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Obesity is also not evenly distributed across the U.S. If you look at the rural/urban split it's more prevalent in rural areas[1], and if you look at the city breakdowns, the cities that foreigners are more likely to visit have lower obesity rates across the board [2].

So visiting the top-performing American cities (usually in the Northeast or West coast) understates the level of obesity in the country as a whole by a fair bit.

I had the realization that there are practically two different Americas after I took a road trip through the south after having lived in the Northeast for ~20 years.

[1] https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20180622mmwr-...

[2] https://wallethub.com/edu/fattest-cities-in-america/10532

Agreed. This post comes from DC. I live there now. The obesity level, at least those in my public view, are much better than the other parts of America I have seen.

> I had the realization that there are practically two different Americas after I took a road trip through the south after having lived in the Northeast for ~20 years.

I've lived in ~8 states and can tell you that "two" is a significant undercount of the number of Americas. (And I suspect the same is true for most countries — it certainly is for India).

I'd also be careful about drawing that line in too purely a geographic way. Geographic differences exist, but parts of Alabama and parts of upstate New York have more in common than their geographic locations might suggest (to pick two places I've been lucky enough to have lived in)

> a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices...

> The people that I see day to day are generally extremely fit. (Or is it just students?)

To be fair to your guests, replace "students" with "folks you'll tend to see around the HQ of a multinational / the places those offices tend to be located", and they hit the nail on the head.

The US is interesting because it's a HUUUUGE single market with political power distributed geographically rather than democratically. Have you spent much time in rural MS or WV? There really are huge swaths of the country that, very unfortunately, fit the "third world with cell phones" stereotype. Except actually without real cell phone coverage. And not quite third world because military bases and welfare dollars do a lot to prop up the floor.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that multinational corporate HQ campuses and their surrounding communities definitely aren't Real America (TM)(R).

> I guess what I'm trying to say is that multinational corporate HQ campuses and their surrounding communities definitely aren't Real America (TM)(R).

The company actually moved away from HCOL cities, so this wasn't NYC/SF/Seattle or whatever top-10 city you might be thinking of.

But your comment is precisely the type of Internet comments that create the pessimistic view of the United States: Everything positive is dismissed or downplayed or discounted, while everything negative is brought to the forefront and presented as the norm.

When the topic of the United States comes up, why are you so quick to bring up rural MS or West Virginia? Those locations are notable precisely because they're outliers, not because they're the norm.

You can build a picture of the US based on chunks of similar land area, or on chunks of similar population.

A huge amount of the land area of the US, if visited, very much supports "the pessimistic view of the US". But these are not the parts that most people will tend to visit.

If you focus on the areas where the majority of Americans actually live, you get a fairly different story.

That's not to say that either version is "The Truth About America". Both stories are interwoven and interconnected with each other, and very interdependent.

The smaller city where these HQs are is nicer IMO.

New York and Los Angeles, maybe throw SF in the mix, is in my experience the places that are furthest from the 'norm' in US.

Even the rust belt towns feels closer to normal than those cities.

Let's see how suburbia survive the 21st century - It surely was a unifying feature across America.

> or whatever top-10 city you might be thinking of.

I'm actually thinking of literally any metro area with over 2M people, or smaller communities totally dominated by highly educated workers (college towns like Urbana or corporate towns or Moline, for example)

> When the topic of the United States comes up, why are you so quick to bring up rural MS or West Virginia? Those locations are notable precisely because they're outliers, not because they're the norm.

Because I've spent substantial time in both.

Don't even have to go as far as Reddit. Try HN comments threads about SF or "Silly Valley" (Silicon Valley).

Thing is, for those that are here as interns at a FAANG, things really aren't that bad, because, well, around 6-figures they're rich, and America really isn't that bad for the rich. Never has been. It's the poor that are continually screwed and unless the internship has a module on SNAP/EBT, the interns aren't learning that the US isn't so bad to its poor, they're learning how great it is to be rich here.

Of course it is better to be rich than be poor in the US. By that standard, the poor are "screwed". However, if someone got a chance to experience poverty in both the US and in India, I'll bet they would choose poverty in the US.

> Obesity is just one example of how the internet, especially sites like Reddit, tend to exaggerate the problems of the United States while downplaying the positives of the country

I don't think the rate of obesity paints the whole picture here. The first time I visited the USA, I wasn't so much surprised by how many people were obese (they weren't that common), but by exactly how obese the outliers were. In my country, you'd ~never see someone so obese that they needed a cart to move around, whereas in the USA that wasn't uncommon.

I think the saliency of that is what surprises people more than the actual frequency of obesity.

The United States gets a disproportionate amount of attention online. That could be interpreted as some sort of endorsement.

But outside of that, and looking at specific judgment of the country, the opinions are overwhelmingly negative. Like, impossibly negative.

It's really inevitable that people's preconceived notions will be challenged if they spend much time in the US given how incredibly negative the claims about the US are, despite being the premier immigration destination.

>Obesity is just one example of how the internet, especially sites like Reddit, tend to exaggerate the problems of the United States while downplaying the positives of the country. It was always kind of fun to watch visitors and transplants slowly realize that the country, while far from perfect, was actually nowhere near as bad as the dystopia they read about on sites like Reddit.

And of course, because Reddit is an American site that is majority American, most of said criticism comes from self-loathing Americans. The best description of Reddit I've ever seen is "maladjusted 19 year old desperate to prove that he is smarter than his parents" (<http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ihk09/iama_cuban_who_l...>).

> third world country with cell phones

As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one another. There's no ceiling and no floor. Lots of places have glaring poverty right round the corner from the tourist parts, all round the world. Unfortunately there was a spate of British tourists getting shot in Florida because they'd taken a hire car to the wrong part of town.

The American media hegemony exaggerates everything as well. We're more likely to hear about bad events in the US because they're great at filling news channels.

>As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one another

Would you describe an ex-mining town in northern England or the midlands as being the latter without the proximity to the former?

There is a lot of material decay in Britain, and it tends to increase as you get further from the Shard, but the highly central government means there's little opportunity for places to achieve the banana republic status of autonomous, large, corrupt political units. Certain places have seediness and violence; I might call out Bradford and Nottingham. But ultimately we might be poor but at least we don't have mass shootings; the only two events which might register on the American scale are Dunblane and Bloody Sunday.

>I have to admit, one of my guilty pleasures was watching people slowly realize that the United States, while not without problems, is actually not a bad place. This comment hit home:

I did some work with a university that sent a lot of grad students to Europe. It was always fun watching the fantasy that Europe has everything figured out crash and burn.

>I did some work with a university that sent a lot of grad students to Europe. It was always fun watching the fantasy that Europe has everything figured out crash and burn.

Health care is an example of this. Having Canada and the UK, the foreign countries Americans are most familiar with, both have single-payer systems (and the UK also having a monolithic delivery system, and Canada more or less outlawing private health insurance) with zero cost on delivery for most care gives Americans a distorted view of healthcare in other developed countries. There's really no meaningful definition of "universal health care" that excludes the US post-Obamacare while including (say) Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. All three countries are like the US in a) mandating having some form of coverage, and b) having said coverage come from a variety of public and private sources.

Or copays and deductibles. In France, the normal reimbursement for care is 70%, much like that of a US high-deductible plan. Paying for ambulance rides in Switzerland is the norm, not the exception. But a comment on Reddit by an American complaining about how he had to pay for being taken to a hospital in an ambulance and how this wouldn't happen anywhere else will get 10,000 upvotes even though such a statement wouldn't necessarily be true outside Canada and the UK. To put another way, the Canada/UK model of single-payer and 100% free on delivery (much less the UK model of monolithic everything else) is, in their own ways, aberrations, with much of the developed world using mixed public/private models with meaningful cost on delivery that would not be unfamiliar to an American.

> Don't get me wrong: Obesity is still a problem and the United States is incrementally worse than most countries. However, the way it's talked about leads a lot of people to believe that the United States is some sort of extreme outlier and nearly everyone they encounter will be obese.

I imagine it is that extreme for people from south or east Asia.

Really depends where you go. I grew up in NYC, then moved to SF and then Boulder, and it always shocks me when I see a fat person in my day to day life. But road tripping through Iowa, I see more fat people sitting in a diner than I do my entire year in Boulder.

Chinese obesity has increased a lot over the past decades, with over half of Chinese now overweight: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55428530

Largely the same reasons as the West; the cheap street food or fast food is not particularly healthy.

> Wang Dan, a nutritionist in the city of Harbin, told the AFP news agency that many adults in the country now "exercise too little, are under too much pressure, and have an unhealthy work schedule".

Anecdotally, there is also societal concern that the one-child policy now means that four doting grandparents are spoiling the one child with food because they remembered living through less abundant times.

Hm, I wonder how accurate this reddit thread about third world countries is: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/imky2m/people_li...

One thing about america is that america loves criticizing itself, or at least parts of itself endlessly. Stating your political opinion is an american pass time.