alt Hacker NewsThere are some theories. Most fresh food in a generic U.S. supermarket has something like 10-25% of the nutrients per pound than it used to a hundred years ago, thanks to soil depletion, so each generation has to consume more pounds of food to get the same amount of nutrients. There’s been long-standing corruption in the FDA “food pyramid” and “recommended daily allowance” systems to bias the U.S. population from recognizing that added sugar leads to obesity. And there’s the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently. Those may not fully explain obesity, but they certainly are known and understood explanations for obesity — and yet they remain wholly unaddressed.
I think the problem is not whether we’ll fully understand the causes, but more that every cause we have identified to date would require regulating corporations in profit-damaging ways to solve, and it is likely that any future causes we reveal will be the same. That’s anathema in the U.S.: profits are sacrosanct to the two primary political parties, discounting their occasional extremists who argue (correctly) that we should be regulating in favor of consumers, not profits. Typically, the desire for a ‘full’ explanation is used to delay or derail efforts to implement solutions to each single proven explanation, and so I tend to caution against pursuing a complete answer first, and instead recommend asking why we have not yet addressed the known causes while continuing to search for more.
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There is no source supporting your claim of nutrient decline in that magitude thanks to soil depletion. It's mostly due to modern crops that grow tall fast, and are thus mostly made up of water.
Similar to a sibling comment,
>>the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently.
requires citations. People lump sugar substitutes together as one class of drugs, but they very much are not. Some are sugar alcohols, some are glycosides, others are different molecules. Different molecules have different mechanisms of action and paths of metabolism.
Much like one might take a "blood pressure" medication, it is a large umbrella consisting of chemically distinct ACE-inhibitors, ARBs, thiazide diuretics, loop diuretics, calcium channel blockers (dihydropyridine and non-dihydropyridine distinctly), and more. These drugs generally do have class effects, but the class effects from an ACE inhibitor (bradykinin cough, angioedema, etc) are quite different from diuretics (hyponatremia, frequent urination, etc). One person's 'blood pressure medicine' is not the same as the next.
I agree that the prevalence of sugar substitutes in the western diet demands scrutiny, and I am concerned about their effects, however any current research lumping them all together without strict attention to pharmacological mechanisms supported by translational research is worse than useless - it is misleading.
In the sense of what we 'know' about modern medicine, we 'know' almost nothing about sugar substitutes. The body of evidence is vanishingly thin. I want more research into this topic, but right now, it's just not there.