59% of 18-25 year olds in the United States are overweight or obese | Hacker News Reader

59% of 18-25 year olds in the United States are overweight or obese

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35 pointsgrecy49 comments

I blame the culture. Fat shaming is wrong, but the culture has turned that around and made healthy living almost a de-facto "fat shaming by proxy" type weird thing. Anyone who does not agree that a fat person is healthy (but they call it "beauty"), is deemed to be automatically insulting that person.

And, corporates are happy to push around "any body is beautiful" because it rakes in the money.

Edit : The other side of the problem is eating processed and ultra-processed food. Its basically cans and pouches of chemical compounds that overwhelms the body.

So your hypothesis is that more shame would lead to less obesity?

I don't buy it. Dietary habits and the types of food available have changed as well as higher levels of sedentary lifestyles becoming more commonplace. "Willpower" has almost nothing to do with it. Very few people prefer to be overweight. The positive body image stuff comes after the weight to keep from hating yourself and probably gaining more weight due to the depression.

I think the culture is changing a little bit, though. It's interesting to see the rise of zoomer gym culture in the past couple of years, primarily driven through TikTok.

Granted, this has caused a huge surge in body dysmorphia in teenagers and a rise in use of performance-enhancing drugs, but regardless I think this might be an indication of future change to come.

It's not because they love to watch gym tiktoks that they work out themselves. Not unlike the masses of cooking shows consumed by people that never cook.

Have you seen much fat acceptance talk in real life? I have in the media but basically zero in real life.

And yet most people continue to see it as a character flaw rather than as a disease or the symptom of one.

They repeat "calories in, calories out", as if excessive hunger wasn't central to weight gain. We aren't rats in a lab being fed a limited amount of food, we all eat until we are satisfied.

So what are the factors that contribute to so many people these days being too hungry relative to the amount of calories they actually need? And what can we do collectively to mitigate the exposure of people to those risk factors? It's a tragedy.

Olive Garden marinara sauce contains grape jelly. A strawberry milkshake from McDonald’s contains something like 75 grams of sugar. Kids are fed Mac and Cheese from a box…its like 3 ingredients to make fresh…A “healthy” salad is lathered in sugar laden sauce worth 10x the calories of the leafy greens it sits on. Ultimately I think the nation is suffering from poor food quality standards combined with corrupted messaging surrounding nutrition and health. Most Americans I meet have skewed perceptions of what a healthy diet looks like. “Eat less, move more” is a convenient mantra suspiciously funded by the likes of Coca Cola. Maybe some things are just straight up unhealthy for you regardless of how much you exercise.

Excessive hunger is not central to weight gain. Most obese people overeat due to habit, boredom, or psychological trauma. People eat all the time when they're not even hungry.

Hunger is just another sensation, like pain or cold. Within certain reasonable limits a disciplined mind can ignore those stimuli. But discipline is not often taught as a distinct and necessary skill in our soft modern society.

The half-a-pack-a-day smoking crowd from before the war on tobacco have some pointed questions for you regarding your "discipline" theory.

We used to, as a society, consume a huge amount of appetite suppressants. We stopped doing that, while simultaneously revolutionizing sanitation and healthcare and applying optimizing chemistry to most food that goes in a box or carton.

> Hunger is just another sensation, like pain or cold. Within certain reasonable limits a disciplined mind can ignore those stimuli. But discipline is not often taught as a distinct and necessary skill in our soft modern society.

Are you saying that the reason there was hardly any obesity among three-year-olds fifty years ago is because those toddlers were "disciplined" and "not soft" and thus able to ignore hunger?

Or is it possible that they were more satiated with the amount of calories they were consuming?

People are too hungry because processed food generally fails to trigger the fullness response properly. This is an obvious target for regulation which could address the obesity problem, assuming we can come up with a way to roughly quantify fullness (doesn’t seem impossible).

Is it eat until satisfied or eat until full? Food tastes good. Plenty of people, myself included, often go well beyond full as the food is an experience in itself.

Also here not in USA we are trained not to "waste" food. That is to eat everything. In some context it make sense to not take more than you are going to eat, but at the same time not eating everything on plate is pretty simple solution.

I think it could be sensible part of solution. To make it okay to leave food on plate specially when you have not served yourself.

Maybe less excessive hunger than excessive calories to satisfy normal hunger due to low quality foods.

It's so incredibly easy to eat excess calories nowadays.

Yeah, you and others raise a good point. It could be that the food people consume isn't enough satiating relative to the calories it contains, it could be that people are hungrier than they should be relative to their caloric needs, or a combination of the two.

If you have a caloric surplus and start doing resistance training then you will gain muscle mass.

If you try to eat healthy, non processed foods, vegetables, etc, your food budget doubles if not triples.

This absolutely is not true. Vegetables are some of the cheapest things you can eat. Certainly cheaper than dairy and meat, which is heavily subsidized.

https://thebeet.com/is-it-expensive-to-be-plant-based-quite-....

You can just google this, or, you know - try it.

The vegetarian stuff that costs a lot is:

- If you shop at WholeFoods, but their prices are insane anyway

- If you only eat Organic AND are picky about what you eat if you're ONLY ORGANIC. Organic has HUGE price swings, so if you're only organic you need to swap out what you want to eat, if you care about cost.

- Meat substitutes - which can be good, but don't fit your bill generally - they are often heavily processed.

Yes, it takes a GOOD amount more effort. You have to literally eat more, yes. That means you have to cook more. If you are cooking, the cooking is often more involved. Of course. But you also don't have to go full veggie either.

correct. it’s a cultural and parenting issue. People simply aren’t taught the importance of eating healthy, it’s not a habit in the household, etc. Or their understanding of healthy is wrong. And then of course the issue of self control (so much temptation in commercials, ads, etc)

This is absolutely not true. I lived in the US (midwestern food desert) for half a year and absolutely made do with fresh tomatoes, ground beef from the counter, bell peppers, fresh garlic, onions etc. I didn't even have a car and had to walk over 30 minutes to the nearest store.

The people in my apartment were all pretty young and were surprisingly confused every time I was making something fresh from scratch. And I am by far not a good cook by any standard in Europe - I'm far from average probably.

I did the math (because I was broke) - on my "lazy" weeks where I didn't cook much fresh I spent much more money on average. I had access to 10 different fast food locations before I hit the first grocery store, this is the actual problem.

Well, currently cooking for 5 and if I shop in the produce department, getting fresh vegetables, etc, I'm paying a lot more than if I don't, or get some premade stuff with a higher shelf life.

Only if you're one person who wants to eat one meal (which to be fair happens a lot).

If you cook for two and/or reheat the leftovers the next day, I think you come out ahead.

I have been overweight my entire life, and I am a boomer from a lower middle class family in the midwest.

The country used to be thinner on average, it's true. I remember. I was the oddball in my crowd of friends.

So what happened? I know from experience that the following things have happened over the past 50 years that may have contributed to our current situation:

1. Portion sizes used to be 1/2 to 1/4 the size that they are now. For example, a typical trip to McDonald's was a small hamburger (no cheese) and a very small bag of fries. Coke machines dispensed tiny 6-8 oz. bottles. A school lunch was a pbj sandwich, a cup of milk and an apple. People just didn't eat as much. It was the norm.

2. Smoking was HUGE. It was everywhere, and all of the time: workplaces, public transit, school lounges, shopping, etc. It was an appetite suppressant and a replacement for snacking.

3. Many more jobs required physical activity all day long. Even desk jobs required more activity: connectivity was minimal and you needed to stand up and walk around to different offices for communication, delivering documents, discussions, etc.

4. Foods were not as processed or flavor enhanced as they are now. Meals were cooked and eaten at home for the most part, and the ingredients were whole foods. And you knew what was in your meal--it wasn't a stick of butter because who could afford that?Also, it was rare for my family or any of my friends' families to go to a restaurant. That was saved for weekends or special days.

Our culture has shifted way too far in the direction of overconsumption in food and just about everything else. We could all survive and most likely thrive on a lot less of everything.

I think that mass availability of weight loss drugs like Ozempic could be the single biggest transformation of public health in the first world in the last 50 years, on par with the contraceptive pill. I don't think it's possible to tackle this problem from the supply side, previous attempts have failed miserably. Normally I'm not one to have such a cavalier attitude towards this type of intervention, but this is a crisis that warrants an immediate solution. The healthcare savings from this alone could easily be in the billions.

I'm 21 with a BMI of 28, 6'4". I'm pretty sure I have some sort of eating disorder. It is so f*cking hard not to overreat. Ozempic would really help me out here, because willpower alone is not enough for me to fight a billion dollar industry trying its damndest to make me addicted.

Relying on willpower is usually a failing strategy. Discipline and building healthy habits towards a sustainable lifestyle is usually more successful.

https://davidgoggins.com/book/

Drugs like Ozempic can help to accelerate weight loss, but most patients will regain the weight once they stop taking the drug unless they also make lifestyle changes. Do you want to spend the rest of your life on a drug with some significant side effects? It also tends to cause the loss of lean muscle tissue along with fat, which may not be what you want.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama45/

I would definitely prefer not to be on any drug permanently, but many don't have any negative side effects from glp1 inhibitors. or at least they are very minor. As for loss of muscle mass, I think that is just as reactionary as the whole "ozempic face" thing. which is to say, of course your face looks different if you lose a lot of weight. and of course when you lose weight, you will always lose muscle mass as well. that's just part of losing weight. a good diet can help offset some, but you are going to need some amazing genetics or drugs to maintain muscle while only losing fat.

Loss of lean muscle can be minimized while while maintaining a caloric deficit by keeping protein consumption high and doing frequent hard resistance training. This works for everyone, no amazing genetics required.

https://peterattiamd.com/laynenorton2/

You might want to try that for a few months before turning to a GLP-1 inhibitor.

Minimized yes, but stopped, no.

1. The availability of semaglutide isn't as wide as it could be because it's many thousands of dollars and not universally covered by all health insurance prescription formularies. The poor in the US generally have zero access to it. In addition, there are shortages as mfgrs cannot keep up with demand.

2. Ozempic is for diabetes. Wegovy is for weight loss. Same ingredient, but different doses and different purposes.

There will be an oral form available relatively soon.

I relate to this so much I had a bizarre Split moment and wondered if I had a second personality posting on here without my knowledge.

This has happened to me several times on the internet and it’s a bizarre feeling. It’s weird to think about other people out there in the world living almost the same life trajectory as you

If you saw this pattern in an animal population, you might just wonder if there was an environmental factor at play.

10% Human book Alanna Collen is worth a read (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/10-human-alanna-colle...). The theory is that our gut microbiome has a lot do with obesity than we realize. It explores various factors from excessive use of antibiotics to lack of fibre in the diet and a lot more.

Thank you for the book recommendation! I am interested in learning more about this topic. The gut microbiome is the newest frontier of discoveries, speaking of Wegovy/Ozempic….

Not sure if the book cover this, but Dr. Gregor (Nutrition Facts, How Not To Die) has written that pesticides are also > disrupting the gut microbiome > leading to obesity.

However, Dr.s are not allowed to recommend organic diets.

Don't worry, we now have a drug for that.

It’s the ultra processed food. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248...

And it's probably going to keep getting worse as more synthetic chemicals enter the water cycle and accumulate in plants and animals.

The paper uses BMI to measure overweight/obese, which is an approximate metric as it does not distinguish fat from muscles.

Based on my BMI, I am overweight. Based on my body fat percentage (measured by DEXA scan), I am athletic.

Conclusions from BMI are not exactly "Garbage in - garbage out," but I suspect that if the body fat percentage were used by scientists, conclusions would be more accurate and insightful.

BMI is very accurate for population level studies like this. People like you are outliers who don't significant affect the results. Just look around at people on the street. How many muscular athletes do you see?

For individuals then sure, ignore BMI and get an annual DXA scan.

Ozempic is going to require a pandemic vaccine like rollout.

Carnivore is the way. Here is what I do: Beef, Bacon, Butter, Eggs (BBBE), salt and water. That’s all I eat! And I feel better than ever! I’m not a doctor and this not medical advice. Do your own research and consult with your doctor. There are many videos about this topic at the normal sources.

For the last year I've been eating 4500 calories a day and not exercising. I'm down 30 lbs. Carnivore is indeed the way.

Is there any particular reason you don't choose to eat vegetables and fruit? How about vitamins? Lots of cholesterol in purely meat?

Humans did not evolve eating vegetables or fruit. Prior to the rise of agriculture a mere 8 - 12 thousand years ago there was very little vegetation in the human diet. Prior to 80 thousand years ago there was virtually none. Humans and their progenitors for at least four million years have existed as hypercarnivores. And that means your genes have been adapted for the vast majority of history to survival on a meat-based diet. Every vitamin, mineral, and nutrient your body needs is found in meat. But the reason I choose not to eat plants is because I'm much much healthier since I tried this way of eating. I have no more acne, no more tiredness during the daytime (despite my continuing insomnia), sharper mental clarity, I no longer get DOMS after working out and can push myself much farther than I could previously, my persistent autoimmune disease (lichen planus) has completely vanished, and most of my gray hairs went away. For the first time in my life I can wake up in the morning and function immediately with no memory or energy problems. (I didn't know that people could wake up and be fully alert immediately upon waking.) And I lost 30 pounds. But probably the best part is that I can eat as much as I want until I'm stuffed and not worry about gaining weight. After nearly 20 years of counting calories I'm so relieved to not worry about it anymore and never need to feel hunger.

> Every vitamin, mineral, and nutrient your body needs is found in meat.

No fiber? And minimal vitamin C?

Cholesterol isn't a nutrient of concern. Very little of the cholesterol you eat is actually absorbed: the molecules are too big. Almost all of the cholesterol in your body is endogenously produced.

Carnivore diets seem to work quite well for some people and are a disaster for others. We don't really know why. Maybe something to do with genetics or gut microbiome. It's worth a try for people who have struggled with losing fat other ways.

I'm almost certain this is not possible.

Your body has a limited capacity to digest both protein and fats, which are passed in the excrement if you exceed that capacity. Carbohydrates, on the other hand, are digested primarily in the stomach from which they are transferred directly to the blood stream, elevating your blood sugar. Your pancreas creates insulin in response to elevated blood sugar which is a hormone that instructs your cells to switch to sugar metabolism. This shuts down fat utilization in the body as your fat cells stop participating in the gluconeogenesis cycle and begin converting sugar into fat. Only after your blood sugar returns to a normal level can your body switch back to fat metabolism and begin the gluconeogenesis process again and start eliminating body fat. A diet that is nearly entirely devoid of carbohydrates, as nearly everyone's diets were prior to the rise of agriculture on the order of 8 to 12 thousand years ago (which isn't that long ago from an evolutionary perspective) forces your body to run primarily on fat metabolism and combined with the aforementioned capacity limits on protein and fat digestion limits your maximum weight. Previously in human evolution carbohydrates were limited by availability and seasonality. (Good luck finding fruit in the winter.) But the rise of agriculture, industrial agriculture, global trade, and factory-produced processed foods has lead to a scenario where the vast majority of humans find it more convenient to eat their food from a boxed product - consisting primarily of carbohydrates, which again halt fat metabolism and tell your body to begin storing fat instead - and are consequently gaining weight on a pandemic scale. I'm happy to provide references and more information if you like.

Your argument is self defeating: if the body is inefficient at digesting these things, you probably shouldn't eat them.

Eating fat certainly makes you gain weight. This is a fact.

> as nearly everyone's diets were prior to the rise of agriculture on the order of 8 to 12 thousand years ago

lol. This is not true. Cereals and starches were scarce, but meat was not a large part of the diet: at most it was 40%. Certainly not 100%.

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