How inadequate coke dealers must feel that crack is pretty much the only option for product enhancement, while the UPF scientists can do so much more....
As a non American who had family there for a while, I think there's a lot of unacknowledged labour involved in being American regarding safety. The higher vigilance required when walking through any city, the inability to trust the safety of food additives, the wildly higher rates of food poisoning from restaurants, sorting out and understanding health insurance, the terrible tax self reporting system...
Don't get me wrong, Europe has problems, but I spend approximately zero time worrying about any of the above.
> As a non American who had family there for a while, I think there's a lot of unacknowledged labour involved in being American regarding safety.
Yeah, I feel like you've just articulated something I've noticed myself many times, but hadn't ever quite put into words.
America is definitely more "adversarial" and "hard mode" on a number of fronts, as you point out. And it's partly higher crime, partly lack of regulation (FDA), partly regulatory capture (taxes), partly capitalism / socialism axes, and partly the independence / paternalism philosophical axis.
Technologically and economically, I'm really glad America exists, but from a personal quality of life perspective, I agree there are certainly better milieus to be had.
> Although, somewhat surprisingly from somebody clearly writing an “advocacy” book, throughout the book he steadfastly maintains an “obesity is a disease and it’s literally impossible to control what you eat” take, which I found fairly original in a book that’s literally about persuading you to eat less UPF, and given that both he and his twin give up UPF in the course of things.
My reading of those lines in the book was that he was just saying the magic words to ensure that the focus was on the actual topic of the book and didn't end up bogged down in people arguing about whether being overweight was actually bad for you since the remainder of the book goes into detail on just how bad for you it is. Going by its fairly massive success in the UK it seemed to work.
I drink an inordinate amount of Diet Coke, which as far as I know is basically a fizzy mix of chemicals. I even dislike normal Coke now as it tastes too sugary to me.
I wonder if this falls into the category of super-stimulus that doesn’t make you fat, or if there’s some underlying harm. As far as I can tell there’s no negative health effects (unless the caffeine prevents you from sleeping well), so I’m pretty content with this addiction.
> I wonder if this falls into the category of super-stimulus that doesn’t make you fat, or if there’s some underlying harm.
Like any biological thing, it almost certainly varies based on the person. If diet coke is the bulk of your processed food exposure, I personally wouldn't worry too much.
The worst part about trying to optimize diet is that the huge numbers of low quality studies makes it a very epistemically treacherous landscape (part of why the KD Hall studies are nice, he actually controls food intakes entirely rather than using diet surveys. Or the study I mentioned here where they measure blood metabolites vs the usual self-recorded diet).
And even if you find high quality studies - say you switched to coffee as a caffeine source, and say you french press or aeropress it because you care about how it tastes. Coffee has cafestol and kahweol, each of which elevate LDL. Cafestol is the most potent LDL-inducing chemical known in the human diet, in fact. Unfiltered coffee has 30x more cafestol and kahweol than unfiltered coffee.
So what? Now you need to french press and then additionally paper filter it? Or drink drip coffee like some kind of gormless coffee naif? I mean, paper filtering additionally is what I started doing (largely because I eat ridiculous amounts of saturated fat every day to meet my macros and didn't want double exposure), but man is it epicycles on epicycles.
Coming from a coffee snob, just want to recommend the Clever Dripper, or similar coffee filter. It looks like a pour over coffee filter, but has a valve at the bottom. Functionally it's a French Press, but the whole thing brews inside a paper filter. All the brewing goodness of French Press, paper filtered, and way easier to clean up than a French Press.
I remember some study that found that diet soft drinks increased ones appetite, so made drinkers more likely to eat more calories (altho afaik the science here remains inconclusie). Perhaps it does mess with your lipostat due to... well no one knows, maybe the plastic or antibiotics or lithium in it.
How inadequate coke dealers must feel that crack is pretty much the only option for product enhancement, while the UPF scientists can do so much more....
Where is coke's Gale Boetiger?
As a non American who had family there for a while, I think there's a lot of unacknowledged labour involved in being American regarding safety. The higher vigilance required when walking through any city, the inability to trust the safety of food additives, the wildly higher rates of food poisoning from restaurants, sorting out and understanding health insurance, the terrible tax self reporting system...
Don't get me wrong, Europe has problems, but I spend approximately zero time worrying about any of the above.
> As a non American who had family there for a while, I think there's a lot of unacknowledged labour involved in being American regarding safety.
Yeah, I feel like you've just articulated something I've noticed myself many times, but hadn't ever quite put into words.
America is definitely more "adversarial" and "hard mode" on a number of fronts, as you point out. And it's partly higher crime, partly lack of regulation (FDA), partly regulatory capture (taxes), partly capitalism / socialism axes, and partly the independence / paternalism philosophical axis.
Technologically and economically, I'm really glad America exists, but from a personal quality of life perspective, I agree there are certainly better milieus to be had.
This article was worth it simply for informing me about COZ corn oil. I am even more skeptical of the food industry now, somehow.
> Although, somewhat surprisingly from somebody clearly writing an “advocacy” book, throughout the book he steadfastly maintains an “obesity is a disease and it’s literally impossible to control what you eat” take, which I found fairly original in a book that’s literally about persuading you to eat less UPF, and given that both he and his twin give up UPF in the course of things.
My reading of those lines in the book was that he was just saying the magic words to ensure that the focus was on the actual topic of the book and didn't end up bogged down in people arguing about whether being overweight was actually bad for you since the remainder of the book goes into detail on just how bad for you it is. Going by its fairly massive success in the UK it seemed to work.
The statistical technique used to refine the UPFs is known as "design of experiments".
I drink an inordinate amount of Diet Coke, which as far as I know is basically a fizzy mix of chemicals. I even dislike normal Coke now as it tastes too sugary to me.
I wonder if this falls into the category of super-stimulus that doesn’t make you fat, or if there’s some underlying harm. As far as I can tell there’s no negative health effects (unless the caffeine prevents you from sleeping well), so I’m pretty content with this addiction.
> I wonder if this falls into the category of super-stimulus that doesn’t make you fat, or if there’s some underlying harm.
Like any biological thing, it almost certainly varies based on the person. If diet coke is the bulk of your processed food exposure, I personally wouldn't worry too much.
The worst part about trying to optimize diet is that the huge numbers of low quality studies makes it a very epistemically treacherous landscape (part of why the KD Hall studies are nice, he actually controls food intakes entirely rather than using diet surveys. Or the study I mentioned here where they measure blood metabolites vs the usual self-recorded diet).
And even if you find high quality studies - say you switched to coffee as a caffeine source, and say you french press or aeropress it because you care about how it tastes. Coffee has cafestol and kahweol, each of which elevate LDL. Cafestol is the most potent LDL-inducing chemical known in the human diet, in fact. Unfiltered coffee has 30x more cafestol and kahweol than unfiltered coffee.
So what? Now you need to french press and then additionally paper filter it? Or drink drip coffee like some kind of gormless coffee naif? I mean, paper filtering additionally is what I started doing (largely because I eat ridiculous amounts of saturated fat every day to meet my macros and didn't want double exposure), but man is it epicycles on epicycles.
Coming from a coffee snob, just want to recommend the Clever Dripper, or similar coffee filter. It looks like a pour over coffee filter, but has a valve at the bottom. Functionally it's a French Press, but the whole thing brews inside a paper filter. All the brewing goodness of French Press, paper filtered, and way easier to clean up than a French Press.
(Thank you for your writing, I enjoy it a lot)
> Coming from a coffee snob, just want to recommend the Clever Dripper
Ooh, sounds like just what I need, I'll def look into one - appreciate it!
I remember some study that found that diet soft drinks increased ones appetite, so made drinkers more likely to eat more calories (altho afaik the science here remains inconclusie). Perhaps it does mess with your lipostat due to... well no one knows, maybe the plastic or antibiotics or lithium in it.