Exercise and eating less is a valid response to the growing weight issue but it all stems from education and an understanding of how being overweight will impact your life and, more importantly, your family's life.
By education I don't mean college level stuff, I mean basic home skills and life skills education and instilling an understanding that fast food/sweets/crisps etc are fine in small amounts but that decent fruit, veg and fresh meat are the staple to a healthy life. Again, this doesn't need to be super complex, there isn't some sexy problem to be solved here, it is just basic, old fashioned food understanding etc. Think Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution type thing.
Also, this is something where governments also need to step up and educate. Free market ethos is fine but preemptive measures don't sell or make money for business so the governments need to fill this gap.
The fact that this is just now becoming a global problem indicates that perhaps there is a problem to be solved here beyond education. Mankind (and our pets) did not evolve to live the lifestyle we're living. Sitting at a computer all day, driving home, then sitting at a TV all night. Changing diet is fine and it works well for some. Others might not have such as easy time of it.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is. But if you do, you will be rich. Something has to change, globally: either our lifestyle or our bodily engineering. And changing lifestyles is not an easy thing to do.
But then it won't fix it sooner than in 10 000 years.
Technological progress (and life style changes that follow it) has outpaced whatever biological processes of adaptation there are by many orders of magnitude.
Also, this is something where governments also need to step up and educate.
No, no, a million times NO. At least in the US, the government already "educates" people about nutrition, and most of what they're pimping is horrible, horrible advice. I don't want some agency stealing my money, and then using it to teach me shit that's ultimately killing me.
I'd rather the role of government in correcting society-wide problems caused by hidden costs be simply ensuring those costs are properly accounted for up-front.
e.g.
You don't stop industrial pollution by educating Americans to not buy products that were created by factories that pollute. You stop industrial pollution by enforcing reasonably safe waste disposal methods, so those costs are reflected customer-facing prices. (And thereby also encouraging free market advances in disposal and production technologies.)
So why would you try to combat an obesity epidemic by attempting to educate people to not buy sugars? You simply identify the problems ('cheap' sugars in processed foods, huge portions) and ensure the costs are reflected up-front in the price (yes, a sin-tax on junk food and absurd portions).
Or, at the very least, stop government subsidies for the production and use of things that we know are contributing to the problem.
(cheap corn->cheap HFCS->cheap sugar in everything)
Exercise will speed-up weight loss if paired with a diet, and it's just plain healthy, regardless of weight issues.
But if the goal is to lose weight, exercise alone can be counterproductive, because leads people to think that slacking off in the gym for half an hour will offset that supersize menu that they will eat afterwards...
Changing (permanently) eating habits should be the first step and the final goal.
The positive thing is that your perception of food intake also changes. I lost 10ish kg after eating less, and now I'm eating various things I like and binging a bit, and I feel like I ate an ox. When I say "god, I binged again today", people say "uh, you only ate some cereal and a steak", so I weigh myself after two weeks of "binging" and I'm at the same weight.
My point is that maintenance becomes simple once you get used to eating less. Eating the amount you used to eat before now seems like a terrible excess (and I wasn't even overweight before).
>My point is that maintenance becomes simple once you get used to eating less. Eating the amount you used to eat before now seems like a terrible excess (and I wasn't even overweight before).
This honestly surprised me once I started trying to lose weight. I assumed it be a constant war with my will power to not gorge myself. After about two weeks of a very restricted diet, the desire to eat a lot, and often, just kind of drifted away.
I now feel super lethargic if I eat a big meal. I prefer eating a couple small meals through out the day. "Eat not to dullness," and whatnot. Your average fast food meal is now a pretty big amount of food for me -- I used to eat the stuff twice a day, and still want more.
It still surprises me. I used to eat a chocolate bar and want more, now I'm the guy who eats two blocks and puts it in the fridge. I never thought this to be possible.
It used to be that differences in obesity rates worldwide were explained by diet: the French ate rich food, but in smaller portions; the Japanese ate lots of white rice, but didn't eat much meat; etc.
That has been found to not hold up over time and so people seemed to explain it by culture: The US was fatter, because we sit in cars all day; in most other countries you have to walk considerable distance every day, even to use transit.
Now that, too, seems to be failing the data, as other countries become fatter without any notable shift in how they get around town.
It may be time we studied to what degree the worldwide spread of obesity maps to the worldwide spread of industrial food products.
Could it be the 'lag' between obesity becoming a problem in the US vs the rest of the world was nothing more than initial cultural resistance to processed food wearing down over time?
The question of how an individual can lose weight is pretty well understood (if difficult for many to practice).
The more interesting question is what enables entire cultures to surrender their previous generation's habits seemingly en masse.
> The question of how an individual can lose weight is pretty well understood (if difficult for many to practice).
From reading discussions and articles about it that pop up here from time to time, and also from talking with my family and friends, I'd disagree. What I actually perceive is that in discussions about loosing weight:
- a) people generalize personal anecdotes,
- b) there are dozens of popular diets, and people usually quote their favourite,
- c) whatever Real Science gets quoted, will soon be challenged by another paper saying something opposite,
- d) people try to reason from common sense ("surely if you eat less X you'll be less fat, because X does this-and-that"); I was a believer of the thermodynamics-like theory that deltaWeight = weight + (calories in - calories out)*stuff; many a post on HN convinced me that it's not true, even though it sounds much more obvious than typical dietetary nonsense you'll hear from your random friend.
I'm against blaming everything on people being not determined or hardworking enough. For one, it's wrong attitude (any system that assumes strong willpower or moral high ground from people will fail because of human nature; it's better to engineer around it), and secondly, there are indications that the same diet/exercise combination executed with the same determination will have great effects on some, moderate on others, and zero-to-negative on few unfortunate people.
It is quite true that the human body is subject to the limits described by thermodynamics (this should not be controversial).
That doesn't make it any easier to determine what calories out happens to be for a given person on a given day. It does mean that a reasonable estimate can be made and evaluated against a well tracked dietary intake (but well tracked there has its own set of problems).
Out of curiosity, what were the arguments that convinced you that simple calories in/out ins't valid?
I'm personally a tiny bit incredulous anytime someone mentions that they've tried cutting calories, but with no results. I've always wondered how they continue to get an energy surplus in the absence of input. These seemingly perpetual motion machines would be of great interest to science, I'm sure ;)
To be fair, the human body is pretty good at limiting calorie depletion when caloric intake decreases. When you cut calories, your body automatically scales back how much you are using.
Of course, this is why any good diet needs to be coupled with an exercise program.
Even better, increase your caloric intake, switch to a high-protein diet and start lifting some heavy weights. Muscle creation is metabolically expensive, and muscle maintenance uses a lot of calories. Furthermore, even though muscle is heavier than fat (omg you may gain weight!) it looks a lot slimmer and more fit.
Moral of the story: lift weights, eat protein, get fit, lose "mirror" pounds (even if you actually put more mass on)
All arguments went along the line: the body is a very complex mechanism and assuming that cutting down on calories will result in weight loss is an oversimplification; also that not all calories are equal.
>I was a believer of the thermodynamics-like theory that deltaWeight = weight + (calories in - calories out)*stuff; many a post on HN convinced me that it's not true
Like doing big-O notation, there are constants that get factored out. Some people have a higher or lower base metabolism, or respond differently to exercise.
You're not proposing, though, that it's possible to maintain or gain weight at a calorie deficit? That would be magical.
After years of failed diets and gym memberships, I also, became unconvinced that calories-activity=weight.
If it's not true, then not eating shouldn't kill us, and anorexia isn't an illness. Have you tried to stop eating? When I tried to wean myself off food, I lost 12 lbs. I'm completely serious -- I went for a week without solid food, taking in only 32oz of soda and 24oz of beer per day (while not working).
from what I read, you completely lack basic nutrition knowledge, and this is the real problem, not the failed diets.
I'm absolutely convinced that you would get an adequate fit starting to study very "standard" nutrition books and understanding what you're doing.
"Losing weight" is a concept that must be absolutely removed. Boxers for example lose a couple of kg in a very short time before being weighted for matches.
Does this mean they successfully got a better shape? No.
Study, and you will understand how things work.
Attacking ignorance and recommending a long course of study won't put someone in better shape. Part of the problem is ignorance, but your answer isn't solving that problem.
"Losing weight" was absolutely necessary for me, and it will be for most people -- unless you're suggesting that humans can be healthy at 5'11" and 260lbs, or 5'5" and 210lbs -- but that seems too unrealistic.
What I learned of nutrition (after that experiment) taught me that most of what's in bread, pasta, fruit, etc is cruft. Most "health" food is just more empty calories in a "healthier" package.
> many a post on HN convinced me that it's not true, even though it sounds much more obvious than typical dietetary nonsense you'll hear from your random friend.
HN is a place that may be full of people who's brilliant in their field, which unfortunately #1) has nothing to do with fitness #2) it's correlated with being "not exactly fit", so certainly this is not the right place to establish beliefs in the fitness field.
The general algorithm that more activity, better quality food and less total food will lead to weight decrease holds for even those unfortunate individuals who have genetic disadvantages and/or a history of obesity.
Yes, they may need to do much more activity and eat much less food or in different ratios than others to see results, but that doesn't change the fact that the same algorithm is: 1. the only known way to make progress, 2. well understood.
I was trying to sidestep the very issue (and same old tired conversation) you're trying to avoid: blaming individuals.
Because while it's arguable that a given hypothetical person might be overweight due their own choices and failings, it's next to impossible to argue that massive society-wide changes in health, in a single generation, are simply the result of huge swaths of a society all making the same bad personal decision, all at the same time.
In the US I always felt part of the problem was the fear fat campaign we've had for so long that has convinced people to have diets that are low in fat and high in carbs as opposed to a more balanced approach.
Plus so many of our foods here are processed, including almost everything having cheap sugars in them, that it cannot be healthy.
I have no evidence to back it up but I would think the spread of obesity can possibly be tied to the spread of industrialized processed foods, just as you say.
We were a lot thinner back when we ate primarily carbs, most of which were processed (historically the American diet was primarily white flour and potatos).
Putting aside the problems of accurately figuring out diets, your charts show very little different consumption in total carbohydrates per day. In 1909-19 it shows 487g carbs per day, and in 2004 is shows 481g carbs per day. The carbs in 1909 were often processed, but there was less sugar (potatoes are starch, and don't contain fructose). Sugar/sweets consumption increased from 12.9% of the diet in 1909-19 to 17.3% of the diet in 2004.
Further, your chart shows that meat consumption went down (13.3% of diet in 1909-19 to 8.2% in 2004), whole milk consumption switched to lowfat milk and cheese, green vegetable consumption dropped, butter dropped (4.4% to 1%), lard & beef tallow consumption dropped (3.8% to 1.4%). These animal fats were replaced by salad and cooking oils (vegetable oils), going from 0.7% of the diet to 11.1% of the diet.
Basically, while total carbohydrate and cholesterol consumption remained the same, Americans began eating more sugars and less starches and ate less animal fat and more vegetable fat.
I think we may benefit from drawing a distinction between processed foods as in processed flour and processed foods as in "rolled off an assembly line with added sugars, preservatives, etc."
My concern is much more for the latter.
Paleo-fans may well have a point about whether flour and such is less healthful than raw plant matter. But that difference didn't seem to manifest into a society-wide weight problem until industrially packaged food gained wide circulation.
Not even the achievement of food-security or the introduction of 'fast food' aligns with the obesity problem like the massive increase of consumption of ready-to-eat types of foods.
Including, notably, chain restaurants peddling industrial foods, displacing local restaurants cooking from scratch (or at lest more often from scratch, or from a place much closer to scratch).
Not sure why you got downvoted. There's a lot of evidence for what you say. The book Living Low Carb by Jonny Bowden provides a ton of citations and information to support exactly this mindset. In fact, it's what I believe as well. Since I was just diagnosed with diabetes, I've eliminated from my diet:
all grains
potatoes
all bread
pasta
table sugar
most processed foods
sodas and other sugar laden beverages
I now eat meat, fish/seafood, dairy, fresh fruit, and fresh vegetables, with a focus on making sure that the carbs I do get are mostly low glycemic load carbs, and that the sugar I get is part of something (fruit,milk) that requires digestion for the sugar to hit my bloodstream.
Living Low Carb makes a strong case that the "fear fat" campaign is, indeed, utter bullshit. And given how damaging sugar is to your body (excess blood sugar contributes to so many maladies it's ridiculous) I'll take my chances going low carb / high fat & protein.
Many people are too poor to eat well. When all you can afford is spaghetti and potatoes, you will gain weight and experience suboptimal energy. You'll also be more likely to suffer anxiety, depression and get diabetes.
Believe me, you don't think all that well either - decisions become more emotional than rational - so getting out of the hole gets even harder.
Instead of finger pointing, chastising and instructing, I think more compassion is required when it comes to dealing with the complex issue of obesity.
"Eating healthily is more expensive than eating junk"
This assertion is blatantly false. I can get full on excellent quality food for about the price of a mcdonald's meal + a bag of chips.
I've eaten like crap, and I've eaten well. It's very cheap to eat healthy. Most people are just making excuses for not wanting to practice self-control or educate themselves.
A lot of people can't even afford a mcdonald's meal + a bag of chips.
Everywhere I look, fat is cheaper than protein, white bread is cheaper than whole-grain multigrain bread, white rice is cheaper than brown rice, a pack of sugar is cheaper than the same weight in fresh fruits and veggies, and a bottle of sauce made with nothing but salt and MSG is cheaper than a bottle of sauce made with natural ingredients. When you need to feed 2 teenagers with a budget of single-digit dollars per day, every penny counts.
Assume that unhealthy food is $1/serving and 500kcal/serving.
Assume that healthy food is $2/serving and 400kcal/serving.
Assume that you need 2000kcal/day.
A healthy diet costs $10 for "just enough calories". An unhealthy diet costs only $4 for the same calories. If you ate 3000kcal/day, it would still only cost $6. So yes, it can be cheaper to eat a lot of unhealthy food than to eat only a small amount of healthy food if the price differential is large enough. It's also easier to overdose on unhealthy food because the calories are so concentrated. A second bowl of ramen can contain 400 calories. A second head of lettuce might only have 40 calories.
Of course, you might face a million-dollar loss 20 years later because of heart disease, but would it really enter the calculations of a single mom with a weekly grocery budget of $35?
Spoken like a person of privilege - a widespread epidemic clearly must be hordes of poor people too lazy to exercise self-control.
Having lived in both incredibly poor neighborhoods and incredibly wealthy ones, I'll say this:
It's possible to eat healthily in poor neighborhoods, it takes a lot of work - a lot more work than it does for a wealthy person living in a wealthy place. I've observed this in myself: I gained enormous amounts of weight while living in a poor, working-class neighborhood, and promptly shed it once I moved to a wealthy upper middle-class neighborhood. I've bounced back and forth between poor areas and rich areas since then, and the pattern has so far held up.
But, anecdotes not equivalent to data, etc etc.
In a upper-middle class neighborhood healthy diets practically come after you with a baseball bat. It's steeped in the general consciousness of the area, support by people who possess the freedom of finance, time, and effort to think about such things, and it's supported by the merchants in the area.
The same is not true in poor neighborhoods, where fast is king to a population of overworked and tired people. When you're holding down multiple jobs and raising kids at the same time, the CSA subscription may be cheaper and healthier, but it also requires time you don't have. Merchant offerings in the area reflect this reality, and so even someone with the intent to eat healthily will find that availability of healthy food is substantially lower.
We are fortunate in that we have the resources with which to abstract many annoying details away from our lives so we can concentrate on the important things: good bodily health, mental well-being, and the such. Most of the population isn't so lucky.
Did poor people 100 years ago have the same problem? I doubt it. But today, poor people in America are fatter than rich people. Fat poor people? There's something strange going on here...
This seems only incredible because you don't understand the mechanics of being poor.
Contrary to popular belief, the main bottleneck of being poor is not access to food - the market has solved that part remarkably well, and farming improvements throughout the last century (Borlaug is perhaps rolling in his grave) means that food in general is so cheap that everyone in a developed country has access to it.
The main bottleneck of being poor is time.
A poor person spends considerably more time just to ensure survival than a wealthy person, and has remarkably little "disposable" time remaining in a day. Long, irregular hours, possibility of multiple jobs, lack of access to speedy/on-demand transportation, lack of access to time-creating conveniences (laundromat far way instead of laundry in the house, for example), all serve to make time the rarest resource for the poor.
That's not an exhaustive list by the way, and I don't pretend to know the full exhaustive list.
All of this means that the poor gravitates towards fast, low-effort food, and the rest makes sense.
If poor people can be fat, we need a different word for what people 100 years ago would have called "poor". Maybe "destitute" could serve this purpose?
In any case, if you're poor, your time is cheap. This doesn't jibe with the claim that the poor lack enough time to, say, cook healthy meals for themselves. Poor people 100 years ago were poorer than most poor people today, and yet they largely cooked for themselves—and they were much thinner.
What accounts for this change? My suspicion is that it's dependence without responsibility. A hundred years ago, private charities (which are accountable to their donors) were in a position to hold recipients of their largesse responsible for their actions. But such charities have now largely been displaced by government agencies. These agencies have been captured by special interest groups,† and charity has mutated into entitlements. As a result of receiving benefits without accountability, the poor have lost much of the knowledge needed to be self-sufficient, which motivates further intervention. It's the law of unintended consequences followed by iatrogenic escalation.
†These interest groups are not the poor themselves, but rather those who speak for the poor. I think it's no coincidence that the former tend to vote for the latter. Political patronage is one of the oldest plays in the book.
I'd guess you'll find the above narrative unconvincing, but I like how you think, so I thought it was worth a shot.
"Most people are just making excuses for not wanting to practice self-control or educate themselves."
This is true, but not a very useful thing to say. Trivial observations of others' moral failings are often a way for us to feel better about ourselves and our choices, but such statements are not solving the problem.
If you live in the ghetto (where shopping options are corner stores or equivalent, not cheap hippie coops) and have no time (due to kids, poor time management, long hours at a low paying job, ...), don't have a real kitchen or any skills, etc., it is a lot harder to eat healthy and cheaply.
The first part of #2 is true, but the latter part is more a moral or philosophical question.
>Eating poorly impairs your ability to think to the extent that you cannot be held responsible for your poor choice of diet
You appear to have fallen into the trap of believing that the concepts of compassion and personal responsibility are at odds with each other. American politics have been poisoned by the same idea, and it's a real shame.
1. How long ago was this? 'Becoming a problem' implies that it is a new-ish thing, and an observation from 5 years ago isn't really current.
2. Are you sure you don't mean "hard to find 1 morbidly obese person everyday? You do realize that a BMI of 30 or greater is obese, right? And In non-tight and non-revealing clothes, you probably aren't even going to be able to tell a person with a BMI of 30-35 is obese. But they are according to studies like the linked article refers to.
I don't think it's changed, I'm not commenting on that, merely saying most people don't realize they are, or are seeing an obese person. People think Obese = rolls of fat when in fact you can be pretty fit looking with clothes on.
I'm pretty sure a BMI of 30+ is still not the healthiest. Just not as obvious as a person with a 40+ BMI (morbidly obese)
That sense is just as nonsensical. Would you also say that people in the 19th century were "addicted to coal" and "addicted to whale oil" and that people before that were "addicted to wood fires"? Oil is just the latest, most economical energy source in an entire series of sources. In a few years modern-day Luddites will change to "addicted to natural gas" or "addicted to nuclear fission", "addicted to fusion" or whatever the most popular portable energy source is then. Whenever there is more of something (food, energy, comfort, luxury, pr0n) than someone approves of (Puritans, Luddites, environmental extremists, religionists, etc.), they demonize it by saying people are addicted to it. It's called propaganda.
Eh, I would say that in some ways the analogy to an addiction makes sense for oil. The point is to illustrate a bad cycle that we have. Oil is our cheapest portable energy solution, so we use it in most of our existing technology that needs lots of portable energy. That has a negative impact on research into new portable energy solutions because it is unlikely that any can be backwards compatible with old technology. As a result, oil continues to be the cheapest portable energy solution even as it gets more and more expensive. The analogy isn't perfect, of course, but no analogy is.
What makes no sense to me whatsoever is to try to extend this analogy to sugar.
For losing weight. For health in general, both seem about equally important. (And lots of exercise will allow you to get away with a crappy diet much easier.)
+1 as well. most of the people with bad habits understands or (refuses to understand) what doing physical activity works out the symptom, not the cause.
unfortunately, it's too easy to speculate on diets sitting on a chair.
I also enjoy cycling and used to cycle-commute. Unfortunately I have now moved to a cold, wet country and work too far from home for it to be practical, and am getting fatter...
It's not a great substitute - it costs ~$50-100 per month and an extra 45-90 minutes per day...instead of saving gas money. I too live in a cold wet land, but can't afford the cost in time or money.
I've just moved from Perth, Australia, where it is pleasant enough almost every morning to just to throw on shorts and a top and go for it.
I'm now in the UK. Getting a face-full of road spray and having to manage your temperature (ugh it's cold, no wait now I'm moving it's hot) and try not to get drenched in either rain or just condensed sweat is frakking NASTY.
My first thought was they are exerting too much pressure on the surface of the world and endangering the integrity of the crust... need to get out more...
I've been a runner for a long time but occasionally I try new forms of exercise / fun. In the not too recent past I joined a rowing club. The dues were cheap and it's a great workout. And I take advantage of hiking if I'm in an area that has mountains.
I think combining fairly elementary economics and physics can reveal the cause of obesity epidemics.
Consumers seek to maximize the taste/cost ratio where
cost = the monetary cost of food + time to prepare
Sure you can eat healthy for cheap if you're willing to eat things that are not that tasty or if you're willing to spend time learning to prepare foods and then preparing them on a regular basis. I'd really like to see the economics behind that - like most things, stuff produced in mass is "cheaper" than stuff we make ourselves, maybe not in terms of monetary costs, but definitely in terms of labor savings.
The tastiest things tend to pack a big caloric impact, which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.
Cheaper tasty calories lead to greater caloric intake, which often occurs at the same time an economy is shifting to less labor intensive work. This creates a perfect storm where caloric expenditure is declining at the same time caloric intake is increasing, leading to an obesity epidemic. It's simple physics, conservation of energy/matter. The energy intake of humans increases, but their expenditure declines, the surplus has to go somewhere. That somewhere is our fat stores.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadBy education I don't mean college level stuff, I mean basic home skills and life skills education and instilling an understanding that fast food/sweets/crisps etc are fine in small amounts but that decent fruit, veg and fresh meat are the staple to a healthy life. Again, this doesn't need to be super complex, there isn't some sexy problem to be solved here, it is just basic, old fashioned food understanding etc. Think Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution type thing.
Also, this is something where governments also need to step up and educate. Free market ethos is fine but preemptive measures don't sell or make money for business so the governments need to fill this gap.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is. But if you do, you will be rich. Something has to change, globally: either our lifestyle or our bodily engineering. And changing lifestyles is not an easy thing to do.
evolution didn't magically stop.
Technological progress (and life style changes that follow it) has outpaced whatever biological processes of adaptation there are by many orders of magnitude.
No, no, a million times NO. At least in the US, the government already "educates" people about nutrition, and most of what they're pimping is horrible, horrible advice. I don't want some agency stealing my money, and then using it to teach me shit that's ultimately killing me.
e.g. You don't stop industrial pollution by educating Americans to not buy products that were created by factories that pollute. You stop industrial pollution by enforcing reasonably safe waste disposal methods, so those costs are reflected customer-facing prices. (And thereby also encouraging free market advances in disposal and production technologies.)
So why would you try to combat an obesity epidemic by attempting to educate people to not buy sugars? You simply identify the problems ('cheap' sugars in processed foods, huge portions) and ensure the costs are reflected up-front in the price (yes, a sin-tax on junk food and absurd portions).
Or, at the very least, stop government subsidies for the production and use of things that we know are contributing to the problem. (cheap corn->cheap HFCS->cheap sugar in everything)
But if the goal is to lose weight, exercise alone can be counterproductive, because leads people to think that slacking off in the gym for half an hour will offset that supersize menu that they will eat afterwards...
Changing (permanently) eating habits should be the first step and the final goal.
That word "permanently" is really key. It's sad to watch people say "Oh, I can't eat that now because I'm on a diet. But in two more weeks..."
My point is that maintenance becomes simple once you get used to eating less. Eating the amount you used to eat before now seems like a terrible excess (and I wasn't even overweight before).
This honestly surprised me once I started trying to lose weight. I assumed it be a constant war with my will power to not gorge myself. After about two weeks of a very restricted diet, the desire to eat a lot, and often, just kind of drifted away.
I now feel super lethargic if I eat a big meal. I prefer eating a couple small meals through out the day. "Eat not to dullness," and whatnot. Your average fast food meal is now a pretty big amount of food for me -- I used to eat the stuff twice a day, and still want more.
That has been found to not hold up over time and so people seemed to explain it by culture: The US was fatter, because we sit in cars all day; in most other countries you have to walk considerable distance every day, even to use transit.
Now that, too, seems to be failing the data, as other countries become fatter without any notable shift in how they get around town.
It may be time we studied to what degree the worldwide spread of obesity maps to the worldwide spread of industrial food products.
Could it be the 'lag' between obesity becoming a problem in the US vs the rest of the world was nothing more than initial cultural resistance to processed food wearing down over time?
The question of how an individual can lose weight is pretty well understood (if difficult for many to practice).
The more interesting question is what enables entire cultures to surrender their previous generation's habits seemingly en masse.
From reading discussions and articles about it that pop up here from time to time, and also from talking with my family and friends, I'd disagree. What I actually perceive is that in discussions about loosing weight:
- a) people generalize personal anecdotes,
- b) there are dozens of popular diets, and people usually quote their favourite,
- c) whatever Real Science gets quoted, will soon be challenged by another paper saying something opposite,
- d) people try to reason from common sense ("surely if you eat less X you'll be less fat, because X does this-and-that"); I was a believer of the thermodynamics-like theory that deltaWeight = weight + (calories in - calories out)*stuff; many a post on HN convinced me that it's not true, even though it sounds much more obvious than typical dietetary nonsense you'll hear from your random friend.
I'm against blaming everything on people being not determined or hardworking enough. For one, it's wrong attitude (any system that assumes strong willpower or moral high ground from people will fail because of human nature; it's better to engineer around it), and secondly, there are indications that the same diet/exercise combination executed with the same determination will have great effects on some, moderate on others, and zero-to-negative on few unfortunate people.
That doesn't make it any easier to determine what calories out happens to be for a given person on a given day. It does mean that a reasonable estimate can be made and evaluated against a well tracked dietary intake (but well tracked there has its own set of problems).
I'm personally a tiny bit incredulous anytime someone mentions that they've tried cutting calories, but with no results. I've always wondered how they continue to get an energy surplus in the absence of input. These seemingly perpetual motion machines would be of great interest to science, I'm sure ;)
Of course, this is why any good diet needs to be coupled with an exercise program.
Even better, increase your caloric intake, switch to a high-protein diet and start lifting some heavy weights. Muscle creation is metabolically expensive, and muscle maintenance uses a lot of calories. Furthermore, even though muscle is heavier than fat (omg you may gain weight!) it looks a lot slimmer and more fit.
Moral of the story: lift weights, eat protein, get fit, lose "mirror" pounds (even if you actually put more mass on)
Example discussion I pulled out of google:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710399
Like doing big-O notation, there are constants that get factored out. Some people have a higher or lower base metabolism, or respond differently to exercise.
You're not proposing, though, that it's possible to maintain or gain weight at a calorie deficit? That would be magical.
If it's not true, then not eating shouldn't kill us, and anorexia isn't an illness. Have you tried to stop eating? When I tried to wean myself off food, I lost 12 lbs. I'm completely serious -- I went for a week without solid food, taking in only 32oz of soda and 24oz of beer per day (while not working).
I'm absolutely convinced that you would get an adequate fit starting to study very "standard" nutrition books and understanding what you're doing.
"Losing weight" is a concept that must be absolutely removed. Boxers for example lose a couple of kg in a very short time before being weighted for matches. Does this mean they successfully got a better shape? No. Study, and you will understand how things work.
"Losing weight" was absolutely necessary for me, and it will be for most people -- unless you're suggesting that humans can be healthy at 5'11" and 260lbs, or 5'5" and 210lbs -- but that seems too unrealistic.
What I learned of nutrition (after that experiment) taught me that most of what's in bread, pasta, fruit, etc is cruft. Most "health" food is just more empty calories in a "healthier" package.
HN is a place that may be full of people who's brilliant in their field, which unfortunately #1) has nothing to do with fitness #2) it's correlated with being "not exactly fit", so certainly this is not the right place to establish beliefs in the fitness field.
Yes, they may need to do much more activity and eat much less food or in different ratios than others to see results, but that doesn't change the fact that the same algorithm is: 1. the only known way to make progress, 2. well understood.
I was trying to sidestep the very issue (and same old tired conversation) you're trying to avoid: blaming individuals.
Because while it's arguable that a given hypothetical person might be overweight due their own choices and failings, it's next to impossible to argue that massive society-wide changes in health, in a single generation, are simply the result of huge swaths of a society all making the same bad personal decision, all at the same time.
Plus so many of our foods here are processed, including almost everything having cheap sugars in them, that it cannot be healthy.
I have no evidence to back it up but I would think the spread of obesity can possibly be tied to the spread of industrialized processed foods, just as you say.
https://docs.google.com/a/patch.com/viewer?url=http://www.cn...
Further, your chart shows that meat consumption went down (13.3% of diet in 1909-19 to 8.2% in 2004), whole milk consumption switched to lowfat milk and cheese, green vegetable consumption dropped, butter dropped (4.4% to 1%), lard & beef tallow consumption dropped (3.8% to 1.4%). These animal fats were replaced by salad and cooking oils (vegetable oils), going from 0.7% of the diet to 11.1% of the diet.
Basically, while total carbohydrate and cholesterol consumption remained the same, Americans began eating more sugars and less starches and ate less animal fat and more vegetable fat.
My concern is much more for the latter.
Paleo-fans may well have a point about whether flour and such is less healthful than raw plant matter. But that difference didn't seem to manifest into a society-wide weight problem until industrially packaged food gained wide circulation.
Not even the achievement of food-security or the introduction of 'fast food' aligns with the obesity problem like the massive increase of consumption of ready-to-eat types of foods.
Including, notably, chain restaurants peddling industrial foods, displacing local restaurants cooking from scratch (or at lest more often from scratch, or from a place much closer to scratch).
all grains
potatoes
all bread
pasta
table sugar
most processed foods
sodas and other sugar laden beverages
I now eat meat, fish/seafood, dairy, fresh fruit, and fresh vegetables, with a focus on making sure that the carbs I do get are mostly low glycemic load carbs, and that the sugar I get is part of something (fruit,milk) that requires digestion for the sugar to hit my bloodstream.
Living Low Carb makes a strong case that the "fear fat" campaign is, indeed, utter bullshit. And given how damaging sugar is to your body (excess blood sugar contributes to so many maladies it's ridiculous) I'll take my chances going low carb / high fat & protein.
Believe me, you don't think all that well either - decisions become more emotional than rational - so getting out of the hole gets even harder.
Instead of finger pointing, chastising and instructing, I think more compassion is required when it comes to dealing with the complex issue of obesity.
1. Eating healthily is more expensive than eating junk
2. Eating poorly impairs your ability to think to the extent that you cannot be held responsible for your poor choice of diet
I find them very hard to believe (even though I hear them often). Do you have any links to the studies or evidence that show this?
This assertion is blatantly false. I can get full on excellent quality food for about the price of a mcdonald's meal + a bag of chips.
I've eaten like crap, and I've eaten well. It's very cheap to eat healthy. Most people are just making excuses for not wanting to practice self-control or educate themselves.
Not that kind of junk. Think ramen noodles.
Everywhere I look, fat is cheaper than protein, white bread is cheaper than whole-grain multigrain bread, white rice is cheaper than brown rice, a pack of sugar is cheaper than the same weight in fresh fruits and veggies, and a bottle of sauce made with nothing but salt and MSG is cheaper than a bottle of sauce made with natural ingredients. When you need to feed 2 teenagers with a budget of single-digit dollars per day, every penny counts.
Assume that healthy food is $2/serving and 400kcal/serving.
Assume that you need 2000kcal/day.
A healthy diet costs $10 for "just enough calories". An unhealthy diet costs only $4 for the same calories. If you ate 3000kcal/day, it would still only cost $6. So yes, it can be cheaper to eat a lot of unhealthy food than to eat only a small amount of healthy food if the price differential is large enough. It's also easier to overdose on unhealthy food because the calories are so concentrated. A second bowl of ramen can contain 400 calories. A second head of lettuce might only have 40 calories.
Of course, you might face a million-dollar loss 20 years later because of heart disease, but would it really enter the calculations of a single mom with a weekly grocery budget of $35?
Having lived in both incredibly poor neighborhoods and incredibly wealthy ones, I'll say this:
It's possible to eat healthily in poor neighborhoods, it takes a lot of work - a lot more work than it does for a wealthy person living in a wealthy place. I've observed this in myself: I gained enormous amounts of weight while living in a poor, working-class neighborhood, and promptly shed it once I moved to a wealthy upper middle-class neighborhood. I've bounced back and forth between poor areas and rich areas since then, and the pattern has so far held up.
But, anecdotes not equivalent to data, etc etc.
In a upper-middle class neighborhood healthy diets practically come after you with a baseball bat. It's steeped in the general consciousness of the area, support by people who possess the freedom of finance, time, and effort to think about such things, and it's supported by the merchants in the area.
The same is not true in poor neighborhoods, where fast is king to a population of overworked and tired people. When you're holding down multiple jobs and raising kids at the same time, the CSA subscription may be cheaper and healthier, but it also requires time you don't have. Merchant offerings in the area reflect this reality, and so even someone with the intent to eat healthily will find that availability of healthy food is substantially lower.
We are fortunate in that we have the resources with which to abstract many annoying details away from our lives so we can concentrate on the important things: good bodily health, mental well-being, and the such. Most of the population isn't so lucky.
Though the relationship appears to have weakened in recent years:
http://frac.org/initiatives/hunger-and-obesity/are-low-incom...
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20050502/rich-poor-gap-narrow...
This seems only incredible because you don't understand the mechanics of being poor.
Contrary to popular belief, the main bottleneck of being poor is not access to food - the market has solved that part remarkably well, and farming improvements throughout the last century (Borlaug is perhaps rolling in his grave) means that food in general is so cheap that everyone in a developed country has access to it.
The main bottleneck of being poor is time.
A poor person spends considerably more time just to ensure survival than a wealthy person, and has remarkably little "disposable" time remaining in a day. Long, irregular hours, possibility of multiple jobs, lack of access to speedy/on-demand transportation, lack of access to time-creating conveniences (laundromat far way instead of laundry in the house, for example), all serve to make time the rarest resource for the poor.
That's not an exhaustive list by the way, and I don't pretend to know the full exhaustive list.
All of this means that the poor gravitates towards fast, low-effort food, and the rest makes sense.
In any case, if you're poor, your time is cheap. This doesn't jibe with the claim that the poor lack enough time to, say, cook healthy meals for themselves. Poor people 100 years ago were poorer than most poor people today, and yet they largely cooked for themselves—and they were much thinner.
What accounts for this change? My suspicion is that it's dependence without responsibility. A hundred years ago, private charities (which are accountable to their donors) were in a position to hold recipients of their largesse responsible for their actions. But such charities have now largely been displaced by government agencies. These agencies have been captured by special interest groups,† and charity has mutated into entitlements. As a result of receiving benefits without accountability, the poor have lost much of the knowledge needed to be self-sufficient, which motivates further intervention. It's the law of unintended consequences followed by iatrogenic escalation.
†These interest groups are not the poor themselves, but rather those who speak for the poor. I think it's no coincidence that the former tend to vote for the latter. Political patronage is one of the oldest plays in the book.
I'd guess you'll find the above narrative unconvincing, but I like how you think, so I thought it was worth a shot.
This is true, but not a very useful thing to say. Trivial observations of others' moral failings are often a way for us to feel better about ourselves and our choices, but such statements are not solving the problem.
The first part of #2 is true, but the latter part is more a moral or philosophical question.
You appear to have fallen into the trap of believing that the concepts of compassion and personal responsibility are at odds with each other. American politics have been poisoned by the same idea, and it's a real shame.
Judge not, so that ye shall not be judged
Vs.
Judge, and expect to be judged
You can live healthy on little money. But most people don't want to eat that kind of food. (George Orwell made a similar observation.)
Potatoes are actually pretty healthy.
2. Are you sure you don't mean "hard to find 1 morbidly obese person everyday? You do realize that a BMI of 30 or greater is obese, right? And In non-tight and non-revealing clothes, you probably aren't even going to be able to tell a person with a BMI of 30-35 is obese. But they are according to studies like the linked article refers to.
For instance, this guy is obese (BMI of 30.7): http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/511-220.html
And this guy is overweight (BMI of 26.2): http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/603-210.html
I'm pretty sure a BMI of 30+ is still not the healthiest. Just not as obvious as a person with a 40+ BMI (morbidly obese)
This is supposed to be a list of "facts" but in reality, the "sugar is addictive" hypothesis is still, well, a hypothesis.
>that the government is scared that there will be political unrest if the price of sugar goes up
It's the Chinese government. "Scared that there will be political unrest if X" is their default state for any untested X.
I took addictive in the sense that we are "addicted to oil."
What makes no sense to me whatsoever is to try to extend this analogy to sugar.
"I believe that the solution to this problem is exercise, and those who would like to decrease their weight should try different sport activities."
What about eating healthier? That strikes me as a more effective and maintainable solution.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121015142405.ht...
Though its a small sample and an extreme one at that, the contestants' diets accounted for approximately 65% of their weight loss.
For losing weight. For health in general, both seem about equally important. (And lots of exercise will allow you to get away with a crappy diet much easier.)
unfortunately, it's too easy to speculate on diets sitting on a chair.
I've just moved from Perth, Australia, where it is pleasant enough almost every morning to just to throw on shorts and a top and go for it.
I'm now in the UK. Getting a face-full of road spray and having to manage your temperature (ugh it's cold, no wait now I'm moving it's hot) and try not to get drenched in either rain or just condensed sweat is frakking NASTY.
I'm also based in the UK. Cambridge to be exact. I commute by bike in any weather. English weather is actually quite tame.
My first thought was they are exerting too much pressure on the surface of the world and endangering the integrity of the crust... need to get out more...
Consumers seek to maximize the taste/cost ratio where cost = the monetary cost of food + time to prepare
Sure you can eat healthy for cheap if you're willing to eat things that are not that tasty or if you're willing to spend time learning to prepare foods and then preparing them on a regular basis. I'd really like to see the economics behind that - like most things, stuff produced in mass is "cheaper" than stuff we make ourselves, maybe not in terms of monetary costs, but definitely in terms of labor savings.
The tastiest things tend to pack a big caloric impact, which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.
Cheaper tasty calories lead to greater caloric intake, which often occurs at the same time an economy is shifting to less labor intensive work. This creates a perfect storm where caloric expenditure is declining at the same time caloric intake is increasing, leading to an obesity epidemic. It's simple physics, conservation of energy/matter. The energy intake of humans increases, but their expenditure declines, the surplus has to go somewhere. That somewhere is our fat stores.