Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

45 here. Here's what I've noticed since the 80s:

- More wealth and more choices now. - More eating out now. Meals are bigger, sweeter, richer, etc. - Less activity now. When I was a kid, video games were just getting started and most folks didn't own computers. TV & media was less engaging.

Food addiction seems more... refined these days. There is a lot less fat shaming too, although I'm not suggesting we bring it back. I think it did have an effect on reducing obesity though.

I grew up on fast food and TV dinners, so I don't see food being significantly more refined now, but I am aware there are newer ingredients(thickeners, texture modifiers, preservatives, etc).

View on HN

I don't think its the food, I feel its several cultural shifts:

- The tamping down of phy ed classes and general removal of exercise from elementary schools with more of an emphasis on learning. If you are not ok shape in middle school, it leads to learning issues. One problem begets the other

- Shifts in parenting. When I grew up in the 1980's, our family ALWAYS ate dinner at home, together as a family. My mom got home early from work when me and my sister got home from school and started dinner before my Dad got him from his job. We RARELY ate out and it was looked as a privilege, not something that happened often.

- The shift from the nuclear family. Most of my friends are married and both parents work full time, their kids are heavily involved in sports, and after school activities. Less time for family, less time for organized meals, less time to prepare good food for your kids. The basic idea now is "just get something in them and get them to soccer, hockey, gymnastics practice, etc."

Likewise, the parents have little or time to properly feed themselves either. Same thing, grab something fast, shovel the food into your kid, then get something fast on the way home before you have to jump back on your laptop and finish the last bit of work you didn't get done because you had to get little Bobby to practice.

This is a situation that never gets any better. Your kids have more activities, you constantly have more work to do. The go go go go attitude of our culture has left the nuclear family and our nutrition in the dust.

Humans are lazy by nature. Make it easier to eat unhealthy foods and we'll do it. Its all we've done for the past 40 years.

You missed the most significant issue outside of portion size changes, etc.

Car dependency. The shift over the last 60-70 years to push everyone to drive more and more and walk, bike, etc less has had an absolutely massive impact on obesity and being unfit.

Compare the obesity rates in any area in the US versus types of transport and you'll see a huge correlation when other factors are fixed. e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28322880/

When I was a child it was quite unusual for other children at my school (private school, well-off families) to be dropped off at school by car in the morning. It would have been at least 95% who either caught a bus, rode a bike or walked.

I was walking to school with my older sister at age four. At age 6 I was doing a fairly long bus ride with her (and we walked down to the bus stop of course). The rest of my school life was mostly riding and walking to school. And this was completely unremarkable. What was remarkable were the kids who were dropped off at school; I viewed it as a somewhat eccentric practice.

When I was a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest I would say adults biked less but kids walked/biked more than today. I think adult biking is massively more popular and accepted today than in the 80s.

Agreed on the biking.

I remember begging my parents to let me bike to school because all the "cook kids" rode their BMX bikes to school and the bike racks were overflowing with kids who were biking to school. I remember being made fun of in the summer for taking the bus instead of riding my bike.

I don't remember seeing bike racks at any of the schools my sisters kids attended.

Is there a lack of phys ed or too much soccer and hockey etc classes? Looks like a contradiction.

What is a nuclear family to you? The normal definition is parents and children. Even if their schedules are too full.

One other thing: I think more jobs are desk jobs these days. Jobs that are desk jobs are more tied to the desk than they ever were.

Oh, and one big thing I don't thing anyone mentioned yet: Smoking. When I was a kid, a lot more people smoked. That has a well known side-effect of reducing calorie intake.

I've been working desk jobs my whole career, and I consider it absolutely mandatory to just get up and walk around often. Always take the stairs, walk to the water cooler, take a walk outside after lunch, stand up at your desk.

Unfortunately management and company culture tends to frown on doing these things.

Re: fat shaming, this is horribly misunderstood by people who have never struggled with obesity.

When you are obese, you are fat shamed by yourself, every day of your life, every time you look in the mirror and what you see doesn’t reflect who you think you are. There is an incredible amount of societal baggage in being fat - the stereotype is that fat people are lazy, stupid, and incompetent. I know better, but even I have to catch myself to avoid unfair bias against fat people (e.g. in hiring decisions) - and I know the stereotype is bullshit because I myself used to be morbidly obese.

Fat acceptance is bullshit, being fat is unhealthy. And because so many people are fat, many folks don’t even know what a healthy weight looks like. I’m not advocating for fat is good or fat is beautiful thinking, because that is counterproductive.

But fat shaming is far worse than saying nothing. Binge eating/food addiction is driven by cycles of shame and hating yourself for being fat is a big part of that. I couldn’t have lost 120+ lbs without first getting over shame and embarrassment.

In my first-hand experience with obesity fat-shaming is a great way to push people harder into a shame->self hate->binge eating-> shame-> self hate cycle, which just makes things worth.

This is clearly a societal problem, we shouldn’t shame people for succumbing to it, but instead work to help people recover.

P.S. it is sometimes hard for naturally skinny people to empathize with obesity. Obesity makes all of the steps to lose weight harder - exercise, nonstop hunger (due to broken hormone regulation). Struggling with dieting long term causes metabolism slowdown which makes the problem harder. I gain weight on 1300 calories, and that’s with an active lifestyle with 16.000 steps of walking daily. American culture at least makes it really difficult to participate in society and stay under 1300 cal/day. I imagine it’s even worse if you’re not a 6ft male.

> Fat acceptance is bullshit, being fat is unhealthy.

Fat acceptance is about ending the disrespect leveled at fat people by society as a whole. Like many other groups, the obese are "acceptable targets" for all sorts of mockery and hate. Changing that is a good thing.

Unfortunately, a lot of fat people seem to have somehow deluded themselves into thinking being obese is healthy. This is of course absolutely false but these people keep posting baseless statements in an effort to remove the negativity associated with obesity. They turned fat acceptance into active promotion of obesity...

Sweeter indeed, amount of sugar im food is absolutely insane these days. I am from Russia, and food in Uk is like 3 times sweeter, there is added sugar on freaking Roasted Vegetables! Its bonkers!

what's scary is that you said UK and not US. Coming from other Anglo cultures and going to the US feels similar to what you describe moving from Russia. instant increase in added sugar and serving sizes.

I live in the US and recently tried to find bread--standard, sliced bread--without sugar in it at my local store. They don't have any. The lowest I could find was a gram of sugar per slice!

I bake various types of bread on a weekly basis, and have never seen a recipe that doesn't require sugar or honey. I'm pretty confident it's needed to fuel the yeast for the rising process vs the flour alone.

French bread is water, flour, yeast, and salt.

I make french bread almost weekly and all the recipes I've used require sugar.

I'm afraid that's just not true. I've made sourdough bread for years, and never added any sweeteners.

There are plenty of bread recipes that require no sweetener, and it's definitely not needed for yeast to develop.

That's empirically not true. Yeast do just fine with the starches in the flour. Here's a simple recipe without sugar (and the oil is optional too): http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-br...

Yeast will do just fine on the carbohydrates in the flour. I find that whole-grain flour tends to lead to more yeast activity, which is sort of the opposite direction.

A lot of the packaged supermarket bread has additives to keep it fresher longer, one of which is sugar. Go either a little upmarket or to the baked-in-store section and you'll find some without it.

It’s quite frightening that you’ve never heard of sourdough bread given your baking experience. And as the other replies allude to, it’s quite common historically and in other places. Are baking books edited to exclude that knowledge in America? It really brings to mind the possibility.

C’mon. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200402-why-san-francisco-d...

I've made sourdough a few times and all the recipes I tried require sugar.

I started baking bread when I moved to the US cos it was so hard to find any without sugar.

When I was a kid, my grandma baked home bread (1930s rural style, she was born in 1926 in eastern Slovakia) and never used any sugar for that.

Bread has been staple food for millennia. For most of that time, sugar was rare, expensive or totally unavailable.

There is reason for optimism. Less than a decade ago you could barely find something in the middle aisles of a grocery store that didn’t have trans fats and now it is relatively rare. These things can be overcome in relatively short order if the will exists.

I kinda feel if kids had a 20 inch black and white tube tv with no streaming/dvr/games they'd be a lot more active too. Fast food is way too cheap, when I was growing up it was a special treat when you were on vacation, now its just a regular meal or even a snack.

>video games were just getting started

It's also worth noting that the nature of video games have changed. Back then you'd pay $ for a cartridge and CD and that was it. There was little in the way of analytics.

Now it's all about DLC and ancillary monetization - with high power analytics. The model has shifted towards addiction.

Yeah. Video games are literally designed to be addictive these days. Many mobile games are essentially gambling...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game...

Anyone who's ever played some gacha money sink will understand the danger they pose. It seems harmless until you're waking up at 4 AM to do daily tasks that boil down to nothing but resetting a couple timers.

The worst part is the traditional games industry is watching. They really like the way these mobile games generate revenue. This sort of design is starting to show up on the more traditional platforms too...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com