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Musings Report 2021-19 5-8-21 Why Do We Eat Foods That Are Bad For Us Rather Than What We Need?
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Why Do We Eat Foods That Are Bad For Us Rather Than What We Need?
We're constantly assured that we live in the best of all possible worlds, brimming with convenience, luxuries and technological advances that promise an endless cornucopia of more convenience and prosperity.
But is this actually true of all aspects of modern life? When it comes to our system of manufacturing and marketing food, that ever-expanding number of people suffering from chronic lifestyle diseases causally linked to what we eat suggests this part of our world is not just far from being the best possible, it is clearly destructive.
Longtime correspondent Don Stewart addressed these issues in an essay he shared with me, and I obtained his permission to reprint it here, as I consider his "connecting the dots" between the perversity of our food system and systems analysis worthy of close study.
Here is Don's essay; my comments follow:
"It is common for systems modelers to assume that we live in the better neighborhood of all possible worlds, and to confine themselves to seeking ways to modify current practices in order to achieve an even better neighborhood.
It is also common to separate 'necessities' from 'luxuries'. I will suggest that our current world is the result of complex system dynamics which are inevitable consequences of our current economic system, and that the current result of those dynamics is very far from the best of all possible worlds.
I will suggest that our prosperity is dependent on doing the painful surgery required to change the dynamics.
The best worked out system for thinking about this sort of problem (that I have seen) is the Eat Like an Animal approach used by two Australian entomologists (insect study). They begin with the questions 'what do animals choose to eat, and how do they know they have had enough'? Right away you can see that modern humans are very poor at solving that problem with the global epidemic of weight gain and the associated chronic diseases. You can look up some discussions with the authors on Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/eat-like-the-animals/id1518537017 There are 7 discussions. You can also buy their book, which is very well written and both authoritative and accessible. Eat Like the Animals: What Nature Teaches Us About the Science of Healthy Eating
https://amzn.to/33t2AG6
It turns out that most animals eat to get the protein they need, with the specific amino acid profile that they need. Because they evolved in a particular environment which supplied food with particular characteristics, they are able in ordinary circumstances to meet their needs without thinking about it and without too much labor. Animals from slime molds to baboons are able to do the job. Along with the required proteins come many other nutrients, some major (e.g., energy from carbohydrates and fats) and some very minor (e.g., zinc). Besides the protein tracking function, there are four other important tracking functions which include carbohydrates, fats, calcium, and sodium. Pandas migrate in order to get the calcium which is seasonally in short supply in their environment, which is an example of a lesser requirement dictating behavior.
What prompts them to stop eating, thus avoiding obesity and almost certain death from predators? It turns out to be the fiber in plants for those animals that eat plants.
A female baboon living free near Cape Town was observed to choose 90 different foods in the course of a month which very precisely matched her requirement for total protein and also the optimum amino acid profile.
We can see that if the food supply changes in such a way that the food available no longer supplies the protein or the amino acid profile and no longer supplies the fiber, then the animal will eat more trying to satisfy the requirement for protein. If an animal eats excessively, even by relatively small amounts, it will gain weight and eventually become obese and have the chronic diseases associated with obesity.
It turns out that industrial agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels have combined to reduce the protein density of the food we humans eat. And the raising for food of the domesticated animals means that instead of eating 7 percent fat animals we may be eating 30 percent fat animals...not the environment we evolved to live in.
The result is that we have a complex system operating which is guaranteed to generate obesity and chronic disease. Perhaps 3 or 5 percent of the population can escape the trap through exercising self-control.
An even more powerful system is also operating: the quest for financial profit. Food science teaches corporations how to manipulate the humans to eat nutrient poor junk food with a long shelf life and very little water weight, made with the cheapest ingredients, and marketed with efficient advertising and sophisticated targeting of hard-wired responses. It’s finding the 'bliss point'.
The net result is that the economic system, which generates GDP, is actually producing many products which have a negative real world value for anyone over 40 and for increasing numbers of people under 40. We even have 6 year olds showing up with brain damage.
The relationship between the industry and the consumers is best thought of as 'predator and prey'. This is very far from the liberal economics ideal of 'equal bargaining power and accurate information'. Neoliberalism prohibits governments from intervening on the side of the consumers. So we get huge government expenditures in the name of 'health care' which are really about 'slowing down collapse using expensive technologies'. Since the costs are high, economists rejoice and governments collect the taxes and corporations and skilled medical people make money and everyone is happy so long as all the jugglers' plates remain in the air.
Why did it take two entomologists to discover the most important levers leading to our current crisis? The dietetic establishment made it hard for them to get published. Years later, one of the senior people in the field admitted that he had personally delayed publication because 'how could we have failed to discover this?' The lesson there is that professional economists and politicians and Wall Street bankers may be blind to reality as the environment changes.
Both entomologists are confirmed systems thinkers which paved the way for hard work to prove their points.
Is the 'protein and fiber' hypothesis the end of the story? I think not. Herman Pontzer at Duke showed that the Hadza in Tanzania, who exercise more in a day than most people in the US exercise in a week, burned exactly the same number of calories that the American couch potatoes burned. Human bodies tend to burn the same number of calories, regardless of fluctuations in calories burned from exercise. Which proves that more exercise is not the solution to obesity. (It has other virtues, which you can discover if you read Pontzer’s book Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy https://amzn.to/33qVUbl ) Pontzer is an anthropologist, not a dietitian nor an exercise physiologist.
And Dr. Nick Fuller, after years of shilling for the diet industry, sought refuge in a university where he was able to tell his truth that almost all diet regimes don't work in the long term. Nick has evidence that each of us has a set point, which the body tries to maintain despite fluctuations in the calories eaten.
So losing 20 pounds in 3 months to get ready for your daughter’s wedding is not a good long term strategy. Nick suggests that long term weight loss requires resetting the set point to a lower weight. His regime is one month of calorie restriction to lose 2kg, then a month of weight maintenance, then another month losing 2 kg, another month of maintenance, and so forth. He calls it Interval Weight Loss. The notion is that the pulsed weight loss of moderate amounts in each pulse allows the body to move the set point.
So there is still much to be learned about the obesity epidemic and how to get rid of chronic disease, not just tend its symptoms with expensive interventions. But we certainly know enough to take radical action in our time of peril. Whether we can muster the intelligence and gumption to do it is another matter.
One could apply similar Systems Thinking to our other structural issues. All fall under the same Complex System analytical methods used by the Entomologists who did the multiple experiments proving the 'protein/ fiber' hypothesis. Whether we continue to tinker or attack at the systems level may well determine the future our children inhabit."
Thank you, Don, for encapsulating so much so succinctly.
Longtime readers know I have endeavored to look at the world we inhabit as a system, which can be broken down at the lowest level to inputs, functions and outputs, and in human systems, to values, beliefs, narratives, metrics (what we measure), goals, incentives, trade-offs and costs.
I have also endeavored to differentiate key dynamics which it is profitable to confuse, starting with the difference between earning a profit by filling a need/scarcity with a faster, better, cheaper solution and maximizing profit by any means available, which includes hiding negative consequences, fraud, collusion, influencing regulators and politicians, monopolies and cartels that limit supply to maximize profits and a host of other "by any means available."
It has long been my contention that the system we inhabit has shifted over the past 70 years to optimize maximizing profit by any means available. Once this is the primary goal, then every part of the system is optimized to served this goal: metrics (we can only manage what we measure), values, narratives, incentives and disincentives (if you fail to maximize private gain / profits due to some ethical reluctance, you're fired.)
Within this milieu--what I term the social ontology--it makes perfect sense to manufacture and market entirely unhealthy food--food that everyone knows is far from healthy--as well as food that is not healthy but can be marketed as healthy--to maximize profits. The visibly unhealthy foods can be marketed as desirable due to their convenience, taste/mouth-feel and social value as luxuries (You're a higher status person if you're seen buying and consuming this product) or low cost (as long as the long-term costs of chronic diseases are excluded from the calculation of cost.)
In other words, our hard-wired systems for preferring foods that are salty, sweet and fatty are hijacked / hacked by the manufacturers and marketers of food as a means of maximizing profits, not health.
Our hard-wired desire to boost our social status in the group is also exploited via luxury brands, and perversely, the desire to be thin and fit, as being thin and fit are key signifiers of high social status now that 74% of Americans are officially overweight.
This destructive social ontology of maximizing profit by inducing chronic lifestyle illnesses and then maximizing profit by managing (but not curing) the chronic diseases is labeled "capitalism," i.e. nothing but good old market forces at work maximizing "value," but this is a perversion of Adam Smith's classical description. The "value" being created is purely financial, but at the cost of the health and well-being of the consumers and ultimately of the nation.
This perverse system is sold as "win-win," i.e. consumers get what they want and companies make a profit providing what consumers want, but this is a marketer's happy story, not the reality. What the food manufacturing and marketing system actually does is offer an illusion of choice (from really bad to less bad) in products whose only possible output is ill health via chronic lifestyle diseases.
To sum up: the consumer's body keeps signaling it needs more food because it's terribly deficient in lean protein, minerals and fiber, yet the consumer's diet of highly processed foods has been stripped of these necessities.
I'm sure you've felt occasional cravings for real food, not processed snacks; after days of hard physical work, I crave protein in just about any form. After a few meals of cooked food, I crave raw fruits and vegetables. This is evidence that the hard-wired system we share with other animals is still intact.
My own strategy is to keep in mind that all processed food--and I mean every single item--has been carefully engineered to be the equivalent of the cocaine given to the caged rats when they press the bar. (In the popular version of this experiment, the rats keep hitting the bar until they starve to death.)
So the solution is to avoid processed foods as much as possible, and be very selective in the quantity and type I do indulge in. Seeking a wide variety of real food with a bias for fresh sources of fiber is a basic strategy, as is growing whatever one can or sourcing food from known local growers.
So much of the world we inhabit is optimized to hijack / hack / commandeer our hard-wired processes in perverse, destructive ways. It's beyond pathetic and tragic that this perversity ("waste and destruction = growth") is presented as "the best possible world" when it is arguably the worst possible world for the prey, i.e. consumers and citizenry.
As for solutions, on the personal level, the ruthless avoidance of all but a smattering of manufactured /processed food and consuming a variety of real (and largely fiber-rich) foods is the base solution.
As for systemic solutions, the usual "policy tweaks" reforms won't change anything, even if they were enacted. We need to create a new, positive, sustainable social ontology, a topic at the heart of my next book.
Highlights of the Blog
Podcasts:
Salon #43: History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men...
Covid Has Triggered The Next Great Financial Crisis (34:46)
Posts:
Hey Fed, Explain Again How Making Billionaires Richer Creates Jobs 5/7/21
Covid Has Triggered The Next Great Financial Crisis 5/5/21
Insights into Risk: Taleb and Tyson 5/3/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Most of the time I'm busy in my self-contained bubble of taking care of the gardens, trees and house, my Mom-in-Law, etc., and working on my writing, so it's a welcome honor to receive a personal note from long time readers/correspondents who share a window into their lives while encouraging my own work. Thank you, Vera, Scott, Allan and Doug.
I've gotten in the habit of posting photos of homemade edibles our household prepares: here's two homemade breads, a whole-wheat millet bread and a fry-bread with homemade chili, and a wok full of our home-grown ong-choy (water spinach).
From Left Field
Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (10:47) (via GFB) -- autonomy, mastery and purpose, financial gain an also-ran...
Welcome to the YOLO Economy -- do it now b/c you only live once...
Flushing the toilet is more dangerous than you think: study
Math Is Hard--but Vital for Understanding Vaccine Risks
Burnt out: is the exhausting cult of productivity finally over?
Patients With Long Covid Face Lingering Worrisome Health Risks, Study Finds
‘Like science fiction,’ Seattle startup sends laser-equipped robots to zap weeds on farmland
Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (book)
China's Reckoning: Demographic Collapse (Part 1) (21 min)
China's Reckoning: Housing Crisis (Part 2) (21 min)
Water — China's Reckoning (Part 3) (21 min)
Common Blood Pressure Medications Linked to Increased Skin Cancer Risk
"Crashes and panics often are precipitated by the revelation of some malfeasance that occurred during the mania... As the monetary system gets stretched, institutions lose liquidity and as unsuccessful swindles seem about to be revealed, the temptation to take the money and run becomes virtually irresistible." Charles P. Kindleberger
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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