In the context where we have gone from obesity rates of 13 percent to 40, to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me.
Think of it like body temperature: normally, your body maintains a certain core temperature, and it will respond in a negative feedback loop when the temperature deviates from that set point. Conditions like infections can induce where your body raises that set point to fight the infection, and it takes time for that set point to come back down.
Something similar appears to happen with people's weight. Hormonal or other changes cause the body to gain weight, and once that happens, it resists losing weight in various ways: increasing appetite, changes to basal metabolic rate, changes to metabolic pathways involved in breaking down nutrients from food, all sorts of things. Deviously, fat cells actually produce hormones that play into these changes, which is one of many reasons why losing weight is usually harder than gaining it. And when people do manage to lose weight, often after a huge exertion of effort and willpower and major lifestyle changes, their set point may not have changed, and so as soon as they slip up even a little bit, they quickly regain back to their set point.
So they're not suggesting that there's some mystical force out there that decides some percentage of the population should be overweight. They're referring to the idea of a set point for body weight that is difficult to change without drugs or bariatric surgery.
Or maybe this is the case, but it is thrown off hard by our modern diets. Our natural set point is in the healthy range, but our meal is x calories per Y food now so it ends up artificially high.
The explanation just doesn't line up with what we've seen. I get that it's hard to lose weight once you've gained it, but that's different. This is absolving us of being responsible for our obesity as a whole.
Today, there are a bunch of factors that have combined to move people's set points higher than they should be: calorie-dense diets, sedentary lifestyles, plastics, drugs like antidepressants and lithium compounds in the water supply, and who knows what else. No one is arguing that the "natural" set point is 300 pounds or whatever. The point is that there is no natural set point because it's a function of many different variables.
Kind of, but increasing doesn't go indefinitely either. People have multiple "set points", not one moveable one, long known among people intentionally increasing their weight as "plateaus".
Your body’s set point is a weight that it wants to go back to. The set point can change, but not without great effort. Small efforts will simply result in temporary weight gain/loss and eventual reversion to the set point weight. Great efforts (long term changes in diet and lifestyle, not just a 7 day juice fast) are required to re-set your set point higher or lower.
Think of a hamster crawling up a giant mixing bowl or something, set on a particular spot on the kitchen floor. The hamster can walk forwards up the side of the bowl, but the bowl has not moved and since the sides of the bowl are very steep, the hamster will slide back down to the middle of the bowl where he started. If he wants to get to a different part of the kitchen, he will have to really slam his body against the side of the bowl, or work hard in a different way, to “nudge” the whole bowl across the floor so it’s now sitting at a different “set point”
> but it is thrown off hard by our modern diets.
Yes. I think the dominant theory is that it has something to do with gut microbiomes, and in particular sugar and/or artificial sweeteners screw it up pretty badly.
Somehow I became a sugar person from a meat person after I immigrated to Canada. Not sure what the cause was though.
It just means that bodies have a set point that they'll defend. And that weight changes. If you get fat, no matter how you do it, your body will defend that weight and if you lose will take action, increase hunger, reduce metabolism, etc. making it near impossible to keep it off even if you lose it.
People do have a natural weight, and a fraction of people are genetically predisposed to be overweight regardless of lifestyle. But what I find impossible to accept is that somehow that number has mushroomed in the past half-century and particularly in the U.S.
I've lived and/or worked on every continent over the past 40 years, and nowhere have I seen the degree of obesity that is commonplace in the U.S. (I have not been to the Pacific Islands--I know they have the highest obesity rates there for reasons I haven't researched, but they're also a very small population). Anecdotes aside, the obesite rate in the US is nearly twice as high as some European countries (and not because people in those countries are malnourished).
It's pretty clearly the food. Living in other countries I never had to worry about weight, but as soon as I moved to the U.S. I started gaining weight right away even though I eat quite healthy. It's just very very hard to escape processed foods in the U.S. unless you 1) have money to buy more expensive food, and 2) are very conscious about it and make considerably effort to stick to fresh fruits, veggies, rice, fish, etc., no fast food, sodas, packaged foods, etc. etc.
It's also well documented that obesity is correlated with income, and it's not hard to see why, when the grocery options in low-income areas have very little healthy, minimally-processed food. Nutritional inequality is a huge issue and there's very little action taken about it. Just think about how cheap and easy it is to get unlimited refills of soda -- with a soda fountain nearly everywhere you go, compared to eating fresh food. Many people have neither the time nor money to eat healthy, and despite "be healthy" slogans, etc., nearly everything around us conspires against eating healthy (unless you have lots of $).
I'm happy that obesity-reduction pills are coming on the market because some people are naturally predisposed to gaining weight and will be helped greatly by the pills. But what I hope doesn't happen (but already see happening) is that being used to paper-over this huge problem of nutritional inequality that is the root cause of much (though not all) of the obesity in the U.S. at least.
But when I say I cook from scratch I mean it. If I want beans I buy a bag of dried beans. I will sometimes buy canned Marzano tomatoes from Italy, ingredients: tomatoes.
And then there are the millions of cats with hyperthyroidism that has been connected to canned cat food.
And I generally buy in bulk at the outdoor market so relatively few beans even come in contact with the packaging.
The evidence is a little slim (no pun), but there's one theory which I find quite compelling. The theory is that eating foods with high flavor-calorie association increases your set point, and eating foods with low flavor-calorie association decreases your set point.
Flavor-calorie association is when your body knows that a particular flavor results in getting lots of calories in the near future. The flavor-calorie association will be higher for foods that are more flavorful or more calorically dense, and flavor-calorie associations can only be developed for foods you eat regularly. This explains why I lose a bit of weight whenever I go somewhere new – I'm trying new foods, so what I'm eating has doesn't have any flavor-calorie association, so my body's set point goes down, so I get full more quickly, causing me to eat fewer calories overall, causing me to lose weight. And since foods have gotten much more flavorful and calorically dense in the past half-century, it would explain why people's set points have gone up.
There's a simple way to test this theory at home. Extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is tasteless and textureless. So, find a 2-hour window of your day when you don't taste anything with flavor, and have two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil right in the middle of that window. Since the oil has no flavor, it should have no flavor-calorie association, and your set point should go down. I've been doing this, and I've been getting full faster and that's been causing me to lose weight. (If you want to google more info, it's called the shangri-la diet.)
(Note that if you try this, your toothpaste probably counts as a flavor.)
Although I suspect there's something to your hypothesis as well. I don't know about a spoonful of oil, but I have gone through phases where food seems less "rewarding" on a physiological level, and as a result I feel more satisfied with less.
Yea, people tend to forget pre-green revolution people going hungry for longer periods of time and mass starvation were really common. We made a trade, between the sudden and terrible outcome of starving and hunger to one of long term consequences like obesity and disease.
Perhaps the effect of limitless food on obesity rates takes time to manifest and is compounded in successive generations.
There has to be excess calories in the first place, much like there must be oxygen for there to be a fire (don't you try to get florine involved in this).
Humans eating behavior seems to be driven by the first few years of our lives. If you eat like garbage as a kid, it follows you into adulthood. The US was (somewhat, there are still plenty of other even fatter countries) first with the TV to counter advertising that taught us that Trix was part of a balanced breakfast and that we should carry a coke wherever we go.
Other countries likely had confounding factors that slowed the excess calorie uptake. For example common traditional meals that were only replaced slowly. Other things that can tip the scale are things like higher walkability in their cities.(for example higher walkability in the US correlates with lower body mass).
But as stated, those confounding factors only slowed the fattening, it didn't stop it and the EU now is growing in weight just like the US did in the past.
I would counter you're incorrect, we're only 2 to 3 generations (maybe 4 now that I'm getting old) past never starving. On an evolutionary timescale this is nothing when talking about an impulse hundreds of millions of years old.
Our bodies never developed any means to prevent eating more than we needed other than "Oh $deity my belly hurts" and "Hmm, I better save some of this for tomorrow because food could run out then instead".
My belief is Japan doesn't have as much of an obesity problem.
Sure, I'd love a drug that lets me eat more calories and not get fat but I'd also love it if we some how managed to stop eating so many cookies, donuts, potato-chips, sugary sodas, giant portion meals, etc.... I'd also love it if we designed more areas to be walkable and bikeable.
I lived ~15 years in Japan. I never missed owning car because the country is designed not to need a car. I also spent a year in Europe and Singapore and again, never missed owning car for the same reasons.
Let me also add that in Japan, at least in big cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, you are almost always 1-2 minutes away from junk food. You can walk to a convenience store and find whole aisles of pastries, chips, ice cream, candies, etc and yet somehow the Japanese manage not to pig out.
Similarly there are bakeries all over full of donuts, etc...
Somethings that help are the portions are often smaller. Certainly for potato chips most bags in Japan are 1/3th the size of the average bag in the USA. Similarly cookies are small and come in small portions vs the USA where pretty much any supermarket sells cookies in packages of 20 to 40 cookies and each cookie is giant 300-500 calories each.
I guess this is one of those, we're not going to get people to stop eating too much so we have to find another solution? I can just imagine once I get this drug I'll start eating more because I can and companies will ramp up the portion sizes even more.... TACO TIME!!!!!
I think the deal is that the drug suppresses your appetite so you do actually eat less
These people are taking a medical finding and blowing it wildly out of proportion to support their agenda. It's an unfortunately common tactic.
I don't quite think it's entirely fair to blame on willpower in modern western society though. We have a food supply that is unnaturally calorie dense, and optimized for hyper strong flavor, shelf stability, and profit, and rarely for health. We're also much more sedentary.
From the point of view of public healthy, you need to think like a public health expert. From this perspective it makes perfect sense to talk about "natural weights" as something that can change (and has risen) over time. The calorie dense food environment and sedentary lifestyles are things that exist in the background here. Given these background facts, the weights of the great majority of people (who don't have the time, means, willpower, etc to resist) are going to rise to a new higher "natural" point. For some, foods will be so calorie dense and provide so little nutrition or satiety that they experience runaway obesity. These are just predictable downstream effects of the environment, and so the perspective of the public health expert is that individuals aren't to be blamed and you have to fix the environment. Ban soda in public schools, etc etc.
Hunger is also impossible to compare, as it is an internal sensation.
Response to hunger is trained, but it is extremely hard to retrain.
Peoples weight just cannot be said to be a "natural number" in this environment. Something is causing this and your average person is obese because of it, not because of their "natural weight"
What seems absurd to me is to jump to conclusions instead of taking a scientific approach to eliminating factors until we find causation.
Based on what evidence? There are plenty of countries where people are not suffering from malnutrition and yet obesity rates are low compared to the U.S.
That correlation with income is almost entirely driven by women.
Rich men aren't much thinner than middle class or poor men.
Rich women are just a lot thinner than middle class or poor women.
This tells a different story than cheap processed food.
Also, people simply can't be trusted when it comes to self-reporting of their own regimen. Whether it's not being honest with one's self, or being embarrassed, ill informed, or plain delusional, lots of people will report that they've done "all the right things" to lose weight when they in fact have not. It's far more common that people suffering from obesity remain fat because they are thwarting their own progress, or are being given shitty advice from crackpot dieticians, and less common that there is some chronic hormonal condition that can't be corrected by diet. If your pancreas is still working, as well as your thyroid, your pituitary, your hypothalamus, etc., you probably can correct your obesity without drugs.
But people want the "pill" or the "shot", even though the chances are really good that they could get most of the work done cutting out exogenous sugar and alcohol. And I can't necessarily blame them because I obesity drugs can be a life changing thing for those stuck in the 300+ lbs range. What worries me about these kind of drugs is if people think it's okay to get fat and prediabetic because they can just get a prescription. I guess that's great if they can, but that also seems like a form of low level megalomania of sorts, and results in one fewer thing for people to take personal responsibility over. It's good for the mind to put effort and work into something. It infantilizes the mind to allow it to not have to put rigor into anything.
Some history. https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-...
It annoys me too! Human genes haven't changed radically over the last 100 years. We're not dogs or cats where generations can be measured in a year if not months, we're talking roughly 30 years between generations, so no, it's not "genes" or "set point". The answer is obvious for anyone paying even a passing interest to history: we largely went from an agrarian society to a sedentary one, eating more and moving less. It's that simple. Combine this with capitalism pushing the fast food industry to make profits at any externalized cost, and the results are obvious.
As an aside, it always amuses me how people talk about "set point" but never address that it only goes up. If "set point" is a thing, you'd think there would be some people with a lower one, or at a minimum it wouldn't go up (hence it being set), but no one likes to admit that . . .
There. Fixed it for you :) Yes, to me it seems like capitalism creates a society where most people get addicted just trying to cope with everyday life. For some it's alcohol, for some it's OxyContin, for some it's food, for some it's all-nighters in World of Warcraft.
"59.3 million (21.4%) people over age 12 used illicit drugs in the past year."
"Underage [..] 29% reported drinking alcohol"
https://www.verywellmind.com/rates-of-illicit-drug-abuse-in-...
Looks like weed and alcohol already are 50% of all citizens... I don't find it difficult to imagine that the other half ab-uses food.
Can I ask that you read a large number of history books across any number of cultures on addictive behaviors throughout history, because you'll find that anytime a society had an excess of time and labor/production that people find addictive behaviors to enjoy. This is not recent. This is not capitalism. This is humanity.
What capitalism has done is given everybody enough free time from starvation to actually follow addictive pursuits.
If you wanted to live with the same amount of 'lifestyle' as a serf did then you'd likely only have to work a few hours a week. The issue is I don't think most people want to live that lifestyle. We like clean water to drink. We like sheltered houses with electricity. We love having a house that is too large and filling it up with an inordinate amount of crap. We love living in expensive places with a lot to do. Turns out wanting all that requires a lot of stuff.
At one point in my life I was more interesting in not working and messing around and doing other things. I worked around 40 hours a month for a few years and made enough of a living to pay my bills (hey, computer work pays good). So it's not impossible for at least some people to live like that , though with rent increases not sure if it's possible these days. But with all that said, I like having all the stuff that working a full time job gives to me, so there is that.
It almost seems like capitalism has brought us not free time, but an unquenchable desire for "having a house that is too large and filling it up with an inordinate amount of crap".
The top comment even recommends that everyone should be taking it. Yikes.
I know I'll get downvoted to hell for this but I could have absolutely nailed a quiz of "who is going to get really fat after high school." Nobody that I would have defined as a "hard worker" has gotten fat.
TLDR: The modern obesity epidemic is mostly a mystery, things like higher caloric food, western diet bad don't tell the whole story. Most likely answers are chemical contaminants in our foods and water i.e. lithium or PFAS chemicals. Interestingly enough both wild animals and lab animals(rats) have been getting fatter over time as well which clearly invalidates the "bad diet" theory. The Human body has a lipostat, you "natural weight" mechanism if you will and it seems these contaminants increase the lipostat and this results in widespread obesity.
I think it tells more of the story than contaminants does. A candy bar is packed with calories and not that filling. This didn't exist a long time ago.
This wasn’t a steady, gentle trend as food got better, or diets got worse. People had access to plenty of delicious, high-calorie foods back in 1965. Doritos were invented in 1966, Twinkies in 1930, Oreos in 1912, and Coca-Cola all the way back in 1886. So what changed in 1980?"