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Helsing, Zodium is telling you why you're deeply wrong nicely, others are doing it more harshly. Whichever way it's presented to you, it's still wrong. Nutritional science is not at a level where we can draw a ton of inferences from it. The past decade or so has mostly been learning that our old, confident, highly moralistic views were wrong, and that we can't make a lot of the connections we thought. It wouldn't matter if the snack food you had available to everyone to eat in your vending machines was natural-as-gently caress nuts or cups of black bean soup, the only thing that we can confidently say matters is calorie consumption. For example, the bans on sodas in various forms is silly because most people switch to drinking milk, which is super-high calorie, or fruit juice, which is super high calorie and fructose so actually just as bad for developing type II. Individual-level behavior policing looks like the low-hanging fruit of public health but it's actually really, really hard to address in many areas, especially those areas most associated with class, stress, and pleasure. If you want to go after that low-hanging fruit, it is dumb as a box of rocks to go after 'nutrition' when we don't have solid science. What you should do is promote activity, exercise, walking places, because that both has extremely solid science backing it up, and small gains and improvements still have a massive effect. If you do want to go after food, then there is one meaningful metric: calorie content, and pretty much only two ways to get people to reduce that: portion size reduction and frequency of eating reduction, both of which are mostly cultural values and not individual, anyway. It is sad, but true, that people with your moralistic views tend to derail any policy-level discussion--though OP poisoned the well in this case by assuming that individual-level waste was a good target. As far as food waste goes, 'processed foods' (which by your mix of definitions are just preserved foods) are less-wasted than fresh foods, for relatively obviously reasons (i.e. they're preserved). Communal cooking, biodigesters, refrigeration units, an improved distribution network, all of these would be cool things to talk about. I like biodigesters quite a lot myself, because they keep things on-site and reinforce the idea that 'waste' doesn't exist, that anything we're throwing out can be repurposed. You can put them in buildings, too, where in urban areas they are a lot more good than recommending individual composting because that requires an entire transportation system to be added, and it's really easy to contaminate compost in a way that makes using it unhealthy, too. blowfish posted:Hopefully people will finally understand that SIGNIFICANCE!!! PUBLISH!!!11!!11!1!!!! is not gospel truth, especially without there being additional studies in support. In Public Health anyway there is a big, big push to look at effect size instead, but that to me, while an improvement, is going to lead to some problems too. And yeah we need to publish negative results with the same enthusiasm but that's a big cultural shift. I actually think that China could do the world a huge service by slowing down their attempts to do envelope-pushing research (where they have a ridiculously bad rate of success and a lot of fraud) and just attempting to replicate experiments and disproving a lot of poo poo that is accepted because one paper had an alpha of .0001. Zodium posted:
That would be a good thread if done well; I worry about that sort of thing in the public consciousness being hijacked into "Turns out science might be wrong about everything!" But the amount of wasted time and effort in science, both hard and soft, working off of assumptions that turn out to have been based in papers citing papers all the way back to one poorly operationalizing paper from the 70s sucks. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 12:03
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wateroverfire posted:FWIW I have no part in the nutrition derail - that was not the purpose of posting this thread. Focusing on individual-level behavior seems to make sense because if you get someone to successfully change it has a huge effect, but in the actual, real world, it is very difficult to enact a campaign that gets people to change behavior, especially if it is highly culturally bound up, like food and eating are. So if you want to talk about affecting the individual you need to talk about affecting the culture. Most of the food waste at the individual level comes from it being wasted before its used or leftovers, and the only real way to culturally affect that would be more communal living and eating. So, addressing the supply chain is still what makes the most sense, because it's by far the easiest target.
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Mar 29, 2016 13:27
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wateroverfire posted:I'm not arguing that we shouldn't address the supply chain, so we agree! "Steps are being taken" is a really silly phrase to throw in there. What steps? How fast are they being taken? What are the obstacles. That consumer waste is a bigger problem, again, doesn't mean that it's up to individual behavior. it means we need to adjust population-level stuff, because super-obviously people on their own aren't going to do it. Your focus on consumer-end is like saying that we need to fight cigarette smoking on the level of the individual smoker. So when you say: quote:Big stores are just not that big a part of the problem, comparatively. Which makes sense if you think about it, because they have every incentive to reduce the wastage eating into their profits. However, they're easy targets for scapegoating and the easiest source of waste to regulate. You are loving up. Big stores are a big part of the problem, even comparatively--something being 10% of the total problem is still a big problem. And they are a much bigger part of the accessible problem, for precisely the reason they state: they have incentive already. If you make it more costly for them to waste, there will be less waste. If you give them a small amount to do--like build storage or a biodigester--they will resist it only somewhat because it is a benefit as well as a cost. They are subject to policy and regulation in a way individual behavior is not. So when you say that it's appropriate to talk about the level of the individual, that may be true for defining the problem, but it really isn't for defining the solution. blowfish posted:And it's not just in the social sciences. For example, one heavily cited older key freshwater ecology paper about organisms compensating for drift in rivers by actively moving upriver contains some dumb let's-extrapolate-from-n=1 poo poo along the lines of "I observed one shrimp moving for 30 minutes". And it's not just complex stuff like ecology, materials science even finds this to be true especially for obscure molecules nobody much uses. It's actually I think a bigger problem in a way in the hard sciences because they're not on the lookout nearly as much for their own bias. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 15:35
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wateroverfire posted:Read the thread and the articles linked in the thread, and many of your questions will be answered. I did, they weren't. quote:Ok. Let's talk about adjusting population level incentives. That seems fine and useful. Not really, for reasons I already stated: The population level stuff is working against culture. For example, one way to reduce food waste would be a lot more communal eating. Say, all apartment buildings, all workplaces have a communal lunch or dinner. This would be seen as essentially anti-American and violating people's rights to go and eat whatever the gently caress they wanted, and would fail overall. You could try to train people broadly in food preservation techniques, but a lot of people will just say 'gently caress it'. The garbage tax is the only suggestion so far that would have an effect and that is really obviously gameable and not really workable. Again, the easiest thing to do is to focus on the waste at the distribution level. You seem really badly to not want to talk about that because you feel that corporations get overly criticized or something, but if you actually want to address food waste that'd be the best place to do it. quote:Ironicly, one way to reduce food waste at the consumer level would simply be to make food more expensive. Eventually, households looking to economize would pay more attention to using everything they paid for. This isn't true, and I have no clue why you think it is. What are you basing this on, other than hopefulness? Individual food waste hasn't gone down with food price increases, so what are you talking about?
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Mar 29, 2016 17:37
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Helsing posted:Because, for most consumers, the vast majority of their intake of sugar, trans-fats, sodium, etc. comes from processed foods which is why nutritional guides almost universally use 'processed food' as a category for pedagogical purposes (even though they also immediately qualify this advice by explaining situations where processing doesn't matter, such as buying chopped and frozen vegetables or pasteurized milk). It gives people a framework for understanding healthy eating and then after they've spent more time learning on their own they can move beyond that simple heuristic and develop a more sophisticated view of nutrition. Like with most educational programs you start with a simplified but helpful guide to action and then build upon it, gradually adding additional nuance and context as appropriate. Again, there isn't any good research about high sodium intake that's population-applicable. Likewise, 'sugar' isn't a problem. Trans-fats are the only thing you listed there that are definitively bad. Those nutritional guides are of very, very dubious efficacy. The video you cited has the key word 'may' in it. WampaLord posted:The "only calories matter" argument is stupid as gently caress when there's poo poo like Wonderbread for sale. You realize that by any sane definition a fresh-baked sourdough loaf is 'processed' too, right?
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Mar 29, 2016 21:49
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WampaLord posted:The over consumption of sugar is one of the biggest problems we have and explains much of America's obesity epidemic. Neither of these is true, though. it's the overconsumption of calories combined with a lack of activity. People actually consumed more calories in the 70s but were in far better shape because they were way more active. Sugar calories are not worse than other calories in any solid way. What definition of 'processed' makes wonderbread processed but the sourdough loaf not?
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Mar 29, 2016 22:13
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WampaLord posted:Tell that line about sugar calories to a diabetic. Ok. I'll happily tell a diabetic that if they eat non sugary foods that keep their blood sugar level high that they will experience the same consequences from it. Sugar is bad because it is calorific and digests super quickly: so is white flour. If they eat the same calories in complex carbohydrates it will still be super bad for them. I'm also more concerned about pew diabetic people, and again, it is just about having far too much blood sugar, which can come from any calorie source. Ok so what about adding that syrup makes it processed? what about that is "processed" but milled flour isn't?
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Mar 29, 2016 22:29
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And yet, if you eat the same amount of non sugar calories, you will be just about as likely to develop type 2. If a diabetic follows your mystical beliefs in fresh food and eats a ton of nuts, or a bunch of boiled potatoes, or anything else calorie dense they will have the same outcomes. the entire reason those fresh vegetables are recommended is because they are not calorie dense. That doesn't mean there aren't "fresh" things which are calorie dense: there are a ton of them. Replacing soda with milk is not good. Replacing wonder bread with potatoes is not good. There are possibly some benefits to doing so but we do not have solid science about this. The video you are citing is a correlation, and you are treating it as a causation. People who eat processed meats may have other attributes in common, may eat salt in over proportion from other sources. Etc. it is likely that eating preserved foods has some negative effects but we do not know the strength of them, and calories total are a far, far bigger problem--and that is only in the context of lack of activity.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:11
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Helsing posted:So in addition to reversing your position on sugar you're now rehashing stuff that was already addressed, in tedious detail, pages ago. I didn't reverse my opinion though. Eating straight sugar is bad for diabetics since it spikes their blood sugar. Eating white bread or a bunch of fruit is bad for the same reason. I can't tell if you are pretending not to understand this or really don't. And the rehashing is stuff that you are still wrong about, so it's probably going to keep happening.
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Mar 30, 2016 01:36
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BarbarianElephant posted:"Fresh" as opposed to processed, I'd assume. It's a good rule of thumb. A pizza might have more tomates than a salad, but that doesn't mean it's better for you. What about a can of tomatoes, though?
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Mar 30, 2016 14:28
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WampaLord posted:Jesus Christ can you be more disingenuous? He said "Pizza is not better for you than a salad" and your response is "Well, what's wrong with pizza?" A pizza can be a lot better than a salad. Examples: Here's a horrible lovely frozen pizza for one, you can't get more processed than this: http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-frozen-pizzas-deluxe-pizza-for-one-frozen_f-ZmlkPTgwMzcw.html Here's a slices from a famous new york place: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/30966587 And two slices would be a hefty lunch. And here's a vegetarian salad from Au Bon Pain with a sesame ginger dressing http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-salads-vegetarian-deluxe-salad_f-ZmlkPTE5NDU2Ng.html http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-salad-dressings-sesame-ginger-dressing_f-ZmlkPTE2MzUwMQ.html And the chicken salad from some salad joint: http://www.saladworks.com/salad/mediterranean Salads would be much better if we didn't put dressing on them, but we do.
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Mar 30, 2016 15:19
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Helsing posted:The point, which you seem to simultaneously grasp and yet not grasp, is that food is more than just an empty and neutral vessel for a certain number of calories. Depending on how it's prepared and what's in it the human body responds differently, and these different responses are very relevant to a discussion about diet and health. Not really, though. Calories in and out are by far the biggest nutritional deal as long as you're not deficient in any vitamins, and very few people eating a modern diet are. For diabetes, for heart conditions, etc. by far the main driver is obesity and for obesity by far the main driver is calorie count rather than calorie makeup. quote:This is one of the reasons why doctors tend to recommend that a large part of our daily food intake come from plants. Because they tend to not only have high nutritional value but also because they promote a feeling satiation. The chips and cola you drink, by contrast, don't make you feel full and you're a lot more likely to eat more of it. I don't know why you keep referencing doctors. Do you think doctors are an authority on nutrition for some reason? Anyway: Yes, compared to chips, vegetables produce satiety. So does crappy 'hungry man' processed food. And 'plants' is a silly thing to say: wheat is a plant and eating bread does not produce satiety. I think you mean 'vegetables'. A lot of the problem with what you say is you seem completely careless about your terminology and get irritated with other people for not continually discerning what you really mean rather than what you actually said. quote:Usually there's no meaningful difference between, say, a bag of frozen fruit vs. a piece of fresh fruit. Sometimes canned foods can have additives like sodium for preservation. And usually when you prepare fresh vegetables, you use salt. Harping on 'fresh' the way that you were is a distraction, and really makes this more of a cultural issue than an actual nutrition issue.
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Mar 30, 2016 17:49
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nigga crab pollock posted:im pretty sure its from supersize-me, but the often quoted anectode of mcdonalds salads having the most calories out of any menu item is one of the more amazing things to me. not because it's true, but because people repeat it as if its useful dietary information That's what we do, though.
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Mar 30, 2016 18:04
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Helsing posted:That's not actually true though, or if it is then it contradicts the studies I've heard about. Huge numbers of Americans are thought to be deficient in vitamin D, people don't generally consume enough fibre, etc. Where exactly are you getting this idea that only calorie counting matters? From the way that you actually develop diabetes. Vitamin D is not something you readily get from plants, fiber isn't a nutrient the body uses int he same way as others. Are you saying that nutritional deficiencies are in any way comparable to obesity in terms of health problems in the US? And please, cite your studies. quote:Because doctors can also be researchers and I'm not just referring to some family doctor but rather the general consensus among a large number of health agencies and practitioners. I'm curious about where your ideas and thoughts are coming from? I work and study at a school of public health and this is an area that I work in. You are falsely representing a consensus. There is huge, huge, huge contention over what recommendations we should make both at a scientific level and a policy level. quote:Also in light of my numerous previous comments on the importance of including whole foods in your diet it's hilariously dorky and pedantic that you're now complaining that my comment on plants could be interpreted as meaning "it's fine if you just eat bread." Is it hard for you to understand that each post I make builds on my previous posts rather than negating them? Yeah, it is hard for me to understand why you are so insanely sloppy with your language and do not give a poo poo about communicating well. Saying stuff like 'fresh' and 'plants' and then saying 'Oh that's not what I meant' is dumb. As I said, nobody should have to be able to figure out what you really mean, the onus on you is to actually say what you mean. Instead of whining about it, take the incredibly minimal amount of time and effort to actually speak accurately. quote:This is yet another thing that was discussed upthread which you either missed or forgot. The vast majority of the salt in American diets comes from processed foods or dining at restaurants, less than 10% is typically added during home cooked meals. Yeah, but the amount of salt in a can of tomatoes is tiny, which is part of why lumping all 'processed' food together is dumb. The amount of salt in a can of tomatoes is trivial compared to what you'd use in cooking. Look, hunts has 210mg in a can of about three cups, whereas a normal pasta sauce recipe will call for 1/4-1/2 of a teaspoon of salt, for that amount of tomatoes, which is 500-1000 mg of sodium. http://www.hunts.com/products/tomatoes/crushed-tomatoes BarbarianElephant posted:Junk food is very calorie-dense, making it hard to moderate your intake. Most vegetables have so few calories that they are practically a rounding error. You'd have to eat a bucket of carrots to get the same calories as a serving of potato chips, and by that time your stomach would be groaning and bloated and you'd swear never to do it again. But a serving of potato chips slips down easily. I don't know any fat people who got that way by gorging on plain vegetables. Why not compare potatoes to potato chips? Wouldn't that be more reasonable than carrots? And potatoes the way that they are normally prepared and made---not just a boiled, naked potato?
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Mar 30, 2016 19:24
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Helsing posted:Here's a little canned summary from NPR on the CDC's report and here's a link to to the executive summary. And yes I'm well aware that you don't get vitamin D from plants, whether or not you think I'm totally wrong here you could at least acknowledge that I'm saying a bit more than "eat plants". So in other words, no, nutritional deficincy in the US is nowhere near, at all, the problem of obesity. Thank you. quote:
I'm claiming the null hypothesis for most things. For "Calories are what matters for developing diabetes": http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa010492 Obesity/BMI the sole biggest predictor, with other factors coming before the diet composition. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/6/1019.short Relationship between fat consumption and diabetes remains unclear http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/25/3/417.short Relationship between fat intake and diabetes disappear when corrected for BMI. Be happy with this one, they also found that consumption of processed meats is related, but don't indicate if they corrected for BMI on that one. quote:I guess we'll have to let anyone else reading this make but their own minds but when I say "you should eat plants", in the context of a conversation where I've repeatedly advocated that people should make whole foods a part of their diet, and your response is "Heh, you mean like bread?" I think that makes you look like an idiot. If someone else has a different take away then so be it but I don't think you scored the brilliant point that you seem to think you did. I didn't think you meant bread. I was saying that spreading the message 'eat plants' is dumb, and you shouldn't do it, because it's massively inaccurate. Is there some reason you are just refusing the idea that maybe it might be useful to be accurate when you speak? You seem to have almost contempt for the idea that you should bother to use the right words to say stuff. ANd also, this was your first post: quote:Sorry but I'm going to go ahead and say you should buy some rice, some veggies, and some dry pasta, familiarize yourself with the stove and oven, and maybe leave the TV off for the evening and crack open a book when you're all done. Rice and pasta are both equivalent to bread in terms of being high glycemic index foods. Pasta and rice are not good foods to recommend for healthy eating, they are calorific and easy to eat a lot of. If you're going to take the stances you are, it is nuts to recommend eating pasta and rice. quote:Did you just start reading the thread in the last page or two and completely ignore the preceding discussion where it was made clear that the reason one lumps together "processed food" is literally just because consumers should scrutinize the label for ingredients more closely? No one has ever claimed there's anything wrong with processed food. The point is that knowing something has been processed should invite much greater scrutiny about what's been added or done to the food, it doesn't mean you should never eat it. But they're not going to. We know how human beings are actually going to behave when presented with complex nutritional information. Putting the calorie count on McDonald's menus goddamn backfired--people ordered more high calorie stuff. A lot of prepared food having high sodium levels is worth looking at even without a really significant finding about sodium, but that doesn't mean that prepared foods are bad. If we want to stop food waste, the absolutely best way to do that is prepared foods, frozen foods, canned foods, etc.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:15
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Helsing posted:This is pathetic. Your original claim was that no American is at serious risk of vitamin deficincies. No, it wasn't. quote:Calories in and out are by far the biggest nutritional deal as long as you're not deficient in any vitamins, and very few people eating a modern diet are. That's what I said. Why on earth would you try to claim otherwise? quote:That's all very interesting but actually what I meant was that I was hoping you could demonstrate that "processed food" is a hugely controversial label rather than a term that practically all health care experts seem to use regularly. Given that even here you're posting a study using the term "processed meats" I feel like you're just demonstrating that actually there's nothing controversial about using that kind of language. Processed meats is a meaningful term, barely. Processed foods isn't. And they operationalized it in the study. There have been very good reasons given to you why 'processed' is overly broad, and I don't get why you refuse to acknowledge them. But anyway, yeah, all those studies were showing that composition of diet does not matter nearly as much as BMI/obesity for diabetes formation. quote:What stance do you think I'm taking and why does it make what I said there "nuts"? You've changed your stances back and forth at a whim, abandoning 'fresh', for example, but in general you're advocating people don't eat 'unhealthy' prepacked foods and were offering rice, veggies, and pasta as the better alternative. Veggies are good, but the other two are unhealthy in terms of glycemic index, lack of other meaningful nutrients, and being calorific. I'm sorry, I should have twigged to this earlier. quote:This is actually a really great illustration of why nutritional guides use simplified heuristics such as advising people to balance between processed foods and whole foods. While these guides all make clear that processed food isn't inherently bad and that the main thing to do is to check the label for ingredients, they also provide a straight forward and easily actionable plan that, if followed through, will reliably help you ensure you strike a reasonable balance in your diet between caloric intake, satiety, and getting the right mix of micro and macro nutrients. But what actually happens when you provide people with that guide? What is the actual, real-world result? quote:Sure, but I never claimed that food waste is reduced by eating more fresh food. This was all an intentional derail?
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Mar 30, 2016 21:46
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P-Value Hack posted:
Cool of you to literally use a straw man accusation there. Nobody accused Helsing of spewing about "DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE IN MY FOOD! OH MY GOD!". He was arguing against what are essentially preserved foods in a food waste thread, and conflating the dangers between a processed food like salami and a processed food like canned tomatoes. He has weird ideas about nutrition, recommending first someone home cook pasta, vegetables, and rice in order to eat more healthily than prepared foods--this is lovely because pasta and rice are things we try to get people to eat less of because they're calorific, not satisfying, and have a high glycemic index. He hasn't got a leg to stand on at any point, especially since his poo poo was one massive derail anyway. Prepared foods are one of the absolute best ways we deal with food waste, and doing home-cooked everything is not a solution to food waste, at all. One of the major problems with public health in urbanization during the late 1800s was that it wasn't economical to import enough fresh food, including fresh milk, into the city to feed everyone, since a lot of those people were stinking poors and vegetables and stuff take up a lot of room. Milk was also really, really hard to get, because it needed intense refrigeration, leading to swill milk http://www.forgottendelights.com/DairySwillMilk.html. I would rather see more recipes that dealt with canned and frozen vegetables and ways to spruce them up than endless "farm-fresh tomatoes from your farmers market" style stuff. We have enough of the latter.
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Apr 5, 2016 16:26
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P-Value Hack posted:Let me remind you that this derail literally started because a goon actually argued against cooking for himself because he is a loving manchild who wanted more time to watch TV. Somehow this is a solution to food waste because....? That's not a solution, but he was defining part of the problem: People like him do not have time and energy to cook and buy groceries, or they don't perceive themselves as doing so--which works out to the same thing. Thinking people like this re just 'manchilds' and not, maybe, super loving tired and alienating after a crummy day at work and not able to get the activation energy up to cook is dumb. Changing that tired dudes' behavior is extremely hard. Changing his beliefs about his behavior is even harder. So if you actually want him to eat healthier, the best way is to make prepared food healthier, not to scold him about cooking. He made the point that he'd probably waste more food if he did home cooking, so he was on point. And it didn't start because of that, it started because Helsing took issue with that. I have no idea why you decided to swoop in and pronounce your judgement, but again: prepared foods are an essential part of fighting food waste. Helsing's beliefs in what makes people happy and nutrified are slipshod and wrong and lead to food waste.
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Apr 5, 2016 16:47
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pugnax posted:Did you guys check out the ReFED report? I was one of the lead analysts on it, so if anyone has questions about the economics of dealing with food waste I'm happy to try and answer. Really cool stuff. I heard about ethylene absorption at some point but never dug into it, so glad to be reminded of that. And I like your focus on portion sizes--double public health benefit there.
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Apr 5, 2016 17:21
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Helsing posted:What I've done is to reproduce fairly straight forward and basic guidelines for shopping, supported by numerous sources, and using the exact same language that professional nutritionists have used. Absolutely zero competent nutritionists suggest 'pasta, veggies, and rice'. quote:When you tried to refute this you immediately ended up citing other sources that used the same "processed" terminology that I've been using. No, dude, they said processed meat. I and several other people told you that there are only a few, very similar, processes of preserving meat, whereas there are a billion different ways to process food. And again, processed food is absolutely vital in not wasting food, yknow, the thread topic? quote:You also made some wildly inconsistent statement about vitamins and about whether anything other than calories actually mattered when it comes to evaluating the health value of food. Nope: Vitamins, in the US and the developed world, are nowhere near as important to worry about as calories. It's not even close. The overwhelming problem in diets is 'consumes too many calories'. No other problem has anything even close to the public health burden as that. If you think so, provide the nutritional deficit you think has anywhere close to the impact, but there isn't one, so you won't be able to. quote:When all this was pointed out to you ducked out of the thread and just ignored that particular reply until a few days passed and it was buried a couple pages back, at which point you made another post rehashing points I'd already responded to. I don't even know what you mean by ducked out of the thread. quote:Well, at least we can have one point of partial agreement here. Our society produces a lot of unhealthy but, for all purposes, addictive food. More importantly, though, our society denies large numbers of people the time, energy and resources to exercise true agency over their diets. That's a serious problem. A lot of it is not that unhealthy, especially when compared to 'pasta, veggies, and rice'. quote:The thing is, if we're going to talk about how to improve the nutritional outcomes of most of the population then we need to be able to articulate what's wrong with the way food is currently created and distributed. It seems like here you're implicitly acknowledging that there are problems and that they're serious enough to warrant some kind of policy intervention by the government. Not really, no. We need to get people to exercise and to eat fewer calories. That is the 'nutritional outcome' of importance: fewer calories. quote:Ok, I can't help but comment on the irony of you chastising someone else for this. "I have no idea why you would swoop in and pronounce your judgement, only I am allowed to do that!" I meant that the conversation was over and you'd admitted it was a huge derail, so why resurrect it? quote:And more generally I think the focus on food waste is actually a proxy for two other problems ... No poo poo-tons of it is avoidable, see the link provided above. Please, please don't rehijack this thread on your 'nutritional' ideas man. I'm not going to respond to you any more on it, so feel free to declare I'm 'ducking out' and declare victory. pugnax posted:Did you guys check out the ReFED report? I was one of the lead analysts on it, so if anyone has questions about the economics of dealing with food waste I'm happy to try and answer. I've read it thoroughly now and can I ask if you if the composting is calculated as 'not waste' if it is composted alone, or does it have to be composted and likely to be used? I'm surprised to see it as such a huge portion of the plan (from the waste perspective)
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Apr 5, 2016 21:44
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pugnax posted:Heroic assumptions were made about the successful marketing of finished compost. We assumed that most of it would be sold, some donated, and a portion of contamination would be landfilled. There is tremendous untapped demand for compost, especially in the arid southwest, where it could be used to great benefit. Currently the market value is too low for it to be economical in many of the places that would benefit most from increased soil water retention. Totally, and that's fair enough. I think--does compost storage require any water use? And I assume that compost has much lower ground-water contamination than fertilizer, so it'd be good for use in low-water places like the Southwest? pugnax posted:Industrial operations are actually really efficient at managing their food waste streams, it's grocery stores and restaurants that are the real commercial problem children. Household food waste is a huge problem because there is virtually no infrastructure in place to manage it. And transportation, right? There's something on your site about an unblocked cold chain which indicated that there's significant loss in transport, which I assume is nearly all about periods of non-refrigeration?
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Apr 5, 2016 22:23
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Helsing posted:
We shouldn't ignore it, but we should definitely acknowledge that obesity is a bigger problem by several orders of magnitude. Obesity easily, easily causes more than 100x the deaths and DALYs vs any vitamin deficiency in the US. And we have probably been underestimating deaths from obesity, as the best methodological study to date shows. http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc3780738 So, the absolutely overwhelming majority of our 'nutritional' approach should be getting people to reduce calories. The populations that have vitamin deficiency area also identifiable demographic groups so they can be targeted, the blanket message to the US should focus only on reduction of calories.
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Apr 15, 2016 10:33
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Helsing posted:What do you think are the most effective steps the government can currently take to actually reduce the rate of obesity in the country? Mostly campaigns to increase physical activity, make cities and other communities more walkable, and try to edge out the spurious and lovely nutritional information that obsesses over 'carbs' or 'balanced meals' and make sure people understand that, while some foods might have ancillary risks, their overall concern should be on calories. There is a possibility of regulation of portion size, of packaging food, even for home, in serving suggestions. Stricter regulations on vending machines would also help, but again, constitutionally it's a bit of a hard sell. quote:Given that these goals are actually complementary, since they both involve taking a more conscious approach to dieting and managing what you're eating, I don't know why you imply that there's some kind of dichotomy. I've made it super clear but here it is again in plain language: the vast majority of Americans do not have a nutritional deficiency, so these approaches are not complimentary. most people need no action at all, or would benefit only sightly, from a more 'balanced' diet, except to the extent that that would reduce their calories. If someone were to continue eating their 'unbalanced', 'processed' food, but eat less of it--which is entirely possible to do, and much easier to get real human beings to do than to actually switch food types--they will have superior health outcomes. quote:As I've already argued, any realistic approach to helping people reduce calories probably has to take into account that some food is more satiating. It doesn't, and we don't have any reliable data on the biology of this, and it probably changes wildly with individual differences in amylase, protease, and lipase production and sensitivity. The majority of factors around satiation are habit-based and somatic. quote:Then again, I also think you're making a mistake here by conflating all dieting information provided to the public with the fight against obesity. I don't know why it would be a bad thing for the government to have advisories on, say, what gets fed to children in a school nutritional program. I didn't say it would be bad. It'd be great--to control the amount of calories they get. other than that, the reason to conflate it is, again, because obesity is orders of magnitude a bigger. And again, you continue to pretend we have solid science on the nuances of nutrition: we don't. quote:Doesn't it make sense for the government to take some interest, beyond calories, in roughly what the kids are being served? No, for the reasons I've stated clearly. it is nowhere, at all, in any way, even close to the same level of problem. This is like saying in our efforts to reduce hep C prevalence in gay men we should also focus on tinea cruris at the same time. No, because it's trivial compared to the larger problem and winds up complicating the issue. The above section on packaging would actually be the best, both in terms of food waste and in nutrition. Widely available prepared food in a realistic serving size would be awesome for public health. But again, it's hard to envision how we get there constitutionally--making them part of WIC-payable items and restricting calorie-dense foods from WIC might be good but if the meals get associated with poverty in our hosed-up culture that'd breed resistance. To hopefully end the dumbass nutritional derail: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0804748 Comparison of Weight-Loss Diets with Different Compositions of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrates http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/diets-weight-loss-carbohydrate-protein-fat/ And all of the associated health indicators increased due to the weight loss. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 16:38
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Helsing posted:It might be a worthwhile tradeoff but it does strike me as ironic that one of the best ways to reduce caloric intake would entail more packaging, presumably increasing the amount of garbage created by the food industry. Not necessarily a counter argument against your suggestion but if we're discussing national level strategies then it seems like a concern. An absolutely trivial problem that can be solved by making packaging that is low-impact or biodegradable. quote:[Can you suggest how an interested layman would independently verify this claim? I'm not making any specific claims like that. i'm making the general claim that there is not a relationship between the calorie source--protein, fat, carb--and satiety, as shown by the study that I linked. I also linked to the pop explanation. What more could you want? quote:So again, if I understand you correctly, you feel that nutritional science is at a point where we simply cannot draw any conclusions at all about the value, of say, getting enough protein in your diet? If your a parent with a six year old kid you'd say that literally the only thing a parent should concern themselves with is how many calories little Timmy gets per day? No, you need 'enough', but there is a very large tolerance for what is enough. If I was a parent with a six year old kid I'd want him to follow healthy eating patterns, so yeah, by far the most important thing would be teaching him not to snack, to limit his portion size, and to pay attention to calorie intake and output. If you're envisioning a stupid edge case 'you only feed him tater tots' diet, then again, the tolerances are extremely wide for what is 'enough', and I don't mean something that would actually be a deficiency. Reaching 'enough' protein, fat, and carbohydrates is relatively trivial and most random diets in the US beat that bar handily. quote:The analogy you've set up makes no sense because, from the beginning, this has been a broadly ranging conversation about diet and nutrition, not a narrowly cast argument specifically about obesity. From the very beginning, I have been saying that A) your claims about nutrition are mostly bullshit and B) by far the most important consideration in nutrition is calories, alone. The reason this is important for food waste--remember, the actual topic of the thread, not your derail--is that it is much easier to reduce food waste of prepared foods than it is of end-use cooked food. That you have repeatedly tried to hijack it to talk about your malformed ideas about nutrition has been bad from the start. quote:I don't see how these issues contradict or confuse each other. As I said above, most of this seems to lead to the same basic conclusion, which is that we need to think about ways to empower people to have more conscious thinking about and control over what they eat. It seems we don't agree on how to achieve that goal but from what I can tell we both agree that this would be a good step? The issues contradict each other because when you are communicating to the public, you can only say so much, only teach so much. Attempting to shovel in your half-baked ideas about nutritional balance and fresh food at the same time as calorie reduction will necessarily result in a reduction of how effective the calorie information is. They are not synergistic topics. You think they are, for some reason, but they're not. The public has been absolutely saturated with "Don't eat fat! DOn't eat carbs! Don't eat red meat! Don't eat preserved meat! Don't eat eggs! Do eat eggs! Do eat fat! Omega 3! " and it contributes to the public's misinformation about the way, way, way overarching importance of calorie restriction beyond any little noodling around with the composition of the diet. quote:Well, this is stepping back and taking even more of a big picture view but I feel like most issues regarding over eating and nutrition in general are very hard to separate form the so called "social determinants of health". We can debate individual strategies or even government programs for nutrition, and I think there's some value in those debates, but ultimately we're pitching what are essentially individualist strategies for a social problem (or, more accurately, several over lapping problems). And as you suggest here, the degree of government intervention that would be necessary to directly regulate portion sizes is far too paternalistic and intrusive to be conceivable in the USA. I don't know what you mean when you say they're hard to separate; in public health, we control for SES all the time, one of the main things we always study is if something is a true effect or being mediated or moderated by SES. You also keep talking about 'nutrition', but again, I don't give much of a poo poo about 'nutrition' except for the overwhelming nutritional problem in the US: excess calories. They don't have to be individualistic solutions. But I would like, before we do anything else, to correct the lovely ideas about nutrition that abound so that individuals who want, and are spending the energy to, have a good diet can actually do that an understand that if they make a healthy, balanced meal of sephardic potatoes and ramps with grilled peppers but eat substantially more calories than they will expend in energy, that is far more unhealthy than eating the appropriate amount of calories from 'processed food'. And beyond that, we can still move to shift the culture so that we can get the public health interventions that we need. Companies have actually been doing well with this because they want more healthy workforces, but a lot more could be done to get them to get rid of vending machines, make portion controlled, calorie controlled food available if they have food on site. There's lots of incentive stuff that isn't coercive paternalism; the Sunstein nudge. pugnax posted:Can someone summarize the nutrition talk/food waste connection? Or is it just a derail? Either way is cool, just don't quite understand the rationale. Helsing really wants to talk about nutrition and the importance of home cooking and the like, while claiming that there's something inherently bad in 'prepared foods'--which is a useless category anyway. If we define 'prepared foods' as either foods with preservatives/preserved through method, or foods of the grab-and-go kind at supermarkets, the unfrozen kind you throw in the microwave, or stuff like the 'turkey burger' from Freshdirect, then prepared foods are one of the best ways to find against food waste in the preparation-to-eating pipeline. So, Helsings portrayal of 'prepared food' as inherently unhealthy and promotion of 'fresh' food as somehow better nutritionally is a stumbling block in trying to reduce food waste. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 17:33
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computer parts posted:Food waste is not really that big of a deal, or at least there's not much to do without targeting individual people. Thus, the topic turned to how else food can be improved. It's a much bigger deal outside the US, but if we figure out how to reduce it here, we can export that knowledge. We need all our systems to be sustainable and reducing food waste would help agricultural sustainability, but so would, like, not growing oranges in the desert.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:48
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computer parts posted:It's mostly a solved issue in developed nations. The solutions are going to be "act more like developed nations". In that respect, it's similar to (eg) the education debate. What pugnax said. It's not a hunger problem here, but it is still a sustainability and waste problem. Especially because even organic poo poo doesn't degrade if it's packed in too tightly, and it's a simple waste of the energy used to create it instead of recapturing that for another purpose.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:55
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Doc Hawkins posted:Can't organic waste just be composted? Yes, but it's not--so that's one proposed solution to the problem, in the link far above by the NGO guy, it was the main solution by one metric at least.
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Apr 16, 2016 11:42
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Helsing posted:... I'm not going to line-by-line this deluge, but basically: your nutrition poo poo has been wildly inconsistent, that's not a problem of mine, but one of yours. It's not me 'strawmanning' you, it's you being incoherent. You were told by people who otherwise respect you that you were wrong and you ploughed on regardless. Eating processed meats correlates with some negative health outcomes. Correlates. Whether there is a causal link, or whether there is a mediator, is not claimed. I didn't use the Harvard pub site as a source, I used the actual paper as a source and the pub site to help you be comfortable with it. In addition, it is really obvious that someone can cite something from a source and disagree with other things from that source; you need to evaluate the actual argument not just the source. This bit in particular: quote:. You're acting as though you're speaking authoritatively and representing some kind of nutritional consensus but every piece of verifiable and concrete information suggests the opposite. Nope, I'm saying there is no nutritional consensus other than the very basic, and by far the biggest and best established consensus with the huge, overwhelming health footprint is that excess calories lead to obesity. There is also a good amount of research showing high-glycemic index foods--pasta and white rice, for example--are especially bad, because it's not just 'calories' it's 'calories over time'. So, foods that are high calorie and highly digestible, like pasta and rice, are the worst, but high calorie foods like fatty red meat and nuts are still quite bad to overconsume too. What you are doing is mostly mistake strategy--try to get people to lower calorie consumption by getting them to eat more vegetables--for theory. The theory isn't that the vegetables themselves are 'good' food, it's that they are relatively low calorie so it's really hard to physically eat enough to get fat on. That's why they place a lot of stress on avoiding pasta and rice, and replacing it with whole-grain versions. Harvard is the most aggressive, by far, of public health programs in still heavily investing in the very particular risks of foods. Other places are far more conservative about that. What Harvard and they agree on absolutely is that not eating more calories than you expend is the most important aspect of diet. There is not, as you seem to think, a consensus that sodium causes negative health outcomes, as shown below. quote:What you're describing sounds like dropping a cup of water on a forest fire. The culture of over eating and other health problems goes a lot deeper than the availability of vending machines. The problem is cultural, a culture of snacking and a culture of over-large portions, and of 'extra' meals'. Reversing that is going to be enormously difficult and requires first for people to understand that foods may be 'healthier' than others but that calories consumed is the actual measurement you care about. A great way to not do it is lecture people about home cooking though, we know that poo poo doesn't work at all. To demonstrate some of the contention in what many people think is confirmed nutrition science: About half of published papers find salt linked to bad health outcomes. https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/science-salt-polarized-study-finds And if you look at Mailman's topics page, 'nutrition' isn't anywhere: Only food policy and obesity. https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/topics That is because the huge public health problem is obesity--not nutrition.
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Apr 17, 2016 01:23
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