… these same people want the government to provide them with free health care, and if they got their full way, other “positive liberties” (to quote Obama) including free college, free housing, free food, guaranteed income, guaranteed jobs.
[…] the moment all your necessities are furnished by someone else, someone else gets to make all the decisions for you. I mean, if your health is paid for by the taxes of your fellow citizens, and the government aka the nation looks after your every need: should they pay for your health if you insist on smoking or drinking? Or should those resources be husbanded for people who take better care of themselves? Okay, Sarah, but isn’t there a point to individual responsibility? Why shouldn’t you be required to take minimal care of yourself, so you get the benefits of the government’s care, which as you say someone else pays for.
Ah, but there’s the rub. See, ultimately, there’s always something some of us say or do that can be used to justify denying care or giving only palliative care. For instance, I’m overweight, which seems to be one of the remaining sins in the current lexicon. Sure, I gained tons of weight over 20 years of untreated hypothyroidism, even though I was starving myself for a long portion of those. But hey, I allowed myself to be overweight. So my prognosis is poor. Why spend money on me, when someone else could have better results?
Hell, even when it comes to my autoimmune. I’m a poor prospect, so why give me top of the line care?
If the government controlled other things, it would be exactly the same. Food? Sure, I break out in eczema all over when I eat a diet rich in carbs. But hey, flour and rice are cheap, and why should I get a specialized diet, since I’m only a writer who isn’t even a leftist or a supporter of the state, and besides my prospects of survival are poor?
College? Sure you want to be an economist, but your teachers say you’re cheeky and talk back, and the state doesn’t need that. What we need right now are pipe fitters. Here, you can take this six week course.
When the state is paying the bill, the state gets to decide what is better for you. The European constitution gives you the right to “death with dignity” because death with dignity is much cheaper than expensive treatments with a low chance of survival. After all this money is for everyone, you know?
And like the NHS, in Britain, they won’t even let you seek treatment outside their tender mercies. Why should they? They pay for you. That means in the end they decide what to spend on you. They own you. And if you went outside their system and your kid got cured? It would look pretty bad for them, wouldn’t it? Why should they allow you to do that? And besides, peasant, you have a bad attitude.
Sarah Hoyt, “Slouching Into Shackles”, According to Hoyt, 2018-04-27.
July 25, 2020
May 12, 2020
QotD: A jaundiced view of science fiction conventions
The first was that nobody at these gatherings, at least as far as I could tell, actually read science fiction, or much of anything else.
There were plenty of board gamers. (This was long before computer gaming or even Dungeons and Dragons; the hottest item on CRT was Pong, or early versions of Star Trek eating up mainframe time across the country.) There were plenty of self-proclaimed artists of one kind or another, and hordes of kids — of all ages — who loved to dress up in costumes.
Another thing I noticed was that these conventions, or “cons” as they were called, seemed to be the only social life most of their attendees had, a sort of portable soap opera migrating from city to city throughout the year. The atmosphere was heavy with prehistoric rivalries and hatreds, grudges and vendettas, sometimes going back decades.
Actually, the first thing I noticed — although I was too polite to put it first here — was that the vast bulk (and I use the term advisedly) of female attendees could have used a carload of deodorant and long-term memberships in Weight Watchers. Which, of course, was why events like these were the only social life they had. Nobody else wanted them hanging around.
L. Neil Smith, “The Security Syndrome”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-01-15
September 4, 2019
QotD: Goth problems
Dan Savage, The Onion A/V Club, 2004-08-04.
June 21, 2019
QotD: Caloric intake and weight gain
By this measure, even people who gain five or ten pounds a year are doing remarkably well, falling short of perfection by only a few percent. It’s not quite true that someone who gains five pounds is ((5*3,500)/800,000) = 98% accurate, because each pound you gain increases caloric requirements in a negative feedback loop, but it’s somewhere along those lines.
Take a second to think about that. Can you, armed with your FitBit and nutritional labeling information, accurately calculate how many calories you burn in a given day, and decide what amount of food you need to eat to compensate for it, within 10%? I think even the most obsessive personal trainer would consider that a tall order. But even the worst overeaters are subconsciously managing that all the time. However many double bacon cheeseburgers they appear to be eating in a single sitting, over the long term their body is going to do some kind of magic to get them to within a few percent of the calorie intake they need.
It’s not surprising that people overeat, it’s surprising that people don’t overeat much more. Consider someone who just has bad impulse control and so eats whatever they see – wouldn’t we expect them to deviate from ideal calorie input by more than a few percent, given that this person probably has no idea what their ideal input even is and maybe has never heard of calories?
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.
May 31, 2019
QotD: How we gain weight
I first learned about [Stephan] Guyenet’s work from his various debates with Gary Taubes and his supporters, where he usually represents the “establishment” side. He is very careful to emphasize that the establishment doesn’t look anything like Taubes’ caricature of it. The establishment doesn’t believe that obesity is just about weak-willed people voluntarily choosing to eat too much, or that obese people would get thin if they just tried diet and exercise, or that all calories are the same. He writes
The [calories in, calories out or CICO] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower. The primary defining feature of this model is that it assumes that food intake and body fatness are not regulated. This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug, since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.
[Debate opponent Dr. David] Ludwig and I both agree that it provides a poor fit for the evidence. As an alternative, Ludwig proposes the insulin model, which states that the primary cause of obesity is excessive insulin action on fat cells, which in turn is caused principally by rapidly-digesting carbohydrate. According to this model, too much insulin reduces blood levels of glucose and fatty acids (the two primary circulating metabolic fuels), simultaneously leading to hunger, fatigue, and fat gain. Overeating is caused by a kind of “internal starvation”. There are other versions of the insulin model, but this is the one advocated by Ludwig (and Taubes), so it will be my focus.
But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)
The Hungry Brain is part of Guyenet’s attempt to explain this third model, and it basically succeeds. But like many “third way” style proposals, it leaves a lot of ambiguity. With CICO, at least you know where you stand – confident that everything is based on willpower and that you can ignore biology completely. And again, with Taubes, you know where you stand – confident that willpower is useless and that low-carb diets will solve everything. The Hungry Brain is a little more complicated, a little harder to get a read on, and at times pretty wishy-washy.
But listening to people’s confidently-asserted simple and elegant ideas was how we got into this mess, so whatever, let’s keep reading.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain“, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.
May 4, 2019
QotD: Calorie-dense modern snack food
So what does cause this fattening effect? I think the book’s answer is “no single factor, but that doesn’t matter, because capitalism is an optimization process that designs foods to be as rewarding as possible, so however many different factors there are, every single one of them will be present in your bag of Doritos”. But to be more scientific about it, the specific things involved are some combination of sweet/salty/umami tastes, certain ratios of fat and sugar, and reinforced preferences for certain flavors.
Modern food isn’t just unusually rewarding, it’s also unusually bad at making us full. The brain has some pretty sophisticated mechanisms to determine when we’ve eaten enough; these usually involve estimating food’s calorie load from its mass and fiber level. But modern food is calorically dense – it contains many more calories than predicted per unit mass – and fiber-poor. This fools the brain into thinking that we’re eating less than we really are, and shuts down the system that would normally make us feel full once we’ve had enough. Simultaneously, the extremely high level of food reward tricks the brain into thinking that this food is especially nutritionally valuable and that it should relax its normal constraints.
Adding to all of this is the so-called “buffet effect”, where people will eat more calories from a variety of foods presented together than they would from any single food alone. My mother likes to talk about her “extra dessert stomach”, ie the thing where you can gorge yourself on a burger and fries until you’re totally full and couldn’t eat another bite – but then mysteriously find room for an ice cream sundae afterwards. This is apparently a real thing that’s been confirmed in scientific experiments, and a major difference between us and our ancestors. The !Kung Bushmen, everyone’s go-to example of an all-natural hunter-gatherer tribe, apparently get 50% of their calories from a single food, the mongongo nut, and another 40% from meat. Meanwhile, we design our meals to include as many unlike foods as possible – for example, a burger with fries, soda, and a milkshake for dessert. This once again causes the brain to relax its usual strict constraints on appetite and let us eat more than we should.
The book sums all of these things up into the idea of “food reward” making some foods “hyperpalatable” and “seducing” the reward mechanism in order to produce a sort of “food addiction” that leads to “cravings”, the “obesity epidemic”, and a profusion of “scare quotes”.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.
April 17, 2019
QotD: “[E]valuating food by its calorie count is like evaluating literature by the number of pages in a book”
… calorie-counting is an ineffective approach to eating. Calories are a crude metric that takes into account nothing about the properties of foods other than the total energy they contain. The value of activities can’t be reduced to a number, and nor can foods. Still calories are listed everywhere, enumerated in enormous fonts on food packaging and across menus and ads for packaged products with nothing to recommend them but a lack of calories.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.
That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.
Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.
James Hamblin, “It’s True, Hot Baths Burn Calories: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading”, The Atlantic, 2017-04-13.
April 10, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on obesity
His latest in the New English Review:
It hardly requires me to point out that obesity has become a greater threat to the health of the human population in most parts of the world than famine. There was a wonderful cartoon recently in the British magazine, The Oldie, which captured this perfectly. A mother is taking a plate of food away from her child, who is protesting. “Think of the obese millions!” she says to him. When I was young, of course, we were told to finish what was on our plate and to think of the starving millions. Being a precocious little brat, I used to ask how eating what I did not want would help them. Let us just say that the reply was seldom well-reasoned, either in form or content.
It has now become an almost unassailable orthodoxy, at least in medical journals, that obesity is an illness in and of itself: that is to say, it does not merely have medical consequences, but — even without those consequences — is a disease. To be fat is, ipso facto, to be ill, in the same sense as to have Parkinson’s disease is to be ill.
Nor, according to the modern orthodoxy, is obesity to be considered the natural consequence of bad or foolish individual choices, a lack of self-control. That would be to blame the victim. The fat person is in effect the vector of forces that play upon him or her, without any contribution on his or her part.
This is an idea of long gestation. Reading an old text on obesity, published in 1975, and edited by one of my medical mentors, I came across the following quote from a paper written in 1962:
I wish to propose that obesity is an inherited disorder and due to a genetically determined defect in an enzyme: in other words that people who are fat are born fat, and nothing much can be done about it.
This is like saying that addicted people are born to be addicted, and until doctors discover a technical means of stopping their addiction, they might as well make no efforts on their own behalf. No doubt the people who adhere to this view – that obesity and addiction are illnesses simpliciter – think they are being generous but in fact they are forging psychological manacles. No doubt the fat woman in the bakery was at some level trying to prove to herself that obesity was a fatality and not under any possible individual control.
But is the theory in accord with the scene I have described above? In fact, the scene might lead us to a more nuanced or less categorical view of the problem of obesity (and, by extension, of other social problems) than we might at first adopt.
April 3, 2019
QotD: Veganism has its drawbacks
Evangelical vegans will tell you that following a purely ‘plant-based’ diet is not only morally commendable, it’s also much better for your health. But if my experience is anything to go by, the opposite is true.
I felt absolutely fine for the first few days. I didn’t miss meat at all, certainly not in terms of taste or flavour. The only thing I really felt an absence of was eggs. Since I embarked on my mammoth weight-loss project, eggs have become a dietary staple for me: nothing fills me up as well or gives me quite as much long-lasting energy as an egg.
I also found I had to eat larger portions to feel full — and I felt hungry again after a shorter period of time. But even that didn’t bother me, since what I was eating was so wholesome.
No, the real issue became apparent after the third or fourth day. Not to put too fine a point on it: wind.
My stomach was, quite literally, in ferment. All those legumes and pulses and generalised vegetable matter appeared to have turned into a giant internal compost heap. It wasn’t too bad in the mornings; but by early afternoon I was like a cow who had overdosed on clover.
At first, I palmed the outcome off on our three dogs. But after a while the problem became so severe that even they could not be expected to account for the frequency and potency of aromas emerging from my lower digestive tract.
One of the key arguments of vegans against livestock farming is the harm animals cause to the planet through the amount of methane they produce; if my experience was anything to go by, a vegan human is capable of producing just as much, if not more. I was a one-woman global warming hazard.
My children, of course, thought it was hilarious. But from my point of view, it was not only unpleasant and occasionally embarrassing, it was also incredibly uncomfortable. I felt bloated, soggy and sluggish, and began to dread meal times.
Following the advice of the nutritionist, I took to soaking nuts, oats and seeds overnight. But it made no difference. If anything, the problem began to get worse. The more healthy vegan food I put into my body, the worse my stomach problems became.
As for the much-vaunted ‘vegan glow’, no sign. Instead, my skin felt dry and dehydrated, and there was a distinctly greyish tinge to my complexion. But still, I persisted.
Sarah Vine, “Going vegan sent me off my trolley! Exhausted, irritable and don’t even start of the tummy troubles – SARAH VINE’s bid to join the health revolution left her VERY green around the gills”, Daily Mail, 2019-02-22.
December 29, 2018
English public health officials angling to ban most restaurant meals due to excess calorie counts
The bureaucrats at Public Health England (PHE) apparently want the English to go back to those gloriously hungry days of rationing during and after the Second World War, at least based on their diktats on the allowable limits for calories in purchased meals:
The idea of the government controlling the number of calories in meals is so outlandish that few people have taken it seriously, despite PHE explicitly stating that this is what they are working on. They have been busy setting calorie limits for almost every food product available in shops, cafés, pubs and restaurants. The plan was to publish them in the spring but Laura Donnelly at the Telegraph has got hold of them and has leaked them today.
They are astonishing, not only because they are so low but because they are so comically precise. Sandwiches and main meal salads will be capped at 550 calories, ready meals will be capped at 544 calories and main courses in restaurants will be capped at 951 calories. Vol-au-vents or onion bhajis will be capped at 134 calories and salad dressing capped at 145 calories. The spurious precision of these numbers is presumably meant to imply that they have been worked out scientifically. They haven’t, of course (why is OK to have a 900 calorie lunch in a restaurant but not OK to have a 600 calorie microwave dinner?). There is no way of working out how much energy a single meal should contain. The concept is ludicrous.
But the detailed proposals have infuriated manufacturers – who say they are far too complex and confusing to be workable.
No kidding.
These are not legal limits. Not yet. The plan is for the bureaucrats at PHE to ‘work with’ the food industry to magically remove calories from their products without destroying flavour. PHE have no knowledge to bring to the table so their part in the ‘partnership’ amounts to setting targets, issuing threats and naming and shaming businesses.
Some of the companies will attempt to play along, mainly by reducing portion sizes, but it is a doomed enterprise. The government initially planed to use the threat of advertising restrictions to make the companies play ball, but it has already capitulated to the ‘public health’ lobby on this, so the only thing left is to threaten them with mandatory calorie limits.
If that happens, it will mean an effective prohibition on many of Britain’s best loved dishes. Steak and kidney pudding far exceeds the 951 calorie limit for out-of-home food, as does ham, egg and chips, the all day breakfast, fish and chips, and beer and ale pie (based on Wetherspoons’ nutritional information). So does a normal Christmas dinner.
As for foreign cuisine, you can kiss goodbye to kebabs, curries, pizzas and Chinese food. But it’s a treat, you say! Tough luck. No exceptions.
November 6, 2018
An alternative explanation for the population explosion of the “land whales”
Tim Worstall suggests that the real reason for our collective expanding waistlines isn’t evil capitalist exploiters pushing us to eat unhealthy fast food:
We don’t, for example, eat more than our forefathers did. Sure, we can all play games with how much people lie on those self-reported surveys about calorie intake. True, to make sense of it being lies we’d have to assume that people lie more now than they used to. So, instead, let’s look at official guidance. In WW1 the aim was, for the Army, to stuff some 4,300 calories a day into each frontline soldier out there in the trenches. Something they largely achieved too. In WWII rationing peeps started to worry that diets of less than 2,900 calories a day would lead to weight loss. Today official guidance is that 2,500 a day for men, 2,000 for women. Well, that’s the last one I recall at least.
I suspect that people actually do lie more on self-reporting surveys of that kind than they once did, if only because we’ve had several decades of prissy lecturing about what we should consume … the temptation to shade the answers in the “right” direction I’m sure plays some part, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. If you doubt that this happens, remember that a significant number of people vote for the party they expect to win rather than the party that best represents their interests or desires. Sucking up to teacher is a very common psychological trait.
However, back to the swelling obesity numbers:
Actually, 40 years ago is about when central heating became a commonplace in Britain. Anyone of my maturity in years – which includes G. Monbiot – and even those from thoroughly upper middle class backgrounds – both me and G. Monbiot – will recall ice on the inside of bedroom windows in winter. Houses simply were not fully heated throughout. Actually, pretty much the entire country was in what we’d now call fuel poverty. That fuel poverty that we have standards for these days, you should be able to heat the entire house to such and such a temperature on less than 10% of income. A standard which just about no one pre-1950 reached, few pre-1970 did.
America had that heating rather earlier than we did. Americans also became land whales that little bit earlier than we did. Anecdata I know but a move to the US in 1981 was marked with an observation of how warm Americans kept their houses in winter.
We do actually spend quite a lot on all this public health stuff these days. It might be worth someone doing a little study of correlations. Different nations became lardbuckets at different times. Different nations adopted central heating as a commonplace at different times. Why don’t we go see what the correlation between those two is?
After all, the idea that mammals use some significant portion of their energy intake for body temperature regulation isn’t exactly fringe science, is it?
October 16, 2018
Fast food outlets cluster in poorer areas – because they’re low-margin businesses
Tim Worstall debunks the “fast food restaurants are preying on the poor” myth:
Contrary to the musings of Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times there is a cause and effect going on over the placings of fast food restaurants or outlets in British towns. The provision of burnt chicken and maybemeatburgers to the hoi polloi is a hugely competitive business. This means that it is also low margin. So, where do you put the places that are in a low margin line of business?
[…] this is about clustering of those nosh joints. Why are they in the poor areas? Well, for the same reason the poor are in the poor areas. They’re cheap. This being rather the defining point about poor people, they look for cheap places to live. The two are therefore synonymous, poor and cheap. And what is it we’ve just said about nosh? That it’s a low margin business. Therefore purveyors of the deep fried and battered saveloy – that joy of the ages – are going to be clustered in the poor part of town where they can afford the rents.
And that’s our cause and effect. Some poor people are poor because they’re, or have been, ill. They’re in the cheap part of town because they’re poor. Fried gut shops are in poor areas because they don’t make much money therefore they’re in the poor part of town. Absolutely any analysis of the phenomenon which doesn’t account for this is wrong. And no analysis done by anyone does take account of it – therefore all current analyses of the point are indeed wrong.
There are also other factors to consider, including the fact that poor people are less likely to have the ability or facilities to prepare their own meals (or the habit of cooking for themselves), so the easy availability of high-calorie fast food or snacks is rather important to them. When you’re hungry and don’t have a fridge or freezer full of food at home, a burger or fried chicken has a much stronger appeal than it does to more wealthy folks with well-stocked pantries. If you’ve been raised on high-fat/high-salt foods, the “healthier” alternatives may not appeal, as they also are less flavourful than their fast food options.
March 16, 2018
August 13, 2017
May 6, 2017
QotD: Cooking for one
You thought about cooking. You had frozen fish filets in the freezer and a rather nice-looking head of broccoli sitting right there in the produce drawer. But then, somehow, it was 8:10, and it all seemed like too much trouble, so instead you grabbed a bowl of Tostitos, a jar of salsa, and three slices of pepper jack, and you ate it in front of “Chopped.”
Or at least, that’s the explanation that an NPD analyst gave Marketwatch for America’s snacking habits.
“It’s hard to shop and cook for one.” That’s one reason why people are buying more snack foods, she says. “They are individually packaged and often have a very long shelf life. That, and an awful lot of people do not have cooking skills.”
Those whitefish filets were probably going to be overcooked anyway. Tostitos, on the other hand, are always done to a turn.
I have some sympathy. When the Official Blog Spouse travels, sometimes I make things he doesn’t like, such as tofu stir-fry. And sometimes, I surrender to the siren call of Trader Joe’s Mac and Cheese Balls, which require no effort and are every bit as good to eat as they are bad for my waistline.
There are any number of articles and books that promise to tell you how to solve this problem. The best are merely adequate; the worst emit the quiet despair of an unmarked grave. I’ll concede that cooking for small numbers simply isn’t as much fun as cooking for a bigger group. Part of the joy of cooking is sharing the results. The labor-to-output ratio is lower for one or two, and you have to spend a lot of time fiddling with small amounts. Some things simply can’t be done efficiently for one or two people, which is why I save the rib roast for dinner parties. Other things shouldn’t be done for one or two people, which is why I am trying not to give in to the urge to make a layer cake this weekend.
Megan McArdle, “Friday Food Post: 10 Tips on Cooking for One”, Bloomberg View, 2015-08-21.
