Well that plus the cheeseburger
I would suggest that the big change is the amount of activity that an average kid does. which seems to be conducive to the calories in/vs out. the cause of this is complex. But a lot of it relates to stranger danger. Parents don't let their kids out after school unattended (for various reasons) which means they are inside not burning off as many calories.
The other thing to remember is that food is now cheap. Its perfectly possible to be in the bottom 20% of the UK income bracket and still have enough cash to eat more calories than you need. (This is a good thing. People starving in the UK is unforgivable.)
Wouldn't this also intuitively be related to the fact that a calorie today is much, much "cheaper" (in terms of labor required to acquire the calorie for both the producer and the consumer) than a calorie was even 100 years ago due to advancements in agriculture and distribution?
That's my point; if you look at a map of obesity rates in the US overlaid with a map of poverty, there's a very strong correlation.
The cheap access to calories today makes it easier to overconsume. In the past, the high cost of calories meant that only the wealthy could really ever become obese (outside of genetic factors).
But even if absolutely true, how do you solve for that? Laws limiting what you can purchase/eat would simply be a non-starter.
It would rankle some people, but so do taxes on alcohol and nicotine. My big concern is that I'm skeptical whether we can really identify those "bad" foods and that even if we could whether we could ensure the government would whitelist/blacklist the correct foods.
As far as lack of control goes, I'd be curious if fatter/poorer people would do worse on some kind of adult marshmallow test. Maybe see if you can get them to sit perfectly still for 20 minutes in exchange for a monetary reward. I don't have a strong sense that they'd do worse than skinnier/richer people.
Implementation wise, it probably would be best to begin at something like half a cent per calorie and then ratchet it up until we hit some target number (or until we discover it doesn't actually influence behavior). Then at the end of the year people get a $4000 dollar tax credit.
One hypothesis is that this is due to "food deserts" where the lack of access to fresh foods leads to over-reliance on processed foods for caloric needs.
It is no coincidence that there is also a strong correlation between food deserts (at a national and local level) with lower income. The solution probably isn't banning specific foods, but to solve the access problem and address socio-economic factors. Better health and nutrition education may also be key.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081766/#!po=35...
Junk foods at high-availability, low cost, offering low-to-zero satiety per-calorie, and habit-forming addictive potential. The answer is pretty much in your sentence. Add to the fact, eating well on a budget requires you to prepare food at home. Lots of pressures funnel people to obesity. In the before-times (if you want to set your clock well before the obesity epidemic), two-income households weren't a thing for the most part and manufactured junk foods were a novelty on the market. People kept more active even at leisure, with tv being the novel and singular screen-based entertainment device that not everyone could afford at outset.
I tried to figure out why. Was it lifestyle? More manual labor? No, even office workers weren't obese. Running was viewed as some weird western habit. Few people went to the gym. Most just went for walks for exercise.
Was it diet? Maybe. But plenty of local foods weren't exactly healthy. Mostly processed carbs. Lots of salt. Plenty of deep fried foods.
Then after eating like a local for a while I realized it. Portion size. I'd say the average meal is maybe half the portion size you'd get in the US. I'd go out to eat at a restaurant and think "I'm not that hungry", then order something anyways. But it was never a lot of food. Very common for people to have a soup dish for lunch - maybe a few strips of meat, an egg, a handful of noodles and ton of vegetables. Add it all up and it's not many calories.
It looked to me like people weren't obese because they ate less. But that was the societal norm. Sure people would gorge themselves at special events like weddings or fancy dinners out. But most of the time they were eating meals of maybe 400-500 calories each.
I'd expect far more exposure, rather than less.
The reason was that I could not become satiated when eating commercial bread, before eating huge quantities, which filled me up. It is much easier for me to not start eating something than to stop after beginning to eat, so I gave up completely on eating bread.
Nevertheless, I have started this year to make at home a bread every day when I wake up, which I eat at breakfast. Unlike commercial bread, this home-made bread satiates me completely without eating too much of it, and until late in the evening, when I usually have my 2nd daily meal.
This was unexpected and I am wondering about the cause. One possible reason is because this home-made bread is more protein-rich than commercial bread, because before baking I wash the dough for a few minutes, to remove a part of the starch.
There is also the possibility that it might matter that this is pure bread, made of flour and water without anything else added, unlike the commercial bread, which includes a huge list of additives. I believe that the additives may also have an influence because, as far as I remember, with the bread eaten when I was a child I did not have the same problem of lack of satiety like with the modern commercial bread.
However you are right that it is chewier than commercial bread and I have also thought that this may be an additional explanation. I believe that the longer chewing time contributes to the satiation effect, but it cannot explain all of it, as I remain satiated for many hours, and I do not believe that the extra chewing can have a lasting effect.
In any case the fact that most modern food requires much less chewing than traditional food is indeed a likely contributory factor to the tendency of eating more at a meal than it was common for the previous generations.
Most people don’t do this and spend their lives wondering why they can’t control their weight.
Some quick culprits: sodas and juices (huge amount of calories), excess oil in food cooking (oil has a ton of calories), side dishes and snacks (chips, French fries, crackers, etc.).
On the satiety level, if you eat out a lot or processed foods, most have little fiber and aren’t that satiating (e.g. you can eat a whole bag of chips or thing of crackers and want more). Either more fiber or protein.
Really the main solution is to limit eating out if you live in America. I eat out once a day maximum. Otherwise you’ll most likely hit a caloric surplus.
My experience with obese and morbidly obese individuals in the northeast US suggests to me that the problem is more related to mental health & addiction than a lack of information & education.
Sure the orange juice is probably "healthier" per calorie, whatever that means, but you're still drinking a lot of calories.
You can say the main solution is not eating out, or anything else, but the fact that losing weight is hard demonstrates the fact that no solution is easy.
Imagine that the basis for the obesity pandemic may in fact lie in other, lack of proper digestive bacteria and yeast for example. I feel that pointing at obesity as just lazyness is just not constructive. I am not obese and have never suffered from it so this is not from a point of self defense. Just a thought.
From my point of view as an obese individual: It is the cheeseburgers. And the lack of excersize. And the long days working at a screen with few breaks.
Change is hard and bad habits are not easy to get rid of. Especially when you've spent a few decades getting used to them when you were young and unwise.
Which is exactly why no expert in treating addiction suggests using willpower to "cold turkey" as a treatment.
I didn't grow fat because I have a slow metabolism (and I do), or because I'm addicted to a specific unhealthy type of food; I'm fat because I made a major switch in lifestyles (hard labour to desk job) without any changes to my diet, and because I kept prioritizing other things than my health for decades. After a while it became obvious that change is needed, but boy is it difficult to lose weight once you've had it for 20 years!
The solution is managing my diet. Sure, some variables may change (such as chemicals affecting my body), but I still need to keep consuming less calories than I burn in order to do something about the issue.
Calorie in calorie out is not false. It's just not useful. Like saying to go to the moon you need to go up.
Calorie in is appetite. Calorie out is metabolism. The specifics of how these are affected, and the solutions to fixing them, are a lot more fruitful than reaffirming the second law of thermodynamics.
The large fries and enormous glass of corn syrup aren't welded to the burger, which has a perfectly fine nutritional profile for an entree.
I wondered if it was some sort of expectation that when you ordered food at a restaurant that there was always excess you could take home in a ‘doggy bag’ which seems to be fairly common in the US but not typical in my experience in NZ or Australia.
I’ve definitely become accustomed to it and I can now eat that full American sized serving :(
Funnily enough, most of the time the cheeseburgers are smaller here in the US than NZ!
That said, this 2011 study from Cambridge University says portion sizes have not grown significantly.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-n...
Maybe if they were required to price it backwards, where the meal costs $x and you can get a ten percent discount if you order small, that would "trick" people into eating less.
Oh my god, yes.
"Free refills" also didn't become standard until some time in the 90s. In the 80s, a refill cost money and often the cups were smaller to begin with. You'd buy a pitcher (just like with beer) if you wanted a lot at a bit of a discount. You can see this on an ad on a pizza hut in the skater movie Gleaming the Cube, near the end of the film. Now the idea of buying a pitcher of soda makes no sense because everywhere has free refills, but almost none did in the 80s. In the early 90s some places did but it was often just during certain hours (lunch, say) as a draw. It spread from there until it became normal, fast-food joints started letting you fill (and re-fill) your own cup, et c.
They talk about lab animals with controlled diets and activity becoming fatter on average over the decades, and point to chemicals as the only possible culprit. I find that quite possible or even probable, but isn't it also possible the gut flora is evolving to be more efficient at processing modern food?
Is emmer or kamut much better? What about red fife, a strain of wheat from ~170 years ago?
I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something.
I certainly don’t think of it as a health food (nothing so heavily processed is), but is it actually harmful?
It’s the bun (full of corn syrup and carbs), a massive amount of sodium, the condiments (also corn syrup), a side of fries (mostly carbs), a soda (even more corn syrup). By the time you’ve finished a decently sized burger you’ve eaten enough sugar, sodium and carbs for the entire day.
Get a double Quarter Pounder with cheese instead and its 1230 calories and 101 g of carbs (10 g of which are added sugars). That's 33% of calories from carbs, which is also in the moderate carb range.
As far as the burger itself goes, a doubler Quarter Pounder with cheese is 740 calories and 41 g of carb (10 g of which is added sugars). That's 22% of calories from carbs and would count as a low carb item in much of the medical literature.
Americans tend to go overboard. They hear that cutting back on carbs has been shown to have some benefits, and they think this means they have to cut back from the 50-60% calories from carbs diets they are on to 5-10%. That is very hard since it eliminates most breads, pastas, rice, potatoes, and deserts. It is costly and/or time consuming to maintain such a diet. Most who try will fail for those reasons.
In fact much of the benefits from reducing carbs will come with a more modest reduction to around 40%, which can be achieved without having to largely give up the aforementioned foods. It is much easier to stick with it when you can still eat at most restaurants, including most fast food places.