> From the practical standpoint of actually trying to lose weight/get people to lose weight, the challenges in nutrition are almost entirely around compliance (how to ensure someone sticks with the program) rather than substance (what people put in their bodies).
Compliance and substance, using your definitions, are not orthogonal. "How you ensure someone sticks with the program" is not independent of what the things they eat are.
I get it why techies -- myself included -- would like the world to have nice, neat, orthogonal levers where you push this input and you get this simple output, and you don't have to manipulate a bunch of inputs to get a simple output (and, don't get a bunch of complex changes in output when you change a simple input.)
Unfortunately, many interesting domains -- especially those involving the human body and particularly the interaction between body and behavior -- don't work that way, and preferring that it works more simply isn't going to change that.
> if we spent more time studying how to teach compliance I think we'd be making a lot more progress towards stopping obesity.
The thing is, there's considerable evidence that "compliance" problems are neither one-size-fits-all nor simply a matter of teaching. Much current effort is on compliance, but it often involves how to manipulate metabolic signals to help people be better able to comply (there's definitely education as a component of that, but its not alone.)
And we understand where there are positive feedback loops involved, and breaking those is part of that (that's a major reason for the various forms and relatives of gastric bypass surgery -- it enables radically breaking some of the feedback loops that make it difficult to acheive compliance.)
> "How you ensure someone sticks with the program" is not independent of what the things they eat are.
We have not put nearly enough scientific resources into figuring that out to say that so confidently.
> Much current effort is on compliance, but it often involves how to manipulate metabolic signals to help people be better able to comply (there's definitely education as a component of that, but its not alone.)
I don't agree that much of the effort is on compliance, there is a massive imbalance towards substance from what I can tell, but who knows maybe you're right.
Compliance and substance, using your definitions, are not orthogonal. "How you ensure someone sticks with the program" is not independent of what the things they eat are.
I get it why techies -- myself included -- would like the world to have nice, neat, orthogonal levers where you push this input and you get this simple output, and you don't have to manipulate a bunch of inputs to get a simple output (and, don't get a bunch of complex changes in output when you change a simple input.)
Unfortunately, many interesting domains -- especially those involving the human body and particularly the interaction between body and behavior -- don't work that way, and preferring that it works more simply isn't going to change that.
> if we spent more time studying how to teach compliance I think we'd be making a lot more progress towards stopping obesity.
The thing is, there's considerable evidence that "compliance" problems are neither one-size-fits-all nor simply a matter of teaching. Much current effort is on compliance, but it often involves how to manipulate metabolic signals to help people be better able to comply (there's definitely education as a component of that, but its not alone.)
And we understand where there are positive feedback loops involved, and breaking those is part of that (that's a major reason for the various forms and relatives of gastric bypass surgery -- it enables radically breaking some of the feedback loops that make it difficult to acheive compliance.)