Originally Posted by Agatson

Well, concentrated orange juice, where you've taken out the pulp and again the nutrient, the fiber, and just concentrated a lot of juice, is drinking a lot of sugar. And I always recall the experience I had with a patient who came in with a very high blood sugar, new onset diabetes. Usually [we] would expect [the cause to be] an infection or recent surgery. What it was, was that they got a juice machine in the office, and he was drinking juice all day. And once he stopped, the diabetes resolved.

Originally Posted by Walter Willet

Unfortunately, what we've created is now being exported to the rest of the world. And in almost every country, in Europe as well as Africa, Latin America and Asia, rates of obesity are climbing rapidly.

Originally Posted by Marion Nestle

Yes. The food industry is in trouble, in the sense that it is in a hugely competitive environment. Our country has available in the food supply 3,900 calories a day for every man, woman, and child in the country. That's roughly twice the actual population need. Food companies are beholden to stockholders. They have to grow in order to maintain their stock prices. We already have 3,900 calories a day and 320,000 different food products in the American marketplace. They can't all keep growing in that situation. So all they can do is to try to get consumers to eat their products instead of somebody else's, or to eat more in general, and they're just terrific at doing that.

And they do that not only through advertising and marketing, but also by enormous efforts to change the social environment, so that it is now socially acceptable for children to drink soft drinks in school and all day long, for babies to have soft drinks in baby bottles, and for people to snack all day long and to eat food in larger and larger portions, all of which are strategies to encourage people to eat more.