Our past beliefs affect what we pay attention to, how we prioritize our skepticism, and how we interpret ambiguous evidence. This can create belief basins, where there are multiple sets of beliefs that reinforce each other, appear internally consistent, and make it hard to see the other basins as valid possibilities. On the topic of nutrition, I seem to have found myself in a different basin. I’ve looked through every nonstandard lens I could find, repeatedly applied skepticism, and firmly committed to not make the same mistakes everyone else is making (as a priority on par with not making mistakes at all). I’ve arrived at a set of beliefs that, as far as I can tell, is internally consistent, reasonably compelling from the inside, and completely contrary to what most other people in our culture think.
This makes for a difficult writing project. When I try to argue nonstandard positions, many of the arguments are tendrils reaching into other nonstandard positions. I’ve finally managed to get into a post-every-day cadence; part of the key to that was accepting that sometimes those arguments will be dangling references. Hopefully after a month of this, the whole thing will cohere. If not, well, the fragments are pretty interesting too.
The most-common basin of nutrition theorizing centers on obesity, and on a particular theory of obesity which goes like this. Food, especially modern processed food, tastes good and is appealing. Some people, if they followed their urges, would eat too much or become obese, so they have to exert self control not to. Weight is a function of calorie intake and calorie expenditure (“calories in, calories out”), and expenditure is primarily a function of behavior. So if someone is trying to lose weight, and it isn’t working, then they must be having willpower failures and eating more than they intend, or exercising less than they intend.
I currently think there are quite a lot of things wrong with this model, but today, I’d like to focus on one in particular. It’s not the only or the most central objection, nor is it a particularly actionable model fragment. But it’s an issue that’s important to me in particular, and it’s one of the wedges that moved into a different belief basin.
I am not obese, and have never set out to lose weight. But sometimes, I have overwhelming cravings for sugar. I would not be able to resist these cravings without great willpower.
If I ever did successfully resist one of those cravings, I would probably die.
I don’t mean this figuratively, or in a heart-disease-years-later sort of way. I mean that if I get a powerful craving for sugar, and I don’t promptly eat something that has sugar in it, then this will be a life-threatening medical emergency. This is because I have type 1 diabetes, and craving sugar is a symptom of low blood sugar, aka hypoglycemia. What T1 diabetes means, basically, is that I have to micromanage my blood sugar using insulin. Eating carbohydrates raises blood sugar, insulin lowers it, these need to be matched pretty precisely, and the whole thing is somewhat error prone. Too much insulin and blood sugar falls below 70mg/dL, and I get the sugar craving. I’ve never been below 40mg/dL, but people who do become mentally impaired, then lose consciousness, then die.
Under the usual theory of obesity, craving sugar would mean that I had been hijacked by the superstimulus of processed food, and that willpower was my defense against this hijacking. But actually, in this case, the craving is a safety mechanism. Sugar craving is to dangerous hypoglycemia as thirst is to dehydration.
With that example in mind, I started thinking about the double-digit percentage of people who drop out of weight-loss studies. And the much-larger percentage of people who start weight loss diets, privately resolved to continue until they reach a target weight, and stop early. What would happen to them, in the counterfactual world where the diet was enforced perfectly from outside, and willpower wasn’t an issue? Whether they would lose weight, seems like very much the wrong question to ask.
You make a good point, that some people who drop out of weight-loss studies might have experienced health problems caused by the study, and quiting was the right decision for them.
But I believe that the average obese person in general population is not this case. There are many situations where people eat refined sugar not because they have a strong craving, but simply because it is easily available or there are even habits built around it.
To give an example, in my family it was for some reason considered a good idea to drink tea with sugar at breakfast. As a child I didn’t have an opinion on this, I was given the breakfast and I consumed it. But as I grew up and started making my own breakfast, out of sheer laziness I starting drinking water instead. I didn’t fall into coma and die. Actually it made the breakfast better, because when you drink tea with sugar first, then everything you eat afterwards tastes bland, but if you drink water, you discover that some things are surprisingly delicious. Recently my kids spent one week with my mother, and then reported to me that they had “cereals” for each breakfast (in this context, “cereals” refers to those cheap hypermarket products that contain the word on the box, but consist mostly of refined sugar with some added fibers; the advertisement tells you to pour milk on them and pretend that the result is healthy somehow, because, you know, milk and cereals). I am not making a big deal out of it, one week is not going to hurt anyone, but sigh, of course most people in my family are fat.
Similarly, if you buy things in a hypermarket, check how many of them contain added sugar. So people eat this sugar not because they had a craving, but because they bought a processed food in a shop, and someone added the sugar for them. (There is often no easily available sugar-less version.) They probably add sugar to your food in a restaurant, dunno.
If you are curious what would it be like to not eat any refined sugar, probably the only solution is to cook for yourself from scratch. Even things like mustard or canned vegetables typically contain refined sugar. So we regularly eat lots of sugar without deciding to, often without being aware of it. (And then we drink coke on the top of it. But hey, the advertisement said that coke had zero sugar now, could they possibly be lying?)
So, avoiding lots of extra sugar is technically possible, but it is a lot of work, and some people cannot afford it, or have never learned the necessary skills. Because of course they don’t teach cooking at schools anymore; why would anyone need such useless skill in the modern economy, where you can buy anything (but have little control over the content).
Our past beliefs affect what we pay attention to, how we prioritize our skepticism, and how we interpret ambiguous evidence. This can create belief basins, where there are multiple sets of beliefs that reinforce each other, appear internally consistent, and make it hard to see the other basins as valid possibilities. On the topic of nutrition, I seem to have found myself in a different basin. I’ve looked through every nonstandard lens I could find, repeatedly applied skepticism, and firmly committed to not make the same mistakes everyone else is making (as a priority on par with not making mistakes at all). I’ve arrived at a set of beliefs that, as far as I can tell, is internally consistent, reasonably compelling from the inside, and completely contrary to what most other people in our culture think.
This makes for a difficult writing project. When I try to argue nonstandard positions, many of the arguments are tendrils reaching into other nonstandard positions. I’ve finally managed to get into a post-every-day cadence; part of the key to that was accepting that sometimes those arguments will be dangling references. Hopefully after a month of this, the whole thing will cohere. If not, well, the fragments are pretty interesting too.
The most-common basin of nutrition theorizing centers on obesity, and on a particular theory of obesity which goes like this. Food, especially modern processed food, tastes good and is appealing. Some people, if they followed their urges, would eat too much or become obese, so they have to exert self control not to. Weight is a function of calorie intake and calorie expenditure (“calories in, calories out”), and expenditure is primarily a function of behavior. So if someone is trying to lose weight, and it isn’t working, then they must be having willpower failures and eating more than they intend, or exercising less than they intend.
I currently think there are quite a lot of things wrong with this model, but today, I’d like to focus on one in particular. It’s not the only or the most central objection, nor is it a particularly actionable model fragment. But it’s an issue that’s important to me in particular, and it’s one of the wedges that moved into a different belief basin.
I am not obese, and have never set out to lose weight. But sometimes, I have overwhelming cravings for sugar. I would not be able to resist these cravings without great willpower.
If I ever did successfully resist one of those cravings, I would probably die.
I don’t mean this figuratively, or in a heart-disease-years-later sort of way. I mean that if I get a powerful craving for sugar, and I don’t promptly eat something that has sugar in it, then this will be a life-threatening medical emergency. This is because I have type 1 diabetes, and craving sugar is a symptom of low blood sugar, aka hypoglycemia. What T1 diabetes means, basically, is that I have to micromanage my blood sugar using insulin. Eating carbohydrates raises blood sugar, insulin lowers it, these need to be matched pretty precisely, and the whole thing is somewhat error prone. Too much insulin and blood sugar falls below 70mg/dL, and I get the sugar craving. I’ve never been below 40mg/dL, but people who do become mentally impaired, then lose consciousness, then die.
Under the usual theory of obesity, craving sugar would mean that I had been hijacked by the superstimulus of processed food, and that willpower was my defense against this hijacking. But actually, in this case, the craving is a safety mechanism. Sugar craving is to dangerous hypoglycemia as thirst is to dehydration.
With that example in mind, I started thinking about the double-digit percentage of people who drop out of weight-loss studies. And the much-larger percentage of people who start weight loss diets, privately resolved to continue until they reach a target weight, and stop early. What would happen to them, in the counterfactual world where the diet was enforced perfectly from outside, and willpower wasn’t an issue? Whether they would lose weight, seems like very much the wrong question to ask.
(Crossposted on Facebook)
You make a good point, that some people who drop out of weight-loss studies might have experienced health problems caused by the study, and quiting was the right decision for them.
But I believe that the average obese person in general population is not this case. There are many situations where people eat refined sugar not because they have a strong craving, but simply because it is easily available or there are even habits built around it.
To give an example, in my family it was for some reason considered a good idea to drink tea with sugar at breakfast. As a child I didn’t have an opinion on this, I was given the breakfast and I consumed it. But as I grew up and started making my own breakfast, out of sheer laziness I starting drinking water instead. I didn’t fall into coma and die. Actually it made the breakfast better, because when you drink tea with sugar first, then everything you eat afterwards tastes bland, but if you drink water, you discover that some things are surprisingly delicious. Recently my kids spent one week with my mother, and then reported to me that they had “cereals” for each breakfast (in this context, “cereals” refers to those cheap hypermarket products that contain the word on the box, but consist mostly of refined sugar with some added fibers; the advertisement tells you to pour milk on them and pretend that the result is healthy somehow, because, you know, milk and cereals). I am not making a big deal out of it, one week is not going to hurt anyone, but sigh, of course most people in my family are fat.
Similarly, if you buy things in a hypermarket, check how many of them contain added sugar. So people eat this sugar not because they had a craving, but because they bought a processed food in a shop, and someone added the sugar for them. (There is often no easily available sugar-less version.) They probably add sugar to your food in a restaurant, dunno.
If you are curious what would it be like to not eat any refined sugar, probably the only solution is to cook for yourself from scratch. Even things like mustard or canned vegetables typically contain refined sugar. So we regularly eat lots of sugar without deciding to, often without being aware of it. (And then we drink coke on the top of it. But hey, the advertisement said that coke had zero sugar now, could they possibly be lying?)
So, avoiding lots of extra sugar is technically possible, but it is a lot of work, and some people cannot afford it, or have never learned the necessary skills. Because of course they don’t teach cooking at schools anymore; why would anyone need such useless skill in the modern economy, where you can buy anything (but have little control over the content).