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Comment by teslabox | Hacker News Reader

If science can’t figure out the causes of the so-called obesity epidemic, even the best aspirational interventions won’t help. Ancel Keys’ tirade against saturated fat turned out to be pseudo-science, but it didn’t make the population instantly larger.

Something happened in the late 1970’s, and the population’s weight on the scales started ticking up around 1978-1980 [0]. All the interventions since then haven’t helped. If we can figure out what that 1970’s mistake was, and what it was that used to protect us from the food industry’s pseudo-science, we can begin to correct course.

[0] my earlier comment about 1978-1980: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812171

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Sometimes I read threads like this and feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people go "Oh we don't know why this is happening, is it plastics? Is it sugar? Seed oils?"

It's incredibly easy to eat a lot of calories and not be active. That's it. Portions are big, foods are calorically dense, and people work desk jobs instead of labor jobs. Kids can play video games or watch TV instead of playing outside.

As an analogy, to me it feels like looking at someone bleeding out from a gunshot and worrying if the lead in the bullet might be causing the person health issues.

None of this changed suddenly in the 70's though. Homeostasis worked just fine until then.

Yes, it did. Portion sizes are larger. Video games didn't exist in the form they do now. TV only happened at specific times, you couldn't binge episode after episode, or watch twitch/youtube for hours, or mess around on the internet. Manual labor work is less common. These are all changes that happened after the 70s.

It probably started a bit earlier than that, we may need to concerned ourselves with a process that took a decade or more to get going.

There has been far too much focus on CICO and exercise and all sorts of other stuff even though a lot of the rare stats for intake and exercise should suggest the population is just as healthy. Something went badly wrong and we need to identify it, its a epidemic that has been burning away for decades slowly but surely spreading.

I don't think we can narrow the dates down quite as much as you suggest, as there may have been a delayed reaction to whatever changed. I can think of several possibilities: increased use of plastics in essentially everything, increased use of seed oils because saturated fat was demonized, and increased carbohydrate consumption because all fats were demonized. Increased consumption of ultraprocessed foods might be a factor too.

Also, in 1953 only half of America's households had TV sets...

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