Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
news.cornell.edu377 points by giuliomagnifico 19 hours ago
377 points by giuliomagnifico 19 hours ago
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US
The American diet is insane, full stop. However, I've just begun a GLP-1 regimen to address a willpower problem, not a nutritional problem. I'm not quite young anymore and have given lots of other approaches a shot over the years, but have persistently failed to achieve a weight that is not a threat to my health.
So far, what being on a GLP-1 gives me is a steady state that most people probably find quite unremarkable: I don't crave a snack, and I don't thirst for alcohol. Both of those desires have had real control over me for a very long time.
And crucially, many of those bad foods can be pretty addictive. They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more. So it’s not surprising many people struggle to change that habit when the food ecosystem is working against you. Junk food both tastes better and is easier to eat than home-cooking a very healthy meal. You’re not exactly set up for success here.
> They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more.
Even if it's not intentional, I find that the enshittification seems to run along these lines.
The things that finally drove it home for me this year were "peppermint bark" and "ranch dip". I used to buy this stuff or use the premade. This year I worked out how to do them properly myself.
People raved about both. But I noticed that they ate far less of them (including myself!). My suspicion is that the difference was that I used actual chocolate and actual buttermilk. I suspect the extra fat made people sated and they quit eating afterward.
I'm finding this applicable to more and more foods. I'm no genius chef, but simply using standard ingredients causes people to eat very differently.
Alcohol is no joke. It can take hold of families and persist for generations. Kudos to you!
Yet they seem to be spending more in restaurants:
> Ozempic Users Actually Spend More Dining Out.
> ..In casual dining establishments, they spend 25% more than non-GLP-1 households do, the market researcher says. Data firm Numerator shares similar findings, noting that while GLP-1 users report eating out less and cooking at home more, their spending says otherwise: “Verified purchase data reveals that their fast-food buy rate is up 2%.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-02/ozempic-g... (archive: https://archive.ph/V6Erv)
Wow, it's hard to think of a better example of a correlational study measuring something that would obviously be confounded by the thing being studied. Don't forget that most GLP-1 users are obese and many will continue to be after treatment (as it only causes a reduction in 10%-20% of body weight). And they're rich. So the headline is "rich obese people spend more in restaurants than average".
No shade on people taking the drug btw. I'm on tirzepatide myself.
> as it only causes a reduction in 10%-20% of body weight
This was simply when the studies ended. Weight loss for most definitely tails off, but doesn't completely stop if you continue longer than the 18mo SURMOUNT-4[0] study went for with Tirzepatide.
I also do not know if this was patients going on maintenance dosing, staying the same, or ramping up doses to the full 15mg max dose. Would need to re-read it as it's been some time.
fwiw Tirzepatide is actually around 25% average loss vs. 20%. My anecdotal evidence from my peer group shows that the vast majority can go further than 25% (if needed) and then maintain it - but that does require significant lifestyle changes to maintain. The few who simply kept eating junk but less of it had far less drastic results.
I do consider it a performance enhancing drug for dieting due to that fact. Those that use it as one tool of many seem to do incredibly well. Those that use it as the only tool have much worse outcomes. No surprises there, but it was surprising to me how durable so far those who decided to make life changes have stuck with it now over the course of around 3+ years.
My random guess would be that if you use it to break habits and establish new ones, you tend to become a super responder. I like to tell people it was perhaps roughly 60% of my weight loss (36% or so, but I tapered off due to hitting my goal) was due to the drug, 40% due to other factors like eating better and creating new workout habits. The drug simply made it much easier than previous attempts at dieting, and the results turned into a feedback loop.
Another pet theory of mine is that if you use it to break a food addiction, you end up being able to stay on the wagon easier. This is based on other life experiences with other substances - the longer you stay off, the easier it becomes (for most) to abstain. Especially if you create new habits in their place. I no longer crave those late night taco bell runs like I once did even when (mostly) off the drug itself.
I know I will be downvoted into oblivion for this but here goes: Im sorry to be crass but if someone makes lifestyle changes after taking drugs its 100% the drugs.
Kind of tired of people taking anabolic steroids and then claiming it's a smaller part of their success or people being born rich talking about hard work whilst being on the golf course.
Just be happy that we live in a time where drugs have been painstakingly researched and move on without the ego boost. Be humble.
> if someone makes lifestyle changes after taking drugs its 100% the drugs
Multi-variate causation doesn't losslessly or deterministically reduce to a single dimension. Particularly when the causes aren't independent.
The drugs facilitate behaviour change. Changed behaviour helps the drugs work. Both done together are stronger than independently, and the strength of that interaction (and the overall effect) is mediated by other inputs.
I think it depends on what you mean by "100% the drugs".
I don't think anyone is arguing that the outcome would 100% not happen if it weren't for the drugs, but I think it is useful to note that part of the benefit comes from the habits the drugs help you form rather than simply 100% the appetite reduction the drug produces.
Do we know what the reason is for the limits of around 10-20%?
I don't know that there's a consensus on what the limit really is. Semaglutide is good for about 15%, tirzepatide about 20%, and retatrutide about 25%. Some people don't get that much, some people get a lot more. Personally, tirzepatide got me just over 35%. I never got anywhere near max dose, either, I am what is colloquially referred to as a super responder.
Super responders unite, I'm down 32% and shooting for 36% before I hit maintenance. I only made it about half way up the dosage chart before I had to back off due to losing too rapidly (!!). I took a 3 month maintenance and am back to losing again, it's been life changing.
The other wild thing is general health improvement - all of my bloodwork has gone from questionable to better than standard - closer to ideal values than I would ever expect. Liver values, cholesterol, lipids, blood pressure, everything. I expected them to improve but not to the degree that they have, my LDL has gone down by 60%. Actuarial tables say it's given me another ~10 years of probable lifespan, and even more if you think in healthspan.
Sorry for personal questions please answer any OR none as you feel comfortable
1) How is your energy/stamina following the 35% loss
2) Have you done any dexascans/bodyspecs to measure your lean mass percentage before and after your loss
3) Did you take any steps to reduce the muscle loss?
4) with 35% loss, what BMI are you at?
Not the original guy, but down 32%, for a point of comparison:
1) Amazing, like being a decade and a half younger
2) Not before, planning one in the next couple months, but I use skinfold and impedance and they say I've dropped from about 48% to ~20% as I've dropped from 272 to 186, lean mass seems maybe 5kg lower than I started with? Less lean mass loss than I expected.
3) Weight bearing exercise and medium-high protein intake (>80g/d)
4) Per above, starting BMI 37.9 -> ending BMI 25.9
As you lose weight, your body needs fewer calories to run. That “needed amount” keeps dropping with your size, until it eventually equals what you’re eating on the medication. At that point you’re no longer in a deficit, so weight loss slows or stops.
That is true but requires some extra assumptions to explain why people don't keep losing weight - because the strongest influence on most people's appetite in the short run is how much of a deficit or surplus they're currently in. Thus as TDEE drops, so does hunger.
In "setpoint theory" there's an additional hunger drive based on whether you are below or above a given level of adiposity - your "setpoint". This is often given as an explanation for why people can't keep weight off, and is the sort of thing you'd need to posit to explain why people on GLP-1 inhibitors can't as easily get to lower levels of adiposity.
Maybe a bias on wealthier households in the US who can afford these drugs. Personally, my total food spending is down 30%. GLP 1 is $66CAD after insurance.
I can't say exactly what the numbers are, but anecdotally, there are a lot of "research" users buying tirz (and reta, for that matter) for a few bucks a week on the gray market. The better known sources sell out batches in a week or two, which amounts to 750K-1M worth of product (at gray prices, not retail). There's a reason you're starting to see regular news stories about it.
I'm curious how these below-the-radar users skew the numbers. Maybe not at all?
GLP-1s are a fairly strong proxy for having enough discretionary income to justify luxury expenditures like eating out or whatever.
Not GLP-1, but moved onto an OMAD diet which is essentially a 23hr daily fast with nothing but neat espresso, cigarettes and water in between - although occasionally I have a small treat or sugary drink.
But now I eat almost exclusively at restaurants and enjoy it, and overall it's cheaper than cooking at home given wastage with many ingredients and desire for variety.
I do eat very simply though, usually south & east asian food.
How can eating at a restaurant be cheaper than at home? Could you give examples?
My local Indian restaurant offers tiffin service for CAD 250/month. That's enough food for my wife and I for lunch on the 5 out of 7 days of the week included in the price (and we usually have leftover Naan each day that we can snack on in the evenings). I would be hard pressed to walk out of a grocery store in Ontario buying fresh ingredients for that level of variety for 20 days out of the month. We can easily spend more on groceries each month for the 10 days that we do actually cook for ourselves.
Granted, this setup does require that you do like Indian food and don't mind having the bulk of what you eat each month generally be of that cuisine. But in our case the restaurant has enough variety that with both of us having a different dish for each meal there are enough dishes to choose from that we don't have to eat the same thing more than once all week.
With all that said, we haven't even talked about how there is no cooking or cleanup involved either, so there are massive time and convenience benefits as well.
But I can appreciate that not everyone would be satisfied with this.
Sure, any kind of non-veg protein adds up quickly, especially if you're doing 3 meals a day.
Most local Indian places will do you a solid 1500 calorie meal for £10 if you know what to look for.
Versus, go to supermarket... get stuck in a routine every day of "buying stuff", wanting snacks, meat, and so on adds up quickly to the point where sticking below £10 a day becomes a constant battle. It's the routine and constant food noise that really got to me, and when even a chocolate bar can be 10% of your budget for a day the decision fatigue is real.
So by breaking the routine, sticking to OMAD, I lost weight, had much less decision fatigue, and no constant food noise - that was the major change that saved me a load of money, time & effort.
For example yesterday I found a tiny cantonese place, got wonton soup and some duck, vegetables and watermelon for about £8
I don't understand the point. Supermarket food is cheaper than restaurant food, virtually without exception.
But the 'routine of supermarket shopping' creates 'noise' that makes you want to eat more / more often? How does that work.
I tend to go to the supermarket once a week and make this buying decision on a full stomach. I've not bought snacks or soda during this type of shopping since I was a teenager, I simply refuse to buy these things, like cigarettes or alcohol. There is no decision fatigue, the decision was made once and stuck to.
The discipline required is about 30 minutes a week. The rest of the time I'm not at the supermarket, and travelling to the supermarket to buy a snack just isn't worth the trouble. This way sticking to the decision becomes easy: I only shop once a week.
Then I have to cook the food (I only buy ingredients). I'm not a big fan of cooking, so I wouldn't go out of my way to cook more often than I need or want, and overspend in this way.
This seems like a lot less noise or fatigue than going out for food 3 times a day and being presented with ready-made menu's of tens or even more than a hundred food options per day, and making a healthy and budget-friendly decision 21 times a week, on an empty stomach -- there's no way I could ever spend less at restaurants than cooking.
I get eating out, I've been doing it solely for the last months due to travel and I love it. But I'm absolutely not spending less or eating more healthy.
Others have given specific examples, but in general it seems like a weird thing that eating out is almost always more expensive than cooking in. You’ve got a place run by professionals, and they can prepare the meals in bulk, overall it should be possible to run it cheaper than an individual. But that would be more like a cafeteria type situation than the super-customized experience we usually get…
That’s because home labor and quality often aren’t priced in:
- a chef is faster
- a chef will produce better quality
- but a chef charges for their time
A restaurant often is paying half the price to ingredients and half to overhead; which means you can get it “cheaper” despite paying more for ingredients — since 150% as much on ingredients is still only 75% cost, once you don’t count personal overhead.
You need a lot of efficiency on the professional side to offset that cook time and kitchen space are “free” on the home side of the equation.
You know these diminishing profits have the food scientists at Pepsi, Coke and Nestle working tirelessly to fuel this arms race. Give it six months and there will be snacks on grocery store shelves so addictive even Ozempic can’t suppress them
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period.
This isn't always the patient's choice—my insurance/PBM (CVS Caremark) dropped coverage for the GLP-1 that I was taking (Zepbound) and had several rounds of prior-authorization shenanigans over a few months before they approved the previous-generation GLP-1, Wegovy. Now I've had to start the ramp-up of a different medication again, which hurt and stalled progress. Evil.
Insurance companies should have to refund your premium when they do this for the time period they are making a decision. It's gotten absurd how badly they are abusing patients.
> “The data show clear changes in food spending following adoption,” Hristakeva said. “After discontinuation, the effects become smaller and harder to distinguish from pre-adoption spending patterns.”
It's interesting that overall spending doesn't decrease that much in the end, although shifting from snacks to fruit is the kind of change health advocates have always wanted?
After discontinuation of Ozempic, people start to gain the weight again (and buy again more food), that’s why the spending changes again.
Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
GLP-1 helped me kick my cravings for junk food, but that just meant I was eating more of the "expensive" stuff. Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.
No this is the most repeated and most incorrect thing in the whole debate about food.
More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed.
Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy.
A kilo of (dry) legumes is about $3.50, about 3500 calories (50% more than an average human needs per day), delivers >200 grams of protein, > 100 grams of fiber, some healthy fats and enough carbs to power you and a good set of vitamins.
Hell if you get down to it, vitamin pills to supplement any deficiencies is a budgetary rounding error.
Compare that to either Doritos and you don't get anywhere close. Doritos cost >$10 per kilo, and cost >$100 per kilo of protein, has low fiber, high fat, high salt. It's not nutritious, actively harmful and actually extremely expensive to fuel the body this way.
And it makes sense: processing ingredients leads to a more expensive product than the base ingredients. This is true in every economic sector. Only uniquely, in the food sector ultra-processing doesn't only lead to higher prices for the customer (the reason companies do it in the first place) but also less healthy outcomes.
Doritos are made of corn and vegetable oil. The prices of these ingredients are orders of magnitude lower than the end-product. Corn is like 30 cents per kilo, oil about $1.50. If you want the same nutrients without processing like frying etc, you can eat literal orders of magnitude cheaper.
Greek yogurt is super easy (and cheap) to make yourself if you have an instant pot:
Put 3L of milk and some starter from your last yogurt batch in the instant pot and press the "yogurt" button. Set an alarm for 10h.
Pour the yogurt into a strainer lined with a cheese cloth, and a capture vessel underneath for the whey, then put it in the fridge overnight.
You now have 1.5L of Greek yogurt that tastes head and shoulders better than anything you'd get at the supermarket. Takes me about a week to eat it all.
If you're worried about a spoiled batch ruining your next starter, you can take the whey from the straining step, pour it into an ice cube tray, and keep it in the freezer. 2 cubes is plenty for 3L of milk and can keep for 6 months.
> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
> Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.
I won't bother with currency conversion because we're comparing ratios.
50 cents here gets a third of a 200g bag of generic brand potato chips, so 360 calories. Doritos are probably at least twice that expensive but whatever. (The generic-brand sandwich cookies that are my personal vice, are cheaper yet. There's so much variation within these vaguely-defined food categories that I can't take the comparison across categories seriously.)
$1.50 gets probably a half dozen bananas here, at around a hundred calories per. Never mind the yogurt. (If you're buying fresh cut fruit you're simply doing it wrong.)
So if you're purely comparing calorie counts and finding yourself on less-calorie-dense options then yeah there's a ratio but it's still not as bad as people think. But this is still fundamentally committing a fallacy equating "less calorie-dense" with "healthy".
The same 360 calories from white rice cost me perhaps 15 or 20 cents (plus the time and energy to cook). I'm not big on brown rice but I'm sure I don't have to pay several times as much for it unless it's some fancy boutique thing. 360 calories from dried split legumes (packed with protein and fibre), similarly, are in the ballpark of 30 cents. Perhaps you don't "snack" on those things, but you get the point.
One particular thing on items like bananas and yogurt is they are very quickly perishable. You better be around and have a plan to eat them.
Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers.
This is the thing about most crap foods. They require no commitment. Keep them around for months. Even after opening them they last for days or weeks.
Processed foods don't require the further processing you're leaving out of the equation.
I pressure cook beans. On induction or gas it takes about an hour to make a gallon beans from dry, and then I eat that for one meal a day for a week. You can get a 3 quart pressure cooker and just make less. I’ve also seen people use stainless steel bowls to cook multiple things in the same pressure cooker.
> Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers.
You can freeze cooked rice for months with very little loss of quality, and reheating frozen rice is quick and easy. Just put the frozen rice in a bowl, add a little bit of water, cover, and microwave for 3 minutes.
I make 12 servings in my rice cooker, then fill 12 one serving containers and freeze them.
And this is the issue with these "healthy"/"processed" discussions.
If you live off bananas and rice, you are not going to be healthy. You can get just as fat off plantains as you can doritos.
Peanut butter (which is at least partially processed) can be a healthy part of your diet. It can also absolutely wreck it.
"let me meet your fat fruit friends" https://youtube.com/shorts/Cp4093Dzt4E
People must be getting prescribed this medication in a vacuum without any corresponding nutritional guidance. I can't see any way of going back to my previous eating habits, mainly because I've really had my eyes opened to how mindless some of my eating was before.
Just like any weight loss and gain, this is the sort of things that happens over years. You lose the weight, then five years later realize your weight has started creeping back up. Once you're heavy the battle never really ends.
Which is no surprise to anybody with common sense, the data for discontinuing GLP-1s show exactly the intuitive outcome. Zero diet change, zero habit change for the vast majority of users. Weight loss is accomplished via biochemical tricks to eat less volume of calorie dense junk food, rather than diet substitution. When the artificial appetite suppression ends, volume of the same food increases again leading to weight yo-yo. Plus why start to exercise when you’ve got a magic weight loss drug?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some people using these drugs to get out of a pit of inertia with weight and sedentary lifestyles. But it’s small. GLP-1 drugs will have most users hooked for life because they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss without it. Cha-Ching!
> they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss
That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time. Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue? Or is that too scientific?
> That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time.
No, it doesn't. Saying that people lack an ability is not the same as claiming that the problem is a simple matter of instilling that ability.
> Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue?
It also isn't the same as shaming people or making a moral issue out of it.
> Or is that too scientific?
The snark is uncalled for. "Science" doesn't require ignoring obviously true proximate causes in search of ultimate causes.
>No, it doesn't
If you owe the bank $100,000 that's your problem.
If you owe the bank $10,000,000,000 that's the banks problem.
Obesity is a 'bank problem' issue. When everyone around the globe is massively gaining weight, in every country on this planet that's not in a war or famine, this isn't a human willpower issue. Something has changed, and to ignore that is unscientific.
All that has changed is the environment and lifestyle humans live in, and it's quite obvious discipline and willpower cannot overpower that environment on average.
The change was far too rapid for anything else to be remotely the primary cause.
If you put a past heroin addict locked in a room with unlimited heroin readily available, chances are likely 9 times out of 10 that person is going to partake eventually. Same goes for our food environment and way of life.
Why do we need to try anything? This comes down to individualism versus collectivism.
Besides, the logical consequence of the portion of my comment you highlighted is that the majority of GLP-1 patients will need to be on these drugs forever to maintain these benefits long-term. We have precisely one trial of 5+ years of patients taking liraglutide, and ~2 years for semaglutide. Some side effects and long-term consequences could be entirely unknown.
All the side effects I've seen of GLP-1s are positive, and we've had diabetes patients taking them for much longer than that.
Anyway, it's fairly obvious that discipline is not a solution to weight loss, because weight gains a) happened in lab and pet animals on the same timescales they happened to humans and b) are reversed by moving to higher altitudes.
So to be productive, you should be telling people to move to Colorado.
It's possible that there could be long term side effects that we don't know about, but given the number of people taking these drugs we would likely already have seen some indication of them. I guess we will find out!
>This comes down to individualism versus collectivism.
All fun and games until it costs every individual a massive amount.
Weight gain/loss is not a matter of motivation and discipline.
It absolutely can be. It was for me.
Is it for everyone? Perhaps not. But to outright unequivocally say it's not is simply outright incorrect.
It was absolutely motivation and discipline for me. One day I just decided enough was enough and I threw the proverbial kitchen sink at it.
I am perhaps an outlier in that I'm not ashamed to say I was obese in the past because I simply lacked the motivation and desire to do the work to change it. It was easier and more comfortable being fat than in shape.
I definitely agree telling an obese person to eat less and move more is about as useful as telling a depressed person to just stop being depressed. But lets not make outlandish claims either.
Great, your one of the few. Statistics are pretty clear that most people cannot willpower their way out of their food seeking behaviours. They are to a large extent not under your concious control.
correcting satiety signaling on a chemical level more directly addresses the problem in those folks.
yes, the food environment is the main problem, in a way, but only because it punishes having a certain set of chemical and lifestyle parameters and rewards others.
> It's interesting that overall spending doesn't decrease that much in the end
Only after discontinuation. GLP-1s should be considered chronic medication for most people.
There was an interesting study recently that showed coming off actually caused weight re-gain an order of magnitude worse than yo-yo dieting.
The media spun it as GLP-1’s being evil and pointless, quelle surprise, but really it hints towards obesity being more than just “fixing your relationship with food” and acknowledging that there is more we don’t understand about why some people are fatter than others despite similar lifestyles.
Going to be an interesting decade as more data is gathered on these, that’s for sure.
> but really it hints towards obesity being more than just “fixing your relationship with food”
No, it doesn't. It points towards that task being too difficult to hand-wave at.
> acknowledging that there is more we don’t understand about why some people are fatter than others despite similar lifestyles.
Such effects are greatly overstated, unless you're counting diet as a product of lifestyle rather than a component.
Citation? Sounds dubious
There are a couple recent stories that people put on weight something like 4x as fast if they go cold turkey after a GLP1 than if they quit a normal starvation diet. This intuitively makes sense, because an average GLP1 weight loss is way higher than most people can attain with willpower alone. So when they stop, the body screams "feeeeeeed me!" at incredible volume.
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-085304
"This review found that cessation of WMM [weight management medication] is followed by rapid weight regain and reversal of beneficial effects on cardiometabolic markers. Regain after WMM was faster than after BWMP [behavioral weight management programs]. These findings suggest caution in short term use of these drugs without a more comprehensive approach to weight management."
My brother was on it for a bit (and should go on it again) and the thing he noted was that it makes it easy to not eat but it gives you no useful habits to keep that up because it's so easy.
Which makes sense. I still calorie count everything generally because I know I'll let myself creep portion sizes unchecked.
I don't think it's natural (in the sense of defining health) for adequate homeostasis to require special rituals and constant attention.
Agreed 100%. I think if your strategy for maintaining a good diet relies on weighing food and counting every last calorie, you are inevitably going to fail. Something more fundamental, natural, habit forming, whatever -- that will be the right answer. Naturally trim people don't count calories to stay that way, either.
>Naturally trim people don't count calories to stay that way, either.
Wouldn't it be funny if we discovered that naturally trim people just produce more hormones like glp...
Look at the modern world and tell me where natural is supposed to fit in though?
I work a desk job in a knowledge work based society with consistent, reliable caloric abundance.
The body doesn't know it's not on the African plains and needing to bank the current bounty because who knows when it'll eat next.
To be fair, 12 step programs would be a counter argument. The maintenance of homeostasis requires constant attention in those programs. You could say overeating is different from other addictions, and I would agree, but there are a lot of similarities too..
One might argue that homeostasis is, itself, a kind of attention that our bodies pay. Maybe by consciously changing our habits we can change our set points. In certainly way more aware of how full I actually am 3 weeks into hitting a 2000 calorie a day diet.
>I don't think it's natural
Natural is a fair part of your population starving every winter.
I think durable habits there are just hard honestly. I was losing weight when I was very strict about calorie counting and lived with a roommate who was on the same diet, but when I moved out and stayed with family my habits and intuition about safe foods didn't last long and temptation got me again.
It does make me think we're applying bandaids over some other issue with the available foods - it's hard to imagine that everyone 50 years ago was just much better about dieting and counting calories?
It's really closer to 70 years ago to see the roots of the obesity epidemic in the US and had a lot to do with the post war world. To put it in another way, machines have taken over the vast majority of labor. Even people that do 'hard' jobs are still using a ton of tools that decrease the amount of physical effort they put in the job. Add in we converted the country from a human oriented place to one where cars rule, all while increasing the ease of consumption and we now have an epidemic.
It also coincides with the rise of manufactured foods available for incredibly cheap prices. And the average percentage of a monthly budget spent on food going down.
Basically incredibly tasty food became plentiful and cheap and convenient right when physical labor went away.
> it's hard to imagine that everyone 50 years ago was just much better about dieting and counting calories?
Do we just have a lot more food available now? Not just bad food, but calories of all kinds? Combined with steadily automating nearly all of the hard work, I'm not surprised people get fatter these days than 50 years ago. I bet the average person today is actually much more aware of what healthy eating looks like, it's just that there aren't that many really physical jobs anymore and food is extremely cheap and plentiful for most.
Snacking (defined as between-meal eating) has had a massive uptrend (in the USA) since the 1970s:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10097271/#:~:text=S...
Around here fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks. In fact, replacing the snacks with healthy food in our case increased spending. So it is awesome that these households managed to cut spendings.
> fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks
This is a commonly repeated claim but it's usually not true. Fruit is, in fact, pretty cheap:
In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...
A kilo is usually ~6 bananas. So a banana costs maybe 28c on average. Find a cost-competitive ultra-processed snack for the calories and satiety that a banana provides. Healthy eating might not is cheap but junk food, specifically, is not usually a cost optimisation.
This leaves out spoilage. Fruit is a pain in the ass to get enough of without running out before the next shopping trip or having it rot.
I think a lot of people that say quickly perishable items are cheap shop every few days and buy in small quantities.
Yes, that’s how you should live if you want to be healthy. If the place where you live doesn’t allow that, then you’re sacrificing your health to live there.
That’s your choice at the end of the day, but don’t make excuses for why you choose to eat garbage all day.
Why is fruit the example of a healthy snack? Fruits are full of fructose, which is enemy #1 for weight loss.
Not so much when you consume it along with the fibre which is typically also included in the fruit.
Well, some fruits are cheap. But there's plenty of expensive fruits that people might want to eat, too.
> In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo:
That's definitely not something I expected to be cheaper in Canada than the US.
Where I am in California it’s .99 cents per pound or 2.18 per kilogram at Safeway/Albertsons and slightly less at Trader Joe’s and Target, depending upon size.
I can buy a bag of apples for less than what a pack of Little Debbie snacks cost.
You're probably not living off either.
Deserts are visible - obviously a pack of Little Debbies has no nutritional value and is purely excess calories - but what fraction of your total calories are coming from deserts? The real issue is excess calories in your regular food consumption, such as large portions. Indeed, if your meals were filling you, you probably wouldn't even be snacking to begin with. When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper. In absolute calorie terms they have lower sticker prices, but they also genuinely appear to be better value: you can get significantly more volume of food, and it will last substantially longer meaning you can buy in bulk, reduce the amount of time you spend grocery shopping, and spread purchases out to better align with when money is available. More often than not they also require less time and effort to prepare good tasting meals.
> When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper.
I can't even fathom what you have in mind as "the ultra processed version of butter". Margarine is a completely different product from a different source.
Bread is a relative luxury regardless. The sponge-foam "wonder" stuff isn't even the cheapest for sale here generally. But even then, typical bread is (adding up the macros) only about 60% actual grain by weight (the rest mostly water), going by the nutrition label; so a kilogram of whole grain whatever equates to nearly two and a half loaves. Even whole rolled oats are much less expensive, on this basis, than the cheapest bread I can find and it's not complicated to cook them.
At any rate, bread and butter are two of the worst possible examples to make a claim about energy density in "healthy" versus "processed" options. Grain is grain (overwhelmingly carbohydrate and almost no water beside what is added in cooking or baking) and fat is fat.
I think you completely misunderstood what I wrote.
I don't know how else to understand "When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper.", other than as a claim that ultra-processed versions of things like bread and butter are much cheaper than non-ultra-processed versions of them.
How much does a loaf of white bread cost? How much does a load of whole grain cost?
Whatever it is you are trying to argue in your comment, it has nothing to do with the cost comparison I am making.
A loaf of white bread here costs a minimum of $1.99 (all prices CAD) and contains by my reckoning a bit over 400 grams of wheat. So nearly $5 per kilogram.
A kilogram of rolled oats can be easily found for about $3; white rice around $1.50 if you shop around; pasta from $1.33 to $2.22 depending (usually on the higher end of that); white flour $1 (in large bags).