90% of US has a poor diet, and 25% don’t exercise | Hacker News Reader

90% of US has a poor diet, and 25% don’t exercise

arstechnica.com

I might not eat enough fruit according to the guidelines (not sure how they count fruits like bell peppers), but the "why is it important to eat fruit?" section of the USDA MyPlate website[0] doesn't list any benefits I don't get from vegetables.

[0] https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/fruits

It's kind of bizarre that the government is still recommending fruit juice. I mean I love it and drink a little bit myself, but based on what we know now about the effects of sugar it's barely healthier than soda pop.

> At least half of the recommended amount of fruit should come from whole fruit, rather than 100% fruit juice.

Baby steps. They also recommend having at least half of the grains in a diet be whole grains.* For the best diet, both of these proportions should be as high as possible in most cases.

* https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/grains

It’s not bizarre when you consider pizza as a vegetable. [0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/pizza-still-a-vegetable-for-u...

Fruit juice means fresh fruit juiced without adding any sugar right? Some people refer to fruit juice as the ones you see in tetrapacks.

Real fruit juice is very much different from soda pop.

If we're just looking at sugar content, it's really not that different. Pepsi has ~11% more sugar than fresh apple juice:

25g of sugar in 285g of juice[0] = that's 37 grams in 355ml of juice[1] vs. 41 grams of sugar in 355ml of soda[2], which is 110.8% more than the juice[3].

The half gram of fiber probably makes it little better, but it's still a very sugary drink.

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=fresh+apple+juice+nutr... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=25*(355%2F240) [2] https://www.pepsi.com/#!products/pepsi [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=41%2F37

I might be remembering the details wrong, but I heard an actual doctor saying there is difference between fresh fruit juice and soda pop.

I found this that seems like what the doctor said, but I'm not sure. Click on 'transcript' and read it.

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/if-fructose-is-bad-what-abo...

Edit: Other than this, fresh fruit juice contains minerals, vitamins, antioxidants etc etc.

High fructose corn syrup is not the same thing as fructose, all other things being equal. Fiber also helps modulate the insulin response. Sugar isn't the enemy, if you're eating fruit you're getting a lot more than fructose from it. The problem is when people get a large % of their calories from nutritionally deficient food, like soda.

Fruits should be eaten as a whole, so fibers act along the sugars. Drinking just the fruit juice isn't too far from a Coke.

Fruit and vegetable consumption is often researched as a single metric, so dietary recommendations tend to lump them together.

The benefit of diversifying your diet (for example, by adding more fruits if you don't eat much of them) is to include nutrients that would otherwise be missing. Not just the macronutrients and micronutrients, but also other antioxidants such as polyphenols.[1]

The UK NHS recommendation touches on this briefly:[2]

> To get the most out of your 5 A Day, your 5 portions should include a variety of fruit and vegetables. This is because different fruits and vegetables contain different combinations of fibre, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_antioxidants_in_food

[2] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/why-5-a-day/

It's probably fine to go without fruit, as your ancestors can't possibly have eaten it every day. However, I find that a diet too heavily focused on vegetables leaves me still wanting "dessert" even when my stomach feels full; fruit calms that feeling. Also fruit is great for slowing down a meal and for adding a lot of bulk relative to the calories inside.

That makes sense. I do often find myself craving a dessert after eating what is otherwise a very satisfying meal. I should try fruit afterwards. A few years ago, whenever I felt too full from a big meal, I would eat a banana, which felt like it helped.

(Alas, this morning I opened up the freezing while making a salad for breakfast and discovered that a housemate had left a massive ice cream cake in there, so I had no choice but to indulge.)

25% don't exercise? That's too low. Over 60%+ of adults are overweight or obese. Mind you, that doesn't stop you from exercising. But it seems highly unlikely only 1 in 4 doesn't exercise.

This is why self reporting is bad.

Aren't people who exercise (bodybuilding) generally considered overweight (defined as having a too high weight for a given height?) I noticed the same as you pointed out but figured that might help explain some of that difference

No. You have to have a ton of muscle to flip the bmi scale into overweight. Certainly professional bodybuilders will do that. Casual bodybuilders generally don’t.

The set of bodybuilders who have enough muscle to put them into the overweight category is a tiny portion of the population. There is a larger portion of the population who has a lot of muscle and a lot of fat, but that’s still pretty small.

fair enough! those communities always seems bigger when you're surrounded by them... :)

BMI is just a very rough approximation used to fit body fat.

Any amount of muscle can slip someone into the overwight category if they are already close. For a 5-10 male, the difference between dead center normal BMI and pre-obese is 20 lbs, not a crazy amount for a casual but consistent weightlifter.

BMI 'works' because it just looks at the total population, and doest care if it doesn't fit edge cases.

> Any amount of muscle can slip someone into the overwight category if they are already close.

Yeah, but that’s hardly the muscle at fault. If someone has 20lb of extra fat and 10lb of extra muscle, it seems a lot more honest to say the fat is why the person’s BMI is high.

To be clear, BMI is definitely a very “rough and dirty” estimate. Certainly there are healthy people with a BMI classified as overweight.

Like 1% of people who exercise are bodybuilders.

And the performance enhancing drugs and bulks are not exactly known to be great for their hearts. See Rich Piana for example

Massive roided up bodybuilders are like 0.1% of the population max. And those guys should be probably more worried about the effects of steroids on the heart than having too much body mass

When the survey is BMI, then yes, individuals outside the standard height and with greater than average muscle mass will fall in the overweight range.

But, when considering the population rather than the individual, these outliers become insignificant.

I agree with this. Their definition of “doesn’t exercise” must be too narrow. “Well, sometimes I walk as much as a quarter mile” is insufficient to count as exercise.

I would expect that 25% of people are effectively completely sedentary and a much larger chunk of the population fits in the “doesn’t exercise” bucket.

It takes a LOT of exercise to burn the calories consumed with one can of soda. Overeating and poor diet is a bigger factor in obesity than exercise

It would take the average American man about 12 minutes of running at a moderate pace to burn the 155 kcal in one 12 oz (355 ml) can of Coca Cola.

https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1350959101

I think the focus on "burning" calories completely misses the mark. It gives people the misconception that food is nothing more than calories, and they can just "burn" off the excess, despite the fact that our nutritional needs become more important with exercise.

But isn't too many calories a way, way bigger problem today than not enough micronutrients is? If we could make the former way better at the expense of making the latter slightly worse, it seems like it'd be a no-brainer.

Yes, for certain. I am more alluding to the false belief that you can just out-exercise a poor diet. For example, many polyunsaturated vegetable oils oxidize very quickly in your body, sending free radicals on a rampage and causing inflammation. This "cost" is not accounted for in a calorie. And the effect becomes even more important when you introduce the stress of exercise into the equation.

https://www.openventio.org/Volume1-Issue6/Oxidation-of-Polyu...

True. But calorie as a metric doesn't help either. It's too abstract. Instead, what if it were minutes? As in you'd have to walk for X minutes to burn off those super sized fries and shake. If a meals takes idk 4 hrs to burn off and you only have 3 extra hours in the evening...well, that would be better than calories.

Calories are a scientific unit. They don't work for every day people leading every day lives.

Those 12 minutes never happen, meanwhile drinking more than one can happens all the time.

True, but it’s often correlated. Show me the obese person who vigorously exercises but then chooses to overeat. Let’s face it: most obese people do not exercise at all and then eat way too much on top of that.

A friend of mine says, "You can't out train a bad diet."

“25% don’t exercise”. It turns out 70% of people are liars.

The US has/is:

- Bad diet, with too much sugar/far/corn syrup.

- Too dependant on cars, being a really bad place for a pedestrian.

- Bad healthcare, health issues get stacked up over the years.

- Too spread over, turning them back to the 2nd point.

If you don't exercise, but also aren't gaining weight or losing shape, is it bad for your health? Asking for a, uh, friend.

Overall a sedentary lifestyle has worse long term health risks than being slightly overweight. The worst effects tend to show up as you age. There's a hidden epidemic of sarcopenia among the elderly.

In my understanding you don't start with a "full health" and lose it over time, instead you can always get better or worse from the position you are in. So while you won't have some dramatic problems, you'll be missing out on how good you could feel all this time.

While what you’ve said is true (according to my understanding), the older you get the more difficult it is to move the needle. It’s much easier to get into better health when you are 20 than it is when you are 60.

Also the margin for error gets much more narrow as you age.

For women there is an issue of having low bone density that cannot be fixed after the mid twenties IIRC from reading an exercise physiology textbook. Your aerobic capacity that can be seen as an approximate proxy for general physical health can be maximized by your thirties and can stay close to that with maintenance until your 70's and beyond.

It’s definitely not good. Having a healthy weight means that exercising should come easy for you. And it’ll protect you from cardiovascular diseases, enhance your mood, boost your endorphins and sex hormones and turn you from skinny to toned.

I would have expected these numbers to be the other way around: 90% don’t exercise and 25% eat a poor diet.

But I guess very little counts as exercising (like talking a walk).

Classic case of lack of willpower.

Or money power, or doctor power. Many people go to a doctor only when things get worse because of the cost

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