Would be nice, for those who are overweight as well as those who suffer from the externalities of those who are overweight, for Governments to treat overeating/junk food like it does smoking and drinking - an addiction that should be discouraged through education and disincentives (tax etc.). Some do but it's obviously not effective.
Then there's the popular cultural angle. We disparage magazines, fashion Houses and websites that present clinically underweight models as the standard, the same should be applied for the clinically overweight.
You're assuming some kind of independence of thought and action by the Government. The problem is Government supports many of the dietary and lifestyle changes behind the obesity epidemic. For example, in my U.S. community, the government builds miles and miles of roads but almost no sidewalks or bike paths. Zoning here encourages the creation of low density subdivisions that are completely car dependent. Nationally, historically the government food scientists have pushed foods like HFCS, trans fat, skim milk, and low fat/high carb diets that newer research shows is part (most?) of the problem. If government didn't subsidize roads, meddle in food choices, and allowed health care insurance companies to charge the obese their actual risk-based cost, the obesity problem might not be as profound.
Seeing how the free market tends to optimize for short term gains for private actors at the expense of long term costs to society I'd say government "meddling" is a must in this case. Coca Cola, the poster child for the free market, is selling sugared water which is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic.
Obviously there are forms of government intervention that leave us better off than the status quo. The more interesting question is if the existing government intervention improved anything or if it is part of the problem.
The government has meddled in many ways: Fat is bad for you. Cholesterol in food is bad for you. Eggs are bad for you. Oats are good for you. No eggs are not so bad. The benefits of oats are not that great. Butter is bad for you. Here eat some vegetable oil and margarine instead. Transfats are okay for you. Oops cholesterol in food has no impact on blood cholesterol. Transfats are very bad for you (sorry about that.) Now we know margarine is worse than butter. But really we don't know which fats are bad for you. Or are carbs worse than fats? Who knows...
Really the government doesn't know enough about nutritional science. Neither do the scientists it seems. Nor can we trust the companies. Not sure who to trust.
And yet we can probably agree on a few things. Calorie heavy softdrinks with zero nutrients are probably one of the most unhealthy things, but incredibly beneficial to resturaunts due to high markup, long storage times, easy transport and so on.
Ordering water when you're out (in America) is often viewed as being cheap. I just prefer water, and not bottled water (it's bad for the environment). Even many waiters may treat you worse for ordering water (since they are paid by meal cost / commission).
Sure softdrinks can be bad in excess. However the substitutes like fruit juice are no better (no pulp, sometimes more sugar added) and then there are things like tea and coffee to which people add excess sugar (hello Starbucks) to make it palatable. So it is not just softdrinks that are bad but a wide assortment of drinks with excess sugar.
Softdrinks and other calory-dense drinks with zero nutrients are bad in excess in the way that eating pure sugar is bad in excess. It becomes an excess very quickly. A small slice of chocolate cake contains more nutrition than a soda, but is more likely to be considered a dessert or unusual treat.
Part of the problem is that it becomes a standard part of many meals.
You're absolutely right - the only way to change behavior is to have governments aggressively manipulate the culture, possibly through public education (if any is left) in addition to using their police forces to make that behavior more uncomfortable and expensive for the people who engage in it through censorship, aggressive street-policing, border inspections, and tactical raids.
I don't want to argue that the government can help to raise awareness but isn't it more like personal choice in the end? I'm not obese but with a BMI of 27.8 definitely overweight. How is anyone else is going to help me to lose weight if I don't realize myself that something is wrong and most important of all that I need to change something?
I can decide if I want to drive to McDonald's or to the grocery store to buy some vegetables or other healthy ingredients to prepare a more balanced meal. The first is obviously easier and kinda more convenient but if you look at what it does to your health then maybe not so convenient at all.
What I'm trying to say is that for example I used to love Coke and even drank some for breakfast. I'm not the typical coffee addicted developer but I pumped myself with energy drinks instead. After my brother forced me to get my sugar levels throughly checked this year I saw that I was close to be diagnosed with diabetes and figured that there is no other way than to change my diet.
The problem is that for a lot of poorer communities where obesity is most rampant, there is no "grocery store to buy some vegetables or other healthy ingredients" anywhere nearby and owning a car is not a given. So yes, making good choices is important, and most posters on HN are lucky enough to have healthy options easily accessible to them. But a lot of people, even in the US, do not have realistic healthy options available to them.
"The first is obviously easier and kinda more convenient but if you look at what it does to your health then maybe not so convenient at all."
Presumably for the same reason you drank too much sugary drinks, there was an immediate reward and you didn't comprehend the long term effects i.e. it wasn't an informed decision. I doubt that the doctor was very surprised with the outcome.
The latest episode of americas test kitchen radio touches on this topic and while I don't agree with everything they do have some good points.
I could only support that idea if the taxes went towards publically funded nutrition research; the kind that drug companies won't do because prevention is not profitable.
It's not like the obese don't know they're obese and unhealthy; the problem is that it's really hard to fix, there's way too much misinformation out there, and for most people most weight loss approaches don't work. There is still a lot of fundamental research to be done to understand obese metabolisms and how to manipulate them so the body doesn't fight back against weight loss.
But being hungry is something people should learn. I'm hungry all the time, most time also after I have just eaten.
It is a sick mindset that you have to feel full all the time.
The doctor won't listen to you, because you're a disgusting fat fuck looking for excuses. Almost everybody suffers from constant hunger when they try to keep weight off, if doctors wanted to listen, they would have acknowledged it long time ago.
I could only support that idea if the taxes went towards publically funded nutrition research; the kind that drug companies won't do because prevention is not profitable.
It's not like the obese don't know they're obese and unhealthy; the problem is that it's really hard to fix, there's way too much misinformation out there, and for most people most weight loss approaches don't work. There is still a lot of fundamental research to be done to understand obese metabolisms and how to manipulate them so the body doesn't fight back against weight loss.
When you are talking about "overweight" and "obese", you are talking about the BMI.
Unfortunately your idea of disparaging the "clinically overweight" is based on arbitrary BMI cutoffs that are poorly chosen. Recent studies have shown that overall health outcomes (ie, not just heart-disease numbers) are actually better for "overweight" people than those of "normal" weight. And BMI does not scale with height correctly, so it imposes a much stricter standard of what's "healthy" on someone who's 6'3" as opposed to someone who's 5'3". The ratings for what's "normal" also do not take into account age or sex, much less things like frame size.
BMI was devised because height and weight are numbers that have been collected in medical records and studies for decades, whereas the other factors are far less likely to have been recorded at all. So while BMI is often used as a tool for doing large-scale historical research or research across large population groups, that's simply because BMI is a number we can easily figure out, and not because it's actually a good indicator of an individual's health.
> It found that over the past four decades, the average age-corrected male BMI rose to 24.2 from 21.7, and in women rose to 24.4 from 22.1.
Could this be due to an increase in people going to the gym?
A bmi of 24.x is still < 30 and not unhealthy.
Therefore, I wonder whether we see two different things here: 1.) More people become obese (those with an bmi > 30 [and even there could be some corner cases due to the fact that bmi is by no means a perfect measure]) and 2.) more people lift weights/become (somewhat) healthier.
The number of people (A) going to the gym, (B) doing resistance exercise to build up lean body mass, and (C) doing so on a regular enough basis to make a difference - is round off error.
The entire reason why Gyms are so profitable, is an insignificant number of people who sign up, actually ever go.
Incidentally, this is why serious gyms, which are built for powerlifters, Olympic weightlifters, strongmen, and similarly dedicated athletes, charge a lot more money. When you get a membership at a 24-Hour Fitness for $30 per month, you're being subsidized by all the resolutioners who buy a membership and never show up.
Meanwhile, powerlifting gyms cater exclusively to the people who will show up 5 days a week, every week. You don't have that massive pool of resolutioners to provide effort-free cash, so you have to charge more money.
Of course, on the other end is Planet Fitness, which specifically caters to the specific demographics who don't show up and actively discourages the people who will show up 5 days a week. Brilliant strategy.
This is also why every lifter bitches about the lack of squat racks, cramped lifting spaces, and fuckstick trainers at corporate gyms. They are often a net negative for the gym, so the gym doesn't care about them; the folks who occasionally show up and do 20 minutes on the elliptical are where the money is.
This, in a nutshell, was why I was so ecstatic about the $20/month membership at Powerhouse Gym (with a $150 sign up fee) downtown Redwood City, CA. Perfect location, not one, but two squat racks that were rarely used. Shoulder press rack. They didn't get on your case if you dropped your deadlift and smack chalk all over the place, and had towel service and really decent showers.
I didn't realize, until I visited many, many other cities - that finding a gym that you can do your squats/deadlift/shoulder press three times a week for $20, is pretty much unheard of.
I sometimes even see it advertised for $17 (presumably with a slightly higher sign up fee) - This is really clever - if you've already invested, say, $200, and you have this pretty cool downtown gym, and it's only $17/month - why on earth would you ever cancel...
> The entire reason why Gyms are so profitable, is an insignificant number of people who sign up, actually ever go.
Increase in average BMI and increase in gym revenue/creation of new gyms are probably even directly correlated via bad conscience customers who sign up and then stay home.
> …rising global trends in obesity should not overshadow the problem of many people not getting enough to eat.
In South Asia, for example, almost a quarter of the population is underweight. In Central and East Africa, about 12 percent of women and 15 percent of men are underweight.
The increase in the obesity gets even more alarming if one considers that out of ~7 Billion world population, one can take ~3 Billion people (India + China + Central Africa) out of the equation as they are affected less than others (the first infographics also supports this notion).
641M of 7B = 10%
600M of 4B = 15%
(Approx numbers just for getting some ballpark indicators)
Yes saw that. But the infographic shows that China is relatively 'green' than other parts of the world (along with India and Central Africa).
My takeway from it (could be wrong) is that in absolute numbers there would be more obese people in china than say in some countries in middle east, but as a percentage of population they are small.
I knew from other other readings that in China this is due to younger generation.
"Within one generation, the percentage of Chinese children who are overweight or obese has skyrocketed from 5% to 20%. The rate has absolutely exploded, over a very limited amount of time." http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-...
Which puts him at 31 BMI, so just barely in the obese category.
And this guy is clearly not your average "gym rat", he's a winner of Natural Mr. Universe, so he'll be somewhere on the very edge of the Bell curve. 99.9% gym rats will never be close in terms of lean body mass. So if they are "lumped in obese", then they truly have a lot of fat to lose.
India+China+Central Africa may be less affected than the rest of the world, but I doubt there are only 41M obese people there. The map shows that in China there are 8.2%/7.4% obese men/women (or maybe the other way around; I have no idea how to interpret the button). So that's 7.8% of 1.381 billion = ~108 million in China alone.
In other news corporations feeding people garbage report billions in profits. Go to a supermarket, 90% of the food there is processed garbage. This is by design. We are not healthy because we are being fed our desires for profit, they create addictive food which is bad for you and costs nothing to produce because there is profit in it. Great success for all of humanity.
The 641M number provides context for the media narratives regarding fat acceptance and body shaming. Perhaps worse than the epidemic of people being overweight, is growing sympathy to accept and not to do anything about it. If you have been following social justice issues you will understand what I am referring to. This issue is beyond health, since it has been made political. Addressing it likely requires fighting back against rhetoric from the fat acceptance movement. (Not looking for an argument, just saying.)
>Perhaps worse than the epidemic of people being overweight, is growing sympathy to accept and not to do anything about it.
Really? Worse then actual suffering and societal costs is the treatment of obesity as a disease and not a character flaw? Not only should people suffer, but they should be shamed for it.
> Really? Worse then actual suffering and societal costs is the treatment of obesity as a disease and not a character flaw? Not only should people suffer, but they should be shamed for it.
What an overly sensitive response. How ridiculous is Hacker News? Where did I say anything about [1] the suffering, [2] societal costs, or [3] treatment of obesity as a disease?
Mentioned it's political and has a media component to it, get attacked. There factually are people, like the parent comment, who will not fairly discuss the issue on neutral terms. Derailed into personal attacks, insensitivity, or straw man arguments like the above comment. How can HN parade itself as intellectual discussion when it can't even handle benign comments.
You're being the overly sensitive one here. You said that fat people should be shamed because being fat makes you sick, someone replied that it doesn't seem right that people who are suffering because they are sick because they are fat should also be suffering because they are being shamed because they are sick because they are fat, and you started crying "I'm the victim in all of this! I'm being shamed for suggesting that people should be shamed because they are sick because they are fat! Won't somebody think about me!"
People don't improve without help or guidance. That goes for all of us, in many aspects of life. To shame people who suffer is to ostracize them, and this will not solve the problem, it will exacerbate it.
If you really want to shame people, then shame the politicians and industry executives that are peddling unhealthy foods and eating habits. Maybe when we've leveled the playing field enough so that healthy food is cheaper and more readily available than unhealthy foods, then you can start shaming obese people like you're shaming smokers now.
You are shaming smokers as fervent as you wrote your post, right?
The point is that stuff like crisps is way cheaper than it should be, making it an option for poor people when stretching their budget. I hope people don't actually eat it for dinner ;) Noodle soup is healthier but still not healthy. Most cheap noodles soups are full of the "wrong" kinds of fats and sugar.
Are you arguing that a complete, healthy evening meal should cost less in Tesco than a packet of crisps? That's not sensible or helpful, or even the underlying problem.
And anyway wouldn't something like bulk rice or porridge be cheaper?
Crisps are already a giant lump of carbohydrates, but I wasn't arguing they were healthier, I was saying that making a entire healthy meal in a supermarket cheaper than a packet of crisps is not realistic.
I would rather have 641mm people obese, and solve that problem, than the alternative (641mm starving people, and try to get them food).
The major concern, of course, is that "scientists" on this topic keep changing the advice they give to people, so by the time people finally absorb, and start practicing what they were told to do - the next set of guidance comes out, that is, in some cases, precisely the opposite of what they were told previous.
Here in Singapore, just today, the front page of the newspaper said, "White Rice causing Diabetes, 1 plate of rice = 2 cans of sugary soda." - while on the inside of the paper, there were talks about increasing taxes on soda, but nothing on white rice....
Hopefully, we'll eventually get some evidence/science based information, guidance, and policy, but I'm not optimistic.
Nutrition scientists and doctors are working with the human body and its surrounding environment, an exceedingly complex model. They publish their findings in journals with cautions and caveats and data.
A mainstream journalist with traffic quotas or column inches to fill on a slow news day then skims these journals for the next "X makes you fat" or "Y gives you cancer" headline without bothering to read the fine print.
Where should the bar be set for scientists to exceed?
In the current funding climate and the well known publish(fast and crazy)-or-perish 'incentives', I find it hard to find fault with the bar set for scientists.
(Disclosure: I'm one. Although not in nutrition science.)
Their recommendations should be reliable in order to achieve some effect, and have some physical basis. Nutrition science has been terrible at this. They have generally been better at this than the reporters who read their breathless press releases, though. I'm a middle-aged man, and virtually everything they told my parents, and me when I grew up in the 70s and 80s was wrong, and some of it actively harmful.
I'm not referring to the journalists, I'm referring to the peer reviewed papers, and the scientific consensus regarding proper diet, that turned out to be not only false, but false in a way that likely could have been demonstrated with just a few, fairly straightforward research studies.
It starts, of course, with Dr. Ancel keys, but he wasn't the only person who signed off on the consensus that a high-carbohydrate diet was the right model for the American people.
I use the scare quotes, because what took place after that, was probably the furthest thing from science you could imagine - presuming we agree that the objective of science isn't to pile on the latest theory, but instead to strengthen those theories, by trying to disprove them.
I'm not sure where the line is between malnutrition and starvation, but the UN says "some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life." [1]
Your article [2] quotes, "while Asians, like the Chinese, had four servings a day of cooked rice, Americans and Australians ate just five a week". The fault for a change in advice is shared between scientists and the media for giving advice based on a western diet to people eating an eastern diet. I think this is a problem in general with English-language media. I see people sharing advice about high-fructose corn syrup, but in the UK it's ① legally called "glucose-fructose syrup", and ② rarely used, and thus irrelevant to most people I know. Similarly for hormones and antibiotics in beef, or added salt in some foods.
Fat causes overweight and the diseases that go along with overweight. Nutrition science has never wavered on that. Fat goes to the lymph and the excess is dumped into the bloodstream, making the blood obviously cloudy and with fat separating to the top, which you can see if you ever see people get blood drawn after a heavy meal. Then the fat is taken up by fat cells. That's where the body load of fat comes from. That's science. They've measured that the sorts of fat stored are the same fatty acids as the fat eaten. It works the same in all animals. That's part of agricultural science too, not just human nutritional science.
The current majority of people who believe that high fat diets are good for something other than getting fat and that carbohydrates cause obesity is no more a sign of a change in science than any popular political or religious belief.
It's a very popular conspiracy theory that nutritional scientists and doctors who follow them are part of or corrupted by the powerful vegan lobby, while the meat and dairy and processed added-oil food and fast food industries have the ideal products for making you thin, as long as you skip the traditional starches in those products, because everyone knows that the all the world's old cultures that lived on potatoes or rice or corn or wheat were full of massively obese people, and it's not until they got modern food industry amounts of butter, manufactured oil, and soybean-fed chicken that they became the crowds of dangerously thin looking people that you see in old pictures.
(I'm going to get downvoted into invisibility for being right, but people's health is at stake, so I'm going to reply anyway.)
I'm curious - do you have any peer reviewed research papers in any of the well known journals, such as American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, to shine further light on this process of fat going to the lymph, excess being dumped into the blood stream, and cloudy blood after a heavy meal?
That information is very elementary. There are thousands of scientific studies where that information is the basis of what they're studying the details of. For an overload of articles on sorts of fat in the diet going into the lymph, you can just Google: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition lymph.
The following quote is some basic information about cloudy blood:
Turbid, cloudy or milky serum (lipemic serum) may be produced by the presence of fatty substances (lipids) in the blood. Bacterial contamination may also cause cloudy serum. Moderately or grossly lipemic specimens may alter certain test results.
A recent meal may produce transient lipemia; therefore, we recommend that patients fast 12-16 hours before a blood specimen is obtained.
No it is not. Because it is filled with lies and scaremongering.
HackerNews should promote culture of science and critical thinking and shouldn't be accepting of the fad diets like lchf, paleo, keto and other scaremongering bs.
The reason why people are fat is because they eat more carbs, fat and sugar, not because they eat a particular thing. They also sit a lot, and lie around. Something that can affect your weight and life significantly.
Lustig studied at MIT+Cornell and is an MD with years of experience. He spent decades researching biochemistry and obesity and published numerous papers on these subjects.
Anthony Colpo, unless I'm mistaken, is just some random guy.
> HackerNews should promote culture of science and critical thinking and shouldn't be accepting of the fad diets like lchf, paleo, keto and other scaremongering bs.
No, Hacker News should promote good conversation: civil discourse that respects people's right to differing views. This is a pluralistic place where everyone has a right to be wrong. Strident denunciations—even (or rather especially) in the name of correct scientific positions—are corrosive of the social contract here and should be eschewed regardless of how right you are, or believe you are.
Otherwise the endgame is a few absolutists yelling at each other, and everyone else leaving.
I don't know why this got flagged. There were two links to Anthony Colpo. I tried to read them and get his point, but his style is borderline unreadable. No scientific arguments, only vitriol / straw man with lots of overloaded images. Feel free to Google him.
The flagged post was in this tone also, calling lies and requested we do not discuss the sugar hypotheses here. So you could interpret this as "The call for censorship got censored" ;)
Adding random citations to straw man arguments proves nothing. It only make it look "sciency". Is his "work" cited anywhere in relevant science journals?
So far I only find a lot echo-chamber forums and questionable publishers (Kopp-Verlag, esoteric/far right stuff)
If you really find Robert Lustig scaremongering a scientific argument, then do you find the relative increase of meat consumption relevant and scary enough (Is Meat Killing Us? jaoa)?
It is absolutely not necessary to be a scaremongering pseudoscientist to notice that epidemiological result on 1.5 million people implying that meat raises all-mortality risk isn't relevant, despite being published in a relevant science journal. When the data is flawed no statistics wand waving will be able to eliminate the effects of bad lifestyle that most meat eaters have.
I'm a vegan, and I'm probably the best man to enjoy using the result of that study as a perfect health argument, but I'm not silly enough to believe that the result is relevant.
Adding random citations to straw man arguments proves nothing.
Did we even read the same articles?
Here are some examples I picked up in five minutes that look like completely reasonable referencing to me.
Anyone with an Internet connection can easily verify as much for themselves by visiting the Food and Agriculture (FAO) website, and checking the per capita intake of sweeteners in Japan for that year. Do that, and you’ll see the Japanese were averaging 52 calories per day from fruits, and a far more significant 174 calories daily from sugar. “Sweeteners, Other” and “Honey” supplied another 86 cals/day[7]
So just from sugar alone, the Japanese were obtaining 22 grams, or 4.4 teaspoons, of fructose per day. The Japanese do indeed eat fructose-containing sugar, and have been doing so for hundreds of years[8].
The same FAO data we just checked out shows that in 2009, the average per capita energy intake in Japan was 2,674 calories/day. The corresponding figure for the USA was 3,652 calories/day[7]
Unlike the US rise in obesity, which stems from both declining activity and a marked increase in per capita caloric intake[11, 7], Australia’s rise seems to have been caused almost entirely from decreasing physical activity.
The indignant paediatrician then completely refuted himself a moment later when he admitted that Americans were indeed eating more than they were in the 1980s[13]. And at 7:30 in his “Bitter Truth” video, Lustig acknowledges to his audience: “We are all eating more now than we did 20 years ago.”[4]
Taubes cites a 2004 CDC article reporting that since 1971, total fat intake increased among women by a mere 6.5 grams but decreased among men by 5.3 grams[14]. This gives the impression overall fat intake has remained relatively unchanged.
HN doesn't promote a good conversation on the subject of nutrition and diets.
Just take the fact that angry users can downvote me to oblivion or flag my posts which are on topic.
Every time a Guardian subject on demonizing sugar and praising fat or any similar material was posted, my responses, which were sometimes less denouncing than this one, were downvoted or censored.
The majority just likes to believe fadists are saving them, instead of outright misinforming and scaring them into healthier but pseudoscientific lifestyles.
Arbitrary because A) BMI (the measure that this article and all obesity crisis statistics use) is a nonsense number that for instance penalizes you for being tall (hey guess what happens when children grow up healthy? They grow up taller) B) the number at which you 'become' obese has no real medical backing (partly because it's a nonsense number.
The American obesity crisis for instance is largely because we dropped our arbitrary threshold down to the WHO's threshold and gained some tens of millions of obese citizens in the process.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadWould be nice, for those who are overweight as well as those who suffer from the externalities of those who are overweight, for Governments to treat overeating/junk food like it does smoking and drinking - an addiction that should be discouraged through education and disincentives (tax etc.). Some do but it's obviously not effective.
Then there's the popular cultural angle. We disparage magazines, fashion Houses and websites that present clinically underweight models as the standard, the same should be applied for the clinically overweight.
Really the government doesn't know enough about nutritional science. Neither do the scientists it seems. Nor can we trust the companies. Not sure who to trust.
Ordering water when you're out (in America) is often viewed as being cheap. I just prefer water, and not bottled water (it's bad for the environment). Even many waiters may treat you worse for ordering water (since they are paid by meal cost / commission).
Our social norms suck.
Part of the problem is that it becomes a standard part of many meals.
I can decide if I want to drive to McDonald's or to the grocery store to buy some vegetables or other healthy ingredients to prepare a more balanced meal. The first is obviously easier and kinda more convenient but if you look at what it does to your health then maybe not so convenient at all.
What I'm trying to say is that for example I used to love Coke and even drank some for breakfast. I'm not the typical coffee addicted developer but I pumped myself with energy drinks instead. After my brother forced me to get my sugar levels throughly checked this year I saw that I was close to be diagnosed with diabetes and figured that there is no other way than to change my diet.
Presumably for the same reason you drank too much sugary drinks, there was an immediate reward and you didn't comprehend the long term effects i.e. it wasn't an informed decision. I doubt that the doctor was very surprised with the outcome.
The latest episode of americas test kitchen radio touches on this topic and while I don't agree with everything they do have some good points.
It's not like the obese don't know they're obese and unhealthy; the problem is that it's really hard to fix, there's way too much misinformation out there, and for most people most weight loss approaches don't work. There is still a lot of fundamental research to be done to understand obese metabolisms and how to manipulate them so the body doesn't fight back against weight loss.
It's not like the obese don't know they're obese and unhealthy; the problem is that it's really hard to fix, there's way too much misinformation out there, and for most people most weight loss approaches don't work. There is still a lot of fundamental research to be done to understand obese metabolisms and how to manipulate them so the body doesn't fight back against weight loss.
Unfortunately your idea of disparaging the "clinically overweight" is based on arbitrary BMI cutoffs that are poorly chosen. Recent studies have shown that overall health outcomes (ie, not just heart-disease numbers) are actually better for "overweight" people than those of "normal" weight. And BMI does not scale with height correctly, so it imposes a much stricter standard of what's "healthy" on someone who's 6'3" as opposed to someone who's 5'3". The ratings for what's "normal" also do not take into account age or sex, much less things like frame size.
BMI was devised because height and weight are numbers that have been collected in medical records and studies for decades, whereas the other factors are far less likely to have been recorded at all. So while BMI is often used as a tool for doing large-scale historical research or research across large population groups, that's simply because BMI is a number we can easily figure out, and not because it's actually a good indicator of an individual's health.
Reminds me of this story: http://time.com/3051380/dubai-gold-children-weight-loss/
> "Your Child in Gold" program will award two grams of gold for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) a child manages to shed over two months.
Could this be due to an increase in people going to the gym? A bmi of 24.x is still < 30 and not unhealthy.
Therefore, I wonder whether we see two different things here: 1.) More people become obese (those with an bmi > 30 [and even there could be some corner cases due to the fact that bmi is by no means a perfect measure]) and 2.) more people lift weights/become (somewhat) healthier.
The entire reason why Gyms are so profitable, is an insignificant number of people who sign up, actually ever go.
Meanwhile, powerlifting gyms cater exclusively to the people who will show up 5 days a week, every week. You don't have that massive pool of resolutioners to provide effort-free cash, so you have to charge more money.
Of course, on the other end is Planet Fitness, which specifically caters to the specific demographics who don't show up and actively discourages the people who will show up 5 days a week. Brilliant strategy.
This is also why every lifter bitches about the lack of squat racks, cramped lifting spaces, and fuckstick trainers at corporate gyms. They are often a net negative for the gym, so the gym doesn't care about them; the folks who occasionally show up and do 20 minutes on the elliptical are where the money is.
I didn't realize, until I visited many, many other cities - that finding a gym that you can do your squats/deadlift/shoulder press three times a week for $20, is pretty much unheard of.
I sometimes even see it advertised for $17 (presumably with a slightly higher sign up fee) - This is really clever - if you've already invested, say, $200, and you have this pretty cool downtown gym, and it's only $17/month - why on earth would you ever cancel...
Increase in average BMI and increase in gym revenue/creation of new gyms are probably even directly correlated via bad conscience customers who sign up and then stay home.
http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/my-600-lb-life/videos/7-000-calo...
The increase in the obesity gets even more alarming if one considers that out of ~7 Billion world population, one can take ~3 Billion people (India + China + Central Africa) out of the equation as they are affected less than others (the first infographics also supports this notion).
641M of 7B = 10%
600M of 4B = 15%
(Approx numbers just for getting some ballpark indicators)
My takeway from it (could be wrong) is that in absolute numbers there would be more obese people in china than say in some countries in middle east, but as a percentage of population they are small.
I knew from other other readings that in China this is due to younger generation.
"Within one generation, the percentage of Chinese children who are overweight or obese has skyrocketed from 5% to 20%. The rate has absolutely exploded, over a very limited amount of time." http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-...
There are also many skinny people who eat nothing but dorritos and are skinnyweak. They don't make the Obese charts but they are no more healthy.
The fact of the matter is that people need to own their health.
Not really. To get to obese by gaining muscle mass one would most certainly have to use certain illegal drugs.
http://www.bodybuilding.com/author/john-hansen
Which puts him at 31 BMI, so just barely in the obese category.
And this guy is clearly not your average "gym rat", he's a winner of Natural Mr. Universe, so he'll be somewhere on the very edge of the Bell curve. 99.9% gym rats will never be close in terms of lean body mass. So if they are "lumped in obese", then they truly have a lot of fat to lose.
Really? Worse then actual suffering and societal costs is the treatment of obesity as a disease and not a character flaw? Not only should people suffer, but they should be shamed for it.
That's ridiculous. Just saying.
What an overly sensitive response. How ridiculous is Hacker News? Where did I say anything about [1] the suffering, [2] societal costs, or [3] treatment of obesity as a disease?
Mentioned it's political and has a media component to it, get attacked. There factually are people, like the parent comment, who will not fairly discuss the issue on neutral terms. Derailed into personal attacks, insensitivity, or straw man arguments like the above comment. How can HN parade itself as intellectual discussion when it can't even handle benign comments.
Haha, is this a joke? Is anyone else seeing this insanity?
Where did Olscore say that?
People don't improve without help or guidance. That goes for all of us, in many aspects of life. To shame people who suffer is to ostracize them, and this will not solve the problem, it will exacerbate it.
If you really want to shame people, then shame the politicians and industry executives that are peddling unhealthy foods and eating habits. Maybe when we've leveled the playing field enough so that healthy food is cheaper and more readily available than unhealthy foods, then you can start shaming obese people like you're shaming smokers now.
You are shaming smokers as fervent as you wrote your post, right?
is an idea the anti-fat-shaming community rejects. For (some of[0]) them, calling obesity a disease is already shaming.
[0] you'll always find a counter example
And wouldn't noodlesoup be even cheaper, and healtier too?
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_humour
That would depend on if the crisps were fried in transfats. Otherwise they both end up as a ball of diabetes-causing carb covered in salt.
And anyway wouldn't something like bulk rice or porridge be cheaper?
But would it be healthier? A giant lump of carb laced with arsenic?
The major concern, of course, is that "scientists" on this topic keep changing the advice they give to people, so by the time people finally absorb, and start practicing what they were told to do - the next set of guidance comes out, that is, in some cases, precisely the opposite of what they were told previous.
Here in Singapore, just today, the front page of the newspaper said, "White Rice causing Diabetes, 1 plate of rice = 2 cans of sugary soda." - while on the inside of the paper, there were talks about increasing taxes on soda, but nothing on white rice....
Hopefully, we'll eventually get some evidence/science based information, guidance, and policy, but I'm not optimistic.
Nutrition scientists and doctors are working with the human body and its surrounding environment, an exceedingly complex model. They publish their findings in journals with cautions and caveats and data.
A mainstream journalist with traffic quotas or column inches to fill on a slow news day then skims these journals for the next "X makes you fat" or "Y gives you cancer" headline without bothering to read the fine print.
In the current funding climate and the well known publish(fast and crazy)-or-perish 'incentives', I find it hard to find fault with the bar set for scientists. (Disclosure: I'm one. Although not in nutrition science.)
It starts, of course, with Dr. Ancel keys, but he wasn't the only person who signed off on the consensus that a high-carbohydrate diet was the right model for the American people.
I use the scare quotes, because what took place after that, was probably the furthest thing from science you could imagine - presuming we agree that the objective of science isn't to pile on the latest theory, but instead to strengthen those theories, by trying to disprove them.
Your article [2] quotes, "while Asians, like the Chinese, had four servings a day of cooked rice, Americans and Australians ate just five a week". The fault for a change in advice is shared between scientists and the media for giving advice based on a western diet to people eating an eastern diet. I think this is a problem in general with English-language media. I see people sharing advice about high-fructose corn syrup, but in the UK it's ① legally called "glucose-fructose syrup", and ② rarely used, and thus irrelevant to most people I know. Similarly for hormones and antibiotics in beef, or added salt in some foods.
[1] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
[2] probably http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/diabetes-the-ri...
The current majority of people who believe that high fat diets are good for something other than getting fat and that carbohydrates cause obesity is no more a sign of a change in science than any popular political or religious belief.
It's a very popular conspiracy theory that nutritional scientists and doctors who follow them are part of or corrupted by the powerful vegan lobby, while the meat and dairy and processed added-oil food and fast food industries have the ideal products for making you thin, as long as you skip the traditional starches in those products, because everyone knows that the all the world's old cultures that lived on potatoes or rice or corn or wheat were full of massively obese people, and it's not until they got modern food industry amounts of butter, manufactured oil, and soybean-fed chicken that they became the crowds of dangerously thin looking people that you see in old pictures.
(I'm going to get downvoted into invisibility for being right, but people's health is at stake, so I'm going to reply anyway.)
The following quote is some basic information about cloudy blood:
http://www.questdiagnostics.com/home/physicians/testing-serv...
TURBIDITY (LIPEMIA)
Turbid, cloudy or milky serum (lipemic serum) may be produced by the presence of fatty substances (lipids) in the blood. Bacterial contamination may also cause cloudy serum. Moderately or grossly lipemic specimens may alter certain test results.
A recent meal may produce transient lipemia; therefore, we recommend that patients fast 12-16 hours before a blood specimen is obtained.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL39F782316B425249&fea...
HackerNews should promote culture of science and critical thinking and shouldn't be accepting of the fad diets like lchf, paleo, keto and other scaremongering bs.
This below is worth reading.
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...
The reason why people are fat is because they eat more carbs, fat and sugar, not because they eat a particular thing. They also sit a lot, and lie around. Something that can affect your weight and life significantly.
Because I do agree I do not find his diet advice relevant. But he definitely showed some lies and idiocy that Lustig displays.
Lustig studied at MIT+Cornell and is an MD with years of experience. He spent decades researching biochemistry and obesity and published numerous papers on these subjects.
Anthony Colpo, unless I'm mistaken, is just some random guy.
No, Hacker News should promote good conversation: civil discourse that respects people's right to differing views. This is a pluralistic place where everyone has a right to be wrong. Strident denunciations—even (or rather especially) in the name of correct scientific positions—are corrosive of the social contract here and should be eschewed regardless of how right you are, or believe you are.
Otherwise the endgame is a few absolutists yelling at each other, and everyone else leaving.
The flagged post was in this tone also, calling lies and requested we do not discuss the sugar hypotheses here. So you could interpret this as "The call for censorship got censored" ;)
The first link has 28 references to scientific texts and studies, the second has 57.
Speak what you want about his style, but his works are always well-researched and well-referenced.
So far I only find a lot echo-chamber forums and questionable publishers (Kopp-Verlag, esoteric/far right stuff)
It is absolutely not necessary to be a scaremongering pseudoscientist to notice that epidemiological result on 1.5 million people implying that meat raises all-mortality risk isn't relevant, despite being published in a relevant science journal. When the data is flawed no statistics wand waving will be able to eliminate the effects of bad lifestyle that most meat eaters have.
I'm a vegan, and I'm probably the best man to enjoy using the result of that study as a perfect health argument, but I'm not silly enough to believe that the result is relevant.
Did we even read the same articles?
Here are some examples I picked up in five minutes that look like completely reasonable referencing to me.
Anyone with an Internet connection can easily verify as much for themselves by visiting the Food and Agriculture (FAO) website, and checking the per capita intake of sweeteners in Japan for that year. Do that, and you’ll see the Japanese were averaging 52 calories per day from fruits, and a far more significant 174 calories daily from sugar. “Sweeteners, Other” and “Honey” supplied another 86 cals/day[7]
So just from sugar alone, the Japanese were obtaining 22 grams, or 4.4 teaspoons, of fructose per day. The Japanese do indeed eat fructose-containing sugar, and have been doing so for hundreds of years[8].
The same FAO data we just checked out shows that in 2009, the average per capita energy intake in Japan was 2,674 calories/day. The corresponding figure for the USA was 3,652 calories/day[7]
Unlike the US rise in obesity, which stems from both declining activity and a marked increase in per capita caloric intake[11, 7], Australia’s rise seems to have been caused almost entirely from decreasing physical activity.
The indignant paediatrician then completely refuted himself a moment later when he admitted that Americans were indeed eating more than they were in the 1980s[13]. And at 7:30 in his “Bitter Truth” video, Lustig acknowledges to his audience: “We are all eating more now than we did 20 years ago.”[4]
Taubes cites a 2004 CDC article reporting that since 1971, total fat intake increased among women by a mere 6.5 grams but decreased among men by 5.3 grams[14]. This gives the impression overall fat intake has remained relatively unchanged.
dang is obviously a low-carb paleo-saved-my-life advocate.
i just checked my posts and a lot of them are flagged.
okay, i'll leave the community.
thanks for loving me.
Just take the fact that angry users can downvote me to oblivion or flag my posts which are on topic.
Every time a Guardian subject on demonizing sugar and praising fat or any similar material was posted, my responses, which were sometimes less denouncing than this one, were downvoted or censored.
The majority just likes to believe fadists are saving them, instead of outright misinforming and scaring them into healthier but pseudoscientific lifestyles.
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...
Sure, it depends on the person and their tolerance negative effect, but there isn't any fumbling with BMI or flatly checking a person's weight.
The American obesity crisis for instance is largely because we dropped our arbitrary threshold down to the WHO's threshold and gained some tens of millions of obese citizens in the process.