If you dig more into it, you'll find the obesity crisis started around the late 70s with a change in dietary guidelines and medical guidelines saying basically 'fat & meat bad' and 'carbs good' along with the widespread introduction of vegetable oils, leading to too much insulin and other hormonal effects slowly increasing diabetes & obesity in our population. Also food companies honing on what obesogenic combos of food lead to people to eat more, buy more and thus get better sales.
Read "The Obesity Code" if you want a more detailed description with a lot of links to papers and studies for more info. [0]
[0] I said this yesterday too in another article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767604
For another anecdote, my wife's friend worked at Starbucks in Canada and in Japan. She said the Frappuccinos in Canada use around double the amount of syrup than those in Japan.
> how much of a punch in the face of sweetness/richness literally everything available in US restaurants is
Yeah, too much sugar/salt/syrup/condiments, too many artificial ingredients on things. Today I was talking to my wife how the Cheetos here is not so good, as it has a weird orange color and the taste is way too much superficial. The cheese too. too many cheddar varieties with colors that doesn't seem like something made out of milk.
The sweetness is another major put off. There's no concept of a savory snack here. There's also no culture of an afternoon or tea time snacking. In my personal opinion, having a small post-lunch snack helps me stay satiated for longer and have a much smaller supper instead of a large dinner.
Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?
Spending has dropped because there are such large subsidies to cheap carbs, and that is the bulk of many people's diets. A steak and veggies is no cheaper than it was 40-50 years ago, but we're eating far more refined junk with additives because it is cheap and convenient.
I believe the leading hypothesis is that being rich absolves you of the stressors that make junk food attractive. Others are, as you mentioned, the ability to buy more expensive food with more nourishment/satiation per calorie ("protein leverage hypothesis"), or access to nature and refuge from pollution (it's certainly the rich people where I live who ride bicycles.).
Regardless, a poor person from 50 years ago couldn't buy the cheap sugary crap even if they wanted to.
That is, the point of the parent's post was not obviously "crap food is so much cheaper than high quality food", but as most naturally read as "because we can afford more food, we're buying and eating more"
My point was "if that logic holds, I would expect the rich to be significantly fatter than the poor". Which, as you note, is not the case. Nothing more.
Other restaurants have retired round plates and serve meals on platters.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY
[2]https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14...
You can also write an article for the Huffington Post arguing it's impossible to ever lose weight.
I'm not calling for fat shamming, but you can't be both obese and healthy. You can't really be obese ( over a certain point anyway) and be happy. When I was over 300 pounds every day was an experience in pain.
But it's considered rude even for doctors to say you need to lose weight. I was fortunate enough that an alternative medicine provider told me to just lose weight.
And that said, I'm even reluctant to make the argument above since there's a lot of really angry people who will try to misconcue it and call me a monster or something. But I've been morbidly obese, and I'm in shape now ( still trying to lose that last 10 pounds ) .
Life is better now in every single way.
I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true. I mean I'm sure there are some people that get offended, but some people will get offended at anything and being called "overweight" when you are convinced you are just "big boned" isn't pleasant.
It wasn't my doctor's advice that led to my weight loss though, it was my father dying prematurely. He wasn't even obese, he just had a poor diet and little exercise. A real wake up call.
Really? Is it a US thing?
I'm overweight but not obese, and basically every doctor I've seen for various issues (blood pressure, back pain, sprained ankle) told me to lose weight, in two european countries.
I don't think so. They may be referring to the fact that it is increasingly becoming an issue of political correctness. But science is pretty clear about the risks of obesity and the medical professions follow that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/business/ama-recognizes-o...
I have a friend who's (US) doctor told he needs to lose weight or he will die. It got him to join a gym at least.
Obesity is more or less considered to be normal now, it’s a real shift in the last few decades.
With my new doctor, I was looking at my last 2 yrs of blood tests and my LDL cholesterol has been at 105. Losing more weight will help with that, so will changing my diet - but my doctor didn’t point my LDL out as a problem even though it is.
So if that's the case, why does it matter what the Huffington Post says?
I'm not morbidly obese, so perhaps I've missed the pro-obesity PR. A fashion magazine might give a cover to an obese model once a year, but the other 11 months all seem to have the same rail thin models that have dominated since the '80s.
Same goes for TV and movies. Producers wouldn't hire a fat guy to play Mark David Chapman, it'd be an easier sell to get a fit actor and have him balloon up to that desired weight.
The only obese poeople of renown in our society are older politicians and the rich, i.e. people that do not care about meeting society's beauty standards.
People used to see those and aspire to be like them and improve themselves. Something changed over the last decade or more, and now no one wants to do any better than they currently are. They are despairing in content with themselves.
People still aspire to be attractive they just don't feel the same social pressure to chase it that they used to. Personally I don't see the problem for the USA, if people are happy being unhealthy then let them be unhealthy. If this was Europe I could see a public cost argument but US businesses are already starting to charge more to people who are inconveniently obese so I don't see why it's a real concern.
They're not happy. They're suffering and helpless. That's the problem.
It's not about beauty standards, it's about healthy standards. Remember when there was a push-back from models being too thin? Everyone agreed that it was bad to show ultra-thin models because it was unhealthy and generally unobtainable. The same should be for overweight people, except now we have the concept of body-shaming (which didn't apply to ultra-thin models??). There needs to be more of a focus on self resposibility along with a push-back against the bad practices of the food industry.
I don't have any references or numbers to back that up, but that's what I've understood from what I've read in papers and heard from some people who apparently did the math.
With that said, physical activity has lots of benefits beyond just weight loss, and it would be worth it to make one's lifestyle non-sedentary in any case.
For one, an hour you spend exercising or walking around is probably an hour that you're not eating. Many Americans are constantly eating when they're at home, either mindlessly snacking or eating a huge meal. Given that you only have 8 hours between work and sleep, occupying yourself for 1 of those hours could mean a significant decrease in time spent eating.
Incidentally, this is why intermittent fasting works well for some people.
Diet is clearly a much more important aspect for weight loss. Exercise has many other benefits though.
When I lost 70lbs, I did so by deciding it was easier just to not consume the calories in the first place rather than trying to burn them off.
On my bike I have a power meter which uses strain guages and an accelerometer to calculate force x distance / time at the crankset so I have accurate calorie burn numbers.
Riding for an hour at the output a generally sedentary person can manage, I’ll burn sub 500 calories. Riding at my maximum output for an hour burns about 1000. Given that the recommended energy intake for a day is 2500, you can see what a difference that makes proportionally to what you can consume.
The fact that companies sell you these “features” in products is a scandal in my opinion, because it’s nothing more than a totally inappropriate guess. They always overestimate based on my experience when compared against actual output measurements, and that can only be harmful to people that are trying to use them to lose weight.
(Not to totally give up exercise tho' - there are other health benefits besides losing weight)
The only caveat I've learned is that weightlifting can make a dent. It's one of the few things where as you improve, you can burn more calories in the same amount of time instead of fewer (partly because you're doing more work as you add weights, partly because the muscle you build is more metabolically expensive to maintain).
I also had success restructuring my life so accessing food was way more of a hassle. Kept a mostly empty fridge. Meal prepped so only whole meals were there. Don't take money unless I know I need to buy something, found a few reasonable options at local sandwich places that became routine, etc.
I'd love to see a correlational study on fridge size and obesity. In America we buy SUV fulls of food, in Europe it's much smaller frequent trips, i.e. generally higher hassle per calorie.
Or more! When I started losing weight, my target was 1600 kcals a day. I learned that I was eating 1600+ calories __every single meal__, plus snacks. Pasta is the devil y'all.
And yet Italians are generally slim and healthy :)
In take is the kcal of the food times the digestion factor. The kcal out is the metabolic need, which depend on factors such as fat building vs energy usage, which in turn is influenced by stress but also things like dieting.
This is why counting calories can be an ineffective strategy for some while for others it is a good match.
Let say 1000 kcal in, and for an average healthy person 1000 kcal in metabolic rate.
For digestion, this person eat mostly proteins resulting in about 20% of kcal going into energy for the digestion system itself (proteins is relative hard to break down). Let also say that in addition, sloppy digestion and incorrect gut bacteria is resulting in additional 20% of the food never getting digested and resulting in feces. Result is a loss of 400.
If thats the whole story you have a person that is loosing weight despite keeping a diet that seemingly fulfills their calories need.
Lets now change metabolic aspects. Rather than suffering from bad digestion they are suffering from chronic stress with high cortisol, adrenal and other stress hormones. The body crave more food that cost less to digest, ie fat and sugar, insulin is spiking in order to get the body to take up more energy, the body goes into lethargic state in order to save energy, muscle and organ cell production is decreased in favor of fat cells. Instead of 1000 kcal in metabolic rate we might have 600 kcal, with now a surplus of +400 going into fat production.
The upper bound on bioavailable kcals is still 1000 kcal, but the numbers won't tell you if the person is going to loose weight or gain it, unless the person is in good healthy to begin with.
Intuition would make me wager testosterone levels of you average powerlifter would be in the higher ranges (necessary to build muscle), despite not generally being lean.
Meh, Americans snack all the time. French people are anal about their meal structures and times and we’re not fat.
Or...to quit and become a lumberjack, etc.
I don't like to go to parties with an empty stomach, because of the poor choice of food there (chips, salsa, cake, cookies, etc.). If I go with an empty stomach, I know I would not resist, and I would feel sick and bloated later, high on sugar & salt, and dehydrated with alcohol.
Just don't snack.
> If one does not live in a modern city center one barely ever walks. Most Americans sit all day - at a desk or in a car.
As opposed to someone in China, where we must do such extraneous physical activities like order take-out delivered to our place less than 15 minutes, then order a masseuse to come give us a massage and finally order a bottle of wine to top the night off, all without needing to get out of bed.
The food ingredients in this country are, on average, garbage. With careful shopping you can get around this but it does take effort and vigilence.
Cultural expectations around both diet (especially portion size) and exercise (I cite the walking thing a lot too) are also bad. It takes effort to avoid those hazards.
I think both of these and probably a few other factors are a terrible combination that compliment each other in a bad way.
That said, I'm 30 lbs heavier than I was a decade ago. I know WHAT I need to do (exercise more, drink less), it's just been hard to get back into better habits.
I’ve also had the same experience on shorter (few month) stays in Europe, while still working a 9-5.
Philippines was part of the Spanish crown and had Spanish customs. Plenty of European (Western) countries have balanced diets and healthy lifestyles.
But for them, it might as well be. People simply did not eat large amounts of packaged, processed food only a few generations ago, like people do everywhere in the west, including the EU.
Also, exercise accounts for maybe a hundred or two calories a day for the average person who isn't into marathons or something, so the only true way to lose weight is to decrease what you eat.
It's not lack of exercise, that's the way these corporations try to blame you for being lazy so you forget their food is garbage that's making you fat.
Yes, driving cars everywhere is not great. But we’re also more obese than other car dependent cultures, so it’s not a satisfactory answer to say that it’s entirely about being sedentary.
I eat mostly fruits, veggies and meats. Pretty much 80% natural foods. But I live in east Asia now so it’s easier to do that and with more variety.
But, I don’t recall American supermarkets food feeling strange. Unless you mean the processed stuff?
For the rest of it: might just be my perception to be honest, my impression was that the fruits and vegetables tasted very watery with little flavour, as if they were grown in the most efficient way to bring them to market quickly. Same for the meat, was kind of floppy and the cheese just didn't taste like much. There were some good things from farmers markets, but at absurd prices.
I see differences in Europe as well, e.g. I think the quality in Switzerland is better than Germany and Austria. In Spain and France I was able to get really good food, probably because it's closer to where it is produced.
Again this might be my perception, didn't do a blind tasting. Unless the food is specially prepared to be stored (like fermented food, cheese, etc.), I don't think the highly industrial production, refrigeration and long transportation is doing the quality any favours.
https://www.greenoptimistic.com/fruit-vegetables-taste-europ...
https://www.treehugger.com/why-doesnt-american-produce-taste...
The key point seems to be that we prioritize the looks, which unintentionally affects taste.
As an American who recently moved to Europe, I don't think 20 minutes of walking per day is being generous. COVID-related measures aside, I find I add about 20min/day of walking easily, and more if I need to do something (e.g. buying groceries). Now, in the US I own a car and here I do not -- but in my Midwestern town I am totally obligated to own and operate a car. Here in Europe I get along fine with walking, riding a bike, and using public transport.
I don't. Certainly it doesn't help and, of course, Americans should eat much better than they do, but ...
I think the most important factor is that our built and cultural environment are constructed to make us obese.
If one does not live in a modern city center one barely ever walks. Most Americans sit all day - at a desk or in a car.
Further, many Americans are 1-2 generations removed from "the farm" and are still heavily influenced by habits like "three square meals per day" that made great sense on the farm and make no sense at all in the city.
We're bad at being urban.
I contrast us with people I see who are good at being urban. The old Chinese women in the park doing Tai Chi every morning. The 70+ woman I saw running (running!) to get the bus in Zurich. The Spanish people I lived with who sort-of ate one big meal every day at 14:00 ...
We'll get there ...