All right, here’s my crack at steelmanning the Sin of Gluttony theory of the obesity epidemic. Epistemic status: armchair speculation.
We want to explain how it could be that in the present, abundant hyperpalatable food is making us obese, but in the past that was not so to nearly the same extent, even though conditions of abundant hyperpalatable food were not unheard of, especially among the upper classes. Perhaps the difference is that, today, abundant hyperpalatable food is available to a greater extent than ever before to people in poor health.
In the past, food cultivation and preparation were much more labor intensive than in the present, so you either had to pay a much higher price for your hyperpalatable food, or put in the labor yourself. Furthermore, there were fewer opportunities to make the necessary income from sedentary work, and there wasn’t much of a welfare state. Thus, if you were in poor health, you were much more likely in the past than today to be selected out of the class of people who had access to abundant hyperpalatable food. Obesity is known to be a downstream effect of various other health problems, but only if you are capable of consuming enough calories, and have access to food that you want to overeat.
Furthermore, it is plausible that some people, due to genetics or whatever, have a tendency to be in good health when they lack access to abundant hyperpalatable food, and to become obese and thus unhealthy when they have access to abundant hyperpalatable food. Thus there is a feedback loop where being healthier makes you more productive, which makes hyperpalatable food more available to you, which makes you less healthy, which makes you less productive, which makes hyperpalatable food less available to you. Plausibly, in the past, this process tended towards an equilibrium at a much lower level of obesity than it does today, because of today’s greater availability of hyperpalatable food to people in poor health.
It is also plausible that our technological civilization has simply made considerable progress in the development of ever more potent gustatory superstimuli over the past century. This is a complex optimization problem, and it’s not clear why we should have come close to a ceiling on it long before the present, or why just contemplating the subjective palatability of past versus present-day food would give us conscious awareness of why we are more prone to overeating the latter.
Both of these proposed causes are consistent with pre-obesity-epidemic overfeeding studies of metabolically healthy individuals failing to cause large, long-term weight gain: They suggest that the obesity epidemic is concentrated among metabolically unhealthy people who in the past simply couldn’t afford to get fat, and that present-day food is importantly different.
All right, here’s my crack at steelmanning the Sin of Gluttony theory of the obesity epidemic. Epistemic status: armchair speculation.
We want to explain how it could be that in the present, abundant hyperpalatable food is making us obese, but in the past that was not so to nearly the same extent, even though conditions of abundant hyperpalatable food were not unheard of, especially among the upper classes. Perhaps the difference is that, today, abundant hyperpalatable food is available to a greater extent than ever before to people in poor health.
In the past, food cultivation and preparation were much more labor intensive than in the present, so you either had to pay a much higher price for your hyperpalatable food, or put in the labor yourself. Furthermore, there were fewer opportunities to make the necessary income from sedentary work, and there wasn’t much of a welfare state. Thus, if you were in poor health, you were much more likely in the past than today to be selected out of the class of people who had access to abundant hyperpalatable food. Obesity is known to be a downstream effect of various other health problems, but only if you are capable of consuming enough calories, and have access to food that you want to overeat.
Furthermore, it is plausible that some people, due to genetics or whatever, have a tendency to be in good health when they lack access to abundant hyperpalatable food, and to become obese and thus unhealthy when they have access to abundant hyperpalatable food. Thus there is a feedback loop where being healthier makes you more productive, which makes hyperpalatable food more available to you, which makes you less healthy, which makes you less productive, which makes hyperpalatable food less available to you. Plausibly, in the past, this process tended towards an equilibrium at a much lower level of obesity than it does today, because of today’s greater availability of hyperpalatable food to people in poor health.
It is also plausible that our technological civilization has simply made considerable progress in the development of ever more potent gustatory superstimuli over the past century. This is a complex optimization problem, and it’s not clear why we should have come close to a ceiling on it long before the present, or why just contemplating the subjective palatability of past versus present-day food would give us conscious awareness of why we are more prone to overeating the latter.
Both of these proposed causes are consistent with pre-obesity-epidemic overfeeding studies of metabolically healthy individuals failing to cause large, long-term weight gain: They suggest that the obesity epidemic is concentrated among metabolically unhealthy people who in the past simply couldn’t afford to get fat, and that present-day food is importantly different.