World's Obese Population Hits 641M
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Would be nice, for those who are overweight as well as those who suffer from the externalities of those who are overweight, for Governments to treat overeating/junk food like it does smoking and drinking - an addiction that should be discouraged through education and disincentives (tax etc.). Some do but it's obviously not effective.
Then there's the popular cultural angle. We disparage magazines, fashion Houses and websites that present clinically underweight models as the standard, the same should be applied for the clinically overweight.
Really the government doesn't know enough about nutritional science. Neither do the scientists it seems. Nor can we trust the companies. Not sure who to trust.
Ordering water when you're out (in America) is often viewed as being cheap. I just prefer water, and not bottled water (it's bad for the environment). Even many waiters may treat you worse for ordering water (since they are paid by meal cost / commission).
Our social norms suck.
Part of the problem is that it becomes a standard part of many meals.
I can decide if I want to drive to McDonald's or to the grocery store to buy some vegetables or other healthy ingredients to prepare a more balanced meal. The first is obviously easier and kinda more convenient but if you look at what it does to your health then maybe not so convenient at all.
What I'm trying to say is that for example I used to love Coke and even drank some for breakfast. I'm not the typical coffee addicted developer but I pumped myself with energy drinks instead. After my brother forced me to get my sugar levels throughly checked this year I saw that I was close to be diagnosed with diabetes and figured that there is no other way than to change my diet.
Presumably for the same reason you drank too much sugary drinks, there was an immediate reward and you didn't comprehend the long term effects i.e. it wasn't an informed decision. I doubt that the doctor was very surprised with the outcome.
The latest episode of americas test kitchen radio touches on this topic and while I don't agree with everything they do have some good points.
It's not like the obese don't know they're obese and unhealthy; the problem is that it's really hard to fix, there's way too much misinformation out there, and for most people most weight loss approaches don't work. There is still a lot of fundamental research to be done to understand obese metabolisms and how to manipulate them so the body doesn't fight back against weight loss.
Unfortunately your idea of disparaging the "clinically overweight" is based on arbitrary BMI cutoffs that are poorly chosen. Recent studies have shown that overall health outcomes (ie, not just heart-disease numbers) are actually better for "overweight" people than those of "normal" weight. And BMI does not scale with height correctly, so it imposes a much stricter standard of what's "healthy" on someone who's 6'3" as opposed to someone who's 5'3". The ratings for what's "normal" also do not take into account age or sex, much less things like frame size.
BMI was devised because height and weight are numbers that have been collected in medical records and studies for decades, whereas the other factors are far less likely to have been recorded at all. So while BMI is often used as a tool for doing large-scale historical research or research across large population groups, that's simply because BMI is a number we can easily figure out, and not because it's actually a good indicator of an individual's health.
Reminds me of this story: http://time.com/3051380/dubai-gold-children-weight-loss/
> "Your Child in Gold" program will award two grams of gold for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) a child manages to shed over two months.
The increase in the obesity gets even more alarming if one considers that out of ~7 Billion world population, one can take ~3 Billion people (India + China + Central Africa) out of the equation as they are affected less than others (the first infographics also supports this notion).
641M of 7B = 10%
600M of 4B = 15%
(Approx numbers just for getting some ballpark indicators)
My takeway from it (could be wrong) is that in absolute numbers there would be more obese people in china than say in some countries in middle east, but as a percentage of population they are small.
I knew from other other readings that in China this is due to younger generation.
"Within one generation, the percentage of Chinese children who are overweight or obese has skyrocketed from 5% to 20%. The rate has absolutely exploded, over a very limited amount of time." http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-...
There are also many skinny people who eat nothing but dorritos and are skinnyweak. They don't make the Obese charts but they are no more healthy.
The fact of the matter is that people need to own their health.
Not really. To get to obese by gaining muscle mass one would most certainly have to use certain illegal drugs.
http://www.bodybuilding.com/author/john-hansen
Which puts him at 31 BMI, so just barely in the obese category.
And this guy is clearly not your average "gym rat", he's a winner of Natural Mr. Universe, so he'll be somewhere on the very edge of the Bell curve. 99.9% gym rats will never be close in terms of lean body mass. So if they are "lumped in obese", then they truly have a lot of fat to lose.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL39F782316B425249&fea...
Lustig studied at MIT+Cornell and is an MD with years of experience. He spent decades researching biochemistry and obesity and published numerous papers on these subjects.
Anthony Colpo, unless I'm mistaken, is just some random guy.
No, Hacker News should promote curious conversation that respects people's right to differing views. This is a pluralistic place where people are allowed to be wrong. Strident denunciations—even (or rather especially) in the name of correct scientific positions—are corrosive of the social contract here and should be eschewed regardless of how right you are, or believe you are.
Otherwise the endgame is a few absolutists yelling at each other, and everyone else leaving.
The flagged post was in this tone also, calling lies and requested we do not discuss the sugar hypotheses here. So you could interpret this as "The call for censorship got censored" ;)
The first link has 28 references to scientific texts and studies, the second has 57.
Speak what you want about his style, but his works are always well-researched and well-referenced.
So far I only find a lot echo-chamber forums and questionable publishers (Kopp-Verlag, esoteric/far right stuff)
Did we even read the same articles?
Here are some examples I picked up in five minutes that look like completely reasonable referencing to me.
Anyone with an Internet connection can easily verify as much for themselves by visiting the Food and Agriculture (FAO) website, and checking the per capita intake of sweeteners in Japan for that year. Do that, and you’ll see the Japanese were averaging 52 calories per day from fruits, and a far more significant 174 calories daily from sugar. “Sweeteners, Other” and “Honey” supplied another 86 cals/day[7]
So just from sugar alone, the Japanese were obtaining 22 grams, or 4.4 teaspoons, of fructose per day. The Japanese do indeed eat fructose-containing sugar, and have been doing so for hundreds of years[8].
The same FAO data we just checked out shows that in 2009, the average per capita energy intake in Japan was 2,674 calories/day. The corresponding figure for the USA was 3,652 calories/day[7]
Unlike the US rise in obesity, which stems from both declining activity and a marked increase in per capita caloric intake[11, 7], Australia’s rise seems to have been caused almost entirely from decreasing physical activity.
The indignant paediatrician then completely refuted himself a moment later when he admitted that Americans were indeed eating more than they were in the 1980s[13]. And at 7:30 in his “Bitter Truth” video, Lustig acknowledges to his audience: “We are all eating more now than we did 20 years ago.”[4]
Taubes cites a 2004 CDC article reporting that since 1971, total fat intake increased among women by a mere 6.5 grams but decreased among men by 5.3 grams[14]. This gives the impression overall fat intake has remained relatively unchanged.
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...
The major concern, of course, is that "scientists" on this topic keep changing the advice they give to people, so by the time people finally absorb, and start practicing what they were told to do - the next set of guidance comes out, that is, in some cases, precisely the opposite of what they were told previous.
Here in Singapore, just today, the front page of the newspaper said, "White Rice causing Diabetes, 1 plate of rice = 2 cans of sugary soda." - while on the inside of the paper, there were talks about increasing taxes on soda, but nothing on white rice....
Hopefully, we'll eventually get some evidence/science based information, guidance, and policy, but I'm not optimistic.
Nutrition scientists and doctors are working with the human body and its surrounding environment, an exceedingly complex model. They publish their findings in journals with cautions and caveats and data.
A mainstream journalist with traffic quotas or column inches to fill on a slow news day then skims these journals for the next "X makes you fat" or "Y gives you cancer" headline without bothering to read the fine print.
In the current funding climate and the well known publish(fast and crazy)-or-perish 'incentives', I find it hard to find fault with the bar set for scientists. (Disclosure: I'm one. Although not in nutrition science.)
It starts, of course, with Dr. Ancel keys, but he wasn't the only person who signed off on the consensus that a high-carbohydrate diet was the right model for the American people.
I use the scare quotes, because what took place after that, was probably the furthest thing from science you could imagine - presuming we agree that the objective of science isn't to pile on the latest theory, but instead to strengthen those theories, by trying to disprove them.
Your article [2] quotes, "while Asians, like the Chinese, had four servings a day of cooked rice, Americans and Australians ate just five a week". The fault for a change in advice is shared between scientists and the media for giving advice based on a western diet to people eating an eastern diet. I think this is a problem in general with English-language media. I see people sharing advice about high-fructose corn syrup, but in the UK it's ① legally called "glucose-fructose syrup", and ② rarely used, and thus irrelevant to most people I know. Similarly for hormones and antibiotics in beef, or added salt in some foods.
[1] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
[2] probably http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/diabetes-the-ri...
The current majority of people who believe that high fat diets are good for something other than getting fat and that carbohydrates cause obesity is no more a sign of a change in science than any popular political or religious belief.
It's a very popular conspiracy theory that nutritional scientists and doctors who follow them are part of or corrupted by the powerful vegan lobby, while the meat and dairy and processed added-oil food and fast food industries have the ideal products for making you thin, as long as you skip the traditional starches in those products, because everyone knows that the all the world's old cultures that lived on potatoes or rice or corn or wheat were full of massively obese people, and it's not until they got modern food industry amounts of butter, manufactured oil, and soybean-fed chicken that they became the crowds of dangerously thin looking people that you see in old pictures.
(I'm going to get downvoted into invisibility for being right, but people's health is at stake, so I'm going to reply anyway.)
The following quote is some basic information about cloudy blood:
http://www.questdiagnostics.com/home/physicians/testing-serv...
TURBIDITY (LIPEMIA)
Turbid, cloudy or milky serum (lipemic serum) may be produced by the presence of fatty substances (lipids) in the blood. Bacterial contamination may also cause cloudy serum. Moderately or grossly lipemic specimens may alter certain test results.
A recent meal may produce transient lipemia; therefore, we recommend that patients fast 12-16 hours before a blood specimen is obtained.
Could this be due to an increase in people going to the gym? A bmi of 24.x is still < 30 and not unhealthy.
Therefore, I wonder whether we see two different things here: 1.) More people become obese (those with an bmi > 30 [and even there could be some corner cases due to the fact that bmi is by no means a perfect measure]) and 2.) more people lift weights/become (somewhat) healthier.
The entire reason why Gyms are so profitable, is an insignificant number of people who sign up, actually ever go.
Meanwhile, powerlifting gyms cater exclusively to the people who will show up 5 days a week, every week. You don't have that massive pool of resolutioners to provide effort-free cash, so you have to charge more money.
Of course, on the other end is Planet Fitness, which specifically caters to the specific demographics who don't show up and actively discourages the people who will show up 5 days a week. Brilliant strategy.
This is also why every lifter bitches about the lack of squat racks, cramped lifting spaces, and fuckstick trainers at corporate gyms. They are often a net negative for the gym, so the gym doesn't care about them; the folks who occasionally show up and do 20 minutes on the elliptical are where the money is.
I didn't realize, until I visited many, many other cities - that finding a gym that you can do your squats/deadlift/shoulder press three times a week for $20, is pretty much unheard of.
I sometimes even see it advertised for $17 (presumably with a slightly higher sign up fee) - This is really clever - if you've already invested, say, $200, and you have this pretty cool downtown gym, and it's only $17/month - why on earth would you ever cancel...
Increase in average BMI and increase in gym revenue/creation of new gyms are probably even directly correlated via bad conscience customers who sign up and then stay home.
Sure, it depends on the person and their tolerance negative effect, but there isn't any fumbling with BMI or flatly checking a person's weight.
The American obesity crisis for instance is largely because we dropped our arbitrary threshold down to the WHO's threshold and gained some tens of millions of obese citizens in the process.
And wouldn't noodlesoup be even cheaper, and healtier too?
That would depend on if the crisps were fried in transfats. Otherwise they both end up as a ball of diabetes-causing carb covered in salt.
And anyway wouldn't something like bulk rice or porridge be cheaper?
But would it be healthier? A giant lump of carb laced with arsenic?
http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/my-600-lb-life/videos/7-000-calo...
Really? Worse then actual suffering and societal costs is the treatment of obesity as a disease and not a character flaw? Not only should people suffer, but they should be shamed for it.
That's ridiculous. Just saying.
What an overly sensitive response. How ridiculous is Hacker News? Where did I say anything about [1] the suffering, [2] societal costs, or [3] treatment of obesity as a disease?
Mentioned it's political and has a media component to it, get attacked. There factually are people, like the parent comment, who will not fairly discuss the issue on neutral terms. Derailed into personal attacks, insensitivity, or straw man arguments like the above comment. How can HN parade itself as intellectual discussion when it can't even handle benign comments.
Haha, is this a joke? Is anyone else seeing this insanity?
Where did Olscore say that?
People don't improve without help or guidance. That goes for all of us, in many aspects of life. To shame people who suffer is to ostracize them, and this will not solve the problem, it will exacerbate it.
If you really want to shame people, then shame the politicians and industry executives that are peddling unhealthy foods and eating habits. Maybe when we've leveled the playing field enough so that healthy food is cheaper and more readily available than unhealthy foods, then you can start shaming obese people like you're shaming smokers now.
You are shaming smokers as fervent as you wrote your post, right?
is an idea the anti-fat-shaming community rejects. For (some of[0]) them, calling obesity a disease is already shaming.
[0] you'll always find a counter example