For a while I had a theory that “sugar in a beverage not paired with bulky food” added calories without the human brain/whatever noticing and having the satiety mechanism(s?) kick in when the right calorie consumption level was hit. The archetypal study here would involve carefully measuring how many calories like this, C, that a person consumed per week, and then C/3500 is how many pounds per week they should gain over time.
I dunno if this is true, but it seemed close enough to likely to be true that I started rejiggering my habits and feelings about food to try to get my personal C “close to zero when left to my own habits and choices”. If I’m just going to “drink” now, I try to basically only drink water or milk. Not ALWAYS. Sometimes I find myself craving orange juice, but I try to eat other similar fruits first, before I fall back to a cup of delicious delicious citric acid flavored sugar water.
In this section there’s a hunter-gatherer tribe for everything. I’m a little suspicious of this line of evidence because these small human populations could plausibly have evolved to tolerate their specific environment but, if you want a group of humans with zero-percent obesity who eat 60%+ carbs, or 60%+ fat, this paper has one for you. They have plenty of food, they just live happily and remain thin.
Is there a tribe that drinks a LOT of fruit juice?
The big obvious macrocausal elephant in the room is corn, and how corn is in everything, and how cows are fattened on it (so milk and burgers are actually corn), and then there’s HFCS, and corn oil, and so on. Cheap edible calories, as far as the eyes can see.
(You might link the “fruit” juice theory with the corn theory, because a lot of juice is just sugar water with fruit flavorants and a lot of sugar is corn based. If you’re not careful, an attempt to drink apple juice will lead you to actually drink “corn” juice.)
If we follow the corn calories, I could imagine them cascading out, through pets, and lab animals, and into the garbage, and into mice and possums (and anything that eats mice and possums)… but NOT into deer nor any other non-garbage-eating herbivores.
4. It’s not just humans: lab animals and wild animals appear to be getting fatter over time too. (A surprise to me, but casual inspection seems to confirm that this is really a thing that reviewed papers are noting.)
The wild animals seems surprising to me. I feel like I can probably suggest animals where it is NOT happening… like: I bet it is not happening in polar bears. How detailed was the analysis here? This seems like the place to find some “surprises” that constrain the causality more precisely.
I know people who only drink water and have issues with their weight, so this isn’t the only answer. I’d definitely believe that it plays a role though.
From what I know of deer behavior, they are quite happy to eat corn right off the field, so much so that deer from agriculturally-worked areas (the flat areas of northwestern Ohio, for example) taste less “gamey” than wood-dwelling deer of hilly areas (in southeast Ohio). Maybe there is a way to use hunting data and use one as a control group against the other.
For a while I had a theory that “sugar in a beverage not paired with bulky food” added calories without the human brain/whatever noticing and having the satiety mechanism(s?) kick in when the right calorie consumption level was hit. The archetypal study here would involve carefully measuring how many calories like this, C, that a person consumed per week, and then C/3500 is how many pounds per week they should gain over time.
I dunno if this is true, but it seemed close enough to likely to be true that I started rejiggering my habits and feelings about food to try to get my personal C “close to zero when left to my own habits and choices”. If I’m just going to “drink” now, I try to basically only drink water or milk. Not ALWAYS. Sometimes I find myself craving orange juice, but I try to eat other similar fruits first, before I fall back to a cup of delicious delicious citric acid flavored sugar water.
Is there a tribe that drinks a LOT of fruit juice?
The big obvious macrocausal elephant in the room is corn, and how corn is in everything, and how cows are fattened on it (so milk and burgers are actually corn), and then there’s HFCS, and corn oil, and so on. Cheap edible calories, as far as the eyes can see.
(You might link the “fruit” juice theory with the corn theory, because a lot of juice is just sugar water with fruit flavorants and a lot of sugar is corn based. If you’re not careful, an attempt to drink apple juice will lead you to actually drink “corn” juice.)
If we follow the corn calories, I could imagine them cascading out, through pets, and lab animals, and into the garbage, and into mice and possums (and anything that eats mice and possums)… but NOT into deer nor any other non-garbage-eating herbivores.
The wild animals seems surprising to me. I feel like I can probably suggest animals where it is NOT happening… like: I bet it is not happening in polar bears. How detailed was the analysis here? This seems like the place to find some “surprises” that constrain the causality more precisely.
I know people who only drink water and have issues with their weight, so this isn’t the only answer. I’d definitely believe that it plays a role though.
From what I know of deer behavior, they are quite happy to eat corn right off the field, so much so that deer from agriculturally-worked areas (the flat areas of northwestern Ohio, for example) taste less “gamey” than wood-dwelling deer of hilly areas (in southeast Ohio). Maybe there is a way to use hunting data and use one as a control group against the other.