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Comment by e4d5 | Hacker News Reader

Hey, as another Indian immigrant here I do want to say that most of these observations are spot on.

There's a couple of things in there that are just correlated to the fact that the author is around young/wealthy people, like the low obesity rate, fancy cars, shirtless dudes, book-reading in public. I had quite a surprise when I started working at a smaller town and consistently started seeing older and grumpier people.

Culture shock is real. For me personally, I didn't feel like I was going through anything unusual in my first 3-4 months in the US, but later a lot of my choices at the time made sense through that lens.

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> There's a couple of things in there that are just correlated to the fact that the author is around young/wealthy people, like the low obesity rate, fancy cars, shirtless dudes, book-reading in public.

I mean, he was on a university campus, so fit young people reading books isn't that much of a surprise. But I agree with you, US is a nation of extremes in some ways. There are places I've been in the US where quite literally every single person I saw was morbidly obese, including children.

As an Indian in the states - my observation was that obesity in the US seems like a class issue. Most well-off folks are fit and working out is woven into their lifestyles. Others can't as they're probably working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet.

Another thing is india tends to be one of the fatter poor states due to its diet. If you came from east or south east asia, americans would seem fatter to you even if your in a fitter place. Same with many europeans.

(As an American) I used to think we had too much sugar in our culture, then a couple of friends extolled the virtue of and convinced me to try gulab jamun...

Indeed - the U.S. has some of the most extreme health differences between the top end and bottom end of the income spectrum (roughly correlated to class). At the top end, the outcomes (and health measures) are better than anywhere in the world, while at the bottom end they are below most first-world nations:

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/

For an apples-to-apples comparison, one must look at the corresponding distributions in other developed countries. It could be that the poorest people live significantly shorter lives in other countries but that the middle do better than in the states.

If you have any data about similar distributions for other countries (life expectancy by income) I would be very interested - I have not managed to find similar.

Are there no wealthy people, over there, who just don’t want to work out?

There are, but it is seen as a moral failing or lack of discipline in the circles I am familiar with (on the coasts).

Not being obese has basically nothing to do with "working out". It's all about diet. Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor.

To your question - Lots of them. I'm (relatively) wealthy and I don't want to diet. But I do it anyway because it's worth the short-term suffering for the long-term gain. It's a super obvious good mid and long term investment with a great RoR.

Parent commenter had the causality reversed. Being poor doesn't make you fat; high time preference makes you both poor and fat.

i.e. Someone poor with low time preference won't stay poor for long. The kind of person who stays poor in America for years and years is generally the kind who also has too high time preference to stop eating a full bag of chips every day.

This is not really true. The amount of physical activity you do absolutely influences both your shape and your health.

Also, we do have more sedentary lifestyles then typical 1960 person. Just in terms of how much you walk during the day, we are already not moving.

You have moved the goal posts. Exercise has a positive effect on health, yes. It does not have an effect on whether you're fat. That is down to food intake. That is what the poster was actually saying.

Of course exercise has an effect on whether or not you are obese, because if you spend more calories than you absorbed through eating, you will loose weight. Exercise is a way to spend calories.

Although technically true, it's much easier (and quicker) to gain X calories than to lose them via exercise. So if you're overweight, your number one priority is to control your diet. Regular exercise is important for health reasons, but not to lose weight.

There are exceptions. If you're a professional cyclist, for example, and able to output several hundreds of Watt for several hours, 6 days a week, you'll quickly lose weight through exercise. But that's not actionable advice for regular people with a full-time job and a family.

If only thing you will do is to control calories, you are pretty much guaranteed to get into the yoyo cycle of loosing/gaining weight. Majority, like almost all, people who only focus on calories stop performing in their lives, becomes tired/sick, give up and gain weight.

If you are overweight, if your concern is not purely temporary esthetic, focusing on calories control is receipt for long term failure.

Also, the exercise is not done only so that you immediately spend some calories. It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism. All these affects you calorie consumption long term.

High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.

Yes, that's great, exercise is important for your health, I already mentioned that. Doesn't change the fact that you generally won't lose weight through exercise, but through a change in diet.

> It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism.

Those effects are negligible compared to eating, say, 20% less. In particular because exercise makes you hungry, and if you don't control your diet, you'll regain the lost energy through increased appetite afterwards. So again, yes, please exercise regularly, but that alone won't make you lose weight.

> High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.

Uh, yeah, that's exactly what I wrote: professional athletes are an exception, and their case doesn't apply to regular people.

It absolutely does. As proven by people who stopped doing sport without changing diets and then gained weight. As proven by people who started doing sports and then over time lost weight - without any effort to change food (or even without conscious effort to modify their weight).

Also, I said "influences both your shape and your health". I did not moved goalposts.

> Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor.

What percentage of the population had desk jobs before 1960? Standing/moving all day burns a lot of calories, I would assume enough so that you don't put on a few pounds each years which can lead to obesity in the 40s. Of course that's not all the population, some are obese before being teen. But I think that's still an important part. You can't outrun your stomach if you eat a surplus of 2000 calories each day, you can if you eat a surplus of 200.

> and nobody was fat

So the baroque ideal of beauty was a contemporary fantasy?

Nothing like that. There are a large number of wealthy people in India who are into exercise and keeping fit. But there are also a a huge number who are overweight because they can afford to stuff themselves with a lot of food.

Poorer people in India end up getting more exercise and being either undernourished or eating just about enough calories to not get fat. As a general rule, poorer people will not be using cars or other forms of mechanised transport for shorter trips and will be more into manual work than the richer people. Also, the average poor person in India can not afford junk food or aereated sugary drinks.

It's not work out or time but diet that makes people obese. They probably eat fast food, sugary drinks, packaged food a lot everyday instead of unprocessed food like meat, veg, fruits, nuts.

Edit: Poor people in India are thin and rich are fat, quite opposite, again due to diet. Indian poor can't afford fast food in chain restaurants daily, must cook which is cheaper.

Wealth is relative. Yes you can be so poor that you can't afford enough calories to become obese. It's rare in the developed world.

But you can also be so poor that you can afford calories, alcohol and little more as an entertainment. It's easy to get obese then.

Keep in mind that unlike in Europe in the US processed food is often cheaper than fresh vegetables, fruits and meats. I always thought the US would be "cheap" in terms of consumer prices compared to western europe but it was significantly more expensive to buy fresh produce in US supermarkets than in Germany or Austria.

On the other hand stuff like coca cola is cheaper.

$1 “any size” soda at McDonald’s up to 40oz where I live, with free refills. Most everyone I know spent a good amount of their teen and early adulthoods surviving off of cheap food - fast food is incredibly convenient and as cheap as a healthy “struggle” meal of staples without a long time in a kitchen which you may not really have.

Meat, veg, fruits and nuts are expensive - and they go bad. You simply can't always afford them and sometimes you can't actually buy fresh stuff.

You see, a fair amount of poor folks get paid once a month, and since there aren't a lot of little grocery stores nearby, folks wind up buying food once and hoping it lasts the month.

Poor folks don't always have steady electricity nor a refrigeration, either: Living without a fridge makes your diet go to crap pretty quickly.

Time is another luxury poor folks have issues with, which also makes diets go awry.

While there are clear differences between obesity rates between rich and poor in the US, basically everything you've put up is personal speculation:

> Poor folks don't always have steady electricity nor a refrigeration, either: Living without a fridge makes your diet go to crap pretty quickly.

Differences between access to steady refrigeration is extremely slim for people in the US for all but the poorest of the poor (basically homeless)

> Time is another luxury poor folks have issues with, which also makes diets go awry.

In the US poor people have more free time, on average, than wealthy people: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...

There are other studies that suggest the causality is the opposite: obese people are more likely to become poor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/

That study is definitely not broadly convincing in my opinion, but just want to point out that there is a ton of baseless speculation in this thread trying to explain the obesity/wealth relationship.

At some point, it's the obvious that no one is stating: the American style of life makes a lot of people lazy as fuck, and they just don't give a fuck about working on their waistlines.

It's not time (very few people who exercise regularly do so to an extent that would undo significant overweight) but more likely a combination of chronic stress and a cultural norm among their family and friends. For younger and more educated people, it's a strong cultural norm to be at a healthy weight, so even people for whom it doesn't come naturally have a very strong social incentive, and they are surrounded by cultural norms that support them. For people in other classes who find it difficult to stay lean, there's much less cultural support (serving sizes, "normal" foods, etc.) and also less social downside to giving up and allowing their weight to drift up.

I remember visiting Atlanta for work for a couple weeks years ago (I'm not American).

"Everyone" in midtown was fit. Cross the border to the adjacent neighborhood (don't recall the name but it's a lot more residential and just barely still accessible by foot from down/midtown due to how far away everything in Atlanta is) and more than half the people you see are obese.

Oh and the homeless people are a lot less scary than in San Francisco. I felt safe asking a homeless man for directions in Atlanta (didn't realize he was homeless until he pointed at the tent he lives in & asked me for a dollar after we spoke) & I would probably not dare do that in downtown SF (I probably wouldn't do that in Berlin either for that matter, even though homeless people aren't as aggressive here).

Another difference is the police - in Germany, Austria & Israel (countries I've lived in so far) it's not unusual to ask a police officer who happens to pass near by for stuff like directions but when I asked a policeman (who wasn't obviously doing anything) in Atlanta where something is he very obviously didn't want to talk to me, just answered my question with "not here" and didn't even look at me while doing so. This was in broad daylight at a "nice"/central part of town so I don't think it was because I was interrupting some police action?

I cant speak to atlanta, but the police where I am (rural) and the beat cops (guys walking around) in bigger cities are generally friendly, especially if you are polite.

If the officer in a bigger area isn't a beat cop or stopping for a break, it isn't unreasonable that he was actually busy. Or, he was just a jerk and, like all humans, you'll find those in varying degrees anywhere you go.

Could very well be! I think it struck me as peculiar due to how friendly/helpful people there otherwise seemed to be.

I'm European and everything in the article is the same from this perspective, except the scale of class differences, which tends to be even lower here (or inverted: I don't have a single friend who owns a car, and I'd be afraid of being ostracized if I ever bought one)

> There's a couple of things in there that are just correlated to the fact that the author is around young/wealthy people, like the low obesity rate

The other issue is geographic - the author is a grad student in DC, which is one of the more fit areas of the country. This is one of the few cases where I'd say it's more a class thing than a wealth thing. Political staffers and the generic military types by and large, are not wealthy people, but are very scrupulous about avoiding obesity.

Near DC. He mentions Baltimore as a street near his house. That's the main street that runs through the University of Maryland campus in College Park. It's just a few miles outside of DC.

Can you give examples of choices which in retrospect seem likely to be a result of culture shock?

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