To me, that suggests that maybe that simplistic (and frequently repeated) mental model is inaccurate or insufficient in some way.
My working theory is that most Americans’ gut microbiome is massively screwed up due to some combination of genetic, dietary, and environmental factors, and it changes what they crave, and how their body reacts to the food they eat. But I’m very much a layman on this topic.
People putting it down to eating less are parroting the food equivalent of abstinence-based sex education, and we’ve been drumming on that for like the last 30 years. We have to find what’s making people want to eat to excess, not just tell people to eat less and exercise more. That obviously doesn’t work.
If you think that there's something else going on, then let's see some hard data.
Personally, my "satiated" level is very low. When trying to gain weight while weightlifting, it was difficult to eat the amount of calories needed. I know others who can easily eat twice as much as me in a sitting and not feel full. Something different in happening in our bodies to signal "stop".
Eating less and exercising more does work. Talk to dedicated lifters about their cutting/bulking, where they want to be, and talk to them about it again in six months if you want to see how effective it is. It doesn't work for a lot of people because in the short, medium, and arguably even long term, it doesn't make you feel good.
There are a handful of people that can struggle to gain or lose weight on a diet appropriate for the amount of exercise they do. You may be one of them. If you are one of those people, asking why other people struggle with it is like being a 6'6" basketball player and wondering why somebody who is 5'9" struggles to dunk like you can.
There is a massive difference between being at a calorie deficit and starving yourself. I don't even know what to say -- this horse has been beaten to death by countless thousands of people and it's wild that anecdotal evidence with a sample size of you is enough to justify theorizing an alternative to an incredibly simple idea that until a few generations ago, there was absolutely no evolutionary pressure to not want to eat everything you can.
I suppose you'd say that some areas experienced more evolutionary pressure to eat as much as possible than others due to differences in food security?
But being hungry/unsatiated is distracting and can decrease your performance on every other task you do, so I don't really agree that there's no counterpressure. And I doubt that people in even those less food secure regions are just hungry all the time, like some obese people here describe being. It really seems like something just gets messed up in the signalling, which makes it seem more like a health problem/malfunction than some built-in evolutionary drive that doesn't fit the modern world.
At the very base this is mostly true but it's like saying the reason people die is because they stop living. Framing it as people behaving "in this self-destructive way" also isn't helpful because being obese isn't a moral failing.
The true answer is more complex. At least in the US, consumers have been fighting deceptive marketing/branding for things that have been claimed to be healthy choices but are full of sugar and unrealistic serving sizes. Combine that with unhealthy foods generally being cheaper and/or easier to cook and now more accessible/easier healthy eating also has class issues. Exercise does too as most of the places where obesity is most concentrated in the US (the Southeast) doesn't have walkable cities or sidewalks at all.
This has been a common comment left on HN of "it's just move more, eat less" and yeah, at a fundamental level, sure, but really doesn't take into account how difficult it can be for a person that's in that situation.
> Snack companies take advantage.
I'm uncomfortable with these new drugs but they seem to be a net positive so this is a good thing. But we should also look into legislating junk food companies that hijack people's appetite for a quick buck.
Chile banned sugary food TV advertising to children and saw a roughly 10% drop in purchases high in sugar. An unleashed free market in food has been shown to be harmful and the drugs alone are insufficient. Regulation is necessary.
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/chiles-comprehensive-food-po...
Incorrect.
You patch that by altering the environment OR the body OR or the impulses.
To fix that you need to alter all 3
We have tons of evidence to the contrary in multiple disciplines. Like, have you never made a conscious dietary change?
In any case, yes I have, but the only time it has worked was when I changed my environment (stopped slouching at home bored with a full pantry) and my impulses (filled my days with activities so that boredom hunger wouldn't strike). Only changing one would make me last a couple of weeks max
Different people struggle with different impulses. I don’t have much trouble permanently modifying my diet. I struggle, on the other hand, with keeping a normal sleep schedule.
Which isn't to say that the overall idea of trying to find other ways to make obesity less common is bad, it just isn't a coherent argument for that.
It's "masking" the issue as much as chemotherapy is "masking" the issue. People are dying. We have tried appeals to salads and quick walks.
Unless you got anything up your sleeve, I recommend we stick to the ol' "keep more people alive with the best stuff we currently got" plan, until information pops up, that makes this look like the morally worse option.
But in that regard preventing death is fairly hard to beat as a baseline.
This bit made me laugh, as if public health initiatives have been taken remotely seriously by the past few decades. It seems quite a jump to go from "maybe try a a salad?" to putting millions of people on medication.
Did that happen with tobacco? Alcohol?
It's a hyperbole, meaning to say: The problem is so frustratingly silly and solution is so obvious and simple — just eat a little less, move a little more — that I understand how hard it is to accept that it might just be the completely wrong approach.
What makes it fairly obvious to me is that despite clear and long standing conflicting beauty ideals, the massive societal advantages beauty affords, and an industry build around weight loss (not even drugs, stuff like Weight Watchers), people still struggle.
If you have good insight into why informing about tobacco worked to the degree it did (although lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer death) other than claiming vague un-seriousness, I am all ears. Otherwise I have a hard time understanding this as an information problem.
My point here was that we seemed to approach tobacco/alcohol a bit more methodically - taxes (i.e., increasing costs for cigarettes), regulations (i.e., where alcohol can be sold), education (i.e., scary cigarette packaging) - whereas we seem to be saying, "Well, we did very little and got no results, so let's go nuclear!" when it comes to obesity
It seems to me that, if obesity is so harmful to society, places like McDonalds and other (provably) unhealthy food shouldn't be as cheap or as easy to get as it is.
> The problem is so frustratingly silly and solution is so obvious and simple — just eat a little less, move a little more — that I understand how hard it is to accept that it might just be the completely wrong approach.
It certainly is frustrating, and I feel that more than I probably should. Probably something to reflect on.
For example, many people around me gained weight after they became parents. Especially women after birth. It is just insanely difficult to work hard in an office job, take care of young kids and exercise etc all at the same time. As you age things get very difficult as well. I eat significantly less than what I used to just few years ago but still have 5-10lbs extra.