Obesity

[MediumTex]

For some reason I have been noticing lately how prevalent obesity is in the U.S.  I've been aware of this issue for a long time, but it's like the reality of it has sort of been hitting me lately.

It's a really tragic thing, because obesity seems to make people unhappy individually (though they may enjoy the process of becoming obese), while also making all of society poorer as the mental and physical tolls of obesity show up in myriad ways, from rising health insurance premiums, to shorter life expectancies, to diabetes, to all of the prescriptions written to make people feel better about symptoms (feeling depressed, despondent, anxious, etc.), rather than addressing the underlying causes (i.e., a crappy diet and sedentary lifestyle).

Perhaps the finest symbol of this sad problem is the people I see driving themselves around the grocery store in the electric carts because they are literally too obese to walk, even as they fill up their carts with a bunch of garbage that won't do anything for them except make them more obese.

The causes of this problem are numerous, but I think that for many people it starts in childhood with the following false narratives: (1) Eating the garbage that McDonald's and other fast food restaurants serve is an acceptable diet, and (2) Eating is an acceptable form of entertainment.  These false narratives are sort of the food equivalent of the false narratives offered by the beer and liquor companies around the ideas that getting drunk will make you feel better and more attractive to the opposite sex, which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what actually happens (i.e., getting drunk makes you feel terrible afterward and a drunk person is usually not attractive at all to the opposite sex).

It seems to me that if people simply eliminated sweetened drinks from their diets and dramatically cut down on the bread and fried foods they consumed, it would make a huge difference in public health.  This won't happen, of course, but it's important to remember that the solution is not complicated, it's just difficult.

What has always puzzled me is the way doctors will virtually never mention or ask about diet unless a person is very obese or diabetic.  It's like they know it's not even worth bringing up because so few people are really interested in (or capable of) making significant changes to their diets.

As Gumby and others have mentioned repeatedly in previous threads, part of the bizarre irony of the obesity epidemic is that it has occurred against a backdrop of a "low fat" craze in foods.  If it wasn't so sad, it would be hard not to laugh at how completely ridiculous it is.  It's sort of like how the frequency of doctors prescribing antidepressants coincides with an explosion in the number of reported cases of depression.  It's like no one is able to make the simple connection that apparently the whole medicine cabinet of antidepressants has failed miserably at the job of making us less depressed, and yet we keep going back to it. 

What's that definition of insanity that they always talk about in movies and on TV?  It sort of suggests that our whole society is insane when it comes to obesity, diet, alcohol consumption and the drugs we take when we feel bad.

[Benko]

Perhaps obesity/overeating is a symptom of people who are already unhappy. 

Doctors are trained to treat things with drugs (or surgery, etc), mostly.  So diet is not really part of their mindset.  Of course it is true that many people would find changing their diet difficult (see above).

Looking on the "bright" side, I suppose companies that cater to a "larger" patient population might do well with the epidemic, and might provide a good VP investment opportunity.

[MediumTex]

Perhaps obesity/overeating is a symptom of people who are already unhappy. 

Yes.  And unfortunately the initial cause of the unhappiness probably often fades and the new cause of unhappiness arises from all of the problems associated with carrying around an obese body.

What's different today compared to the past may be the number of outlets available for a person who wants to eat poorly.

Back in frontier days it seems like becoming very obese might have just been hard to do because garbage food was harder to come by and there was a lot more manual labor to be done by everyone.

Now we go to a dedicated facility just to get physical activity, and we are often careful to make sure that no unnecessary physical activity leaks out of the confines of the facility.

[Alanw]

I think that many of the obese  don't even associate there obesity with over eating or poor diet.  They think that it is just something that has happened to them over time.  Then, when they are out in public and see the many other obese people, it becomes more acceptable and not as great a concern to them.  It is like the alcoholic who is the last to admit that he/she has a drinking problem.

I have always believed that most health problems (those not genetically related) could be solved by seeing a good nutritionist and following a prescribed diet and exercise plan rather than going to a Dr. and being prescribed drugs that simply mask the underlying conditions.  But for most people, changing lifestyle, diet and eating habits is just too difficult.  It  is so much easier just to take several pills that seem to make the condition more tolerable. 

For many, a proper diet and exercise is all that is need to remain healthy.  It is unfortunate that the medical profession doesn't spend as much time prescribing these as they do various drugs.  But then, where would the pharmaceutical companys be without all the obese, depressed and angry people out there taking there products.

It is rather comical that the drug company TV ads spend half of the commercial explaing the benefits of the drug and the other half telling you about the side effects which if listened to closely, would give anyone pause about taking the drug in the first place.

[Lone Wolf]

It seems to me that if people simply eliminated sweetened drinks from their diets and dramatically cut down on the bread and fried foods they consumed, it would make a huge difference in public health.  This won't happen, of course, but it's important to remember that the solution is not complicated, it's just difficult.

Yes, it really isn't all that complicated!  Replacing nutrient-poor foods with satisfying, nutrient-rich foods by itself is a monumental step forward.  The next step is remembering we descend from beasts that wandered, gathered, and killed for every scrap of food they were lucky enough to find.  We're not well-evolved for sitting around eating sugary snacks and drooling into a cup while our Twitter feed rolls by.  We're meant to move.  We're meant to be limber, lean, strong, and active.  It's what we are.

Useful here (and equally as challenging at first) is shutting off the diet of cultural junk food that commands us that we have to think thought X, lust for damaging/unhealthy/tantalizing thing Y, or impress Z number of people.  We're physical beings that get one life and one body to live that life.  It's easy to forget what we really are when we're acting as neurotic playthings of the mass media.

[MediumTex]

It is rather comical that the drug company TV ads spend half of the commercial explaing the benefits of the drug and the other half telling you about the side effects which if listened to closely, would give anyone pause about taking the drug in the first place.

Most of these commercials are basically saying: "We want you to ask your doctor to prescribe this medicine for you basically because you believe that you can be one of the happy people in this commercial.  The fact is, though, that this drug might also ruin your life or even kill you, but we hope that you don't dwell on that part of it too much."

The drug commercials basically follow the same recipe that the beer commercials follow.  If the beer commercials showed wrecked cars and broken bodies from drunk drivers and destroyed families because of alcoholism it wouldn't sell much beer.

Some drugs do work well, but the commercials suggest that ALL drugs, especially the NEW ones, work almost perfectly.

[MediumTex]

Useful here (and equally as challenging at first) is shutting off the diet of cultural junk food that commands us that we have to think thought X, lust for damaging/unhealthy/tantalizing thing Y, or impress Z number of people.  We're physical beings that get one life and one body to live that life.  It's easy to forget what we really are when we're acting as neurotic playthings of the mass media.

Part of the genius of The Matrix films was the way it reminded us of this in a commercially viable and entertaining format.



To take the Buddha's insight one step farther, I think that we have to reawaken ourselves continuously, because we live in a world designed to continuously separate us from our true nature and lull us into a reality composed of the trivial, the stupid and the meaningless.

[dualstow]

Some of you may have heard the news about some American children hitting puberty at 9 instead of 13. I heard Dr Dean Edell talking about the theory that this may be caused by obesity.

[MachineGhost]

I suggest practicing relative morality.

[RuralEngineer]

There is a certain amount of the obesity epidemic that I believe is genetic.  What I mean by this is that we are seeing the conflict between a lifestyle that our millions of years of evolution has left us completely unprepared for and our current sedentary existence.  Humans are calorie hoarders.  We're adapted to store food as fat to accommodate a diet that is volatile depending on the day, the season, and a wide array of other factors.  We have always lived extremely active lifestyles, sometimes brutally so.  It's hard to get fat burning 4000 - 8000 calories per day.

Now we find ourselves in generally sedentary professions, the activity necessary to provide us with food and shelter have many of us sitting on our butts for 8 hours per day.  Our most common form of entertainment has us sitting on our butts for the remainder.  There have been recent studies that have shown there are severe negative health consequences with sitting for that long each day that cannot be corrected with exercise.  I don't have a good solution to this issue, but the problem is deeper than "people eat too much and exercise too little."

[AdamA]

It seems to me that if people simply eliminated sweetened drinks from their diets and dramatically cut down on the bread and fried foods they consumed, it would make a huge difference in public health.

So true.

Doctors are trained to treat things with drugs (or surgery, etc), mostly.  So diet is not really part of their mindset. 

I spend a lot of time trying to convince patients that they don't need any treatment at all!

[Gumby]

The causes of this problem are numerous, but I think that for many people it starts in childhood with the following false narratives: (1) Eating the garbage that McDonald's and other fast food restaurants serve is an acceptable diet

McDonald's gets a bad rap, but I doubt McDonald's caused the obesity epidemic. If you remember the documentary, Super Size Me, by Morgan Spurlock, it's easy to think that McDonald's played a major role. But, Spurlock's documentary is another one of those generalizations that misses the point. Fat Head the movie (you can watch it on Hulu) challenges Spurlock's assumptions...

[align=center][/align]

During the film, Naughton goes on an all-fast-food diet, mainly eating food from McDonald's. For his daily dietary intake, he aims to keep his calories to around 2,000 and his carbohydrates to around 100 grams per day, but he does not restrict fat at all. He ends up eating about 100 grams of fat per day, of which about 50 grams are saturated. He also decides to walk six nights a week, instead of his usual three. After a month eating that way, he loses 12 pounds and his total cholesterol goes down. His HDL does go down, often thought to be undesirable.

At the end of his experiment, Naughton details an additional experiment inspired by his research into the lipid hypothesis. In this second experiment, he cut out all sugars and starches from his diet for a month, and ate things like cheeseburgers without buns, eggs and bacon fried in butter, steaks, Polish sausage, Egg McMuffins without the muffins when he traveled, fruit in heavy cream and green vegetables covered in butter. He used coconut oil to fry onions for his cheeseburgers and shredded cheese as his favorite snack. As a result, Naughton says his energy level and mood suffered no deleterious effects, despite often working until 2am on a large programming project with a tight deadline. At the end of that month, his overall cholesterol dropped from 222 to 209, and his LDL dropped from 156 to 130, and his HDL increased from 49 to 64.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Head

So, I think it's shortsighted to say that McDonald's causes obesity. McDonald's has been around much longer than the obesity epidemic. (Though, I suppose it's worth mentioning that, in 1990, McDonald's made a switch from frying in saturated fats to frying in vegetable oil.)

[Gumby]

When one tries to figure out the cause of obesity, it gets very, very complicated. Extremely complicated. Taubes tells us that carbs are what makes us fat, but even that logic can be faulty...

One of the biggest mistakes often made in this debate is the confounding of cause, mechanism and effect. A classic example is the assumption that if reducing carbohydrate or fat intake leads to weight loss, then the original weight gain must have been caused by excess carbohydrate or fat consumption.

While it’s tempting to make such an assumption, the logic is faulty. It’s kind of like saying “Advil cures headaches. Therefore, headaches must be caused by Advil deficiency.”?

Let’s look at some definitions.

Cause: something that brings about an effect or a result

Mechanism: the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomenon

Effect: an outward sign

Obesity is an effect. Insulin resistance, leptin resistance, lipotoxicity, disruption of the mesolimbic dopamine reward pathway and inflammation of the hypothalamus are presumed mechanisms. Excess consumption of carbohydrates, fat, highly palatable food and food toxins (wheat, seed oils, liquid fructose, etc.), exposure to environmental toxins (chemicals), stress, infections, etc. are presumed causes.

Say we do a study on obese people and we observe that they eat a lot of carbohydrates and are insulin and leptin resistance. It’s easy to assume that the chain of causality worked like this: normal weight person eats high-carbohydrate diet, becomes insulin and leptin resistant, and then becomes obese.

But again, this is faulty logic. There’s no proof that A (high carbohydrate intake) was what led to B (insulin and leptin resistance) was what led to C (obesity).

In fact, we could disprove that theory simply by observing another individual or group that eats a very high carbohydrate diet, but does not develop insulin or leptin resistance and obesity. Guess what? Such individuals and groups most certainly exist. There goes that theory.

Likewise, we could also disprove this theory by observing people that are insulin and leptin resistant, but don’t become obese. Such people do exist, and I’ve written about them in my series on diabesity here.

A MORE RIGOROUS APPROACH

How have we developed our theories on obesity and weight regulation? It seems to me they come from a blend of personal experience, belief and facts. And I think it’s time to become more rigorous about keeping them separate. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Personal experience: I lose weight on an low-carb diet, therefore low-carb diets must be best for weight loss.

Belief: carbohydrates are responsible for the obesity epidemic, via their effects on insulin.

Fact: many cultures around the world eat high-carbohydrate diets and are exceptionally lean.

Those who’ve lost a lot of weight on a low-carb diet have a tendency to become convinced that their wife, friends, family, plumber and everyone else will also lose weight following the same diet.

From this personal experience, a belief is formed. And once we believe in something, we have a remarkable ability to filter out any evidence that might contradict that belief.

This is especially true if our reputation or financial livelihood is tied to said belief. As Upton Sinclair famously said:

"It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary is dependent upon him not understanding it."

When a belief like “carbs cause obesity”? is shared between enough individuals, it becomes a meme. Once that happens, it is accepted by most as fact – regardless of whether it has any scientific basis. Hence we had the idea for decades that eating fat makes you fat, and now the more recent idea that eating carbs makes you fat.

THERE'S NO SINGLE CAUSE (OR TREATMENT) OF OBESITY

Perhaps one of the reasons it’s so easy to confuse cause, mechanism and effect and personal experience, belief and fact is that obesity is an incredibly complex disease. Just how complex is it?

Click on the Obesity Systems Influence Diagram below to find out

[align=center][/align]

Wow. That should give you a rough idea of how many variables are potentially involved in weight regulation. Now you know why it has been such a challenge to come up with a single, unified theory of obesity.

That said, of all of the hypotheses advanced to explain the mechanisms behind obesity, I think the food reward theory is the most inclusive.

However, as even its proponents would agree, it doesn’t tell the whole story because there are people and groups that eat large amounts of highly palatable foods that do not become obese.

My opinion is that the modern lifestyle (i.e. food and environmental toxins, stress, poor gut health, infections, micronutrient deficiencies, sleep deprivation, etc.) interfere with hypothalamic hormonal regulation, dopamine signaling, leptin and insulin sensitivity at the cellular level, glucose metabolism and a range of other mechanisms that lead to obesity.

This is consistent with the observation that obesity is extremely rare or nonexistent in traditional cultures that do not consume modern foods and do not live a “modern”? lifestyle.

But even this theory is incomplete, because there are people fully exposed to the modern lifestyle that do not become overweight or obese. This suggests that genetics, and perhaps other undiscovered factors, also play a role.

Source: http://chriskresser.com/there-is-no-sin ... or-obesity

Whoah.

[Gumby]

Another great snippet from that same article on our society's quest to find the causes of obesity...

Believing passionately in something doesn’t make it true. Experiencing something personally doesn’t make it fact for everybody else.

19th century philosopher Charles Peirce said:

"The state of belief is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else."

And Tolstoy said:

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

Recognizing this basic human trait, philosopher of science Karl Popper advised every researcher to earnestly try to discredit their own hypotheses.

That is no easy task, and it asks a lot of us. Yet intellectual rigor, emotional maturity and personal integrity are characterized by the capacity to question our own beliefs, no matter how deeply cherished they are or how much is at stake.

I sometimes wonder why we’re all so sure of ourselves. It helps me to remember that at every point in history scientists (and the general public) were convinced they had the right answers. At one time the world was flat, the earth was the center of the solar system and disease was caused by foul humors and could be cured by bloodletting.

Nowadays we look back on those fallacies with a smirk. But are we so arrogant to assume that our great-grandchildren won’t do the same?

The truth is, there’s far more we don’t know than we do know.

Source: http://chriskresser.com/there-is-no-sin ... or-obesity

Tolstoy really hit it out of the park with that quote. Though, I tend to think Tolstoy's quote can be applied to a lot of money managers (and professors).

[AdamA]

The causes of this problem are numerous, but I think that for many people it starts in childhood with the following false narratives: (1) Eating the garbage that McDonald's and other fast food restaurants serve is an acceptable diet

McDonald's gets a bad rap, but I doubt McDonald's caused the obesity epidemic. If you remember the documentary, Super Size Me, by Morgan Spurlock, it's easy to think that McDonald's played a major role. But, Spurlock's documentary is another one of those generalizations that misses the point. Fat Head the movie (you can watch it on Hulu) challenges Spurlock's assumptions...

[align=center][/align]

During the film, Naughton goes on an all-fast-food diet, mainly eating food from McDonald's. For his daily dietary intake, he aims to keep his calories to around 2,000 and his carbohydrates to around 100 grams per day, but he does not restrict fat at all. He ends up eating about 100 grams of fat per day, of which about 50 grams are saturated. He also decides to walk six nights a week, instead of his usual three. After a month eating that way, he loses 12 pounds and his total cholesterol goes down. His HDL does go down, often thought to be undesirable.

At the end of his experiment, Naughton details an additional experiment inspired by his research into the lipid hypothesis. In this second experiment, he cut out all sugars and starches from his diet for a month, and ate things like cheeseburgers without buns, eggs and bacon fried in butter, steaks, Polish sausage, Egg McMuffins without the muffins when he traveled, fruit in heavy cream and green vegetables covered in butter. He used coconut oil to fry onions for his cheeseburgers and shredded cheese as his favorite snack. As a result, Naughton says his energy level and mood suffered no deleterious effects, despite often working until 2am on a large programming project with a tight deadline. At the end of that month, his overall cholesterol dropped from 222 to 209, and his LDL dropped from 156 to 130, and his HDL increased from 49 to 64.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Head

So, I think it's shortsighted to say that McDonald's causes obesity. McDonald's has been around much longer than the obesity epidemic. (Though, I suppose it's worth mentioning that, in 1990, McDonald's made a switch from frying in saturated fats to frying in vegetable oil.)

That's a great movie.

I don't think McDonald's is any worse than any other restaurant, and I'm pretty sure the guy who made the movie is right about overeating carbs being the main problem, and you can do that almost anywhere you chose to eat.

[MediumTex]

Well, I don't mean to be unfair to McDonald's, but I would say that the whole fast food culture seems to promote a fundamentally unhealthy diet.  That's not to say that a meal at McDonald's can't be modified to be reasonably healthy.

Childhood obesity is also obviously a situation that sets the stage for lifelong obesity, which is really sad because the person may literally have no frame of reference for when they weren't overweight.

It's also important to point out the fact that there is no person with less willpower than someone who is deeply depressed.  When you are in this place mentally the easiest things seem hard, and something like changing your diet probably feels impossible because it feels like you are denying yourself one of the few things in life that actually seems to bring pleasure.

I'm not blaming obese people for being obese, it just seems like the U.S. has a worse problem than many other industrialized countries, even though we all have a lot of sedentary office jobs and we all like to watch TV, but for whatever reason a lot of these other countries seem to have avoided the obesity problem much more effectively than we have.

Maybe corn is part of the problem.  I get the impression that corn-based products have seeped into many more foods here than in other countries.  Is it crazy to think that too much corn might have the same effect on people that it has on cows (i.e., it makes them big and flabby).

[doodle]

My diet is pretty bad on occasion. For example, yesterday I ate two big iced honey buns from the vending machine at work for a total of 1200 empty calories. Fortunately, I have never had an issue with getting too overweight because by foregoing a car, I burn a tremendous number of calories just getting from point A to B on a daily basis. If I want to get a donut for instance, I have to bike about 3 miles to do so. The act of getting and eating a donut therefore is calorie neutral. Even though I think that diet is 80 percent of the problem with the obesity issue in the United States, the condition that cements the deal is that most Americans have very little movement incorporated into their daily lives. Walking, biking, sweeping, bending, stooping, washing, and climbing stairs should be a natural part of our daily lives, yet most people choose to take the elevator and drive everywhere during the day. They use the latest gadgets designed to turn every chore into an automatic process. Many dont evev expend the calories to vaccuum because they now have a robot that will do it for you. If they do any exercise at all it is compartimentalized to a flourescently lit gym box which they drive to (another ironic twist) in the evening and walk on a treadmill like some lab rat or use the stair stepper.

Every time I visit another country I'm always surprised initially how much walking is done by most people on a daily basis by virtue of the fact that they either don't have the money for a car, or their city is too crowded to make it a reasonable mode of transportation. The lack of activity in Americans daily lives combined with a corn based high sugar diet is a fantastic way to create an obesity epidemic. We love to mind#### ourselves about this problem, and we have created myriad complicated and expensive solutions such as stomach stapling to combat it. In my mind it would be better (although less lucrative) to get at the root of the problem rather than spend trillions in expensive healthcare procedures and diet potions fighting the symptoms.

Although diet and exercise are the direct causes of obesity, our economic system is the enabler. America prides itself on economic growth and we look for constantly growing GDP numbers to indicate the health of our society. The truth is however that part of the reason that our GDP is so large is that Americans love fantastically complicated and expensive solutions to basic problems. First we buy all the gizmos that take activity and exercise out of our daily lives and stop cooking healthy meals at home. Our waist lines expand along with our GDP. Then we have an obesity epidemic and instead of reverting to more activity and healthier meals (a free and easy solution) we design lapband surgery or hire personal fitness instructors and dietitians to solve the problem. Finding a simple and robust solution to the obesity epidemic won't happen because there is no economic incentive to do so. Our system is not designed to create solutions to problems that make logical sense, its designed to create solutions that make money.

[doodle]

Bad for jobs....good for waistlines? Twinkies maker to Liquidate, lay off 18,500.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49852161

[RuralEngineer]

Bad for jobs....good for waistlines? Twinkies maker to Liquidate, lay off 18,500.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49852161

Another union bites the hand that feeds it. Apparently no job > an 8% salary cut. Even the Teamsters think the Bakers union is nuts. Simply amazing.

[Gumby]

Well, I don't mean to be unfair to McDonald's, but I would say that the whole fast food culture seems to promote a fundamentally unhealthy diet.  That's not to say that a meal at McDonald's can't be modified to be reasonably healthy.

I tend to agree. But, it's also an oversimplification for a very complex problem. For instance, a few decades ago, fast food, and typical restaurant food, was different. The quality of the food was better, there were fewer artificial ingredients, far fewer heated/oxidized PUFAs (Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids) and people didn't eat out nearly as often.

The fast food industry is obviously part of the free market — it serves to meet a demand. Taubes argues that people are just hungrier than they used to be, since the majority of the food supply is now "low fat". And what do people do when they are hungry? They go to McDonald's to satisfy their hunger. But, again, that's an oversimplification because satisfying one's "low fat" hunger with heavily satiating meals can't explain the cause of obesity.

No, there is something more complex about what's going on here...

One of the more interesting theories to surface in recent years is the effect of the foods on the reward centers of the brain. Stephan Guyenet's series on Food Reward is really fascinating...

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2 ... esity.html

It all started with one little sentence buried in a paper about obese rats. I was reading about how rats become obese when they're given chocolate Ensure, the "meal replacement drink", when I came across this:

"...neither [obesity-prone] nor [obesity-resistant] rats will overeat on either vanilla- or strawberry-flavored Ensure."

The only meaningful difference between chocolate, vanilla and strawberry Ensure is the flavor, yet rats eating the chocolate variety overate, rapidly gained fat and became metabolically ill, while rats eating the other flavors didn't (1). Furthermore, the study suggested that the food's flavor determined, in part, what amount of fatness the rats' bodies "defended."

As I explained in previous posts, the human (and rodent) brain regulates the amount of fat the body carries, in a manner similar to how the brain regulates blood pressure, body temperature, blood oxygenation and blood pH (2). That fact, in addition to several other lines of evidence, suggests that obesity probably results from a change in this regulatory system. I refer to the amount of body fat that the brain defends as the "body fat setpoint", however it's clear that the setpoint is dependent on diet and lifestyle factors. The implication of this paper that I could not escape is that a food's flavor influences body fatness and probably the body fat setpoint.

Source: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2 ... esity.html

Food Reward is a fascinating subject and the food industry certainly uses the science on food reward to increase consumption of their foods. For instance, the potato chip industry is notorious for searching for just the right oils to make it so that your tongue and brain gets a reward, with each chip, that disappears after five to ten seconds. So, you reach for another chip, and another, and another... every five to ten seconds.

Taubes is probably right that the government pushing for a "low fat" diet pushed people to seek "safety" in mass-produced low fat foods. The cottage industry of "healthy" low fat foods that sprang up are also engineered to induce Food Reward. But, to say that one or two things caused the obesity epidemic is too oversimplified. We may never figure out just how complex it all is in our lifetime.

[Pointedstick]

I think there's a lot of wisdom in doodle's observation that we're a culture that prizes complicated, automated solutions to basic problems. The quantity of ostensibly "labor-saving" gizmos and devices available is incredible, to the point of ridiculousness. For example: http://www.cracked.com/article_19911_th ... n-buy.html

There are a lot of gadgets out there that probably cause you to expend more mental effort using them than they're saving you physical effort, to say nothing of the cost of buying, maintaining, storing, and replacing them.

I'm reminded of this Thoreau quotation:

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."

[doodle]

Today's Thoreau - Mr. Money Mustache explains how to use the "Catheter and Bedpan" slipperly slope to shock people into realizing why physical exertion is an essential part of what makes us human. Rather than trying to devise ever more complex technologies to escape labor, we should instead revel in opportunities to utilize our bodies. A simple, but effective change in cultural philosophy could go a long way to resolving part of the obesity epidemic. Unforntunately, there is scant chance this will happen unless someone can figure out a way to monetize it.

Let’s suppose you want the latest iPad. You want it because it is convenient to be able to look at pictures and websites and books and play music around the house. Sure, you already have other computers that do those things, but the iPad is special because it lets you do them while holding it in one hand, sitting on the couch.

Wow, that couch is pretty convenient too, isn’t it? It is comfortable, enjoyable, convenient, and joyful to sit and lie on your couch. In fact, wouldn’t it be best to just lie on that couch all day? Forever? Yeah! Maybe you could even hook it up with a catheter and a bedpan, and a friend or robot could bring you all your food on the couch too. With each release, the latest iPad could be delivered to you, and you’d have the most convenient and comfortable and effort-free life ever.

Maybe you were with me for the first bit of that paragraph, but it probably lost its appeal by the time we reached the end, right? And indeed, with proper understanding, almost any consumer purchase (and almost any bad habit) these days, beyond the necessities, should start to sound like a catheter and a bedpan to you.

“I really like my Land Rover, and I deserve it because I’m a big executive now. It’s much faster than biking those five miles to work. Especially since I don’t want to arrive at work all sweaty”?. Uh-huh. And it’s much more convenient than a compact hatchback, because you don’t have to bend your knees to get into the driver’s seat. And you no longer have to wait a whole ten seconds to accelerate to 60MPH, because it has a big enough engine to pull its enormous bulk to that speed in only six seconds. Would you, by any chance, like a catheter and a bedpan to go with that?

“I like running my A/C at 72 degrees, because it’s just so nice to come in out of the Texas heat into a fresh, cool house. Then I do the laundry and use my electric clothes dryer to get crisp, hot clothes ready to wear without all that hassle of hanging them up to dry”?. Uh-huh. If only your clothes were equipped with catheters and bedpans, then you’d really be set, wouldn’t you!?

We could go on and on with this theme (and you’re welcome to do so in the comments, because I find it pretty funny). But the bottom line is, virtually everything we buy is actually a form of false happiness, a slippery slope that ends at the catheter and the bedpan, and the earlier on the slope that you catch yourself, the richer and happier you will be.

[doodle]

Maybe there is a way to monetize this....

Take the vaccuum for example. You can move in the direction appealing to our lazy gene by creating a robot that does the work for you....or you can target the vanity gene by turning vacuuming into a zumba like workout.

You could add progressive resistance bands or something to makes the vaccuum harder to push, thus exercising your flabby triceps and girly shoulders. Incorporate some choreographed vacuum exercise moves to target the abs and glutes. Throw in a hyped up salesperson like Tony Little and you could have the beginning of a movement. Other household routines could be incorporated into an entire "cardio cleaning" product. Buy the vacuum package and get the scubbing and scraping package for free!!!

Other socially engineered products designed to get us off our asses could also be designed. How about a bike commuters or walking app that rewards points for certain speeds, heart rates etc. You could even use these apps to qualify for discounts on health insurance or maybe even government sponsored coupons for healthy foods.

Just some ideas that came to me....

[RuralEngineer]

I think the women hand washing clothes with a washboard would take issue with the idea that all or even most modern conveniences are a form of "false happiness."

[Pointedstick]

I think the women hand washing clothes with a washboard would take issue with the idea that all or even most modern conveniences are a form of "false happiness."

I think we would all agree that washing machines, refrigerators, and gas and electric stoves represented quantum leaps forward in efficiency and had a very liberating effect on women. But electric apple peelers? Roombas? A third car that you don't know how to maintain?

I believe there's a point at which labor-saving machines stop liberating you and begin enslaving you. That point will vary by the person; a paraplegic will need and benefit more from labor-saving machinery, for example. But most people aren't paraplegic.