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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

A trajectory question: have we have definitive answer to why the US now has so many obese people when before 70s not so many (or I just got the wrong impression from poor sampling of videos)? It's not like the US didn't have enough supply of food or people didn't have access to cars. The US was wealthy then and still wealthy now.

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Obesity has definitely increased and I’ve seen many hypotheses floated. The most convincing one to me so far has been simple sugar and the fact that sugar is now added to practically everything.

Other hypotheses I’ve seen include more sedentary jobs, endocrine disruptors, and cigarette smoking going away. Nicotine is a stimulant and an appetite suppressant.

I guess a combination of less nicotine and more sugar isn’t a bad one.

Of course it’s not that people were categorically more healthy back then. Heart disease was pretty rampant.

It's not sugar perse. It's the fact that you have companies cooking for you vs your grandma. Yes, your grandma's cookies had sugar, but it didn't have the other 10 ingredients that are basically pre-digested, making that cookie from the store to be EXTREMELY palatable.

There’s nothing different in terms of store bought “homemade style” cookies and a homemade cookie in terms of badness for you, unless perhaps your grandma didn’t make very good cookies.

I can easily make cookies at home that are more palatable/cravable than anything I can buy at a store. And they don’t have any of those “other” ingredients. And let me tell you, 3 of those homemade cookies could easily be 1000 calories.

I think it has more to do with the fact that everything has sugar in it now. French fries, bread, processed meat in some cases. Im not usually in favor of making laws to solve problems. But for sake of argument if you had to call anything that had sugar added to it a "desert" i think we'd all find out that, all we eat is desert.

Obesity is on the rise globally, not just in the US (though the US is leading the pack).

https://ourworldindata.org/obesity#obesity-varies-widely-wor...

I don't think we've figured out exactly what's causing it. The simplest explanation is an abundance of easy, cheap calories. Some think it's some unknown/unstudied environmental factor like PFAS. There are various other theories. It's another unsolved billion dollar question.

The most likely explanation is that back in the 70s, the dietary villain of the day was high-fat foods. So manufacturers switched to low-fat varieties and marketed them based on the lower fat content. But foods in which the fat was lowered tasted blander, so to compensate they added a potent flavorant -- sugar. Sugar was safe, right? It was a simple carbohydrate, not a fat, so it wouldn't make you fat... right?

Unfortunately I don't think there is any single villain here, but instead a cabal of them.

Fat to sugar was one of them, yet fat is very high calorie itself.

Another is that we've moved from jobs working on our feet to jobs sitting on our butts. Same with going outside and playing. Add to that in the US more people have moved to the southern part of the country with air conditioning and spend more time inside.

Mass removal of fiber from foods (hence the ultra processed part) make it far easier to over consume thousands of extra calories per day.

Another is the amount we go out to eat in the US. When I was young we might eat out a few times a month at most. Now the average is 4-5 times a week! Most places offer very large serving sizes so it's very easy to consume over half your daily calories in one meal.

I'd have to add in better marketing and placement of high calorie impulse foods in stores of all types.

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