20 – I am unhappy because I over-eat!

30 – I under-exert myself because I am unhappy…

40 – I am unhappy because I under-exert myself!

50 Goto 10

Science will say >Reprogram yourselves.
Either bio-engineering or psychological re-education
will do fine.

Simple, (Nuovo Ordo Seclorum)

On the one hand, he presents everything as nefarious — Chili’s *fries* their tortillas, driving water content down! Oh noes!

On the other hand, this same guy says he drove all over the SF area seeking out his favorite (bad for you) foods. He went to SFO specifically for donuts or something comparable.

Now what’s more likely: evil scientists, who understood everything he’s just discovered but who have kept it secret all these years so they can concoct unhealthy foods and dupe the American public… or natural selection in the market, where guys like him drive all over the place to spend money on unhealthy foods, increasing sales of those foods and keeping them on menus and driving more healthy foods off menus because people order less of them?

The science is great and seems sound. The complete blindness to market forces and his own participation in the market is naive, and the “how food chemists are making Americans obese” conspiracy side is just ludicrous.

Supply and demand, people. Chili’s is giving people what they want, for whatever reason. If they refused to serve unhealthy food, Chevy’s would, and would be more profitable. There’s no ethical implication here, and no evil plot. And if you’re shocked that deep fried tortillas are less healthy than crudite, no amount of warning labels and disclosures are going to help you make smarter choices.

Anyone know if there’s some science behind that?

With neural networks, the raw materials are the fundamental building blocks of axon, cell body and dendrites, within the fluid permeated tissue. At a finer level, the neural network consists of biological polymers, ions, metabolites and water eith a highly ordered distribution of charge densities. This substrate demonstrates an emergent physical form of great complexity in the performance of a thought/behavior. Past and current forms of thought pattern future performances. In memory recall, for example, feedback mechanisms enable the complex electrical and chemical state of the neural network to be mirrored through the memory system, through recall and recognition, to produce a new thought, which is an evolved copy with similarity and differences reflecting the new context and cues triggering generation. The performance of thought is a process of evolution in which neural network performances are selected for fitness through neurophysiological regulation by hormones and neuropeptides. The mind culls through its own complex encyclopedia and selects previous thought patterns to emerge as templates based on context cues, and other fitness cues to favor those thoughts and behaviors satisfying these feedback criteria which may change in development, experience or illness.

So the difficulty is that even after substituting a new healthy pattern which has its own neuroendocrine fitness, the old performances remain in memory, (seemingly) permanently tagged and ready to go by the dopamine system, which seems to have a function of encoding reward prediction error in behavior pattern selection. Dopamine responses transfer to the onset of a conditioned stimulus after repeated pairings with the reward. Further, dopamine neurons are depressed when the expected reward is omitted. So the neuroendocrine system maintains and stores the behaviors as a performance of neural networks that have been shown to have fitness (such as providing the organism with sugar, salt, and fat) basically as a permanent template to generate future performances through the biological processes of mimesis that manifest thought and behavior. The old patterns activating and generating a new behavior through context cues (seeing old friends, Valentine’s Day, the golden arches) is what everyone experiences as a moment of weakness. I think the best strategy for a brain hack may be to find some healthy behavior that gives pleasure and stick with it for at least two weeks, until it becomes a habit, until there is a decent store of the pattern in memory. Avoid context cues for unhealthy behaviors and try to drive them further and further under layers of memory. The difficulty of course, as anyone who has had long battles with smoking will attest, is that the old behavior patterns never go away. Once an addict, always an addict.

“Eat food.
Mostly plants.
Not too much.”

weight is the least of the problems for anyone who orders that … mental health issues are clearly more pressing.

Fast food chain specifically aim their advertising campaign toward children. Because they want to “educate” their taste , so that these children grow up as crappy food nostalgic adults (=future customers).

For example: couple of years ago, I helped some of my friends to move into their new home. At the end, the only opened eatery was a McDonald’s (the new house kitchen was a mess, of course). While we were chewing our burgers, their two 5 and 7 years old kids were complaining, and didn’t finished their Happy Meal. Why ? Because it was their first fast food experience, and for them, the “food” was too fat, salty, and to be honest, disgusting.
They were used to proper food, nothing fancy, organic, feng shui or what you can imagine. Just real, cooked food.
Some more details: my friends work, full time. So, they are not spending their life in the kitchen. It was in France, where school tend to serve proper meals (even if not always appetizing).
Culture and education matter.

I agree that conditioning/advertising/psychology makes a big difference, but I suspect that those things are built to exploit more much basic mechanisms like those I described above.

You’re right — grains are the staple of settled agricultural civilizations, and there’s a good argument to be made that human health has deteriorated in the 6 to 10 millennia since that transition. (Of course, the trend way intensified after industrial farming and inventions like high-fructose corn syrup.) Hunter-gatherers and nomadic pastoralists, who eat mainly proteins and fat and some vegetables, have excellent health before they adopt a grain-based diet. Grains were an adaptation to high population density, but the cost is that it’s not what our bodies evolved to eat (and a few thousand years isn’t long enough to change that).

There’s an excellent chapter on the “grain belt” and its consequences in Jarrod Diamond’s Guns, Germs And Steel.

“This is approximately the same eating advice I’ve heard for decades, and while it works, it’s hard, and harder still to sustain. Anyone who’s devoted more than a few hours to the question of controlling weight and eating has encountered and tried this advice — and chances are, they’ve failed at it.”

It’s surprising to me that nobody has mentioned programs such as Overeaters Anonymous or the like that really try and treat the problem at a different level. The world doesn’t need another Diet. The world needs to see what obesity really is, a symptom of something deeper going on in the individual. Unfortunately while there is still money to be made in selling the next diet which will lead to the next failure no dent will ever be made in the real problem.

Abandoning the hunter-gatherer-(herder?) means of obtaining calories was no doubt driven by climate change, the decline of certain fauna, and the fortuitous emergence of easily exploitable new grains after the retreat of the glaciers. Bingo. A perfect storm of circumstances.

We are a highly adaptable species, very much the wanderers, and the principles of horticulture-agriculture were probably quickly learned and utilized — along with animal husbandry, since heretofore herded quadrupeds could be fed surplus grains.

Imagine that! On the brink of extinction 75,000 years earlier, and then … the Garden of Eden.

And of course The Fall.

This works because you are unlikely to pour lots of added salt and HFCS and saturated fat into what you make yourself. You’ll use olive oil where a restaurant might use lard. Also, time pressures will encourage simpler, healthier food choices. It’s much faster to make a meal with lots of fresh produce than it is to bake a pie.

I’ve done this, and now most restaurant food tastes almost unbearably salty to me.

My moral framework is–as much as possible–vegan, local, and open source seed (anti-Monsanto, etc.).

Understanding the Rescorla-Wagner equations for compound cue conditioning (developed in 70′s and still going strong as a scientific theory today) leads to multiple methods of breaking/changing/replacing any conditioned responses that get assoc. strength from a reinforcer like tasty food.

A simple compounding of the two would produce a host of conditoning sequences that would change eating behavors to whatever patterns one wants.

Of course, one would have to engage in the training and since humans are not kept in cages, this requires self-displine and so is doomed to failure for most people.

Another point–it used to be a food mantra that “fat is flavor” and dieters desperately tried to replace fats in their foods with spice mixes, so they wouldn’t lose out on “flavor.” The truth is that fat squashes and subdues flavors. Our bodies are made of water, and the molecules that stimulate flavor receptors in our tongues and noses are water soluble. When the fat content of a food is too high, we actually experience less flavor. Skilled chefs know this, but many poorly educated restaurant chefs still believe this, so they load up their menus with extremely fatty foods, thinking it will be more delicious to diners. A moderate quantity of fat combined with flavorful meats, vegetables, and fruits is actually much more flavorful.

As a remedy for overeating, try journaling everything you eat. I’ve been doing this for months, and it really works. You don’t have to subscribe to any diet plan or philosophy, or avoid any particular foods, just write down every calorie with the informed knowledge of your bodily needs. Also track any nutrients you are concerned about. You will find yourself naturally making corrections while still enjoying all of your favorite foods. There have been some studies on journaling that have shown it to be very effective.

Word. I eat three home-cooked meals per day. I’m completely spoiled for most restaurant food and you couldn’t pay me to eat fast food. Fresh fruits and vegetables are fucking delicious.