{"id":38552,"date":"2019-05-04T01:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-05-04T05:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38552"},"modified":"2019-04-04T09:15:05","modified_gmt":"2019-04-04T13:15:05","slug":"qotd-calorie-dense-modern-snack-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/05\/04\/qotd-calorie-dense-modern-snack-food\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Calorie-dense modern snack food"},"content":{"rendered":"

So what does cause this fattening effect? I think the book\u2019s answer is \u201cno single factor, but that doesn\u2019t 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\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

Modern food isn\u2019t just unusually rewarding, it\u2019s also unusually bad at making us full. The brain has some pretty sophisticated mechanisms to determine when we\u2019ve eaten enough; these usually involve estimating food\u2019s calorie load from its mass and fiber level. But modern food is calorically dense \u2013 it contains many more calories than predicted per unit mass \u2013 and fiber-poor. This fools the brain into thinking that we\u2019re eating less than we really are, and shuts down the system that would normally make us feel full once we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Adding to all of this is the so-called \u201cbuffet effect\u201d, 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 \u201cextra dessert stomach\u201d, ie the thing where you can gorge yourself on a burger and fries until you\u2019re totally full and couldn\u2019t eat another bite \u2013 but then mysteriously find room for an ice cream sundae afterwards. This is apparently a real thing that\u2019s been confirmed in scientific experiments, and a major difference between us and our ancestors. The !Kung Bushmen, everyone\u2019s 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The book sums all of these things up into the idea of \u201cfood reward\u201d making some foods \u201chyperpalatable\u201d and \u201cseducing\u201d the reward mechanism in order to produce a sort of \u201cfood addiction\u201d that leads to \u201ccravings\u201d, the \u201cobesity epidemic\u201d, and a profusion of \u201cscare quotes\u201d.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2017-04-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So what does cause this fattening effect? I think the book\u2019s answer is \u201cno single factor, but that doesn\u2019t 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\u201d. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,66,41,16],"tags":[150],"class_list":["post-38552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-health-science","category-quotations","category-science","tag-obesity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a1O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38553,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38552\/revisions\/38553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}