I'm pretty confident that we'll see a reversal in the trend, for humans at least. The last 70+ years have been unprecedented in the history of nutrition, with high calorie and high fat food being more affordable than ever and with the addition of additives (such as the "E numbers" in Europe) also tastier than ever. We were simply unprepared to deal with such a high availability of tasty and highly nutritious food, because most people didn't know what a good diet looks like. the term diet in itself is a pretty new term, the whole concept of choosing what you eat might seem pretty absurd to earlier generations, which simply ate whatever they could get.
But I'm confident that current generations will adapt to these new circumstances in our nutrition and start learning about their diets and start teaching their kids how to eat properly. and I'm pretty certain that within 50 years or so, widespread obesity will be nothing but a short and weird artifact during the turn of the millennium.
I think you may be over-optimistic. I live in a poor neighborhood. Food stamps are the norm. "high calorie and high fat food being more affordable" is true, but the food necessary for a good diet is completely absent. The only food in walking distance is the gas-station (think Big Gulps and Twinkies).
This isn't an educational problem, it's a systemic socioeconomic one. And it's not likely to work itself out in the next 50 years.
Surely everyone in your neighborhood is not subsisting on Big Gulps and Twinkies. When they get to the grocery store (even if it is just once per month) to use those food stamps, there is food other than twinkies and big gulps to be had, right?
There are clearly systemic socioeconomic issues, but this seems to be an educational one. Being able to read the backs of packages and know what is better for you at the same price point. For example how $2 bag of beans are better for you than a $2 bag of chips (in general). Or $.75 canned vegetables are better for you than $1 canned beefaroni (in general). The amount that it takes to fill you up vs. the nutritional value / cost is obvious in those 2 examples but gets murky pretty quick for a lot of people.
People do not need to live off of fresh produce and coconut waters to not be obese.
I think there isn't enough public education in this area, and I believe that labeling requirements are not nearly as helpful as they could be and are often deceptive (in particular to serving portions) to consumers.
The biggest problem is that in poor areas, supermarkets / grocery stores don't set up shop because of crime and the smaller amount of money that they can get from customers. So, in general, poor areas are served by convenience stores. They might have some garbage produce that's going to be not fresh and relatively expensive, and they have a lot of cheap, unhealthy, calorie-rich food. In order to get to the grocery store, it's usually more than half an hour, if not more. And if they don't have a car, they're limited to what they can carry. And if they're living in a cramped apartment, their storage space is really limited.
I have none of these problems - I live less than ten minutes from four different grocery stores, (Albertson's, Safeway, Fred Meyer, and Costco) have a freezer chest in addition to a regular refrigerator, and an enormous amount of cabinet space for non-perishable goods. Poor people have none of that. So, they buy shitty food from the bodega and the local Taco Bell so that they don't have to travel long distances and store food.
I understand the concept of food deserts, but what about all the poor obese children that do not live in urban areas riddled with crime so bad that stores can't even stay open? The urban areas in the South are few and far between, yet there is an overwhelming number of poor obese people.
I agree in some cases it is logistics, but it would seem that in most cases it is just ignorance of dollar-per-nutritive-calorie. Even among well educated groups with money to spend this can be hard to figure out, but it really seems to be devastating the poor.
> The urban areas in the South are few and far between, yet there is an overwhelming number of poor obese people.
I often drive from middle GA to Raleigh, NC to visit friends by way of state and US highways, rather than the interstate system. The number of poor or low population towns I pass through is quite high. In a similar vein to businesses not wanting to set up shop in poor, crime-ridden urban communities, it's just not economically sound to set up a full-featured grocery store in these small, poor towns.
> Surely everyone in your neighborhood is not subsisting on Big Gulps and Twinkies.
Sadly, they do.
Vegetables, pastas, lean meats? Those are strangers to a lot of people.
Instead, people will buy TV-Diners, frozen french-fries, hot-dog sausages, mac n' cheese. All things that won't fill you up unless you eat double or triple portions.
It is indeed an educational problem. We teach good habits do kids, but old habits die hard, especially for parents who don't have the time or education to build effective meals.
Have you ever been poor? When you get home from your 12th hour of working (at your second job) and need to feed yourself & the kids the last thing you have the energy to do is spend an hour cooking a nutritious meal, even if you had the time to go out to the supermarket (by bus) and the money to stock up on things that aren't going to go bad by the time you eat them. So you toss some fish fingers and frozen french fries in the oven to feed your family before you all go to bed to start the cycle again
Over 60% of people in poverty do not work at all or work one part-time job, let alone 2 jobs. Of the 40% that is left, nearly all work a single (low-paying) full-time job. The old canard about poor people working multiple jobs and still on the edge of being homeless is true for a very tiny fraction of people.
Btw, 12 hrs. a day for 5 days a week at minimum wage, puts a single person at over double the poverty level (over $22k) in the US...just saying.
I grew up very poor (from a family of migrant workers) and I can say from personal experience and observing many, many thousands of poor people over a couple of decades, that it is almost exclusively an educational problem.
The easy stuff is easy (don't eat tubs of lard and ice-cream), but even professional nutritionalists can not agree on what a healthy diet is, how can you expect people with an average 10th grade or less education to do it? Those fish fingers are marked "PACKED WITH OMEGA-3s!!!", the fries have "HALF YOUR DAILY REQUIREMENT OF POTASSIUM!!! LOADED WITH VITAMINS!!!"
With millions spent on spinning shit food into something that sounds healthy to people, they are being misled and confused because nutrition is complicated and labeling is misleading for highly processed foods.
That frozen lean-cuisine dinner in the next freezer is better balanced, cost the same as microwave fries, takes the same amount of time to nuke, but says "Only 410 calories!" instead of "calcium-enriched" like the fries do, but how to properly judge the differences without a strong background in nutrition?
There are alternatives to eating bad quality food that are just as cheap and fast, sadly people are not made aware of it.
Why would you take the time to find an alternative if you are not aware of the health problems coming from eating frozen french fries daily? A lot of poor parents would avoid such solutions and find alternative if they were truly aware of how bad the food they ingest truly is.
The way I did it was cook enough for multiple days and freeze the rest in day portions so you could defrost only what you needed. So, on your Sunday, cook three meals each enough to subsist on for two to three days.
The food is not glamorous, but it can be tasty and nutritious.
And the cycle starts over again. Single mothers with no idea about nutrition (it is not an easy subject!) do the best they can, but it is usually not very good at all, and pass that on to their children.
Education is a big component. Time is another. None of the people I routinely see at the grocery store or the multiple people I've known personally to use EBT were doing the really bad items like Twinkies and megagulps either way. Though the ones with more time and education tended to eat better than the other EBT users with less time (e.g., full-time job and single parent vs no children and part-time or no work)
The thing about food deserts is that it is a purely economic phenomenon. All of the fast food places and bodegas are getting money. If there were are push with dollars and food stamps for nutritious food, I assure you someone would find a way to take that money.
There seems to be a movement or reawakening where people have begun to prepare their own meals again. Some out of necessity some out of health concerns, but quite a few people who previously relied on processed foods are now,making their own.
If this gathers momentum, which it seems it is, can only contribute to healthier eating. I think the outlook is better than you suppose.
This is absolutely right. I'll post below my comment from a similar thread that considered this factor.
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I think modern "foods," of the extracted and refined sugars sort, and artificial colors and flavors sort, definitely play a large role in this.
I find all this searching for bio-chemical processes to blame obesity on pretty silly. A non-trivial portion of society has shown it is possible to not be obese. People have also shown it is possible to go from being obese to not being obese.
There are several inter-playing factors that shoulder most the blame I would say.
One major factor that seems to be missing from most conversations is that there is a huge mental factor in obesity I would surmise. And I think you're overlooking that when you ask why do some people feel satiety when others don't.
I think obesity can rightly be considered a mental illness. Why do some people continue to eat when it does their body no good? Everyone probably does this on occasion, but why do obese people do it routinely?
Most obese people I'm guessing would tell you that a lot of their eating has an emotional component, beyond a feeling of hunger.
When you think about it, present day "food" companies, are just as bad as tobacco companies, arguably worse when you calculate the costs. How many people are suffering from diabetes, or potentially will in coming years, how many from other 'diseases of civilization,' what amount of health and monetary resources are expended on these preventable conditions each year?
These are diseases of a civilization that is structured poorly. Just think about it, a civilization of overworked, overstressed, underslept, mindless-media over-exposed people who emotionally stuff their faces with garbage 'foods.'
The "food" industry and regulation there of no doubt shoulders a lot of blame, just consider for some people, the majority of their food energy intake comes basically from candy.
It appears that 'food' companies are exploitative of the low iq, low income segments of our society, but in the US I think that has a lot to do with agricultural policies that subsidize sugar and corn production and the like. And the people running these "food" companies navigate current market dynamics and govt incentives/subsidies to maximize shareholder returns, and that is producing negative health results for many people.
So with these factors considered, I would say that there are better ways of addressing this issue than the search for obesity immunity conferring pills and the like.
> Now, feral rats could be chowing down on a greater abundance of rich food in the available garbage, but that doesn’t explain the upwards creep in ad libitum fed research animal weights.
That doesn't seem to make sense. So when feral animals eat more processed "rich foods" and gain weight that's understandable, but when animals that live with and are fed by humans gain weight it's a mystery? Could it be that animal food production has changed in the same way as food production for humans?
Asking why rats given unrestricted food had lower weights in 1980s than today seems like a reasonable question.
Has the food recipe changed? (And how has it changed?) because if the calorie content of the food hasn't changed but the recipe has changed we might be able to challenge the calories in calories out crowd.
"...we might be able to challenge the calories in calories out crowd."
Not really. If they have unrestricted access and the recipe has changed, the simple balance of sugars, fats, and proteins per serving could be having an impact on their total caloric intake.
A semi-common calories in calories out argument is that it doesn't matter what you eat, you just need to make sure that you eat less calories than you use.
This is (probably) technically true, but it's not a very useful statement if certain foods are likely to make us eat more before feeling full.
Yeah, it's the also the first comment on the blog post.
>I haven’t read the paper, but domestic cats and dogs doesn’t surprise me in the least.
>The pet food industry isn’t that much different than the human food industry in making food cheaper, tastier, and more calorie rich than ever. Not too mention more pets now are strictly house pets than ever before and don’t run around the yard or neighborhood as much.
>As for lab animals I’d wonder the same thing regarding chow. For many caloric intake is probably highly monitored but I would wonder if where those calories come from has changed in monkey chow for example in the last few decades.
Adenovirus 36 is zoonotic, and causes obesity in mammals and birds, including humans, rodents, chickens, and monkeys.
The gut biome is significantly different between obese and non-obese individuals, though so far, no causative mechanism has been proven in either direction.
My first thought was chemical as well due to the recent series of articles about DuPont's use of the surfactant C8[0] and how they continued to use it for fifty years after knowing that it caused major problems in humans and was leaking into the environment[1]. This chemical is now ubiquitous, it's in everybody, and it's an endocrine disruptor, meaning that it screws with living systems that are controlled by hormones, and it does so in very small doses.
There are literally thousands of unstudied, unregulated chemicals in industrial use in America. Chances are high that there are a number of them doing a number on us.
It's arguable that most industrial organic chemicals are degraded in the environment in one way or another. But some aren't. And others have environmentally stable degradation products. So there are probably at least tens of thousands of persistent, anthropogenic, organic chemicals.
The lipophilic ones are most hazardous, because they bioaccumulate through the food chain. Also, the more volatile ones tend to get trapped in polar regions. So lipid levels for Eskimos and penguins are higher than those for more equatorial populations. I wonder if body mass has increased more in recent decades among polar populations than among equatorial populations.
> In the UK, 67% of men and 57% of women are either overweight or obese, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, published in the Lancet medical journal. More than a quarter of children are also overweight or obese – 26% of boys and 29% of girls.
> Worldwide, the proportion of adults with a body-mass index (BMI) of 25 kg/m2 or greater increased between 1980 and 2013 from 28·8% (95% UI 28·4–29·3) to 36·9% (36·3–37·4) in men, and from 29·8% (29·3–30·2) to 38·0% (37·5–38·5) in women. Prevalence has increased substantially in children and adolescents in developed countries; 23·8% (22·9–24·7) of boys and 22·6% (21·7–23·6) of girls were overweight or obese in 2013. The prevalence of overweight and obesity has also increased in children and adolescents in developing countries, from 8·1% (7·7–8·6) to 12·9% (12·3–13·5) in 2013 for boys and from 8·4% (8·1–8·8) to 13·4% (13·0–13·9) in girls. In adults, estimated prevalence of obesity exceeded 50% in men in Tonga and in women in Kuwait, Kiribati, Federated States of Micronesia, Libya, Qatar, Tonga, and Samoa. Since 2006, the increase in adult obesity in developed countries has slowed down.
Just based on my observation as a French person, I'd say that the French are getting fatter as well. It only makes sense since more and more people are abandoning the "French way" of 2,3 meals a day eaten at the dinner table at fixed hours with the family, a healthy dose of red wine and variety in the plate. More and more people are falling to the sirens of Starbucks, McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut because it's easy and convenient.
The irony in this is that in the meantime in the United States (home of aforementioned franchises), a decent fraction of the population is going the other way and starting to eat healthy, incorporate more cooking and good produce into their diet. Funny how cultural soft power is so strong...
No country has managed to lower the rate of obesity. Some countries are seeing slower rises in rates of obesity, and some countries have much lower rates of obesity than international averages.
But I'm confident that current generations will adapt to these new circumstances in our nutrition and start learning about their diets and start teaching their kids how to eat properly. and I'm pretty certain that within 50 years or so, widespread obesity will be nothing but a short and weird artifact during the turn of the millennium.