Not that dramatically. Things like fatty liver take a long time to reverse. It’s not like you stop eating junk food and then suddenly your body is chilling. No, the damage is done and takes a long time to repair. It’s like smoking. You can benefits from quitting smoking within 20 minutes. But to reach the full benefit and reversal, you need 15 years.

As someone who has experienced so many different sides of this, you have zero clue the degree to which your appetite and ability to suppress it is hormonal until you get hormonally compromised (and then fix it, in my case, happily)

Blaming individuals for a public health crisis affecting 40% of the population is absolutely silly. There are a lot of individuals like me, who overeat behaviorally, but that doesn't explain the scale of the issue. maybe 8-10% of the population has some sort of eating disorder, the other 30% are just regular people eating an american diet.

I think this is easy to say as a healthy eater (I am one too, always have been). However, unlearning a lifetime of bad habits is hard. But yeah, it's costing nations billions that could be better spent.

If it’s not too hard why are people not doing it?

It's really not hard to not drink. It's really not hard to not do heroin. It's really not hard to...

They do slow down the metabolism, yes.

They seem to also act on some reward mechanism - making some stuff (not just food. Alcohol, gambling, porn, smoking, other drugs have anecdotally been reported to feel less attractive / addictive) have a reduced pull on one's will. They also measurably delay gastric emptying - to the point that some medicines, meant to be taken on an empty stomach, are not safe to take within up to 3 hours from the last meal, compared to one hour or so for other people.

> metabolic changes that make weight loss harder

Which are vastly overblown. I diet every year as part of bodybuilding, at a range of intensities and durations, and have never had issues with sudden metabolic changes that make it harder to lose weight.

Gastrointestinal - nausea, extreme fullness, paradoxically both rapid and slow transit (I recommend lots of fiber, but that will make you too full too), bloating, all kinds of negative stuff, and obviously if you're on a calorie deficit because you get full off a single bite of food you're going to have low energy and feel pretty garbage on that front (thus ramp slowly), but also some jitteryness, all manner of things. I would call the first week on a tiny dose something like a very mild GI bug or flu, in terms of everything I experienced.

That said, I'm extremely prone to side effects, most people I know who have tried them started at maybe half the standard dose and had zero side effects at all. I'm the best possible guinea pig for these things, because if I can tolerate it, almost anyone who isn't frankly allergic or something can.

The other downside, obviously, is injections - you will need to learn how to use sterile technique to inject yourself or pay the incredibly high costs for the pens. The pills are also an option but I have no personal experience and their bioavailability is so low I don't know that I fully trust them.

They will completely change your relationship with food and alcohol, too. Your tastes will probably shift, nearly everybody I know who is on them has essentially given up booze (maybe a couple drinks a year, more or less)

In my experience, basically all downsides can be solved by lowering the dose, and not escalating dosages as fast as the doctors tell you.

Most of the time when people try to define healthy food vs. junk food in a fair and unbiased way, the line gets drawn at "whole foods" vs "processed foods".

A typical burger meal is definitely processed food because the meat is processed mechanically and mixed from different sources (usually with added fat); the bun is made from refined flour and refined oils; and the fries are thinly-cut potatoes blanched and fried in more refined oils. (Not to mention a whole bunch of chemical additives which are the norm rather than the exception; and "hyperpalatability" tweaks which means the food is formulated to taste unnaturally good.)

You could perhaps argue that a home-made burger meal made using whole cuts of meat, a lean wholemeal bread dough, and potatoes roasted in animal fat could count as a healthy/whole food meal, but it would taste different to the typical hamburger meal we all associate with fast food.

Fast food also has an enormous marketing industry behind it which pushes it in unhealthy volume, with maximum convenience, and at (until recently, at least) affordable prices.

(to all the boolean questions): yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Is there evidence supporting the idea that sugar is more satiating? My understanding was that they were equally unhealthy

Real sugar in your soda pop? What are you, a health nut? Must be a real my body is a temple sort.

Seriously though, it's a dogshit thing to consume whether it is sweetened with HFCS or sucrose.

"Even today, a Soda with 'real sugar', at least for me, is far more satiating"

Did you know that in the acidic environment of a cola, sucrose quickly degrades into fructose and glucose (and if it didn't, your enzymes literally immediately crack sucrose into them). You know, exactly the same fructose and glucose that would be added by HFCS. The proportions differ a tiny amount, but this notion that one is satiating and the other isn't should really send you down a path of self-discovery, where you determine how you fell for nonsense.

What's interesting is that it's different parts of the electorate that get upset. When Republicans wanted to make junk food/soda ineligible for food stamps, Dems got upset. And when Dems wanted to tax large sodas, Republicans/libertarians got upset.

I think the former makes much more sense than the latter, since it is literally being funded by the govt. That's a reasonable first step, or possibly only step, especially considering that most people on food stamps are also on govt-funded/subsidized healthcare (meaning taxpayers will end up footing the bill when they require expensive treatments resulting in part from an unhealthy diet).

I mean kinda yeah

If you're seriously claiming black women didn't have the right to vote in 1976, you should probably provide some evidence rather than snide remarks.

You are describing time, not cost. I can assure you my family worked pretty demanding jobs with long hours. And spent hours preparing food on top of it.

The average American spends 4-5 hours a day on personal screen time, and this skews higher the poorer you get based on a few studies. I've found from talking with folks on the subject many of them are the ones glued to social media and/or the TV.

I agree it's much more convenient to toss a couple pizzas in the oven. I do not agree it's less expensive. I don't know where you're buying your rice or chicken, but even at $4/pizza I can't pencil that out. Chicken comes with free chicken stock if you're buying $5 rotisserie chickens (or whole chickens) and keeping the bones and vegetable ends/etc. around for stock making. This is the level of poor I was talking about. Even at $2.69/lb (the price I paid ~3 weeks ago) for chicken breast, it's going to be cheaper to feed two people than split a whole pizza. Rice is less than 30 cents a serving bought in bulk 50lb bags from a local ethnic store. $1 of rice and a $5 chicken is going to feed around 3-5 people, or give 1 person a lot of leftovers.

I agree one cannot live on just chicken and rice, but one cannot live on just the cheapest frozen pizzas either. I've kinda done both during my life. I lived probably a decade on junk food because I was either too busy or too lazy to do my own cooking like I did growing up. But this was after I started making IT money and could afford it.

> But then there's the sort of 'generational passing on' where we now have multiple generations raised on carry out, fast food, or microwaved meals. Sometimes where they were never given the teaching or responsibility of cooking because (for reasons similar to above, including more affluent cases) the general concept of 'a home cooked meal' becomes the exception case rather than the norm

I definitely agree with this one. Habits and skills are passed down generationally. Someone may not even know where to start looking at youtube for how-to videos to make their own chicken stock for close to free with a $5 crock-pot from the local thrift store these days. And that's probably intermediate level cooking skills, much less beginner level. My wife and I joke about our "depression era cooking" hobby.

I agree there are exceptions, nuance, etc. to this topic. But I get so tired of folks pretending eating home cooked meals is somehow more expensive than an equivalent quality prepared meal. Yes, you can spend as much as you want cooking at home. But the same is true eating out or buying pre-made stuff.

The time factor is certainly very true though. You get much better at it as you practice over the years, but it's always going to be easier and faster to just toss some chicken nuggets into the microwave and be done with it.

This is not moralizing or anything like that. I have lived well over half of my adult life eating junk, and only since getting married to a partner who loves cooking have I turned this back around to my childhood experiences. And we certainly do not optimize very hard for cost - just smart choices by buying stuff on sale, in-season, and in bulk when it makes sense to. I just really cannot square the claim to reality that it's cheaper to eat junk food than it is to eat moderately healthy at home. It's one of those Internet social media memes that just becomes truth by repeating it so much.

Maybe it's 4oz of very lean tough steak and a single small russet potato with no fat, and the two mentioned are five year olds.

I can buy the day old steaks for $5-6, and a potato is maybe 50 cents. Doritos are $6.49.

A Hershey's chocolate bar is $3.99-$4.99. A banana is maybe 50 cents.

....

At least 10 to 15-ish years ago, I would actually be closer to agreeing;

You could get Cube or Chuck steak for 3-5$ a pound and potatoes were cheap as hell too. Toss some diced onion in and You'll have a good dinner.

How do I know? Well I grew up in a family where for... reasons[0] we were not that well off for quite a while.

Cube Steak was one of the big things we did for a family meal that Dad cooked. (Chili was his other favorite to make, which was also cheap to do for how much food came out of it...)

However the current prices of beef, I feel like you'd need to have a long standing personal relationship with a local butcher or rancher to make this true.

[0] - My mother's over-propensity for being truly Christ-like in her charity to family and others, also sending myself and my three siblings to Catholic school to avoid the then-absolutely-failed Detroit Public school system were major factors.

Eggs and legumes and yogurt and milk and tofu have protein. And chicken isn’t that expensive.