I agree with this. Their definition of “doesn’t exercise” must be too narrow. “Well, sometimes I walk as much as a quarter mile” is insufficient to count as exercise.

I would expect that 25% of people are effectively completely sedentary and a much larger chunk of the population fits in the “doesn’t exercise” bucket.

It takes a LOT of exercise to burn the calories consumed with one can of soda. Overeating and poor diet is a bigger factor in obesity than exercise

It would take the average American man about 12 minutes of running at a moderate pace to burn the 155 kcal in one 12 oz (355 ml) can of Coca Cola.

https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1350959101

I think the focus on "burning" calories completely misses the mark. It gives people the misconception that food is nothing more than calories, and they can just "burn" off the excess, despite the fact that our nutritional needs become more important with exercise.

But isn't too many calories a way, way bigger problem today than not enough micronutrients is? If we could make the former way better at the expense of making the latter slightly worse, it seems like it'd be a no-brainer.

Yes, for certain. I am more alluding to the false belief that you can just out-exercise a poor diet. For example, many polyunsaturated vegetable oils oxidize very quickly in your body, sending free radicals on a rampage and causing inflammation. This "cost" is not accounted for in a calorie. And the effect becomes even more important when you introduce the stress of exercise into the equation.

https://www.openventio.org/Volume1-Issue6/Oxidation-of-Polyu...

True. But calorie as a metric doesn't help either. It's too abstract. Instead, what if it were minutes? As in you'd have to walk for X minutes to burn off those super sized fries and shake. If a meals takes idk 4 hrs to burn off and you only have 3 extra hours in the evening...well, that would be better than calories.

Calories are a scientific unit. They don't work for every day people leading every day lives.

Those 12 minutes never happen, meanwhile drinking more than one can happens all the time.

True, but it’s often correlated. Show me the obese person who vigorously exercises but then chooses to overeat. Let’s face it: most obese people do not exercise at all and then eat way too much on top of that.

A friend of mine says, "You can't out train a bad diet."

Aren't people who exercise (bodybuilding) generally considered overweight (defined as having a too high weight for a given height?) I noticed the same as you pointed out but figured that might help explain some of that difference

No. You have to have a ton of muscle to flip the bmi scale into overweight. Certainly professional bodybuilders will do that. Casual bodybuilders generally don’t.

The set of bodybuilders who have enough muscle to put them into the overweight category is a tiny portion of the population. There is a larger portion of the population who has a lot of muscle and a lot of fat, but that’s still pretty small.

BMI is just a very rough approximation used to fit body fat.

Any amount of muscle can slip someone into the overwight category if they are already close. For a 5-10 male, the difference between dead center normal BMI and pre-obese is 20 lbs, not a crazy amount for a casual but consistent weightlifter.

BMI 'works' because it just looks at the total population, and doest care if it doesn't fit edge cases.

> Any amount of muscle can slip someone into the overwight category if they are already close.

Yeah, but that’s hardly the muscle at fault. If someone has 20lb of extra fat and 10lb of extra muscle, it seems a lot more honest to say the fat is why the person’s BMI is high.

To be clear, BMI is definitely a very “rough and dirty” estimate. Certainly there are healthy people with a BMI classified as overweight.

fair enough! those communities always seems bigger when you're surrounded by them... :)

When the survey is BMI, then yes, individuals outside the standard height and with greater than average muscle mass will fall in the overweight range.

But, when considering the population rather than the individual, these outliers become insignificant.

Massive roided up bodybuilders are like 0.1% of the population max. And those guys should be probably more worried about the effects of steroids on the heart than having too much body mass

Like 1% of people who exercise are bodybuilders.

And the performance enhancing drugs and bulks are not exactly known to be great for their hearts. See Rich Piana for example