Literally every other card in the deck is in the hands of the kind of people who will hoard toilet paper to sell it for 10 times its value then publicly complain when outrage mounts.
That's not an argument for letting this disease burn through our entire population. That's an argument for the government to step up and assist people during this time.
Edit: and who gives a shit about your retirement account.
People who for whatever reason are utterly dependent on support from the state might well give a shit about the state's decreased capacity to provide aid thanks to additional demand on the part of those whose retirement funds (which allowed them to be self-sufficient) have been destroyed.
At least in my country a big chunk of grandma and grandpa's retirement is subsidized by government programs, if not directly provided by government programs. The same way we provide disability coverage for people who end up out of work through no mistake of their own due to on-the-job injury, etc. You might have your own 401k you deposited salary into or have extra private disability insurance but a big chunk of your safety net here is a government program that you pay into while you're able-bodied and working and then draw out of when you're disabled and/or retired.
It's not as if a disease mitigation shutdown is the only thing that's going to crater grandpa's 401k. His stock holdings took a big hit during the 2008 crash too (as did mine).
Acting to preserve the economy first and foremost will not help those people. You have to keep them alive first while coming up with effective strategies to look after them later in the event that their retirement funds somehow evaporated. What good is protecting their retirement funds if the retiree isn't around to spend them?
What ruins families more, a breadwinner losing their job due to a shutdown or spending a month in the hospital?
P.S. You're probably not getting paid wages during that month in the hospital. Have fun paying off those ICU medical bills when you get back if you still have a job somehow and weren't replaced by someone who wasn't on a ventilator.
Unemployed parents are at least around to look after the kids. A parent sick in the hospital with COVID-19 isn't working or looking after anyone.
And that's assuming that you're at 100% when discharged from the ICU. We still don't know all of the long term issues with internal organ damage from COVID-19 survivors.
There was a comment on HN a few days ago basically saying, "what's wrong with panic, maybe we should be panicking" and I just found that comment frightening. We mock all the "idiots" buying up the toilet paper, but panic clouds the clear thinking of even the "intelligent". It can absolutely effect our leaders and medical professionals.
Depends on what people define as panic and the degree of it. I started stocking up food a couple of things a time in January and many people told me I was panicking. If a lot more people had panicked like me shopping would be easier.
As it turns out I didn't panic enough either, I should have had more toilet paper and pasta to get through the panic from other people.
Reading that comment charitably, I guess they meant something about fear sometimes being a productive motivating emotion. In my view, panic is fear strong enough to override rationality. Cool-headed fear might be a good thing, but panic usually isn't.
Right, panic is pure emotion, fight or flight, hard be rational in that state. Covid19 is "sobering". 100 years since the 1918 flu and we still aren't ready. Even with the billions we spend on health care.
Quinine is amazing stuff and quite easy to make, but the poison is in the dosage. Controlling that when you're making your own with cinchona bark isn't something you want to do trial and error style, serious side effects.
Nutrition research seems to change as often as JavaScript framework of the month. I saw one Ted talk that essentially said "everyone is different and no rules apply to everyone".
The real issue is that nutrition science is bad and everyone has a book. Maybe 1 in 20 studies don't have obvious confounding factors that cause us to have no real base facts, but we can find a lot of correlation. Unfortunately, this is kind of the nature of the beast, nutrition science isn't bad because nutrition scientists are bad, but rather because it's so complicated it's tough to have very clean data.
Demonizing fats in favor of sugar as a country has allowed one of the biggest and longest population studies of its kind, and it's pretty obvious from the health of the population that very high calorie, sugar rich diets are overall bad for you (notice the wide strokes we have to make here).
Everyone is different, and no rules apply uniformly to everyone, but general rules do apply to everyone. Fructose in a caloric surplus is more damaging than glucose, for instance, but different bodies are more or less effective at mitigating this. Most people have some inflammation response to gluten, but for the vast majority of people, it's minor. Most things are a sliding scale, on one end is no measurable result, on the other end is acute response.
NOTE: I'm not interested in arguing about what the research says here. I know the pro-gluten party will come out in force, and I've made an enemy with the bread baker's union. I'm not a researcher, I'm just a nutrition hobbyist. There are much smarter people doing much more comprehensive breakdowns and having much more meaningful debates than I can, so go listen to them. Read the research yourself with a skeptical eye. Take all dietary advice with a grain of salt, and check the opposite side of the research, nutrition and biology is WEIRD.
Also, we're still learning very basic things that have massive impacts. No one was talking about "gut health" unless you had a chronic disease roughly 10 years ago. Microbiome didn't have much place in the conversation about health and nutrition, no crossfit people knew about resistant starches, etc.
The government may have been advocating low fat diets but of course people don't follow nutrition advice. If you look at what people were actually eating in the time you describe they started eating more of everything. Consumption of chicken and cheese in particular exploded.
Sugar consumption has actually been in decline for years now and obesity keeps climbing. Yes sugar is bad for you but blaming modern health problems just on sugar is not accurate.
Yeah maybe I should be clear here, I'm not talking about putting granulated sugar in your coffee. I'm talking about the explosion of dumping high fructose corn syrup into everything that occurred during these years. And teaching children that they need to eat foods based off the food pyramid was directly opposite to what was actually good for you. Of course everyone doesn't listen to the government recommendations, but it's naive to say it doesn't have an impact.
In addition to that, eating a bagel for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and having bread on the side with dinner is pumping carbohydrates for you body to break down into sugars 24/7. These things are higher in calories.
To reinforce what you're suggesting, I'd need to see trends of added sugars to food going down and the obesity rate increasing. At the end of the day, it's calories in vs calories out, but pumping things with fructose increases the calories and the palatability of food, increasing how much you eat. There are a number of negative health side affects, but sugar likely causes obesity by secondary affect.
> Sugar consumption has actually been in decline for years now and obesity keeps climbing.
Do you have a source for this? Because it seems like unless you cook your own food, it's nearly impossible to avoid foods that have _added_ sugar these days. Maybe sugar consumption has increased, but it's less obvious now.
> Maybe 1 in 20 studies don't have obvious confounding factors that cause us to have no real base facts, but we can find a lot of correlation.
Even worse: Many studies are done on mice, who do not eat the same things as humans
And worse still: Many are done with "food surveys" which lean too much on the poor memory and faulty assumptions of participations (eg what some Americans think of as a serving of "meat" is really a serving of fried breaded bread with condiment levels of meat mixed in. Most Americans do not know that chicken nuggets are half corn. etc )
The people with the worst data may be the scientists, unfortunately. You can draw somewhat accurate conclusions from your own personal testing and anecdotes, but you might draw mightily wrong conclusions from survey data which appears to say something that simply isn't true.
The nutrition "research" you read on internet sites does. But don't confuse this with what nutrition researchers believe. What they believe does not change month to month but over years. And none of them believe things as simplistic as "sugar bad" or "fat bad".
> Nutrition research seems to change as often as JavaScript framework of the month.
Nutrition “science”, like most health-related “sciences”, has approximately zero predictive power. A pretty reasonable strategy is to completely ignore whatever helpful advice the FDA or whomever is currently spouting (food pyramid!) and come up with some plausible first-principles model that matches available anecdata, like trying to match a plausible far-ancestral diet.
Agreed. The problem is that doing actual controlled studies is really hard. You have to take a group of people and randomly assign them the diets you want to study, essentially locking them up for the duration. It could possibly be done, if one of our billionaires took an interest in this problem.
Well, to be fair, it was on purpose. The food pyramid in the US is created by the USDA, whose sole job is to produce and sell food at massive scale. Remember, they are the ones that subsidize crops and pay farmers not to grow corn and soybeans to keep the price up. If things were sensible, it would be produced by the Department of Health & Human Services. Fat may have more calories per gram than carbs but our real problem is insulin control and resistance and that is what those low fat diets turbo charge.
Remember that in the era these policy positions were stood up, you were looking at big advances in medicine and concern about population and food supply.
The guys dying of heart attacks from eating fatty pork and beef at 50 got the message, unfortunately that message shifted the bad habits to bread and sugar.
I think this is mistaking correlation for causation. The problem with sugar is that it's often found in highly palatable foods that contain large quantities of fat and calories. If one monitors their caloric intake/outtake such that one is in a deficit or at maintenance not only do negative markers disappear, they improve. (Even on a high sugar diet.)
That's not to say: 'only eat lion candy bars and all is fine.' (One reason is that that would be too hard to adhere to since the volume of food is so low because they're so calorically dense. Low volume, even if calories are high, causes hunger. Another would be the lack of fiber, protein and micronutrients.)
But it does show that it's not sugar that's the problem but rather consistently being in a caloric surplus such that people become severely overweight.
Unfortunately, nutrition has become such a religious topic that it's become hard to have civil, scientific discussions. Instead, we stick to our tribe, demonize those who show flaws in our reasoning, and selectively search for research that aligns with what we already believe.
I actually think it might be all of at least three things:
1. Too much sugar has direct effects on the body, even for people at a totally healthy weight. Possibly including changing your appetite.
2. What you said: unhealthy foods very often contain sugar; therefore, foods high in sugar are more likely to be unhealthy in other ways too.
3. Sugar has calories but doesn't make you feel full. Too much sugar works against controlling your weight because people want a minimum amount of satiation.
The first point may seem wrong if you tend to think of the body as simply using sugar as fuel so that it only "pays attention" to the energy content. One thing that convinced me it's probably more complicated than that is a study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513783/) showing that if endurance athletes merely swish a sugary beverage in their mouth and then spit it out, it still improves their athletic performance. It can't be merely sweet; artificial sweeteners didn't have the same effect.
This is a pithy statement belies the complexity of nutrition. Besides, researchers that linked heart disease to dietary fat didn't recommend that sugar be substituted in. And the diet heart hypothesis seems alive and well today; lowering blood cholesterol and saturated fat consumption is what health practitioners still recommend today.
No one knows for sure yet. The most convincing theory I've heard is that it actually is fat...
But fat is an umbrella term. Saturated fat is (almost certainly) benign; eat as much (or as little) as you want.
Omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fats, on the other hand, are precursors to an important class of hormones called eicosanoids. If you eat too few, too much, or the wrong ratios, you will run into problems.
Our current diet is almost certainly way too high in omega-6 fats; the easy fix is just to stop eating vegetable oils.
This kind of conspiratorial thinking blows my mind. The claim is: big ag, with all their grain production, wants Americans to eat lots of grains, and corrupts government agencies to recommend such diets. The real healthy diets include lots of “protein” (meat), but “they don’t want you to know”...
What’s incredibly absurd about this is: where do you think the vast majority of the farmed grain goes? Feeding the cows, chickens, and pigs providing your “high protein” diets. If these “big ag” businesses did have any sway or disinformation campaigns, they’d absolutely be pushing the “eat more meat” narrative.
There’s no conspiracy. There aren’t any u-turns in nutritional science. The USDA guides are almost completely identical to WHO nutritional guides, and the guides for virtually every other modern country. Lots of whole grains, fruits, vegetables. Limit sugars, salt, and fats. As Michael Pollan says: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That’s pretty much it. We complicate things so much with fear mongering and conspiracy thinking.
It's not a conspiracy per se. I don't think Big Ag and the government got into a room together and said, "we're going to kill everyone over time with a Western diet leading to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and eventually death". It's more simple than that: greed of industry and regulatory failure on the part of government. Mexico has one of the highest rates of Coca Cola consumption, it's even fed to babies instead of formula. You know why it can't be stopped? Multinational power and greed, with trade weaponized against countries who attempt to counter these multinationals [1]. In country, instead of trade, it's campaign contributions to representatives that keep more substantial regulation at bay.
But you simply cannot argue that Western diets aren't causing epidemic levels of obesity and civilization disease [2], and that food producers and government aren't contributing to it.
Sidenote: Was "they don’t want you to know” a Kevin Trudeau reference? If so, I get that reference!
No no. I think we agree that there are capitalist-driven incentives that may be at odds with providing the best nutritional advice.
Where we differ (it seems?) is the implication that a diet rich in animal products (meat, cheese, eggs, etc) isn’t part of the Big Ag industry, but pasta, bread, cereal, etc. are. Livestock consume far more grain than the human population. So again, if big ag had any say (which, of course they do), they’d profit most by encouraging the consumption of meat, cheese, and eggs, not encouraging people to eat bread, pasta, and oatmeal. The fact that the USDA recommends eating whole grains at all is implicit proof that it’s not entirely corrupted by big ag.
I would agree with this, and concede that my original comment was not as accurate as it could be representing historical events that have led us to this point.
Couldn't you also argue that stakeholders who profit off low carb / sugar diets would also have a vested interest to push biased media about the benefits of low carb / fat diets?
Who are the stakeholders in "low carb"? Influencers? Sure, there are always going to be folks selling shovels, but the information on how to adhere to a low carb diet is freely available, and fat/protein macro foods readily available and fungible (I agree you'll have a slightly more difficult time to adhere to low carb if you're vegetarian or vegan, but it can be done, my partner and I tried it for fun to see if we could). You can spend an inordinate amount for your keto lifestyle, but you can also spend modestly and still arrive at the same results (whether that be weight loss, maintenance of a healthy weight, or management of a condition that is exacerbated by high blood sugar levels).
Eat properly ("abs are made in the kitchen", you can't work off excessive carbs consumption). Get enough sleep. Find time to exercise (high impact short duration cardio, weight lifting are best IMHO). These basics will contribute to a long, healthy life.
I hope this is helpful to someone, anyone! I was obese from my early teens (pizza and Mountain Dew, sigh), and only in my 30s after much research and experimentation am now in the best shape of my life (healthy BMI, low mile time, targeting a powerlifting competition this year). Everything I learned was from free online resources (r/fitness, r/keto, r/intermittentfasting wikis and discussions), and most of our food purchased at Aldi and Costco.
Sidenote: Keep in mind pricing is a signal. All of this information is free, and yet people still spend enormous amounts of money in aggregate on similar self-help materials with lesser results. Food for thought.
Arguably the meat industry, since most low carb people eat more meat. Yes, vegetarian is possible, but I don't know any vegetarian low carbers, while I know a lot of vegetarians and a lot of low carbers eating bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The meat industry probably has a similarly big lobby as the sugar industry.
I've dropped 8Kg in the last half year by going mostly vegetarian and lowering my dairy intake. I eat more carbs than before. I don't think keto is the whole truth.
As always, the "truth" is a moving target and is going to be highly variable depending on circumstance. You should do what works best for you. If that's practicing vegetarianism, awesome. If that's being mostly a carnivore and eating chicken and bacon every meal, go for it. Somewhere in the middle works too (mostly vegetarian, occasional meat, majority of protein sourced from eggs and whey protein). But refined sugars are not your friend. Put that soda down!
Industry lobbying is deplorable, but inevitable. Consumer education (see my comment above) is paramount (with a helping hand of government regulation) in mitigating its impact on consumer behaviors.
>while I know a lot of vegetarians and a lot of low carbers eating bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
is that because everyone has fallen for an extreme of a fad diet?
It's like everyone comes up with the right observation, and the wrong conclusion. "Low carbs are good, so ill eat fat protein. Meat is fat and protein" instead of "seeds and mushrooms." Or "meat is bad" so "ill eat lots of cereals" instead of "leaves and shoots."
Seeds, shoots, and leaves with some bottom feeding ocean animals is a perfectly doable diet.
The USDA food pyramid favored grains because that is what the US farming could produce in greatest quantity at the time it was developed, thanks to machine-assisted farming tasks. Grains had enormous combine harvesters that could be operated by one person and harvest the whole field within a day. Produce like tomatoes were limited by the number of Mexicans and Central Americans that could be admitted by the guest worker program and could carry filled harvest bags to the collection point, for a few weeks at the right time of year.
Now machine harvesting and factory-style farming has expanded to some fruits and vegetables, using things like hydroponic lettuce tracks, horizontal trunk-shakers, vertical limb-shakers, and flexible-fingered robot arms. Or even when hand-harvested, the human pickers can follow behind a processing rig that trims, washes, sorts, and packs right there while rolling over the field, and transports the product out via portable conveyor belt.
Cauliflower, muskmelons, lettuces, culinary herbs, cabbages, and tree nuts have all benefited from harvest mechanization. Farms can even, at minimum, use a fleet of golf-cart-like vehicles, so that human harvesters can gather the crop from a seated position, rather than, standing, stooped, or crouched, and allow the vehicle carry the weight of the produce, thus making each human harvester more productive, even when the harvest still requires hands, eyes, and blades.
The machines, of course, represent a hefty barrier to entry from the capital investment, and favor mega-agribusinesses. Farms that can't hire enough cheap transient laborers or buy the specialized machinery are priced out of the industry.
But it does bring cheaper lower-carbohydrate foods to the consumer in greater quantity.
