I think saying “we” here dramatically over-indexes on personal observation. I’d bet that most overweight Americans have not only eaten untasty food for an extended period (say, longer than a month); and those that have, found that it sucked and stopped doing it. Only eating untasty food really sucks! For comparison, everyone knows that smoking is awful for your health, it’s expensive, leaves bad odors, and so on. And I’d bet that most smokers would find “never smoke again” easier and more pleasant (in the long run) than “never eat tasty food again”. Yet, the vast majority of smokers continue smoking:
A personal observation regarding eating not tasty food:
I served in the Israeli army, eating 3 meals a day on base. The food was perfectly edible… But that’s the best I can say about it.
People noticeably ate less—eating exactly until they weren’t hungry and nothing more than that, and many lost a few kilos.
Adding my anecdote to everyone else’s: after learning about the palatability hypothesis, I resolved to eat only non-tasty food for a while, and lost 30 pounds over about four months (200 → 170). I’ve since relaxed my diet a little to include a little tasty food, and now (8 months after the start) have maintained that loss (even going down a little further).
Slightly boggling at the idea that nuts and eggs aren’t tasty? And I completely lose the plot at “condiments”. Isn’t the whole point of condiments that they are tasty? What sort of definition of “tasty” are you going with?
This sounds like a pretty intense restriction diet that also happens to be unpalatable. But the palatable foods hypothesis (as an explanation for the obesity epidemic) isn’t “our grandparents used to only eat beans and vegan sausages and now we eat a more palatable diet, hence obesity.” It’s something much more specific about the palatability of our modern 20th/21st century diet vs. the early 20th century diet, isn’t it? What’s the hypothesis we could test that would actually help us judge that claim without inadvertently removing most food groups and confounding everything?
I’m going to bury this a bit deeper in the comment chain because it’s no more indicative than Eliezer’s anecdote. But FWIW,
I am in the (very fortunate) minority who struggles to gain much weight, and has always been skinny. But when I have more tasty food around, especially if it’s prepared for me and just sitting there, I absolutely eat more, and manage to climb up from ~146 to ~148 or ~150 (pounds). It’s unimaginable that this effect isn’t true for me.
Yeah, that sounds right—with a non-broken metabolism, eating lots and lots of tasty food that’s just prepared and sitting there, to your heart’s content, should totally result in about 4 pounds of weight gain, all the way up to 150 pounds.
Do you have any empirical evidence for either of the following?
Farmers were historically wrong to think that free-feeding their animals would tend to fatten them up, OR they didn’t believe it has that effect.
Prior to the more recent novel contaminants, humans are an exception among animals in this general trend, that free-feeding tends to fatten animals up.
Actually I’d ask about the effect of free-feeding non-domesticated animals on ecologically realistic food, rather than free-feeding cows bred to gain weight using grains.
Why “ecologically realistic food”? And which types of realism are you going to pick?
Overfeeding and obesity are common problems in pets, which are mostly not bred to gain weight the way cows are.
My family has kept many kinds of animals. If you give bunny rabbits as much veggies as they want, a large fraction becomes obese. And guinea pigs too. And for their own favorite foods, tropical fish do too. Cats too.
In fact, I have never noticed a species that doesn’t end up with a substantial fraction with obesity, if you go out of your way to prepare the most-compelling food to them, and then give that in limitless amounts. Even lower-quality, not-as-compelling foods free-fed can cause some obesity. Do you even know of any animal species like this?!
If there is large variation in susceptibility (which there would be) to the ostensible environmental contaminant, there should be species that you can free-feed and they don’t get obesity.
I agree that most animals will become overweight if given unlimited tasty food. Two counter examples in my life were a cat and a hamster. Both only became overweight in old age—with unlimited food and many treats. Caveat—the hamster didn’t look fatter than normal hamsters, but maybe all hamsters are fat.
Just adding my own anecdote here, literally every time that I can recall overeating out of my own volition, it was because the food was tasty or otherwise satisfying. The connection between how tasty a food is, and how likely I am to overeat it, is such a strong connection that it might as well be treated as a law of nature.
Doesn’t sound obviously true for me? I obviously won’t overeat food if it’s disgusting, but I’d say I’m more likely to overeat rice cakes than chocolate, for example. A lot of milder foods feel easier for me to overload on.
That’s interesting. One caveat I should add is that I was referring to calorie overconsumption, as opposed to volume overconsumption. Rice is not very calorie dense, making it relatively easy to become full without eating many calories.
Yeah, I was thinking of calories too. I think I could eat way too many rice cakes, reliably, day in and day out. Whereas eating even one Hershey’s bar starts to approach the level where I’d feel sick from the amount of chocolate, and want less of it around me in the future.
How are we defining tasty foods? I’m sure if the entire world voted, chocolate would clearly be more in the “tasty food” category than rice cakes, but perhaps you really like how rice cakes taste?
I think saying “we” here dramatically over-indexes on personal observation. I’d bet that most overweight Americans have not only eaten untasty food for an extended period (say, longer than a month); and those that have, found that it sucked and stopped doing it. Only eating untasty food really sucks! For comparison, everyone knows that smoking is awful for your health, it’s expensive, leaves bad odors, and so on. And I’d bet that most smokers would find “never smoke again” easier and more pleasant (in the long run) than “never eat tasty food again”. Yet, the vast majority of smokers continue smoking:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/156833/one-five-adults-smoke-tied-time-low.aspx
A personal observation regarding eating not tasty food:
I served in the Israeli army, eating 3 meals a day on base. The food was perfectly edible… But that’s the best I can say about it. People noticeably ate less—eating exactly until they weren’t hungry and nothing more than that, and many lost a few kilos.
Adding my anecdote to everyone else’s: after learning about the palatability hypothesis, I resolved to eat only non-tasty food for a while, and lost 30 pounds over about four months (200 → 170). I’ve since relaxed my diet a little to include a little tasty food, and now (8 months after the start) have maintained that loss (even going down a little further).
What sorts of non-tasty food did you eat? I don’t really know what this should be expected to filter out.
For the first part of the experiment, mostly nuts, bananas, olives, and eggs. Later I added vegan sausages + condiments.
Slightly boggling at the idea that nuts and eggs aren’t tasty? And I completely lose the plot at “condiments”. Isn’t the whole point of condiments that they are tasty? What sort of definition of “tasty” are you going with?
Nuts, bananas and olives are tasty, and common snacking foods. What they are not is highly processed.
This sounds like a pretty intense restriction diet that also happens to be unpalatable. But the palatable foods hypothesis (as an explanation for the obesity epidemic) isn’t “our grandparents used to only eat beans and vegan sausages and now we eat a more palatable diet, hence obesity.” It’s something much more specific about the palatability of our modern 20th/21st century diet vs. the early 20th century diet, isn’t it? What’s the hypothesis we could test that would actually help us judge that claim without inadvertently removing most food groups and confounding everything?
I’ve heard that combinations of fat and sugar are particularly superstimulating.
I’m going to bury this a bit deeper in the comment chain because it’s no more indicative than Eliezer’s anecdote. But FWIW,
I am in the (very fortunate) minority who struggles to gain much weight, and has always been skinny. But when I have more tasty food around, especially if it’s prepared for me and just sitting there, I absolutely eat more, and manage to climb up from ~146 to ~148 or ~150 (pounds). It’s unimaginable that this effect isn’t true for me.
Yeah, that sounds right—with a non-broken metabolism, eating lots and lots of tasty food that’s just prepared and sitting there, to your heart’s content, should totally result in about 4 pounds of weight gain, all the way up to 150 pounds.
That’s how everybody’s metabolisms used to work.
Do you have any empirical evidence for either of the following?
Farmers were historically wrong to think that free-feeding their animals would tend to fatten them up, OR they didn’t believe it has that effect.
Prior to the more recent novel contaminants, humans are an exception among animals in this general trend, that free-feeding tends to fatten animals up.
Actually I’d ask about the effect of free-feeding non-domesticated animals on ecologically realistic food, rather than free-feeding cows bred to gain weight using grains.
Why “ecologically realistic food”? And which types of realism are you going to pick?
Overfeeding and obesity are common problems in pets, which are mostly not bred to gain weight the way cows are.
My family has kept many kinds of animals. If you give bunny rabbits as much veggies as they want, a large fraction becomes obese. And guinea pigs too. And for their own favorite foods, tropical fish do too. Cats too.
In fact, I have never noticed a species that doesn’t end up with a substantial fraction with obesity, if you go out of your way to prepare the most-compelling food to them, and then give that in limitless amounts. Even lower-quality, not-as-compelling foods free-fed can cause some obesity. Do you even know of any animal species like this?!
If there is large variation in susceptibility (which there would be) to the ostensible environmental contaminant, there should be species that you can free-feed and they don’t get obesity.
I agree that most animals will become overweight if given unlimited tasty food. Two counter examples in my life were a cat and a hamster. Both only became overweight in old age—with unlimited food and many treats. Caveat—the hamster didn’t look fatter than normal hamsters, but maybe all hamsters are fat.
Just adding my own anecdote here, literally every time that I can recall overeating out of my own volition, it was because the food was tasty or otherwise satisfying. The connection between how tasty a food is, and how likely I am to overeat it, is such a strong connection that it might as well be treated as a law of nature.
Doesn’t sound obviously true for me? I obviously won’t overeat food if it’s disgusting, but I’d say I’m more likely to overeat rice cakes than chocolate, for example. A lot of milder foods feel easier for me to overload on.
That’s interesting. One caveat I should add is that I was referring to calorie overconsumption, as opposed to volume overconsumption. Rice is not very calorie dense, making it relatively easy to become full without eating many calories.
Yeah, I was thinking of calories too. I think I could eat way too many rice cakes, reliably, day in and day out. Whereas eating even one Hershey’s bar starts to approach the level where I’d feel sick from the amount of chocolate, and want less of it around me in the future.
There’s more common foods everyone can agree are tasty and high calorie and easy to indulge on, such as spaghetti with meatballs
How are we defining tasty foods? I’m sure if the entire world voted, chocolate would clearly be more in the “tasty food” category than rice cakes, but perhaps you really like how rice cakes taste?