What If Obesity Is Nobody’s Fault?
nautil.us
nautil.us
If we are going to talk about laws for obesity discrimination. Isn't it better to discuss height or attractiveness discrimination first? We know those things can't be change by lifestyle at all.
Weight and obesity is a hard topic to discuss concretely because people are individuals. It's like sleep, some people can operate on 3 hours of sleep, while others need 9. However, by in large, it's calories in vs calories out.
It's way more complex. The quality of the calories count and if you move/exercise a lot you can eat almost any amount without gaining weight. Obesity is a consequence of a sedentary lifestyle and super processed food that's designed to be addictive and not nutritious.
What you are talking about is hunger management, which is different, but yes also important on long term than just counting
The fact that we do not all handle food intake in the same way doesn't mean it's not a lifestyle issue, not everyone has to eat the same. Some people are more efficient, good for them, now they can eat less. And I say that as a fatty myself (from overeating, no magic here).
Let's not try to frame that is if it were a good thing. In parts of the world that are overflowing with so much delicious food, almost everyone would like to be able to eat more of it without getting fat. The inefficient people are the fortunate ones.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who would like to use cocaine every day
There are plenty of people who do use cocaine regularly, and a lot of them are celebrities.
I think you may have missed the point I was making. Just because people like something doesn't mean it is beneficial or it should be done regularly
As a culture we share blame in making it way to damn easy to eat billions of calories. Coca Cola has probably done more health damage that Big Tobacco.
As he drinks his Diet Coke he posts this, c’est la vie.
We can likely blame lobbyists for the tragedy that we'll never figure it out because of special interest money in keeping the "someone/something" in the dark.
But does it really make sense to say obesity is someone's 'fault'? Choices have consequences, but fault requires unambiguous harm.
And in general, society's attempt to make things "no fault" seem to always result in more of whatever it is, not less.
Would I love to blame my body fat on anything else? Sure! But in the end it's down to me. Maybe it's harder for me or easier for me, but it's still me.
I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease and prior to getting medication I had been gaining weight.
Although that's an actual medical condition so I guess it's an extreme case.
Then, well, something happened with my thyroid. Best guess is some kind of infection. I was already at a healthy weight, but lost 20 pounds over a few months. Tests showed my thyroid was producing WAY too much hormone and we were about to oblate it and put me on thyroid replacement hormone when the levels returned to normal on their own. Ever since then however I've struggled with my weight despite eating healthier than ever before. Unfortunately I never had cause to have my thyroid checked before this incident, so I have no way of knowing how my "normal" levels pre-infection compare to my new "normal" levels post infection.
Yes calories in vs calories out may be the literal physics of the situation, but the details of that equation can be very different for different people.
1 Serious analytical inconsistencies challenge the validity of the energy balance theory https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...
It's absolutely not... I have zero sympathy for the 'fat pride', political fatness etc side of body positivity. But I can confirm both through personal experience and research that your perspective is uselessly reductive. Endocrine disruption, sleep schedule, glycemic index and pharmaceutical drugs can all enormously impact on weight gain and retention. Moreover the 'calories in, calories out hypothesis' (first outlined in this paper from the 1950's - https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/6/5/542/47299...), has been debunked (see this recent met-analysis - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4516704/). Weight gain / loss in humans is a dynamic system, where the body will preconsciously adjust activity preferences and metabolic activity to maintain weight homeostasis. There are also enormous interindividual differencies in how the body responds to calorie load - related to genetic and gut microflora differences - https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/gut-bacteria-and-weight... (not a link to a study directly, but links to dozens of stories confirming impact of gut bacteria on weight and overall health). Additionally, we've seen cross species weight gain, including in species that exist outside of human society, indicating that there are environmental factors for cross cultural weight gain beyond worse diets and more sedentary life styles - https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/everything-getting....
So why do we never find obese people among starving conditions (famines, concentrations camps, etc)
Your body will never go under such heavy energy conservation that you cannot lose weight, and it doesn't have enough control to do that anyway. At best your body can attempt to slow down your physical activity and slow down digestion for efficiency. Yes as you diet your metabolic rate will decrease, and even if it were to decrease an impossible amount like 50+% you would still be able lose weight by comsuming less energy.
That’s why I prefer a much more simple and natural model: mass-in vs mass-out.
Calorie-in vs calorie-out, or mass-in vs mass-out is really the same thing in the end.
The impact of genetics in mice, as shown in the article, is practically the same in humans: ±10% in all but the most extreme, rare, and irrelevant edge cases.
If you have bad genetics, eat 10% less and you won't be obese. Eat 15% less and you'll lose weight and then you can resume eating 10% less once at a healthy weight.
In a typical person's diet, eating 10% less is equivalent to not eating 51g of cheese. That is a cube of cheese approximately 2cm per side.
In the typical American's diet, not consuming the average 145 daily calories of sugar-sweetened beverages already gets you more than halfway there so all you have to do to get to 15% less is not eat the equivalent of two slices of sliced cheese. (113 calories, 145+113+113=371 = 18% of a 2000 calorie diet)
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/sugar-sweetene...
If you are one of the EXTREMELY RARE, SPECIAL, AND STATISTICALLY IRRELEVANT edge cases, yeah, it's gonna be tough for you.
I blame the companies that are designing foods to be fattening and addictive and advertising them everywhere.
Even Subway (marketed as healthy) tries to upsell cookies and chips and soda. Supermarkets sell "salads" with a bit of lettuce and 500 calories of meat, cheese, and dressing. Even gas stations try to upsell junk food.
Why aren't food companies being held responsible for the harm caused by their products in the same way that, say, big tobacco was?
Also, most companies exist to serve people. The reason most food are super processed and fattening is because that’s what people want. It’s not what they need, but that’s what people want. Most people prioritize cheap, delicious food over health, even if they don't say it.
Individuals can make good decisions, but as a species we continually make bad ones.
But if 75% of us are overweight or obese, we're talking about a public health concern. I just masked up and hid in my home for a couple of years to avoid something effectively as harmful as the flu. Where is the response to the obesity crisis?
The obesity epidemic is a crisis that has only existed for 30 or so years.
But yet we see yet another study looking for biological reasons to blame for us being obese!
Our food chain has been corrupted and our shelves are full of processed foods. We spend all day sitting at desks and driving cars.
Until we change our society we aren't going to fix the obesity crisis.
When I decide to focus on being more active and eating healthier, my weight goes down. Do I have to work a little harder than others? Possibly, but crying about that isn't going to make me less obese.
But in the end I’m still the one who chooses to fall to temptation.
Interesting that we talk about fat shaming and body pride. Why? It's not healthy, and it never will be.
When I was in France I ate bread, cheese, pate, and meat like a pig and lost weight. I walked less than I do at home and drank more. You can't tell me there's nothing to that. I also don't believe it's simple carbs because China, Japan, and India's food cultures eat a ton of rice and obesity isn't nearly the same problem there.
CICO is not wrong but it's like 5% of the issue. People only lazily argue CICO as some kind of case-closed internet flourish. It's like going up to an NBA pro and going "bro, why do you ever miss, it's just physics"
I'm British and my partner is Russian. Our first date was at an Italian restaurant and she ordered a pizza.
She was shocked to receive a full circle of pizza, as opposed to a slice.
I was shocked she was only expecting a slice.
That was quite eye-opening for me. I've never been overweight and growing up my parents brought me up on a good diet (albeit somewhat large portions). Looking around, many people weren't fortunate enough to have the same experience with food. Either because they grew up on fast food, or because their parents cooked large batches of rather beige British food.
(Practically) anybody being stubborn with themselves following a CICO diet will lose weight. But the portion sizes and types of food people eat have definitely been misunderstood as having less energy.
I've been confused for some time as to why our food packaging recommends 2500 calories for men and 2000 for women, when the basal metabolic rate (BMR), the amount of energy burnt daily by doing nothing is around 1500, and the extra 1000 calories would require a decent amount of exercise which most people simply don't do (akin to a daily 10 mile run). I have assumed it's food companies lobbying to increase it with a very optimistic view on people's daily energy expenditure.
Edit: another thing I would do first thing would be to cut the meal in half and put half in the fridge. Good for lunch the next day.
You stop by a restaurant and order a burger. Maybe the restaurant has calories posted. Those calories are probably based on the "corporate standard" for that item, or might be based on buying samples of the product from several locations and averaging. But your burger won't have exactly that number of calories. Perhaps this person puts more or less of certain toppings on than is average. Perhaps your patty was slightly larger or smaller than average.
All of that means it is hard to know the real calorie count. The same sort of thing will apply but is possibly even worse for food you prepare yourself from scratch. It is not trivial to even calculate the calories in meals you prepare, especially if fresh produce is involved. (For packaged ingredients you can try to go by the info on the nutrition label, but be warned that the rounding rules can make those misleading at times. But for fruits and vegetables, the best you can do is look up the average Caloric density for this variery, and hope that the items you have are not from some local strain with meaningful differences from the normal for that variety). In the end, it is actually easiest to accurately count calories when only eating prepackaged foods, which are generally viewed poorly.
And this is not counting the fact that the systems we use to determine the calories in food are not completely accurate. Using a calorimeter to measure the heat energy output by completely combusting the food is objective, but flawed because the body does not perfectly combust everything we ingest! The Atwater system we currently use can at least in theory account for this, but the numbers used are not especially accurate and have known weaknesses. Plus they depend on accurately determining the number of grams of protein, fat, carbohydrates, non-digestible carbohydrates (like dietary fiber), etc. I suspect that even on extremely tightly controlled packaged food we could be out by over 10%. The limited precision of the Atwater numbers could easily bring the food to a 5% margin of error on its own, before considering accuracy issues with those numbers, or accuracy/precision limitations on determining the protien, fat, carb contents.
And so far I've only tackled the calories in side, and not issues with calories out, like accounting for the basal metabolic rate varying in response to changes to the diet, or that not 100% of all nutritional value will get extracted from the food, and many others. There is a LOT that can be said about that side.
But bigger picture, compliance with any given diet is an issue, and any diet that approach that requires counting calories means more effort must be expended to comply, making it much more likely that the person will either "cheat" on the diet, or just stop even trying after getting worn down enough. That is why even if CICO is thermodynamically sound and sufficent, it is not in and of itself a viable dieting strategy.
The act of consistently observing one's own weight, what one eats, and what exercise one does, is a viable dating strategy, much more so than Paleo, Keto or some other named diet which can push book sales and courses.
To drop 100g of weight requires around a 700 calorie deficit (or 7000cal for 1kg). If you're rounding up your energy intake, rounding down your exercise/BMR estimates, and still staying clear 700 calories or more a day, you'll shift the weight.
I think the issue comes when people try to use CICO with precision, thinking that 50cal here, 100cal, 7cal there etc. will add up and help them lose weight. It's not big enough deficits and like you stated, they're probably actually in surplus from bad measuring/inaccurate figures at that point, so they'll likely maintain/gain weight.
Completely agree on the restaurant / self-prepared food. That's why you round it up. I round up everything to the next 50/100, even if the packaging states a figure.
Basically, you're overthinking it. You need to simplify it. Also, as someone said, you don't need to be that precise.
If the mice were defecating equal calories yet some were putting on weight and others weren't then the energy had to go somewhere. Until there's a clear idea of where that energy went, this result is little more than speculation.
In contrast there was another study earlier this year that showed "naturally thin" people simply eat less.
There are genetic predispositions in play here. The gut biome too may play a role. The biggest factor however is our relationship with food. People eat for a variety of reasons eg for the experience, to self-medicate (eg anxiety, depression), as a reward, as an activity that itself acts as a reward, etc. The healthiest attitude to have is to treat food as fuel.
I tend to eat the same thing a lot. Part of this is decision fatigue. Part of it is probably ADHD or something adjacent. But a lot of it is simply thinking of food as fuel and not tying it to emotional states, social obligations or hobbies.
The idea is 100% clear, it's differing metabolic rates. There is zero mystery here. (To be clear, the physical mass that the obese mouse puts on, is breathed out in the lean mouse. And the lean mouse runs hotter too, of course.)
Both rat's (and people's) metabolisms vary widely -- for a host of different reasons (genetics/activity/diet/etc). Which is what tends to get ignored in the whole calories-in-calories-out viewpoint.
If I don't watch the salt knowing I have a genetic predisposition to high blood pressure, is that not my fault? It depends on your perspective. Ultimately I think we each have to play our hands the best we can. There's no point arguing with the hand you've been dealt.
It's certainly harder for people with the lower calorific requirement. Food often comes in "one size fits all" and that's more often than not a male-sized portion. Why are women forced to exercise restraint at restaurants when they are served too much food? But, oddly, when I have suggested different portion sizes people have baulked and said it would be sexist.
The big issue I rarely hear people talk about yet is addiction. Obesity is, in the majority of cases, food addiction. Does anyone think obese people want to be obese? They are all conscious of being uncomfortable, incapable and unattractive. But they can't stop eating. That's addiction. But we still allow fast food and junk food that specifically preys on this addiction. We accept their advertising everywhere. We accept their specifically engineered formulations of sugar, salt and fat designed to be as addictive as possible. If you want someone or something to blame, the food industry would be it.
I'm not sure I agree all the way to the conclusion, but it's definitely worth considering that inter-country obesity may be linked to an environmental factor.
Both questions are strange, for different reasons. The first, because it doesn't follow from the above. They later clarify "Only when they were fed 10 to 15 percent less did they slim down to the size of their unaltered siblings." So its not that such a specimen can't lower thir obesity by eating less, but simply that they have a lower threshold for becoming obese.
As for the second question, if some portion of people would be obese regardless of the era, "purveyors of fattening foods" can still be accountable for all the other obese people. Though we don't especially have a tradition of holding such companies accountable in any meaningful sense.
This article too says that when the fat mice ate 10% less they went back to a normal weight.
10% less is not "starving yourself".
If you have a gene like this then it's not fair. But life's not fair. At least this you CAN fix.
You can't fix ugly genes, short genes, or hair loss genes. Or low IQ genes.
So the title is wrong. Ultimately it is, actually, someone's fault. The fat person led their own life there.
It's not a short person's fault that they're short, and they can't fix it. But a fat person ate themselves fat, and can eat less and will lose weight.
And for food i disagree. 10% less is actually not that much less. It's more like remembering to eat less than it is to stop eating while still hungry.
It literally is though. If you burn more calories than you eat you will lose weight. It's tautological. Now some people are genetically disposed to having different calorie spends all else equal, but that doesn't change the calories in, calories out equation.
I have a great deal of trouble gaining weight, and the way I have always worded it is that "Some people's digestive systems are better at holding on to calories"
A close friend who counts as morbidly obese at 380lb, eats 1800 calories a day, and does not loose weight. They have to go significantly lower to make looses. Their body is very good at holding on to calories.
I doubt your friend is being honest with themselves about their portion size. I have to weigh everything to stay on track to lose weight at the rate I want to. (Despite losing 125lbs I'm still morbidly obese). My ability to estimate portion size is so hilariously bad I have started to assume 500 calories for each Carb or 'rich food'(meat, cheese etc) I have to guess on and 300 calories for each veg or fruit serving I guess. Experience has shown that I am actually roughly that bad and calculating serving sizes for things.
Also depending on their height they may need to eat a 1500, or 1200 calorie diet to trigger weight loss(consult a pro to help guide this process).
The scientists' findings with the mice definitely tracks.
I'd be willing to bet most people (even those in shape) underestimate their calorie intake and overestimate their energy expenditure, unless actively logging it, and these small differences gradually add up.
I've lost 10kg since June (starting from a healthy weight of 75kg), and my special method that doctors don't want you to know, is calories in, calories out. I track food in, and I track exercise.
Even if my weight is being influenced by microplastics or something else, I believe everything is still within my own control.
I do think that in an ideal world, junk food (including alcohol) would be treated akin to cigarettes, with bland packaging . featuring health warnings, and a carpet ban on being advertised.
If that were the case obesity probably wouldnt vary so widely across decades and countries.