The average American woman now weighs 166 pounds – as much as a 1960s man | Hacker News Reader

The average American woman now weighs 166 pounds – as much as a 1960s man

vox.com

66 pointsprostoalex130 comments

> The average American’s total caloric intake grew from 2,109 calories in 1970 to 2,568 calories in 2010. As Pew Research put it, that’s "the equivalent of an extra steak sandwich every day."

A better comparison might be a snickers and a coke:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=snickers+and+coke

Yeah, what kind of steak sandwich would only have 459 calories? I wouldn't expect any reasonably sized and palatable steak sandwich to pack less than 800!

Thank you for demonstrating part of the problem, the inflation in expected portion sizes.

As well as the expectation that calories make something "palatable".

The difference between a lean steak and a nicely marbled steak in both taste and calories are significant. Not that lean meat is not palatable, but it might require some sauce due to dryness at most places (if you make it yourself, you can probably do better than most fast food restaurants) - and that extra sauce might bridge that calorie gap. Most places always overcook their meat, sadly, and lean meat isn't very palatable when overcooked; or it at least has less resistance to dryness than the fattier cuts.

But that's not so unusual. We know that people like a combination of salty fatty sweet stuff, and that food manufacturers engineer products to have the right proportion of sugar, salt, and fat, while being very eatable. That's how we go from roast chicken with gravy to deep fried chicken to deep fried popcorn chicken bites in batter with sugar sauces.

I mean more calories simply as in two pieces of deep fried chicken being more palatable than one.

That's... not what "palatable" means.

Think more like, deep fried chicken dipped in some delicious sauce, versus eaten without any sauce. The kind with sauce is more palatable because it has more fat and/or sugar, not because it is just more of the same thing.

Actually, the human body is wired to experience pleasure when eating fats and sugars. This represents a useful adaptation in a species exposed to a potentially nutrient-poor environment, where identifying and consuming high calorie food sources is critical to survival.

So, yes, in fact more calories specifically makes food more palatable.

I didn't mean caloric density.

If you just stuck 4 ounces of sirloin steak (276 calories) between two slices of white bread (158 calories) and put literally nothing else on it, you would have a "steak sandwich" with 434 calories. Does that sound like a good meal to you?

The idea of steak sandwhich is just crazy. In the Netherlands something like that probably not even exists. Or it is exceptionally rare. Come on, if you want a steak. Sit down at at home or at a proper restaurant and have it on a plate. And not on the go. Pay attention to what you eat and actually taste it. If somebody would actually taste the flavor of a snickers he would probably not finish it. Same for a steak on a sandwhich. Steak is not the problem. Having it on the go/in front of the tv/computer is.

(Nothing wrong with a bar of good chocolate though. Might be a bit more expensive though)

> In the Netherlands something like that probably not even exists. Come on, if you want a steak. Sit down at at home or at a proper restaurant and have it on a plate

The idea of a stroopwafel is crazy. Come on, if you want a waffle with syrup just sit down at a table and eat a real one ;)

But stroopwafels are good;) and not like 1000 calories :)

In the Netherlands something like that probably not even exists. Or it is exceptionally rare.

http://www.subway.nl/nl/locaties

Doesn't seem that rare to me.

Thats an american style thingie! Nice find though. But if you have lunch at restaurants like this you deserve to get fat. It would have been nice if it was open at night, so you can have a fat unhealthy meal after some proper unhealthy drinking session. Instead of a "frikandel". Which is another crazy dutch invention.

In the USA a 'steak sandwich' isn't really like a ribeye steak on two slices of bread.

It's typically either thinly sliced steak or ground beef patty of sorts, with cheese and sauce (and possibly things like onions or peppers) depending on what region of the country you are in.

Or, alternatively, it's a steak served on a slice of garlic toast or baguette, that you eat with a knife and fork.

A sandwich? I suppose technically an open faced one, but... stretching the definition, certainly.

I really wouldn't blame steak sandwiches (or similar food) for America's weight problem. The biggest cause of the problem is empty calories in the form of sugary soft drinks. Americans are fat because we drink too much soda and don't exercise enough.

Several restaurants that are not Subways in Amsterdam with steak sandwiches:

http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=%22steak+sandwich%22&fi...

By convention, a "steak" is a uniform piece of beef from a single primal muscle, cut in such a way as to make it cookable quickly by direct heat. That's what "steak" means: beef, one coherent piece of it, cooked by direct heat. "Steak" does not necessarily refer to a 1.5lb porterhouse on the bone.

So in that sense, "steak" is no different than any other protein you'd put in a sandwich. We don't call chicken breast cutlets "chicken steaks", but we could (indeed, that's how we sometimes refer to large slabs of tuna).

Objecting to "steak sandwiches" is therefore a little odd. If anything, a steak sandwich is bound to be healthier than a burger; a restaurant burger is typically 20% fat, while even a ribeye --- which is rarely what's in a steak sandwich --- can be below that number.

A steak sandwich also shouldn't be anything close to 1000 calories. There are ~300 calories in a typical grilled cheese sandwich. Take that as the basis for "ambient sandwich calories" and add 4oz of skirt steak; you're now at 500 calories, for which is essentially a fried sandwich.

Of course, you're probably much better off eating 4oz of skirt steak (protein, fat calories) than a stroopwafel (refined sugar, carbs).

You can get a Philly by the inch, any calorie count you want. Subway's Steak & Cheese 6" is 380 calories (241g). [1]

[1] http://www.subway.com/nutrition/nutritionlist.aspx

*Sandwich nutrition values include 9-Grain Wheat bread, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, green peppers and cucumbers. Values do not include cheese unless noted.

So that's for a Steak & Cheese, hold the cheese.

This is such a great example. I used to have like 1 or 2 snickers a day, then noticed that it was basically 100% of my daily recommended saturated fat intake in a single bar.

Snickers bars are one of the worst things you can put in your body.

It'd be really helpful for someone like me to see the bellcurve.

Shifting that average up means people on the high end are eating significantly more calories than the old high end.

The original WaPo article[1] is better IMO. It actually mentions that people on average are an inch taller than in 1960 before starting to pound the obesity drum.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/12/l...

To be fair, this article also mentions the increase in height.

Thank you. I read right over it.

I still think the original article (though shorter) is better.

But it also goes on to say that the main reason is we're eating less healthy food, more of it, and are less active, and that that inch only partially accounts for the increased weight.

Up or out, what does it matter? It seems like overconsumption either way.

Isn't increased height generally taken as a sign of better nutrition?

Yes. See the differences in the heights of the populations of the two Koreas over the past 50 or 60 years. Malnutrition in the north has resulted in a shorter population, while an abundance of food in the south has led to a taller population.

And? All that shows is that they ate less and were shorter as a result. Is that the conclusion?

Malnutrition is not the same as eating less. A healthy diet includes a variety of proteins, sugars, vitamins, minerals and other things. The North Korean diet has, for several generations now, been lacking in essential nutrients. The consequence is that their population has been shrinking (malnutrition during growing years means you don't grow).

You can over consume food and still be malnourished. See a friend of mine in college that subsisted off a diet largely consisting of pastas and cheese, sometimes fruit. He was incredibly unhealthy, though he obtained more than enough calories to maintain his weight (he was somewhat overweight at the time, but not extremely so). Once he improved his diet he had enough energy to actually start exercising again and resolved several ongoing medical issues he had at the time due to missing key nutrients in his diet.

I understand the malnutrition crisis in North Korea. Of course that situation is appalling. I'm just saying that malnutrition and height are not polar opposites on some spectrum of good health.

Yes, diets low in proteins and certain vitamins/minerals (calcium, vitamins A and D) are associated with poorer physical development. This is why milk is fortified with A and D and we've bred rice (golden rice) that's high in these nutrients. That said nutrition probably only means the difference between 6' and 6'0.5", assuming you're not malnourished.

Golden rice is genetically engineered. The pathway to synthesize vitamin A has been inserted.

I'm aware, genetically engineering plants is a type of breeding...

There's a huge grey area between "diets low in..." and "overconsumption".

And...? All things equal, greater caloric intake is associated with taller people.

That was my point in the first place.

Up is probably more a result of better childhood nutrition and better knowledge of and avoidance of childhood (and maternal, prenatal) consumption that has adverse effects on development. People don't get tall from overeating.

An inch in length doesn't weigh 26 pounds

Sure, what you described actually weights exactly 0 pounds.

But in general the volume of a sphere grows with the cube in regards to the radius, thus gaining an inch of height could add a lot of mass. How much depends on the object shape.

And no healthy person will gain 26 pounds when growing an inch. Get real man.

I'm already real. Start reading replies.

From my less than scientific observations (past heavy experience with bodybuilding/weightlifting), at similar levels of leanness 15%, 1 inch = 5 lbs. A well known calculator kind of confirms that[0]. I could see less lean individuals being 10 lbs or greater at one inch but 26 sure does seem high.

[0] - http://www.weightrainer.net/bodypred.html

For instance, if you put in the values 69 inches tall, 7 inch wrists, 9 inch ankles and 15% BF (not super lean but not overweight), you get a maximum lean bodyweight (natural) of 210lbs (years and years of bodybuilding), but at 70 inches, with the same measurements, it shows 215lbs being the maximum lean weight.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm certain that it's more of a percentage than a number and that it happens to be 5 lbs at around my height - a 4'll" woman might only differ 2-3 lbs at a similar build from a 5'0" woman.

About an inch, but actually less than an inch and even less so for women. So women are ~1% taller and 18.5% heavier. I don't think height is a factor.

You're assuming increased height only leads to a stretch in the z axis. If you linearly scaled someone up from 5'3 to 5'4 in every direction, the increase in volume would be 5%. So maybe not the main factor, but definitely a factor.

While you have a point, weight doesn't go like height cubed (you don't grow equally in all directions). I read an article a while ago (can't find it now) that looked at the exponent for various species. I think it was typically about 2.5 rather than 3. I suppose you could look at a BMI chart and back out the exponent that is assumed.

The actual formula for determining BMI only squares the height component.[0] Healthy humans should not even approach being cube shaped!

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index

This calculation is not exactly scientific, but : if U.S. women were an inch shorter then, that would make them 63 inches tall, instead of 64 inches (5'4). This equates to a 1.6% increase in height. If we assume that they have grown proportionally in all directions, we cube it, to get roughly a 5% increase in volume (which I will assume leads to a 5% increase in weight).

The increase in weight of women was a lot more than this, roughly 18%, so it seems to me this is not the important factor.

To save you a round-trip to Google, that's 75.3KG

And also known as 11.85 stone.

And 5.16 slugs

Is this a common unit of measurement for people's weight?

Stone is standard in the UK for expressing people's weight, which is why I mentioned it. I've never met anybody that weighs themselves in pounds. (I bet I'm not the only person who isn't even sure how many pounds there are in a stone.) Certainly few people seem to have a good instinctive sense for whether a given amount in pounds is about average, a bit light, or a bit heavy. Which is why I thought UK readers might like to know how many stone there are in 166 pounds, but evidently not ;)

I have a couple of friends who've gone metric and weigh themselves in kg. That's as avant garde as it gets.

I'm from the UK and have started weighing myself in kilograms.

Makes more sense now that I'm used to it.

Wow, I would never have guessed British didn't use pounds as a unit when weighting themselves. I thought you were just making fun of how there are always so many units in English for the same measurements, so I went an mentioned yet another mass/weight one. I honestly only remember ever using slugs in some classes in undergrad. I doubt anyone actually ever weights themselves in slugs. Actually, slug is a unit of mass, as opposed to pounds which measure a force. So a slug is the equivalent of a kg and a pound is the equivalent of a Newton. But there is also the 'pound mass' (lbs_m) and the 'kilogram force' (kg_f) to confuse us even more.

I always thought it was interesting that the SI system is based around mass, time, and length whereas the English system is based around force, time, and length. Which means that in SI, the Newton is derived from the kg whereas in the English system the slug is derived from the pound. Of course, wikipedia states that the 'stone' unit you were mentioning is both a unit of mass and weight -.-

Please correct me if I'm wrong though, that's what I remember from my B.S. in the States (I was born and raised with SI units). Also, is the unit of mass 'slug' ever used in conversations in English speaking countries ? I've never encountered it outside of science problems in my 4 years of undergrad (nor did I after, but I don't live in an English speaking country anymore)

Thank you! It's hard to live in the civilized part of the world sometimes. ;)

And it's 88.7kg for men.

For comparison, average men's height is 177cm, and average women's height is about 164cm.

Americans sure are heavy. On average.

11 stone 12 lb in English (GB)

The advent of limitless food in the first world has created the need for a skill to focus on healthy food and ignore the junk. Those that can't slowly poison their bodies.

Now in addition to that for the first time in history we are presented with unlimited information. It will be interesting to see the negative effects that come about for those unable to focus on the right things and ignore the junk.

Sure would be nice if that unlimited information was universally accessible and accompanied by unlimited opportunities to actually implement anything learned from said info... because it sounds to me like your comment is basically saying "It's their own fault, let's watch them fail" without offering up anyway to help correct the issue.

No, I think his point is before we had lots of food, but a lot of it was bad and because not everyone can tell the difference, we've paid a great price.

Now we have lots of information, and a lot of it is bad, and a lot of people can't tell the difference. What price will we pay for that?

Interesting analogy. But I was hoping that medicine and education would work against that trend.

The problem with unlimited information - it's getting harder and harder to tell what's good and what's bad for you:

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken

Take a look at the chart that's titled "Everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer". A picture that's worth a thousand words.

We need better science. But I don't know how that's going to happen.

We need corporations to stop funding shady research, or at least be more upfront when they do. You might be skeptical if the Association of Nebraska Corn Growers publishes a study saying HFCS is healthier than cane sugar, but you wouldn't bat an eye if they paid an organization named America First to publish it for them. And then paid the WSJ to put it on the front page. And then paid the FDA to put it into the food pyramid.

PG's "submarine" isn't a fiction piece (http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).

Very nice reading on PR. Thanks for sharing.

There wasn't exactly a food shortage in the 1980s either (and to take an extreme example, Japan has a food supply that's equally abundant and much lower rates of obesity). I think we need to look at more things to explain the current circumstances. For instance, how many households were traditional two-parent, single-earner homes in the past versus now? I would expect such households to eat fewer prepared foods. What about the kinds of foods supermarkets are selling? Ads? You get the picture. The abundance of food alone isn't enough to explain things.

Let's travel back in time to the late 70's, early 80's.

McDonald's was incredibly popular I would guess than the Big Mac and french fries are around the same serving size and calorie count as they are now. But the soft drinks were smaller. So you had less calories.

People eat out at casual dining chains far, far more often than they do now. There are so many more Applebees/Chili's/ what have you now. Serving sizes are huge there. Appetizers alone are 1,000 calories. 1,500 calorie riblet platters, 1,400 calorie fajitas. 1,200 calorie salads.

Fast casual. A burrito from Chipotle with chicken, beans, rice and sour cream is over 1,000 calories. Double that of a 500+ calorie Big Mac.

Starbucks craze. People don't blink at the thought of drinking a 500 calorie treat from Starbucks every day.

We just eat too dang much.

The serving sizes for the french fries are larger than they used to be. People (to conserve their mental energy, I assume) order by number, and that automatically includes a large order of fries.

If I remember correctly, in the 70's & 80's McDonald's had only two sized of french fries, small and large.

But you know what? Screw all this quibbling about specifics. Our portions are larger, we eat more, we exercise less. Our lifestyles and communities are pretty toxic from the standpoint of metabolism. Lots of places you have to get in a car to do the simplest things. This is a ridiculous way to live.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find that people eat more because they feel more economically desperate than before and because in real terms they are making less. My pet theory is that over-eating is a kind of hatred turned inward. It's like blaming yourself when the game is rigged to begin with.

Blah, I covered a lot of ground there. Sorry for the sloppy thinking, but I think some things can be salvaged from there.

The oral contraceptive pill is approved by the FDA in 1957. Griswold v. Connecticut, which declares state laws against it unconstitutional is decided in 1965. Since we are already having a conversation about women's bodies, the fact that (according to http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_contr_use.html, whose veracity I know nothing about) 16% of women aged 15-44 use daily hormone pills is probably relevant to a discussion of their bodies' tendency to retain adipose tissue.

To be clear against uncharitable interpretation: I think the ability to decide when/if you get pregnant and have kids is fantastic.

And how does this explain the 17.5% increase in men? Or are you saying that the pill accounts for the 1% difference?

"...I think the ability to decide when/if you get pregnant and have kids is fantastic..."

Typical scenario: she lies to him she is (still) on the pill, gets pregnant - he has no say on abortion, gives a birth - he has to pay or he goes to jail.

Both parties should have a say on whether a child gets born.

"typical"? I don't think so. If "he" is worried about this, "he" has options of his own - surgery is reversible, and physical methods are widely available at every drug store.

Do you think that hormonal birth control makes it impossible to maintain a healthy bodyweight? The article very clearly points to an increase in daily caloric intake.

Those two claims aren't incompatible. If birth control pills increased appetite, people would gain weight on them VIA an increase in daily caloric intake.

(A third option is that being fatter makes people hungrier, so fatter people eat more...but starting down the path of getting fatter might have any random cause at all - that people are eating more doesn't give us much insight into why.)

It needs to be pointed out that one of the reasons Americans aren't more active is that the built environment has been designed to maximize driving to the active obstruction of any other way of getting around.

It's not just driving. The company I work for has an office in Marseille, France. At that office, there is a beautiful staircase that spirals around the middle of an open central area. In the middle of that area is a tiny, metal elevator. Virtually everyone takes the stairs, and the elevator is basically only there for the physically impaired.

At the US office, the ONLY access to higher floors (mind you, the building only has 4 floors total) from the lobby is through two large elevators. To even use the stairs you have to enter through a back alleyway, and the stairs themselves are the basic dungy "pretty much emergency use only" type stairs.

I see this pattern everywhere, where basic design and access flow in the US discourages even the slightest amount of physical exertion.

Average American woman - 166 lbs., up 18.5%

Average American man - 195.5 lbs., up 17.6%

The title seems bit linkbait-y. Why focus on women, when it's really all Americans?

166 is a nicer number?

200lb doesn't have a 1960's equivalent to compare it to in a headline?

Because for the "average person" the temporal equivalence across the genders makes an easier comparison than using percentages?

What happened around 2000 that the fats & oils calories jumped so fast?

I don't know, but I wouldn't take anything from "CPSI" (actually, CSPI: the Center for Science in the Public Interest) at face value.

They're the exemplar of the Nanny State Scold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Science_in_the_Publi...

So find flaws in the data. Attacking the messenger does nothing to further the discourse. It's mudslinging at best and only creates more confusion and uncertainty.

The "data" they link is this "Special Feature Report Card", presumably prepared for one of CSPI's newsletters or PR blasts:

http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/changing_american_diet_13.pdf

It has one "citation": "Source for all graphs: U.S. Department of Agriculture."

Well, OK then, but I don't think this chart is well-sourced enough to criticize except by blasting the lobbying group that pawns it off as resembling research.

(I hope nobody thought CSPI actually did science!)

Here's an idea. Go to the USDA website. Note they do food surveys and post all of their raw data tables online (gotta love the internet!):

http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=80-40-05...

Now check the data if you don't believe it.

Found the data [1] from [2]

There is indeed a 17% increase in grams of fat between 1998 and 2000. That's 25g per day - around 5 times the olive oil you'd put in a portion of salad. Amazing increase for an entire population, no?

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/179795/carbs_intake_d.html

[2] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-(per...

I'm looking at

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=18349 (2001-2012)

and

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=14392 (1935-1998)

I'm really suspicious that such a large jump happens to coincide with "new" vs. "old" surveys, and indeed the pre-2000 page says:

CHANGES IN METHODS AND OPERATIONS ACROSS SURVEYS… It is important to consider that survey methods and operations including questionnaire wording, data processing methods, and the survey nutrient database used to calculate the dietary intake were changed from survey to survey based on new data and methods available at the time. Comparing data across surveys must take into account these types of changes.

Does anyone think CSPI really spent the time digging into this anomaly that they would have if it had been purported "good news"? Did they spend any time digging in at all? Who knows... which is why, as I said, I don't take their chart very seriously.

That's actually a very good observation! There does seem to be a major discontinuity between those two study periods.

Very strange that it seems to only affect fats, and that the effect was so dramatic... They do mention "There has been some research that addressed the impact of changes in methods and/or databases between selected surveys"... it'd be worth digging that up to see what the effects were determined to be.

Edit: Found it?

http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/7349

Nothing in the abstract explains a major discontinuity in reported fat intake, though. They only report small but statistically significant effects on various other nutrients.

Edit 2: They also have a FAQ on this topic. From http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=13793:

"Is it possible to combine WWEIA data from different release cycles?"

It goes on to point out that sample weights, number of days, and the nutrient database do change over time, and so you have to take into account these effects.

The above study covers effects as a result of changes in the nutrient database.

I have trouble believing that sampling method or the data cycle length would result in such a major discontinuity in the data.

So, I had a thought, and checked, and indeed, Dietary Fiber is 24-25g from 1998 onwards. Could it be as simple as someone accidentally including Dietary Fiber in Fats & Oils?

I doubt it explains it all, but I remember the Atkins diet got a lot of popular attention around that time.

I thought about that, but both the second Atkins book (the first was in the 70s) and Cordain's Paleo book came out in 2002, whilst the trend really picks up starting 1997-8 or so.

The second book could have been in response to the popularity.

I have specific recall of someone I knew following Atkins prior to a high quality anchor event that occurred in April 2002 (I guess they were following it in 2000).

The Atkins Diet regained popularity around 1998.

My guess: the price of sugar spiked and the price of oil fell?

The popularity and promotion of the 'Mediterranean diet' around that time allowed manufacturers of processed foods to make the switch from sugars to fats?

Looks like the numbers match:

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=sugar&month...

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=rapeseed-oi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet

Interesting theory but the "caloric sweeteners", whilst dropping from that period, do not do so anywhere near as much or violently as fats rose, and continue dropping after fats stabilize (2002 onwards). In fact, corn-based sweeteners took over from the mid-1980s (mostly thanks to HFCS) [1].

Why would sugar and vegetable oil be substitutes in manufactured foods, other than for HFCS type sweeteners?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#/medi...

A pound of sugar has ~1,800 calories in it.

So at the peak price of ~$0.30, the calories per dollar is about 6,000.

The peak price of canola oil there is $1.70 per kilogram, at 9,000 calories per kilogram, the calories per dollar is about 5,300.

Both provide so many calories per dollar that I would not expect strong substitution between them.

Except the majority of sweetening is done with HFCS, not sugar.

Except the stat that shows a drop in sugar consumption includes corn-based sugars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Sweetener_consumption,...

Reporting changed. Per the CDSI

(In 2000, the number of companies reporting data to the USDA jumped, so the rise was probably less steep than it appears.)

Perhaps the Atkins diet craze?

Just look at photos of your parents or grandparents generations. While not scientific per say, it is hilariously obvious that people are increasingly overweight. And to see people in this thread trying to defend the increases in weight is pure gold.

It mostly seems to be the grains and fats that have gone up. Too much doughnut like food I guess.

TIL that I weigh as much as a 1960s man, too!

(Or a 2015 woman, depending on how I go about looking at it.)

So little is being held constant between "average American woman in 1966" and "average American woman in 2014" that I can't see the point of such a statistic except as clickbait.

Hmm ... has the average american woman grew new limbs, extra appendixes, wings, gills or something like that?

No, but she might be older or younger, live in a different part of the country, be more likely single or married, have different ancestry, have a different career, live in a household with a different fractional number of children, ...

Any of these things could have an impact at least as great as the raw passage of time. IMHO, much more interesting to look at comparable individuals. Parents and their children and grandchildren at the same ages, for example.

A woman is still a woman. Neither of the factors you mentioned causes weight gain. Let alone 20%

Yep, age will. If the average age of an American woman has changed from, say, 30 years to 50 years (aging population, changing demographics etc.) then this could contribute to weight differences because people tend to become more overweight as they age and get less active.

14.2 extra gills, actually.

This is a great article, I find it really curious that the only submission on Reddit is the hacker news repost.

Perhaps the filters on there are capturing too much?

If you follow the link from Vox to Washingtonpost, he links to reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/39dm6v/ame...

Instead of simply stating weight, how about tissue composition? Muscle vs bone vs fat?

Weight and height are easy to accurately measure - tissue composition not so much. And while tissue composition is important for individuals, at a societal level, BMI (ratio of weight to height) is good enough because it's easy to show that the vast, vast majority of the change is due to people getting fatter. It's not like half of American women became bodybuilders.

It's not like half of American women became bodybuilders.

No, but it has become socially acceptable for women to be visually muscular. In the 70s, a body conscious woman would not likely be lifting weights and drinking protein powders.

The number of "visually muscular" women contributing to the rise in the average US female body weight is essentially a rounding error.

Hope soon average American Journalist will use the metric system :)

They should make a law that you can't order a pint at the pub, it must be ordered in metric if you are a member of the EU.

Do you mean Imperial pint (568 ml) or American pint (473 ml)? :)

Often in metric Europe, a pint is exactly 500 ml. Same as the pound that has become exactly 500 g.

We order our beer in metric portions here, thank you very much (usually 500ml or 330ml).

Those billions of burgers have to go somewhere. Weird how the title mentions just the women, how have the men fared?

If you read the article it's right there.

Exactly, so why focus on the women in the title?

Men have gone from ~166 to ~196 since 1960.

Men gained 17.6%, women gained 18.5%, so pretty similar.

I guess this is a typical misuse of the average, where we have lots of American women some way below 166 pounds and an equal amount much higher.

Similarly, not every American is eating an extra sandwich, just some get two.

Why is this a "misuse" of the average? Is there really proof that there are a handful of outliers distorting the average? The article says 30% of Americans are obese; that alone seems like a large number, even if the other 70% were not heavier than they used to be (which I doubt).

I'm not saying there are outliers that are distorting the average, I'm saying that there are few people that are the average. Hence we can't make decisions based on the value of the average.

That objection doesn't make sense if everyone is moving in the same direction.

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