Readit NewsNow, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.
It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.
Since 1960 American GDP has more than tripled in real terms (constant dollars): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDUSA
Because they couldn't afford to eat more. In 1900, the average American household spent 43% of their income on food.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...
I don't know what's causing obesity, but it doesn't seem to be income, given everyone worldwide exploded into fatness around 1980.
And I'm not satisfied with flimsy hypotheses, such as a historically unprecedented worldwide diminution in human "willpower."
https://opendataforafrica.org/atlas/Guatemala/topics/Food-Se...https://data.worldobesity.org/country/guatemala-85/#data_tre...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food"). As to why we move less is less manual labor, more sedentary entertainment and increased use of vehicles.
The obesity discussion seems to somehow deliberately try to avoid the obvious.
A brief sample, though their whole argument is more complex:
"People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights effortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight. Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either."
Even reading the Nova classification, the scientific verbiage describing the ultra processed category could easily describe making egg noodles at home. Extrusion is how we get noodle shapes. Molds are how we get cakes and muffins. Emulsifiers are everywhere and are a common reason for adding egg to a recipe. Specific protein isolates less so, but we isolate compounds all the time when brewing and stewing. The only significant difference I see between group 3 and 4 is that they are spoken about in completely different registers that make one sound familiar and the other foreign.
So please, put some sincere research behind this so we can finally get useful clarification on this subject.
Which is fine, I’m glad they enjoyed it and whatever but personally I thought it was a bad poorly written book that doesn’t deserve anywhere near the love it gets.
What you offer is not a "counterpoint," as you put it. It's the equivalent of: "I don't like ketchup, ketchup is bad, people who like ketchup are stupid."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of...
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The headline (“fairness is what the powerful can get away with”) is a tad lofty given the methodology of the study.