More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese
I mean, duh?
Eating makes you feel good. It releases all kinds of feel-good chemicals in your body, and it just feels good to be, if not full, satiated. It's an activity chock-full of positive reinforcements.
Exercise, in contrast, is filled with various forms of pain (short and long term) and lots of tedium. If you're lucky, you get an endorphin rush to help offset these, but not everybody (and not every exercise regimen) provides these. It's an activity with lots of built-in negative reinforcements.
And dieting? Dieting is constantly saying "No" to the positive feelings associated with eating. A piece of Christmas fudge? No. A side of fries with your hamburger? No. A full rack of sauced BBQ ribs? No. Creamy dressing for your salad? No. Seconds? A whole lot of No.
It takes a lot of willpower and a long term goal to maintain a certain body shape to consistently - over the course of your entire lifetime - exercise more and eat less. And any mistake, any injury or illness which pushes you into obesity, and you're having to go even further into the "this doesn't make me feel good" category.
Throw in a continuing shift towards jobs which don’t burn thousands of calories every day (e.g. forced exercise, overhead for increased caloric intake), and the availability of cheap meals with lots of calories, and boom. Obesity.
If you're inclined to think of this as just an American problem, keep in mind that most western nations are following the same trajectory as the US -- they're just 10 to 15 years behind.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-who-are-o...
This isn't surprising. We're conditioned to eat great tasting food and lots of it. Most American cities have a car-oriented culture, along with sedentary lifestyles; therefore, not much walking or NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis). It seems over the years, Americans are burning less calories, but consuming more.
I usually cook at home now, thanks to the Pandemic. Looking at all the recipes I found online, I realized how much high-calorie ingredients you have to add to make the food taste delicious. I try to limit those ingredient or use lower-calorie substitutes, but it is challenging. I can't imagine how much fats and sugars restaurants put in their foods to make it tasty for the general population.
Also, food portions have gotten bigger. We're used to eating more. Having a great tasting food filled with sugar or fats is not bad by itself, but eating a small portion of it won't be satisfying or satiating enough for most people.
There's a Youtube home cook named Ethan Chlebowski who sometimes does low-calorie versions of certain foods. I think more people need to do that--give great recipes that can taste almost as good as the high-calorie versions.
Fringeing overweight, it has taken me years to remove 10kg and keeping it off is a constant battle. I used to be as thin as a rake.
Folks, its a mostly one-way ratchet. If you put a one-way walk into any system, and let it run free, what direction do you think things will trend, even if the pace of movement is a crawl?
I still remember driving through some small town in Arizona 10 years ago, and I couldn't find a single non-obese person there. Not just overweight, full on obese. Parents, kids, everyone. It was the one of the most bizarre experiences I've had, as a visitor. Cities are not that bad though, but I'm sure many rural parts are close to 100%.
I think everyone working in tech knows that sometimes simplistic solutions handle the vast majority of cases. The people who are muscular athletes are probably not worried about their BMI, but if they are, they can discuss with their doctors.
Is "healthy at every size" still a fringe movement, or is it gaining more social acceptance?
For those interested in a different measure that is much more suited to athletes:
A body fat calculator that requires just a tape measure.
You measure your height, waist and neck (as a man).
http://fitness.bizcalcs.com/Calculator.asp?Calc=Body-Fat-Nav...
The site is in 90's retro style. You can click on the question mark at the bottom left to see an explanation of all fields.
Someone with BMI of 27 ("overweight") and 16% body fat ("fit") and no belly (but no six-pack either)
It's impressive, because it's as if in America, we've figured out how to design a system that gets 73% of us to agree to do whatever we are doing to be overweight. That's really something when you think of it in terms of a population that is otherwise divided and polarized.
Just watch some home movies or look at pictures from the 60s or 70s and see how skinny most people were back then. It’s pretty amazing how the country got fat in such a short time. Having lived only on the coasts I noticed that Americans are a little chubbier than what I was used from Germany but the extent of the crisis became only clear when I did a cross country trip. Going to a Walmart in Indiana or Oklahoma you basically see only very fat or morbidly obese people. Even children are huge.
In the US there are many highly processed foods with little fiber and added sugar.
Nutrition fact labels can be very misleading. e.g.: showing nutrition facts per certain some arbitrary amount of weight, or having multiple servings per container, which is misleading if it's an individual serving container.
e.g.: Oreo serving size is 2 cookies. Who opens a pack of oreos only to eat 2 of them? nobody.
Many occupations do not involve physical activity, and nowadays many day to day activities also do not involve physical activity.
I find it amazing how much effort and economic sacrifices we are willing to take to fight COVID, while at the same time, even now, the death toll because of unhealthy lifestyles is far greater. Why don't we put a similar effort into banning fast food, for instance? How can the USA allow companies to advertise that stuff when the bad consequences can be seen everywhere?
> A new report has also revealed that 19.3% of children and young people, aged between two and 19, had obesity, with 6.1% of kids identified as being severely obesity.
Small point but I found it interesting that 'obesity' is used here as a condition one can have, rather than be. Maybe that's the norm in science writing but first time I've seen it.
Isn’t it strange how the only way to eat healthy food in America is to cook it yourself?
Every fast food restaurant is unhealthy. Most sit down restaurants are unhealthy.
I can pay someone to change my oil, I can pay someone to cut my grass, but for some reason cooking healthy food, the most essential service, is difficult to find.
Why has our economy failed us in this sector specifically?
A thing I wondered over the weekend:
Is there a correlation between frequency of bowel movements and BMI?
I read a book about pigs a couple years ago. It mentioned that once of the main differences between breeds of pigs that are high fat and those that are more lean is intestine length.
Basically, the longer food is in your guts, the more energy gets extracted from it.
My hypothesis would be that for an obese person, the length of time between food entering the body and food exiting the body is greater than in a person of a healthy weight.
BMI has no scientific validity and never did. Huge numbers of people are "overweight" by BMI standards, which is why even the armed forces don't use it (the Marine Corps height/weight standards allow for heavier individuals at each height, which is pretty telling since were the most physically demanding branch and geared toward being light naval infantry).
Many folks that weight lift are overweight by the BMI metric. When I used to hit the gym 3-4 times a week I was overweight, now I don’t and bam lost most of the muscle and in the normal range. It’s pretty easy to fall into the overweight range of the bmi metric
Sometimes I wonder how this trend impacts dating and marriage
The Biden administration is going to try to advance a Medicare for All healthcare system. If the government wants to control the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, it can do well by addressing the root causes of health problems rather than structuring creative contracts with healthcare providers and pharmaceuticals. Even something as progressive as "incentivize healthy living" is very difficult when every legislator is lobbied nonstop by a long line of vested interests. Obese Americans create billions of dollars of financial opportunity. Think about the financial losses that people would experience if the mind and habits of every American were to change today. Healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, finance, food, academia, government agencies and administration -- all have a stake in keeping America the way it is.
Just as America is focusing resources on a Green New Deal, so too does it need to focus on a Lean New Deal. This doesn't seem to be on the agenda for the first term, though.
Obesity is 100x worse of a crisis than covid. We do nothing to change obesity or the lifestyle choices that lead to it.
We need to have a national dialog about obesity that results in some people feeling bad.
Global levels of obesity are set to meet US levels by 2040.
Using the BMI to gauge obeseness of a population is very lazy and disingenuous.
BMI isn't a reliable indicator to gauge obesity. For example, Tom Brady at 6' 4" and 225 lbs is considered overweight, which is obviously not the case.
That being said, as an American, it really did shock me how fit the majority of people were in Italy when I visited there for the first time last year.
This New England Journal of Medicine chart really does a good job of showing that America has gotten heavier over the years: https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...
