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Comment by sundvor | Hacker News Reader

Wow... ${expletives}. It is all starting to make sense to me now.

Ref what I wrote on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17017920 :

"As a Norwegian, when I visited Boston in 1999 for an Allaire dev conference I saw more grossly fat / obese people in the _hour_ spent switching flights at Newark airport than I had in my (then) home country in the preceding year. I was really taken aback."

I never got my now 7y son into juices etc and Coke products are generally banned in our home. He has a very healthy body weight, so that's one fewer thing he has to worry about whilst growing up.

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My wife and I were watching Wild Wild Country (events from the 80s) the other week and we commented on how skinny everyone in the cult/commune was. Image in the header here:

https://www.elitedaily.com/p/netflixs-wild-wild-country-docu...

You'd be working hard to find a cross-section of non-athletes/models in the US these days that didn't include a reasonable number of larger people.

Sugar lobbyists have a lot to answer for IMO.

I was in Copenhagen earlier this year and I commented to my wife and our friends multiple times on how there were just no obese people anywhere. You Scandinavians are obviously doing something right.

Some do, especially in bigger cities. Rural and suburban Sweden for example is getting obese at an alarming rate. But don't worry, the tax payers can foot that bill too I guess.

A lot of that comes down to much stronger belief in government regulation and initiative. In the US it seems there is an outrage every time somebody suggests some kind of regulation to promote health and welfare.

I suspect that outrage is partly manufactured by the sugar and junk food industry though.

Copenhagen is also very active in getting people to bike in town instead of driving.

Interesting. Coming from a Mediterranean country, what shocked me the most was not the extremely obese people (although these really were a lot more common than in my country), but the fact that figuratively everyone seemed to be at least overweight and how common were (inconsequential) conversations about weight loss.

And then there was something that infuriated me. I eat a lot but I am pretty skinny (I do a lot of sport and keep a healthy diet), and the usual commentary during meals was how lucky I am for being able to eat anything I want without getting fat. I was always polite but damn... for a culture so focused on the self made man they sure believe in predestination.

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