Your point is great, but could you elaborate on how you read the article as pushing, "fat makes you fat"?
I read it much more as saying that large food companies have developed deep expertise in tuning the quantity of sugar, salt, fat, and texture to make their products bypass our body's natural mechanisms for feeling full.
I think if you're reading this through some kind of paleo/non-paleo lens, then you're missing the point of the article.
It's amazing how much arguing and pontificating there is about subtle effects of dietary composition with little or no mention of massive increases in intake. For example:
I do tend to accept the idea that it is better to get excess calories from fat than from simple carbohydrates and sugars, but I don't think any ongoing significant excess is a good idea, elaborate metabolic theory or not.
While that's a good point, things are a little bit more subtle than that. Changes in dietary composition have an effect on satiety and whether or not you experience hunger spikes, and thus can affect intake quite drastically. Two links in the chain of causality.
Sure, food choices can be used to make calorie reduction/control easier. My point is more that eating approximately the amount of calories your body will consume in a day is going to be effective with little regard to the exact percentage of macro nutrients. That doesn't make it any easier to correctly estimate the calories needed or the actual calories consumed.
Well, we were talking about the obesity epidemic, which you mentioned was caused by overeating. My point was that if our diets have changed over time (different protein/carbs/fat ratio), that in itself can explain overeating. (Rather than assuming that overeating is "something we just do".)
Same here. I read this whole article a few days ago, and discussed it with friends. The main takeaway for me is the incredible complexity and subtlety that goes into researching the "perfect" junk food.
In particular, the term "bliss point" which seems to apply to a number of properties that food can have. For one example, a "bliss point" as applied to the "crunch" a food should have, ie the most satisfying amount of resistance for a cracker or chip to have is apparently 4 lbs of pressure.
But often there isn't just one single answer- sometimes there are multiple mutually exclusive, highly optimal combinations of preferences, as with spaghetti where you have plain, spicy and chunky. And sometimes, the most satisfying flavor preference is not the most optimal result for profitability- snacks with too strong a flavor will "oversaturate" the brain and you will not have a strong desire to keep eating them after a few samples. In these cases it's better to have a subtle taste that never leaves the consumer feeling quite fully satisfied.
So yeah. It's not really about "fat makes you fat" -- though perhaps there is an aside to that effect -- it's more about corporate junk food researchers foraging their way through a world of data on consumer preferences and designing the most efficient products.
The article mentions in multiple places the saturated fat content of the junk food, often alongside sodium and sugar content, implying that these are the "bad numbers" to care about.
I read it much more as saying that large food companies have developed deep expertise in tuning the quantity of sugar, salt, fat, and texture to make their products bypass our body's natural mechanisms for feeling full.
I think if you're reading this through some kind of paleo/non-paleo lens, then you're missing the point of the article.