“Cut out saturated fat” is the stereotypical horrible purely-made-up bad-science zombie-study opposite-of-smart advice of exactly the sort Gary Taubes was criticizing. It’s one of the worst possible bits of advice you could give someone. It’s probably not my comparative advantage to go into at length here, browsing paleo blogs (and I do recommend Perfect Health Diet despite the name) would fill you in.
ChrisHallquist claims that Taubes is attacking a misrepresentation of what mainstream nutrition experts actually believe. Eliezer met an endocrinologist, and she just happened to spout horrible advice of the kind Taubes attributes to the mainstream. This is more likely to happen in worlds in which Taubes is correct about such advice being widespread among the mainstream than in worlds in which Taubes is exaggerating the spread of such advice.
It’s one of the worst possible bits of advice you could give someone.
Really? Is it that saturated fat is actually good for you, or that it isn’t necessarily bad? Would you recommend more saturated fat to a thin healthy person who has no trouble with their food intake?
Yes, Paleo people and the Perfect Health Diet book would recommend that most Americans consume more healthy saturated fats such as the kind in butter from grass-fed cows. I put such butter in my morning coffee.
Most Americans get about the optimal amount of calories from protein, so if you cut out most sugar you have to replace the calories from somewhere else and the Perfect Health Diet suggests they come from healthy fats.
Sorry I did. It has the look and feel of science. It takes evolution as a starting point, basically as a source of Bayesian priors. It has lots of scientific citations. It uses probabilistic reasoning where the authors admit they are guessing at what is healthy. It uses marginal analysis assuming diminishing and then negative returns to eating any given nutrient. I’ve listened to one of the authors on several podcasts and he seems very knowledgeable when answering questions. The paleo community seems to have a high opinion of the book.
I don’t know about that book in particular, but the “look and feel of science” is a defining characteristic of pseudoscience.
It takes evolution as a starting point, basically as a source of Bayesian priors. It has lots of scientific citations. It uses probabilistic reasoning where the authors admit they are guessing at what is healthy.
Do the authors estimate these “priors” using some reliable methods or do they just pull numbers out of thin air and multiply them to get whatever result they wanted to get?
The paleo community seems to have a high opinion of the book.
Again, I didn’t read this specific book so I don’t want to bash it, but the whole idea of paleo diet is just patently stupid. I mean, if trying to reproduce a paleolithic diet was a good idea, then why stop at it? Why don’t also try paleo healthcare or paleo housing? There weren’t many modern drugs or brick buildings in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, right?
Of course it could be theoretically possible that the paleo diet folks happen to believe a correct thing for the wrong reasons, but it isn’t likely.
I mean, if trying to reproduce a paleolithic diet was a good idea, then why stop at it? Why don’t also try paleo healthcare or paleo housing?
I can think of at least one obvious answer to this question. Was it supposed to be rhetorical?
Modern medical and housing technologies are dramatically superior to ancient ones. A modern house is a better place to live than an ancient dwelling in quite a lot of ways. Modern technology gives us the ability to produce much more food than the ancients did, but it is unclear that the food is superior: nutritionally, modern foods do not have obvious and dramatic advantages over ancient foods (in many cases it’s the same food!), certainly not to the same degree modern medicine can outperform ancient herbalism.
(This is not by itself sufficient to justify the idea of a paleo-like diet. That specific criticism just doesn’t hold up.)
“look and feel of science” is a defining characteristic of pseudoscience.
I don’t agree. Most pseudoscience is created by and for people who don’t understand science.
Do the authors estimate these “priors” using some reliable methods
It’s more like if something has been consumed by our ancestors for millions of years it’s probably healthy, although we are willing to let data change our position on this, or breast milk is the perfect food for babies and given how babies differ from adults we guess we probably need to make this adjustment...
Science and engineering work and have given us stuff much better than what our paleolithic ancestors had. In contrast, the field of nutrition has not succeeded in giving us a better diet than our ancestors ate.
From what I understand, hunter-gatherers eating traditional diets have very low rates of cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and obesity—the so-called diseases of civilization. The goal of many paleo people is to take the best of the paleo and modern world.
The rapid growth of obesity in the modern world shows that something is seriously wrong with modern diets and going to a paleo diet, which evolution conditioned us to for millions of years, seems like a safe alternative.
The big insights of paleo movement are that:
(1) evolution didn’t have enough time to adapt us to a diet with lots of sugar and/or grains, (2) archaeology of graves shows a reduction in average health shortly after a community switches from hunter-gathering to agriculture, and (3) many people seem to get a lot healthier after going paleo.
I don’t agree. Most pseudoscience is created by and for people who don’t understand science.
It has to look sufficiently “sciency” to the target audience. Different target audiences have different expectations on what a proper scientific theory within a certain domain should look like.
From what I understand, hunter-gatherers eating traditional diets have very low rates of cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and obesity—the so-called diseases of civilization.
How do you know the rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, etc. of paleolithic humans? Anyway, many paleolithic humans died in their childhoods, and those who did make to their adulthood rarely lived past their forties, therefore it seems pretty natural that they had lower rates of diseases that correlate with old age.
The rapid growth of obesity in the modern world shows that something is seriously wrong with modern diets and going to a paleo diet, which evolution conditioned us to for millions of years, seems like a safe alternative.
Considering different target lifespans, paleo diets don’t strike me as particularly safe. For instance, eating a lot of meat could have given a paleolithic man an evolutionary edge, even if such diet clogged his arteries and would eventually have killed him by heart attack at the age of 60, because he probably never got to reach the age of 60 anyway.
hunter-gatherers...have very low rates of...the so-called diseases of civilization.
How do you know the rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, etc. of paleolithic humans?
James said HG, not paleolithic. We can look to modern HG and observe their causes of death. This does become a problem when he wants to make evolutionary arguments. Do they eat the same as in the paleolithic? Do we even know what people ate then? If we can’t compare modern HG to ancient, the causes of death of ancient ones are irrelevant, but we can still consider adopting the diet of modern HG (with less justification).
paleolithic humans...who did make to their adulthood rarely lived past their forties
Where do you get this figure? According to wikipedia, modern HG live about 40 years from age 15. Numbers I’ve seen from the paleolithic are similar, but much less precise. I think Caspari-Lee and Trinkhaus both expect the median paleolithic adult to reach 45.
Where do you get this figure? According to wikipedia, modern HG live about 40 years from age 15. Numbers I’ve seen from the paleolithic are similar, but much less precise. I think Caspari-Lee and Trinkhaus both expect the median paleolithic adult to reach 45.
I went by memory. But anyway, if the total life expectancy at 15 was about 55, it would still be the case that they would have been disproportionally less subject to old-age diseases than we are.
(and anyway, modern hunter-gatherers are generally at least neolithic, not paleolithic)
From what I understand, hunter-gatherers eating traditional diets have very low rates of cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and obesity—the so-called diseases of civilization.
I wonder if those have been actually tested. You can’t reliably tell why someone died without medical records or autopsy.
From what I understand, hunter-gatherers eating traditional diets have very low rates of cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and obesity—the so-called diseases of civilization.
But at the same time the vast majority of them die of something unclassified. Dying in your sleep “of old age” is basically unclassified.
The big problem with 1 is assuming evolution will ever select out dietary diseases that show up after your prime reproductive years. Thats not how evolution works.
Which isn’t to say something hasn’t been going wrong in our modern diet (I personally tend to avoid most highly processed foods), just pointing to right-thing-for-wrong-reason.
Really? Is it that saturated fat is actually good for you, or that it isn’t necessarily bad? Would you recommend more saturated fat to a thin healthy person who has no trouble with their food intake?
I think this is an important question and I would refer you to the concept of “nutritionism” as described by Yoni Freedhoff, a Canadian obesity researcher. He defines it as “the notion that specific properties of foods are sufficient to make them healthy”
I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot, and it occurs to me that a lot of diet thinkers are guilty of the sin of nutritionism.
To illustrate, everyone knows that doughnuts are unhealthy, but one can ask why exactly they are unhealthy.
Is it that they contain a lot of fat?
Is it that they contain a lot of carbohydrates?
Is it that they contain a lot of sugar?
Is it that they are heavily processed and not what cavemen would have eaten?
It’s dangerous to answer these questions incorrectly. If you assert that muffins are unhealthy because they contain a lot of fat, it won’t be long until someone shows up with low fat muffins and people start pigging out on them.
Perhaps the most extreme example of nutritionism is diet soda. It contains, no fat, no carbohydrates, and no calories. So you would think people could easily achieve significant and lasting weight loss success by switching from regular soda (and juice) to diet soda. But it doesn’t seem to work.
Let’s make this a bit more complicated by adding a few questions. By nutrients I will refer to both micro- and macronutrients. You may allow this to refer to indigestible substances and artificial flavors as well.
Is it that they replace healthier food?
They contain a lot of calories and contain few micronutrients compared to macronutrients.
They might taste better than other foods, and might make healthier foods taste bland in comparison.
Is it that they regulate appetite differently?
They might taste better than other foods, and people would eat them past satiety because they enjoy their taste.
Different nutrients might regulate satiety differently.
Different flavors might regulate satiety differently, and this is relevant to zero calorie artificial flavors.
Is it that they regulate digestion differently?
The effectiveness of absorbing different nutrient ratios might vary in different portions and timescales.
Different nutrients might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different flavors might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different nutrients might regulate the effectiveness of enterohepatic circulation differently.
Different nutrients might lead to different bacterial normal flora in the gut.
Is it that they regulate metabolism differently?
Different nutrients might be inherently different in how effectively they can be used to store fat.
Different nutrients might regulate the efficiency of metabolism differently through increasing or diminishing thermogenic waste metabolism.
Different flavors might regulate metabolism differently, either directly through taste or through hormonal changes from digestion, and this again is relevant to zero calorie artificial flavors.
Is it that they regulate where the fat is stored?
The fat might be stored evenly, abdominally or in the proximity of different vital organs.
Fat stored in different locations in the body might have different health effects.
Is it that they regulate physical activity differently?
--
Does one’s body composition affect how these questions are answered and are there other important individual differences?
How interconnected are these questions and in where exactly are the relevant nodes?
Are there nodes where many of these questions can be answered at once?
Does the fact that different diets lead to different results in weight loss allow us to make accurate assessments of which nodes are affected, or is our level of understanding of the human body inadequate for that?
I’m sure people can add even more relevant questions to this bunch, and I would be interested to read them.
Yes those are good questions. In answering them, I think one should keep in mind that nobody has ever invented an effective diet doughnut. This suggests to me that it’s not a matter of adding some nutrients to the doughnut recipe; that the problem is inherent in the doughnut.
By analogy, one can look at the attempts to create a non-addictive morphine. Which resulted in heroin. Oops! Probably it is impossible to create a non-addictive morphine because the analgesic aspect of morphine is exactly what makes it addictive.
Although AFAIK there is not scientific consensus on this point, I’m pretty confident it’s a similar problem with foods like doughnuts. They just make you feel too good. And that screws up something in your brain.
Opiates are relatively non-addictive if their use is regulated intelligently, which for some reason all people can’t reliably do themselves. I think the same might make sense for certain foods. I can eat a doughnut every once in a while just fine, but if I started binging them it might be difficult to stop. Same applies to nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, video games and movies for me too.
Opiates are relatively non-addictive if their use is regulated intelligently, which for some reason all people can’t reliably do themselves.
The question of what is or isn’t addictive and why is important but it’s a little beside the point. I am happy and perhaps eager to discuss addiction in the context of dieting and obesity, but at the outset we need to agree on a definition of “addiction.”
My point in bringing up heroin is that it’s basically impossible to separate the good aspects (analgesic) and bad aspects (addictiveness) of morphine because both qualities are the result of the same mechanism. Analogously, it’s (in my opinion) impossible to separate the good aspects (tastiness) and bad aspects (fatteningness) of foods like doughnuts because both qualities are evidently a result of the same mechanism.
Actually I am tempted to go further than that and hypothesize that in both cases a big part of the problem is the part(s) of one’s brain which process pleasurable experiences.
Let’s make this a bit more complicated by adding a few questions.
Is it that they replace healthier food?
They contain a lot of calories and contain few micronutrients.
They might taste better than other foods, and might make healthier foods taste bland in comparison.
Is it that they regulate appetite differently?
They might taste better than other foods, and people would eat them past satiety because they enjoy their taste.
Different nutrients might regulate appetite differently.
Different flavors might regulate appetite differently, and this is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate digestion differently?
The effectiveness of absorbing different nutrient ratios might vary in different timescales.
Different nutrients might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different flavors might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different nutrients might regulate the effectiveness of enterohepatic circulation differently.
Is it that they regulate metabolism differently?
Different nutrients might be inherently different in how effectively they can be used to store fat.
Different nutrients might regulate the efficiency of metabolism differently through increasing or diminishing thermogenic waste metabolism.
Different flavors might regulate metabolism differently, either directly through taste or through hormonal changes from digestion, and this again is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate where the fat is stored?
The fat might be stored evenly, abdominally or in the proximity of different vital organs
Is it that fat stored in different locations in the body have different health effects?
Is it that they regulate physical activity differently?
How interconnected are these questions and in where exactly are the relevant nodes?
Are there nodes where many of these questions can be answered at once?
Does the fact that different diets lead to different results in weight loss allow us to make accurate predictions of which nodes are affected, or is our level of understanding of the human body inadequate for that?
Let’s make this a bit more complicated by adding a few questions.
Is it that they replace healthier food?
They contain a lot of calories and contain few micronutrients.
They might taste better than other foods, and might make healthier foods taste bland in comparison.
Is it that they regulate appetite differently?
They might taste better than other foods, and people would eat them past satiety because they enjoy their taste.
Different nutrients might regulate appetite differently.
Different flavors might regulate appetite differently, and this is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate digestion differently?
The effectiveness of absorbing different nutrient ratios might vary in different timescales.
Different nutrients might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different flavors might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different nutrients might regulate the effectiveness of enterohepatic circulation differently.
Is it that they regulate metabolism differently?
Different nutrients might be inherently different in how effectively they can be used to store fat.
Different nutrients might regulate the efficiency of metabolism differently through increasing or diminishing thermogenic waste metabolism.
Different flavors might regulate metabolism differently, either directly through taste or through hormonal changes from digestion, and this again is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate where the fat is stored?
The fat might be stored evenly, abdominally or in the proximity of different vital organs
Is it that fat stored in different locations in the body have different health effects?
Is it that they regulate physical activity differently?
How interconnected are these questions and in where exactly are the relevant nodes?
Are there nodes where many of these questions can be answered at once?
Does the fact that different diets lead to different results in weight loss allow us to make accurate predictions of which nodes are affected, or is our level of understanding of the human body inadequate for that?
“Cut out saturated fat” is the stereotypical horrible purely-made-up bad-science zombie-study opposite-of-smart advice of exactly the sort Gary Taubes was criticizing. It’s one of the worst possible bits of advice you could give someone. It’s probably not my comparative advantage to go into at length here, browsing paleo blogs (and I do recommend Perfect Health Diet despite the name) would fill you in.
Sorry, I clearly misunderstood your point.
On the other hand, I’m not sure what your point was. Would you be willing to expand on what you meant?
ChrisHallquist claims that Taubes is attacking a misrepresentation of what mainstream nutrition experts actually believe. Eliezer met an endocrinologist, and she just happened to spout horrible advice of the kind Taubes attributes to the mainstream. This is more likely to happen in worlds in which Taubes is correct about such advice being widespread among the mainstream than in worlds in which Taubes is exaggerating the spread of such advice.
Really? Is it that saturated fat is actually good for you, or that it isn’t necessarily bad? Would you recommend more saturated fat to a thin healthy person who has no trouble with their food intake?
Yes, Paleo people and the Perfect Health Diet book would recommend that most Americans consume more healthy saturated fats such as the kind in butter from grass-fed cows. I put such butter in my morning coffee.
Most Americans get about the optimal amount of calories from protein, so if you cut out most sugar you have to replace the calories from somewhere else and the Perfect Health Diet suggests they come from healthy fats.
You know of any evidence replacing those calories with saturated fat is better for you then replacing them with (cis) polyunsaturated fats?
It’s in the book the Perfect Health Diet.
What makes it a reliable source compared to others?
From what I can tell, yes, although I’m an economist not a life science person.
I think you misread my question.
Sorry I did. It has the look and feel of science. It takes evolution as a starting point, basically as a source of Bayesian priors. It has lots of scientific citations. It uses probabilistic reasoning where the authors admit they are guessing at what is healthy. It uses marginal analysis assuming diminishing and then negative returns to eating any given nutrient. I’ve listened to one of the authors on several podcasts and he seems very knowledgeable when answering questions. The paleo community seems to have a high opinion of the book.
Did it answer many of these questions? I’m not expecting you to answer them, that would be a lot of work.
I think yes to some extent.
I don’t know about that book in particular, but the “look and feel of science” is a defining characteristic of pseudoscience.
Do the authors estimate these “priors” using some reliable methods or do they just pull numbers out of thin air and multiply them to get whatever result they wanted to get?
Again, I didn’t read this specific book so I don’t want to bash it, but the whole idea of paleo diet is just patently stupid.
I mean, if trying to reproduce a paleolithic diet was a good idea, then why stop at it? Why don’t also try paleo healthcare or paleo housing? There weren’t many modern drugs or brick buildings in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, right?
Of course it could be theoretically possible that the paleo diet folks happen to believe a correct thing for the wrong reasons, but it isn’t likely.
I can think of at least one obvious answer to this question. Was it supposed to be rhetorical?
Modern medical and housing technologies are dramatically superior to ancient ones. A modern house is a better place to live than an ancient dwelling in quite a lot of ways. Modern technology gives us the ability to produce much more food than the ancients did, but it is unclear that the food is superior: nutritionally, modern foods do not have obvious and dramatic advantages over ancient foods (in many cases it’s the same food!), certainly not to the same degree modern medicine can outperform ancient herbalism.
(This is not by itself sufficient to justify the idea of a paleo-like diet. That specific criticism just doesn’t hold up.)
I don’t agree. Most pseudoscience is created by and for people who don’t understand science.
Science and engineering work and have given us stuff much better than what our paleolithic ancestors had. In contrast, the field of nutrition has not succeeded in giving us a better diet than our ancestors ate.
From what I understand, hunter-gatherers eating traditional diets have very low rates of cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and obesity—the so-called diseases of civilization. The goal of many paleo people is to take the best of the paleo and modern world.
The rapid growth of obesity in the modern world shows that something is seriously wrong with modern diets and going to a paleo diet, which evolution conditioned us to for millions of years, seems like a safe alternative.
The big insights of paleo movement are that:
(1) evolution didn’t have enough time to adapt us to a diet with lots of sugar and/or grains, (2) archaeology of graves shows a reduction in average health shortly after a community switches from hunter-gathering to agriculture, and (3) many people seem to get a lot healthier after going paleo.
It has to look sufficiently “sciency” to the target audience. Different target audiences have different expectations on what a proper scientific theory within a certain domain should look like.
How do you know the rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, etc. of paleolithic humans?
Anyway, many paleolithic humans died in their childhoods, and those who did make to their adulthood rarely lived past their forties, therefore it seems pretty natural that they had lower rates of diseases that correlate with old age.
Considering different target lifespans, paleo diets don’t strike me as particularly safe. For instance, eating a lot of meat could have given a paleolithic man an evolutionary edge, even if such diet clogged his arteries and would eventually have killed him by heart attack at the age of 60, because he probably never got to reach the age of 60 anyway.
James said HG, not paleolithic. We can look to modern HG and observe their causes of death. This does become a problem when he wants to make evolutionary arguments. Do they eat the same as in the paleolithic? Do we even know what people ate then? If we can’t compare modern HG to ancient, the causes of death of ancient ones are irrelevant, but we can still consider adopting the diet of modern HG (with less justification).
Where do you get this figure? According to wikipedia, modern HG live about 40 years from age 15. Numbers I’ve seen from the paleolithic are similar, but much less precise. I think Caspari-Lee and Trinkhaus both expect the median paleolithic adult to reach 45.
I went by memory. But anyway, if the total life expectancy at 15 was about 55, it would still be the case that they would have been disproportionally less subject to old-age diseases than we are.
(and anyway, modern hunter-gatherers are generally at least neolithic, not paleolithic)
How would that happen in practice?
Even that would screen out most diseases relevant to modern humans.
I wonder if those have been actually tested. You can’t reliably tell why someone died without medical records or autopsy.
But at the same time the vast majority of them die of something unclassified. Dying in your sleep “of old age” is basically unclassified.
The big problem with 1 is assuming evolution will ever select out dietary diseases that show up after your prime reproductive years. Thats not how evolution works.
Which isn’t to say something hasn’t been going wrong in our modern diet (I personally tend to avoid most highly processed foods), just pointing to right-thing-for-wrong-reason.
I think this is an important question and I would refer you to the concept of “nutritionism” as described by Yoni Freedhoff, a Canadian obesity researcher. He defines it as “the notion that specific properties of foods are sufficient to make them healthy”
I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot, and it occurs to me that a lot of diet thinkers are guilty of the sin of nutritionism.
To illustrate, everyone knows that doughnuts are unhealthy, but one can ask why exactly they are unhealthy.
Is it that they contain a lot of fat?
Is it that they contain a lot of carbohydrates?
Is it that they contain a lot of sugar?
Is it that they are heavily processed and not what cavemen would have eaten?
It’s dangerous to answer these questions incorrectly. If you assert that muffins are unhealthy because they contain a lot of fat, it won’t be long until someone shows up with low fat muffins and people start pigging out on them.
Perhaps the most extreme example of nutritionism is diet soda. It contains, no fat, no carbohydrates, and no calories. So you would think people could easily achieve significant and lasting weight loss success by switching from regular soda (and juice) to diet soda. But it doesn’t seem to work.
Let’s make this a bit more complicated by adding a few questions. By nutrients I will refer to both micro- and macronutrients. You may allow this to refer to indigestible substances and artificial flavors as well.
Is it that they replace healthier food?
They contain a lot of calories and contain few micronutrients compared to macronutrients.
They might taste better than other foods, and might make healthier foods taste bland in comparison.
Is it that they regulate appetite differently?
They might taste better than other foods, and people would eat them past satiety because they enjoy their taste.
Different nutrients might regulate satiety differently.
Different flavors might regulate satiety differently, and this is relevant to zero calorie artificial flavors.
Is it that they regulate digestion differently?
The effectiveness of absorbing different nutrient ratios might vary in different portions and timescales.
Different nutrients might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different flavors might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different nutrients might regulate the effectiveness of enterohepatic circulation differently.
Different nutrients might lead to different bacterial normal flora in the gut.
Is it that they regulate metabolism differently?
Different nutrients might be inherently different in how effectively they can be used to store fat.
Different nutrients might regulate the efficiency of metabolism differently through increasing or diminishing thermogenic waste metabolism.
Different flavors might regulate metabolism differently, either directly through taste or through hormonal changes from digestion, and this again is relevant to zero calorie artificial flavors.
Is it that they regulate where the fat is stored?
The fat might be stored evenly, abdominally or in the proximity of different vital organs.
Fat stored in different locations in the body might have different health effects.
Is it that they regulate physical activity differently?
--
Does one’s body composition affect how these questions are answered and are there other important individual differences?
How interconnected are these questions and in where exactly are the relevant nodes?
Are there nodes where many of these questions can be answered at once?
Does the fact that different diets lead to different results in weight loss allow us to make accurate assessments of which nodes are affected, or is our level of understanding of the human body inadequate for that?
I’m sure people can add even more relevant questions to this bunch, and I would be interested to read them.
Yes those are good questions. In answering them, I think one should keep in mind that nobody has ever invented an effective diet doughnut. This suggests to me that it’s not a matter of adding some nutrients to the doughnut recipe; that the problem is inherent in the doughnut.
By analogy, one can look at the attempts to create a non-addictive morphine. Which resulted in heroin. Oops! Probably it is impossible to create a non-addictive morphine because the analgesic aspect of morphine is exactly what makes it addictive.
Although AFAIK there is not scientific consensus on this point, I’m pretty confident it’s a similar problem with foods like doughnuts. They just make you feel too good. And that screws up something in your brain.
Opiates are relatively non-addictive if their use is regulated intelligently, which for some reason all people can’t reliably do themselves. I think the same might make sense for certain foods. I can eat a doughnut every once in a while just fine, but if I started binging them it might be difficult to stop. Same applies to nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, video games and movies for me too.
The question of what is or isn’t addictive and why is important but it’s a little beside the point. I am happy and perhaps eager to discuss addiction in the context of dieting and obesity, but at the outset we need to agree on a definition of “addiction.”
My point in bringing up heroin is that it’s basically impossible to separate the good aspects (analgesic) and bad aspects (addictiveness) of morphine because both qualities are the result of the same mechanism. Analogously, it’s (in my opinion) impossible to separate the good aspects (tastiness) and bad aspects (fatteningness) of foods like doughnuts because both qualities are evidently a result of the same mechanism.
Actually I am tempted to go further than that and hypothesize that in both cases a big part of the problem is the part(s) of one’s brain which process pleasurable experiences.
Let’s make this a bit more complicated by adding a few questions.
Is it that they replace healthier food?
They contain a lot of calories and contain few micronutrients.
They might taste better than other foods, and might make healthier foods taste bland in comparison.
Is it that they regulate appetite differently?
They might taste better than other foods, and people would eat them past satiety because they enjoy their taste.
Different nutrients might regulate appetite differently.
Different flavors might regulate appetite differently, and this is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate digestion differently?
The effectiveness of absorbing different nutrient ratios might vary in different timescales.
Different nutrients might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different flavors might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different nutrients might regulate the effectiveness of enterohepatic circulation differently.
Is it that they regulate metabolism differently?
Different nutrients might be inherently different in how effectively they can be used to store fat.
Different nutrients might regulate the efficiency of metabolism differently through increasing or diminishing thermogenic waste metabolism.
Different flavors might regulate metabolism differently, either directly through taste or through hormonal changes from digestion, and this again is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate where the fat is stored?
The fat might be stored evenly, abdominally or in the proximity of different vital organs
Is it that fat stored in different locations in the body have different health effects?
Is it that they regulate physical activity differently?
How interconnected are these questions and in where exactly are the relevant nodes?
Are there nodes where many of these questions can be answered at once?
Does the fact that different diets lead to different results in weight loss allow us to make accurate predictions of which nodes are affected, or is our level of understanding of the human body inadequate for that?
Let’s make this a bit more complicated by adding a few questions.
Is it that they replace healthier food?
They contain a lot of calories and contain few micronutrients.
They might taste better than other foods, and might make healthier foods taste bland in comparison.
Is it that they regulate appetite differently?
They might taste better than other foods, and people would eat them past satiety because they enjoy their taste.
Different nutrients might regulate appetite differently.
Different flavors might regulate appetite differently, and this is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate digestion differently?
The effectiveness of absorbing different nutrient ratios might vary in different timescales.
Different nutrients might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different flavors might regulate different digestive excretions differently.
Different nutrients might regulate the effectiveness of enterohepatic circulation differently.
Is it that they regulate metabolism differently?
Different nutrients might be inherently different in how effectively they can be used to store fat.
Different nutrients might regulate the efficiency of metabolism differently through increasing or diminishing thermogenic waste metabolism.
Different flavors might regulate metabolism differently, either directly through taste or through hormonal changes from digestion, and this again is relevant to zero calorie sweeteners.
Is it that they regulate where the fat is stored?
The fat might be stored evenly, abdominally or in the proximity of different vital organs
Is it that fat stored in different locations in the body have different health effects?
Is it that they regulate physical activity differently? How interconnected are these questions and in where exactly are the relevant nodes? Are there nodes where many of these questions can be answered at once? Does the fact that different diets lead to different results in weight loss allow us to make accurate predictions of which nodes are affected, or is our level of understanding of the human body inadequate for that?