For years, I’ve been on a quest to understand why we’re experiencing a surge in health issues like obesity and diabetes.
As an engineer, I try to understand long-term, data-driven long-term trends to get to the root cause to address the fundamental issue.
TL;DR: It’s all about the money. But not in the way you think.
“Their goal wasn’t to make us less healthy. The goal was to keep food prices low to maintain hold of political power.” Matthew Lysiak, author of Fiat Food
Is It the Carbs + Insulin?
With my wife Monica having Type 1 Diabetes, the carb-insulin model of obesity initially made a ton of sense. Going low carb gave Moni a new lease on life.
It’s no wonder the Atkins diet was so popular when we saw that the increase in carbohydrates in our food system aligned perfectly with obesity between 1960 and 1999.
Chart created using data from the USDA Economic Research Service and the Centres for Disease Control.
However, since the FDA approval of sucralose (Splenda) in 1999, our intake of both carbs and sugar decreased while obesity continues to power on.
Food manufacturers pivoted away from using high fructose corn syrup in their products (which had become very unpopular) to artificially sweetening refined fat, which was even cheaper.
Is It the Fat?
After experiencing the benefits of a lower-carb diet, I was an early keto adopter.
But with some more research and, sadly, personal experience where I just got fatter chasing higher ketones with more fat, I realised that you could also overeat fat. I learned that, unfortunately, fat isn’t a free food because it doesn’t spike insulin.
While carbs have indeed increased in line with obesity rates since the 1960s, fat has been trending up since we worked out how to extract hydrogenated seed oils from crops a century ago.
Chart created using data from the USDA Economic Research Service and the Centres for Disease Control.
While the energy available from carbs has gone down and come back up to 500 calories per day, fat has been on an ominous upswing for the last century, to the tune of 800 calories extra per person per day!
While saturated fat from animal-based sources has been demonised, most of the increase in fat has come from polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, likely mainly from refined seed oils in ultra-processed foods.
So, is it all about the seed oils?
Sort of. But again, as with carbs, it’s only part of the story. Nutrition is complex and multifaceted.
Avoiding packaged food with refined seed oil listed in the ingredients would eliminate ultra-processed food from your diet, which would radically improve most people’s health.
However, I don’t think it’s as simple as seed oils being bad and saturated fat being good.
When we demonise one ‘bad’ thing (e.g., carbs/fat, plants/animals, or saturated/unsaturated fat), we overshoot to the other extreme, usually to our detriment.
Processed Foods: Bliss Point Addiction
While carbs and fats each contribute to the problems in our food system, the real driving force behind overeating might be how these components are combined.
A year ago, my analysis of a growing dataset revealed the precise macronutrient and micronutrient bliss points that align with eating more.
Rather than carbs OR fat, it’s more about the perfect combination of both, with low protein, that drives us to eat more. Food manufacturers seem to understand that processed foods with about 34% fat, 48% net carbs and 14% protein sell the most because we eat more. This analysis helps us pinpoint the formula for low-satiety, ultra-processed junk food that we all gravitate to.
In addition, many of the micronutrients appear to have a Goldilocks concentration that aligns with eating more. Food manufacturers also understand how to hit precisely to make ultra-profitable foods that make us feel addicted to them.
Combining all these factors gives us an excellent understanding of the foods we should avoid to minimise addiction and prioritise to increase satiety so that we can eat less without having to exert unsustainable levels of conscious willpower.
Big Food companies use tobacco companies’ playbook to get us hooked and maximise profit.
I have dreamed that my Food-Addiction Satiety Index could be used to apply a cigarette-style tax to target the bliss points to maximise addiction, with the proceeds going to subsidise nutritious foods that boost satiety and regenerate the environment.
But any time I’ve floated this idea online, most people have said that while they like the theory, they wouldn’t support it because they don’t trust the government to apply it fairly. Most believe it’s more likely that lobbyists would succeed in implementing a system that penalises whole foods and promotes processed foods.
The problem I can’t understand is that taxing processed foods would disadvantage the people who currently can’t afford nutritious food, even if it were a little cheaper because it was now subsidised. Any tax on ‘bad foods’ will penalise those who already can’t afford healthy, nutritious food.
Where We’re Headed: The Food Compass?
Rather than my Food-Addiction Satiety Index, we seem to be heading towards something like Tuft’s Food Compass, which ranks Cheerios as super healthy, with anything with saturated fat or cholesterol at the bottom.
The stated goal of Tuft’s Food Compass nutrient profiling system is to “…rank the healthfulness of foods and beverages for governments and industry to make decisions around promoting healthier eating, including for front-of-pack and menu labelling, thresholds to restrict food marketing, eligibility for health claims, food procurement policies, portfolio reformulation targets, and health-conscious investment strategies.”
With systems like the Food Compass gaining traction, it may not be long before dairy and meat are taxed to subsidise Kellogg’s cereals and meat-free substitutes.
To many, it seems crazy that we should double down on the processed foods that have made us sick over the past half-century. What gives? Is it all about the money without considering nutrients or our health?
As they say, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
As you’ll see, it’s more than big food companies profiting from our ill health.
Our Broken Money
I watched Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presentation at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville in July, which sent me down the rabbit hole to understand our financial system.
Many have been getting excited about RJK Jr’s vision for making America healthy (MAHA). However, I’ve come to understand that it will be nearly impossible without also addressing the broken financial system and ending the forever wars funded by it.
I read Saifedean Ammous’s Bitcoin Standard and listened to his Fiat Standard. I finally understood that new money is created when we borrow, and low interest rates mean that more and more money is created, forcing the price of everything up.
When more money is printed without backing, prices naturally rise. This is why housing, food, and essential goods cost more over time.
As a 48-year-old engineer who has managed the budget of massive construction projects, I felt like I finally understood how money and debt worked! Why hadn’t anyone told me this stuff before?
But how is this relevant to food?
My perspective has shifted.
I no longer view our broken food system as a simple matter of big food companies profiting off our addiction. Instead, I see it as a complex interplay between governments and food companies striving to provide affordable food in the face of rising costs.
How Financial Systems Drive Food Costs
The cost of houses, electricity, fuel, and nutritious foods like meat, seafood, vegetables, and dairy are rising. But this is not merely due to supermarkets and big food companies’ price gouging. Instead, it’s because of increasing private and government debt at unsustainable rates.
I used to tune out when I heard about inflation and the CPI rising at an average rate of about 3% per year. But many don’t understand that the basket of goods on which the CPI is measured keeps being revised to keep the CPI number from looking so bad.
We’re now assumed to be driving a smaller, cheaper car than the V8 gas guzzler we did in the 80s. Rather than living on acreage, the CPI is based on a smaller house. Rather than steak, eggs, seafood, and vegetables, we’re encouraged to drink almond milk and pea protein-based meat alternatives with cheaper ingredients.
The exact numbers used in the basket of goods used to measure CPI are hard to come by, but what we do know is that since 1970, the availability of money (M2 global money supply) has increased by around 7% per year, which means the cost of assets (e.g. stock market and houses) and other tangible things like food have increased by about that.
Between 2007 (before the GFC) and 2023:
- the US debt has increased at 8.5% per annum,
- Australia’s debt has increased at an alarming 22% per annum,
- Queensland’s debt (where I live) has increased by 15% per annum, and
- China’s debt has increased by 16.4% per annum.
If you’re not getting an annual pay rise in line with the numbers above, your buying power is probably not keeping up with the cost of hard assets or real food.
How it Started
So how did we get here?
In 1971, Nixon removed the US from the Gold standard to curb inflation, which was primarily caused by the cost of funding the 20-year-long Vietnam War. Since then, except for five years, the US has used debt to fund wars abroad. Once the money was no longer redeemable for a hard asset, we could borrow and print as much of it as we wanted.
According to Matthew Lysiak, author of Fiat Food, in this excellent interview, “What you find when you look back on history is that governments can survive corruption. We’ll keep voting these people in. Governments can be at constant war, and we will still support them, but when the food prices go too high, that is always followed by government instability.
“Nixon’s decoupling meant we would flood the economy with more dollars untethered from gold. While doing my research, I came across many documents where administration officials were very concerned about the rising cost of food. What they decided to do was alter the food supply. Their goal wasn’t to make us less healthy. The goal was to keep food prices low to maintain hold of political power.”
President Nison had Earl Buzt, the US Secretary of Agriculture, enforce aggressive measures to force farmers to produce cheaper crops to avert the political backlash due to the rising cost of food.
Butz’s ‘get big or get out’ approach mandated planting the whole field all year round (leaving no time for the soil to rest or recover) and the intensive use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides to produce more food more quickly, but with a lower nutrient yield per calorie.
Since then, this trend has continued, with the government and industry working together to keep food affordable for the public and profitable despite the increasing availability of money.
While this cost-cutting and optimisation means calories are more affordable than they would be, nutritious and satiating food—like meat, dairy, seafood, and vegetables—is still more expensive and unaffordable today for many.
The results speak for themselves. America has taken the lead in obesity rates, and the rest of the world is not far behind. Notice how our debt and obesity rates are both on a similar trajectory.
Balancing our financial and energy budgets by eating nutritious, satiating foods is difficult, especially when surrounded by cheaper and more addictive options. Most of us would find it challenging to choose steak and broccoli when a box of doughnuts is in front of us. Similarly, governments who have access to easy money also struggle to keep a lid on debt.
But if we don’t, there is a price to pay.
Food affects our weight, appearance, and metabolic health. Money causes rising inflation and diluted purchasing power for future generations, who are shackled with debt that they will never be able to repay.
Many of us are addicted to ultra-processed foods that are cheap and designed to be addictive, leaving us with a weight problem that’s hard to reverse. Similarly, it’s easy to get hooked on debt, which is equally addictive and challenging to unravel.
But the reality is, if it weren’t for ultra-processed food, many would starve because real food would be unaffordable. With wars being fought on multiple fronts and debt projections rising exponentially, I don’t see this trend reversing anytime soon.
When we have easy access to money or food with no consequences, we can’t resist.
Is There a Way Out?
Unfortunately, we can’t turn the clock back and return to the gold standard.
I’m also not holding my breath for overhauling the US Dietary Guidelines to nutrient density and satiety. The government is probably not coming to save us from our poor health, partially because real food has become more expensive.
But the good news is that we can educate ourselves and take responsibility for our health to ensure our bodies are satisfied with our food because it contains the necessary nutrients!
As Matthew Lysaik highlights in the video above, eat minimally processed foods your grandmother would recognise and avoid processed foods with dirt-cheap ingredients like industrial seed oils, refined flour with flavours, artificial sweeteners, and colourings to make them (hyper)palatable.
We must accept that nourishing our bodies will be an investment and that government nutrition guidelines are not designed to optimise our health or weight.
Because of the move toward cheaper and cheaper ingredients to keep costs down, the average food bill has decreased a proportion of disposable income. So, if health and nutrition are a priority, investing in the best quality food you can afford from local sources makes sense.
Conclusion
While many factors contribute to the decline in food quality and the rise in addiction to unhealthy options, the core issue may be the need to provide affordable food in the face of rising inflation.
Nutritious, filling foods will continue to be a costly investment, especially as their prices outpace wage growth, making them increasingly inaccessible to the average person.
In the future, we might transition to a financial system based on harder, more stable money, which could push individuals and societies to live within their financial and nutritional means. Until then, we must take charge of our health by prioritising and investing in nutrient-dense, satisfying foods.