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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"I completely blame the food. Even eating absolute junk in Europe I noticed I lost 5 or 6 pounds over 2 weeks."

I don't. Certainly it doesn't help and, of course, Americans should eat much better than they do, but ...

I think the most important factor is that our built and cultural environment are constructed to make us obese.

If one does not live in a modern city center one barely ever walks. Most Americans sit all day - at a desk or in a car.

Further, many Americans are 1-2 generations removed from "the farm" and are still heavily influenced by habits like "three square meals per day" that made great sense on the farm and make no sense at all in the city.

We're bad at being urban.

I contrast us with people I see who are good at being urban. The old Chinese women in the park doing Tai Chi every morning. The 70+ woman I saw running (running!) to get the bus in Zurich. The Spanish people I lived with who sort-of ate one big meal every day at 14:00 ...

We'll get there ...

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It really is the food. America was as car dependent in the 70s as they were in today, but if you look at photos then, you'll notice how uncannily THIN everyone was.

If you dig more into it, you'll find the obesity crisis started around the late 70s with a change in dietary guidelines and medical guidelines saying basically 'fat & meat bad' and 'carbs good' along with the widespread introduction of vegetable oils, leading to too much insulin and other hormonal effects slowly increasing diabetes & obesity in our population. Also food companies honing on what obesogenic combos of food lead to people to eat more, buy more and thus get better sales.

Read "The Obesity Code" if you want a more detailed description with a lot of links to papers and studies for more info. [0]

[0] I said this yesterday too in another article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767604

What’s the percentage of food spend in the 70s vs today? If I read the USDA charts, it’s about 13% for the decade of the 70s, declining to under 10% today. So I would expect that as food gets significantly cheaper, people consume more of it.

Portions are now massive. McDonalds, once upon a time, had small and large sizes of french fries; the little white paper pouch or the red cardboard sleeve. Today I believe they have two even larger sizes. The smallest size of soda doesn’t even exist any more.

Other restaurants have retired round plates and serve meals on platters.

Are rich people on average fatter than thin people? After all, they can afford more food, so presumably they consume more of it.

Spending has dropped because there are such large subsidies to cheap carbs, and that is the bulk of many people's diets. A steak and veggies is no cheaper than it was 40-50 years ago, but we're eating far more refined junk with additives because it is cheap and convenient.

I'm not quite sure what your first point is? Infamously, rich poor are on average thinner (the "poverty obesity" paradox).

I believe the leading hypothesis is that being rich absolves you of the stressors that make junk food attractive. Others are, as you mentioned, the ability to buy more expensive food with more nourishment/satiation per calorie ("protein leverage hypothesis"), or access to nature and refuge from pollution (it's certainly the rich people where I live who ride bicycles.).

Regardless, a poor person from 50 years ago couldn't buy the cheap sugary crap even if they wanted to.

My post was in response to the parent's statements "If I read the USDA charts, it’s about 13% for the decade of the 70s, declining to under 10% today." and "So I would expect that as food gets significantly cheaper, people consume more of it."

That is, the point of the parent's post was not obviously "crap food is so much cheaper than high quality food", but as most naturally read as "because we can afford more food, we're buying and eating more"

My point was "if that logic holds, I would expect the rich to be significantly fatter than the poor". Which, as you note, is not the case. Nothing more.

I also think cheap food tends to be worse for you on average.

After moving to Japan and living here for a while, I realized when I visited my family back in the US how much of a punch in the face of sweetness/richness literally everything available in US restaurants is; it was honestly exhausting. Plus the fact that the portion sizes are double that of anything here, it's no surprise to me that Americans are obese and Japanese people by and large aren't.

For another anecdote, my wife's friend worked at Starbucks in Canada and in Japan. She said the Frappuccinos in Canada use around double the amount of syrup than those in Japan.

There is a great youtube video about exactly that:

Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM

When I moved from Brazil to Canada I was kinda surprised with the portion size in some restaurants here. Also:

> how much of a punch in the face of sweetness/richness literally everything available in US restaurants is

Yeah, too much sugar/salt/syrup/condiments, too many artificial ingredients on things. Today I was talking to my wife how the Cheetos here is not so good, as it has a weird orange color and the taste is way too much superficial. The cheese too. too many cheddar varieties with colors that doesn't seem like something made out of milk.

American sauerkraut, the kind you can buy in supermarkets, has SUGAR in it! What is wrong with you?!? :-(

Everything has sugar in it. Even Sriracha!!! My experiment with cutting adding sugar completely for a month was the single hardest experiment I ever did with my diet. I lost 10 pounds in a month - absolutely unhealthy and I had to reverse course because of that. But, that's how much sugar there is in American food.

Milk in general is high calorie + high fat and a Starbucks Grande is 5 times the size of a typical coffee I was used to. Not to mention the fact that they charge a good chunk more for other low calorie non-dairy substitutes. A typical meal at an American restaurant is two meals - easily - and our portion sizes are not small by any means.

The sweetness is another major put off. There's no concept of a savory snack here. There's also no culture of an afternoon or tea time snacking. In my personal opinion, having a small post-lunch snack helps me stay satiated for longer and have a much smaller supper instead of a large dinner.

This sounds like the equivalent of lead poisoning being one of the causes for the fall of the Roman Empire.

Is there a study about this?

Please check this video on Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story by the author of the book "The Big Fat Surprise" [1][2].

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14...

Don’t forget everyone in the 70s who smoked...

The type and quantity of available food is a huge factor. In the 1970s more people were also involved in jobs that required more physical labor: farming, manufacturing, construction, etc.

>We'll get there ...

You can also write an article for the Huffington Post arguing it's impossible to ever lose weight.

I'm not calling for fat shamming, but you can't be both obese and healthy. You can't really be obese ( over a certain point anyway) and be happy. When I was over 300 pounds every day was an experience in pain.

But it's considered rude even for doctors to say you need to lose weight. I was fortunate enough that an alternative medicine provider told me to just lose weight.

And that said, I'm even reluctant to make the argument above since there's a lot of really angry people who will try to misconcue it and call me a monster or something. But I've been morbidly obese, and I'm in shape now ( still trying to lose that last 10 pounds ) .

Life is better now in every single way.

> You can't really be obese ( over a certain point anyway) and be happy. When I was over 300 pounds every day was an experience in pain.

So if that's the case, why does it matter what the Huffington Post says?

I'm not morbidly obese, so perhaps I've missed the pro-obesity PR. A fashion magazine might give a cover to an obese model once a year, but the other 11 months all seem to have the same rail thin models that have dominated since the '80s.

Same goes for TV and movies. Producers wouldn't hire a fat guy to play Mark David Chapman, it'd be an easier sell to get a fit actor and have him balloon up to that desired weight.

The only obese poeople of renown in our society are older politicians and the rich, i.e. people that do not care about meeting society's beauty standards.

>but the other 11 months all seem to have the same rail thin models that have dominated since the '80s

People used to see those and aspire to be like them and improve themselves. Something changed over the last decade or more, and now no one wants to do any better than they currently are. They are despairing in content with themselves.

>Something changed over the last decade or more, and now no one wants to do any better than they currently are. They are despairing in content with themselves<

People still aspire to be attractive they just don't feel the same social pressure to chase it that they used to. Personally I don't see the problem for the USA, if people are happy being unhealthy then let them be unhealthy. If this was Europe I could see a public cost argument but US businesses are already starting to charge more to people who are inconveniently obese so I don't see why it's a real concern.

> Personally I don't see the problem for the USA, if people are happy being unhealthy then let them be unhealthy.

They're not happy. They're suffering and helpless. That's the problem.

"people that do not care about meeting society's beauty standards"

It's not about beauty standards, it's about healthy standards. Remember when there was a push-back from models being too thin? Everyone agreed that it was bad to show ultra-thin models because it was unhealthy and generally unobtainable. The same should be for overweight people, except now we have the concept of body-shaming (which didn't apply to ultra-thin models??). There needs to be more of a focus on self resposibility along with a push-back against the bad practices of the food industry.

> But it's considered rude even for doctors to say you need to lose weight.

I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true. I mean I'm sure there are some people that get offended, but some people will get offended at anything and being called "overweight" when you are convinced you are just "big boned" isn't pleasant.

My doctor told me to lose weight. I wasn't offended, I'm not stupid.

It wasn't my doctor's advice that led to my weight loss though, it was my father dying prematurely. He wasn't even obese, he just had a poor diet and little exercise. A real wake up call.

> But it's considered rude even for doctors to say you need to lose weight

Really? Is it a US thing?

I'm overweight but not obese, and basically every doctor I've seen for various issues (blood pressure, back pain, sprained ankle) told me to lose weight, in two european countries.

There is a Far Side cartoon with an obese doctor talking to an obese patient, and the patient says to the doctor, “you’re the first doctor who has not told me to lose weight!“

Obesity is more or less considered to be normal now, it’s a real shift in the last few decades.

> Really?

I don't think so. They may be referring to the fact that it is increasingly becoming an issue of political correctness. But science is pretty clear about the risks of obesity and the medical professions follow that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/business/ama-recognizes-o...

I have a friend who's (US) doctor told he needs to lose weight or he will die. It got him to join a gym at least.

Anecdotal from SoCal, 2 years ago I saw on my doctor’s chart that my BMI placed me in the obese category. She said nothing to me about it. I wish she had bc it was a shock to me. I had become so accustomed to that weight, and everyone I was around was a similar weight so I just didn’t know. If I hadn’t seen it on her chart I would not have made any changes.

With my new doctor, I was looking at my last 2 yrs of blood tests and my LDL cholesterol has been at 105. Losing more weight will help with that, so will changing my diet - but my doctor didn’t point my LDL out as a problem even though it is.

It would've been the right thing for her to tell you. But unfortunately, if she tells the wrong person she could get called out for fatshaming on social media and probably lose her career nowadays. It's the rational choice to not offend anyone's feelings, when those feelings can be used to crush you and your livelihood.

While it may be true that the American lifestyle is more sedentary, I don't think obesity can be entirely or even mostly explained by that. AFAIK diet generally affects weight more than exercise does; if your diet is energy-heavy, it's very difficult (without being an athlete) to exercise enough to consume as much as your energy surplus from the diet is.

I don't have any references or numbers to back that up, but that's what I've understood from what I've read in papers and heard from some people who apparently did the math.

With that said, physical activity has lots of benefits beyond just weight loss, and it would be worth it to make one's lifestyle non-sedentary in any case.

It's really that baseline metabolic burn is pretty high, you have to work a lot to double the number of calories you burn, but it's easy to eat double your metabolic needs

>easy to eat double your metabolic needs

Or more! When I started losing weight, my target was 1600 kcals a day. I learned that I was eating 1600+ calories __every single meal__, plus snacks. Pasta is the devil y'all.

I found this pasta made purely from peas or beans in the shop. They are a bit harder to eat but fill you up much faster and feel lighter in the stomach. (And they have less carbs and more protein.) If you like pasta I can recommend trying this.

The sum of kcals is not as easy as that,

In take is the kcal of the food times the digestion factor. The kcal out is the metabolic need, which depend on factors such as fat building vs energy usage, which in turn is influenced by stress but also things like dieting.

This is why counting calories can be an ineffective strategy for some while for others it is a good match.

kcal of food is still an upper bound on bioavailable kcals

Let put this is numbers for illustration purposes.

Let say 1000 kcal in, and for an average healthy person 1000 kcal in metabolic rate.

For digestion, this person eat mostly proteins resulting in about 20% of kcal going into energy for the digestion system itself (proteins is relative hard to break down). Let also say that in addition, sloppy digestion and incorrect gut bacteria is resulting in additional 20% of the food never getting digested and resulting in feces. Result is a loss of 400.

If thats the whole story you have a person that is loosing weight despite keeping a diet that seemingly fulfills their calories need.

Lets now change metabolic aspects. Rather than suffering from bad digestion they are suffering from chronic stress with high cortisol, adrenal and other stress hormones. The body crave more food that cost less to digest, ie fat and sugar, insulin is spiking in order to get the body to take up more energy, the body goes into lethargic state in order to save energy, muscle and organ cell production is decreased in favor of fat cells. Instead of 1000 kcal in metabolic rate we might have 600 kcal, with now a surplus of +400 going into fat production.

The upper bound on bioavailable kcals is still 1000 kcal, but the numbers won't tell you if the person is going to loose weight or gain it, unless the person is in good healthy to begin with.

> Pasta is the devil y'all.

And yet Italians are generally slim and healthy :)

To be fair they don't eat all that much pasta.

That tracks with what's written in The Hacker's Diet, and I think it's largely right. If you look at how much running you need to do to burn off a daily burger it's intimidating.

The only caveat I've learned is that weightlifting can make a dent. It's one of the few things where as you improve, you can burn more calories in the same amount of time instead of fewer (partly because you're doing more work as you add weights, partly because the muscle you build is more metabolically expensive to maintain).

I also had success restructuring my life so accessing food was way more of a hassle. Kept a mostly empty fridge. Meal prepped so only whole meals were there. Don't take money unless I know I need to buy something, found a few reasonable options at local sandwich places that became routine, etc.

I'd love to see a correlational study on fridge size and obesity. In America we buy SUV fulls of food, in Europe it's much smaller frequent trips, i.e. generally higher hassle per calorie.

You're right, it's impossible to out-exercise a bad diet, but there are secondary reasons that being sedentary leads to weight gain besides just the raw number of calories burned.

For one, an hour you spend exercising or walking around is probably an hour that you're not eating. Many Americans are constantly eating when they're at home, either mindlessly snacking or eating a huge meal. Given that you only have 8 hours between work and sleep, occupying yourself for 1 of those hours could mean a significant decrease in time spent eating.

Incidentally, this is why intermittent fasting works well for some people.

Well it's not literally impossible to out-exercise a bad diet. Look at what some ultra endurance athletes eat. But those are extreme outliers and that lifestyle isn't really sustainable.

Once you start tracking the energy usage of exercise with a smart watch or similar, you'll notice that even extended exercise consumes almost no energy compared to the energy used simply living. Doing an hour of heavy exercise only changes my total energy usage for the day by a fairly small % compared to no exercise.

Diet is clearly a much more important aspect for weight loss. Exercise has many other benefits though.

I don't know, my Garmin watch says my daily 1h-1.5h long walk burns about 500-600 calories. It could be wildly inaccurate. But it definitely gives me more cushion to eat comfortably during the day that is for sure! I realize it is dwarfed by the 2000+ calories I burn naturally but that is almost another meal in calories.

You burn about 100-150 calories just by existing for 1h-1.5h, so walking for an hour or so only gets you an additional 400 calories. Versus eating, you can consume a 400 calorie cookie in one minute.

When I lost 70lbs, I did so by deciding it was easier just to not consume the calories in the first place rather than trying to burn them off.

It’s really a case of the rich getting richer when it comes to exercise, because if you’re fitter you can sustain a calorie burn rate far higher than someone who isn’t.

On my bike I have a power meter which uses strain guages and an accelerometer to calculate force x distance / time at the crankset so I have accurate calorie burn numbers.

Riding for an hour at the output a generally sedentary person can manage, I’ll burn sub 500 calories. Riding at my maximum output for an hour burns about 1000. Given that the recommended energy intake for a day is 2500, you can see what a difference that makes proportionally to what you can consume.

Indeed, energy intake is a big part of the equation and indeed a single run/exercise will not burn off a gigantic amount of calories. What repeated exercise does do is to raise your metabolism and increase muscle mass which will increase energy consumption at rest and combat all kinds of other symptoms.

Heart rate or step based calorie tracking is so inaccurate that you might as well just use Math.random.

The fact that companies sell you these “features” in products is a scandal in my opinion, because it’s nothing more than a totally inappropriate guess. They always overestimate based on my experience when compared against actual output measurements, and that can only be harmful to people that are trying to use them to lose weight.

An average 10km run burns 600cal. Sure just living burns 2000cal, but its a noticeable change. In Addition, for most people its much easier to track their exercise, than pedantic tracking calories.

A casual search on google says a chocolate bar is about 500~600 calories ... so you could maybe skip that chocolate bar and not feel the need to run so much.

(Not to totally give up exercise tho' - there are other health benefits besides losing weight)

This is often expressed as: You can't outrun your fork.

Hmmm this makes me think of powerlifters. Curating a 'power gut' is pretty normal for competing lifters (even hobbyists).

Intuition would make me wager testosterone levels of you average powerlifter would be in the higher ranges (necessary to build muscle), despite not generally being lean.

> Further, many Americans are 1-2 generations removed from "the farm" and are still heavily influenced by habits like "three square meals per day" that made great sense on the farm and make no sense at all in the city.

Meh, Americans snack all the time. French people are anal about their meal structures and times and we’re not fat.

I concur. I am French living in US. And I do not snack at all. I only have 3 meals a day. And I try hard to get a lighter dinner (dinners here are generally too big for me).

I don't like to go to parties with an empty stomach, because of the poor choice of food there (chips, salsa, cake, cookies, etc.). If I go with an empty stomach, I know I would not resist, and I would feel sick and bloated later, high on sugar & salt, and dehydrated with alcohol.

Just don't snack.

portion size is generally way way way too big in the US. I always put on weight when I visit the US.

One time I went to a restaurant in upstate New York and I swear to god, I ordered the chicken and an entire roasted chicken arrived on a plate! The mashed potatoes came in a second plate and I spent the first 15 minutes laughing at how ridiculous it all was. Oh, and my meal without drinks was like $16.

I agree that portions are ridiculous, but do Keep in mind that in most lower-end restaurants the customer expectation is to have enough for a doggy bag

Doesnt that just mean you are going to have two or three unhealthy meals instead of one?

It's weird how HN commenters consider free office snacks as an employee "benefit" and complain when they're taken away. I'd rather the company not put any snacks out and remove the temptation. For most of us that work at computers all day we really don't need extra snacks.

The bigger and unhealthier you are, the less motivated you may be to get up and leave your desk.

Or...to quit and become a lumberjack, etc.

I live in China, I can assure you there are plenty of obese chinese people here in the major cities I've been to. It's not as bad as the US, and the culture is more aggressively against it, but it's not uncommon. Obesity is a problem that most developing nations are facing. You can buy junk food anywhere.

> If one does not live in a modern city center one barely ever walks. Most Americans sit all day - at a desk or in a car.

As opposed to someone in China, where we must do such extraneous physical activities like order take-out delivered to our place less than 15 minutes, then order a masseuse to come give us a massage and finally order a bottle of wine to top the night off, all without needing to get out of bed.

As a formerly obese American, I need to say you are both right.

The food ingredients in this country are, on average, garbage. With careful shopping you can get around this but it does take effort and vigilence.

Cultural expectations around both diet (especially portion size) and exercise (I cite the walking thing a lot too) are also bad. It takes effort to avoid those hazards.

I think both of these and probably a few other factors are a terrible combination that compliment each other in a bad way.

Portion sizes are a huge factor. My wife tried a few new recipes this week. All of them said they serve 4. We are a household of two adults and one almost adult and didn't eat half of what she prepared (they all tasted great).

That said, I'm 30 lbs heavier than I was a decade ago. I know WHAT I need to do (exercise more, drink less), it's just been hard to get back into better habits.

Vietnam has the lowest adult obesity rate yet is the 8th most sedentary population. The only thing I see that accounts for this is the lack of cheap, processed foods. The Vietnamese diet is largely prepared at home from scratch. Sugar is not crammed into every effing thing you eat the way it is in the U.S.

Were you travelling in Europe? I typically lose weight while travelling because I'm walking more and have fewer snacks around. This includes months in the US last year where pace and timing of a lot of our driving meant we ate fast food a bit. It was hot so we couldn't stash chocolate/ice cream, we didn't have access to a fridge so we didn't scoff leftovers, etc. We mostly lived out of a cooler and cooked on fires. We walked around exploring cities/towns where many residents would not have though. The number of mobility scooters and the like is incredible.

I lived in Europe for multiple years and then moved to the US. I gained a lot of weight. This had to do with both less of an effective culture of walking and public transit in the city I lived in the US. And also the quality and availability of relatively healthy, tasty foods at a reasonable price.

I’ve also had the same experience on shorter (few month) stays in Europe, while still working a 9-5.

When I came to the Philippines I was shocked by the large number of obese people here. I thought it would be like China because that was my only reference point in SE Asia. Relatively speaking, it's not as bad as the States or the UK but it's getting there. If you look back only a few generations, you'll see what happened here: they were colonized by the US and adopted Western-style processed food and soft drinks. Also, car ownership is a new thing for most families. Before WW2 this was not the case, and thus there was far less obesity.

Western style != American style.

Philippines was part of the Spanish crown and had Spanish customs. Plenty of European (Western) countries have balanced diets and healthy lifestyles.

They were under American rule more recently, and were only given their Independence without a fight after agreeing to preferential trade on importing American products.

I didn't argue about that. I just said that before American rule they were ruled by Spaniards.

Sure, for you and I it's not equivalent.

But for them, it might as well be. People simply did not eat large amounts of packaged, processed food only a few generations ago, like people do everywhere in the west, including the EU.

I just complained about the use of "western diet" as a catch-all epithet for unhealthy, processed food.

I barely walk, but I've been losing weight like mad because I've been cooking at home everyday now, not eating fast food, and not drinking soda. Look at the ingredients for any premade foods, even the ones that bill themselves as healthy, they are mostly sugars and carbs and sauces containing HFCS. Also, the caloric density is insane, one "meal" can be upwards of 1500 or 2000 calories if you ignore their "suggested serving" which is unrealistic to what people eat.

Also, exercise accounts for maybe a hundred or two calories a day for the average person who isn't into marathons or something, so the only true way to lose weight is to decrease what you eat.

It's not lack of exercise, that's the way these corporations try to blame you for being lazy so you forget their food is garbage that's making you fat.

Only in US there's this serving size bullshit that requires effort to figure out how much you're actually eating.

Exactly, that's why we're fat as fuck. We don't have the same culinary habits as most of the world. I ate a cookie for lunch today: it was 500 calories.

I personally think that body composition is 80% food and 20% work.

Yes, driving cars everywhere is not great. But we’re also more obese than other car dependent cultures, so it’s not a satisfactory answer to say that it’s entirely about being sedentary.

I agree that there is a big cultural factor here. I wish people focused on this more. So many people want to look at correlations like income:BMI that don’t generalize to other countries or cultures. Really what they expose are cultural and societal idiosyncrasies, much more than they expose that “cheap food is not healthy”. Of course, that is less appealing to an epidemiologist because the cause and effect is less clear and has much greater implications than recommending more exercise.

I actually lost weight when I moved from Switzerland to the US. The food just all felt somehow gross, so I didn’t eat much (also the options on campus were incredibly limited, apart from these horrible undergraduate dining halls there were few normal choices and most only served food for around 2 hours - the food at the supermarket also felt strange)

I’m curious, how did the food in the supermarket feel strange?

I eat mostly fruits, veggies and meats. Pretty much 80% natural foods. But I live in east Asia now so it’s easier to do that and with more variety.

But, I don’t recall American supermarkets food feeling strange. Unless you mean the processed stuff?

The processed food I avoided mostly, though I do that in Europe as well.

For the rest of it: might just be my perception to be honest, my impression was that the fruits and vegetables tasted very watery with little flavour, as if they were grown in the most efficient way to bring them to market quickly. Same for the meat, was kind of floppy and the cheese just didn't taste like much. There were some good things from farmers markets, but at absurd prices.

I see differences in Europe as well, e.g. I think the quality in Switzerland is better than Germany and Austria. In Spain and France I was able to get really good food, probably because it's closer to where it is produced.

Again this might be my perception, didn't do a blind tasting. Unless the food is specially prepared to be stored (like fermented food, cheese, etc.), I don't think the highly industrial production, refrigeration and long transportation is doing the quality any favours.

This isn't the first time I've heard this, and a quick Google search with the right keywords brings up:

https://www.greenoptimistic.com/fruit-vegetables-taste-europ...

https://www.treehugger.com/why-doesnt-american-produce-taste...

The key point seems to be that we prioritize the looks, which unintentionally affects taste.

Walking burns like, what, 5 kcal/minute (generous)? If non-Americans walk on average 20 more minutes a day (generous), that's like 100 kcal per day. Or about 7kg at 15 kcal/kg basal metabolic rate, not taking into account for increased appetite.

While you have a good point, I want to nitpick a little:

As an American who recently moved to Europe, I don't think 20 minutes of walking per day is being generous. COVID-related measures aside, I find I add about 20min/day of walking easily, and more if I need to do something (e.g. buying groceries). Now, in the US I own a car and here I do not -- but in my Midwestern town I am totally obligated to own and operate a car. Here in Europe I get along fine with walking, riding a bike, and using public transport.

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