fishmech posted:

What's condescending is your insistence on putting out the extraneous bullshit. All that needs to be said is "eat less then you do now" - nothing else is really backed by the facts.

fishmech posted:

"Healthier foods" is a thing that has no scientific basis, but rather a Puritanesque semi-religious basis.

SlipUp posted:

I never agreed that people are badly educated.

SlipUp posted:

The reductionist would at least be obliged to provide an explanation as to why these incorrect intuitions arose in the first place.

SlipUp posted:

The reductionist would at least be obliged to provide an explanation as to why these incorrect intuitions arose in the first place.

Discendo Vox posted:

Discendo Vox posted:

The problem is the promotion and application of these features where they aren't relevant. "Reductionist trimming" is the best policy because industry and other bad actors use extraneous statements to induce health halo effects in the consumerbase. People read "fat-free" and "no added sugar" on FoP and think that means it's a diet food. Industry knows this and exploits it. Health gurus and pop sci speakers exploit this confusion and increase it, sometimes with interest group funding. Food purists and anti-industry pressure groups distort research findings.

Discendo Vox posted:

No


Don't

HootTheOwl posted:

Do you just live your life making posts about tone and drinking Soylent since you're a being evolved above all emotions like taste.

fishmech posted:

Salt has little to no impact on the vast majority of people, according to recent research. It doesn't actually cause high blood pressure, it can merely aggravate it in people who already have it from another source, and have certain conditions (the vast majority of people simply piss it out about as soon as it comes in).

And you don't seem up on health since you think we're talking about diseases caused by eating, of which there are practically none. You for example can't have a lot of potassium if your kidneys are having issues, but you don't get kidney troubles from eating a lot of potassium. If you get diabetes you gotta watch your sugar, but overeating induced diabetes appears to come up just as often in people who ate a relatively low amount of sugar while overeating on fats and protein.

The fact remains that unless you have specific health conditions, you can eat pretty much any diet you want so long as you achieve at least the minimum recommended amounts of macro and micro nutrients averaged out over months. Yes this means you can eat grease covered pizza and drink Coca Cola by the gallon, so long as the portions are kept within a proper for your height and weight and activity level limit.

fishmech posted:

Because, for example, a lot of people found it was easiest for them to cut to the requisite low calorie rates needed to not get fat if they avoided fats. Other people, sugars. Other people, carbs in general. Still other people did it by only eating foods that at are green in color. Others swear by never eating anything red or purple. Basically there are assloads of things you can do that for a particular person, can get them into eating the necessary low amount of calories. They all work equally well, and none of them work at all if the person manages to overeat anyway.

And historically governments have tended to push a program based on the current most popular fads, see for example the push for low-fat in the 80s and 90s which led to the rise of higher sugar.

Because of all this the smartest thing to advise is just "eat the stuff you love to eat, but make sure you're eating less of it".

edit: And on top of everything else, incorrect intuitions arose because nutritional science barely had its poo poo together at all before the 50s, and still has taken a while to get a good idea of things. Because studying this stuff is hard. And so much diet advice over time has been based on centuries old intuition from the times when only the rich got fat, and doctors treated you with leeches.

Lemming posted:

The point is that the eating habits you develop before you start suffering from those health conditions are hard to change. 1 in 4 Americans die of heart disease. Almost 10 percent of Americans have diabetes. Almost 1 in 3 have high blood pressure. Almost 1 in 3 have high cholesterol. These are severe health effects that may not be caused by eating those diets, but those diets make it worse when you do have those health conditions, and chances are very, very good that any given person will develop one or more of those conditions, and once they have, it's very difficult for them to change their diet.

If your diet will aggravate a health condition, and you are likely to develop a health condition, then that diet is a bad, risky diet. Sure, it means you can eat whatever garbage you want as long as you inhuman willpower and self control and can completely change your diet once you develop heart problem, or diabetes, or high blood pressure, or etc etc, but since most people can't, those diets are dangerous.

SlipUp posted:

Well I agree with the sentiment even if I believe there are numerous other factors at play. I don't deny that people will lose weight by eating less either, but I would maintain however that different people may be more responsive to different strategies that along with eating less can be combined or not with any of the following: eating differently, exercising, behavioural therapy, and poverty reduction.

fishmech posted:

The thing is there's no useful message that can be given to everyone beyond just eat less. Every diet scheme will work for different people, pretty much at random, and fail to work for the rest of the population. As such the government messaging should be "just eat less". Exercise is already repeatedly touted by government PSAs, whether therapy at all will be helpful is highly dependent on the person and poverty reduction isn't done through advertising it's done through actually handing out the money to people.

SlipUp posted:

For exercise I made a suggestion a few pages back about Public Gyms. I think we can definitely be more proactive on the fitness side than just PSAs. Therapy is highly dependant on the individual, but for those individuals it can be massively beneficial when nothing else has. Do we have a societal obligation to get them that therapy? I also agree with just handing out money to people and suggested as much. Surely you can agree this approach carries pretty much all the benefits of eating less while being more encompassing?

fishmech posted:

And all of those conditions have little to do with diet, other than if you get fat eating any combination of foods you're more likely to get them. Do you really not get that? And for the vast majority of people, they can leave those symptoms behind by eating the same food they were eating before, just less of it, because the conditions are caused by being overweight and fat, not by any particular diet combination. You see the same things crop up everywhere people get fat, regardless of what the average fat person there actually eats.

The things that actually require substantially different diets than "whatever you want, just less of it" are rarely caused by diet. They tend to have genetic or infectious causes, and rarely they'll be caused by massive injury to an organ by physical means.

Lemming posted:

Yeah, and I get that vaccinations are only useful if you're exposed to the disease. Those conditions absolutely have a lot to do with diet. Having a diet that isn't going to kill you faster when you inevitably get a health problem that most Americans will eventually get one or more of is helping protect you in advance before anything bad happens. When you get one of those problems, a doctor will tell you to change your diet. What's easier, developing a safe diet in the first place, or changing your diet a lot once you're dying? The longer you stick to a certain eating pattern, the harder it is to break out of. The causes of those health issues is also not limited to being overweight. That's obviously a huge factor, but it's not the only one.

And "whatever you want but less" isn't a solution if what you want is something like a Big Mac, which is 540 calories and almost 1000mg of salt. If you had high blood pressure and needed to reduce your salt intake, that would make your diet, uh, like one and a half Big Macs per day, and then more food with no salt in it so you don't starve to death. Which is a substantial diet change.

fishmech posted:

It's more encompassing, but it's all also things that aren't messaging/advertising/educational based.

Also as far as public gyms go, don't expect people to show up en masse, you know? Because laziness is so totally a thing

fishmech posted:

Get this through your head: the only thing that makes a diet bad is if it involves excessive calories compared to what would be needed to maintain you at a healthy weight for your height and activity level, or if it meets those goals but somehow you're grossly undereating on a major macronutrient or completely lacking in multiple vitamins or minerals

And salt isn't bad for you. Get over that outdated bullshit too while you're at it. And Big Macs are absolutely fine to eat, guy who apparently learned his negative knowledge of nutrition from the documentary with the guy who ate 8 big macs a day or whatever. There's absolutely nothing objectionable in a Big Mac.

SlipUp posted:

I don't think everyone would show up, no. But from personal experience private gym access is a nightmare. Waiting lists, membership fees for outrageously long term memberships, massively expensive personal trainers. Doing away with some of that would encourage more people to go, save money, and I'd tie it to the fitness tax credit I mentioned then too. The idea is if you can provide documentation of a reduction in body fat %/blood pressure or improvement in cardio you would be eligible for the credit. I agree with you that laziness is a problem I suppose where we disagree is whether it is one of the issues contributing to obesity. Regardless, if they are too lazy for a gym there's still three other vectors where the disease can be addressed.

Open question to you, vox, and whoever: What societal changes do you feel should be implemented, if any, to combat obesity? If not, why?

Lemming posted:

The other thing that makes a diet bad is if you have health conditions that are exacerbated by things you're eating in your diet. Since it's harder to change your diet once you develop a health problem, it's a lot safer and smarter to have a diet that isn't dangerous once you develop the condition you are statistically likely to develop in the first place.

I talked specifically about salt and blood pressure with respect to the Big Mac. The CDC says to limit your salt intake to below 1500 mg/day if you have high blood pressure. A Big Mac has about 1000mg of salt in it. If you eat more than one and a half Big Macs, you will be eating too much salt if you have high blood pressure. Since a Big Mac has about 540 calories in it and most people need to eat more than 810 calories every day, this would require supplementing your diet with a lot of food with literally 0 salt in it, which is a substantial diet change more than "eat whatever you want but less." I'm sorry this very simple math is too complicated for you.

Edit: My point is that instead of having the 5 Big Macs Every Day diet that fucks you over when you get high blood pressure, it's a lot smarter and safer to have a diet that doesn't have 5000mg of salt in it in the first place, even if it won't cause any health problems directly at the time.

Discendo Vox posted:

Slipup, I'd try to divide policies into 3 camps:

1. Attempting to change exercise
I don't think these are particularly feasible or effective, and they're hard to implement. There are other health benefits to exercise that can be discussed, but it's not a very effective way to target weight loss specifically- and national gym systems aren't really viable.

2. Secondary ("nudge"-style) regulatory efforts
Ingredient-based or behavioralist regs have been in vogue since the book got published, but there's not really good evidence they work and they incentivize evasion by industry. Claimed effects of "having a taste for" different substances are based in questionable research at best, and they can't be easily or directly acted upon.

3. Public education as an indirect effect on caloric intake
I like this set of policies, but think that at this point we mostly need stronger restrictions on health and weight claims, particularly in food packaging and marketing. A major area of difficulty here is the dietary supplement field, as well as the generally insufficient funding of FDA and FTC, which limits enforcement of existing rules.

I wanna emphasize that I don't hold fishmech's overarching policy position- calories are all that matter for weight gain and loss, but other nutrients and substances in diet can and should be discussed with regard to other health markers and outcomes. I also think wider-ranging public education efforts, particularly through labeling regulation, are important. Many of the problems we currently have are because the information ecosystem around health is a fetid cesspool of false claims and bad actors.

And fishmech, the salt-hypertension relationship is still the subject of active and vociferous debate. At a minimum, the relationship is unclear. It's disingenuous to pretend that there isn't empirical uncertainty there.

fishmech posted:

But generally, that is solved by simply eating less, not radically changing your diet. There is no such thing as a diet that is inherently dangerous outside of really oddball ones that have no protein, or no carbs or no fats, or which deliberately avoid micronutrients, or which are substantially over or under your height's "maintain healthy weight" level.

You keep ranting about how afraid you are of salt and the horrors of a gram of sodium in a burger the verage consumer has a couple times a week tops. It's wholly irrelevant, and high blood pressure tends to go away simply by eating less and losing weight, barring other organ problems also being present.

There's nothing wrong with having a whole 5 grams of sodium a day, deal with that fact. You'll just need to piss more, barring certain rare genetic conditions or cases where you developed organ problems separately.

As it stands, public health officials are seeing more cases where people are eating way too little sodium based on scares about sodium and becoming at risk to various problems because of it.

Discendo Vox posted:

The salt-hypertension relationship is still the subject of active and vociferous debate. At a minimum, the relationship is unclear. It's disingenuous to pretend that there isn't empirical uncertainty there.

Lemming posted:

You also say "public health officials are seeing more cases where people are eating way too little sodium based on scares about sodium and becoming at risk to various problems because of it." Do you have numbers on hand? 10 cases instead of 5 would be an increase but not relevant in any way to the conversation. I'm skeptical that you're not trying to dishonestly frame the conversation in a certain way through being technically correct about an irrelevant fact.

Lemming posted:

You keep arguing against things I'm not saying, so feel free to point out where I said the diets were inherently dangerous, rather than dangerous for their potential future effects if you develop a health condition. Please also point out where I said salt was dangerous outside the context of high blood pressure. Please point out where I said having 5 grams of sodium a day was bad for you outside the context of where you keep eating that sort of diet when you develop high blood pressure.

You also say "public health officials are seeing more cases where people are eating way too little sodium based on scares about sodium and becoming at risk to various problems because of it." Do you have numbers on hand? 10 cases instead of 5 would be an increase but not relevant in any way to the conversation. I'm skeptical that you're not trying to dishonestly frame the conversation in a certain way through being technically correct about an irrelevant fact.

Discendo Vox posted:

Look, I'm trying to be polite here, fishmech. You Are Wrong.

fishmech posted:

In recent studies we aren't seeing high sodium intake causing problems, but rather exacerbating problems induced by other things. That if you already have clinically proven consistent high blood pressure hen you specifically should try to reduce it if you eat a lot, but that Joe No Diagnosis doesn't seem to need to.

There's also a noticeable lack of consensus on what even counts as "high sodium intake" and what seems to be a consensus that whatever the target should be, it's higher then what many public health orgs are currently recommending (and which very few people stick by anyway). And that separately, there seems to be a very wide range that results in health as regards sodium intake.

fishmech posted:

You have repeatedly contrasted "other diets" with "safe diets". The opposite of safe is dangerous. Did you really not think that through? You excessively harped on having a lot of sodium as bad for you in general when you were struggling to find a way to claim the Big Mac is bad to eat.

The study from this article mentions it: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/15/183883415/eating-much-less-salt-may-be-risky-in-an-over-salted-world People with excessively low salt intake were ending up with more frequent medical problems then people eating "normal" or even "excessive" amounts.

fishmech posted:

As it stands, public health officials are seeing more cases where people are eating way too little sodium based on scares about sodium and becoming at risk to various problems because of it.

Lemming posted:

The argument that I have been consistently making is that certain diets are "safer" in the sense that they are easier to modify to follow medical guidelines if you develop certain health conditions. You'll note I've used the sodium example a few times, where I talk about how a diet that is already higher in sodium requires more radical changes (ie the Big Mac diet) to fall in line with the guidelines. This is abundantly clear from the context of what I'm arguing. If you take my argument out of context and focus on the word "safe" outside of this context, you can twist what I'm saying, but that would be dishonest of you. Please feel free to quote where I said "eating too much salt is bad for you in general" like you just accused me of in the bolded portion.

You also made a very, very specific claim here:


that there was a relevant increase in people who eat too little sodium specifically as a result of "scares" about sodium. Would you care to back that up? The fact that not eating enough sodium may be bad for you was not the relevant point.

SlipUp posted:

Wasn't an open question but I don't disagree with you. I would like to know what fishmech thinks.


There is such a thing as greedy reductionism though. It comes up more in ecological debates, where they call it fragmentalism. The simplistic approach "fragments" the perception of reality and we lose our collective ability to predict and evaluate the entire complexity of the problem. People overeating led us to this, but what led people to overeating? Treating just the overeating is a symptomatic treatment that doesn't address the root cause of the issue in our society, which could be a worse problem down the line.

Arglebargle III posted:

Fishmech doesn't know how to treat overeating though. He only knows how to tell people not to.

fishmech posted:

If that is your argument, then your argument is absolutely stupid. It is about as easy to modify one diet as it is any other when someone ends up with a health problem that will remain even if they cut to a normal weight. Namely, it's pretty difficult because people like what they like. I still don't know why you want to act like big macs are especially bad other than the stupid meme factor.

The study believes that the under consumption of salt leading to health issues is a result of recent (past 20 years) health messaging that sodium needs to be cut severely

fishmech posted:

The treatment for overeating is literally just "not overeating".

Lemming posted:

Not all diets are equally easy to modify. There are certain diets that fall under your "eat the same stuff but less" and others that require you to stop eating certain foods and start eating others. If you have a diet where you eat 2300 mg of salt a day for 2000 calories, it would require much less modification than if you are 5000 mg for 2000 calories *edit: for the case where you develop high blood pressure and should lower your salt intake to 1500 mg. Please point out where I made the argument at any point that Big Macs were especially bad, I merely used it as something that had a high ratio of salt to calories. Apparently that pushed one of your buttons though because you seem stuck on it.

OK, you say "the study believes." What kind of numbers are we talking about? If it's a few hundred people, then it's an entirely different problem than if suddenly tens to hundreds of thousands of people are suffering health problems specifically as a result of what you call "scares" about salt. I wasn't able to read more than the abstract from the link in the NPR article. It could certainly indicate that messaging about salt should be "the appropriate amount" rather than just "less." Over consumption of salt is still a huge issue for the almost one third of Americans who have it, though.

SlipUp posted:

If I could quote myself: People overeating led us to this, but what led people to overeating? Treating just the overeating is a symptomatic treatment that doesn't address the root cause of the issue in our society, which could be a worse problem down the line.

fishmech posted:

All diets are equally hard to modify when people are set in them, sorry. You keep harping on big macs despite them not being particularly high sodium dude. To say nothing of how a lot of the sodium in them in particular can be removed by deleting some of the sauce etc.

What you don't get is we have no idea what "the appropriate amount" of sodium people should target is. We know that if you eat very level all sorts of health issues crop up, but there's no level above that solidly causes other health problems to occur without confounding factors. As such messaging for "the appropriate amount" is impossible.

Lemming posted:

Nah reducing the calories you eat by 10% to lose some weight is way easier than cutting out gluten because you find out you have Celiac's, so you're obviously wrong there. I used Big Macs as an example one time and you haven't been able to address my argument beyond "you think they're bad lol" despite my using clear numbers to illustrate my point. Are you planning on addressing any of the parts where you obviously lied about or misrepresented my argument, or are you hoping that you can just ignore it? What about the part where you claimed that "scares" were causing a notable (in that you thought it was happening often enough that it was worth bringing up) increase in people who were being harmed by low-sodium diets?), but haven't brought up any concrete numbers or data?

I'm not convinced by your argument that we don't know enough about what salt levels are appropriate that we can't communicate what an appropriate amount of salt is. If the CDC is recommending certain levels, I find that institution a lot more trustworthy than "fishmech's shitposting." Do you care to post some relevant studies or articles to support that position, rather than just asserting it's so?

Discendo Vox posted:

vvvvv Oh look, it's like I'm psychic. Lay coverage based on "the most recent report"- and it seems he's only read the first few paragraphs. It's being actively debated, you doofus. I know the authors, you idiot. I read the report when it first came out, you goon. It's not settled.

fishmech posted:

All diet changes are hard when someone's set in their ways. Were it not so, it'd be a lot easier to get people to eat less in general. There are no "clear numbers" on big macs that illustrate your point. The study already covers the low sodium thing, go read it. I don't have the free uni literature access anymore to post the full paper but it's down in my notes as covering the subject as of a thread from back when I did.

There is literally no consensus on what the appropriate salt intake for the mass population is. There used to be one, but it seems it was unsupported, so right now we don't what the true one is. You're the one shitposting because you insist on harping on a diet fad as The Key, which is known to be false. Go look at the literature, there's wide disagreement on what's an appropriate sodium level, or if there even is a particular healthy range, beyond "don't eat very very little".

Solkanar512 posted:

Fishmech, you're seriously going to pretend like this doesn't exist? You're allowed to change your mind when you see new data, christ.

Lemming posted:

I agree changing your diet is almost always going to be hard, but you specifically said that it was equally hard for all diets, which again, is obviously wrong.

If it's difficult for you to get the study, why do you think it's easier for me? I'm not going to do your work for you. Post an easily accessible source if you want your point to be taken seriously. Again, your specific implication was that a notable number of people were harmed by switching to a low sodium diet specifically because of "scares" about eating too much salt.

I didn't claim there was a consensus about salt intake for everyone. The only diet I've made specific reference to is reducing your salt intake to 1500mg if you have high blood pressure, which I got from the CDC's website. In what way is that a diet fad? Where have I said it's "The Key" or the only thing or even the most important thing that matters? Feel free to stop lying about and misrepresenting my arguments.

Lemming posted:

Is it impossible for you to address the arguments people are actually making rather than the straw man you have in your head, or is it just physically painful?

fishmech posted:

The argument you're actually making is "I want to blame this on salt, and I think people who eat a lot of salt are bad" and "I really want to get angry at big macs".