Porking up with the FDA

Politics and religion
21

I call shenanigans. I’m sorry but lots of crap foods do taste really good. So do lots of healthy ones, granted, but the healthy ones are more difficult and expensive to prepare generally.

I would add that difficulty of preparation is an angle this thread hasn’t given much coverage too but it can be a key one for a lot of families. I do all the cooking for my family and it’s a real challenge some nights to get home from work and then turn around and get dinner on the table in a reasonable time frame. I can’t do anything that takes more than 30-40 minutes most nights for both prep and cook time and even then I can’t dedicate that whole block of time to cooking as I’m supervising a toddler also. So instant this and frozen that are quite popular in my house.

22

Are you serious? In the grand and storied history of retarded internet debates, there still has yet to be an internet debate as retarded as “Salt, sugar, fat: Do people find them tasty?”

I’m guessing you swore them off a decade ago and therefore have no idea, but twinkies taste the way they do for a reason, and it’s because THEY’RE FUCKING AWESOME.

23

I saw a person feeding a baby ice cream one time. Does the baby really care whether it gets ice cream or not?

I think the political problem with ending farm subsidies is that it will make food prices go up, which, like gas prices, people tend to blame on politicians.

24

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

Was this written by a twelve-year-old?

25

Food preparation is a huge component to the decline in healthy eating, which i’m afraid can probably be traced to the feminist revolutions in the 60s. Hardly anyone my age knows how to cook and it seem like it’s more men than women - most young women that i know seem to have inherited an utter hatred of cooking. Preparation is not just the time to cook, but in buying the groceries ahead of time and knowing what to get, and having some sort of recipie to go by.

It’s easy to cook simple, generic food at home. It’s very hard to match what you can get at a restaurant. Even something like Subway offers 5x as many veggies and bread types as you’d have at home - even if the cost/quantity equation is grossly skewed.

A lack of time, a lack of money, a lack of desire, and a lack of knowledge all contribute to unhealthy eating.

I heard about Alice Waters before; it makes me want to move to Berkeley just to raise my kids hehe. Sounds like a great school.

26

Yeah, wheat and soy are notoriously unhealthy snack foods.

27

Yea, the evil potato chip. If you think about it it’s truly a miracle meal in satifying biological cravings.

Did you know the Ottoman Sultan used to serve fried food as his highest available delicacy to visiting royal personages and diplomats? It was so expensive/rare, that you could be eating fried fish and the guy next to you would not.

28

It’s worth noting that the correlation between income and body weight is very easy to destroy. In the U.S., if you collect a bunch of data on people’s weights and household incomes, you do find a negative raw correlation. But if you compare people of the same age and break the sample down seperately by sex, you find that the correlation between income and body weight is positive for men and negative for women. The claim that income is the most “reliable” predictor of body weight is difficult to assess because “reliable” is not a well-defined statistical term, but if he means “explains the most variation in,” then the claim is wrong, as education is more “reliable” in that sense, and higher education is correlated with lower body weight for both men and women.

More subtly, if folks like Drewnowksi were correct that it’s low income which causes obesity, we should observe that people get lighter if their income goes up for reasons beyond their control. A recent unpublished (but highly credible) study shows that higher EITC payments lead to higher, not lower, body weight. The causal effect of income on body weight appears to be positive.

In short, body weight and income are negatively correlated for women, but not for men. And that correlation does not appear to result from a causal effect of income on body weight, rather, it appears to be that some other factor causes both women’s body weights and incomes.

On the other hand, it is true that making crappy high energy density food relatively cheaper causes increases in obesity rates, particularly among adolescents. But it’s a pretty small effect.

Edit: and, yes, people do likes them some fat and sugar, go figure. See for example:

Yeomans MR, Gray RW. Opioid peptides and the control of human ingestive behaviour. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 2002;26:713–28.

Levine AS, Kotz CM, Gosnell BA. Sugars and fats: the neurobiology of preference. Journal of Nutrition 2003;133:831S–4S.

Even at Chez Panisse, people likes them some tasty fat and sugar, e.g.:

Wednesday, April 25 $65
Fava bean and duck gizzard salad with pancetta
Steamed local halibut with leeks and Graves wine butter
Grilled Sonoma County Liberty duck breast with merlot, shallot, and black pepper sauce,
fried potatoes, and roasted turnips
Rhubarb tart with Sauternes ice cream

Who wants to wager that meal has more calories than a Big Mac dinner?

Noting that people like to eat unhealthy foods doesn’t contradict the observation that they also like to be healthy, of course.

29

Yeah, wheat and soy are notoriously unhealthy snack foods.

I know what you mean, it’s not like they grind up wheat into some kind of white powdery substance, mix it with a shit load of sugar and fats, chuck it in an oven for a bit and call it, I don’t know, a cake or anything.

30

Yeah, but they don’t always do that, is the point. I have an extremely healthy loaf of whole-grain bread sitting right here, and it’s primarily made out of wheat. And soy? Christ, soy is what they make healthier versions of things out of. That’s why this guy’s argument is ludicrous; if wheat subsidies are the reason people eat loads of Twinkies, why aren’t people also eating healthy, high-fiber breads?

31

It would depend in part on what happens to trade barriers and related items. To the degree that we pay for these subsidies in the form of higher taxes, the subsidies themselves are making food prices go up. If the same products could be obtained through free trade from Brazil, for example, then we would not need to pay our farmers a subsidy and could still obtain cheap food.

32

That’s why this guy’s argument is ludicrous; if wheat subsidies are the reason people eat loads of Twinkies, why aren’t people also eating healthy, high-fiber breads?

We do at least agree on that point, blaming everything on The subsidies is a narrow minded view. Sure, Wheat being far cheaper than it should be certainly helps in making a lot of the shit food as cheap as it is, but I’m more inclined on blaming the manufacturers for pumping their cheap frozen pizzas and chicken nuggets full of salt and fat to disguise the fact they’d taste of cheap shit otherwise.

I just couldn’t resist the wheat thing, sorry ;)

33

To elaborate on SlyFrog’s points, some federal agricultural policies have the effect of driving food prices up. I believe some crops, like peanuts, are on a quota system that restricts competition, and thus, presumably, increases prices. For others, like sugar, high tariffs reduce low cost foreign imports, again raising prices to consumers.

Finally, IIUC, the current national fascination with ethanol is sucking up a lot of agricultural output, presumably increasing prices for other crops (i.e. a farmer producing corn for ethanol is not producing wheat or even corn for feed). Unlike situations like peanuts and sugar, ethanol production is tied up into concerns about dependence on foreign oil, emissions issues, and global warming. But some argue that ethanol (as currently produced, anyways) isn’t a particularly good answer to these concerns.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the issue myself.

Regardless, federal subsidies and other inducements for ethanol production are very likely driving up prices for foods that we eat.

34

Two things:

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could.

How many calories are there in a dollar’s worth of LARD?

The other thing: Is there something wrong with having 45% of your daily calorie intake for lunch?

35

All the fattest people I know are also the poorest.

36

I eat cereal for breakfast and I try to take in a big lunch so I’m less tempted to eat a huge dinner.

37

All the fattest people I know are also the poorest.

All the best looking/healthiest/most in shape are the richest.

Food is comforting.

This country works the opposite of say, rural Asia or a small village in Africa because there, the poor try to work the land and grow crops and are bascially active all day. They burn off more calories than they take in and sometimes . . . well, there is just NO food and they just starve and don’t do much.

Here, the poor (a lot of the time, let’s be realistic) sit around all day watching TV and eating cheap, high caloric food. It’s pretty simple, why the very poor don’t eat well and are fat.

No one, no one in the US will ever starve to death. Except maybe the raving lunatic lost in the wildnerness or the loner shut in who broke her leg. Malnutrion? Oh yeah. But starvation is not a problem here.

38

Awesome. I’ve lost 15 pounds recently, where’s my money?

39

I just want to say that I eat fast food all the time, and I have to make sure to drink at least three cans of soda per day or I lose weight like I pissed off a gypsy.

40

Exactly. Even that brings up the subsidies combined with tarriffs issue. Corn is a much less efficient way than sugar cane to produce ethanol. Brazil has more ethanol from its sugar cane production (produced far more efficiently) than it needs basically. It is able to export it.

Yet we will pay subsidies to American farmers, to produce ethanol from a far less efficient process, so that we can end up paying much more money for the fuel, and destroy more of the environment to create it (due to the inefficiencies of corn based ethanol production). I believe there is actually a debate whether more energy is used to create corn based ethanol than actually is created from it.

I actually think it is great, presuming you do not have a huge dinner. Another thing I have repeatedly read is that Americans get their meals backward; you should eat smaller amounts of food as they day goes on (large breakfast, hearty lunch, small dinner). Of course, for Americans it is often the opposite, and then a bunch of food sits in your gut relatively shortly before you go to sleep, and after most of your day’s activity is already done.