I agree, and also I note that both words in 'nutrient deficiency' are doing a lot of heavy lifting. People can't agree what a vitamin is. Do they know what nutrients are either? And deficient in what sense? For instance, I'm not sure at this point I regard fructose as much of a 'nutrient', and you probably don't consider anything else in fruit as much of a nutrient either. And in evolutionary time, there's a distinction a bit like short-term vs long-term. We're supposed to overeat fruit when we get it -- seeds too. It's only for a season, and then the snow falls.
As for the specifics of this experiment, I did a bit more reading and feel vindicated on my 'fermented foods' guess. The most common explanation for humans liking 'sour' is connected with our inability to make our own vitamin C, but some (e.g. professor Rob Dunn) connect it to fermentation. In an interview, he says, “The acid produced by the bacteria kills off the pathogens in the rotten food. So we think that the sour taste on our tongue, and the way we appreciate it, actually may have served our ancestors as a kind of pH strip to know which of these fermented foods was safe.”
Craving for "spicy" food is explained by some (people are saying) as due to the endorphins -- not everyone produces them equally in response to all stimuli, and for some spicy foods do a good job of it (for some, running does -- we both know you're not that one).
Craving for salt of course is well-known and well-understood.
So. Even when you're fully metabolically healthy, would it be unreasonable for you to overeat salty spicy sour foods, especially when your brain thinks it's the end of summer (or some other strange period in which you went months without sour fructose)? Is keto truly an evolutionary-enough state that your 'deficiency' system is throwing no error codes at all, even below the surface? Would you have so intense a craving for a humble salsa if it weren't? These aren't rhetorical questions, I do genuinely wonder.
"I don’t buy the argument that we are now constantly swimming in much more hyper-palatable food." why not? it seems very obvious that food producers have been specifically manufacturing food to be exponentially more palatable over the years. its not as if our grandparents were eating seed oils or the 600-900 number of compounds referred to as artificial flavors.
You’re not going to like the book “Ultra Processed People” which I just read. Still, I enjoyed hearing that perspective in order to clarify my own. “Coloring in the negative space,” as one might say.
I got a good laugh out of “diabesityheimer”! And I enjoy imagining that you have “CaRoLiEs” on autocorrect.
I had my own hyperphagia episode this weekend. Got invited to a breakfast that was serving Belgian waffles and bacon and eggs. I never eat breakfast (haven’t in the last 5 years more than 4 or 5 time) but this time I ate 4 slices of bacon and a waffle covered in coconut flavored butter syrup. It felt like I hadn’t eaten anything, like I had only eaten air. Such a weird feeling. So I ended up eating double that, and way overeating the rest of that day. When I woke up this morning I weighed 5 lbs heavier (2 days later)!
I’m curious if you think the best policy to cut global obesity would be to eliminate all seed oils from the global food supply? I’d love to see a clinical trial like this NIH-led one (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/) except they make all of the “ultra processed food” have an omega balance of at least 40%. i.e. match the two diets as much as possible on macros as well as omega balance and then see what happens.
This seems to be the missing link at the heart of the “seed oils” vs “hyperpalatable” wars. Just have Nabisco make an all-butter Oreo and feed it to a group of people in a highly controlled environment and see what happens.
I think you should try sour cream again at some point just without the salsa- because it seems pretty clear that you’ve proven that salsa/chili’s does that for you
Also agree that for me,I also have had certain foods that set off crazy overeating- so much that part of my ‘diet’ for years now has been “no foods that I can’t stop eating “ because as long as I don’t eat the first bite I am fine- and agree those foods are NOT the same as what people are calling “hyper platable foods” (in fact like you, I’ve has them be foods I disliked, all while I kept eating it anyway)
I'm not ready to throw out the "hyperpalatable food" hypothesis just yet. There are a lot non-diet factors that play into it. I don't have an answer, but these peak my interest -
- regional culture i.e. new york vs. the south. In the south, people don't exercise, or even walk anywhere. Very common for people to get in the car and drive 1 block. It's HOT out. All homes are air conditioned and very pleasant to stay in. You don't really have to interact with other people. In dense cities people have to walk because driving sucks. Apartments are noisy and have no A/C. If you want to escape you have to leave and walk places. Meet people. Probably have lots of sex (I can't imagine any other reason to live in NY). Social functions are the only reason to live in a city, and that changes the incentive structure.
- marketing. Marketing, branding and ads work. Once you start looking at successful businesses it's obvious, and we are MUCH better at marketing (in this case for junk food) than in the past. So even if snickers and snickers equivalents were available and eaten in 1920, they were not consumed as much because the marketing for them sucked.
- Less socializing in general (driven by electronics in the 90s, and now social media) means less time spent with other people means many more meals are eaten alone. Let me tell you if I had to eat every meal with others I would exercise more self control (incentives!). I know this is true because I've deployed and have done exactly this. Binging would have been very difficult in the past, you would literally would have to wake up at night and sneak down to the kitchen, I Love Lucy style. Or, be some kind of outcast eating bachelor chow which had it's own social implications.
- Poor people eat less. People were poorer in the past and had less money to spend on food. Yes our poor today are fat, but they live a heavily subsidized life (no judgement, government assistance to the poor is good!). If you didn't have money for food then you just didn't eat. There were, like, convents for the truly destitute but those you basically had to go to church whereas assistance today is judgement free. We didn't emerge from the one-two punch of the great depression, then WWII rationing, into the utopian vision of the 50s. Large swaths of the country didn't have indoor plumbing, I refuse to believe everyone was, on average, eating as much as and whenever they wanted like we can today.
All that being said I'm still avoiding seed oils, even though it's comically difficult.
Oh interesting! So do you have any problem with just sour cream? Or was it the salsa? I found sour cream to work just like plain cream, but it does taste better, so if that's a problem for you I can see it going either way...
I'm wondering if you've got some sort of micronutrient deficiency and that's where the hyperphagia's coming from. You might want to try eating a bucketload of tasty yet calorie free things and see if you can satisfy those cravings. If your body's crying out for salsa it may know something you don't.
Food scientists: big brains with labs, money, assistants, internet et cetera - try to make food cheaper per calorie and more addictive; I believe there has been progress. Pringles Habaneras are my most recent error: a 900-calorie can vanishes instantly and leaves me hungrier.
You're right, the terms of this whole debate are completely off. No wonder we're getting nowhere. They do not mean anything consistent. Only the memes can get us out of this situation!
I’ve certainly eaten a head of roasted cabbage which had negligible calories, and was bulk, but not satiating. I’m just annoyed that “this is a thing”.
This may sound simplistic - but my experience with successful weight loss has been that the body works hard to rebound to its previous state. In my case it was fasting, aka the biggest loser and it all came back. In your case what is metabolically “not from weight loss perspective” optimal is probably the question.
I agree, and also I note that both words in 'nutrient deficiency' are doing a lot of heavy lifting. People can't agree what a vitamin is. Do they know what nutrients are either? And deficient in what sense? For instance, I'm not sure at this point I regard fructose as much of a 'nutrient', and you probably don't consider anything else in fruit as much of a nutrient either. And in evolutionary time, there's a distinction a bit like short-term vs long-term. We're supposed to overeat fruit when we get it -- seeds too. It's only for a season, and then the snow falls.
As for the specifics of this experiment, I did a bit more reading and feel vindicated on my 'fermented foods' guess. The most common explanation for humans liking 'sour' is connected with our inability to make our own vitamin C, but some (e.g. professor Rob Dunn) connect it to fermentation. In an interview, he says, “The acid produced by the bacteria kills off the pathogens in the rotten food. So we think that the sour taste on our tongue, and the way we appreciate it, actually may have served our ancestors as a kind of pH strip to know which of these fermented foods was safe.”
Craving for "spicy" food is explained by some (people are saying) as due to the endorphins -- not everyone produces them equally in response to all stimuli, and for some spicy foods do a good job of it (for some, running does -- we both know you're not that one).
Craving for salt of course is well-known and well-understood.
So. Even when you're fully metabolically healthy, would it be unreasonable for you to overeat salty spicy sour foods, especially when your brain thinks it's the end of summer (or some other strange period in which you went months without sour fructose)? Is keto truly an evolutionary-enough state that your 'deficiency' system is throwing no error codes at all, even below the surface? Would you have so intense a craving for a humble salsa if it weren't? These aren't rhetorical questions, I do genuinely wonder.
"I don’t buy the argument that we are now constantly swimming in much more hyper-palatable food." why not? it seems very obvious that food producers have been specifically manufacturing food to be exponentially more palatable over the years. its not as if our grandparents were eating seed oils or the 600-900 number of compounds referred to as artificial flavors.
You’re not going to like the book “Ultra Processed People” which I just read. Still, I enjoyed hearing that perspective in order to clarify my own. “Coloring in the negative space,” as one might say.
I got a good laugh out of “diabesityheimer”! And I enjoy imagining that you have “CaRoLiEs” on autocorrect.
I had my own hyperphagia episode this weekend. Got invited to a breakfast that was serving Belgian waffles and bacon and eggs. I never eat breakfast (haven’t in the last 5 years more than 4 or 5 time) but this time I ate 4 slices of bacon and a waffle covered in coconut flavored butter syrup. It felt like I hadn’t eaten anything, like I had only eaten air. Such a weird feeling. So I ended up eating double that, and way overeating the rest of that day. When I woke up this morning I weighed 5 lbs heavier (2 days later)!
I’m curious if you think the best policy to cut global obesity would be to eliminate all seed oils from the global food supply? I’d love to see a clinical trial like this NIH-led one (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/) except they make all of the “ultra processed food” have an omega balance of at least 40%. i.e. match the two diets as much as possible on macros as well as omega balance and then see what happens.
This seems to be the missing link at the heart of the “seed oils” vs “hyperpalatable” wars. Just have Nabisco make an all-butter Oreo and feed it to a group of people in a highly controlled environment and see what happens.
I think you should try sour cream again at some point just without the salsa- because it seems pretty clear that you’ve proven that salsa/chili’s does that for you
Also agree that for me,I also have had certain foods that set off crazy overeating- so much that part of my ‘diet’ for years now has been “no foods that I can’t stop eating “ because as long as I don’t eat the first bite I am fine- and agree those foods are NOT the same as what people are calling “hyper platable foods” (in fact like you, I’ve has them be foods I disliked, all while I kept eating it anyway)
I'm not ready to throw out the "hyperpalatable food" hypothesis just yet. There are a lot non-diet factors that play into it. I don't have an answer, but these peak my interest -
- regional culture i.e. new york vs. the south. In the south, people don't exercise, or even walk anywhere. Very common for people to get in the car and drive 1 block. It's HOT out. All homes are air conditioned and very pleasant to stay in. You don't really have to interact with other people. In dense cities people have to walk because driving sucks. Apartments are noisy and have no A/C. If you want to escape you have to leave and walk places. Meet people. Probably have lots of sex (I can't imagine any other reason to live in NY). Social functions are the only reason to live in a city, and that changes the incentive structure.
- marketing. Marketing, branding and ads work. Once you start looking at successful businesses it's obvious, and we are MUCH better at marketing (in this case for junk food) than in the past. So even if snickers and snickers equivalents were available and eaten in 1920, they were not consumed as much because the marketing for them sucked.
- Less socializing in general (driven by electronics in the 90s, and now social media) means less time spent with other people means many more meals are eaten alone. Let me tell you if I had to eat every meal with others I would exercise more self control (incentives!). I know this is true because I've deployed and have done exactly this. Binging would have been very difficult in the past, you would literally would have to wake up at night and sneak down to the kitchen, I Love Lucy style. Or, be some kind of outcast eating bachelor chow which had it's own social implications.
- Poor people eat less. People were poorer in the past and had less money to spend on food. Yes our poor today are fat, but they live a heavily subsidized life (no judgement, government assistance to the poor is good!). If you didn't have money for food then you just didn't eat. There were, like, convents for the truly destitute but those you basically had to go to church whereas assistance today is judgement free. We didn't emerge from the one-two punch of the great depression, then WWII rationing, into the utopian vision of the 50s. Large swaths of the country didn't have indoor plumbing, I refuse to believe everyone was, on average, eating as much as and whenever they wanted like we can today.
All that being said I'm still avoiding seed oils, even though it's comically difficult.
Oh interesting! So do you have any problem with just sour cream? Or was it the salsa? I found sour cream to work just like plain cream, but it does taste better, so if that's a problem for you I can see it going either way...
I'm wondering if you've got some sort of micronutrient deficiency and that's where the hyperphagia's coming from. You might want to try eating a bucketload of tasty yet calorie free things and see if you can satisfy those cravings. If your body's crying out for salsa it may know something you don't.
Food scientists: big brains with labs, money, assistants, internet et cetera - try to make food cheaper per calorie and more addictive; I believe there has been progress. Pringles Habaneras are my most recent error: a 900-calorie can vanishes instantly and leaves me hungrier.
Great stuff!
You're right, the terms of this whole debate are completely off. No wonder we're getting nowhere. They do not mean anything consistent. Only the memes can get us out of this situation!
I’ve certainly eaten a head of roasted cabbage which had negligible calories, and was bulk, but not satiating. I’m just annoyed that “this is a thing”.
Thanks X. Loved the article! Gonna enjoy reading about the other diets. Just for a laugh!
This may sound simplistic - but my experience with successful weight loss has been that the body works hard to rebound to its previous state. In my case it was fasting, aka the biggest loser and it all came back. In your case what is metabolically “not from weight loss perspective” optimal is probably the question.