It's really shocking how quickly Americans' weights increased. The map also shows the increases are usually more pronounced in the South and Midwest first, then spread to the coasts (skipping over Colorado, of course)
Focusing on kids, because that's where I've got the clearest reference for making my own comparisons: 30 years ago, kids in my neighborhood spent most their time running around outdoors. I'm not even sure everyone's parents knew where they were half the time, and it was fine as long as you made it home for dinner. Nowadays, kids seem to spend most their time playing Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever. I don't see them often on the sidewalk unless they're headed to or from school, and the playgrounds are generally pretty quiet. Over the same time period, hours of TV watched per household is up by about 2 hours per day, and consumption of the Internet has gone from zero to whatever it is right now, so that's where I'm guessing all the kids have gone.
Definitely watched a lot of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network too.
I really wouldn't point to modern video games as the blame, look more toward how the food has changed.
Anetdotal, but the majority of people I know eat like shit.
A poor diet over a year or two will do it without trying.
We can see this clearly in China. The older generation seems to have some resistance to junk food in terms of weight gain: this is why asians have a reputation for remaining slim, even if they eat junk food. But, it's not due to their genes: they were simply lucky enough to not be introduced to those bad foods until their adulthood.
If you look at the newest generation in China in the cities, their obesity rate is skyrocketing at an extremely high rate.
How so? Growing children can probably handle a lot more junk food and sugar without any consequences than adults.
I know some people who just hate exercise. I think they has no habit of movement of any sort. Likewise, people who were fat or weak as a child have no baseline sense of what it feels to be healthy - and neither do their bodies cells.
So kids can handle more sugar, but if messed up the consequences are worse.
Our World in Data can show the change from 1975 to today.
https://ourworldindata.org/obesity
So it's more than just a US thing attributable to any particular US policies.
> The amount of fructose in the Standard American Diet (SAD) is a major culprit in obesity and obesity related diseases.
> The body metabolizes fructose differently than other carbohydrates. Fructose has become the default cheap carbohydrate additive for food, and it is found in nearly every packaged food in America. Human bodies have not evolved to handle these levels of fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is, from a nutritional standpoint, pretty much equivalent to table sugar. The most substantive difference between the two is a hydrogen bond that is easily broken by even fairly weak acids - it doesn't last long at all once it hits your stomach, so what actually hits your bloodstream is (typically) a 42/58 fructose/glucose mix for solid foods with HFCS, a 50/50 mix for table sugar, and a 55/45 mix for HFCS-sweetened beverages. Those numbers also imply that, unless you just guzzle soft drinks, the industry replacing sucrose with HFCS presumably actually tilts the fructose/glucose mix in your sugar intake away from fructose. And if you do guzzle soft drinks, blaming HFCS for your metabolic situation seems just a bit dissonant.
I think we should be looking first at the big picture: Overall calorie consumption over the past 50 years is way up. If you break that down, fat, having nearly doubled, comes in first, followed by complex carbohydrates (up by about 1/3), and sugar is comparatively a quite small portion of what's changed.
Over the same time period, caloric expenditure from physical activity has gone way down, too.
To me, that picture doesn't imply, "Nabisco changing the sugar they put in my Wheat Thins is ruining my health." It implies, "Driving my car to the supermarket and coming home with a back seat full of Wheat Thins is ruining my health."
FWIW, the word "additive" also has a tendency to be a bit of a weasel word in this context. The glycemic index for starches and sugars is typically about the same, and your metabolism doesn't care that the starches are typically considered the food itself while the little bit of sweetener that's added for flavor is just an additive.
The glycemic index is problematic for lots of reasons. If by "a little bit of sweetener" you're referring to HFCS in packaged foods, I disagree. HFCS prevalence seems much much larger than that.
You're right on that sucrose (table sugar) is not much different than HFCS.
Fructose != starches. The body metabolizes the two differently (See below).
A bit of knowledge about fructose rumbling around my brain...
1) Fructose is metabolized differently than glucose. All fructose has to be metabolized by the liver and go through the portal vein. This is not the case for glucose or other non-fructose carbohydrates.
2) Metabolizing fructose via the liver, especially in excess leads to fatty liver. Think foie gras but in humans. Non-alocholic fatty liver disease is now a huge thing, happening even in children. In prior decades if you saw a fatty liver it was because the person was an alcoholic.
3) Fructose is unique in that it short-circuits your bodies methods of letting you know you are full and to stop eating.
Human bodies, metabolism, and our food supplies are all complex dynamic systems so, it's unlikely that one single thing can answer the obesity epidemic.
Nonetheless, if I had to pick one place to start, I'd begin at fructose and see what kind of web is woven around it.
Two places to check out if you're interested in some of what has informed my thinking.
1) Dr. Rick Johnson--seems to know more about fructose than anyone else https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/
2) Dr. Robert Lustig--sees himself as a public advocate so have to wade through some of that to get to his ideas: http://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/robert-h.-lustig.html https://robertlustig.com/ https://peterattiamd.com/roblustig/
Here's a good satirical paper aimed at illustrating the dangers of trying to extrapolate large-scale effects from a constellation of individual metabolic effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/
A++ exchange, would converse with again.
My first would be that a lot of it is that increases in the availability of vegetable fats that are solid at room temperature (originally thanks to hydrogenation, now thanks to more refined palm and coconut oils) means that it's easy for food manufacturers to add more fat to packaged foods without them seeming greasy.
There's also the whole "Mediterranean diet" thing fueling the perception that olive oil is a health food and making us feel comfortable drizzling it all over everything we eat. It's perhaps relatively healthy compared to other fats, but it's still darn near the most calorie-dense food possible.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the amount of french fries that get piled on one's plate as a side at restaurants has doubled over the past 50 years.
Heck, even avocado toast. Avocados are way more available than they used to be. Everyone thinks of them as a healthy food, but they're chock full of fat.
Also the amount of glucose in you blood is highly regulated and the amount is 'less than you would assume'. Least as I understand. Probably consuming even moderate amounts of sugar sets off a desperate attempt by the body to stash glucose as fat to keep glucose blood levels normal.
> The first corn syrup in the United States was produced in Buffalo, New York, in 1866. A major breakthrough occurred in 1967 with the patenting of an enzymatic process to convert dextrose to fructose, a 6 carbon sugar that is sweeter tasting than sucrose.
High fructose corn syrups was developed in the 1970s. Americans began producing starch sugar from cornstarch instead of potato starch. Its cheaper than table sugar.
In 1971, food scientist in Japan found a way to produce a cheaper sweetener from corn. HFCS began to appear in frozen foods to protect against freezer burn and in vending machine products to preserve taste.
In the 1980s, both Coke and Pepsi switched from a fifty-fifty blend of sugar and corn syrup to 100 percent high fructose corn syrup, saving them 20 percent in sweetener costs. [0]
[0] https://www.world-foodhistory.com/2011/04/history-of-high-fr...
I'm going to guess the "throwback" soda that came out a few years ago was probably almost entirely the result of corn prices rising due to ethanol production. (itself the result of government policy)