Study: people who eat and exercise the same as people 20 years ago are fatter

Just the types of cooking oil we use has changed a lot.

Look at what goes into cookies now. It used to be butter, now I've seen recipes with canola oil. (if anyone tells you to use canola oil in your baked goods, ignore them and use butter!)

There is evidence that gut bacteria is passed down from generation to generation, we could very well be seeing a delayed effect from public policy and health decisions made around the time the previous generation was growing up. oops.

I am sort of on the fence about processed foods. A lot of canned food was eaten previously, fresh vegetables were not available year round, but a lot of the canning was done at home in glass jars. I am not one to be paranoid, but now all our canned food comes in coated aluminum cans.

We have a few decades of aluminum cans being coated on the inside with BPA. It is know known that BPA can have harmful effects that take a long time to manifest.

The point is, there are a lot of potential culprits, and it is going to take a long time to figure out what state unbridled capitalism has left public health in.

I cannot access the full text, but this isn't acknowledged in either the Atlantic piece or the abstract. There is no talk about more adipose tissue, less fat-free mass or higher bodyfat.

We cannot distinguish between good weight gain and bad weight gain based on BMI changes alone.

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"[...] in the U.K., average living room temperatures rose from 64.9F/18.3C in 1978 to 66.4F/19.1C in 2008 and bedroom temperatures increased from 59.36F/15.2C to 65.3F/18.5C."[1]

[0][1] http://hypothermics.com/2011/02/ch-ch-changes/

http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf

Two big increases in consumption are in chicken and cooking oils. The average American eats 40 pounds more chicken than their grandparents and 30 additional pounds of fat and oils.

The bulk of these ideas come from Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat. Here's a summary of the process: http://www.columnfivemedia.com/work-items/infographic-carbs-...

The scary part is that you start secreting insulin just by THINKING about carbs, sugar and so on. I haven't heard people discuss this... but if it's true that insulin is secreted, ADVERTISING could be contributing to obesity. Which is disturbing. I hope I'm wrong.

I'm not super well-informed on this subject, but I would like to be and welcome any thoughts and suggestions and corrections and so on.

What you eat is the most important thing. How you exercise is next.

What you do in your leisure time is important too. In the 70s, I don't recall anyone binge-watching Netflix while sitting on a couch. TV just wasn't that great and there were only a few specific times per day or week that were something you might be interested in. I don't remember many people playing video games for hours at a time. Sure some minority of people did but the games just weren't that fun and anyone that played Pacman on the Atari 2600 knows that. Kids played outside more, and throughout the neighborhood not just in their own back yard. Adults socialized outside more. There was no Facebook to spend hours per day sitting and reading. I don't think the 70s had Amazon.com either so people burned more calories walking through stores. I distinctly remember shopping with my parents as a kid and it was exhausting walking through a mall for hours.

I don't see any evidence the study took any of this technological change into consideration.

answer is - we became lazy, so slowly that many actually think that nothing changed. sample job you mention - carpenter now doesn't do as much physical work as he used do do 500 years ago. the ones who don't use modern approach, they are skinny, muscular athlete-looking types, even if they are 50-60 years old.

most people really have very sedentary lifestyle, and even the same profession got more passive over time. you don't need to run around that much in the office searching for some document, if you have DMS for that. all is electronic, reachable with few clicks/taps. Especially in US, but also generally in 1st world countries, people are using cars all the time. For my parents, the only way to do shopping was to carry 10-20kg shopping bags 500m back home from shop, usually few times a week. These tiny examples stack up.

Add to this crappy oversweetened, junkish food most people are eating, and it couldn't end up any other way. I live practically in France (Geneva), but most colleagues eat fine tasting, buy shitty composition-wise foods. Most countries fare worse on this. A bit of veggie at the plate doesn't make it magically good and healthy.

Also, most people lack any kind of discipline when it comes to food. Spoiling oneself ("treat yourself" bullsh*t), small cheat snacks that somehow don't count to whole food equation, people focused too much on work, and not on their well being.

I could go on and on, but why, its apparent. we are to blame, nobody else. you and I choose every day what we put in our mouth, and how much physical exercise we do. Eat better, less (especially dinner), exercise more and all will be good. But for many people, for some reason this seems to be too-hard-to-succeed challenge in life.

for example, when was the last time you "ran to the store" to grab something like milk? I wouldn't call that exercise but it's definitely something current generation lost compare to all the previous ones.

Including myself and friends, our weekend preferred activity are changing from going out (to parks, movies etc) to "Netflix and chill".

think about this, "Running" didn't become a thing until the late 70s. People simply didn't do much to stay "fit" before that. You can attribute it to biomes or genetics, but this is just within one or two generation.

What I would find interesting is if we can find data similar to what we record with fitbits, ie. # of steps per day etc. from people 30/40 years ago, and compare to actual fitbit data of today. I'd wager we'd find some interesting correlations.

May I present my broad theory ?

Americans, across a very broad swatch of behaviors, haven't broken away from the social norms and habits of living on a farm.

You (my fellow American) drive a big truck, eat "3 squares" a day, serve HUGE portions, don't specifically exercise and generally overequip and overfuel our entire lifestyle because we can't remember we're not on the farm anymore.

My father grew up on a farm, my wifes grandparents both grew up on a farm, and everyone in their lineage going back ... forever ... were living rural, agrarian, peasant lives. So depending on who you are in the United States, you are perhaps 1-2 generations removed from a radically different lifestyle.

It's going to take more than one generation to become well-practiced at being urban, and a pseudo-rural suburban environment coupled with a TV shouting "YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH TRUCK!@" is not helping ...

These conclusions from a study with 36,000 people out of some 300 million Americans?

> In NHANES I (1971–1975) and NHANES II (1976–1980), in-person interviews were used to obtain self-reported dietary information via a 24-h dietary recall questionnaire that assessed food and beverage intake for weekdays only. In NHANES III (1988–1994), dietary information was obtained through a self-reported 24-h dietary recall using a computer-assisted, automated, interactive method for any day of the week. In NHANES 1999–2002, a multiple-pass computer-assisted dietary interview format was used to collect detailed self-reported information about all foods and beverages that were consumed the day prior to the in-person interview (weekday or weekend). In NHANES 2003–2008, 24-h self-reported dietary recalls were performed twice (3–10 days apart) using an automated multiple pass method.

I'm highly suspect of this one. This seems like an interesting avenue of exploration, but this data seems too weak to make broad claims from.

I think the article mostly applies to America. American food is just fattening

In any case, congrats on the achievement!

It's purely anecdotal, but the fewer grains I eat (I do have some legumes, but try to limit them), the better I do all around. In general if I stay under an estimated glycemic load of 100/day, I loose weight with not other real changes in terms of calories or exercies.

Staying away from soda (Diet Dr Pepper) has been much harder... mostly drink water, but have a soda about every other day. I try to cook about once a week, usually soup that's easy enough to eat during the week and supplement with some meat along with fruit & nuts. It isn't easy, especially the first week... also, it's definitely more expensive avoiding heavily processed foods all around.

But if you take the idea seriously, then the problem is - which ones? For me, I've arrived at the answer, more of less, of "dairy and poultry." The first one, specifically casein(milk) protein, gives me all sorts of small issues if I treat it as a staple - joint inflammation, hayfever, trouble concentrating, elevated heart rate, etc. It may have been responsible for my scoliosis and nearsightedness too, though I'll never know for sure. The second tends to trigger migraines. I've only ever managed to become substantially overweight by consuming a lot of dairy and sugar, and as soon as I cut those out I slimmed down again.

Fortunately I don't have to put my foot down too much to make a compromise. When I have a burger it's always the plainest burger, since all the others have cheese. Nearly any snack food manufactured to taste "addictive" will contain the odious phrase "milk protein", with the exception of some potato chip flavors. The most unavoidable one is pizza, but I can take a hit there occasionally. And I'll default to lower-GI foods like oatmeal where I get the opportunity - although I tried the "avoid grains" strategem a while ago, it was never something that resulted in a _reaction_ like milk, it was more a matter of "after having milk I wanted to eat more."

Now, if I could get my mom to actually try following this plan I would be content. But despite apparently experiencing many similar issues in a more stark, life-impacting fashion, she is far, far too stubborn to give up her 4 AM coffees with milk, her various yogurts, cheeses, etc. She will, in fact, point to the microbiome as a reason to consume those things.

Amongst others we blamed cholesterol, we blamed fats, then saturated fats, now we're starting to blame carbohydrates. The problem starts from the reductionist science being applied, coupled with the constant lobbying of the food industry of course. What happens is that nutrition is an incredibly complex subject and nutritionists can only blame what they can currently measure. The result is a whole industry of processed foods that have lost their nutritional value. And for the food industry, that's OK because processed foods are more profitable.

The problem is not naturally occurring sugar. The problem is high fructose corn syrup and (to a lesser extent) sucrose and the current practice of injecting these substances in processed foods, because these sugars are fooling our senses and create addiction. But we are talking about refined carbohydrates. The sugar in fruits is totally fine and in fact there are signs that we don't eat enough fruits. But why stop at sugars? Margarine was certainly a bad idea, as was every other idea that the nutritionists' community ever had.

So really, if you want an enemy, that's certainly processed foods and the weakest cult-like science that human kind ever practised. To this day doctors are still advising patients to avoid saturated fats, even though there's zero evidence of saturated fats provoking cancer or heart disease or obesity. To this day you can see low-fat products, like low-fat milk that's artificially coloured and enriched with powdered milk, being sold because of health claims. Expect to see Omega-3 in bananas.

And entertainingly this reckons increasingly industrialy generated wheat is now so devoid of any nutrients, even pigs won't eat it? http://www.grainstorm.com/pages/modern-wheat

Is it just me or is it becoming increasingly more difficult to get the truth on any matter, because you're wading through so many layers of human generated FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)?

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^ The 3rd paragraph of the article.

Meat is fine, as long as you don't eat something too industrial.

It's like junk food is a complete mystery for last 20 years, and we don't have a free will and we are not actually choosing what we buy or eat. the fact that sweet stuff is not healthy was known to me as a kid 25 years ago, without all the science. Everybody knew it.

I'll say something many won't like - people got weak, not only physically, but mentally. We cannot handle pain that was common before, we frown upon hard physical work, because its well... hard. We seek professional challenges, but other, more important ones, are often sidelined.

Also, completely agree with you. Doing sports, anything that makes your heart pumping and your body sweating like pig is by far the best thing one can do for his/her health. Regularly/often is the key, the only true key. Unless one is paraplegic, there is no excuse good enough to be valid. But guess what - it's hard :)

> A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher.

A room gets more crowded when more people enter than exit. Obviously true.

Neither of these statements tell you why that is happening though, and that is important thing. So, why are people eating more calories? Or, since the articles says they aren't, could the sources of calories matter? (They do.)

If most Japanese citizens eat it, they will absorb calories from it.

There is a gut bacteria common in the Japanese population that extracts calories from this type of seaweed.

"calories in" is that calories that went down your throat. It is calories that your body was able to digest, and "your body" includes many types of bacteria that are unique to each person and also unique to different population groups (meaning that some populations share commonalities in gut flora).

It is possible that certain antibiotics have wipe out some types of gut flora, allowing others to proliferate more. That alone could increase calorie absorption. (Or cause a host of other problems!)

It is possible that having a diet too heavily reliant upon one type of food results in an imbalance of some type. The problem is, this is a brand new area of research and we just don't know yet.

But it is sure as heck known that it is more complicated than "calories in food down the throat".

So: hard problem. Not strictly a technical problem, either.

RTFA, please. Paragraph five, specifically.

As much as you're not going to fix your health by reading superficial linkbait articles, you also will not do it by taking a smug reductionist view that allows you to dismiss the subtleties of nutrition which still remain frustratingly beyond the reach of conclusive hard science.

There are several reasons for this. One promising area of research is gut flora. Someone could have a gut flora that makes it harder to absorb calories. Someone else could have a gut flora that makes it easier to absorb calories.

Here's one paper that links gut flora to anorexia. (Read carefully, they have human samples buried in there) http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp201498a.html

> Statements like these only help people who have weight-problems to have an excuse not to do anything about it.

No. Statements like this are an effort to help fat people to lose weight by creating treatments that work rather than just yelling judgemental but useless advice at them. "Eat less food" does not work on populations. "Exercise more" does not work across populations.

If you're restricting calories and your body isn't doing a good job of mobilizing energy from fat reserves, then one way or another you'll burn less energy. You'll fidget less, think poorly, turn up the thermostat, lack the motivation to exercise, and if you do get a little exercise you won't be very vigorous about it. No amount of willpower can overcome thermodynamics.