This is directly related to the way American cities are designed. It’s a car centric culture where big houses are far away from each other. That means driving everywhere. That means long commutes. That means TV over communal activity. That means big grocery runs with shelf stable food.
Then pile on hyper sweet drinks and nutritional misinformation campaigns, and of course Americans are going to be overweight. The worst part is it’s becoming culturally acceptable for children to be overweight. I do not advocate for fat shaming—but there is a limit to my tolerance. Children should not consume anywhere near the amounts of sugar that they do and the pervasive attitude of “just one [soda, ice cream, pop tart, pie slice, muffin, cupcake, cookie] won’t hurt!” is incredibly damaging. Five grams of refined sugar a day. That’s it. That is less than one tenth of a “personal” (16oz / 500ml) bottle of Coca Cola.
I'm italian and I visited united states a couple of months ago. In my opinion the biggest problem is that you don't have decent food at affordable prices. Healthy food has nonsensical high prices and if you want something at a human price you don't have much choice except fast food. What a shame.
That's partly because much of the government subsides go towards subsidizing corn, ending up in high fructose corn syrup and all the junk food most people consume. It's quite sad, that everyone is so okay with this.
Personally, I try to eat as healthy as possible and use my nutrient finder (https://kale.world/c) to find high nutrient, low calorie foods, which end up being mostly beans, vegetables and fruits.
Wow - the rest of the thread aside, that's a fantastic nutrition tool.
edit: I just fed it one of the tasks I've found most frustrating - how to optimize protein:carbs ratio without resorting to meat. Most of the diet advice I've seen on that question is unhelpful, since it emphasizes for "enough protein" and not ratio. But this turned up exactly what I was after.
Agreed, the subsidized corn is also used as cheap feed for low quality meat. On the flip side fruits and vegetables receive the lowest subsidies. Plus the lower cost of unhealthy foods decreases demand for relatively more expensive healthy foods, lowering demand which drives prices up even higher. Tough to keep perishable foods when people don’t buy them as quickly. It’s a self reinforcing cycle to the bottom.
I'm curious about this. I lived in a predominantly Latino (mostly Puerto Rican) neighborhood of Brooklyn for a while a couple of years back. The supermarkets were full of fresh, cheap food, yet the customers (who were consistently overweight and often obese, including the kids) were piling their shopping carts up with terrible stuff -- sugary cereals (Froot Loops etc.), sugary drinks (sodas, fruit juices, Caprisun, iced tea), white bread, snacks (cookies, doughnuts, potato chips), tons of frozen microwave meals, etc. I never saw a shopping cart filled with anything healthy and unprocessed. And I realized that I was actually being very picky walking through this place. I had to ignore 90% of the stuff they stock their shelves with because it's unhealthy.
Places like Whole Foods have the same problem, of course -- it's also full of sugary drinks and cookies, except they're labeled "organic" and made with "natural sugar cane" or agave, or they're things low/no fat yogurt (containing more sugar than the full fat ones). You can get fat on Whole Foods groceries if you're not super picky.
Definitely seems odd on its face, but if you dig into it, you'll see that it's SO much more complex than simple access. Other factors include, but are certainly not limited to:
Time to prepare: fresh foods generally take a lot longer, and a lot more effort to prepare than processed foods. When you've got each available parent working two jobs then this is a huge barrier.
Knowledge of preparation: especially in immigrant populations, not everybody has access to the ingredients they're used to.
Knowledge of nutrition: it's not like life comes with an instruction manual, and if you got little to no nutrition education, you probably don't realize the impact of those empty calories.
Fussy Kids: people who appeasing fussy kids (yeah yeah yeah... the hardos without kids will say you should just force them to eat it. Life isn't so straightforward.)
Waste: this is a huge factor. If you've got a tiny amount of cash and you need to spend it on things that will ensure you wont starve, something that will potentially go bad in a few days is a risky proposition, so you tend to stock up on heavily processed shelf stable items.
Price: Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. You can get a whole bag of chips for the same price as 2 apples. When you have a REALLY borderline income, your "cheap" is a lot different than someone else's.
There's plenty of other factors. Check out the research on it for more info. Really interesting stuff to dig into.
> Fussy Kids: people who appeasing fussy kids (yeah yeah yeah... the hardos without kids will say you should just force them to eat it. Life isn't so straightforward.)
My friends with children basically fall into two camps: one camp that agrees with you and blames their kids, and the other camp that just feeds their kids healthy food because, like your pet dog or cat, can't drive to the grocery store when it refuses to eat its croquetas.
Spending time with the families of my friends, the real issue seems to be with the adults either giving in to their children because they don't want to bother, feeding their children boxed food because they don't have the energy, or feeding their children bad food because they themselves don't eat much healthy food.
It hurts to watch you child starve because they are being picky. I had a teacher tell me she didn't want to eat peas one night, so her father sent her to bed hungry. She woke up a few hours later, went downstairs to her cold plate of peas still on the table, and ate the whole thing.
I had a classmate in high school who ONLY ate pancakes and fries. He was from a wealthy family and his mother had various supplements she would put in the pancakes to keep him healthy. We went on a week long canoe trip where you obviously can't eat pancakes and fries 24/7. 3 days in, this guy is starving, and for the first time in his life had pasta, trailmix, and eggs.
Children don't have fully developed faculties for reasoning, you can't take a reasonable approach to solving pickiness. Things seem to taste better the hungrier you get, so I think the approach to pickiness is to starve them out.
My dad made me sit at the table until I finished my milk and peas. After waiting two hours to spite him, I then had to drink warm milk and eat cold peas anyways. I learned pretty quickly that the manipulation didn't work on him.
I have no doubt that a lot of parents have that "my little angel" syndrome that keeps them from disciplining their children, but notice how that doesn't free them from the responsibility nor allow them to blame their kids.
I can appreciate that I was really fortunate to have parents that put in that sort of effort. My mom would also cut up vegetables like turnips for us after school that we would scarf down. They set me up for a healthy lifestyle as an adult that didn't take much effort on my part.
I know a lot of people didn't have those kinds of advantages, so they especially don't come naturally for them once faced with raising children and having to make those decisions themselves.
I wonder if it is a good approach to force children to finish their plates?
Seems like not. There are some studies [0][1][2] that show parental control over food intake may result in children's (mostly girls') obesity since it teaches children to ignore their satiety/hunger mechanism and thus overeat.
It may lead to the situation that once grown up, they could keep this habit of leaving the plate empty no matter how full they feel.
It's really super easy to judge people from the outside, especially with parenting. None of these decisions are made in a vacuum, and especially in low-income immigrant populations, there are many factors at play. When you've got a double digit food budget in which you can't waste a penny, no spouse around to help, and 3 kids who all need help with their homework, then fighting a nightly battle over eating food that takes longer to prepare and you could barely afford to begin with is probably a lot less important.
Maybe the reason is that in a large part of the US, there isn't a strong home cooking culture. You can really tell the difference if you walk into a Daiso store (japanese dollar store). The variety of cooking-related gadgets and trinkets is mind boggling. In japan, they also do home economics (cooking) in school and culturally, ability to cook is often portrayed in media as one of the "checklist" qualities when looking at a romantic partner.
No instructions on the label of a pak choi, and no industry gain from suggesting recipes using it, since it would just be rice, cheap meats and/or other vegetables. Blue Apron and similar services might be superfluous for some, as well as expensive, but they at least inspire people to use more basic ingredients. I don't know where one starts to educate people in making "real" food. New/old school subject?
Way back when, there used to be home economics but that was really oriented toward the women who were clearly going to get married and cook for their husbands/families. As gender roles changed, home economics pretty much went away.
Well it depends but most granola has more fibre than fruit loops which means it is healthier because it has a lower glycemic load. Even so—not a huge fan of sweetened granola.
I was in Bologna not too long ago and I was baffled by how fresh, high quality ingredients are available at affordable prices. I've seen similar quality ingredients in the Bay Area but they charge an arm and a leg for it. I don't know how the Italians do it or why we Americans have such a hard time doing something similar.
That's a good question. I think it has to do with a lot of food that are not calorie dense and more likely to satiate you simply taste better fresh and not so great past a certain age. On the flip side, foods that tends to taste good for a long time also tend to be calorie dense and some studies suggest aren't likely to trigger the signals for satiation.
Healthy food isn't expensive. You can buy chicken breast for $3 to $5 a pound. You can buy a head of lettuce for $2. Oatmeal is dirt cheap. Most vegetables are less than $3 a pound.
It may be true that these ingredients are available in certain markets for those prices, but that isn't accounting for a significant portion of the true overall cost of healthful eating.
Healthy food tends to spoil, and if you're not able to go shopping multiple times a week and have unpredictable availability for meal preparation, you're going to see a lot of spoilage. If 30% of your fresh produce ultimately spoils, your actual cost is 43% higher.
Healthy food requires a degree of planning and execution which takes time and focus. Finding healthy options which are appealing for 3x meals a day is a lot of work if you aren't happy with 1 or 2 standbys every day.
Healthy food is extremely hard to find on the go. If you don't have a kitchen at your disposal generally you are shit out of luck for finding something that is truly healthy. So for example, the quality of my diet is highly inversely correlated with the amount of travel I am doing in a given month.
Making unhealthy choices more expensive through taxes is extremely regressive for many of these reasons.
>Healthy food tends to spoil, and if you're not able to go shopping multiple times a week and have unpredictable availability for meal preparation, you're going to see a lot of spoilage. If 30% of your fresh produce ultimately spoils, your actual cost is 43% higher.
That's not at all true. I eat healthy, lots of vegetables, beans, lean meat,and so on, and I go shopping only once every two weeks. Apples keep for weeks, ditto cauliflower in the refrigerator, kale, cabbage, tomatoes, and so on. Meat you can freeze. Dry beans keep forever, and plus there is canned goods.Plus flavorings like salsa in a jar. I waste virtually nothing.
And it is cheaper than living off of processed foods, unless you are living off of pure starches like macaroni and cookies.
You do know have to know how to cook. Nothing fancy, just the basics like boiling beans, chopping vegetables, mixing together a bunch of things to get something that tastes reasonably good. And it does take time.
The issue, as you suggest, isn't so much that healthy food isn't available at a reasonable price but that turning it into meals may be challenging for someone working two jobs and lacking a proper kitchen. I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that. I just think it's mostly a mistake to lay the problem solely on prepared and fast food--which often isn't actually all that cheap.
As for travel, yeah. I started doing a lot more a number of years back and it took me a while to get more disciplined about it. I find it's more about regulating my intake than eating healthy per se. I try to avoid eating just because some food has been laid out for me. And I tend to keep things to one or two full meals a day.
you're suggesting that humanity has historically had easier access to healthy (fresh) food as they went shopping multiple times a week? I doubt this. What makes you think there was improved transportation options or significant amount of free time ?
And you call that cheap.... In my country most vegetables cost below 1$ per kilogram, which is 6 times cheaper. I think this has to do with EU policy of subsidies for farmers.
I haven't seen 0.80 EUR/kg in Germany for vegetables, so I wonder where you live. I've assumed vegetables are rather cheap in Germany due to very high competition. Lettuce is around $1.85 a piece, carrots are 1 EUR/kg or 1.50 EUR/kg when organic. Karfiol is 2 EUR/kg here.
The cheapest discounters (Aldi) are little bit cheaper.
Cheapest I've seen in a UK Lidl was a kilo of carrots discounted to 20p. I can't see how that could possibly pay for any of the supply chain but I'll take it.
Up here in Scotland I think we have a good illustration of how obesity can be a cultural problem, especially linked to alcohol. There's a reasonable amount of healthy food available but the traditional preference is all fat, starch and sugar.
I partially agree with you guys substaining that there were cheap healthy things, but for my experience they were exceptions. I could find very rarely vegetables at affordable price and at decent quality together. Or they were cheap, or they were decent. And a head of lettuce at 2$ is a high price. As exceptions examples, avocados were good and cheap.
No, that sounds about right. At the normal grocery store in my area, for example, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage are $1.99/pound right now, celery is $1.49/pound. Asparagus is much more expensive, I think around $4.99/pound.
I cheat by shopping at the local Korean grocery store instead, prices are much cheaper but you have to sort through the produce to make sure quality is up to par.
If you're buying non-frozen leafy greens that have been sitting around before getting sold a great deal of nutritional content has degraded and you can definitely taste it.
Vegetables aren't subsidized the same way corn is.
In the Midwest chicken is often $2 a pound. Vegetables vary a lot, but $3 a pound is about right for perishable stuff other than greens (which are more expensive). Carrots and onions and the like are way less than $3 a pound.
A little OT: The price for food in Germany are to my knowledge one of the lowest in the world compared to the average income.
This trend of food getting cheaper all the time has led to a real „industrialised“ agricultural sector in Germany. This effect is good for the consumer because an egg costs like 15 euro cents, but it is horrible for the environment and especially for the animals. You just can‘t produce so much cheap food without tremendous sacrifices.
Food prices here in Germany indeed are very low. In my experience this has another bad side effect. Many people expect food to be that cheap and don't even consider buying 'good' food for higher prices (even if they can afford it).
E.g. I buy ecological eggs (not the 'supermarket-ecological' ones) and they cost about 45 cents a piece. That's at least 3 times the usual price.
I don't think access to raw calories is the problem here, given that we're talking about people being _overweight_. Broccoli provides considerably more satiety per calorie than Doritos, to say nothing of the difference in healthfulness.
I would add that many Americans seem totally unaware that junk food is bad for them and for their kids. Even in well-educated families, I would see kids drinking soda and eating snacks all the time. As I understand it, it is also a political issue, food corporation have huge marketing power and any attempts of regulation draw big protests (free will / nanny state arguments).
My ex has a degree in biology, yet can't understand that feeding the kids box mac-and-cheese and pasta multiple times per week (because it is easy to prepare) is what's making them fat, not just the portion sizes. So yeah, what you describe is real. I'd take it one step further though - not only do most Americans not really understand the content of their food, but most can't cook. They have really no understanding of how to plan means, shop for meals, or prepare meals quickly. So then you throw in long working hours and commute times and they feel compelled to reach for food that is fundamentally unhealthy.
I would suspect most kids learned to cook because a parent was home doing all the cooking, and when they got home from school they would be expected to assist with meal prep.
With both parents working, less time to prepare meals, we are raising a generation who on average has a lot less first-hand experience with how to cook, and certainly how to cook healthy balanced meals.
Here's what's weird for me... my mom came from a traditional farm family - so she really knew how to cook. She was also a home economics teacher for many years, so she taught middle schoolers how to cook. While I remember vaguely being in the kitchen with her as a kid, I really don't remember her ever teaching me anything in particular. It certainly wasn't an every-day thing for me to help with meal prep. But, today I'm a really good cook and have done the majority of meal prep for my family (3 kids) both in and out of being in a two-adult household. I guess what I'm saying is -- I agree with you, but I also think that too many adults cop out on "I don't know how to cook!!!!" when it is actually not that hard to figure it out. Anyone can make a salad, throw some veggies in a wok, make some rice and beans, etc. The healthiest meals are in many cases the easiest to make, but somehow people think it is even easier to grab that frozen lasagna out of the freezer.
I watched a good youtube video that compared the 7/11-level food available in japan vs america and was convinced that this is one of the biggest issues.
What's the healthiest thing you can get in a 7/11 in the States? An apple? One of those shitty packaged sandwiches that has a slice of ham with a mysterious wad of splooge? A hotdog that's been turning on the spit all day?
Then you realize this is how it is every step of the way. It's a cultural problem. With a lot of the world trailing right behind.
You can blame everything on personal choice, and that might make you feel good, but that doesn't help us solve systemic issues.
I live in Mexico now which has some of the worst obesity issues as well due to their soft drink consumption. They just had a president that was the ex-president of Coca Cola.
> It was during the Fox's leadership of Coca-Cola Mexico that Coke became Mexico's top-selling soft drink, increasing Coca-Cola's sales by almost 50%.
But Mexico still has healthy enough food that's readily available. Getting a bag of chips from 7/11 has to compete with a just-as-cheap taco stand right outside. I find it easy to eat pretty healthy here for that reason. I love some tacos and nopal salad.
Meanwhile in Austin you can't even find a taquero outside of East Riverside.
And, of course, the lack of walkability in the US is horrifying. I don't ever want to live somewhere where I can't walk to a fruit stand or cafe ever again. I think of any time I've felt dullness in my life and every time it was at a point in my life where I had to drive everywhere. Like playing an open-world game and only using fast travel, missing out on all the small interactions that turn out to be the spice of life.
For whatever reason, there seems to be a gap in the US between convenience store and full-fledged grocery store. There are various mostly non-chain markets in many cities but, for the most part, you either have pretty much junk food or you have to find a big grocery store. In London at least there are a lot more of the Sainsbury Local or other chains that don't have the selection of a bigger store but aren't just junk either.
It's the walkability again. If I'm getting in a car, I may as well go somewhere that will have everything I could possibly need.
Also, I do feel the store you mention, and similar ones, are de-emphasising veg in favour of higher margin packaged/processed items. Although, they are wildly optimised for each store placement so it is difficult to tell.
This isn't really a fair comparison: not a lot of people in the states buy food at 7/11, while it is much more common in Japan. With the volume that 7/11's do in the states, they can't really support bento boxes or whatever you'd find at the grocery store lunch counters (which, actually, are very comparable to Japan 7/11, but not as widespread).
I don't understand this. Rice, potatoes, vegetables are still cheap here. I guess if you're looking at restaurants, this is true. If you are with a group and have to go eat somewhere, they usually provide healthy options which are not too expensive compared to the unhealthy ones (though sometimes, that's just due to smaller portions).
Maybe you have a different experience, having just visited, instead of living here.
addendum: it also depends quite heavily on the area's cost of living, apparently. I just bought a sack of potatoes for $0.40/lb, whereas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448984 says potatoes in LA are $1.88/lb (nearly 5x as expensive).
I completely agree, but my thoughts are that it is biology in action -- people crave fats and sugars, and by themselves rice, beans, etc don't have much flavor. Or, the average American's palate has become so conditioned to sugar that they think those things don't have flavor. They have also been conditioned to think of meat as the go-to source for protein. Plus, frankly, there is a stigma of "rice and beans" being poor people food or even "ethnic" food in some circles, Ie: compare a meat / potato / bread heavy "traditional" American diet.
I found buying fruits and veggies in LA to be much cheaper than Seattle, unfortunately. Both are still cheaper than Switzerland (but then...what is cheap in Switzerland?).
yes. And beans. Beans are very cost effective, 1 to 2$ per pound or less. And they're very high in nutrients: Protein, Fiber, and countless micronutrients, super low in sodium and fat. They're easy to make too.
Decent by Italian standards is pretty decent. But if we're talking about fresh fruit and vegetables, go to any Asian market. Or Walmart. It's not that expensive.
There's few good reasons to be eating tripe if you live in a city or live in a 'food desert' (spare me) and have a car.
The real problem is the overabundance of crap choices crowding out the sensible ones.
Fresh food is top of the list. And three sub-sections are all 'fresh' something.
There's zero reason Walmart can't do the same. Except for the fact that Americans demand soda and 800 different types of cookies, so that's what they're supplied with.
Edit: this submission was bumped from first to the third page within minutes...for whatever reason. Comment to upvote ratio perhaps?
My local Walmart isn't my favorite store in the world to go to for fresh produce and meat. The selection and quality are generally inferior to a couple of local regular supermarkets. But I could absolutely shop for food there that isn't all highly processed.
The thing is that, as you suggest, the pre-packaged deli section is bigger than the unprocessed meat section. And then there's the soda aisle, the chip aisle, etc. Shelf space is hugely tilted toward "junk" and other highly processed food.
My regular supermarkets have lots of processed food too of course. (And nothing wrong with a lot of that in moderation.) But it's far less skewed than in the case of Walmart.
I find healthy food to be very accessible in the United States if you cook for yourself. Most of our grocery stores have huge varieties of produce and lean proteins are relatively inexpensive. I think eating fast food is becoming more and more common as well as people buying pre-made packaged foods to heat up at home which are often just as unhealthy as fast foods.
> Most of our grocery stores have huge varieties of produce and lean proteins are relatively inexpensive
It depends on where you live. In the U.S. poor and working class neighborhoods often lack grocery stores. The only options are convenience stores where fresh, healthy food is very expensive, availability is limited, and quality is poor. I've read that the problem is on such a wide scale that it significantly impacts health. Cities work at attracting grocery chains to poor neighborhoods.
Try it yourself: Try shopping for groceries in a neighborhood with those demographics in your town. Or just layer a map of income with a map of grocery stores; I think I can predict where you will find the Whole Foods.
Shelf space at the stores seems to be shifting more toward prepared and semi-prepared foods. This comes at a cost of more carbs, sugar, etc. I interpret this trend as consumer choice, that people are preferring to spend less time cooking and preparing meals.
If you have a strong food culture that demands fresh ingredients (Italy) then the prices may follow.
An entire new science of how people shop developed in the past few decades. The centermost aisles are prime territory. So, the higher-margin, fast-turnover items get center aisles and medium height (easily seen) shelves. Wholesalers actually pay for placement rights for things like chips and soda -- that's why they are organized by brand rather than product.
Produce gets moved to one end of the store (generally the end nearest the main entrance because produce is low priority for shoplifters.
> I'm italian and I visited united states a couple of months ago. In my opinion the biggest problem is that you don't have decent food at affordable prices. Healthy food has nonsensical high prices and if you want something at a human price you don't have much choice except fast food. What a shame.
We recently just spent a week in Spain. We went to the grocery store and bought a whole cart full of food for like 20 euros. I was blown away. The equivalent amount of food in the US would have easily been like 100 dollars, probably more.
My (potentially incorrect) impression was that the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe meant that the affordable food prices you get used to could just be the result of subsidies. So any country with different subsidies would have surprisingly high food prices and give you sticker shock, but that wouldn't really mean all that much, it's like the difference between paying for it in the store vs paying for it with taxes. Is this plausible?
Perhaps you're thinking only of restaurants, because healthy food is far cheaper than fast food or any restaurant food in general, but it does require going to any grocery store and then spending a few minutes cooking.
Meh, veggies, rice, etc. are super-cheap everywhere in the world.
It doesn't take money to eat healthy. It's not that fast food restaurants are the only choice is you don't have money. You can go to a grocery store and eat extremely healthy if you want to.
Those who eat at fast food restaurants all the time are more uneducated than poor (although both things might go hand-in-hand), and might not know how many calories are in a burger or more importantly sodas (I've seen people drinking liters every day).
You can buy an apple instead of a can of coke and save you both a few hundred calories and a few pennies. Nothing to do with money.
FWIW Vietnam War prisoners (Americans held in North Vietnam) strongly tended to live longer than their peers after release. Years without artificial light eating a basic diet and limited calories made a big difference, even without factoring out torture.
In contrast the starvation diet the Japanese imposed on their WWII prisoners (from Hong Kong in particular) shortened their lives quite a bit.
Yeah, all of those are single serving prices that you're looking at, and only the onion (and I guess lettuce if it's not romaine) is actually a vegetable. Potatoes are starches, the others are fruits (with higher sugar). They don't list much in the way of vegetable prices.
But, even given that; I can buy a head of lettuce for $1.40. Okay. Or, I could buy an 8 pack of little debbie snack cakes for the same amount. 5 servings of lettuce that has nearly no nutritional substance, and that I have to combine with something else anyway to make it palatable...or 8 servings of convenient, enjoyed food.
If I wanted crunch, I can get a giant bag of tortilla chips for $1, too. Why would I buy a head of lettuce for 40% more, when it takes more work, and more ingredients inflating the price even higher?
It was stated that the obesity crisis might be caused by the cost of vegetables (or otherwise healthy food). This is nonsense. I don't know why you're getting picky with definitions while that was just an example to prove that it's not as if an eggplant is $20 and a cheeseburger $1.
> Or, I could buy an 8 pack of little debbie snack cakes for the same amount. 5 servings of lettuce that has nearly no nutritional substance, and that I have to combine with something else anyway to make it palatable...or 8 servings of convenient, enjoyed food.
Right. I would never eat that, though. There are also plenty of ways to make vegetables palatable: eggplants with tomatoes with spices are very tasty, for instance.
I'm also not saying that junk food isn't cheaper, just that healthy food is affordable for everyone.
Not a lot of vegetables but eggs, sausage, and bacon are very common. But yes, if you’re vegan or at least prefer food that is more vegetable in nature you’ll have a tough time other than fruit.
I'm quite far from a vegan, but eating all you mentioned + waffles with syrup really is too much for my stomach. Some salad/tomatoes/cucumber next to that would have helped.
Honestly this is only slightly true. Beans are 2 bucks a pound, cabbage is 2 bucks a head, bananas are 50 cents a pound, chicken is 4 bucks a pound, lentils are 2 bucks a pound, broccoli is 3 bucks a pound, yams are 1.5 bucks a pound, green bell peppers are 1 each, peanuts are 4.5 a pound, etc.
You get my point but I think it's more of a culture and convenience thing.
I don't get this. You'll get just as fat with "healthy" food. People aren't skipping small portions of healthy food because it's expensive - they just don't want to eat it at all, or they want to eat enough of it to feel full and satisfied, which is going to make them fat.
>"This is directly related to the way American cities are designed. It’s a car centric culture where big houses are far away from each other."
New York City is perhaps one of the most walkable cities in the world. It's also a place where you absolutely do not need a car and the majority of residents don't have a car. Yet 34% or New Yorkers are overweight and 22% are obese.[1]
The BMI statistic for the EU are none too encouraging either. [2]
Well, honestly, this comment is only giving more credence to OP, since, apparently, the US average is 70% is much much worse than the 34% of NY.
EDIT: Haha, apparently the HN crowd is very quick to point out inconsistencies since the original comment has been up 2 minuites and there are already 3 comments pointing the same thing (and counting)
Even if it doesn't explain 100% of it, it's still striking that the overweight rate in NYC is, according to your figures, less than half of the US average.
Given that its a reference for one of the great "walking cities", I think it disputes the OPs assertion "the design of American cities" and "car culture" are substantial contributors.
In other words whether one walks or or drives to McDonalds probably matters very little.
I agree NYC should be better but a number of problems are present there:
1. Cultural. I haven't been there for two years, but people use the subway, not the bike lanes. And I remember as recent at 2010 taxis were very prevalent, although slightly less so last time I was there. Though that could be Uber. The walkability of a city isn't just its density, it's its zoning, the width of its streets, the expected work hours. NYC is fast food, finance, media. Though they're still better off than the average American, they are no Amsterdam.
2. They have many of the problems that most American cities have: Dirt cheap unhealthy food and sugar consumption rates that are unhealthily high.
3. Many people come to NYC to make it. If they're coming from the rest of America they're coming in overweight.
>"I haven't been there for two years, but people use the subway, not the bike lanes."
The bike lanes are actually quite busy. This was true two years ago as well. It has also been steadily increasing with the increase in the number of Citibikes. The NYC DOT even has stats that support this [1]
>"They have many of the problems that most American cities have: Dirt cheap unhealthy food and sugar consumption rates that are unhealthily high."
There's also shortage of affordable and healthy options in just about every neighborhood.[2] There's also plenty of Whole Food and fruit and vegetable are present outside most bodegas.
>"Many people come to NYC to make it. If they're coming from the rest of America they're coming in overweight."
That's is a pretty absurd statement. People come for all kinds of reasons and they generally bring their A game if trying to "make it."
While I agree American cities don't promote the most healthy lifestyles, it's not like city-dwelers are less healthy or more obese on average than those who live in the country.
You're spot on with your second paragraph though. There is a lot of misinformation about nutrition, dieting, and food in general, and it's all aimed at one goal: turning a profit. Sugar is one of the major culprits, but over eating in general in America is an issue.
We need to start health education on a basis of Calories in vs. Calories Out, what healthy bodies actually look like, and dispel the myths of fad dieting and fat-burning-exercise routines/equipment.
Eat a balanced diet, consisting of little to no processed foods, and keep your calories close to your TDEE (or below if you are overweight).
Exercise for long-term health (physical and mental), not weight loss binges.
Pretty much all cities and towns in the U.S. are car centric. Large amounts of space wasted in the form of parking lots. Houses are mostly built away from grocery stores and shops. Usually there are no decent foot paths to get to them. It’s not just a phenomenon of large cities. It’s pretty much everywhere.
It really depends on the city. A lot of the "urban/rural" statistics are somewhat clouded by the fact that most American cities aren't really walkable outside of a central business district that nobody really lives in, and that its residents probably have to drive out of to get to such basic places as a grocery store.
The correlation looks a lot firmer when you look at overweight rates compared to population density or walkability instead of trying to just coarsely bucket it into "urban/suburban/rural".
I think people underestimate how much walking or physical activity they’d need to do to counterbalance the calorie surplus they have on a daily basis. You’d literally need to be fast walking for hours and hours a day. Cars don’t help, but walking for an extra 3-4hrs a week isn’t the major factor here. It’s the pound of cheese you had melted on everything, or the 24oz Cola.
Everything you list is simple, but nearly impossible for most people to stick with for life. It's not a matter of education, it's the fact that implementing that plan is physically and emotionally painful and wears most people down inside of a week or two.
As I've gotten older I've come to appreciate pro surfer Laird Hamilton's perspective on making friends with pain. That doesn't mean you should be a masochist, just stop seeing pain as something to always avoid.
Sugar seems to be a major driver of this development. The main problem is likely excessive sugar and especially fructose consumption starting with the emerge of cheap HFCS in most products. Dr. Robert Lustig has put a lot of research into the causes of the obesity crisis. He goes into great detail in his lectures on YouTube https://youtu.be/ceFyF9px20Y?t=51m41s
He also argues against the "gluttony and sloth" prejudice by saying that you eat too much and move to little as a consequence of messed up hormones due to excessive fat. Not the other way around.
The problem is probably more dimensional but the correlation between increasing Sugar/HFCS amounts in foods and the onset of obesity seems to be pretty strong.
You should read Stephen Guyenet to challenge what you've heard about sugar, both his twitter and his blog. He's a Ph.D. neuroscientist who studies the connection of the brain to fatness for a living.
A recent tweet from him:
Most comprehensive analysis of macronutrients vs. lifespan, fatness, health in mice. High fat + high carb + low protein = highest body fat. High fat + high carb + high protein = highest insulin. High carb + low fat + low protein = longest lifespan.
There is an air of certainty about low carbs permeating our culture right now that is not justified by the evidence at all. The Kitavans today get 70% of their calories from potato and have no diabetes or metabolic syndrome.
Look up Ray Peat for a good argument in favor of sugar. Plenty of people are thriving on high sugar diets.
For my own part, I've consumed 1300 or so calories of sugar a day for 20 years and my biomarkers are 99th percentile. I'm very consistent about resistance training and I don't overeat, both factors likely dwarfing my sugar intake.
Of course, obviously that's an anecdote, but I would caution anyone who automatically judges someone else for their sugar consumption. You might be wrong about sugar and, more importantly, you might be wrong about sugar paired with a particular person's genes or other lifestyle factors.
Because of my high sugar consumption, I eat relatively low fat and protein. What if that's better for you, assuming you don't overeat?
Guyenet is somewhat in favor of the hypothesis that sugar increases fatness, but he thinks it's because humans are susceptible to the "unnatural" increase in food reward that adding extra sugar induces, not because sugar is toxic in and of itself.
Were this the case, you would see a correlation between urban development and obesity rates; cursory examination of obesity rates and population density (and our basically unchanged urban planning methods since the 1960s) reflect that this is not the case.
I'd like to note that poor quality of food does not make one overweight (and lack of exercise does not either).
Exercise and good food are good for you (diabetes and heart disease are bad) but in terms of weight what matters is pure number of calories consumed.
This has been true from everything I've read on the subject and what I've seen from my own underweight failures and triumphs to gain weight.
Americans just eat too much, for a variety of reasons.
You are spot on here -- I lost ten pounds in just the past few weeks simply by upping my step count.
Taking it one step further though... I think about my forebear farmers. When I would hear my grandmother talk about the huge meals they would eat daily, you'd think they were all 300 pounds and died of heart disease by 40. Instead, they were trim and lived into their 80s and 90s. The reason being that they were physically active all day long on the farm. In a modern services economy though, we have to go to a gym, go for a run, IE: build physical activity into our day. After a long work day, this is a mental challenge for many people just as much as a time challenge. So, in many ways it's an artifact of the transition away from the farming / industrial economy of the past that many segments of the population have simply not addressed.
I moved from Canada to the US a few years back, and gained an enormous amount of weight and gained a bunch of health issues, all food related. Here's my take on it.
Food is much, MUCH cheaper. Not a big difference at the grocery store for whole produce and raw ingredients (though it is cheaper). But the processed foods, premade stuff, deserts, drinks, etc? A fraction of the cost.
Restaurants are also much, much cheaper. Where I used to work, going to the sit down restaurant next door downtown brought me down 20-25 bucks. A similar restaurant downtown where I now live has equivalent food for 8-10 bucks. I make 4 times my Canadian salary and pay a lot less taxes, so effectively, it's virtually not worth it for me to cook, if my only constraint was money.
Sugar in EVERYTHING. Food that used to be a little bit sweet (not necessarily health, but not the end of the world) is drenched in sugar. I have to be careful when I get an orange juice in case its sugar added. A milkshare at the local icecream shop has way more sugar. Sugar sugar sugar EVERYWHERE.
Ordering food is also way easier, with formerly Foodler, GrubHub, Doordash, etc. I have no idea if those services became common up north after I left, but that was a big change, being able to order from 100 different restaurants at any point in time, sometimes in the middle of the night, with a few mouse clicks.
The portions: Cheesecake Factory exists up north, but it's not considered normal. Here, while the portion sizes are certainly above average, they aren't exactly unique either. You have Outback and the like all service you enough food to last you 3 days.
I also find it a lot more common to have fatty or sugary snacks at the office, and soft drinks, etc.
I'll shamefully admit I have zero self control when it comes to food. I have a sweet tooth like no other. But the price and availability constraints in my hometown stopped me from going overboard. For a while I was pretty much flush at my "recommended" weight. After I moved here? Things got really bad for me.
You are not wrong, but I will say that overweight is a really low threshold. For me at 6'5", it's about 200lbs at the top. Factor in that tall people generally have more variance in torso to leg ratio, and it makes it difficult to get down to that weight. I was 235 lbs when I left the Army and was incredibly trim. At 200 lbs, I would have been very skinny. At the middle of the healthy range, 175 lbs, I would look incredibly skinny.
My goal weight is 200. I've got 100 to go and I've lost 40 so far. I got there because of the sugar and depression, but I thought it was important to note that 200 for me is going to be incredibly skinny. I don't think it is practical for most people to maintain that.
The top of the normal BMI range for someone 6'5" tall is actually 210 lbs. That's not incredibly skinny nor would it be impractical for most people to maintain.
Def, the nutritional issues are still there & so are the issues around communal activity - but I think for a lot of people I know who have long commutes to work, the opportunity to exercise in transit would be compelling.
I don't really see the correlation. In Brazil, obesity is commonly associated with lower incomes, and if you were to correlate with the transportation system usage patterns there, one might misguidedly conclude that public transit usage is related to obesity. It seems more logical to make a correlation with lack of food variety (in both cases, cheaper food tend to be heavy on carbs and fats) and sedentary lifestyle
The reason Americans eat that much sugar is not the "one won't hurt" mentality, but the fact that the government singled out fat as the only source of evil, and companies started adding sugar to everything because without fat everything tastes like cardboard.
I bet most of the sugar consumed is from things that no one would think contain as much sugar as they do (like--bread, meat, etc.), which is added to make it more palatable.
I was curious so I checked the bread in my cupboard. The generic loaf of white bread has high fructose corn syrup, and the fancy whole wheat loaf has sugar. Both are pretty high up in the ingredient list.
Yes because in European bakeries they might add butter to make it taste good, but in America no one would buy it because it wouldn't say "fat-free", so they add sugar.
By and large, the mass produced American breads aren’t very good. But the bread sitting on my counter right now from Trader Joe’s, which is not actually an artisanalproducer, doesn’t seem to have any added sugar. No it’s not a mass market product but it’s also something that’s more than “no one” buys.
Why is it only now that obesity is reaching such epidemic proportions though? We've had a car-centric culture since Post WW2. Why haven't we seen this epidemic before?
Because GP's reasoning is likely not to be correct. The proliferation of cheap, high calorie foods along with a sedentary lifestyle (including occupations that require very little physical activity) are more likely to blame than 'cars did it.'
I would add that food corporations devote a lot of resources to make people eat their junk. It's not only that the food is there to eat. Companies like Coca Cola or Mac Donald's spend billions to convince people to eat their stuff.
The rates have been steadily going up since that time, though. It makes sense that you would see a gradual ramp up in a drastic change like ths.
I don't have sources to back this up, but here's some thoughts:
* Gradual changes in types of labor? (From agriculture -> industrial -> office jobs) which are less calorically intensive.
* Changes in food? Calorie-dense food is cheaper and easier to get than ever. People have less free time to cook healthy meals (working more hours, far fewer homemakers, longer commutes, more time spent doin extracurriculars outside the home, etc). As a result, people consume more calories because they're easy to get.
* Health/Food misinformation. The demonization of nutritional 'fat' which lead to it being replaced by sugar, which is even more addictive.
* Changes in drink consumption? Alcohol consumption is up (at least compared to ~25 years ago), and alcoholic drinks area very high in calories.
* Childhood changes due to changes in food and care. More high-calorie, "manufactured" foods introduced earlier into peoples lives sets them up for a lifetime of bad habits and problems that only compound over time.
If you look at the obesity charts, year by year, you can see precisely the year obestity took off like a rocket. It was the year following the US Gov announcement that Fat is evil. This caused all the food manufacturers to start pumping everything full of sugar. In the coming decades, gym memberships increased quickly to no avail - you can't out excercise a terrible diet.
The interesting thing is that obesity and overweightness rates are very different between States.
Most coastal States have regular rates among rich countries (albeit still high). 23.1% of Californians are obese, which is a lower rate than France, Ireland, and most of Western Europe.
There's a completely different story in the South, where more than a third of Mississipi's population is obese.
Public policy, lack of education, overall culture and scale and dominance of food corporations.
I'm not surprised with this data. The best example to understand this is to go to your nearest US convenience store.
Price of an Arizona Iced Tea 23oz can = $0.99
Price of the average bottle of water 16 oz = $1.50
Any poorly educated individual wouldn't understand the health implications of gulping 70g of liquid sugar when the only available data points to make food decisions are price and flavor.
Do people really not understand that drinking 23oz of empty calories day after day will make you fat?
People aren't really that ignorant, they make choices, often driven by short term desire. The corporations get this, but I feel like you are using poor as a synonym for stupid. We gotta stop treating poor people like they are dumb helpless animals, it gives them no agency.
Dude. It's pretty easy to say that. You're educated and you definitely understand well the implications of sugar consumption. It's easy to imply this just because of your presence here.
Someone uneducated will not understand this well. It's not about being stupid or being poor either. You don't hear people blaming their problems on sugar...
I consume sugar products because they are delicious (dopamine release).
However, I have the knowledge and education to make a conscious decision about moderation. I know how to read a food label. I know how to calculate the amount of sugar in a product. I know these things because I got access to education that allowed me to understand this.
No fucking Iced Tea Can is telling you that. You know what is telling you? Price: 99 cents, Flavor: Great... There's your problem. It's not about being stupid. It's about not having enough data to understand the implications of those decisions.
Uneducated people don't know about caloric guidelines or recommended processed sugar intake. The only mental filter for consumption of any edible product is its availability and personal flavor appeal.
All the educated people in here are conflating health and being thin - while they are very different things. Part of difference might be that poor people simply value "looking fit" less. That is not the same as valuing health less, but there is strong component of competitiveness about looking fit and thin among more educated people that has zero to do with health.
Why can’t it be low willpower along with availability of instant cheap calorically rich unsatiating food? In the past even if you had low will power you didn’t have access to cheap 2000+ simple carb / sugar meals. Now we do.
It's the food. I've visited the U.S. several times, and every time I'm shocked by how hard it is to find affordable healthy food. Even so called "healthy" options like salads are often loaded with egg yolks, fatty dressings, bacon bits and all kinds of unhealthy ingredients. Portion size is also way off.
I think portion size is the main issue with food quality being a very close second. Even if you "eat healthfully", if you eat too much food, you're still fat.
I went to a restaurant the other night. I ordered chicken marsala. I ate my meal, and when I felt I was getting full I stopped eating. I had two meals worth of food left.
Fat people want more food, so more restaurants put out bigger portions than is healthy. The same is true of prepared and pre-packaged foods. And with high-calorie, salt, fat and carb laden snack foods everywhere you look, you can keep eating all the time, everywhere you go. Find yourself in a place where they don't sell food? Don't worry, here's food made to take everywhere you go, so you can be constantly eating.
... and salt, sugar and butter. I was surprised to learn that supermarket chicken and meat is routinely injected with salt water and other chemical in a process known as 'Plumping'....
Abundantly available extremely cheap food of poor nutritional value and addictive over consumption encouraging qualities forcefully positioned by the market at the expense of other options.
Doesn't a 25 BMI seem like kind of a crappy metric for "overweight"? That makes my 6'4" brother "overweight" at like 205 which seems nuts. That doesn't feel overweight at all.
BMI is not meant as an individual health measure. It's a general population measure valid over a large sample size.
6'4" is a statistically rare height. I believe BMI is less valid for the extremely tall and extremely short. That doesn't mean it isn't useful when viewing the whole population.
For an individual, BMI + a waist measure is a better indicator. Your brother probably isn't overweight, unless he has low muscle mass and a large waist - but that individual anecdote does nothing to argue against the population level validity of BMI.
>It's a general population measure valid over a large sample size
This assumes a relatively symmetric distribution of heights and weights though, right? I'm curious if the tails for which BMI is individually invalid are equally populated. Basically, are short, fat people as common as tall, thin people?
My ex was career army. He had to pass a PT test and pass weight to keep his job. He was a little guy, so he lifted weights to be able to do his job.
When he was on recruiting duty, every year they attended a conference. Every year, there was an insurance guy there. Every year, every one in the office was pronounced overweight according to their height and weight charts.
The army offers a tape test as an alternative if you can't pass weight. It is sometimes necessary to prove that bodybuilders are all muscle. My ex and his office mates were not so muscular that they needed to rely on a tape test. They were still pronounced overweight by the insurance guy every year.
BMI isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. For example, I'm 5'5'' and weigh 160lbs. Currently trying to get down to 135lbs (which is less than my peak physical form in high school) and people balk at the idea that I can lose that much weight based on my appearance. Funnily, 115lbs is still considered healthy for someone my height. At the end of the day, it is much cheaper to read a scale and a measuring stick than use an expensive DEXA scan to get an accurate measure of body fat percentage.
These numbers aren’t shocking. Many people are “casually” fat, meaning they carry an extra 30-40lbs around their gut. Probably accumulated slowly by 2-3lbs a year. They don’t fit the classic image of an obese person but they are obese according to BMI.
I moved to SF which is a relatively fit city. Going back home in the Midwest I am shocked by the number of people who are overweight. Fat is normalized there. It wasn’t until I lived in a health conscious area and checked my own BMI that I realized how skewed my image of a healthy person was. In the Midwest if you are active you are considered healthy, even if you are overweight. It’s not until you are 100lbs overweight are you considered fat. And this doesn’t even touch the HAES mentality.
I've lived in San Francisco and I've lived in Europe, and while SF isn't quite as bad as other places in the USA (for example, Philadelphia), I was still shocked at how fat everyone was.
It's not necessarily odd - obesity rates are high, but not so high that a healthy weight is exceptional. Being generally muscular or trim isn't a negative, and probably isn't going to get anyone dismissed as a fitness nut.
That said, an average to low-normal BMI can certainly get comments. I'm smack in the middle of the healthy BMI range, and not exceptionally muscular or anything else that would distort that. Living in and visiting friends in flyover country I get comments like "you're too skinny", "you need to eat more", and so on. No one is particularly judging me, there's just a shifted sense of average where BMI ~21 feels like the low end of the range.
(And of course they're not exactly wrong; eating Midwestern food and living in a driving-centric suburb had the predictable effect on my weight, so on some level thinner people there are behaving unusually.)
I live in Missouri. Response to fit people is highly variable, and seems to depend on the family. Some fat families here seem to see fit people with jealousy, not understanding how they stay so thin. Others just don't seem to care about their obesity and think of normal sized people as abnormal, like their sense of what is normal is completely shifted. Yet others are ashamed of their obesity, yet none of their attempts to change seem to work.
Mating behavior here seems to follow the norm. Fat people tend to date/marry fat people, and healthy people mostly stick with other healthy people.
As a fit Midwesterner it's seen as good (and it made dating easier). There are plenty of fit Midwesterners so being fit in the Midwest isn't weird at all in my experience
Thanks for sharing; this line of thinking is too often overlooked.
From the abstract:
> National and international health organizations have focused increasingly on a perceived obesity epidemic said to pose drastic threats to public health. Indeed, some medical experts have gone so far as to predict that growing body mass will halt and perhaps even reverse the millennia-long trend of rising human life expectancy.1 In response to such concerns public health agencies across the world have sprung into action, searching for policies or incentives to mitigate the alleged ‘disease’ of obesity.
> Yet even as the volume of alarm grows louder, a growing number of researchers, drawn from a broad array of academic disciplines, are calling these claims into question. The authors of this article come from this latter group. In our view the available scientific data neither support alarmist claims about obesity nor justify diverting scarce resources away from far more pressing public health issues. This article evaluates four central claims made by those who are calling for intensifying the war on fat: that obesity is an epidemic; that overweight and obesity are major contributors to mortality; that higher than average adiposity is pathological and a primary direct cause of disease; and that significant long-term weight loss is both medically beneficial and a practical goal. Given the limited scientific evidence for any of these claims, we suggest that the current rhetoric about an obesity-driven health crisis is being driven more by cultural and political factors than by any threat increasing body weight may pose to public health.
This is an interesting paper, particularly the sections on how Americans have gained weight. "Obesity is up!" is much less informative than specifying which populations have gained how much like this does.
That said, the section on health outcomes is not hugely compelling. The "normal weight has worse outcomes" studies (particularly the famous NEJM one) have a significant set of problems.
NEJM simply didn't use the same bucketing as common parlance, so bucketed comparisons (as opposed to BMI ones) are basically meaningless.
More broadly, these studies are generally correlational, which produces serious issues regarding patients suffering from diseases. Eating disorders have very high mortality and often cause low weights, while conditions like cancer and neurodegenerative disease often cause both mortality and low weight. Without correcting for that, you're actually noticing trends like "late stage cancer patients are both skinny and sick".
I'll have to go and dig up references, but I thought the current state of research suggested that among otherwise-healthy patients, especially men in middle age or older, health outcomes noticeably worsened beyond the middle of the overweight category?
I mean I don't know what's come out in the last months, that's just the famous one because it's such a large group but you can go poke around Wikipedia all the smaller studies seem to go back and forth though so if there is a negative effect it's probably a weak correlation or a weak effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Body_mass_index&i...
Too old by more than half. 2005. The discussion has moved on since. For more recent articles, I went to pubmed.com and entered "obesity longevity review." Four quick highlights:
"Although a recent meta-analysis suggests that overweight individuals have significantly lower overall mortality than normal-weight individuals, these data are likely to be an artifact produced by serious methodological problems, especially confounding by smoking, reverse causation due to existing chronic disease, and nonspecific loss of lean mass and function in the frail elderly."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24628815
"Utilizing novel models of visceral obesity, numerous studies have demonstrated that the relationship between visceral fat and longevity is causal while the accrual of subcutaneous fat does not appear to play an important role in the etiology of disease risk."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23764746
Mexico:
"Obesity and overweight have a strong effect on the incidence of T2D;this, combined with the large impact of diabetes on adult mortality, generates increases in mortality that translate into losses of 2 to 3 years of life expectancy at age 50."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26172231
How many of these people are actually "overweight" as far as health and how many are "overweight" according to BMI?
When I was in the best shape of my life from my mid 20s to
my mid 30s, working out 12 hours a week (part time fitness instructor and a runner) with a body fat of 12% (measured with calipers) and a 29-30 inch waist, I was according to the BMI calculations 30 pounds overweight. Even now weighing 10 pounds more and I'm considered "obese", I wear a size 30 regular cut pants.
Where exactly am I suppose to lose 40 pounds from? Realistically, I need to lose about 15.
It tells me that my correct weight according to BMI is anywhere from 118 to 159. Now, I know if I weight 159lbs, I'd be fat. 118 doesn't seem especially healthy to me either - I'm at my lowest weight ever right now, 128lb, and my clothes are hanging off me like I'm a skeleton. All the other calculations are telling me 134-138 are right for me, which matches my normal weight. I think I'm down right now because I've been weight training and not taking in enough extra calories to gain weight, but if I lose any more weight than this I'm gonna start chugging olive oil or something. No way am I going down to 118.
>Where exactly am I suppose to lose 40 pounds from?
At your best shape you still had 5% lower you could go on your bodyfat, assuming you are male. It can be rather stricking, I used to be 208lbs and didn't feel like I was overweight at all. Got into endurance sport and dropped to as low as 165. (normally hover around 175 now that I'm not hardcore about it) I can look at pictures and see now where it went, but couldn't have imagined it before.
I think a lot of people in America suffer from skewed expectations. The kind of body mass that is healthy is perceived as sickly and unrealistic at this point. Yet it used to be common, or is common in other parts of the world.
Caliper measurements are notorious for underestimating actual body fat percentage. If you can afford $50 it's worth getting a DXA scan to accurately measure composition.
What do the meta-studies have to say about statins and life expectancy? Back then, before we had statins we had clofibrate. It decreased cholesterol levels just fine but overall mortality went up.
Also, why isn't dietary adjustment the first-line treatment for high cholesterol?
> What do the meta-studies have to say about statins and life expectancy?
For long term maintenance, they're definitely recommended. Near EOL is a bit different, but I don't know the guidelines.
> Also, why isn't dietary adjustment the first-line treatment for high cholesterol?
It is, but only in conjunction with medication. It seems that having a poor diet (e.g. high saturated fats) has long-lasting effects on cholesterol levels, and short-term dietary changes do little to "repair the damage", so to speak. Additionally, we know very little about what other factors affect HDL/LDL levels. For example, for a long time, there was concern that dietary cholesterol had an impact on serum levels, but I believe now the consensus is that this is false.
Cholesterol is complex, and while its role in disease is what gets attention, it's a vital compound with a number of downstream effects. In most cells, it acts as a modulator of membrane structure and function: absolutely crucial aspects of every cell's job, regardless of what tissue they're in. My point is twofold: first, statins likely have unknown "off-target" effects on cholesterol synthesis throughout the body (which potentially speaks to the life expectancy issue); and second, the comorbidity of high cholesterol and obesity is likely more complex than "bad diet."
Of course, keep in mind that having a "good diet" in the cholesterol sense (low saturated fats, possibly low dietary cholesterol) has been shown to be a good idea regardless. It's temporary changes to diet that seem ineffective, at a population level.
"Unfortunately, even the strict very low saturated fat, lowcholesterol American Heart Association Step 2 diet only minimally lowers serum cholesterol. Hunninghake et al found a mean 5% reduction in low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in patients following this program and discouragingly found an equivalent 6% fall in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, so that ratios were unchanged. Low-fat diets as commonly prescribed rarely produce significant LDL declines. Studies performed on controlled metabolic units where intakes are rigidly enforced can demonstrate cholesterol reductions of 15% with diet alone; however, in the real world, people can rarely replicate these results."
> When you are in a place where it's eat food that gives you no vitamins, no protein, no micronutrients, etcetera, or eat food that does not give you enough basic breakdown of glucose to get your body through another day, you do not have the luxury
But McDonalds and fast foods are much more expensive than healthy foods like rice, beans, rolled oats and potatoes, onions (all can be had for less than 1$ per pound). They should allow people to purchase those foods, and maybe even publish a guide on how to stretch each dollar farther.
as i said before, Beans especially are very well balanced, super high in fiber, protein and micronutrients.
I can't feed yourself on onions. And diet based on rice and potatos is not all that better for you. And you have to know hoe to prepare these so that they are remotely tasty.
Anyone have statistics on what % of those overweight adults are actually healthy, or at least have an acceptable body fat %? Many athletes and weightlifters would be considered overweight by BMI due to muscle mass. And according to the "Adults" PDF, that's the metric they're using. It's probably not a large percentage but I get ticked off a bit to know that you can be in the "overweight" BMI category and have clearly defined abs.
I've also noticed that the muscle-building culture is much, much smaller in the rest of the world than America. So while I'm sure we have a lot more fat people, we also have a lot more buff people, both of which are contributing to this percentage.
I would fall into this category. I am 5'11", weighing 220lbs, which equates to a BMI of 30.7. My hobby is powerlifting, 1,300 lbs total.
I have a clean diet, but do eat a heavy animal fat diet. Though all my meat comes from a local small farm e.g., I was able to watch the pig grow from a baby to right before it was slaughtered. I saw them feed the pigs (6 in total) 15 gallons of goats milk etc...
The beef I got was done a similar matter but a slightly larger farm - which was grass finished. While I eat a meat heavy diet, I feel great, the best I have in my entire life (I am 32 years old).
I also tested my cardio recently via swimming and I was able to swim 500 yards in 11 minutes. Not breaking records but felt good enough. Though I did notice swimming is more form and I basically muscle my way through the water i.e., I don't have good swim form.
Could I loose some weight? I am certain I could and probably be a little healthier. However, the feeling of being strong is incredible and I don't wish to give that up.
"Healthy" is such a nebulous term it is hard to reply in a serious fashion.
Many HAES-advocates, for example, would claim they're extremely healthy despite weighing 300lbs+. Any poor effects are just coincidental, and the weight is not a cause.
The best way of discovering how healthy somebody is? Perform an autopsy. Beyond reporting on aches, pains, lumps, worn out joints, the simple fact is people can appear very healthy right until they drop dead. Blood tests, CT-scans, etc, can be used to look at very narrow metrics, but they don't tell give a useful "healthy vs. non-healthy" response.
What is the deepest most complete diagnostics we can run on humans without them having to be dead? I would be interested in such a lab exercise even if it cost a lot.
I fall into the group you mention. BMI of 34, which makes me obese, but not, you now, actually obese. That being said, serious weight lifters and large athletes are not a meaningful % of population.
Very few athletes are actually overweight. The Olympics are on TV right now. How many of the competitors look overweight to you? Even in America only a tiny fraction of the population is really "buff"; they have a negligible impact on the overall percentage.
No the vast majority of Olympians really aren't classified as overweight. Check your data again. It's really only in a few sports which require short bursts of high power where you frequently see athletes muscular enough to technically fall into the "overweight" category.
We're not doing enough to understand the environmental factors in a trend like this. As fashionable as it is for each generation to shit on the next, "will power" is clearly not explanatory for a shift of this magnitude.
I have to wonder if our sedentary lifestyle, processed foods (with additives examined under an ignorant lens), stress (income inequality, constant stimulation, glowing objects being the center of our lives), are wrecking our microbiomes and other broader systems from a VERY young age, or causing other systems-level changes that make it hard to correct with behavior changes in adulthood.
Because ultimately, even when people get educated, get active, eat better, etc -- the trends aren't reversing.
It will get worse. You rarely see fat children with skinny parents. But a lot of fat parents have fat kids too. Once these grow up it will be more and more likely that their children will get fat too.
Also when you grow with a lot of fat people around you you don't even know how normal weight looks. I noticed this last time in Paris. I had completely forgotten how normal weight looks.
It's worse even than that. Over 40% of people in France are overweight now - the numbers have increased rapidly over the past 20-30 years.
Paris is leaner than the French average, but you were probably still seeing a population with a fair amount of overweight people. Just, less overweight than what you're used to.
Seeing Paris 110 years ago would be a shock. (On many levels, but certainly on the average body composition level).
I have a book by Georges Hebert, who was an influential fitness instructor in France about 100 years ago. In it, he has pictures of French peasants shirtless, and some African tribesmen and women. They are in a form that today would be considered "unrealistic".
I can't find any of the peasant pictures online, but here are a couple of examples of the Africans:
Some here say nutritional misinformation is one of the primary culprits, however, the reality is if you go tell someone "stop drinking soda, it's unhealthy", they will tell you "I don't care."
If people are not motivated to eat healthy, what are you supposed to do? Perhaps this goes back to educating your family on healthy eating, consequently if everyone were doing that, we'd see a trend of increased concern for healthy eating.
I am certainly not suggesting it's the right answer but in threads like these rarely do I see industrial seed oils with high omega-6 polyunsaturated fat content being suggested as a culprit. The use in food correlates as well as anything else that is being suggested with the rise in obesity rates and metabolic conditions.
If you read the fine print you'll see they're using BMI to determine if people are overweight or obese. BMI is a tragically flawed metric (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/265215.php) and I would approach the 70.7% figure with caution. The more compelling story in the stats is the trend showing a gradual rise from 54.9% in the period between 1988-1994 to the more current figure of 70.7% in the period between 2013-2014. I'm skeptical of the raw figures given issues with BMI but highly doubt such a massive increase came from US adults getting significantly taller or more muscular (both factors that can inflate BMI for healthy individuals).
"Significant weight loss was observed with any low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet. Weight loss differences between individual named diets were small. This supports the practice of recommending any diet that a patient will adhere to in order to lose weight." (Many diets work. Most important is optimizing for one that will be continued long term / rest of their life)
It seems that food types do play into this - in part because eating 1000 calories of sugar will leave you much hungrier than eating 1000 calories of fat, so while in theory you've eaten the same amount of calories, in reality the sugar eating person will probably eat more the rest of the day.
I did a small investment in a food oriented start-up and I really hope they will succeed in their dream of feeding people healthy stuff. Many companies claim to want to 'change the world for the better' when actually they are just looking to make bank. These guys are driven because of their ideals, they're super nice and have a good idea + track record. Time will tell if it works out.
Its not about eating healthy food, obesity is about the over consumption of food. You can maintain a healthy weight eating hamburgers and fries every day. The problem is portion size.
Diet is more complicated than that. I lost a significant amount by being on a low-carb diet. I didn't really try to control the portion size - though that may have happened naturally. What you eat does matter.
High fat and high protein provides high satiation which prevents the over consumption of calories. I've also lost significant weight on a keto diet. I've also done it with intermittent fasting and eating anything but keeping my calories below my required calorie intake.
The human body is not a pneumatic system that you push food through. It has a nervous system attached to it which changes your mood in ways that affect both the intake (hunger vs. satiety) and expenditure (laziness vs. feeling energetic) sides of the energy equation.
If you listen to people who have had success with low-carb and/or keto diets, their comments almost always discuss how the way they feel about food changed. They weren't hungry and they felt more energetic. Just about 0 of them mention spending time tracking calories consumed or measuring calories expended.
I've done keto diet while eating bacon, lettuce wrapped hamburgers and other high fat foods. I had full blood panel blood work done and everything was fine.
They are still in closed beta, see https://www.velafoods.com/, they are US based. I've seen their whole product evolution up close and decided that I believe as much in the founders as I believe in the product which made investing in them a relatively easy decision.
I don't disagree with what you've written, but regarding your brief point on exercise... On my journey to lose 100 pounds I came across a meta-analysis of studies on weight loss* which indicated that, while exercise wasn't a significant contributor to short-term weight loss, exercise was correlated to successful long-term weight loss (a much less likely occurrence, since the vast majority of people who lose weight regain it within a decade).
*I read this analysis a decade ago, so I can't really find it to share.
We applied and interviewed twice with Bitesnap/Bite AI but got feedback that they weren't sure if the market was big enough. Blame probably falls more on us and our ability to sell the vision though.
While this might be true, the CDCs “healthy weight” ranges are laughably inaccurate for anyone that does weight resistance training. And in my circle of friends, this is becoming the more common form of working out.
The CDC calculations basically assume 100% of us are sedentary.
Maybe it's not a problem, but I don't think it helps is when asking and/or researching what to go do, enjoy, see, explore, experience when traveling or moving to a new city. The most common responses almost exclusively and only mention food and local places to eat or drink. As if it's the only thing to do and enjoy? Anyone else notice this or is it just me?
I don't know about other people, but I only spend a small percentage of my day actually eating, needing, or hungry enough to sit down and eat. I've got a whole day not including sleep to do so much more! Food is good, but I want to have some fun, see things, explore, meet people, relax and not eat.
IMO the only way for this number to go down is to educate future generations better on nutrition and the importance of taking care of their bodies. I have no faith that the vast majority of people currently overweight will ever weigh much less than what they do today, and studies have backed this up. 95% of people who lose significant weight gain it back after a year. The few stories of people who keep weight off for good does not scale out to the general population. Indeed, it still seems the best way to lose weight is to go back in time and never gain it in the first place. It is never too early to talk to your children about responsible food consumption.
I have a very unpopular opinion on this: if someone is overweight, and isn't sick or malfunctioning in any way that negatively impacts themselves, their loved ones, or society, then who gives a shit?
The libertarian and contrarian in me doesn't care what someone weighs, or how they choose to life. So extrapolating to a larger population, or society, I still fail to see how being collectively overweight is a negative in and of itself if there were no damaging burdens created because of that.
In fact, I think we need to subset the 70.7% population to weed out the "innocously fat".
Being overweight has a plethora of scientific evidence as being bad for you. I'm not going to re-cite the last 50 years of medical publications if that's what you're expecting.
Extrapolating it to society means that healthy people have to subsidize the unhealthy, so it's extremely unfair to those who chose to invest in their health. So being 'contrarian' in this context is just being wrong, ignoring evidence and contributing nothing to the discussion.
Because this article is on the front page and this one about having an active lifestyle is too, I thought to link it here for discussion and reference:
Adopting a more active lifestyle could benefit your personality decades from now (bps.org.uk)
I work in health tech and I genuinely believe that this is an endemic problem that can’t be solved by a startup. It is a social issue approaching a health crisis and we need to have our policy, educator, and parents addressing this. While private industry can help, the ultimate responsibility lies with our democracy.
Real question here (US specific) -- how do the subsidies work, that they make corn cheaper, and milk more expensive? Are they truly both subsidies or is one another form of intervention that causes a different market result?
It also sucks to frequently throw out spoiled produce. If you live alone or with roommates, go to restaurants, etc chances are nearly half the produce will go bad. It's not expensive so much as disheartening.
Yes, you can see that quite clearly with any trip into a public space. But 70% is a low estimate for many parts of the country. And morbid obesity is becoming extremely common as well.
Obesity and the fat epidemic will bankrupt the US health care system.
Sooner than later, weight must be tied directly to out-of-pocket health care costs, via premiums, taxation, tax credits, or some other financial incentive and/or penalty combination for horrendous lifestyle decisions. Maybe go the Japanese route with a metabo law too. Obviously merely being an unhealthy glutton with high disease propensity and increased mortality is not a motivator for the majority of populace, so make them pay for their bad choices the same way someone who speeds frequently pays higher car insurance.
I think it is important to diffirentiate between people who are born with overweight body and cannot do anything with it and people who would have normal weight but are gaining it because of unhealthy food or lifestyle. Sadly, the page doesn't have such a table.
Yes, I don't know if it is checked scientifically, but people have different figures. If we take several people of the same height and age and will give them the same food and the same amount of physical load, they still will have different body mass.
If this is based on BMI, I couldn't care less. It's a terrible metric which is not fit for its purpose.
"Obesity is defined as body mass index (BMI) at or above the sex- and age-specific 95th percentile BMI (based on the variable BMXBMI) using cutoff points from the 2000 CDC growth charts for the United States: Methods and development. NCHS. Vital Health Stat 11(246). 2002. Available at:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_246.pdf. Excludes pregnant girls."
Almost everyone I know is "overweight" by this metric, which, as it turns out, means they are healthier (in terms of less likely to die from any-cause overall) than their thinner peers.
Show me the bell curve of longevity versus body-fat percentage, and what percentage of Americans are 1-sigma past the right side of the peak of that curve. Even body shape, for example, is a much better indicator of all-cause mortality than BMI. E.g. http://absi-calc.appspot.com/
BMI is a sufficiently sensitive metric for this. BMI can be relied on to confirm overweight/obesity. It cannot be relied on to confirm normal weight (that is to say, if your BMI says you're overweight, you're overweight. If it says you're normal weight, that may or may not be true).
Then pile on hyper sweet drinks and nutritional misinformation campaigns, and of course Americans are going to be overweight. The worst part is it’s becoming culturally acceptable for children to be overweight. I do not advocate for fat shaming—but there is a limit to my tolerance. Children should not consume anywhere near the amounts of sugar that they do and the pervasive attitude of “just one [soda, ice cream, pop tart, pie slice, muffin, cupcake, cookie] won’t hurt!” is incredibly damaging. Five grams of refined sugar a day. That’s it. That is less than one tenth of a “personal” (16oz / 500ml) bottle of Coca Cola.
We’re poisoning our kids.