bad; pooping once a day is fine. How often is more often?
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/when-dieting-doesnt-work...
> 121 eligible trials with 21 942 patients were included and reported on 14 named diets and three control diets ... At 12 months the effects on weight reduction and improvements in cardiovascular risk factors largely disappear.
>What if they'd lasted 12 months, or two years, or a lifetime? The benefit would likely have been greater and more long-lasting. The trick is to pick a diet with foods you actually like so that it's not so hard to stick with it.
Meaningful behavioral change is hard, especially in a modern food environment.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989512/#:~:text=co...
> In contrast, a matched group of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery patients who experienced significant metabolic adaptation 6 months after the surgery had no detectable metabolic adaptation after 1 year despite continued weight loss (17). It is intriguing to speculate that the lack of long-term metabolic adaptation following bariatric surgery may reflect a permanent resetting of the body weight set-point (18).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weig...
Keeping up the basal metabolic rate is part of the rationale behind intermittent/extended fasting instead of pure calories-in-calories-out weightloss advice.
Long term change in one of the most fundamental aspects of ones life and biology is a massive challenge.
Also, not everything is reversible biologically.
You answered your own question. Weight loss programs do not work long term because only healthy nutrition does. I have been downvoted here before, but I would argue that healthy nutrition is expensive. It is cheaper in terms of time and cost to consume quick meals full of carbs, sugars, chemical additives that wrecks our bodies. It not only takes money but also time to cook meals that are heart healthy, prevent diabetes, and provides healthy fats/proteins/carbs.
That's not entirely true, although it is a big factor. As an anecdotal example, there was a period of my life where nearly 100% of my diet was fast food: there was a McD's, BK, and Wendy's in my neighborhood. I did this part out of laziness, and part because Supersize Me annoyed me. In contrast to Supersize Me I dilligently tracked my caloric intake from those meals and intentionally limited things to be affect the changes I wanted to see in my weight.
Net result? I lost weight until I achieved my target, and then I was able to stay steady.
Would I recommend this plan? No. I was focusing purely on weight and I'm sure there were many other suboptimal knock on effects for my body. But people act like it is physically impossible to lose weight via pure caloric deficit and/or by consuming fast food. That's not true.
I think of these things because I worked in a kitchen that made dough, and our dough mixer always needed to be lubricated. I once found grease that had dripped from above into the mixing bowl. Luckily I am someone who takes such things seriously, but there are a lot of careless people out there. Even if you wipe off grease, an invisible trace amount will remain on the surface unless you clean it with a solvent. I also worked in a warehouse that stored machine parts used in food packaging equipment. There was drywall work being done at the time and the whole place was coated in gypsum dust. I remember handling "food grade" lubricant and looking up its safety data sheet (SDS) out of curiosity, and my takeaway from reading it was that it's still probably not something you would want to eat.
We eat out too much. To the point where we overpay to have shoddy delivery services bring us fast food.
The portions are too big. 1,500 calorie burgers, 2,000 calorie appetizers (the thing you eat before you eat your meal), 1,600 calorie 'salads'. Let's not forget the copious amounts of soda. When's the last time you at a single slice of pizza?
Plus ubiquitous snacks like chips or cookies that are precisely engineered to get to eat as many as you can.
Thank you, New Yorker, for letting me read the article without a subscription.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
In this sense, I think dietary advice has been relatively stable over the decades, though there is definitely arguments over how much is "too much" and what proportion is "mostly". Perhaps even what is covered by "plants".
It's not about shaming yourself or having tremendous restraint. Dieting is like "not thinking about elephants" in that you'll obsess over it if you try not to.
What has helped is understanding true hunger and the sensation nutrients have. Sugar can feel as strong as a narcotic in certain conditions. If you are eating 20g of sugar you should have a strong sensation. if you aren't, the calibration is off.
Junk food (including restaurant cuisine) plays a part in disrupting that calibration. It's like listening to a deafening rock concert every day and then trying to distinguish a whisper. But junk food isn't poisonous. I eat "junky" food daily like chocolate truffles, marshmallows, butter, ice cream, bacon fat, donuts, brownies, chocolate cake, McDonalds. The difference is that a mouthful has an immediate sensation.
Would you be able to catch a baseball by calculating the vectors? no, you just look at it and raise your hand.
It's too easy to over eat sugar and carbs yet still be hungry, nutritionally deficient.
It's why Ozempic is effective- one feels satiated even if deficient.
Yes, "Nestle" != "Nestlé", but reading that she defended the chocolate chip cookie seemed so on the nose.
It's from this NYT article and I think it hits the mark: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...
Snacks and meat have too much calories
https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/12/11/major-food-c...
(I don't suggest this is the one lawsuit we need, it's just a start)
I did the math once and Americans ingest a lot of hexane just from seed oils every year on average.
Peanut oil is a seed oil though and it's refined the same way as others using hexane.
I don't know how much it's the fact of them being seed oils vs the toxic stuff added to them in the refining process.
I deliberately tried my best to isolate that variable, but obviously some other changes are downstream from that decision.
I don't think I could ever go back - I feel more clear headed, have begun losing the last stubborn 10-15 lbs which I have always found to be a challenge, and my skin has improved.
YMMV, but to me the results are plainly obvious.
In the years since then I was introduced to concepts like the "Bliss Point" [1] and "Taste Satiety" which explained both the taste of Doritos and the use of Kimchi to cleanse the palette so you could eat more.
Over time the Korean diet has changed and I've started to recognize that the food sciences are taking over for the traditional home-made meals and the flavors in Korean food are changing dramatically -- you can feel them targeting the bliss point in flavor. In some ways its getting harder to eat out because it's not hard to cook at home, and make it taste better, and we can keep ingredients fresh. You can still find small restaurants run by old people who make things the home cooked way, but all of the larger restaurants and chains have this new kind of sweetness in the food.
There's a well known TV chef [3] who even advises people on how to make their home cooking taste more like restaurants. The magic ingredient? Add sugar to basically everything. Gone is the delicate sweetness from carrots or pears, now even beef dishes blast you in the face like a candy bar. It used to be unusual to see an obese person at all in Korea (I was usually the largest person anywhere, and I'm not big by American standards). But now it's not at all unusual. Korea is where the mukbang originated [4].
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety
Processed foods are part of the problem (in that they are tastier and easier to consume than "rawer" foods), but increased wealth and ability to consume food is also a part of the problem
Food has literally never been cheaper and tastier
Even quick snacks found at U.S. gas stations (when I'm running late) consist chiefly of mass-produced, sugary, heavily processed desserts like Twinkies and HoHos, whereas options for fresh fruit and locally made goods with natural ingredients are often not to be found. I take a pass and look for an open supermarket instead. I doubt that it is a supply chain issue: in the north of Scandinavia and Canada, the outback of Australia, and especially through Asia it is almost always possible to get somewheat healthy quick snacks of a local variety at roadside petrol stations.
The sugar industry's manipulation of scientific research has further wrecked the industry, deflecting blame from refined sugar. Legacy of WW1's food rationing and the conscription of farmers has resulted in a food system unable to serve the population #s.
As the joke goes, the British empire dominated the world to obtain spices... not to use any of them. Is British food supposed to be bland? Yes if correctly prepared.
Our food culture has been shaped by a century of disinformation, perpetuated by governments and the education system. The consequences of this disinformation campaign are far-reaching, with many people developing unhealthy relationships with food.
Want to fix this? Gotta start with the governments who are pushing the disinformation.
"The term “ultra-processed food” was introduced by a Brazilian epidemiologist named Carlos Monteiro. In the early seventies, Monteiro was a primary-care doctor in the Ribeira Valley, an impoverished part of rural Brazil, and he treated many plantation workers with swollen bellies, stunted growth, and exhaustion. He started to think that they needed better food, in larger quantities, more than they needed medicine. He relocated to São Paulo, hoping to study malnutrition. Then he learned that around a million Brazilians were growing obese each year. Strangely, a shrinking number of people were buying ingredients that doctors blamed for the obesity epidemic, such as salt, sugar, and oil." - he went to São Paulo to study malnutrition, he found malnutrition - just not the type he expected.
Also ultra-processed is contextual. They're eating Nattō for breakfast, not McMuffins.
Couldn't quickly find a source for Japan, but this meta-study [1, see Table 1] gives a list of the percentage of UPFs per national diet. It lists Korea (25.1%) and Taiwan (19.5%), which may be relatively close. Anyway, the US comes in at 58%, clearly a big difference.
> is vastly healthier
Also a bold assertion. Citation?
So, fast food, preservatives, single use plastics, shelf stable processed food, etc all are a result.
We're not going to convert everyone into only eating fresh and non-processed stuff, so you'll have to find out which specific ways of processing or which additions to processed food are problematic and address those.
If you have an argument, make it. If you see an argument you want to refute, refute it. Complaining about people that aren't even commenting in the thread serves no useful purpose.
To use your example, surely hand made noodles aren't ultra processed. But are Bertolli noodles ultra processed? The only difference in ingredients is what emulsifier is used.
Food, biology, etc. is complicated and reducing it to TikTok sound bites often results in squabbles.
How dare they raise issues you don't like!
would you like some low fat diet coke with your high carbohydrate freedom fries?