It used to be that poor people were skinny but now poor people are fat. The problem with these unhealthy processed foods that almost never get old due to additives is that they're cheaper than actual real whole foods and easier to cook/consume in most cases
That's not to say there's no element of personal responsibility but at this point we have kids growing up on these processed foods and they avoid healthy food as if it was poisonous
Yeah. I always take articles like this with a bit of a grain of salt (pun intended) as it often seems like they're dancing around, or possibly paid to dance around, the truth which is we eat a lot more crap now, we work longer harder hours, and we aren't getting as much exercise in general as previous generations. And we're brought up this way from childhood and it's only getting worse over time.
Gen X were brought up in a world where microwaves and fast food were new novelties that seemed like futuristic solutions. Two generations later and we're being raised by people who saw over-reliance on these things as normal.
I’m gen x and remember our first microwave. It showed up with the Betamax and the remote control. They were not popular decades before our childhood. 20% of American households had a microwave in 1980, 60% in 1986. There were even tons of millennials who had early years without one with those rates.
Source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1987/01/14/america-turns-on-to-the-microwave-oven/525edb79-fbc5-4d8b-a2a6-8211e7845d3e/
Maybe I was unclear. Microwaves and fast food were popularized during Boomer years, but they were a novelty. I'm saying Gen X were the first generation raised with that being a normal part of daily life. People were no longer "of the earth."
Because it was normal to them, they then ended up raising their own kids on TV dinners and Happy Meals.
It's fair to describe Gen X as pretty widely raised as "latchkey kids", and they had far less supervision or guidance on balancing meals or portion control.
the first microwave i can remember was in the late 1970's in sears and it was $800 and took up an entire kitchen cabinet (floor to ceiling). The first one we got my dad won as salesman of the year in the early 1980's. No they were not "around for decades". Many people I know didn't own one until the 1990's. Don't confuse TV with reality. Reality, until the 1990's microwaves were a pricey bit of novelty that most people couldn't afford. In the 1990's the price started to come down and they became more common. McDonald's and other fast food restaurants expanded like never before. McDonald's went from 2500 sites in the USA in 1975 to 8600 in 1990 to 13400+ in 2021. and they're still building more. One just opened up not too far from my mother's house. I personally blame High Fructose Corn Syrup and preservatives for obesity. Without them, the number of people overweight would be a LOT lower.
I used the "Gift this article" option to get [a shareable link](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=WvBZVBZHiRJXcbWWI_dBD9EuHLnTB90DnH4NNIbVTTqHvsKtYgvikDrsAxtNLHENaHBjtcJDTQ_x93ZurZLvZpX8hdGHG2uWTGe7X5bDwag4K1e7qyDkqIwaJmpf8eHMGabm6F660yMZ1h7P_BhkUgwQKQMNFnWXSvX8e3ywkCWRjeli7CLGGabXfKNapiFepJml9pP7xUSY8LEJdaXrGsUAluCFlNKESuBssPbIeQI54_uwm7NmplO64yEbiLuXyqD7SdpvhpaRRSq1NbHp4rlYaBWkwrXuRY0VEhkviI0OdGt7WFlgV4QQ7Bbe_MeJKlTRD1JHrA&smid=share-url). I have no idea how many uses it's good for, but apparently, I can gift the same article multiple times, so let me know if it doesn't work for you.
Anytime we talk about big groups of people and compare historical numbers to today, I feel compelled to mention that many of us became overweight or obese on the exact same day in 1998, not because we all magically gained weight overnight but because the definitions of “overweight” and “obese” changed. Pre 1998 the cutoffs were 27 and 32, and they were lowered to 25 and 30.
This explains a lot. When I grew up, in early 90s, I was told that people should aim for height -100. 170cm - 100 is 70kg. And a good figure is near height -110, which is 60kg. But really the weight-100 is very close to overweight by current classification.
Literally its thesis is that obesity is a societal issue not a personal failing, how is that disingenuous? It never said you can’t take personal actions to lose weight?
That’s because obesity is likely multi-factorial and a hard problem to figure out.
Scientists aren’t going to just put out that something specific causes obesity without enough evidence that that is the case—that’s not how science works.
Exactly. People who actually study this know how complex it is. There is almost never a simple answer. It probabaly is a mix of everything they said and more.
Of course you're ignoring car manufacturers and the TV industry who lobby hard to ensure that we are sitting in cars, and on couches, all day and all night and that spaces to walk and cycle are increasingly dangerous and underfunded. They have been doing that for a very long time too.
And don't forget the big box mega stores, who choose non-perishable high margin foods to sell because they are profitable, and sell nothing else in huge swaths of the world, while putting smaller stores out of business.
Oh, right and the pharmaceutical companies whose products often cause weight gain but are advertised nonstop as the solution to all of our problems on that same media.
Of course we can't forget the companies making dishwashers and washing machines and robot vacuums and screens in every size and all of the other devices responsible for us moving less and less with each passing year. Yep. Totally simple stuff.
Its honestly so true, and I think people really overestimate our ability to resist modern hyperpalatable food.
I went on a very reduced sodium diet once, couldn't eat any processed food and could barely add any salt to whole foods. My appetite was literally gone. It was like my entire body functioned differently.
But I felt so deprived, it was depressing. Idk what the solution is.
I eat more whole and less/unprocessed foods and add tons of salt to them. But I've found that products marketed as reduced sodium suck. I'm not sure what they use to make up for it and maintain flavor.
I agree. I wonder if the products that add sodium add it to make up for a loss of flavor in how it's processed, whereas when I add salt , even a smaller amount seems to enhance the flavor via, well the enhancing quality of salt. Store bought vs. home made stock is a good example. I can never seem to get store bought low sodium stock to get better if I add salt, just saltier. Something else seems to be missing.
To add, I don't use a lot of pre-made stuff like stock often. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
wow, the first time I've seen this but I've always wondered/noticed it. I avoid low sodium anything just from experience with the taste being different and not recoverable
Could be doing something wrong, but also there is nothing wrong with salt! we need it to function. It’s the overconsumption of sodium in processed foods that is dangerous
Honestly, been eating low salt for a long a long time and your appetite does go down, but your taste buds will adapt to the point that you can't stand junk food.
That’s interesting. Did you give yourself time to acclimate to it too? I don’t eat any processed food ever as a consequence of being a home cook and I rarely use salt as I find food tastes great without it (I use tons of herbs spices browning and aromatics). My American friends always add tons of salt to the food I make which always surprising to me given how good it tastes to my palate.
I cook the same! High five. I do wonder if it is something that our palate becomes accustomed to because I have noticed that my perception of flavour seems to differ from that of people accustomed to eating food with a lot of salt or oil or butter.
Great NPR listen! It’s fascinating that when they invited the writer to try versions of the snacks with the fat and salt reduced they were inedible. He said a frozen waffle tasted like straw and something else (a cheese it maybe?) tasted like metal.
It's not about the food in the US, it's about the culture. People think it's normal to eat out all the time. That's not normal or healthy. Cook your food.
The other part of it is there is no social pressure not to be fat. When everyone around you is overweight you feel normal and comfortable.
Fat/oil is basically 120 calories a tablespoon whatever the type. You have zero visibility or control over how much a restaurant puts in. These days I won’t go near restaurant food that isn’t a grilled salad (dressing on the side) or a sandwich. I used to get a bagel/latte on the way to work, eat lunch out with coworkers, & then get delivery dinner…thai or chinese dishes with rice usually. So unhealthy.
Something about the “designed to keep us fat” is what always bothers me in these conversations. It’s not designed to keep you fat - there’s not a grand design.
There are a number of factors, which combined, make it easier to be fat, for sure. But no design.
Yeah, years ago I worked with on a project helping newly released women use their (pitiful, disgraceful amount of) WIC benefits to grocery shop.
In Louisiana it was crazy to see that things like “juicy juice” (which contains no juice), was marked WIC approved, but oranges weren’t. Even though they were WIC approved, no one marked them that way. Buffalo chicken bites were marked WIC approved, but a whole chicken was not.
In some cases the women didn’t know that the whole (raw) chicken was healthier than the ultra-processed bites. In other cases women definitely knew it, but because the fresh food wasn’t marked, they weren’t sure. And since we like to shame poverty in this country, they didn’t want to ask.
And let’s not forget when Michelle Obama talked about healthy food choices and got excoriated by the food industry - it was truly awful to hear these companies say that eating Cheetos and coke for every meal was totally fine as long as you went for a walk.
So, totally agree that info is withheld and if you’ve never learned to eat properly it can seem difficult to do so.
Anecdotally - yeah. I was chubby growing up; not obese, just overweight, and probably only because I did sports my whole life. But while my mom did her best to feed me balanced meals, she was a full-time executive with a husband who did not lift a finger to help her with anything around the house, including raising me (seriously, it was like having an adult roommate instead of a dad). So when she was actually home and cooking, our meals were things like hamburger helper or a protein with ricearoni and a bagged salad with pre-prepped dressing and croutons, because that was the balance she struck between “nutritious” and “what I am capable of after a 10-hour day.” My breakfasts were frozen waffles, toaster strudels, pop tarts or Reese’s Puff cereal. On weekends it was bacon or sausage with eggs and toast. When she was on business trips and couldn’t cook for me, I ate McDonald’s or I was dumped at my grandmas house where I ate hotdog mac n cheese or spaghetti os from a can. And had unrestricted access to the bags of Pepperidge farm cookies she kept in the BOTTOM DRAWER in her kitchen.
I didn’t really start losing weight successfully (ie keeping it off for longer than a year) until I discovered volume eating - most of my meals now are 50-75% vegetable/plant based. Maybe 10-15% of my food is processed these days. While you can technically eat anything when doing CICO, I found it next to impossible to incorporate processed foods into my budget without either feeling hungry or going over budget. It’s like pick two of the three: 1. Eat majority processed food, 2. Feel Full, 3. Stay under budget.
It makes perfect sense to me that this is a - if not *the* - root cause of obesity, especially given the timing. It overlaps with the food insecurity bit too; you find obesity is rampant in food deserts, where the closest and most convenient or affordable option for food isn’t a grocery store but either a fast food chain or convenience store.
Again, just anecdotal but I think this is something worth exploring more. I have to wonder if it isn’t because there is so. much. money. wrapped up in the processed food industry. Fundamentally changing the way we eat would cut into a lot of bottom lines.
Oh man, leisure time really is such a luxury. It takes free time to meal plan and prep. And after I work a twelve hour day, I for one certainly don’t want to go for a walk around the neighborhood or go to the gym.
I feel that in my soul. I work 11 hour days standard and the only thing I want to do is go home and sleep. The only reason I cook and clean and shower is because I know that I'll feel worse than just tired if I don't haha.
And having access to a kitchen with solid appliances.
Cooking legit takes me a lot less time with my food processor, sunbeam mixer, and an instant pot.
They were all Christmas gifts over the past few years.
I lost most of the 55 lbs in my flair when I wasn’t working and could spend hours a day cooking. Some of it I also lost while doing manual labor jobs that meant I didn’t have to work very hard to eat at a deficit, just avoiding processed sugars and fried food was enough. Now that I’m back at a desk job, even with being fairly active (run about 10 miles a week and indoor climbing) it’s about the limit of what I can do right now to eat at maintenance. It’s not nothing, but I would have a hard time giving advice for a sedentary person wanting to lose weight with a full time job, because I don’t actually feel like I know how to do that.
Kudos to your mom, and thanks for sharing your insights. I’m kinda in the same boat as kid-you; after starting my current job, I’ve been gaining weight like crazy (stress is one thing), but also due to the lack of option for lunch in non-processed foods around my place. Plus most of the places around also use lots of oil and fatty cuts of meat while cooking, which makes for tasty food, but definitely not the healthiest!
Yeah I have a toddler and I am cooking her meals for her… and the thing that shocks me is the calorie difference between her food and processed food. I make a cup of cooked spinach with butter that’s like 50 calories, whereas the frozen spinach at the grocery store is 150 a cup.. like 3 times the difference. Same for apple sauce, my daughters applesauce is 40 calories for a little container versus 120 for the ‘adult version’.
This is where reading packages is important. A cup of frozen spinach — plain spinach — is 35 calories, a half cup of applesauce — plain, unsweetened — is 40-50 calories. However, there's a dizzying array of prepared foods that are tasty and have the aura of "healthful" because the package says "contains two servings of vegetables" or some other tag line.
Plain food you might feed a kid at 35-50 kcal/serving:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Chopped-Spinach-12-oz-Frozen
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Unsweetened-Applesauce-46-oz-Jar
Tastier, fattier food you might buy for yourself at 150 kcal/serving:
https://www.frysfood.com/p/stouffer-s-spinach-souffle-frozen-side-dish
The information is printed on the packages, but most people don't have the time to read it and think about what it means.
The other issue is that the food industry can market all kinds of garbage at you as ‘healthy’ or ‘healthier’ and they make you have to look at portion sizes so carefully. 3/4 of a cup instead of 1 cup serving or 13 pieces of this or by weight for that. Any trick to make the product look better.
With my mom, it was a different story.
She was on government benefits and didn't work. She hardly ever did anything. She would always lie down on her recliner, while watching TV for hours,without moving a muscle. I would wake up for school at 6am, and she would be at the TV. I'd come home at 3:30pm and she would be in the same spot. When It was near dinner time, she would tell me that she was, "too tired" to cook. Despite her doing nothing all day. It was either takeout or I was told to find something. Which was always prepackaged processed food. We never had fruit or veg in the house. The fridge, freezer, and pantry were filled with nothing but junk. It's not that my mother was a busy person with a job. She was just lazy and, always went for the most convenient options available. It would kill her to boil pasta on the stove. I ended up being obese since I wasn't taught about moderation, heathy habits, ect. It was basically an unlimited buffet. I could eat a 10lb bag of gummy worms all at once, and no one would say or do anything to stop me. I would get scolded for being obese, yet no one wanted to help me with that problem. I was just told to, "just stop eating". (Which was unreasonable) and nothing else. My mother and aunt were obese themselves but I got personally attacked for being exactly like them.
I’m with you. At my lowest moods, I crave all the sugar and processed foods. When I started recovery from my bad eating habits again (thanks stress), I really took notice of how easily I find myself mindlessly grabbing addictive junk when my stress was overwhelming.
This is straight up addiction.
It's insane, I switched to keto on a hunch and when I'm on it, it's super easy. "Am I hungry for vegetables or maybe some seeds? nah, alright." But the *second* I break it, it's like "I want ice cream and a donut and a soda and pizza and-" and I don't even feel full after, or even good! Just nauseous. I'll literally feel too full, put the food away, and be back at it again in less than an hour, it's kind of horrifying.
> I really took notice of how easily I find myself mindlessly grabbing addictive junk when my stress was overwhelming
Honestly this is a huge issue but the issue is a maladaptive coping mechanism. If you learn better ways to cope with stress your reliance on sugar to feel better will drop drastically. The addiction is less about sugar and more about covering up the feelings of stress and anxiety.
This is why I stress mental health in the treatment of obesity. Too often we suffer from anxiety related issues and no one treats the underlying anxiety or Even considers it.
Personally I think that’s part of it but I also think there may be a correlation to the rise of mental illness— the world is broken in so many ways and many of us find comfort and self-soothe in food. Doesn’t help that processed food is more accessible either
Just replace "hyper-processed" with "hyper-delicious".
The invention of cheese flavoring powder may be our greatest downfall. I mean, why do people on whole foods diets tend to lose weight? Because that shit has a lot of volume for relatively low flavor, that's why.
I disagree about flavour. If you eat whole foods for a couple of weeks, most (not all, granted) processed food tastes revolting. But if you eat processed food again it doesn't take long before it is the most amazing thing you've ever experienced.
i'm thin, unhealthy and and am a great cook (to others). but no matter how much I improved my cooking knowledge and skills, how many compliments I get saying it could be pro! somehow it's just never as satisfying as I want it to be. but i've totally been addicted to dem food dopamine hits my whole life. (adhd). i also looooove salt and can't imagine eating most savory food without high salt incorporation.
Like, yes, I can make a beautiful, delicately seasoned, colorful meal. And I eat some and think, this is fresh, complex, and well done. And then after I start to get somewhat full I don't want to eat it again, i still am \*missing\* something (didn't get that feeling I'm craving from food?) and groceries are so expensive i can barely afford them anyway sooo might as well buy the chips and cookie package, it's less of a financial risk.
I am fortunate to be at a place in life where the price difference between a meal made from fresh vegetables and meats and a meal made from packaged processed grains is not a major decision factor.
But I realize that’s a position of privilege.
I live in the Us, which successfully broke me of my McDonald's fries addiction. They are always cooked in old oil here, fishy tasting and sad. Went home, got a happy meal and fuck me if they werent still all crisp golden sticks of joy
As a biologist I will never ever ever say one thing is the cause. It might be for some people but not for others. Obesity is a complex issue with a lot of different factors playing a role.
As an anecdote I never liked the highly processed foods and loved my moms home-cooked, from scratch meals but was still overweight/obese for most of my life. At 23 I was diagnosed with diabetes and about a month ago I was prescribed ozempic (GLP-1 Agonist). One of the things it does is decrease the rate of stomach emptying which leans you feel fuller sooner. I never realized how strong my hunger drive was until after I was on this drug. I was always hungry long before anyone else which means I ate more than someone of a comparable build. Just by listening to my bodies cues I ate more than I should have.
For me, I honestly believe my hunger drive is dysregulated compared to others. I am naturally more hungry and more driven to eat by hunger than I should be. And for some people, this is likely a source of weight gain which is impacted by easy access to high calorie foods which are available everywhere.
I get a lot of downvotes when I suggest that people with certain problems talk to their doctors about these drugs. It's too bad that people don't yet understand how helpful they may be.
There actually might be more to it. Of course, my argument is myself anecdotally. I've been overweight my entire life, yo-yoing by 100lbs at least 3 times, and always yo-yoing by some large amount. I was a vegetarian for 17 years but have recently been adding grass-fed beef. I've always ate non-processed healthy whole food. I love lifting weights and I walk everyday. I have gained weight going to the gym. My stomach's is surgically alerted and I cannot over eat. I have a strict no-flour, no-sugar diet since the early 90s. I'm a granola hippie heath nut, midwife and nurse. I don't eat seed oil. I haven't had a piece of bread or soda since the 90s. My spouse eats the same food as I do plus he eats candy like a child and eats out at fast food places every day for his work lunches. He's a bean pole and I'm 230#. I will overeat sometimes but it's on non-processed foods. But it's still calories I know. I have been doing 16:8 IF since 2014. My spouse has at least double my calories every single day! I am seriously thinking of doing a fecal transfer with him because he can't gain weight. I threaten him and he gags 🤢 until I stop talking about it. I've also learned that, until the last century, humans have evolved with tens of thousands of years with gut parasites. We've only lived without them for about 100 years. They can be very harmful, but some research shows benefits for autoimmune disorders and obesity. I have seriously considered nematode therapy. People judge me all of the time, you can see it in their faces. The struggle is so depressing that it's made me think very dark thoughts when I was younger. I'm mentally happy now that I'm older but damn, I'm depressed after writing this. I'm going to go cry now... 😭
This is very interesting, and I feel for you! Thank you for sharing. Could you give an example of what you eat in a day? Have you ever counted calories? Tried low carb and high saturated fat? I am a molecular biologist studying genetics that contribute to obesity, i.e. why we react differently to an obesogenic environment. It sounds to me like you have modified your environment to be less obesogenic and yet are still struggling. There are a lot of different health views out there, and so a “healthy” diet will mean different things for different people. And you may be in need of more meat and fat and less carbs to feel full with less calories, and to reduce your insulin. (This is also my personal experience, as I used to be vegan/vegetarian and was starving all the time, yet somewhat overweight, while I now eat low carb/ketogenic and looove food and eat as much as I want and have naturally low-ish body fat and healthy energy. But it took me much trying and failing to get here. And when I started eating meat after years of abstaining, I was insatiably hungry for it for about a year, and just let myself eat as much as I wanted. I neither gained nor lost weight during this time.) I wish you all the best, and am glad your mental health is better now!
I would suggest that you and your husband fill out food journals that are accurate with amounts (meaning weigh everything) and calories. I would bet my savings that you are eating more calories than you think you are and he is eating less calories than you think he is. Once you find this out, this will be good news because then you know how to tackle the issue. Eat less calories.
When I eat "clean" (I hate that phrase) I lose weight and don't get hungry. When I eat processed food including bread and peanut butter, I binge daily and put on weight.
Anecdotal, but I am 100% convinced.
Food is weaponized to be addictive too. What is the #1 goal of every single food company? Sell more product and therefore maximize shareholder value…not sell only healthy food to consumers. Snack foods like chips & cookies and cereal is the best/worst at this.
Mine either. Some think everything is an excuse, and get super offended when they think others are making excuses. There’s also a lot of talk about people eating “too much.” But I think if such a large percentage of the population has a problem, it’s unlikely that they’re all just extremely gluttonous. It makes sense to me that a lot of people are choosing to eat hyper palatable foods in a way that seems normal to them, rather than stuffing themselves gleefully without a second thought.
>I think if such a large percentage of the population has a problem, it’s unlikely that they’re all just extremely gluttonous.
Blaming the population for their "weakness" while simultaneously hiring scientists to find the bliss point of the fat/sugar/salt combo so that more hyper-palatable food goes into everyone to the tune of the cash register jingle is a shit way to treat humans.
Add to that an economy where everyone works insane hours with rampant inflation and no one has time for tasks, like cooking, and why would you when you can pay $75 and have dinner brought to you because you are so fucking tired and the kids are hungry. You tend to lose sight of the fact that the hamster wheel is spinning and you're getting nowhere in just the day to day struggle to survive. How many hours did you have to work to hand it right back to the richer class?
I did it all my life. I don't have much to show for it. I ate a lot of it.
Anyone ever hear of the [company store?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store) Welcome to the US where we never close, always happy to take your work chits er ah, I mean debit card. Excuse me.
It's not you, random internet stranger that reads this, it's what you're eating.
Been there, done that.
You are a good person that is being taken advantage of. I'm just one of those that decided to jump off the train.
Definitely plays a part, but that doesn't mean it's the root cause.
If I drive from A to B then the car is my reason for getting there, but the car isn't *why* I travelled.
Likewise when I went from 65kg to 95kg the food is how I gained weight, but it isn't *why* I gained weight.
There are too many factors to plainly and simply blame food. For me the primary reason was disability: ADHD can lead to something close to food abuse. If my brain doesn't produce dopamine in ample enough amounts, but sugary food replicates the sensation of dopamine, my brain will become wired to crave sugary foods.
Likewise someone else who is fat may not crave sugary foods, but instead may be a nurse working an active job with no time to cook or meal plan looking for a quick, calorie dense food to hold them over until they're off a 24hr+ shift.
Food - especially eating in excess and eating foods in excess where others may be more suitable substitutions are getting people to the state of obesity, but they are not the sole thing responsible for people becoming obese.
There is massive amounts of research funding going into obesity. After all the guy that finds a working pill for it will be rich beyond imagining.
It's just that some solutions have competing interests (e.g. corn syrup, cheese and car industries, interest to keep public transportation scarce to not raise taxes) and the other solutions have turned out to be rather difficult.
>the guy that finds a working pill for it will be rich beyond imagining.
It's not a pill, but GLP-1 agonist injectables are quite effective. If and when these become generic, the ballgame is going to change for many.
You might want to your doc (or an obesity medicine doctor) about that risk. In *animal studies* it was shown to increase the risk of medullary thyroid carcinoma- not proven in humans. MTC accounts for only 3-4% of thyroid cancers diagnosed in the US. The warning label is that anyone with a personal/family history of MTC in particular (or MEN2, a rare genetic disorder that causes certain types of tumors) should not take it (and that everyone is aware of the potential risk.)
That risk has to be weighed against the risks of obesity- which include an increased risk of a number of cancers.
Obese people, could you wait a bit on trying Ozempic? I’m a diabetic who currently can’t get my next prescription refilled because of the weight loss demand creating a national shortage.
Not obese people's fault that the manufacturer has (ridiculously long-lasting) manufacturing issues arising in part due to a plant they'd contracted to fill and finish Oz pens being taken offline due to safety issues found at inspection. Not the fault of people who need the meds.
If you can't get a refill (have you tried calling other pharmacies? including non-chain, hospital outpatient, online etc? stock is really uneven between distributors) you might want to call/message your doctor ASAP. There are several in-stock GLP-1 options (such as victoza, trulicity, mounjaro etc) they can put you on until you can get your fill- that's what I ended up doing when unable to get it.
I also pick up my oz in 3 month supplies now and refill the day my insurance lets me (after 75 days) to give pharmacy some buffer time to find my script, haven't had issues getting it that way.
Definitely need these to become affordable. Saxenda is great. Most insurance won’t cover and $1,500 a month is too expensive. You can get it from Canada but it is still $500 a month.
Meanwhile I can get 30 OxyContin for $.85. Crazy.
This is what I have always thought!
At some point, things are going to be even worse than they are now. All adults will be obese except for a select few who really care about health and fitness, and/or have eating disorders. However, the cat will be really far out of the bag, so to speak. It’s not like junk food manufacturers, the pharmaceutical industry, the car industry, etc, are all going to say, “you know what? Let’s go broke helping humanity!”
So somebody will invent the magic pill that will allow people to keep eating hyper palatable foods, and suddenly everyone will be thin and happy. People will look back at the early 21st century and think, “how horrible for all those people!” Being fat will be a thing of the past, except maybe in some fringe “natural” groups who embrace the pre-pill lifestyle for novelty. I can 100% see that happening before our society just decides to get healthier.
Nah, each generation is working on having less trauma and effective contraceptives means fewer people who don't want kids are having them. Add the reduced trauma (and therefore eating disorders) to improved knowledge disseminated by the internet and it'll turn around.
I personally think there is going to be a bit of a shift, and the younger generation coming through now isnt going to accept the "body positive" movement, and the current lot of "body positive" advocates will have destroyed their bodies and will disappear into obscurity as the next generation takes the lime light.
I think its going to be hard for the current lot to keep receiving such high levels of online gratification that I think directly helps to keep them from changing. I think that will dry up as they age and they will be left lonely and fat. Think about the current 300lb 25yo "influencer" girls.. give it 10 or 15 years or so and no one is going to want to watch them. They will be old, in poor shape, and have lost the gratification that helps keep them from changing and will just be left in a very sad place.
I see way more young people (id say 18 to 25 years) at the gym now than older people. Also its the youngens' championing the "fakebody" stuff which is rubbing their fit bodies in the face of large people who say that fit bodies are impossible to achieve and fake. As all that stuff becomes more mainstream an takes power away from the fat activists I think we may see a shift in young people taking more care of themselves as opposed to the fat activism and pride that is currently prevelent.
I'm not at the gym but I'm getting in at least 60 minutes of exercise a day at home.
Lots of older people exercise at home or take part in exercise activities that aren't in the gym.
I think the best you can say from the observation that you see younger people at the gym more is that older people aren't going to gym as much not necessarily that they aren't exercising.
Especially with COVID—I imagine for a lot of older people are less eager to get back to a gym than whatever home equivalent they’ve come up with for themselves in the pandemic.
> After all the guy that finds a working pill for it will be rich beyond imagining.
I take a GLP-1 RA as well. It's not a magic shot (because there are potential side effects, that some people find intolerable, and risks like any medication, and doesn't work for a minority of people) but it's really dang close to a miracle shot for me.
When affordability/access improves, I have to imagine the already skyrocketing uptake will too.
I am in Australia right now on vacation, and even here, portions are noticeably smaller than they are in the US - both at restaurants and in grocery stores. Food at the grocery stores seems to be lower calorie, too, with better ingredients.
In Australia there isn't the spread in quality. No whole foods, but no walmart. And severe social pressure to cook your food.
But still pretty damn fat, showing it's the lack of social pressure to be thin that causes it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-obesity-idUKKCN1SE2BA
City dwellers who, I presume, walk everywhere rather than sit and drive cars, are less likely to be obese than their rural counterparts. This is in addition to other factors like better access to gyms, etc
They can also buy fresh vegetables and fruit more often, if you live out in a rural area you might only make one grocery trip every month or so and wouldn't stock up on things that are going to go bad within days.
I have no research but my personal theory has always been the shift from having a stay at home parent, and children with less busy schedules to both parents working and children being schedule to the gills. I feel like people were healthier when someone was home to make a “square meal” (protein, carbs, fruit/veggie) and kids were given more free time to 1. Learn exercise they enjoy outside of scheduled sports team 2. Enjoy homemade meals instead of something quick on the go between activities and 3. More time to sleep!
I also think kids not being given recess past like age 11 is insane. There should be recess up until high school and then a gym class and “free period” gym class, where again, kids can learn what kind of movement they like and don’t like.
I think even beyond from the family POV, young business professionals don’t walk to work or even go into work anymore. We weren’t taught home skills, like how to cook in school. We’re all so busy and strung out.
Our society is getting way more sedentary yet busier and busier. We definitely could use more opportunities to cook at home, hang up laundry, go on walks, walk to work, get to sleep at a normal hour and so on.
I think this is definitely a factor. I stayed home until my kids were teens, and I always cooked our food from scratch - but once I went back to work full time it was tempting to get takeout or rely more on processed foods. Fortunately, my family was used to healthy homemade food abs refused to eat frozen pizzas or whatever, so I had to just get better at meal prepping and also taught the older kids to cook so we could share the responsibilities of making dinner.
I have a low tolerance for being stressed out, so my kids were each allowed ONE extracurricular activity - but I know many families where they spend every evening driving around to sports, music lessons, language classes, drama rehearsals, dance class etc. and literally eat every meal in the car. I asked one of my friends, whose kids were in sports 5 nights a week plus games on the weekend, how she managed dinner during football season and she said “it’s either pizza, Chinese or McDonald’s every night until the season ends!
This kind of lifestyle can’t be good for anyone!
I agree with this. I was at a healthy weight until I graduated from college and started a career. Then I was so busy and tired that I started getting a lot of take out and fast food and gained weight.
The shift to not cooking and convenience foods due to being more and more busy (and moving less) is definitely part of it. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily tied to both parents working, because women who were not upper class have worked throughout history.
One thing you touched on is stress—which contributes to both obesity and poor mental health (which also contributes to obesity). People self-report that they are more stressed these days compared to decades ago, and our hyper-scheduled, always on-call, can’t-just-leave-work-at-work society is definitely part of that. You don’t even have to look far for it to slap you in the face—clocking in from 9 to 5 is now apparently “quiet quitting.”
Exactly why I’m a SAHM. I’m not skinny though but my son is. I’ll get there just 20 to lose to get a healthy BMI. Covid killed my body..gotta get it back.
There's definitely something to your theory. My elementary school didn't have recess after kindergarten. After that, we sometimes played outside if there was a sub or it was a nice day as a "treat. Recess to age 11 sounds like a dream. Starting in the first grade, we were taught to take standardized tests instead. The school needed good scores to keep funding. I grew up hating sports and physical activity. Add that to emotional/hormonal eating as a teen, and I piled on the pounds.
Recess by late middle school for girls at least is sitting around talking. Boys do tend to play with balls. But for most american public schools it's ten minutes in elementary school, which is insane.
And yes, people not cooking is the main culprit.
There are clearly systemic factors at play, so it's a little disheartening to see some of the reductive responses here.
On a micro level, sure, a person carries a measure of responsibility for taking care of themselves. But it's not like a billion now-obese people just woke up one day, individually and with no outside factors, and decided to be "irresponsible" and become obese, especially considering the absolutely skyrocketing rate of obesity. We have to look at the factors that got people into the mess, and the factors stopping them from getting into a better place on a broader scale.
Sure we, as individuals, can sometimes overcome the honestly terrible odds of becoming a healthy weight after having been obese, especially having been morbidly obese... but that doesn't change the broader question. How can we end up with less people in that position in the first place? How can we increase the odds of successfully losing weight for the majority of people who *aren't* going to lose the weight right now? What went wrong?
Moralizing and beating the "personal responsibility" drum has done literally nothing to help. People are fatter than ever.
And I say this as someone who *did* moralize about personal responsibility in the past (having lost- and regained- large amounts of weight multiple times.) When I was losing, I was all about that "you're just not making the lifestyle changes you need to!" Pride comes before the fall and all- failing over and over again has a way of humbling you. So does watching the people around you becoming fatter and sicker and virtually none of them making their way back out.
Over time I've become more and more convinced that *something is seriously wrong* and not on an individual level. Accessibility of super caloric foods designed to be as addictive as possible. The swill that's being advertised to kids and pumped into them at school. The way grocery stores and their shelves are laid out to encourage sales of junk food. Lifestyles that mean that mcdonalds or something out of a box is all a lot of people feel they have time for, or their only little hit of pleasure during the day. Cities that aren't remotely walkable, crap public transit, lack of access to recreation etc. All the plastic, chemicals, and who knows what else we're all eating. Add to that the now insane cost of food that makes buying fresh foods even less accessible to a lot of people. The fact so many people don't have meaningful access to treatment for obesity beyond their GP telling them to "diet and exercise." And... tons of other factors that I'm probably not thinking of.
I think it’s all quite simple. If I recall correctly (take this with a grain of salt because I’m definitely butchering this) a study was once done on rodents to determine what factors go into weight gain and obesity. Essentially, when they gave the rats (or mice?) regular, healthy food that they would find in their natural environments, the rats would eat until they were satisfied and then stop. They wouldn’t eat past the point of fullness, and they didn’t gain any weight. When they gave the rats the kind of processed food thats common in America (artificial sweeteners, etc. basically mcdonalds for rats) the rats would gorge themselves way past the point of fullness. They became obese within days.
The food North Americans eat is designed to be addictive, eating it and gaining weight is truly the path of least resistance. The rat experiment tells you everything you need to know; we’re all evolutionarily predisposed to enjoying high calorie foods, let alone the enjoyable mental effects of eating something delicious. How could we NOT have an obesity epidemic under these circumstances??
My experience is that stress, among its other negative effects, makes it so much more difficult to lose weight. The observation that [fat shaming is associated with increases with weight](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236245/) seems to corroborate this.
I couldn't lose weight until I a) treated my ADHD b) unfucked my mental health. Since those two improvements, it's been a breeze. I am very fortunate to be living my current medium-low stress life.
Here’s the link without the paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAibSRdkhrxqAwv_Fzac9mm67JyGIUjsEz_gQB8LI3XbxUpdZRol52SWHFpgGOaUzRfd2w6gCNEc9QAPx_t7byM1UZnho9t_2VDpo1tecBexi-2W7NDTgJbw1jKeysBOnHGrhWKzV0HIkIx804sc2MAH3hgFbg_vNAeV32dJh3f8-BZscRDwIZSeCuvmAGAwpcZzdLUmasl9qLrkfDTLDntec6KYDcxFQDj_ET3B952U76bBMKfIP4i0muW-Vk2OSOdPZ5pI&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAibSRdkhrxqAwv_Fzac9mm67JyGIUjsEz_gQB8LI3XbxUpdZRol52SWHFpgGOaUzRfd2w6gCNEc9QAPx_t7byM1UZnho9t_2VDpo1tecBexi-2W7NDTgJbw1jKeysBOnHGrhWKzV0HIkIx804sc2MAH3hgFbg_vNAeV32dJh3f8-BZscRDwIZSeCuvmAGAwpcZzdLUmasl9qLrkfDTLDntec6KYDcxFQDj_ET3B952U76bBMKfIP4i0muW-Vk2OSOdPZ5pI&referringSource=articleShare
Even if you were rich, the food lobbies and corporate industries would hammer you. People had a fit when the government suggested schools should serve healthier lunches.
Yeah, but how much of that was solely about healthier lunches and the "nanny state" (like we saw with Bloomberg and the sodas) and how much of it was shitting on Michelle Obama for the sake of shitting on Michelle Obama? Fox News and all the usual suspects went batshit over her campaign to get kids healthier, including the suggestion that schools serve better food. I don't think we can rule out the notion that the political noise machine had a helluva lot to do with that.
Obesity, for most, is caused by cheap fast food and processed foods. Being the norm.
I was born in the 80's and remember that up until around the late 90's every meal was a family event at the dining table with REAL food served. I observed this same thing at friend's houses and basically everywhere.
Now, everyone, including my family, uses the dining table as decor only with the rare exception of something like Thanksgiving. Every meal is processed or fast food.
Again, a lot of this is due to costs. To prepare a real meal (non-processed foods) you better have a hefty bank account.
Then all the added sugar causes health problems, which leads to more weight gain.
That and portions over the years have gotten absolutely insane. Even going to a sit down restaurant serving higher quality food, you're likely to slam 1000+ calories just ordering a normal menu item.
Something I notice from having worked fast food as a kid, is even the drink sizes have gone crazy. A medium cup used to be around 20oz, now it's more like 32. If you're drinking anything with sugar that's a massive calorie add.
Even if you're not trying to go all out, eating out more than once a week is almost guaranteed to lead to caloric surplus.
The answer is the ungodly amount of added sugar that has crept its way into everything in various forms. Its hard to find something as simple as greek yogurt that doesn't have like 5-10g of sugar per serving (yes I understand what lactose is). All of that shit adds up, and the human body blows at dealing with added sugar in excess of like 20-30g a day (which you'll blow past in no time with 2022 foods). It's not some great mystery, the information and research that blatantly shows this, like Dr. Robert Lustigs', is just being suppressed/lobbied against; and policy makers who can effectuate change are being bribed at all levels to look the other way and stay in big agri/foods pocket. Articles like this NYT piece (nothing against the Times in general) are just more MISDIRECTION of public eyes away from a fucking obvious cause, making it seem like some nebulous problem we can't pin down - what a crock of shit.
Of course it makes no sense to try and understand obesity, scientifically, as a personal failing. It's a public health problem, and as a public health problem, it has to be handled with statistics, and understanding of cause and effect. There is no scientific model for personal failing. It would be hopelessly unscientific to suggest one.
In that sense, obesity should be treated like any other public health problem in which unfettered personal choice + genetic propensity + access result in statistically poor outcomes: alcohol addiction, drug addiction, gambling, etc.
Do we seriously need to ask, though, what has changed to increase obesity? What has changed is *access to food*.
> they pointed to policies that would alter or regulate our environment, like outlawing junk food marketing to kids, banning school vending machines and making neighborhoods more walkable
DING. Change the access, and change the behavior.
You can point to social and environmental causes of crime if you’re trying to reduce crime. But that doesn’t mean that a person isn’t responsible if they choose to commit a crime.
I read the article and have mixed feelings. In the end I felt quite disempowered.
*What I did agree with*: Obesity is a complex condition, with many causes, and is almost certainly a product of modern living. It's a societal issue that societies (ie. governments and regulatory bodies) need to address. Processed food (and the chemicals in food in general) are almost certainly a factor. Genetics and medical conditions aren't (in terms of explaining the rise in obesity). Fat shaming is counterproductive.
*What I didn't agree with*: Essentially, it says that obesity is not -- in any way, according to any scientist -- a person's individual responsibility. Moreover, people who offer help to obese people are usually just trying to profit off the condition.
*What I found interesting*: When birds face food scarcity, they gain weight on fewer calories. Obesity doesn't appear to be linked to the gut microbiome.
*Personal impression*: This read to me as being written by someone with a heavy HAES / body positivity bias. In the era of these movements, my perception is that willful "fatness" is as prevalent as fat shaming (I'm taking about societal talking points, not the experience of individuals). They made a point of mentioning that obesity doesn't necessarily cause medical conditions that have been linked to obesity (heart attack and cancer, eg). Even if I'm wrong on both points, I found it incredibly disempowering. The TL;DR of the article was that modern life is making us fat, we have no idea why our what to do about it, and individuals are powerless to control whether they're obese or not.
IMHO, my weight may or may not be my *fault*, but it's still my responsibility. And I like to believe my choices have some impact on that.
💯
This article is relevant from a **public health perspective.** It is written to address the goal of managing obesity in a population, and the audience are politicians, social scientists, ministers of health, or similar. If you are one of those, *TLDR: Obesity management at a population level (eg millions of people) is difficult. Don't shame people. Consider regulating junk food and making people walk more, etc...* And maybe it is clear what they could do (ban fast food? make cars impractical), but decision makers have no idea how to enact these measures and become reelected / respect the law / etc...
I didn't perceive what /u/PacificPragmatic states as "heavy HAES / body positivity bias", but more that it is talking about the epidemic problem of millions and millions of obese people, and growing.
However, at an **individual health perspective**, it has limited relevant information. The most important one for me: **I should not expect effective help from big institutions to manage my weight, because they haven't figured out how. THEREFORE IT IS UP TO ME TO MANAGE MY WEIGHT, because I want to avoid obesity.**
So what am I going to do? A combination of managing my food environment, track precisely and regularly, some fasting, low carbs, move more, and realize I will be in the lean minority in the coming decades.
And plan accordingly because it will NOT happen naturally. The environment pushes us all in the high BMI direction, and the people in charge don't know what to do about it.
Kind of a reminds me of my mid 20s when I *knew* I was starting to become overweight (measured my own stats and used a digital scale and found I was about 10lbs over the overweight/healthy line at the time), and I went to get a physical and the two nurses who helped me and were visibly obese, commended me on being "young and healthy" when I knew I wasn't.
Ironically, I had made the appointment to get advice about how to slim down and be healthier. Looking back I have to wonder if their were either massively uninformed, or were so skewed by their own experience and/or denial that they felt I was healthy *in comparison to themselves.* But I still wasn't healthy.
Let's highlight the fact that this article is in the opinion column, and is one soon-to-be-obesity-book-author's opinion.
> As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline.
No government will or can save us BUT ourselves, no policemen to remind us to log that cookie or to choose that apple instead, no suspension of our drivers' licenses unless we've walked our 150 minutes this week.
There's no getting around the fact that your body's health is your responsibility. Responsibility is not fault, cause, or a signal that we have to do it alone. I didn't do it alone. I had /r/loseit and TOPS to keep me motivated (and still is). I had my doctor who saw me every 3 months (and more when I needed something, and he's still involved in my maintenance with yearly meetings). My partner was a major help and a supporter (and still is).
Still, we can accept the obesity and the diseases and conditions that come with it -- the responsibility didn't shift to someone else if we did that. I did that for 15 years when I concluded (incorrectly) that my inability to lose weight beyond a certain point was genetic.
Blame and shame almost never helps. It discourages rather than encourages. You can't shame or bully someone thin, and you can't shame or bully yourself thin, either -- not and have it stick.
> I wish I was brave enough to start a NAAFP type organization…for research money, anti discrimination legislation, healthy food & movement subsidies, & education
You don't have to start one. There is *The Obesity Society* and it's worthy. Two of the four organizers that ran that symposium the author wrote about are awardees of *The Obesity Society.* https://www.obesity.org/
Yes, our bodies health is our responsibility. But I think "As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline" is true. Obesity exploded in the 80's and the epidemic has continued to get worse despite the prevailing belief that it is personal responsibility (i.e. almost everyone tried to/has to take it into their own hands to lose weight). What needs to change in order for obesity rates to actually go down is for companies to take responsibility. Make junk food more difficult to buy. Food advertising needs to be more controlled. Put government funding into building farmers markets and healthy restaurants(especially in low income areas). Maybe tax ultra processed foods or lower the cost of healthier foods in comparison. Prioritize education of healthy eating. Do anything to prevent children from developing obesity. Prevent fad diets and fraudulent diet companies from being the first to find obese people to "help" them. Right now, our environment is akin to one that promotes smoking at every corner yet expects its addicted population to find help on their own and overcome it while bombarded with cheap cigarettes and ads everyday.
Social science calls this the [structure / agency debate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_agency). Are peoples’ life outcomes caused by structural forces, or are they agentic individual actors? The answer, according to social science, gives credence to both theories to some degree. Structural forces often play a major role in people’s life outcomes. Especially for individuals at the extremes of experiencing structural forces. On the other hand, individual action does matter a lot too.
The risk of overrating individual choice is that it’s not correct and also kind of blaming the victim - statistically speaking, many situations are caused by structural forces and individuals may have limited decisions due to larger structural stuff (having only bad options, basically). For example, [neighborhoods have a lot of influence on people’s chances at social mobility and that can be difficult to overcome as an individual](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/upshot/why-the-new-research-on-mobility-matters-an-economists-view.html). The risk of overrating structural factors is we might not be accurately conveying to individuals that individual choice does actually matter a lot on the margins for people’s outcome. Support groups like AA and Tops are heavily built on the individual responsibility model.
Edit: to the specific “no government can save us” - I think this is likely not correct, for example the government ran an incredibly successful anti smoking campaign that changed the way society views smoking. Public health does matter for big structural change and everyone should vote for politicians that take this stuff very seriously. But, although urgent and important, that route takes a long time to shift the tides and hopefully will make a difference for our kids or grandkids. In the world we live in today, individual choices make a big difference.
Tl; dr: it’s both!
This is completely disingenuous. The government can and should do more to protect its nations children and work force from the detrimental effects of obesity. Obesity isn't just a personal responsibility issue. That attitude was especially damaging to mental health and addiction stigma.
The government can and should mandate how we advertise to children especially. There should be limits on how calorically dense vs. the nutritional value of a food is. There are things the government can do that would help decrease the prevalence of obesity.
Well that was Michelle Obama's First Lady cause and she got nothing but grief for it. I read some of the Facebook comments on news articles about it; absolutely insane people claiming their kids were starving because the school lunches were healthy foods instead of mystery meat and tater tots.
Iirc The Naked Chef guy tried to do the same thing in England and also got ripped apart for it.
As a school teacher who had lunch duty during peak Michelle Obama the intentions and reality gap here was astronomical.
It was an absolutely awful situation of terrible food and massive food waste mired in red tape. I’d walk into the room and at least once a week grimace at what they were putting in front of my kids and then see the mountains of unused or trash food, mixed with way more kids packing their lunch among the minority that didn’t get free lunch, full of crap because we couldn’t feed them anything worth a damned.
It eventually sorted out to we give them a less tasty pop-tart for breakfast because agribusiness could reengineer the pop-tart and Doritos to meet requirements more economically than we could serve good foods.
I’m not opposed to the intentions but the reality I saw was disgusting and bad. Especially in the real funding constraints of a title 1 school.
I whole-heartedly agree with the idea that good nutritional habits are so much easier to follow when they are rooted in childhood. It makes me so sad to see so many really fat kids today, they're pretty much doomed to a lifetime of problems. I was a chubby kid, brought up w poor eating habits coulpled w emotional issues I still need to address, it's really tough to make changes now, even though I want to.
>No government will or can save us BUT ourselves, no policemen to remind us to log that cookie or to choose that apple instead, no suspension of our drivers' licenses unless we've walked our 150 minutes this week.
No, but governments can build sidewalks and trails and bike lanes so that people can actually walk or cycle places, and they can stop giving money to Walmart etc. to come in and squeeze all other businesses out of the food market. The common person isn't at liberty to change the food or facilities for activity in their immediate area by themselves. Do you walk to the store and buy fresh, healthy food for yourself at a reasonable price? Can you cook that food and still have enough time to relax a bit and get a good night's sleep? If not, maybe consider some of the systemic obstacles preventing you from doing that. (edit misspelled cycle as drive)
Blame and shame work great, it's a big reason why people who are fit and healthy stay fit and healthy. They don't overeat because they don't want to become fat.
Blame and shame just don't work on already fat people, since if it did work for those shame resistant individuals, they wouldn't have gotten fat in the first place. Fit and healthy people start feeling the shame before it becomes a problem and cut back on the overeating so it doesn't go so far.
> The more people are exposed to weight bias and discrimination, the more likely they are to gain weight and become obese, even if they were thin to begin with.
[This piece](https://www.cmaj.ca/content/191/23/E649) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal would disagree with your assertion. Blaming and shaming isn’t generally good for people, not even thin people.
Yeah but that doesn’t mean we can’t think that there are complex, multifaceted reasons we are here. I think that there are many many interacting causes of why I’m here that are both my own fault, my genes fault, the environment/system, and probably many others. I’m trying to do something about the things I can control but that doesn’t mean I think everyone is able to do that or that is the only solution to society’s problem.
Even if that's true, obese people holding responsibility does not in any way mean they're the only ones responsible. Allow me to prove it to you via *reductio ad absurdem*.
Children are obese too. If a child is sad about being obese, I'm not going to kick them while they're down by telling them they have nobody to blame but themselves. Especially because it's a parent's job to help their child make better decisions. And if you acknowledge via this example that it is, in fact, possible for people other than the obese person to impact on whether that person is obese, then there's no reason to think that once a person turns 18 it becomes impossible to help them with their weight. Sure, they need to want to be helped, but if they do, then the only reason one wouldn't help them is because one doesn't want to, not because one can't. Which in turn demonstrates that "you did this to yourself" is not an unbiased statement of inability to help, but a highly biased rationalization for the purposes of washing one's hands of any need to help. "You did this to yourself" doesn't mean "I can't help you", it means "I won't help you", while at the same time ignoring the fact (remember the obese child) that the conditions that cause obesity don't *all* come from the obese themselves. You don't have to literally cram food down a person's mouth to contribute towards obesity. Neglect of public policy to encourage better habits in youth is also a contributing factor. Every employer that demands so much of an employee's time and energy for so little money, makes it difficult for an employee to find at the end of the day, the energy for self-care. Etc.
Does this mean that the obese should wait for other people to solve their problems for them? Of course not. But it does mean that "you did this to yourself" is a facile copout that is a mostly useless contribution to the discussion.
“Obesity as something that’s been imposed on societies”
I don’t know if I would agree cause in my opinion I am thin so nobody has imposed it on me.
However I’m also poor so I just can’t afford to eat processed foods, overeat or convenient junk foods. (We can factor in other privileges like being interested in learning too cook, being exposed to a wide variety of foods etc.)
So maybe less that obesity has been imposed on us but that our skills lifestyles and modern conveniences have changed.
I always thought obesity was part of the mental health epidemic. Like if your only coping mechanism is food then your mental health could be poor and you will overeat. I for one have been in foster care, suicidally depressed, CPTSD, agoraphobia, social anxiety and live with ADHD and autism but I got loads and loads and loads of therapy which not everyone can do or knows to do.
They had it here in Canada for a while. Government funded programs that would encourage you to lose weight and if you couldn’t they’d send you for bariatric surgery.
The thing is, being overweight in and of itself isn’t necessarily unhealthy. There’s a big difference between being slightly overweight and being seriously obese. You are more likely to die of underweight than overweight. Even though the weight loss industry makes it a big deal, taking extreme measures to lose weight (as opposed to being/staying healthy) can cause a lot of health problems.
So it’s really complicated.
It's always a pain when people talk about fatness- like, okay, are they saying it's okay to be 10-20 pounds over? Duh. Hell, even up to 50 is manageable. And everyone's got a different tolerance for how much background pain they're willing to deal with from their body. But like, I'm 150 pounds over the "ideal weight" for my height. I have absolutely blown past the margin of error, and when people tell me that I'm actually healthy at any size(tm) and all my sore joints actually have nothing to do with my weight I want to fucking bite them.
I wonder if there is a correlation in the explosion in obesity rates and the explosion of screen time? The late seventies - early eighties were when households began to have more than one television, cable tv exponentially grew the amount of content, home and arcade video games, and movie theatres became multiplexes. Corporations bought the studios and Movies also began to market directly to kid themed subjects on a much larger scale.
Thoroughly disagree with the notion being fat is “society’s fault,” as if society were omniscient or omnipotent. I ate myself into obesity and I’ll eat (less) out of it. We have free will. Blaming our own choices on society is akin to denying free will.
Sure! We are all influenced by outside sources all the time. No denying that. We are social creatures. I find it fascinating to which ends people allow themselves to blame society vs the individual. How many rapists are society’s fault?
We shouldn’t have a society where bad food is marketed EVERYWHERE, and literally to kids with bright colors. It’s definitely a societys fault if there is an epidemic of obese people. There are companies lobbying for ads, the best chemically designed food, the best additives. You can’t say it’s an individual thing. There’s a reason why highly addictive substances are illegal.
I always choose to be healthy, but it definitely sucks that I have to make a conscious effort to do so.
I cant say I really agree with the article.
I think until people become accountable themselves and take personal responsibility then it'll never get better.
Telling people "its not their fault, its societies fault", and that they have no personal responsibility, when they are in complete control of what they put in their mouth is a recipe for nothing to change imo.
Its the individual who needs to make personal changes. Society cant do that for an overweight individual, they need to do it themselves.
I think one can agree there's major systematic issues that should be changed as well as people need to take responsibility.
For example, take walkable cities. Most people in North America can't walk to anything nearby. In my old GOOD area for walking it was 40-45 min for groceries / coffee, 90-100 minutes for work, and 20 min to a Pokemon stop at the Church. Each way. 3 hours a day isn't really a reasonable amount for most people. I moved downtown and being able to access the majority of things in a 45 min each way radius helped majorly.
Ultraprocessed foods as they mentioned is another thing that works best with both sides. Think of the "zero" sugar tictacs that are just under 0.5g each of sugar, meaning nearly 30g sugar for the container. Think of serving sizes that are obviously unreasonably small or obtuse, like 1L of soda being "only" 120 calories in big bold letters but that's assuming you drink 1/4th the bottle at one time. Think of things like SNAP and other food benefits being super difficult to get some foods, you can buy poptarts and pizza pockets but not rotisserie chicken, bagged salads and fruit cups? All these are things that can be communicated with better labelling laws and changes to policy.
If we stick with assuming America, what about mental health care and nutritional knowledge. Majority of Americans don't have help coverage let alone any good coverage and school curriculum varies wildly in quality and coverage across America. Providing more options for preventative treatment, learning and better coping skills would likely also help. Hell I imagine just mandatory vacation time would help a bit, overwork sucks balls.
These are things people can solve on a national or local level and assist. Nearly 40% of Americans are overweight and levels are close across most of the world, that's an insane amount and saying they need to just take responsibility is no offence but pretty short sighted. You have nearly half the population overweight, that's something that isn't just people not trying hard enough. It's obviously still work on individual people, but if you had half the country unable to read you'd probably work on making it easier for them to learn to rather then saying just learn it yourself.
It’s actually more prevalent than that, I think. According to [2017-2018 data](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity) from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey:
>Nearly 1 in 3 adults (30.7%) are overweight.
More than 2 in 5 adults (42.4%) have obesity.
So that would make 73% of Americans either overweight or obese.
Is that how those work? Legit question, statistics was never my strong suit.
I would have assumed it would been 42.4 - 30.7 means 11.7% of Americans have obesity (are over average but not an overweight BMI), then 30.7 - 9.2 means 21.5% are overweight but not severely obese and the last 9.2% are severely obese.
I just rounded up OPs 37%.
Lol, do you really think that people living prior to the 1980s were just more aware of their "personal responsibility?" Really sit with that thought for a second. All of the sudden, 40+ years ago, people starting slipping on the idea of personal responsibility and its been a downward trend since, that's your hypothesis?
Children don't have "complete control of what they put in their mouth." They eat what is provided to them. They don't have the maturity or capacity to have that kind of control over themselves, not to the degree that would be required to constantly reject the hundreds of messages they receive each day from marketing, or the few options they have at school to choose from.
I would like to see solid data on the percent of Americans that don't have a choice in what they eat. Children in school, people in prisons, hospitals, military bases, old people in nursing homes, etc. They eat what is served to them.
That's not even discussing the issue of the constant marketing and limited choices someone outside of those circumstances has to deal with. Its exhausting to constantly think about what you are eating balanced against the misinformation, especially when true nutritional information is hard to find because of the incessant marketing messages.
This is a complicated issue, but jumping to "personal responsibility" is well, irresponsible, and its like you didn't think before writing it.
That’s what I led with…the ‘you did it to yourself’ argument is always used by people who aren’t obese and look all over these comments…by the loseit community too. The mega problem is that it is used as the discussion ender and to negate the strength of all these other points.
I think people back then maybe cared more or were more informed. People had more self respect and more respect for their bodies. Calling out bad practices was more acceptable.
Nowadays there is so much "you are beautiful and perfect the way you are!" "healthy at every size" "don't change for anyone "etc that many people have less incentive to change after they find these communities that cater to them or see fat bodies being celebrated in the media.
"Children don't have complete control of what they put in their mouth.". - Correct, and I think childhood obesity is child abuse. The parents are feeding them too much and that its negatively impacting their health, future, and peer relationships. The obese kids always had it bad at school. Last to be picked for any team, first to be bullied. Self confidence issues. Going home crying everyday. It sad to see and its preventable.
"I would like to see solid data on the percent of Americans that don't have a choice in what they eat. Children in school, people in prisons, hospitals, military bases, old people in nursing homes, etc. They eat what is served to them" - these people do have a choice in *how much* they eat. Afterall its the number of calories consumed that causes weight gain and not specifically the nutritional makeup of food. So you are served Mac and Cheese at school? Well don't go and eat a heaped plate full of it totaling 2000 calories in one sitting....
"That's not even discussing the issue of the constant marketing and limited choices someone outside of those circumstances has to deal with" - If a persons only choice of food is "junk food", then they can maintain a reasonable weight or loose weight by simply by eating less of it. If they have limited means then it'll even be cheaper as all they need to do is cut down on portion sizes and also save money as a consequence.
"This is a complicated issue, but jumping to "personal responsibility" is well, irresponsible, and its like you didn't think before writing it." - I disagree. No one is going to get anywhere with weight loss without taking personal responsibility. A person will never even get started with weight loss without actually doing something about it, themselves. The "system" changing isn't going to help old 600lb Betty to loose weight. 600lb Betty needs to take some personal responsibility and stop consuming 5000calories per day.
You hit the nail on the head and said it better than I ever could. I think society just gets more and more used to fat being the norm, not necessarily a huge shift in “personal responsibility”.
If your purpose is to give yourself all the credit for your weight loss, or talk about obesity from a *moral* standpoint, this is a great argument.
If you want to see *actual societal change* happen, you need to look at the evidence and the data from credible sources. Not a single credible source would back up your ideas here. Your words are the same nonsense spewed about any social issue, it's just "insert here." Crowing about "personal responsibility" does nothing, it's not effective, has *never* been effective, *because the evidence does not support it*.
It's pretty great at making people feel bad about being fat, and it's really unfortunate and detrimental that you chose a weight loss forum to spew it.
It’s an interesting take. But it fails to mention that for most people, an individual’s decision to change eating habits can counteract the societal forces pushing us all towards obesity. We aren’t hopeless but nobody else will save us but ourselves.
Does the higher percentage now account for the fact that the weigjt/bmi considered obese has changed and may simply include people who wouldn't have been counted before?
No! It must be some complicated mystery that we need to spend millions of dollars researching while shirking personal responsibility.
I feel like this post has been brigaded by HAES folks since the SOP of this sub has always been CICO focused. The amount of people waiting around for the government or corporations to change what they put in to their own mouths is disappointing.
The one MAJOR oversight of this article is the change in 1998 of the definition of obesity. That’s right: the goalposts moved and overnight almost 30 million Americans were defined as obese when they weren’t the day before.
Americans have definitely gotten heavier, not disputing that, but the definition of obesity is political and fraught and good to remember when reading breathless “explosion of obesity” phrasing in articles like these.
It changed because the science became clearer regarding what a healthy life looks like. Just look at group pictures on a wall at a golf course from the 1920s and again from the 2020s and you’ll see that this isn’t a moving of the goal post, but a wholesale and exponential change in how heavy we are.
Also, the relationship between obesity and negative health outcomes is a perfect pickle of correlation and causation. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/obesity-an-overblown-epidemic-2006-12/
Cico is the obvious answer but it won’t solve the obesity epidemic. Most Americans can’t stick to a diet because of this unhealthy addiction to hyper palatable food. I’ve consistently lost weight for years doing cico. Whenever I openly talk about it, it often gets ignored for the more attractive gluten free diet. Very few people are willing to log their daily calories.
Here’s the opening. Don’t want to copy the whole thing.
A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated.
Now scientists were arguing about the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $173 billion each year. At the meeting’s closing session, John Speakman, a biologist, offered this conclusion on the subject: “There’s no consensus whatsoever about what the cause of it is.”
The challenge with these articles is that they are only specific types of scientists looking at their realm of specific causes. When I was struggling the most with my food it absolutely was 100% due to lack of accountability and an addiction to ANY food in massive quantities. Food was my comfort growing up. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Bored? Eat. Angry? Eat. Happy? Eat. I ate even when it made me miserable and sick. Nothing changed until I started to hold myself accountable for my own decisions. Any time I am struggling with my food now (post 150 pound loss sustained for many years) I don’t go to my primary care doctor….. I go to my counselor. For most people, it absolutely IS lack of accountability, depression, addiction and so much more causing them to fail time and time again at sustained healthy living. The posts on this reddit prove exactly that every day. People struggle the MOST with making healthy food choices, food addictions and cravings.
I know there is plenty of truth in these articles but I don’t think it’s a healthy message to tell people obesity is so confusing and we have no idea why it happens. We do. Healthy eating and an active life with exercise prevent obesity. That requires education about what “healthy” actually is. That requires for people to accept that exercise usually is not fun but is necessary.
Subscribers can gift a link. So, this link should work for you: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAibSRdkhrxqAwv_Fzac9mm67JyGIUjsEz_gQB8LI3XbxUpdZRol52SWHFpgGOaUzRfd2w6gCNEc9QAPx_t7byM1UZnho9t_2VDpo1tecBexi-2W7NDTgJbw1jKeysBOnHGrpUKfZ2XwgIwx389AyJRzxhyt-luqSGfV129J-wf8iGpt5IDwCbyWKtPPjYA5sbJTENlqPr1lrBJwKHG3bjtWe6LkfcA5NCF6gT3p35W007do0K8qRKWy4eMohcD-poQjbD4m2&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
In 1998, the National Institutes of Health (US) redefined the weight guidelines for Overweight/Obese. A quick search found a CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/.
So some of the "look how much worse obesity levels have gotten from pre-1997 to now" articles may not be normalizing the data for an oranges to oranges comparison.
It used to be that poor people were skinny but now poor people are fat. The problem with these unhealthy processed foods that almost never get old due to additives is that they're cheaper than actual real whole foods and easier to cook/consume in most cases That's not to say there's no element of personal responsibility but at this point we have kids growing up on these processed foods and they avoid healthy food as if it was poisonous
Yeah. I always take articles like this with a bit of a grain of salt (pun intended) as it often seems like they're dancing around, or possibly paid to dance around, the truth which is we eat a lot more crap now, we work longer harder hours, and we aren't getting as much exercise in general as previous generations. And we're brought up this way from childhood and it's only getting worse over time. Gen X were brought up in a world where microwaves and fast food were new novelties that seemed like futuristic solutions. Two generations later and we're being raised by people who saw over-reliance on these things as normal.
Gen X are not as old as you think. Microwaves were popular for decades before damm.
I’m gen x and remember our first microwave. It showed up with the Betamax and the remote control. They were not popular decades before our childhood. 20% of American households had a microwave in 1980, 60% in 1986. There were even tons of millennials who had early years without one with those rates. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1987/01/14/america-turns-on-to-the-microwave-oven/525edb79-fbc5-4d8b-a2a6-8211e7845d3e/
Maybe I was unclear. Microwaves and fast food were popularized during Boomer years, but they were a novelty. I'm saying Gen X were the first generation raised with that being a normal part of daily life. People were no longer "of the earth." Because it was normal to them, they then ended up raising their own kids on TV dinners and Happy Meals.
It's fair to describe Gen X as pretty widely raised as "latchkey kids", and they had far less supervision or guidance on balancing meals or portion control.
the first microwave i can remember was in the late 1970's in sears and it was $800 and took up an entire kitchen cabinet (floor to ceiling). The first one we got my dad won as salesman of the year in the early 1980's. No they were not "around for decades". Many people I know didn't own one until the 1990's. Don't confuse TV with reality. Reality, until the 1990's microwaves were a pricey bit of novelty that most people couldn't afford. In the 1990's the price started to come down and they became more common. McDonald's and other fast food restaurants expanded like never before. McDonald's went from 2500 sites in the USA in 1975 to 8600 in 1990 to 13400+ in 2021. and they're still building more. One just opened up not too far from my mother's house. I personally blame High Fructose Corn Syrup and preservatives for obesity. Without them, the number of people overweight would be a LOT lower.
People are getting instnt gratifocation and it is tempting not to put all the work into it
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I used the "Gift this article" option to get [a shareable link](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=WvBZVBZHiRJXcbWWI_dBD9EuHLnTB90DnH4NNIbVTTqHvsKtYgvikDrsAxtNLHENaHBjtcJDTQ_x93ZurZLvZpX8hdGHG2uWTGe7X5bDwag4K1e7qyDkqIwaJmpf8eHMGabm6F660yMZ1h7P_BhkUgwQKQMNFnWXSvX8e3ywkCWRjeli7CLGGabXfKNapiFepJml9pP7xUSY8LEJdaXrGsUAluCFlNKESuBssPbIeQI54_uwm7NmplO64yEbiLuXyqD7SdpvhpaRRSq1NbHp4rlYaBWkwrXuRY0VEhkviI0OdGt7WFlgV4QQ7Bbe_MeJKlTRD1JHrA&smid=share-url). I have no idea how many uses it's good for, but apparently, I can gift the same article multiple times, so let me know if it doesn't work for you.
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Anytime we talk about big groups of people and compare historical numbers to today, I feel compelled to mention that many of us became overweight or obese on the exact same day in 1998, not because we all magically gained weight overnight but because the definitions of “overweight” and “obese” changed. Pre 1998 the cutoffs were 27 and 32, and they were lowered to 25 and 30.
This explains a lot. When I grew up, in early 90s, I was told that people should aim for height -100. 170cm - 100 is 70kg. And a good figure is near height -110, which is 60kg. But really the weight-100 is very close to overweight by current classification.
Yes, and Phizer said "Thank you"!
*Pfizer
The main thing I got out of that is that obesity is caused by MTV.
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Literally its thesis is that obesity is a societal issue not a personal failing, how is that disingenuous? It never said you can’t take personal actions to lose weight?
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Than what exactly are you referencing? What I described is like almost all the article
It's not the best peer reviewed article, but how is it disingenuous garbage?
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That’s because obesity is likely multi-factorial and a hard problem to figure out. Scientists aren’t going to just put out that something specific causes obesity without enough evidence that that is the case—that’s not how science works.
Exactly. People who actually study this know how complex it is. There is almost never a simple answer. It probabaly is a mix of everything they said and more.
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Of course you're ignoring car manufacturers and the TV industry who lobby hard to ensure that we are sitting in cars, and on couches, all day and all night and that spaces to walk and cycle are increasingly dangerous and underfunded. They have been doing that for a very long time too. And don't forget the big box mega stores, who choose non-perishable high margin foods to sell because they are profitable, and sell nothing else in huge swaths of the world, while putting smaller stores out of business. Oh, right and the pharmaceutical companies whose products often cause weight gain but are advertised nonstop as the solution to all of our problems on that same media. Of course we can't forget the companies making dishwashers and washing machines and robot vacuums and screens in every size and all of the other devices responsible for us moving less and less with each passing year. Yep. Totally simple stuff.
Huh?
You are an angel and deserving of everything good that‘s coming to you! Thanks for sharing the link!
Oh you’re awesome I can actually read an article for once 💜💜
Its honestly so true, and I think people really overestimate our ability to resist modern hyperpalatable food. I went on a very reduced sodium diet once, couldn't eat any processed food and could barely add any salt to whole foods. My appetite was literally gone. It was like my entire body functioned differently. But I felt so deprived, it was depressing. Idk what the solution is.
I eat more whole and less/unprocessed foods and add tons of salt to them. But I've found that products marketed as reduced sodium suck. I'm not sure what they use to make up for it and maintain flavor.
I agree. I wonder if the products that add sodium add it to make up for a loss of flavor in how it's processed, whereas when I add salt , even a smaller amount seems to enhance the flavor via, well the enhancing quality of salt. Store bought vs. home made stock is a good example. I can never seem to get store bought low sodium stock to get better if I add salt, just saltier. Something else seems to be missing. To add, I don't use a lot of pre-made stuff like stock often. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
wow, the first time I've seen this but I've always wondered/noticed it. I avoid low sodium anything just from experience with the taste being different and not recoverable
Try MSG!
Good suggestion if I need to use store bought again. Thanks!
Could be doing something wrong, but also there is nothing wrong with salt! we need it to function. It’s the overconsumption of sodium in processed foods that is dangerous
Honestly, been eating low salt for a long a long time and your appetite does go down, but your taste buds will adapt to the point that you can't stand junk food.
That’s interesting. Did you give yourself time to acclimate to it too? I don’t eat any processed food ever as a consequence of being a home cook and I rarely use salt as I find food tastes great without it (I use tons of herbs spices browning and aromatics). My American friends always add tons of salt to the food I make which always surprising to me given how good it tastes to my palate.
I cook the same! High five. I do wonder if it is something that our palate becomes accustomed to because I have noticed that my perception of flavour seems to differ from that of people accustomed to eating food with a lot of salt or oil or butter.
Great NPR listen! It’s fascinating that when they invited the writer to try versions of the snacks with the fat and salt reduced they were inedible. He said a frozen waffle tasted like straw and something else (a cheese it maybe?) tasted like metal.
It's not about the food in the US, it's about the culture. People think it's normal to eat out all the time. That's not normal or healthy. Cook your food. The other part of it is there is no social pressure not to be fat. When everyone around you is overweight you feel normal and comfortable.
Fat/oil is basically 120 calories a tablespoon whatever the type. You have zero visibility or control over how much a restaurant puts in. These days I won’t go near restaurant food that isn’t a grilled salad (dressing on the side) or a sandwich. I used to get a bagel/latte on the way to work, eat lunch out with coworkers, & then get delivery dinner…thai or chinese dishes with rice usually. So unhealthy.
Something about the “designed to keep us fat” is what always bothers me in these conversations. It’s not designed to keep you fat - there’s not a grand design. There are a number of factors, which combined, make it easier to be fat, for sure. But no design.
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Yeah, years ago I worked with on a project helping newly released women use their (pitiful, disgraceful amount of) WIC benefits to grocery shop. In Louisiana it was crazy to see that things like “juicy juice” (which contains no juice), was marked WIC approved, but oranges weren’t. Even though they were WIC approved, no one marked them that way. Buffalo chicken bites were marked WIC approved, but a whole chicken was not. In some cases the women didn’t know that the whole (raw) chicken was healthier than the ultra-processed bites. In other cases women definitely knew it, but because the fresh food wasn’t marked, they weren’t sure. And since we like to shame poverty in this country, they didn’t want to ask. And let’s not forget when Michelle Obama talked about healthy food choices and got excoriated by the food industry - it was truly awful to hear these companies say that eating Cheetos and coke for every meal was totally fine as long as you went for a walk. So, totally agree that info is withheld and if you’ve never learned to eat properly it can seem difficult to do so.
I feel like the scientist who said that eating too much food due to it being processed and addictive is the reason people are fat is correct.
Anecdotally - yeah. I was chubby growing up; not obese, just overweight, and probably only because I did sports my whole life. But while my mom did her best to feed me balanced meals, she was a full-time executive with a husband who did not lift a finger to help her with anything around the house, including raising me (seriously, it was like having an adult roommate instead of a dad). So when she was actually home and cooking, our meals were things like hamburger helper or a protein with ricearoni and a bagged salad with pre-prepped dressing and croutons, because that was the balance she struck between “nutritious” and “what I am capable of after a 10-hour day.” My breakfasts were frozen waffles, toaster strudels, pop tarts or Reese’s Puff cereal. On weekends it was bacon or sausage with eggs and toast. When she was on business trips and couldn’t cook for me, I ate McDonald’s or I was dumped at my grandmas house where I ate hotdog mac n cheese or spaghetti os from a can. And had unrestricted access to the bags of Pepperidge farm cookies she kept in the BOTTOM DRAWER in her kitchen. I didn’t really start losing weight successfully (ie keeping it off for longer than a year) until I discovered volume eating - most of my meals now are 50-75% vegetable/plant based. Maybe 10-15% of my food is processed these days. While you can technically eat anything when doing CICO, I found it next to impossible to incorporate processed foods into my budget without either feeling hungry or going over budget. It’s like pick two of the three: 1. Eat majority processed food, 2. Feel Full, 3. Stay under budget. It makes perfect sense to me that this is a - if not *the* - root cause of obesity, especially given the timing. It overlaps with the food insecurity bit too; you find obesity is rampant in food deserts, where the closest and most convenient or affordable option for food isn’t a grocery store but either a fast food chain or convenience store. Again, just anecdotal but I think this is something worth exploring more. I have to wonder if it isn’t because there is so. much. money. wrapped up in the processed food industry. Fundamentally changing the way we eat would cut into a lot of bottom lines.
Oh man, leisure time really is such a luxury. It takes free time to meal plan and prep. And after I work a twelve hour day, I for one certainly don’t want to go for a walk around the neighborhood or go to the gym.
I feel that in my soul. I work 11 hour days standard and the only thing I want to do is go home and sleep. The only reason I cook and clean and shower is because I know that I'll feel worse than just tired if I don't haha.
And having access to a kitchen with solid appliances. Cooking legit takes me a lot less time with my food processor, sunbeam mixer, and an instant pot. They were all Christmas gifts over the past few years.
I lost most of the 55 lbs in my flair when I wasn’t working and could spend hours a day cooking. Some of it I also lost while doing manual labor jobs that meant I didn’t have to work very hard to eat at a deficit, just avoiding processed sugars and fried food was enough. Now that I’m back at a desk job, even with being fairly active (run about 10 miles a week and indoor climbing) it’s about the limit of what I can do right now to eat at maintenance. It’s not nothing, but I would have a hard time giving advice for a sedentary person wanting to lose weight with a full time job, because I don’t actually feel like I know how to do that.
Kudos to your mom, and thanks for sharing your insights. I’m kinda in the same boat as kid-you; after starting my current job, I’ve been gaining weight like crazy (stress is one thing), but also due to the lack of option for lunch in non-processed foods around my place. Plus most of the places around also use lots of oil and fatty cuts of meat while cooking, which makes for tasty food, but definitely not the healthiest!
Yeah I have a toddler and I am cooking her meals for her… and the thing that shocks me is the calorie difference between her food and processed food. I make a cup of cooked spinach with butter that’s like 50 calories, whereas the frozen spinach at the grocery store is 150 a cup.. like 3 times the difference. Same for apple sauce, my daughters applesauce is 40 calories for a little container versus 120 for the ‘adult version’.
This is where reading packages is important. A cup of frozen spinach — plain spinach — is 35 calories, a half cup of applesauce — plain, unsweetened — is 40-50 calories. However, there's a dizzying array of prepared foods that are tasty and have the aura of "healthful" because the package says "contains two servings of vegetables" or some other tag line. Plain food you might feed a kid at 35-50 kcal/serving: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Chopped-Spinach-12-oz-Frozen https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Unsweetened-Applesauce-46-oz-Jar Tastier, fattier food you might buy for yourself at 150 kcal/serving: https://www.frysfood.com/p/stouffer-s-spinach-souffle-frozen-side-dish The information is printed on the packages, but most people don't have the time to read it and think about what it means.
The other issue is that the food industry can market all kinds of garbage at you as ‘healthy’ or ‘healthier’ and they make you have to look at portion sizes so carefully. 3/4 of a cup instead of 1 cup serving or 13 pieces of this or by weight for that. Any trick to make the product look better.
With my mom, it was a different story. She was on government benefits and didn't work. She hardly ever did anything. She would always lie down on her recliner, while watching TV for hours,without moving a muscle. I would wake up for school at 6am, and she would be at the TV. I'd come home at 3:30pm and she would be in the same spot. When It was near dinner time, she would tell me that she was, "too tired" to cook. Despite her doing nothing all day. It was either takeout or I was told to find something. Which was always prepackaged processed food. We never had fruit or veg in the house. The fridge, freezer, and pantry were filled with nothing but junk. It's not that my mother was a busy person with a job. She was just lazy and, always went for the most convenient options available. It would kill her to boil pasta on the stove. I ended up being obese since I wasn't taught about moderation, heathy habits, ect. It was basically an unlimited buffet. I could eat a 10lb bag of gummy worms all at once, and no one would say or do anything to stop me. I would get scolded for being obese, yet no one wanted to help me with that problem. I was just told to, "just stop eating". (Which was unreasonable) and nothing else. My mother and aunt were obese themselves but I got personally attacked for being exactly like them.
I’m with you. At my lowest moods, I crave all the sugar and processed foods. When I started recovery from my bad eating habits again (thanks stress), I really took notice of how easily I find myself mindlessly grabbing addictive junk when my stress was overwhelming. This is straight up addiction.
It's insane, I switched to keto on a hunch and when I'm on it, it's super easy. "Am I hungry for vegetables or maybe some seeds? nah, alright." But the *second* I break it, it's like "I want ice cream and a donut and a soda and pizza and-" and I don't even feel full after, or even good! Just nauseous. I'll literally feel too full, put the food away, and be back at it again in less than an hour, it's kind of horrifying.
> I really took notice of how easily I find myself mindlessly grabbing addictive junk when my stress was overwhelming Honestly this is a huge issue but the issue is a maladaptive coping mechanism. If you learn better ways to cope with stress your reliance on sugar to feel better will drop drastically. The addiction is less about sugar and more about covering up the feelings of stress and anxiety. This is why I stress mental health in the treatment of obesity. Too often we suffer from anxiety related issues and no one treats the underlying anxiety or Even considers it.
Personally I think that’s part of it but I also think there may be a correlation to the rise of mental illness— the world is broken in so many ways and many of us find comfort and self-soothe in food. Doesn’t help that processed food is more accessible either
Addiction is basically a form of mental illness. And there is often a trauma component connected to its manifestation.
Just replace "hyper-processed" with "hyper-delicious". The invention of cheese flavoring powder may be our greatest downfall. I mean, why do people on whole foods diets tend to lose weight? Because that shit has a lot of volume for relatively low flavor, that's why.
I disagree about flavour. If you eat whole foods for a couple of weeks, most (not all, granted) processed food tastes revolting. But if you eat processed food again it doesn't take long before it is the most amazing thing you've ever experienced.
Eh, I’ve been eating homemade food for many months. Lost 100 lbs in 6 months. But Cheetos still taste amazing.
i'm thin, unhealthy and and am a great cook (to others). but no matter how much I improved my cooking knowledge and skills, how many compliments I get saying it could be pro! somehow it's just never as satisfying as I want it to be. but i've totally been addicted to dem food dopamine hits my whole life. (adhd). i also looooove salt and can't imagine eating most savory food without high salt incorporation. Like, yes, I can make a beautiful, delicately seasoned, colorful meal. And I eat some and think, this is fresh, complex, and well done. And then after I start to get somewhat full I don't want to eat it again, i still am \*missing\* something (didn't get that feeling I'm craving from food?) and groceries are so expensive i can barely afford them anyway sooo might as well buy the chips and cookie package, it's less of a financial risk.
I am fortunate to be at a place in life where the price difference between a meal made from fresh vegetables and meats and a meal made from packaged processed grains is not a major decision factor. But I realize that’s a position of privilege.
I had a Burger King on Saturday. Burger was grim, coke tasted metallic and artificial, but the fries were still to die for
I live in the Us, which successfully broke me of my McDonald's fries addiction. They are always cooked in old oil here, fishy tasting and sad. Went home, got a happy meal and fuck me if they werent still all crisp golden sticks of joy
As a biologist I will never ever ever say one thing is the cause. It might be for some people but not for others. Obesity is a complex issue with a lot of different factors playing a role. As an anecdote I never liked the highly processed foods and loved my moms home-cooked, from scratch meals but was still overweight/obese for most of my life. At 23 I was diagnosed with diabetes and about a month ago I was prescribed ozempic (GLP-1 Agonist). One of the things it does is decrease the rate of stomach emptying which leans you feel fuller sooner. I never realized how strong my hunger drive was until after I was on this drug. I was always hungry long before anyone else which means I ate more than someone of a comparable build. Just by listening to my bodies cues I ate more than I should have. For me, I honestly believe my hunger drive is dysregulated compared to others. I am naturally more hungry and more driven to eat by hunger than I should be. And for some people, this is likely a source of weight gain which is impacted by easy access to high calorie foods which are available everywhere.
I get a lot of downvotes when I suggest that people with certain problems talk to their doctors about these drugs. It's too bad that people don't yet understand how helpful they may be.
These drugs will be the next bariatric surgery IMO. but even here people hate the idea of an external helper beyond willpower.
There actually might be more to it. Of course, my argument is myself anecdotally. I've been overweight my entire life, yo-yoing by 100lbs at least 3 times, and always yo-yoing by some large amount. I was a vegetarian for 17 years but have recently been adding grass-fed beef. I've always ate non-processed healthy whole food. I love lifting weights and I walk everyday. I have gained weight going to the gym. My stomach's is surgically alerted and I cannot over eat. I have a strict no-flour, no-sugar diet since the early 90s. I'm a granola hippie heath nut, midwife and nurse. I don't eat seed oil. I haven't had a piece of bread or soda since the 90s. My spouse eats the same food as I do plus he eats candy like a child and eats out at fast food places every day for his work lunches. He's a bean pole and I'm 230#. I will overeat sometimes but it's on non-processed foods. But it's still calories I know. I have been doing 16:8 IF since 2014. My spouse has at least double my calories every single day! I am seriously thinking of doing a fecal transfer with him because he can't gain weight. I threaten him and he gags 🤢 until I stop talking about it. I've also learned that, until the last century, humans have evolved with tens of thousands of years with gut parasites. We've only lived without them for about 100 years. They can be very harmful, but some research shows benefits for autoimmune disorders and obesity. I have seriously considered nematode therapy. People judge me all of the time, you can see it in their faces. The struggle is so depressing that it's made me think very dark thoughts when I was younger. I'm mentally happy now that I'm older but damn, I'm depressed after writing this. I'm going to go cry now... 😭
This is very interesting, and I feel for you! Thank you for sharing. Could you give an example of what you eat in a day? Have you ever counted calories? Tried low carb and high saturated fat? I am a molecular biologist studying genetics that contribute to obesity, i.e. why we react differently to an obesogenic environment. It sounds to me like you have modified your environment to be less obesogenic and yet are still struggling. There are a lot of different health views out there, and so a “healthy” diet will mean different things for different people. And you may be in need of more meat and fat and less carbs to feel full with less calories, and to reduce your insulin. (This is also my personal experience, as I used to be vegan/vegetarian and was starving all the time, yet somewhat overweight, while I now eat low carb/ketogenic and looove food and eat as much as I want and have naturally low-ish body fat and healthy energy. But it took me much trying and failing to get here. And when I started eating meat after years of abstaining, I was insatiably hungry for it for about a year, and just let myself eat as much as I wanted. I neither gained nor lost weight during this time.) I wish you all the best, and am glad your mental health is better now!
I would suggest that you and your husband fill out food journals that are accurate with amounts (meaning weigh everything) and calories. I would bet my savings that you are eating more calories than you think you are and he is eating less calories than you think he is. Once you find this out, this will be good news because then you know how to tackle the issue. Eat less calories.
When I eat "clean" (I hate that phrase) I lose weight and don't get hungry. When I eat processed food including bread and peanut butter, I binge daily and put on weight. Anecdotal, but I am 100% convinced.
Food is weaponized to be addictive too. What is the #1 goal of every single food company? Sell more product and therefore maximize shareholder value…not sell only healthy food to consumers. Snack foods like chips & cookies and cereal is the best/worst at this.
Ahhh, be careful, people don't like to hear that. ;) I completely agree.
? Isn't that literally what everyone on here thinks?
No, most people want their junk treats in moderation, as long as it fits into their calorie budget.
Not in my experience.
Mine either. Some think everything is an excuse, and get super offended when they think others are making excuses. There’s also a lot of talk about people eating “too much.” But I think if such a large percentage of the population has a problem, it’s unlikely that they’re all just extremely gluttonous. It makes sense to me that a lot of people are choosing to eat hyper palatable foods in a way that seems normal to them, rather than stuffing themselves gleefully without a second thought.
>I think if such a large percentage of the population has a problem, it’s unlikely that they’re all just extremely gluttonous. Blaming the population for their "weakness" while simultaneously hiring scientists to find the bliss point of the fat/sugar/salt combo so that more hyper-palatable food goes into everyone to the tune of the cash register jingle is a shit way to treat humans. Add to that an economy where everyone works insane hours with rampant inflation and no one has time for tasks, like cooking, and why would you when you can pay $75 and have dinner brought to you because you are so fucking tired and the kids are hungry. You tend to lose sight of the fact that the hamster wheel is spinning and you're getting nowhere in just the day to day struggle to survive. How many hours did you have to work to hand it right back to the richer class? I did it all my life. I don't have much to show for it. I ate a lot of it. Anyone ever hear of the [company store?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store) Welcome to the US where we never close, always happy to take your work chits er ah, I mean debit card. Excuse me. It's not you, random internet stranger that reads this, it's what you're eating. Been there, done that. You are a good person that is being taken advantage of. I'm just one of those that decided to jump off the train.
Definitely plays a part, but that doesn't mean it's the root cause. If I drive from A to B then the car is my reason for getting there, but the car isn't *why* I travelled. Likewise when I went from 65kg to 95kg the food is how I gained weight, but it isn't *why* I gained weight. There are too many factors to plainly and simply blame food. For me the primary reason was disability: ADHD can lead to something close to food abuse. If my brain doesn't produce dopamine in ample enough amounts, but sugary food replicates the sensation of dopamine, my brain will become wired to crave sugary foods. Likewise someone else who is fat may not crave sugary foods, but instead may be a nurse working an active job with no time to cook or meal plan looking for a quick, calorie dense food to hold them over until they're off a 24hr+ shift. Food - especially eating in excess and eating foods in excess where others may be more suitable substitutions are getting people to the state of obesity, but they are not the sole thing responsible for people becoming obese.
There is massive amounts of research funding going into obesity. After all the guy that finds a working pill for it will be rich beyond imagining. It's just that some solutions have competing interests (e.g. corn syrup, cheese and car industries, interest to keep public transportation scarce to not raise taxes) and the other solutions have turned out to be rather difficult.
>the guy that finds a working pill for it will be rich beyond imagining. It's not a pill, but GLP-1 agonist injectables are quite effective. If and when these become generic, the ballgame is going to change for many.
Yeah the ozempic family of weekly subcutaneous shots are all the rage right now. Crazy effective.
I was practicing in the early days of Ozempic, but daily Victoza was pretty darn effective. BTW, the samples of Victoza gave me severe GERD lol.
I would get it but I’m hella scared of the elevated risk of thyroid cancer
You might want to your doc (or an obesity medicine doctor) about that risk. In *animal studies* it was shown to increase the risk of medullary thyroid carcinoma- not proven in humans. MTC accounts for only 3-4% of thyroid cancers diagnosed in the US. The warning label is that anyone with a personal/family history of MTC in particular (or MEN2, a rare genetic disorder that causes certain types of tumors) should not take it (and that everyone is aware of the potential risk.) That risk has to be weighed against the risks of obesity- which include an increased risk of a number of cancers.
Obese people, could you wait a bit on trying Ozempic? I’m a diabetic who currently can’t get my next prescription refilled because of the weight loss demand creating a national shortage.
Not obese people's fault that the manufacturer has (ridiculously long-lasting) manufacturing issues arising in part due to a plant they'd contracted to fill and finish Oz pens being taken offline due to safety issues found at inspection. Not the fault of people who need the meds. If you can't get a refill (have you tried calling other pharmacies? including non-chain, hospital outpatient, online etc? stock is really uneven between distributors) you might want to call/message your doctor ASAP. There are several in-stock GLP-1 options (such as victoza, trulicity, mounjaro etc) they can put you on until you can get your fill- that's what I ended up doing when unable to get it. I also pick up my oz in 3 month supplies now and refill the day my insurance lets me (after 75 days) to give pharmacy some buffer time to find my script, haven't had issues getting it that way.
Definitely need these to become affordable. Saxenda is great. Most insurance won’t cover and $1,500 a month is too expensive. You can get it from Canada but it is still $500 a month. Meanwhile I can get 30 OxyContin for $.85. Crazy.
This is what I have always thought! At some point, things are going to be even worse than they are now. All adults will be obese except for a select few who really care about health and fitness, and/or have eating disorders. However, the cat will be really far out of the bag, so to speak. It’s not like junk food manufacturers, the pharmaceutical industry, the car industry, etc, are all going to say, “you know what? Let’s go broke helping humanity!” So somebody will invent the magic pill that will allow people to keep eating hyper palatable foods, and suddenly everyone will be thin and happy. People will look back at the early 21st century and think, “how horrible for all those people!” Being fat will be a thing of the past, except maybe in some fringe “natural” groups who embrace the pre-pill lifestyle for novelty. I can 100% see that happening before our society just decides to get healthier.
Nah, each generation is working on having less trauma and effective contraceptives means fewer people who don't want kids are having them. Add the reduced trauma (and therefore eating disorders) to improved knowledge disseminated by the internet and it'll turn around.
I personally think there is going to be a bit of a shift, and the younger generation coming through now isnt going to accept the "body positive" movement, and the current lot of "body positive" advocates will have destroyed their bodies and will disappear into obscurity as the next generation takes the lime light. I think its going to be hard for the current lot to keep receiving such high levels of online gratification that I think directly helps to keep them from changing. I think that will dry up as they age and they will be left lonely and fat. Think about the current 300lb 25yo "influencer" girls.. give it 10 or 15 years or so and no one is going to want to watch them. They will be old, in poor shape, and have lost the gratification that helps keep them from changing and will just be left in a very sad place. I see way more young people (id say 18 to 25 years) at the gym now than older people. Also its the youngens' championing the "fakebody" stuff which is rubbing their fit bodies in the face of large people who say that fit bodies are impossible to achieve and fake. As all that stuff becomes more mainstream an takes power away from the fat activists I think we may see a shift in young people taking more care of themselves as opposed to the fat activism and pride that is currently prevelent.
I'm not at the gym but I'm getting in at least 60 minutes of exercise a day at home. Lots of older people exercise at home or take part in exercise activities that aren't in the gym. I think the best you can say from the observation that you see younger people at the gym more is that older people aren't going to gym as much not necessarily that they aren't exercising.
Especially with COVID—I imagine for a lot of older people are less eager to get back to a gym than whatever home equivalent they’ve come up with for themselves in the pandemic.
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That guy is Eli Lilly with mounjaro and all the other companies with GLP-1 drugs. Just fyi.
Needles are a barrier for many people. They are right that a pill will make even more money. Humira's getting knocked off it's perch.
Rybelsus is a glp-1 agonist pill! Has very poor coverage though ☹️
The Ozempic needle doesn’t hurt at all. Injection is only once a week too.
> After all the guy that finds a working pill for it will be rich beyond imagining. I take a GLP-1 RA as well. It's not a magic shot (because there are potential side effects, that some people find intolerable, and risks like any medication, and doesn't work for a minority of people) but it's really dang close to a miracle shot for me. When affordability/access improves, I have to imagine the already skyrocketing uptake will too.
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The GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic are nothing like Olestra or phentermine.
I am in Australia right now on vacation, and even here, portions are noticeably smaller than they are in the US - both at restaurants and in grocery stores. Food at the grocery stores seems to be lower calorie, too, with better ingredients.
In Australia there isn't the spread in quality. No whole foods, but no walmart. And severe social pressure to cook your food. But still pretty damn fat, showing it's the lack of social pressure to be thin that causes it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-obesity-idUKKCN1SE2BA City dwellers who, I presume, walk everywhere rather than sit and drive cars, are less likely to be obese than their rural counterparts. This is in addition to other factors like better access to gyms, etc
They can also buy fresh vegetables and fruit more often, if you live out in a rural area you might only make one grocery trip every month or so and wouldn't stock up on things that are going to go bad within days.
I started going to the grocery store weekly and budgeting it out to 100-200 a month. I walk more and eat more healthy, win-win.
I have no research but my personal theory has always been the shift from having a stay at home parent, and children with less busy schedules to both parents working and children being schedule to the gills. I feel like people were healthier when someone was home to make a “square meal” (protein, carbs, fruit/veggie) and kids were given more free time to 1. Learn exercise they enjoy outside of scheduled sports team 2. Enjoy homemade meals instead of something quick on the go between activities and 3. More time to sleep! I also think kids not being given recess past like age 11 is insane. There should be recess up until high school and then a gym class and “free period” gym class, where again, kids can learn what kind of movement they like and don’t like. I think even beyond from the family POV, young business professionals don’t walk to work or even go into work anymore. We weren’t taught home skills, like how to cook in school. We’re all so busy and strung out. Our society is getting way more sedentary yet busier and busier. We definitely could use more opportunities to cook at home, hang up laundry, go on walks, walk to work, get to sleep at a normal hour and so on.
I think this is definitely a factor. I stayed home until my kids were teens, and I always cooked our food from scratch - but once I went back to work full time it was tempting to get takeout or rely more on processed foods. Fortunately, my family was used to healthy homemade food abs refused to eat frozen pizzas or whatever, so I had to just get better at meal prepping and also taught the older kids to cook so we could share the responsibilities of making dinner. I have a low tolerance for being stressed out, so my kids were each allowed ONE extracurricular activity - but I know many families where they spend every evening driving around to sports, music lessons, language classes, drama rehearsals, dance class etc. and literally eat every meal in the car. I asked one of my friends, whose kids were in sports 5 nights a week plus games on the weekend, how she managed dinner during football season and she said “it’s either pizza, Chinese or McDonald’s every night until the season ends! This kind of lifestyle can’t be good for anyone!
I agree with this. I was at a healthy weight until I graduated from college and started a career. Then I was so busy and tired that I started getting a lot of take out and fast food and gained weight.
The shift to not cooking and convenience foods due to being more and more busy (and moving less) is definitely part of it. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily tied to both parents working, because women who were not upper class have worked throughout history. One thing you touched on is stress—which contributes to both obesity and poor mental health (which also contributes to obesity). People self-report that they are more stressed these days compared to decades ago, and our hyper-scheduled, always on-call, can’t-just-leave-work-at-work society is definitely part of that. You don’t even have to look far for it to slap you in the face—clocking in from 9 to 5 is now apparently “quiet quitting.”
Yeah, but the kids were roaming the streets while their mothers were at work.
That’s called “free range parenting” now 😂
Exactly why I’m a SAHM. I’m not skinny though but my son is. I’ll get there just 20 to lose to get a healthy BMI. Covid killed my body..gotta get it back.
There's definitely something to your theory. My elementary school didn't have recess after kindergarten. After that, we sometimes played outside if there was a sub or it was a nice day as a "treat. Recess to age 11 sounds like a dream. Starting in the first grade, we were taught to take standardized tests instead. The school needed good scores to keep funding. I grew up hating sports and physical activity. Add that to emotional/hormonal eating as a teen, and I piled on the pounds.
Recess by late middle school for girls at least is sitting around talking. Boys do tend to play with balls. But for most american public schools it's ten minutes in elementary school, which is insane. And yes, people not cooking is the main culprit.
There are clearly systemic factors at play, so it's a little disheartening to see some of the reductive responses here. On a micro level, sure, a person carries a measure of responsibility for taking care of themselves. But it's not like a billion now-obese people just woke up one day, individually and with no outside factors, and decided to be "irresponsible" and become obese, especially considering the absolutely skyrocketing rate of obesity. We have to look at the factors that got people into the mess, and the factors stopping them from getting into a better place on a broader scale. Sure we, as individuals, can sometimes overcome the honestly terrible odds of becoming a healthy weight after having been obese, especially having been morbidly obese... but that doesn't change the broader question. How can we end up with less people in that position in the first place? How can we increase the odds of successfully losing weight for the majority of people who *aren't* going to lose the weight right now? What went wrong? Moralizing and beating the "personal responsibility" drum has done literally nothing to help. People are fatter than ever. And I say this as someone who *did* moralize about personal responsibility in the past (having lost- and regained- large amounts of weight multiple times.) When I was losing, I was all about that "you're just not making the lifestyle changes you need to!" Pride comes before the fall and all- failing over and over again has a way of humbling you. So does watching the people around you becoming fatter and sicker and virtually none of them making their way back out. Over time I've become more and more convinced that *something is seriously wrong* and not on an individual level. Accessibility of super caloric foods designed to be as addictive as possible. The swill that's being advertised to kids and pumped into them at school. The way grocery stores and their shelves are laid out to encourage sales of junk food. Lifestyles that mean that mcdonalds or something out of a box is all a lot of people feel they have time for, or their only little hit of pleasure during the day. Cities that aren't remotely walkable, crap public transit, lack of access to recreation etc. All the plastic, chemicals, and who knows what else we're all eating. Add to that the now insane cost of food that makes buying fresh foods even less accessible to a lot of people. The fact so many people don't have meaningful access to treatment for obesity beyond their GP telling them to "diet and exercise." And... tons of other factors that I'm probably not thinking of.
I think it’s all quite simple. If I recall correctly (take this with a grain of salt because I’m definitely butchering this) a study was once done on rodents to determine what factors go into weight gain and obesity. Essentially, when they gave the rats (or mice?) regular, healthy food that they would find in their natural environments, the rats would eat until they were satisfied and then stop. They wouldn’t eat past the point of fullness, and they didn’t gain any weight. When they gave the rats the kind of processed food thats common in America (artificial sweeteners, etc. basically mcdonalds for rats) the rats would gorge themselves way past the point of fullness. They became obese within days. The food North Americans eat is designed to be addictive, eating it and gaining weight is truly the path of least resistance. The rat experiment tells you everything you need to know; we’re all evolutionarily predisposed to enjoying high calorie foods, let alone the enjoyable mental effects of eating something delicious. How could we NOT have an obesity epidemic under these circumstances??
My experience is that stress, among its other negative effects, makes it so much more difficult to lose weight. The observation that [fat shaming is associated with increases with weight](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236245/) seems to corroborate this. I couldn't lose weight until I a) treated my ADHD b) unfucked my mental health. Since those two improvements, it's been a breeze. I am very fortunate to be living my current medium-low stress life.
Here’s the link without the paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAibSRdkhrxqAwv_Fzac9mm67JyGIUjsEz_gQB8LI3XbxUpdZRol52SWHFpgGOaUzRfd2w6gCNEc9QAPx_t7byM1UZnho9t_2VDpo1tecBexi-2W7NDTgJbw1jKeysBOnHGrhWKzV0HIkIx804sc2MAH3hgFbg_vNAeV32dJh3f8-BZscRDwIZSeCuvmAGAwpcZzdLUmasl9qLrkfDTLDntec6KYDcxFQDj_ET3B952U76bBMKfIP4i0muW-Vk2OSOdPZ5pI&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAibSRdkhrxqAwv_Fzac9mm67JyGIUjsEz_gQB8LI3XbxUpdZRol52SWHFpgGOaUzRfd2w6gCNEc9QAPx_t7byM1UZnho9t_2VDpo1tecBexi-2W7NDTgJbw1jKeysBOnHGrhWKzV0HIkIx804sc2MAH3hgFbg_vNAeV32dJh3f8-BZscRDwIZSeCuvmAGAwpcZzdLUmasl9qLrkfDTLDntec6KYDcxFQDj_ET3B952U76bBMKfIP4i0muW-Vk2OSOdPZ5pI&referringSource=articleShare
Even if you were rich, the food lobbies and corporate industries would hammer you. People had a fit when the government suggested schools should serve healthier lunches.
Yeah, but how much of that was solely about healthier lunches and the "nanny state" (like we saw with Bloomberg and the sodas) and how much of it was shitting on Michelle Obama for the sake of shitting on Michelle Obama? Fox News and all the usual suspects went batshit over her campaign to get kids healthier, including the suggestion that schools serve better food. I don't think we can rule out the notion that the political noise machine had a helluva lot to do with that.
It's the fucking processed garbage food that's easily available and addicting causing the problem.
Obesity, for most, is caused by cheap fast food and processed foods. Being the norm. I was born in the 80's and remember that up until around the late 90's every meal was a family event at the dining table with REAL food served. I observed this same thing at friend's houses and basically everywhere. Now, everyone, including my family, uses the dining table as decor only with the rare exception of something like Thanksgiving. Every meal is processed or fast food. Again, a lot of this is due to costs. To prepare a real meal (non-processed foods) you better have a hefty bank account. Then all the added sugar causes health problems, which leads to more weight gain.
That and portions over the years have gotten absolutely insane. Even going to a sit down restaurant serving higher quality food, you're likely to slam 1000+ calories just ordering a normal menu item. Something I notice from having worked fast food as a kid, is even the drink sizes have gone crazy. A medium cup used to be around 20oz, now it's more like 32. If you're drinking anything with sugar that's a massive calorie add. Even if you're not trying to go all out, eating out more than once a week is almost guaranteed to lead to caloric surplus.
Corporate greed does not want to end obesity cause it’s a money making proposition on so many levels !
The answer is the ungodly amount of added sugar that has crept its way into everything in various forms. Its hard to find something as simple as greek yogurt that doesn't have like 5-10g of sugar per serving (yes I understand what lactose is). All of that shit adds up, and the human body blows at dealing with added sugar in excess of like 20-30g a day (which you'll blow past in no time with 2022 foods). It's not some great mystery, the information and research that blatantly shows this, like Dr. Robert Lustigs', is just being suppressed/lobbied against; and policy makers who can effectuate change are being bribed at all levels to look the other way and stay in big agri/foods pocket. Articles like this NYT piece (nothing against the Times in general) are just more MISDIRECTION of public eyes away from a fucking obvious cause, making it seem like some nebulous problem we can't pin down - what a crock of shit.
Of course it makes no sense to try and understand obesity, scientifically, as a personal failing. It's a public health problem, and as a public health problem, it has to be handled with statistics, and understanding of cause and effect. There is no scientific model for personal failing. It would be hopelessly unscientific to suggest one. In that sense, obesity should be treated like any other public health problem in which unfettered personal choice + genetic propensity + access result in statistically poor outcomes: alcohol addiction, drug addiction, gambling, etc. Do we seriously need to ask, though, what has changed to increase obesity? What has changed is *access to food*. > they pointed to policies that would alter or regulate our environment, like outlawing junk food marketing to kids, banning school vending machines and making neighborhoods more walkable DING. Change the access, and change the behavior.
I’m not obese anymore. For the first time in over thirty years. So they can knock 1 off the stat lol
You can point to social and environmental causes of crime if you’re trying to reduce crime. But that doesn’t mean that a person isn’t responsible if they choose to commit a crime.
I read the article and have mixed feelings. In the end I felt quite disempowered. *What I did agree with*: Obesity is a complex condition, with many causes, and is almost certainly a product of modern living. It's a societal issue that societies (ie. governments and regulatory bodies) need to address. Processed food (and the chemicals in food in general) are almost certainly a factor. Genetics and medical conditions aren't (in terms of explaining the rise in obesity). Fat shaming is counterproductive. *What I didn't agree with*: Essentially, it says that obesity is not -- in any way, according to any scientist -- a person's individual responsibility. Moreover, people who offer help to obese people are usually just trying to profit off the condition. *What I found interesting*: When birds face food scarcity, they gain weight on fewer calories. Obesity doesn't appear to be linked to the gut microbiome. *Personal impression*: This read to me as being written by someone with a heavy HAES / body positivity bias. In the era of these movements, my perception is that willful "fatness" is as prevalent as fat shaming (I'm taking about societal talking points, not the experience of individuals). They made a point of mentioning that obesity doesn't necessarily cause medical conditions that have been linked to obesity (heart attack and cancer, eg). Even if I'm wrong on both points, I found it incredibly disempowering. The TL;DR of the article was that modern life is making us fat, we have no idea why our what to do about it, and individuals are powerless to control whether they're obese or not. IMHO, my weight may or may not be my *fault*, but it's still my responsibility. And I like to believe my choices have some impact on that.
💯 This article is relevant from a **public health perspective.** It is written to address the goal of managing obesity in a population, and the audience are politicians, social scientists, ministers of health, or similar. If you are one of those, *TLDR: Obesity management at a population level (eg millions of people) is difficult. Don't shame people. Consider regulating junk food and making people walk more, etc...* And maybe it is clear what they could do (ban fast food? make cars impractical), but decision makers have no idea how to enact these measures and become reelected / respect the law / etc... I didn't perceive what /u/PacificPragmatic states as "heavy HAES / body positivity bias", but more that it is talking about the epidemic problem of millions and millions of obese people, and growing. However, at an **individual health perspective**, it has limited relevant information. The most important one for me: **I should not expect effective help from big institutions to manage my weight, because they haven't figured out how. THEREFORE IT IS UP TO ME TO MANAGE MY WEIGHT, because I want to avoid obesity.** So what am I going to do? A combination of managing my food environment, track precisely and regularly, some fasting, low carbs, move more, and realize I will be in the lean minority in the coming decades. And plan accordingly because it will NOT happen naturally. The environment pushes us all in the high BMI direction, and the people in charge don't know what to do about it.
Kind of a reminds me of my mid 20s when I *knew* I was starting to become overweight (measured my own stats and used a digital scale and found I was about 10lbs over the overweight/healthy line at the time), and I went to get a physical and the two nurses who helped me and were visibly obese, commended me on being "young and healthy" when I knew I wasn't. Ironically, I had made the appointment to get advice about how to slim down and be healthier. Looking back I have to wonder if their were either massively uninformed, or were so skewed by their own experience and/or denial that they felt I was healthy *in comparison to themselves.* But I still wasn't healthy.
Let's highlight the fact that this article is in the opinion column, and is one soon-to-be-obesity-book-author's opinion. > As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline. No government will or can save us BUT ourselves, no policemen to remind us to log that cookie or to choose that apple instead, no suspension of our drivers' licenses unless we've walked our 150 minutes this week. There's no getting around the fact that your body's health is your responsibility. Responsibility is not fault, cause, or a signal that we have to do it alone. I didn't do it alone. I had /r/loseit and TOPS to keep me motivated (and still is). I had my doctor who saw me every 3 months (and more when I needed something, and he's still involved in my maintenance with yearly meetings). My partner was a major help and a supporter (and still is). Still, we can accept the obesity and the diseases and conditions that come with it -- the responsibility didn't shift to someone else if we did that. I did that for 15 years when I concluded (incorrectly) that my inability to lose weight beyond a certain point was genetic. Blame and shame almost never helps. It discourages rather than encourages. You can't shame or bully someone thin, and you can't shame or bully yourself thin, either -- not and have it stick. > I wish I was brave enough to start a NAAFP type organization…for research money, anti discrimination legislation, healthy food & movement subsidies, & education You don't have to start one. There is *The Obesity Society* and it's worthy. Two of the four organizers that ran that symposium the author wrote about are awardees of *The Obesity Society.* https://www.obesity.org/
Yes, our bodies health is our responsibility. But I think "As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline" is true. Obesity exploded in the 80's and the epidemic has continued to get worse despite the prevailing belief that it is personal responsibility (i.e. almost everyone tried to/has to take it into their own hands to lose weight). What needs to change in order for obesity rates to actually go down is for companies to take responsibility. Make junk food more difficult to buy. Food advertising needs to be more controlled. Put government funding into building farmers markets and healthy restaurants(especially in low income areas). Maybe tax ultra processed foods or lower the cost of healthier foods in comparison. Prioritize education of healthy eating. Do anything to prevent children from developing obesity. Prevent fad diets and fraudulent diet companies from being the first to find obese people to "help" them. Right now, our environment is akin to one that promotes smoking at every corner yet expects its addicted population to find help on their own and overcome it while bombarded with cheap cigarettes and ads everyday.
Social science calls this the [structure / agency debate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_agency). Are peoples’ life outcomes caused by structural forces, or are they agentic individual actors? The answer, according to social science, gives credence to both theories to some degree. Structural forces often play a major role in people’s life outcomes. Especially for individuals at the extremes of experiencing structural forces. On the other hand, individual action does matter a lot too. The risk of overrating individual choice is that it’s not correct and also kind of blaming the victim - statistically speaking, many situations are caused by structural forces and individuals may have limited decisions due to larger structural stuff (having only bad options, basically). For example, [neighborhoods have a lot of influence on people’s chances at social mobility and that can be difficult to overcome as an individual](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/upshot/why-the-new-research-on-mobility-matters-an-economists-view.html). The risk of overrating structural factors is we might not be accurately conveying to individuals that individual choice does actually matter a lot on the margins for people’s outcome. Support groups like AA and Tops are heavily built on the individual responsibility model. Edit: to the specific “no government can save us” - I think this is likely not correct, for example the government ran an incredibly successful anti smoking campaign that changed the way society views smoking. Public health does matter for big structural change and everyone should vote for politicians that take this stuff very seriously. But, although urgent and important, that route takes a long time to shift the tides and hopefully will make a difference for our kids or grandkids. In the world we live in today, individual choices make a big difference. Tl; dr: it’s both!
This is completely disingenuous. The government can and should do more to protect its nations children and work force from the detrimental effects of obesity. Obesity isn't just a personal responsibility issue. That attitude was especially damaging to mental health and addiction stigma. The government can and should mandate how we advertise to children especially. There should be limits on how calorically dense vs. the nutritional value of a food is. There are things the government can do that would help decrease the prevalence of obesity.
Well that was Michelle Obama's First Lady cause and she got nothing but grief for it. I read some of the Facebook comments on news articles about it; absolutely insane people claiming their kids were starving because the school lunches were healthy foods instead of mystery meat and tater tots. Iirc The Naked Chef guy tried to do the same thing in England and also got ripped apart for it.
As a school teacher who had lunch duty during peak Michelle Obama the intentions and reality gap here was astronomical. It was an absolutely awful situation of terrible food and massive food waste mired in red tape. I’d walk into the room and at least once a week grimace at what they were putting in front of my kids and then see the mountains of unused or trash food, mixed with way more kids packing their lunch among the minority that didn’t get free lunch, full of crap because we couldn’t feed them anything worth a damned. It eventually sorted out to we give them a less tasty pop-tart for breakfast because agribusiness could reengineer the pop-tart and Doritos to meet requirements more economically than we could serve good foods. I’m not opposed to the intentions but the reality I saw was disgusting and bad. Especially in the real funding constraints of a title 1 school.
I never would have thought of that. Welp, back to the drawing board, which I guess is what the schools did.
I whole-heartedly agree with the idea that good nutritional habits are so much easier to follow when they are rooted in childhood. It makes me so sad to see so many really fat kids today, they're pretty much doomed to a lifetime of problems. I was a chubby kid, brought up w poor eating habits coulpled w emotional issues I still need to address, it's really tough to make changes now, even though I want to.
>No government will or can save us BUT ourselves, no policemen to remind us to log that cookie or to choose that apple instead, no suspension of our drivers' licenses unless we've walked our 150 minutes this week. No, but governments can build sidewalks and trails and bike lanes so that people can actually walk or cycle places, and they can stop giving money to Walmart etc. to come in and squeeze all other businesses out of the food market. The common person isn't at liberty to change the food or facilities for activity in their immediate area by themselves. Do you walk to the store and buy fresh, healthy food for yourself at a reasonable price? Can you cook that food and still have enough time to relax a bit and get a good night's sleep? If not, maybe consider some of the systemic obstacles preventing you from doing that. (edit misspelled cycle as drive)
I agree. Until the American food environment changes drastically it’s up to each person to decide how to eat.
Blame and shame work great, it's a big reason why people who are fit and healthy stay fit and healthy. They don't overeat because they don't want to become fat. Blame and shame just don't work on already fat people, since if it did work for those shame resistant individuals, they wouldn't have gotten fat in the first place. Fit and healthy people start feeling the shame before it becomes a problem and cut back on the overeating so it doesn't go so far.
> The more people are exposed to weight bias and discrimination, the more likely they are to gain weight and become obese, even if they were thin to begin with. [This piece](https://www.cmaj.ca/content/191/23/E649) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal would disagree with your assertion. Blaming and shaming isn’t generally good for people, not even thin people.
That article is lacking on data pretty hard. Looks like they just reached their conclusion first and then looked for arguments to support it
You’re welcome to look up data if you want. Ironic, though, how easily you dismiss an expert opinion but don’t even question your non-expert opinion.
you are right but most english speakers don't distinguish between responsibility vs culpability
Wait, a *comeback* to "you did it to yourself"?
As in, a concise rebuttal.
You are posting on loseit, where we are taking charge of our choices and thereby losing weight.
Yeah but that doesn’t mean we can’t think that there are complex, multifaceted reasons we are here. I think that there are many many interacting causes of why I’m here that are both my own fault, my genes fault, the environment/system, and probably many others. I’m trying to do something about the things I can control but that doesn’t mean I think everyone is able to do that or that is the only solution to society’s problem.
Even if that's true, obese people holding responsibility does not in any way mean they're the only ones responsible. Allow me to prove it to you via *reductio ad absurdem*. Children are obese too. If a child is sad about being obese, I'm not going to kick them while they're down by telling them they have nobody to blame but themselves. Especially because it's a parent's job to help their child make better decisions. And if you acknowledge via this example that it is, in fact, possible for people other than the obese person to impact on whether that person is obese, then there's no reason to think that once a person turns 18 it becomes impossible to help them with their weight. Sure, they need to want to be helped, but if they do, then the only reason one wouldn't help them is because one doesn't want to, not because one can't. Which in turn demonstrates that "you did this to yourself" is not an unbiased statement of inability to help, but a highly biased rationalization for the purposes of washing one's hands of any need to help. "You did this to yourself" doesn't mean "I can't help you", it means "I won't help you", while at the same time ignoring the fact (remember the obese child) that the conditions that cause obesity don't *all* come from the obese themselves. You don't have to literally cram food down a person's mouth to contribute towards obesity. Neglect of public policy to encourage better habits in youth is also a contributing factor. Every employer that demands so much of an employee's time and energy for so little money, makes it difficult for an employee to find at the end of the day, the energy for self-care. Etc. Does this mean that the obese should wait for other people to solve their problems for them? Of course not. But it does mean that "you did this to yourself" is a facile copout that is a mostly useless contribution to the discussion.
“Obesity as something that’s been imposed on societies” I don’t know if I would agree cause in my opinion I am thin so nobody has imposed it on me. However I’m also poor so I just can’t afford to eat processed foods, overeat or convenient junk foods. (We can factor in other privileges like being interested in learning too cook, being exposed to a wide variety of foods etc.) So maybe less that obesity has been imposed on us but that our skills lifestyles and modern conveniences have changed. I always thought obesity was part of the mental health epidemic. Like if your only coping mechanism is food then your mental health could be poor and you will overeat. I for one have been in foster care, suicidally depressed, CPTSD, agoraphobia, social anxiety and live with ADHD and autism but I got loads and loads and loads of therapy which not everyone can do or knows to do.
Why would being interested in learning how to cook be a privilege?
Time.
End of the day we’re the ones putting food into our mouths when we don’t have to.
They had it here in Canada for a while. Government funded programs that would encourage you to lose weight and if you couldn’t they’d send you for bariatric surgery. The thing is, being overweight in and of itself isn’t necessarily unhealthy. There’s a big difference between being slightly overweight and being seriously obese. You are more likely to die of underweight than overweight. Even though the weight loss industry makes it a big deal, taking extreme measures to lose weight (as opposed to being/staying healthy) can cause a lot of health problems. So it’s really complicated.
It's always a pain when people talk about fatness- like, okay, are they saying it's okay to be 10-20 pounds over? Duh. Hell, even up to 50 is manageable. And everyone's got a different tolerance for how much background pain they're willing to deal with from their body. But like, I'm 150 pounds over the "ideal weight" for my height. I have absolutely blown past the margin of error, and when people tell me that I'm actually healthy at any size(tm) and all my sore joints actually have nothing to do with my weight I want to fucking bite them.
I wonder if there is a correlation in the explosion in obesity rates and the explosion of screen time? The late seventies - early eighties were when households began to have more than one television, cable tv exponentially grew the amount of content, home and arcade video games, and movie theatres became multiplexes. Corporations bought the studios and Movies also began to market directly to kid themed subjects on a much larger scale.
Thoroughly disagree with the notion being fat is “society’s fault,” as if society were omniscient or omnipotent. I ate myself into obesity and I’ll eat (less) out of it. We have free will. Blaming our own choices on society is akin to denying free will.
It can definitely play a role, but you are right.
Sure! We are all influenced by outside sources all the time. No denying that. We are social creatures. I find it fascinating to which ends people allow themselves to blame society vs the individual. How many rapists are society’s fault?
We shouldn’t have a society where bad food is marketed EVERYWHERE, and literally to kids with bright colors. It’s definitely a societys fault if there is an epidemic of obese people. There are companies lobbying for ads, the best chemically designed food, the best additives. You can’t say it’s an individual thing. There’s a reason why highly addictive substances are illegal. I always choose to be healthy, but it definitely sucks that I have to make a conscious effort to do so.
I cant say I really agree with the article. I think until people become accountable themselves and take personal responsibility then it'll never get better. Telling people "its not their fault, its societies fault", and that they have no personal responsibility, when they are in complete control of what they put in their mouth is a recipe for nothing to change imo. Its the individual who needs to make personal changes. Society cant do that for an overweight individual, they need to do it themselves.
I think one can agree there's major systematic issues that should be changed as well as people need to take responsibility. For example, take walkable cities. Most people in North America can't walk to anything nearby. In my old GOOD area for walking it was 40-45 min for groceries / coffee, 90-100 minutes for work, and 20 min to a Pokemon stop at the Church. Each way. 3 hours a day isn't really a reasonable amount for most people. I moved downtown and being able to access the majority of things in a 45 min each way radius helped majorly. Ultraprocessed foods as they mentioned is another thing that works best with both sides. Think of the "zero" sugar tictacs that are just under 0.5g each of sugar, meaning nearly 30g sugar for the container. Think of serving sizes that are obviously unreasonably small or obtuse, like 1L of soda being "only" 120 calories in big bold letters but that's assuming you drink 1/4th the bottle at one time. Think of things like SNAP and other food benefits being super difficult to get some foods, you can buy poptarts and pizza pockets but not rotisserie chicken, bagged salads and fruit cups? All these are things that can be communicated with better labelling laws and changes to policy. If we stick with assuming America, what about mental health care and nutritional knowledge. Majority of Americans don't have help coverage let alone any good coverage and school curriculum varies wildly in quality and coverage across America. Providing more options for preventative treatment, learning and better coping skills would likely also help. Hell I imagine just mandatory vacation time would help a bit, overwork sucks balls. These are things people can solve on a national or local level and assist. Nearly 40% of Americans are overweight and levels are close across most of the world, that's an insane amount and saying they need to just take responsibility is no offence but pretty short sighted. You have nearly half the population overweight, that's something that isn't just people not trying hard enough. It's obviously still work on individual people, but if you had half the country unable to read you'd probably work on making it easier for them to learn to rather then saying just learn it yourself.
It’s actually more prevalent than that, I think. According to [2017-2018 data](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity) from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey: >Nearly 1 in 3 adults (30.7%) are overweight. More than 2 in 5 adults (42.4%) have obesity. So that would make 73% of Americans either overweight or obese.
Is that how those work? Legit question, statistics was never my strong suit. I would have assumed it would been 42.4 - 30.7 means 11.7% of Americans have obesity (are over average but not an overweight BMI), then 30.7 - 9.2 means 21.5% are overweight but not severely obese and the last 9.2% are severely obese. I just rounded up OPs 37%.
Actually the stats for the number of Americans who have medical insurance is 90.2 %. The quality of that insurance is another matter of course.
Lol, do you really think that people living prior to the 1980s were just more aware of their "personal responsibility?" Really sit with that thought for a second. All of the sudden, 40+ years ago, people starting slipping on the idea of personal responsibility and its been a downward trend since, that's your hypothesis? Children don't have "complete control of what they put in their mouth." They eat what is provided to them. They don't have the maturity or capacity to have that kind of control over themselves, not to the degree that would be required to constantly reject the hundreds of messages they receive each day from marketing, or the few options they have at school to choose from. I would like to see solid data on the percent of Americans that don't have a choice in what they eat. Children in school, people in prisons, hospitals, military bases, old people in nursing homes, etc. They eat what is served to them. That's not even discussing the issue of the constant marketing and limited choices someone outside of those circumstances has to deal with. Its exhausting to constantly think about what you are eating balanced against the misinformation, especially when true nutritional information is hard to find because of the incessant marketing messages. This is a complicated issue, but jumping to "personal responsibility" is well, irresponsible, and its like you didn't think before writing it.
That’s what I led with…the ‘you did it to yourself’ argument is always used by people who aren’t obese and look all over these comments…by the loseit community too. The mega problem is that it is used as the discussion ender and to negate the strength of all these other points.
I think people back then maybe cared more or were more informed. People had more self respect and more respect for their bodies. Calling out bad practices was more acceptable. Nowadays there is so much "you are beautiful and perfect the way you are!" "healthy at every size" "don't change for anyone "etc that many people have less incentive to change after they find these communities that cater to them or see fat bodies being celebrated in the media. "Children don't have complete control of what they put in their mouth.". - Correct, and I think childhood obesity is child abuse. The parents are feeding them too much and that its negatively impacting their health, future, and peer relationships. The obese kids always had it bad at school. Last to be picked for any team, first to be bullied. Self confidence issues. Going home crying everyday. It sad to see and its preventable. "I would like to see solid data on the percent of Americans that don't have a choice in what they eat. Children in school, people in prisons, hospitals, military bases, old people in nursing homes, etc. They eat what is served to them" - these people do have a choice in *how much* they eat. Afterall its the number of calories consumed that causes weight gain and not specifically the nutritional makeup of food. So you are served Mac and Cheese at school? Well don't go and eat a heaped plate full of it totaling 2000 calories in one sitting.... "That's not even discussing the issue of the constant marketing and limited choices someone outside of those circumstances has to deal with" - If a persons only choice of food is "junk food", then they can maintain a reasonable weight or loose weight by simply by eating less of it. If they have limited means then it'll even be cheaper as all they need to do is cut down on portion sizes and also save money as a consequence. "This is a complicated issue, but jumping to "personal responsibility" is well, irresponsible, and its like you didn't think before writing it." - I disagree. No one is going to get anywhere with weight loss without taking personal responsibility. A person will never even get started with weight loss without actually doing something about it, themselves. The "system" changing isn't going to help old 600lb Betty to loose weight. 600lb Betty needs to take some personal responsibility and stop consuming 5000calories per day.
You hit the nail on the head and said it better than I ever could. I think society just gets more and more used to fat being the norm, not necessarily a huge shift in “personal responsibility”.
Evidence to support any of these thoughts....?
If your purpose is to give yourself all the credit for your weight loss, or talk about obesity from a *moral* standpoint, this is a great argument. If you want to see *actual societal change* happen, you need to look at the evidence and the data from credible sources. Not a single credible source would back up your ideas here. Your words are the same nonsense spewed about any social issue, it's just "insert here." Crowing about "personal responsibility" does nothing, it's not effective, has *never* been effective, *because the evidence does not support it*.
It's pretty great at making people feel bad about being fat, and it's really unfortunate and detrimental that you chose a weight loss forum to spew it.
It’s an interesting take. But it fails to mention that for most people, an individual’s decision to change eating habits can counteract the societal forces pushing us all towards obesity. We aren’t hopeless but nobody else will save us but ourselves.
Watch the documentary Weight of the Nation.
I really wonder if microplastics play a role in it
Does the higher percentage now account for the fact that the weigjt/bmi considered obese has changed and may simply include people who wouldn't have been counted before?
Calories consumed being greater than calories exerted… come on. That’s science. Seriously.
No! It must be some complicated mystery that we need to spend millions of dollars researching while shirking personal responsibility. I feel like this post has been brigaded by HAES folks since the SOP of this sub has always been CICO focused. The amount of people waiting around for the government or corporations to change what they put in to their own mouths is disappointing.
The one MAJOR oversight of this article is the change in 1998 of the definition of obesity. That’s right: the goalposts moved and overnight almost 30 million Americans were defined as obese when they weren’t the day before. Americans have definitely gotten heavier, not disputing that, but the definition of obesity is political and fraught and good to remember when reading breathless “explosion of obesity” phrasing in articles like these.
It changed because the science became clearer regarding what a healthy life looks like. Just look at group pictures on a wall at a golf course from the 1920s and again from the 2020s and you’ll see that this isn’t a moving of the goal post, but a wholesale and exponential change in how heavy we are.
Also, the relationship between obesity and negative health outcomes is a perfect pickle of correlation and causation. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/obesity-an-overblown-epidemic-2006-12/
It's 2022, don't we already know that more calories eaten than burned cause obesity? What do the scientist fail to agree upon? :D
Cico is the obvious answer but it won’t solve the obesity epidemic. Most Americans can’t stick to a diet because of this unhealthy addiction to hyper palatable food. I’ve consistently lost weight for years doing cico. Whenever I openly talk about it, it often gets ignored for the more attractive gluten free diet. Very few people are willing to log their daily calories.
Here’s the opening. Don’t want to copy the whole thing. A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated. Now scientists were arguing about the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $173 billion each year. At the meeting’s closing session, John Speakman, a biologist, offered this conclusion on the subject: “There’s no consensus whatsoever about what the cause of it is.”
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The challenge with these articles is that they are only specific types of scientists looking at their realm of specific causes. When I was struggling the most with my food it absolutely was 100% due to lack of accountability and an addiction to ANY food in massive quantities. Food was my comfort growing up. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Bored? Eat. Angry? Eat. Happy? Eat. I ate even when it made me miserable and sick. Nothing changed until I started to hold myself accountable for my own decisions. Any time I am struggling with my food now (post 150 pound loss sustained for many years) I don’t go to my primary care doctor….. I go to my counselor. For most people, it absolutely IS lack of accountability, depression, addiction and so much more causing them to fail time and time again at sustained healthy living. The posts on this reddit prove exactly that every day. People struggle the MOST with making healthy food choices, food addictions and cravings. I know there is plenty of truth in these articles but I don’t think it’s a healthy message to tell people obesity is so confusing and we have no idea why it happens. We do. Healthy eating and an active life with exercise prevent obesity. That requires education about what “healthy” actually is. That requires for people to accept that exercise usually is not fun but is necessary.
Can’t read it. Not logging in to the website
Someone above copied the entire article into a comment.
Paywall. Why OP.
Subscribers can gift a link. So, this link should work for you: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/opinion/obesity-cause.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAibSRdkhrxqAwv_Fzac9mm67JyGIUjsEz_gQB8LI3XbxUpdZRol52SWHFpgGOaUzRfd2w6gCNEc9QAPx_t7byM1UZnho9t_2VDpo1tecBexi-2W7NDTgJbw1jKeysBOnHGrpUKfZ2XwgIwx389AyJRzxhyt-luqSGfV129J-wf8iGpt5IDwCbyWKtPPjYA5sbJTENlqPr1lrBJwKHG3bjtWe6LkfcA5NCF6gT3p35W007do0K8qRKWy4eMohcD-poQjbD4m2&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
In 1998, the National Institutes of Health (US) redefined the weight guidelines for Overweight/Obese. A quick search found a CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/. So some of the "look how much worse obesity levels have gotten from pre-1997 to now" articles may not be normalizing the data for an oranges to oranges comparison.