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Comment by atmartins | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, every single one of them. And none of the people in any other country.

American culture is staggeringly unhealthy. Denying this is impossible.

Not sure we're alone. Take the UK, for example. 2/3 are either overweight or obese. Better than the US? Sure. But what a weak victory that is.

I'm definitely biased by living in the southern hemisphere for almost half a decade. The places I've lived are visibly healthier than the US. People have less chronic health problems, take fewer sick days, etc.

I imagine a lot of that depends on where in the US you go. I live in an area that is statistically similar to Europe. If your idea of the US is south and east, it will be considerably different.

I've lived in major cities in the southeast and the west coast. The west coast of the US is still extremely unhealthy.

Learning how unhealthy the culture I grew up in is has been a gradual process. Shock moving to the west coast, and then shock at each of the subsequent moves around other parts of the world.

I think it is pretty easy to deny. The CDC breaks out obesity by demographics[1]. White adults have an obesity rate of ~29%. This is the same as other predominantly white/Anglo countries like Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom[2].

Maybe 29% is staggeringly unhealthy, but it isn't American culture to be that overweight. Being overweight is fairly widespread and not unique to America.

Probably it has more to do with lifestyle changes (e.g. cars and working at computers) and diet changes (rise of processed and fast food). These things have disparate impact on racial groups, e.g. hispanics and blacks are considerably more overweight than whites. America having more hispanics and blacks than places like the UK, the US seems like it is more obese.

1 - https://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/NHIS/SHS/2015...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...

12th most obese nation in the world, I'd call that staggeringly unhealthy given our GDP:

https://obesity.procon.org/global-obesity-levels/

Also, 46th in life expectancy:

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

Happy with those numbers? I'm not.

> it isn't American culture to be that overweight

> hispanics and blacks are considerably more overweight than whites

Are these people not American?

Those implicit biases can be pretty explicit...

You may want to edit this comment. It reads as though you don't think Hispanics or Blacks count as American. I don't think you intend to express this racist sentiment, but it's easily inferred from the text as written.

I don't see how that sentiment can be read into what I wrote. I looked at three racial groups in America and observed they had different obesity rates. In abstract terms - "You think this quality is specific to the whole. If you divide the whole into three parts you can see the quality differs between the parts. This implies the quality is not specific to the whole."

To take that claim and infer that I mean to suggest the parts are not part of the whole is clearly nonsense.

There were 3 different responses that read your post similarly, as though the higher levels of obesity among Hispanic and Black people are unrelated to American culture, as though it doesn't matter what the rates of obesity are among people who aren't White.

I suppose the reason why some bristle at your partitioning of American obesity rates into racial groups is that it's unclear that it's particularly relevant. Obesity varies by income, urban/suburban/rural-ness, red state/blue state, and more.

Any of these dimensions could be used to partition America into tranches. Then, throw out the bottom tranches. Then, say that America isn't especially unhealthy.

Imagine person A says: There's an epidemic of gun violence in America.

Person B responds: No. Just ignore the urban gang violence, the mentally ill mass shooters, and the suicides. It turns out that among mentally stable Whites, America isn't that violent.

There could have been three million such responses. It still wouldn't change the fact that that's a logically incoherent reading of my comment.

The reason to use racial groups in my example, is first because I happened to know obesity differed between the groups, and second because it offers the opportunity to look at similar groups in different countries. This example shows that there is variance within the country and similarity beyond it, which I think makes a good case that the culture of the country is not what's responsible.

Regarding your point on violence, suppose it were the case that left handed people had a murder rate 100x higher than right handed people. Now, imagine too that the OECD countries, or whichever group you would like to compare America too, were 99% right handed and America were only 90% right handed.

Would it make sense in this case to say that American culture was the root of the problem with American violence if right and left handed Americans committed violence at the same right as their OECD counterparts? I wouldn't think so. I would think the explanation would be as simple as "greater proportion of more violent left handers".

I realize in the violence example that I've simplified and exaggerated the case compared to obesity. I am not claiming that obesity rates are similar to my example.

You've linked me a list that shows the US nearly in the top 5% of the world for obesity and claimed that we're not unhealthy. Also the implication that white people are somehow genetically predisposed to obesity is strange, with plenty of countries existing as counterexamples.

You've listed the obesity rate, not the rate of people who are overweight. Beyond that, you haven't limited to adults. According to the CDC [1]:

Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 42.5% (2017-2018)

Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)

It absolutely has to do with lifestyle. America is one of the cultures most reliant on cars in the developed world. Physical activity is also ridiculously low. The problem is there's no way to reliably measure physical activity across countries. There's just survey data, and people in the US know they _should_ exercise.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

I think you are misunderstanding most, if not all, of what I wrote.

I never claimed that we weren't unhealthy but that being unhealthy isn't "American culture" as evidenced by different demographics in America having markedly different obesity rates. The obesity rates are similar among similar demographic groups in different countries - e.g. white people in the US have similar obesity rates as UK, Canada, and Australia. It's very weird to say that this thing that is constant among demographic groups across countries is dependent on the culture of one country. Especially when it is different among demographic groups in the same country.

I am not implying that white people are genetically predisposed to obesity. Actually, what I wrote is the exact opposite. I suggested the obesity rates were due to environmental factors and, crucially, I pointed out that other racial groups have greater obesity rates. So, I explicitly stated I believed the difference was not genetic and that white people have less obesity in the US than non-white.

For the other points you seem to prefer using a different metric, overweight instead of obesity. You haven't said why that factor is more relevant or how it changes what I wrote above.

I am studying in Russia and one of my teachers told me that it must be so that North Americans have some disease that has made them all so large. It was after I told him two of my neighbours had tummy tucks in the same month... he did not know what that was.

I would contend that physical activity is probably not a large determinant of weight, although physical activity is an important determinant of health.

Yes and no.. on a strict thermodynamics basis, it's not. If you're say 30lbs overweight (i.e. some, but not much), straight up burning that is going to require considerable patience and discipline to not destroy your body in the process. Each lb of fat is - very roughly - equivalent to running a marathon.

However, being physically active makes you more aware and mindful of the input side of the equation; building muscle mass, cardiovascular fitness and endurance in turn improves your metabolic ability to burn calories. So it's absolutely part of the picture. "The Miracle Pill" by Peter Walker is an excellent introduction to the topic.

> America having more hispanics and blacks than places like the UK, the US seems like it is more obese.

Whether or not you actually meant it, this very clearly comes off as you saying that they aren't American.

How? The UK has more anglo people than the US. Am I implying that Anglos aren't United Kingdomers or Americans? The US has more white people than Sudan. Does that imply white people aren't American?

It's logically implied by your words, "the US _seems_ like it is more obese." (Emphasis added.)

"Seems", as in "appears to be, but is not actually." The only way the US is not actually more obese is if Hispanics and Blacks do not count as "the US".

The only other way to read "seems" here is in the "I'm not totally sure, but this is what it looks like" sense. But this doesn't seem to be the way you're using this word, especially given that your entire comment is denying that the US is more obese purely in virtue of white obesity statistics.

If you are intent on finding offensive meanings you will be able to regardless of if they are there or not.

It's pretty clear that "seems" means that obesity seems to be a US problem unless you start looking at demographics, where similar demographics in different countries have the same rate of obesity (e.g. white people in the US, Australia, and Canada) and demographics in the same country have different rates of obesity (e.g. in the US blacks, whites, and Hispanics all have different rates of obesity).

I was not denying that the US is obese, to the extent that it is. I was explaining that it is not "American culture" that is the issue. Multiple groups that share "American culture" have different rates of obesity and groups that don't share American culture do share obesity rates.

The UK is not a good yardstick to judge healthy weight by. High levels of overweight here among all races (also, a lot of UK TV drama portrays the UK as a lot whiter than it actually is - our major cities & more modern towns are as ethnically diverse as the US equivalent). However, there's less extreme obesity here - likely as portion sizes tend to be smaller (soda cups larger than 20oz are a rarity, for example).

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