We see obesity becoming increasingly normalized. People feel powerless to stop it and that we should just accept it.
It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or some kind of gut biome disruption is playing a role as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/19/environm...
https://www.webmd.com/obesity/what-to-know-obesogens
These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.
It sounds callous but if you go to Africa or visit a prisoner of war camp you won’t find many fat people and so blaming chemicals in America for so many fat people doesn’t make much sense to me.
In the 40s, 50s, and 60s most people did manual labor and even office jobs were not as sedentary since you couldn’t just sit at a computer.
Here’s another simple overlooked example, grocery shopping, before the rise of superstores you’d go into town and visit 4 different stores. The butcher, the hardware store, the grocer, the pharmacist etc. now it’s all in one big store all next to each other.
Here’s another example lawn mowing. Back then most people had manual lawnmowers.
Here’s another example the moving of goods. Go look up a picture of the manual labor involved in being a stevedore back then versus now and that’ll give you an idea of how much less physical exertion is needed these days even in jobs that are still considered manual labor.
Overall I think solely blaming plastic for obesity is an oversimplification and assuredly wrong, although it could have some affect there are a lot of other things going on.
Declines in fertility and IQ are most likely due to obesity so it’s a big issue.
I also just had this thought about declining levels of fertility in humans. If it’s being caused by external factors like plastic or any pollution we’d expect to see similar effects in all other mammals especially ones close to human populations.
I wasn’t able to find any studies backing this up with just a cursory search, but it is likely the easiest way to add or detract from the plastic hypothesis.
I do know that not all but most studies comparing fertility between decades found that when controlling for obesity the differences were not statistically significant between time periods.
Which happens to be the cheap thing in industrialized mass produced Western food chains. Cheap in terms of dollars and personal time.
So obesity is really an economic problem.
We should come down like a ton of bricks on fast food and require they offer healthier options at low prices, subsidized by taxes on their unhealthier options.
But until very recently, I would absolutely have still chosen the unhealthy option. I'm not sure how much impact 20% on a bag of Doritos is really going to have.
To me, substitutability is key.
If you tax unhealthy food, but unhealthy food is the only option (from physical, financial, and time perspectives), people just pay more to eat unhealthy food.
If you tax unhealthy food, but also require healthier and low-cost options at the same establishment, then people begin to have options. I.e. do I want a $10 Big Mac or a $3 grilled chicken sandwich?
Even getting the Big Mac less often would be a net win.
And I call bullshit if McDonald's tries the "But it's impossible to run healthy food through our supply chain..." argument.
Cigarettes are a great example of missing substitutability.
If you smoke, and the price of cigarettes increases, what options do you have?
My version of an anti-smoking campaign would have drastically boosted the price of cigarettes and used to tax to decrease the price of nicotine patches or gum.
If there aren't alternatives at the point of sale, there aren't alternatives.
I agree. But most of my bad food choices are made in supermarkets. Next time you're at a checkout, look for the healthy trolleys and the unhealthy trolleys. Honestly, the difference is stark. (When I go on a health kick, I find it amazing how many aisles I just don't need to walk down. So much processed food).
On the tax point I'm going to try to argue you away from the concept of hypothecated tax, because I think it's almost always a bad idea. Money is fungible, and taxation all goes into a single pot. Tying tax and spending together is a rhetorical trick, meant to manipulate public opinion - whenever you see a politician doing that, there's a good chance they're trying to con you.
If we're going to put a sin tax on something, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. If we're going to fund a health programme, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. But these decisions are orthagonal. Tying them just unnecessarily binds government's hands wrt future policy changes. Worst-case, you end up funding obsolete health programmes, "because that's what the tax is for".
For practical purposes you either need to eat modestly at McDonalds or more realistically not eat at McDonalds very much.
When we eat out, we easily eat 1000+ calories. That's over half the daily calorie budget of a 5'5 woman. Yet it's just one of the meals people eat in a day.
People like to come up with a bunch of reasons for why we eat too much or why the food we eat is somehow making us fatter than it might otherwise but we gloss over how trivial it is to overeat caloric dense foods even if "obesogens" and microplastics never existed.
Fast forward a little bit and their lobbyists have convinced government to further incentivize healthy options by paying Restaurants that implement absolutely meaningless standards that do nothing for anything and we are actually subsidizing giant asses whose milkshake brings all the obesity adjacent diseases to the yard.
If you actually want to disincentivize negative things you have to either actually forbid them or just make it more expensive. Incentives will always be gamed and end up as free giveways. See bullshit carbon credits.
Want people to eat fewer big macs? Tax them at 100% and watch most of the cheap fast food implode and cease to exist. Want those people not to starve watch in amazement at a virtue of UBI you can tax things out of existence that destroy people's health without starving people.
Starvation mode is a myth. Well, kinda. You do enter "starvation mode" where your metabolism significantly slows down, but only if you're actually starving. Simply eating in a caloric deficit will not do anything to your metabolism.
The beginning of this article talks about that in great detail:
And that the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.
because let's be honest, telling people to eat less is not going to stop them from eating junk, just less junk.
"Just eating less" I don't think is really enough for most cases. You need to also be active and exercise along with, and even better, be eating the right balance of macros.
I would say you need to do maybe 2 of the 3 to lose or maintain weight, and doing all 3 will certainly allow you to lose weight. But doing just 1 is unlikely to see results.
To lose weight, you need to eat in a caloric deficit, that's it. Excercising just burns extra calories which allows you to eat more while staying in a deficit.
And macros / less junk food are, of course, important for health, but if we're speaking strictly about weight loss, no, it doesn't matter. FWIW, you can eat only a Big Mac and 3 Snickers bars every day, and you'll still lose weight, because that's about ~1800 kcal, which is a deficit for most people.
> the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.
That depends on what you eat really, there are a lot of foods that don't have a lot of calories while still being very nourishing, and many of them are just normal foods, not some special "fitness stuff"
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The article I linked in my above comment is actually a great explanation of why "just eating less" is enough for most people, I highly recommend you read it if you haven't already.
We have to be taught the value of exercise and being physically active because most people don’t default to that.
Just look up 'hormonal weight gain' to see that it isn't just about eating less. Then look at research into the influence of chemicals/micro plastics on those hormones.
Yes, all calories have to go in through the mouth. How those calories are processed, however, is influenced by a great many factors.
I feel compelled to assume that we can't possibly be extracting every calorie from certain types of food. Caloriometers work differently from human digestive systems.
But yeah, human digestion is pretty efficient. Muscles are far less efficient though, around 30%, which is a neat fact.
The pervasive obsession with avoiding this truth is concerning and has had a detrimental effect on society. How many of us know someone who passed away from COVID due to this kind of unhealthiness? Primary Care Physicians and health professionals out there need to step it up and be truthful with people.
I can acknowledge the extreme cases where this may not be possible, but 9/10 times we can take ownership of our lives whatever the situation, clean our diets and get out there and exercise.
Say that someone was failing at university because they have no motivation. And they have no motivation because they have depression. Then a vocal minority would always butt in with the following truism:
- Failing university courses is caused by not studying enough. There is no subverting the fact that you need to study the material in order to not fail the course.
This is of course a completely useless advice/truism.
Now say that someone overeats because they have depression. Or because of some pathology caused by microplastics. Or let's just say that there is a possibility that a different environment (no microplastics) would lead to them not overeating. Do you still want to derail this conversation with irrelevant “thermodynamics” truisms?
"I am failing because I am not studying enough."
Granted, I could introspect on what was preventing me from studying, leverage additional college resources, align to my learning styles, etc.
But until I accepted the above as an honest objective truth, and a path to change, I wasn't able to be successful.
Many commenters like to slight of hand their possibly objective comments about calories as making their comments about moral or will-power failings just as objective, when it’s not a transitive property.
― Luhmann, Niklas (1990), The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown. In: Krohn W., Küppers G. & Nowotny H. (eds.) Selforganization. Portrait of a scientific revolution. Kluwer, Dordrecht: pp. 64–85, p. 66
I'd say more, but frankly, I'm only on hackernews rn because I can't bloody sleep and doing more than copy pasting would wake me up too much
Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s. How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...
Regardless of the cause of the obesity epidemic, it should be addressed compassionately and efficaciously. What makes that difficult (at least in the US) is that the most efficacious treatments aren't aligned with how the healthcare system works. Maybe you won't blame being fat on diet and exercise, but there's almost certainly a diet and excercise plan that will make you lose weight.
First-line treatment should be, - Walk/jog 30 min, 3x per week. Pace for a mildly elevated heart rate. - Eliminate super sweet foods from regular diet. No more than 3x per week. This could be VERY hard for sugar-addicted folks, so start small and work up. - Fast occasionally. Intermittent is great, but longer is even better. - Take a multivitamin.
The end goal is to replace your sweet craving with a fat craving and be ok feeling hungry for periods of time.
High fructose corn syrup is relatively new.
So are many sugar substitutes.
Why would you not have sympathy for someone suffering? Even if it's theoretically their own doing most people don't want to be obese.
If it's environmental pollutants, shouldn't lab or wild animals be getting fatter as well? Yet they're not: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...
Based on what many people have in their shopping carts and the sugar water many people are constantly chugging, I see no reason to think anything other than excess calories is the cause. And lack of exercise as an exacerbating factor.
When I used to weight train, during my cuts (weight loss phases), I had much more success with a high fat/low carb diet than I ever did calorie counting (which naturally makes you avoid fat since they have a higher calorie density).
[0] Not an expert but this is my layman's understanding after reading lots of books on the subject.
Under my doctor's supervision, I went on the keto diet. I eat high fat foods and meats, and I lost about 50 lbs in 2 months. My weight stabilized over the following months within a healthy range. Additionally, chronic pain, concentration, and energy levels all improved. Most of this is due to the weight loss, but not all of it. Sugar can cause inflammation in high quantities, and it can also cause an increase in blood pressure. Sugars are also metabolized by cancer cells while ketones are not, which would explain the rise in cancer rates as sugar consumption has increased across the planet. My liver function improved, cholesterol levels improved, blood sugar stabilized, and insulin resistance went down.
I personally believe that there is some kind of difference among humans in how we digest things that goes beyond the microbiome. Some people can eat high amounts of carbohydrates and sugars without negative consequences beyond tooth decay. Other people cannot eat any sugar without incurring weight gain and cognitive problems.
"In aquatic invertebrates, microplastics cause a decline in feeding behavior and fertility, slow down larval growth and development, increase oxygen consumption, and stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species. In fish, the microplastics may cause structural damage to the intestine, liver, gills, and brain, while affecting metabolic balance, behavior, and fertility; the degree of these harmful effects depends on the particle sizes and doses, as well as the exposure parameters"
From a quick search: https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html
Well sure, obesity is a result of a lot of factors, some genetic, but a lot of it is the food environment surrounding people. The lack of easy access to healthy foods or education on how to buy and prepare them, plus economic pressures all play into this.
Yup. It is hard to pull all the factors apart because they contribute to each other. If you are obese, I understand it screws up your hormones which makes it easier to stay obese. Also if you have exposure to chemicals which cause you to have a tendency towards being obese you are more likely to seek out a bad food environment - e.g. crave McDonald's fries, etc.
So you sort of just need to work on each factor and over time, it will change. For many, we already have significantly accumulations of forever chemicals or microplastics so it may take a generation to truly fix.
This doesn't exist anywhere in the world. You either have easy access to healthy food or no access to food at all.
Healthy food is so much cheaper, more abundant and easier to source in all situations than processed junk.
The idea that people don't know how to eat healthy or can't afford to is a convenient lie.
[1]gas stoves and ranges, overhead fans, etc. and of course when they released a trial balloon they accused people of conspiracy theory thinking -but here we are. Meanwhile sweeteners and fillers are everywhere.
Unlike smoking, half the class is already fat. NGOs and media would frame it as a psychological harm to those children, fat-shaming, or who knows what else. It would be a political landmine.
No, this should be confronted as _the_ health threat of the next 20 - 30 years. It's more consequential than anything else, Health-wise, productivity-wise, medical costs, quality of life --All these shoppers in their electric 4-wheeled scooters. It's insane that this is not a declared crisis.
Cars?
A US comedian once commented that when he went to Europe 20 years ago, he noticed that people only ate three meals a day.
What a concept!
The number of meals is a very small part of the entire diet and lifestyle matrix.