Childhood Obesity Is Rising 'Shockingly Fast' Even in Poor Countries | Hacker News Reader

Childhood Obesity Is Rising 'Shockingly Fast' Even in Poor Countries

npr.org

30 pointspseudolus39 comments

My daughter is in 3rd grade (in Greece) and she is the only kid in her class getting packaged food everyday with her without any money in her pocket. All the other kids have money, which use regularly to buy potato chips, beverages, sweets, etc from the school's shop.

Also, from what I hear from other parents, other kids regularly eat out, with the Greek souvlaki being the main food they get (which comes with fried potatos and pita), burgers and pizza.

Parents don't want to face their kids when the kids whine all the time, and in order to shut them up, they buy whatever the kids want.

The above, coupled with lack of physical activity due to various reasons, creates the obesity epidemic for kids, at least in my country.

Same thing in Cyprus here. My daughter is in 3rd grade and nearly all Cypriot kids in the class are fat. While Cypriot ones are of course, a minority these days in Cyprus schools.

> While Cypriot ones are of course, a minority these days in Cyprus schools.

I don't follow.

Most seem to be Russians, Chinese and the like? Even Cypriots kids themselves are whole lot whiter-skinned now, due to a lot of British, then Russian and other Eastern European wives brought in over last couple generations.

I wonder if it has something to do with body-positivism? Why would anyone get himself in shape, if he/she is beautiful no matter what they say?

I think it has to do with how food quality keeps hitting new lows. We really don't need sheep hair and 5 types of artificial sugars in our foods. We don't need everything bulked up with hydrolyzed soy bean. We really don't need purple plastic gel "berries" in our breakfast. Etc. Surely we can find a way to get foods from the farms to our tables fast enough that they don't have to be picked before they develop full nutritional profiles.

Most of all, that is to say we really don't need 80% of our diets to be empty calories and sugars.

Of course, there is the problem of sedentary living. I can't believe how lazy kids are these days - they don't even go for aimless bike rides anymore, because chatting online and playing 5-hour video game marathons is way more fun than real life apparently. But I'll leave that for someone else to cover.

Let's just say our culture is feeding it, and it takes willful blindness to be at all surprised.

> "sheep hair"

That's a new one to me, which foods have wool in them?

Look for the word lanolin in your ingredient lists. It's basically boiled down sheep hair. It's a source of vitamin D, but mainly it's used to make things really crispy (when fried) or shiny and slippery (when straight up).

You get vitamin D from a whole lot of other things you eat (it's not rare), and it takes some laboratory wizardry to derive the vitamin D3 from it (versus simply eating normal food to get it...) so nobody is adding lanolin to your food for it's wholesome goodness. It's literally only there for the texture. That's why its in your shampoo, chewing gum, leather polish and french fries, amongst a whole lot of other foods you eat.

Seems a tad misleading to call that hair; lanolin isn't keratin.

Yeah and lanolin would have been of use for cooking for millennia even if it wasn't appetizing just from sheer calories and survival. That fits the pattern of PETA style vegan fanatic "too important for the truth" propaganda. Like claims that sheep are skinned for their wool.

Can you link a source for "Like claims that sheep are skinned for their wool."?

> nobody is adding lanolin to your food for it's wholesome goodness.

Most people are D deficient and D3 is fat soluble. That is literally why it's added to milk.

I think the sedentary part is far more important. I grew up in the 1970s in the US, and if anything, we ate worse than we do now with our current concern with calories and nutrition -- we had fast food a couple of times a week, drank soda daily, and ate those awful sugary cereals like Lucky Charms. And yet we didn't (on average) get fat the way kids do today. We burned off those excess calories running around outside and riding bikes.

But what if it had to do with the food they ate instead

Please read about proximate and ultimate causation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causati...

lol, username. I loved you at one point and had to give you up.

How many people actually believe body positivism deep down? For example, how many people would see zero difference between, all things being equal, dating a thin person and a morbidly obese person?

I'm sure they are out there but I would guess it's very rare compared to the number of people that are body positive in words but not in actions.

I suspect that body positivism wouldn't have that big an effect because most people don't actually believe in it.

My biases say yes but my brain says no. I think it's simply a function of a worsening economic situation incentivizing the consumption of poor quality food that saves people time, money, or both. Also sedentary lifestyles make a lot of heavy foods appetizing that makes you want to puke while exercising.

I ate very unhealthy and was teased quite a bit for it yet never kicked the habit. Once I started receiving more disposible income than I knew what to do with, it became a lot easier to exercise, I could buy whatever food I wanted, and it sort of spun people's heads how quickly my diet changed. People keep making fun of me for having an unhealthy diet just because of inertia even though I'm eating healthier than them.

I really see body positivism as being more caused by the obesity epidemic than the inverse. As well as the rise of social media sort of spiking body-shaming and anti-body-shaming sentiments. Not just in regards to weight but also things like height.

I blame processed foods and all the additional additives and ingredients. Foods have dozens of ingredients now. Simpler foods are better for people. Count ingredients AND calories. Plastic packaging, nonstick chemicals, and antibiotics are also to blame. Plastic and nonstick chemicals change your hormones. Antibiotics kill gut bacteria and make your digestive system absorb more energy. But of course, all of these things are making the few rich at the expense and health of the many. I think sugar and sedentary lifestyles also contribute, but to a lesser extent, and are jut easy scapegoats.

There was an article by The Atlantic that covered this a few years ago. I linked it in a previous comment somewhere, but can’t find it at the moment. Basically, there was a study that controlled for exercise and calories intake and showed even adjusting for that, people weigh 10% more than in the 1980s and 20% more than the 1950s. So exercise and calories aren’t the entire cause.

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