Blame food palatability for obesity

This was going viral

I dunno why people are so obsessed with this topic. It’s like people want to live in a perpetual state of crisis, whether it’s Russia, civil unrest, Covid, various shortages, or obesity. But it’s worse than the illustration depicts. Even men with healthy BMIs can still carry a lot of abdominal fat, the so-called skinny fat syndrome.

People blame sugar and fat, but it’s also texture and flavor. Cane sugar out of the bag is sweet, but who eats raw sugar. Same for pure butter or lard. A combination of factors such as ‘richness’ and ‘body’, known as palatability, is why modern, processed food tastes the way it does and is addicting for so many people. Optimizing for palatability always means a greater caloric density. This involves usually mixing fats and sugar to create a super-flavor/taste that is much more intense when combined than alone.

Consider vegetables. The reason why people put so many sauces, dressings, and oils on them is because otherwise they are bland and hard to chew and swallow. But this negates the health benefit.

For example, a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s, which can fit in your palm and has two wafer-thin patties, without sides or ketchup–packs 440 calories, and is not even that filling. Hardly any effort is needed to chew it. It almost dissolves in your mouth, like a paste, exploding in greasy flavor. Same for fries. A century ago nothing like that existed, at least not on a mass commercial scale except for maybe veal, which was expensive. Food was tough…one had to expend effort to chew and eat it, so overeating required a concerted, conscious effort. It wasn’t something that could be done recreationally, like seen today.

Anything that is not a vegetable or fruit is very caloric dense. Protein, which is sometimes marketed as being healthy, has the same density as those dreaded, evil carbs. Even bread. Peanut butter, which is found in so many foods, packs so many calories. The sad reality is it’s really easy to overeat, because food is engineered that way, and not just junk food or fast food either. A tiny pack of salami has 400 calories, similar to a cheeseburger despite not being considered junk food, because there is so much fat. As soon as modern food is introduced into any society, even poor countries in Africa, fatness ensues.