Go into any supermarket in the USA and you'll see collections of giant cookies. They are easily 4x larger than cookies from the 1950s (or for that matter 2x/3x larger than cookies in many other countries) and they come in packs of 20+, each cookie is at least 400 kcals and people easily eat half the box at a time.
Chips come in giant bags. The average bag of chips in Japan is ~65g. The average bag of chips in the USA is 280g!!!
Cold Stone Creamery (an Ice Cream chain), you can see how big a single portion is in their front page image
https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/ba...
It's also at least 3x the portion I'd get in many parts of the world.
Those types portions have been arounds so long that now pretty much all of the USA takes them for granted. Anything smaller is considered a rip off. The culture is high volume, low price = best.
It's crazy to see all the giant obese people all over the place. Except maybe in SF/NYC, restaurants that served smaller portions would quickly go out of business.
As with anything else, to get smaller meals the food/wage price ratio needs to be larger. Food in America is absurdly cheap compared to most other nations.
A friend of mine likes a local deli. The third or fourth time I joined him there, I remarked that the portions seemed sized for people doing hard physical labor all day--digging ditches or working on a loading dock--but that the clientele didn't seem to be laborers. He remarked that with comfort food, the ingredients are the least part of the cost.
Generally, food isn't designed for nutrition. It's made to be maximally salty or crunchy or cheesy or whatever. This is true even for mid-range packaged items and not just the cheapest ones.
What difference does that make on the whole? You don't overeat on these foods because you didn't get enough vitamin A. You overeat them because it's delicious or because the portions are wrong or your body doesn't send the signal to stop or because you're depressed or...
I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. Instead, I ate foods mostly rich in protein and fats. But once I went back onto a general carbohydrate-heavy diet, as is common in the modern world, it was very easy to eat too much. (Most of our popular foods seem to contain flour in copious amounts.)
This isn't a silver bullet though. It might've worked for me while I was doing it, but might not work for others.
This can be because your body is still missing some nutrition.
> I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs.
I think that while high protein and fats is fine, a lot can be said about the type of carb you eat as well. Chips and candy is a lot worse than bread and pasta, which is a lot worse than fibrous and filling carbs like vegetables.
Remember that until fairly recently in human history, meat was very expensive, and so it wasn't necessarily a thing you had for every meal.
Sure, but plentiful grains are also a fairly new thing. Before agriculture it would've been not that easy to overeat on carbs for every meal.
I’ve been doing Keto (very-low carb, high fat) for 8 years now. For me, it simply helped that I was far more conscious about what I was eating.
But I still overeat when making any kind of Keto-"Pizza"
A while ago I went one month without any added sugar, I cut out dried fruits and reduced fruit intake. On the weekends I allowed myself one tablespoon of fruit jam. After the first week, the jam tasted incredibly sweet, but delicious. When I went back to normal eating, everything tasted incredibly sweet to me, and I thought two tablespoons of jam was unnecessary, and that was just one month!
We just celebrated Halloween here in the US. I think it was more special when cane sugar was more scarce and candy was really a special non-daily treat. No kid needs a tenth of the candy haul I see them carry around, and my office is in a glut of candies that were bought by the adults but not given away.
Then I moved to the middle of the city and I have no commute and many options for food available which are healthier. Since I no longer use a car, these fast food places are less temping.
Most of Europe also has cable television and other inside diversion. However car dependence and obesity is lower.
I find this video here quite enlightening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzuRL0uJnw
When meal preparation is done manually from base ingredients, the calorie count is typically lower for a given level of "fullness" you feel from the food. And since it takes time and effort, the meals are prepared (and consumed) on a set schedule (breakfast, lunch, dinner). Now contrast that to ready made meals and restaurant meals. These typically have more calories than what is required for a serving (or they consists of excess servings), so over-consumption tends to happen due to easy access. And they are made to taste excessively good (because that sells better). Home cooked meals using traditional ingredients taste ok, but aren't the flavor profiles that keep you wanting to consume excess servings.
For instance, I just had a grilled fish lunch set meal (teishoku) similar to this one [1] with miso soup (full of veggies), pickles, eggplant and small bowl of rice for $6 today, which based on similar meals at chain stores that publish calorie counts, probably amounts to maybe 600-750 calories with around 30-40 grams of protein. If you're hungry maybe choose a pork cutlet instead for the same price, or add a side dish for $1, or switch to a larger serving of rice for free.
That said, even if those options were available, convincing Americans that "tasty" is not equivalent to "supersaturated with butter and corn syrup" is a difficult proposition...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/%E3%82%B...
You forget one important piece of that puzzle, I think: access to (affordable) base ingredients. From my outsider perspective, having read some articles and seen some activists talk about this, there seems to be a thing in the US they call "food deserts"[0] where in many, mostly not very affluent neighborhoods there simply are no stores left that do sell fresh base ingredients, only "dollar stores" that sell highly processed cheap "food".
Stores carry what is demanded of their customers, and they don’t carry what they can’t sell before it goes bad. The food isn’t there because it’s not consumed, and because you can’t buy it, it’s not consumed. Fresh food is expensive and goes bad, it’s too much risk as a small business to carry if you don’t think you can sell it. That’s the issue you often see.
My second point would be the huge number of ethnic markets in low income areas with a tone of fresh fruits and veggies. When consumed, they are carried.
There is a culture of convenience that pushes people to shelf stable meals. Those are quick, and generally unhealthy.
Is that really such an issue where you live? Interesting.
[0] "Loose" stuff is usually sold by weight, there are scales in the supermarket where you weigh whatever you intent to buy, so buying small quantities has no surcharge at all.
[1] Smaller packages usually are a little bit more expensive than "family size" ones. But I hardly buy anything perishable in such packages anyway. It's mostly things like noodles or cereal, which if stored correctly, can last for months if need be, so buying a cheaper family-size pack as a single is not an issue for me.
I say this as someone that was gaining weight while biking twenty miles a day. Easy to chalk it up to previous years over eating. But I don't do most fast food that we love to demonize.
When working from home, i managed to lose on the order of 5-6 kg by eating less and skipping the occasional meal.
Now that the office is open again, the weight is slowly creeping upwards. This is due to the rather large plate served in the canteen at work.
To balance that out, my estimate is that the 45 km of biking a week i do, will have to be supplemented with gym visits 2-3 times a week.
With the above it will be possible to get within 4-5 kg of the ideal weight:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight
So maintaining a healthy weight is not easy without reducing servings and the ideal weight is even harder to achieve.
I tried switching to smaller plates. Doesn't seem to help too much.
I was finding that salads help. Not sure how much, though. I was basically in a starvation diet when it was working well.
That said, counting calories definitely helps better than I want it to.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitn...
Though, I am sympathetic to the idea that some foods encourage you to be more active. At least, some do the opposite. Eating a full pizza will almost certainly not be followed by anything active.
Oddly, following anything active with eating a pizza seems better.
That's a good typo there :)
Edit also this type of restaurant portion sizes bleeds into me preparing food at home for myself or my family.
* The food supply is fake. Anecdote. Back in the '80s the Eastern Block went through a deep crisis, including a low grade famine. After the communism fell, the food supply improved. One item stood apart: the American frozen chicken. Three times the size of a domestic one, tasting like moist cardboard. Most people would not touch it, unless positively starving. These days, everything is tasteless fake: bread, chicken, milk, eggs, veggies. For somewhat better quality, the prices are at least 2x, possibly quite some more. Good quality produce is nearly impossible to find, the fakes have pushed real farmers into bankruptcy long ago. Even the meager subsistence farmers markets of the Eastern Block of old had noticeably higher quality offerings (caveat: in season).
* Americans don't prepare food at home. The American woman was pushed into the workforce and doesn't have time, energy, will or knowhow of basic homecooking. What, you reminisce of (grand)mother's comfort food? What kind of barbaric misogynist are you? No, men didn't step up to take on the traditional feminine role. Realistically, they will never do. No amount of nagging NYT editorials will change that. The food industry happily filled the void with processed fakes.
* The mass restaurant network delivers fake food. The staples are ground meat & fried potatoes, fake chicken & rice or pasta. Sometimes industrial tofu or shrimp. If you are really "health conscious", there is "gluten free" for you. Sure, there is a dazzling variety of sauces and presentations, but the basis is pauper. You have to search hard for ethnic restaurants to even find a veggie basis, and even then the most popular offering is American Indian, with dubious thick sauces.
* Americans eat way too much sugar. The food industry drops ridiculous amounts of sugar in everything, including savory foods if they get a chance. Anecdote. Coming from a different culture, American sweets literally make me sick. Making sweets at home, using about 1/4 - 1/3 of the American recipe sugar recommendation is about right.
* Americans don't walk. Old World cities are (were?) built in such a way that doing basic life functions require walking. Buying groceries, going to school, going to church, going to see friends, going to work (walk + public transport). Americans drive everywhere, because everything is too far away for walking. With Amazon and Amazon Fresh, even the meager shopping trips are vanishing, which will lead to an extra bump in obesity. Removing the reward for walking mostly removed walking itself. Shaming people for not hitting the gym often enough doesn't work, we are built to pick the path of least resistance.
* American kids don't roam the streets. Something happened and kids simply don't just go out to play with their friends for hours on end. At the minimum the parents must setup activities, playdates & transportation. In practice, this leads to sedentary overweight depressed kids. Let's buy them the latest networked gaming console instead, that will keep them socialized, active, and healthy.
* American culture is increasingly adverse to generating signals for distinguishing healthy and unhealthy. In the name of "inclusivity" we are implicitly promoting deeply unhealthy lifestyles. We are good people and wouldn't want to hurt feelings, right? Right, except that we are depriving our kids of the ability to identify and model healthy behaviors.
So maybe there is hope and evidently educated people care less about sexual identity stereotypes than you think.
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937...
I grew up in a poor country, with an objectively deprived food supply chain. There were multiple home cooked dishes in the fridge at all times, though, if memory serves right, '88/'89 were rough. Every single social gathering had more 10x tastier and more varied home cooked food than I ever saw in decades of American life. I met exactly one American family that took cooking seriously and placed a noticeable degree of effort in home cooking dinner from raw ingredients, though their results were rather on the high end, not sure they were engaging in the process on a regular basis.
Consider using 1900ish as the comparison point... https://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/scripts/explore.php
The linked study claims: While the mean per capita time spent cooking increased over time for both men and women, women cooked for a much greater amount of time than did men (50 min/capita/day vs. 20 min/capita/day). Even 20 minutes is a long time for microwaved mac & cheese.
From what you've been observing, it's very different here in Europe, I know a lot of people now who take cooking quite seriously, and I knew a lot of people back in the 90s for whom it was perfunctory. And in fact: The increase in men’s cooking found here mirrors trends in Europe, where research from four Nordic countries found increases from 1997 to 2012 in the percent of men cooking, particularly those from the working and upper classes [28]. Even in 2016, however, US males’ cooking levels were still lower than in the United Kingdom a decade earlier, when a 2005 time use survey showed 60% of men (and 85% of women) in the United Kingdom cooked over one 24-h period [29].
Unfortunately, I don't get a response for the URL you posted, maybe I'm geo-blocked or something.
> According to People in the EU, a new publication from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, Denmark boasts by far the highest proportion of single-person households of any country in the European Union, at 45%. Finland, the country with the next highest share, has only 40.8%. In the UK it is 30.6%. In Spain, 23.2%.
> According to figures from Statistics Denmark, the phenomenon of alene-kultur, as the Danes call it, has been on the march for decades, with the proportion of Danes living alone rising by 42% since 1986.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/20/city-of-borgen...
> Around 47% of households have just one occupant – typically a child-free, single adult.
https://www.flashpack.com/us/relationships/sweden-solo-livin...
PS. We might have inadvertently HN-effect the prior link, it was simply a reasonably looking description of the 1850-1930 household lifestyle.
I am aghast at the misogynistic downplay of the skills, hard work, love and dedication our foremothers poured in keeping the household happily humming along. But to each its own, at this point some of these words are probably just some empty strange anachronisms. Enjoy the Nordic lifelong solitude, probably happier to simply not know what has been lost.
I am aghast at the misogynistic downplay of the skills...
I'm sure you are. What specifically are you talking about?
Small servings get ridiculed.
Really, the issue is that routine exercise of the most basic kind is totally absent in most Americans' lives. In most of the world you can reasonably walk to school, to work, to do some quick shopping, to meet with friends, and if you're not walking directly there you can walk to a bus or a train that will get you in that general direction. In most American suburbia, these types of walking journeys are at best indirect and at worst downright dangerous with a lack of safe sidewalks or crosswalks.
In 1969, half of American schoolkids walked or biked to school. In 2012, that figure declined to 19%. https://www.wnyc.org/story/284604-why-so-few-walk-or-bike-to...
The number of people who are going to get a caliper test done or a water displacement test, outside of elite athletes, is again approximately zero.
The number of people who are overweight or obese and don't realize and could discover it using just two pieces of easily available information is more than I could count in my lifetime, working 24/7.
The real COVID-19 risk isn't from BMI or even obesity in general, but specifically from excess visceral fat.
https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(20)3030...
However measuring visceral fat is slow and expensive since it requires something like a DXA scan. We don't have enough equipment to scan everyone. So we usually rely on BMI as a proxy.
Countries like the US includes the EU too, at a lower level but still over 50% are supposedly overweight. [1]
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
If you look at obesity level per country, the most populous country in the EU is on rank 79 of 191, not far from the middle of the table, while the US is on rank 12, with mostly micro nations above it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity...
Curious, Why is that ?