Carb Addiction Part 3 -- filling the 'gap'

Apparently as drugs have moved out of improving neighborhoods, the carb pushers have rushed in to take their place.




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Upper West Side Momofuku Milk Bar Certified Open

•   Posted by Niko on September 24th, 2011

   
  

  
  

  The menu for the Upper West Side Milk Bar

   
  

  Updated: Sunday, September 25, 2011: David Chang’s Upper West Side Momofuku Milk Bar is now open.
  As I watched the line grow outside the shop on Sunday morning I had a thought about how much things have changed in NYC over the last 25 years. In the 1980’s (and even into the early 1990’s) they also sold “crack pies” on this corner of West 87th Street, although minus the “pie” part. Now, people line up to pay $5 for a thin slice of dessert or $6 for soft serve made from cereal milk. Crazy.

   
  

  

   
  The sign and the paper menu says “Open Every Day”.  They were serving croissants (pistachio) and cookies (compost, blueberries & cream, cornflake & marshmallow and corn), buns (pork, veggie) soft serve, pies by the slice, etc.  561 Columbus Ave at 87th Street.

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And related

Amid increasing concern about the health impacts of sugar overconsumption, and particularly the addictive qualities of sugar, the first annual Sugar Addiction Awareness Day (SAAD) is kicking off October 30, 2011. The effort, supported by many leading physicians, researchers, nutritionists, and obesity experts, promotes a fun but sugar-free Halloween and aims to raise awareness of the potentially dangerous, and addictive, effects of excessive sugar consumption, especially for young people.

“Halloween candy seems like an innocent treat, but the reality is that millions of Americans are hooked on refined sugars, and it starts in their youth,” Jill Escher, founder of SAAD and author of the book, Farewell, Club Perma-Chub: A Sugar Addict’s Guide to Easy Weight Loss. “Chronic sugar consumption is a big contributor to the sweeping epidemics of obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes we see today. I am excited to stand with many leading lights in supporting Sugar Addiction Awareness Day as a big step forward in helping people break the cycle of sugar dependence.”

"The trouble with fructose: A Darwinian perspective" by Robert Lustig, MD from Ancestry on Vimeo.

Decisions under uncertainty: expectations, capital and an unfortunate current example

This is not a political site and we are not interested in making political or moral statements.  But we are deeply interested in how people and societies make decisions under uncertainty.

Theoretically one needs to account for both the expected value of the strategy and some cost of carrying uncertainty, as long as it persists.

What is the value in an execution?  Accepting the eye-for-eye 'logic' for a moment we have:

• Pright = probability guilty verdict is correct
• Cost of original crime = -1.0
• 'Value' of imprisonment to date = +0.25  (22 yrs)
• Incremental value of immediate execution =   0.50 
• 'Value' of imprisonment for rest of life = ?  = 0.25?
• Cost of being wrong and executing =  large negative (Let's be generous to the eye-for-eye perspective and call it -0.50 and neglecting the immense  societal costs.  We will also neglect the societal costs- if any- of life imprisonment when death-penalty was 'justified'.)

So for the execution strategy
      Expected value =  -0.75 (current state) + Pright*(0.50)+Pwrong*(-0.50)

For the don't execute strategy
      EV = -0.75 +0.25

So, to make execution a good decision (better expected outcome) we need
     -0.75+Pright(0.50)+(1-Pright)*(-.50) > -0.5    

                                            or    Pright>75%

So even on an expected basis we need to be very certain the verdict is correct.  Moreover, if one introduces the a more realistic assessment of the damage to the justice system and society of being wrong, the need for certainty will be greatly increased.

For instance:
if Cost of being wrong and executing = -2.0 we need to be 90% certain.

When the cost of uncertainty 'capital' (say, proportional to the standard-deviation of the payoff distribution)-- which will accrue until conclusive evidence is discovered is brought into the picture-- the demands on Pright will be higher still.

So even if one accepted the death penalty from a moral perspective, given the dubious nature of the legal case, it seems that a very bad decision was made.

Coexistence of food reward and carb theories of obesity? pt 2

Our own observations and reading of the literature strongly support the hypotheses that:
1. significantly reducing carbs, especially wheat and sugar leads to weight loss
2. wheat and sugar can have severe adverse health consequences, especially when excessively consumed

That said, obesity as a macro phenomenon (no pun intended) seems obviously a result of behavioral and fundamental biological factors. (Behavior is highly influenced by biological factors as well as other sensory inputs but is an emergent phenomenon). If food reward factors contributes significantly to high carb intake, then it seems reasonable to see the increase of availability of highly palatable food as a major "cause" of obesity.

It has been argued that, absent any other serious health conditions, one cannot become obese without eating a high carb diet.  This may be perfectly true but is it a sufficiently useful conclusion if it requires the caveat that “high” needs to be defined individually based on their genetics, individual history, and level of food addition (people who are following an on-average low carb diet who occasionally binge may do more damage to themselves than people on a higher average carb diet– negative convexity!)

So it seems that the debate boils down to whether the complex system involved has some natural regulation so that the behavior associated with food reward are only associated with high carb intake or whether other factors can significantly contribute to and perhaps exacerbate the food reward behavior.  It is generally assumed that there is effective regulation and so something has to fail (metabolic damage) in order to transition into the vicious cycle of weight gain and food reward.  However, this failure may be an abstraction in itself: perhaps there is a range of regulation effectiveness across the population and by moving into a new regime of food consumption we are seeing that variation in the form of the ‘obesity epidemic’. Alternatively one could hypothesize that on an individual level regulation is only effective within some range of inputs. When the frequency of exogenous shocks to consumption (of something) crosses some tipping point, the market feedback effect of making more highly palatable food leads to a systemic effect.

Our overarching point is that it may not be very fruitful (another unintentional pun) to try to isolate food reward from carb consumption as an underlying cause as they may reinforce each other in very complex ways.

Coexistence of Food Reward and Carb theories of obesity

Chris Kresser has an interesting post:

Reframing the obesity debate: cause/effect, genetics & robot clones.
His theory of obesity (reproduced below) may not be completely satisfying for people looking for mechanical explanations, but it is certainly not inconsistent with what has been demonstrated empirically.

Modern lifestyle + genetic predisposition = obesity

It really is that simple.

Modern lifestyle includes processed, refined and highly rewarding and palatable foods, excess fructose, unprepared grains (especially flour), industrial seed oils, environmental toxins, sedentary behavior, stress, infections and dysregulated gut flora.

But the modern lifestyle doesn’t cause obesity in all people. I’m sure we all know someone who eats a horrible diet, doesn’t exercise, is under tons of stress and lives a shockingly unhealthy lifestyle – but doesn’t gain a single pound.

That’s where genetics come in.

The current raging debate about the root or dominant cause of obesity seems rather futile given the number of conflating factors and collinearities and even the lack of clear definitions of the terms being used. Can one define obesity rigorously: is it an instantaneous state or a change from some other state; does the definition vary given the individual? If it is not a precise medical condition but rather a societal problem/theme it is hard to understand why food reward mechanisms and carbohydrate mechanisms of obesity cannot peacefully coexist as important contributors and even reinforce each other non-linearly. To many people there are few foods as palatable as sweet pastries, etc.

Even something as simple sounding as the statement 'you can eat as much meat as you want on a low carb diet' means different things to different people. Richard D Feinman recently gave his take on this in terms of satiety on a high fat, low carb diet.

If you have a weight problem, it is likely that you don't stop eating when you are no longer hungry but instead you continue for a number of possible reasons: eg,  you simply enjoy it (food reward),  you are distracted by hard thought, or perhaps are compensating for stress. One could also legitimately interpret 'eat as much as you want' to mean that there is some perfectly efficient diet (macronutrient breakdown perhaps) that would allow for effectively infinite consumption with the body only using what it needs for optimal performance and getting rid of the rest. Or is the statement meant to be true in some impractical limit which may not be nutritionally sound from a health standpoint, but would technically allow for easy weight loss?