Is BMI even a fair measure of what is overweight? While I do agree people are generally more overweight than they were, my eyes tell me that, starting with an unrealistic goal doesn’t make sense.
Let’s get real. There’s no evidence losing weight is possible for most people. Once you’re fat, you’re fucked. Trying to lose weight after you’ve been too fat for two long just increases the boomerang effect.
I strongly suspect that alterations in our microbiome due to highly processed foods including refined carbohydrates does meaningfully affect the way we digest and metabolize what we eat.
Not once has any public official mentioned that obesity increases your risk of covid severe illness & death. You can’t change your age (increased risk in elderly) but you can change your weight. What a missed opportunity to send a message to get our country in a healthier place.
I've not read this yet, admittedly, but I've noticed that overweight people don't seem to understand how non overweight people live. It's choices all day, every day. Some of us were geared this way by our folks or by an early medical dx that we had to manage, but maintaining a healthy body is an every day, all day, lifetime job. It's not using food to blunt emotions. Also, once you are overweight and insulin resistant, your body wants to stay that way and it is harder. But it is like that with any part of us we abuse...even our brains. Anyway...Will read later.
You can say the same about people who aspire to become and do become doctors vs. people who don't reach their career goals. But yet, it was the aspiring doctor who didn't go to the mall instead of studying for the chem test, and the underachieving person who did. People can't conceive of the time and effort it takes to actually do things and the sacrifices required.
A dramatic rise in obesity has occurred among humans within the last several decades. Little is known about whether similar increases in obesity have occurred in animals inhabiting human-influenced environments. We examined samples collectively consisting of over 20 000 animals from 24 populations (12 divided separately into males and females) of animals representing eight species living with or around humans in industrialized societies. In all populations, the estimated coefficient for the trend of body weight over time was positive (i.e. increasing). The probability of all trends being in the same direction by chance is 1.2 × 10−7. Surprisingly, we find that over the past several decades, average mid-life body weights have risen among primates and rodents living in research colonies, as well as among feral rodents and domestic dogs and cats. The consistency of these findings among animals living in varying environments, suggests the intriguing possibility that the aetiology of increasing body weight may involve several as-of-yet unidentified and/or poorly understood factors (e.g. viral pathogens, epigenetic factors). This finding may eventually enhance the discovery and fuller elucidation of other factors that have contributed to the recent rise in obesity rates.
My whole adult life I've driven a car everywhere , because it's the only practical thing to do in the suburbs. For most of it I was taught to eat low fat and ate low fat packaged foods, thinking they were healthier than home cooked higher fat foods. this was all in accordance with the Nutrition class I took in college. Now, in the last (hopefully) one third of my life, I have to dedicate 10-15 hours of my week going to the gym and using the sauna and cooking at home. I don't mind spending time on these things, but I don't see how the average 40+ hour a week commuting parent can easily afford the time and cost just to offset the damage of the modern lifestyle.
I read it more than once & my thought was "Where does personal responsibility come into play"?
[and yes I understand all the processed food, etc. debacle]
I was slowly gaining about 3 pounds a year, & although I have great blood pressure & no diabetes, I felt SO MUCH better when I decided to lose weight over a year ago & keep it off.
I have had to learn not to fall for the SUGAR trap.
I always had trouble gaining weight until I was in my 50's & then let myself eat so much more processed & full of sugar food & it showed all over my body & with how I felt.
I have learned to eat "food" that is better for me & makes me feel full.
...AND the good news is my Chronic Fatigue & Fibromyalgia, that I have suffered with for over 27 years, seems to be almost in remission.
It has shown me that all the sugar was impacting me EVERY single day.
Now, at 70 I feel alive again & can "move about" with more zest than ever!!!
Something has happened over the past fifty years to cause the huge increase in obesity we see today.
It's clear that our genes haven't changed in such a short time. Nor has our basic willpower. And yet we see obesity everywhere we look.
One thing that has changed dramatically is our food industry.
Sometimes my wife asks me to pickup various things from the grocery store, and I realize when I am walking through the store looking for them, that there are entire aisles that I have never been down because we don't buy the things in those aisles. And those aisles are generally prepared meals or processed foods. I'm not saying this to virtue signal, but to point out that there but for the grace of God go I. My wife likes to cook and has the time to cook so we buy basic ingredients for cooking rather than prepared foods. Thus our diets haven't been materially affected by the dramatic changes in what is available in the grocery stores.
Another unintended benefit of my wife's cooking is that we rarely eat fast food. Again, not virtue signalling, it's simply that we get better food at home and so don't need to eat fast food. We do love McDonald's french fries though!
Robert Lustig's book, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, was eye-opening for me as it presents a simple idea that explains a lot of what I observe personally: sugars added to food to make them taste better and last longer have fundamentally changed what we eat.
My Dad who was born in 1925 , didn't do a lick of exercise, was 6' and weighed 140lbs. I was born in 1960, exercise a lot, am 6', and weigh 175lbs. I find this curious.
Doctors telling overweight patients to eat less and exercise more obviously makes almost zero difference.
As a society we need to come up with a better plan for tackling this problem or all of our children and grandchildren are going to end up looking like the characters in Pixar's Walle and will have terrible health problems.
Finally, we have to figure out a way to talk about the obesity epidemic without being labeled fat-shamers.
A completely tangential comment: Your mail carrier probably wouldn't describe the catalogs he or she delivers as a burden. In 2019, direct-marketing mail accounted for 16.3 billion dollars of the USPS's total revenue of 71 billion. No matter how the customer might feel about the environmental impact or the inconvenience of receiving it, that "junk" pays a lot of salaries!
If you want to know what is making people gain weight, next time you are at the grocery store, look at what is in the carts that are piled high. The question should not be "What makes people gain weight?” It should be "What makes people keep buying and eating the stuff that is killing them?" Until you address that, the rest of this discussion about why there are so many overweight and obese Americans is irrelevant for most people.
Fathead is a great documentary about this.
Is BMI even a fair measure of what is overweight? While I do agree people are generally more overweight than they were, my eyes tell me that, starting with an unrealistic goal doesn’t make sense.
It is all about how much is eaten. Period. Have you ever seen pictures of fat POW's?
Let’s get real. There’s no evidence losing weight is possible for most people. Once you’re fat, you’re fucked. Trying to lose weight after you’ve been too fat for two long just increases the boomerang effect.
I strongly suspect that alterations in our microbiome due to highly processed foods including refined carbohydrates does meaningfully affect the way we digest and metabolize what we eat.
Not once has any public official mentioned that obesity increases your risk of covid severe illness & death. You can’t change your age (increased risk in elderly) but you can change your weight. What a missed opportunity to send a message to get our country in a healthier place.
Part of my child’s “homework” is 5 push-ups and 10 sit-ups
This should be part of every child’s homework sent home by the school
I just fake it
But it should really be part of it
It's a sad reality that people like to attribute problems to other factors when it comes to things like obesity but not CoVid or other things.
I've not read this yet, admittedly, but I've noticed that overweight people don't seem to understand how non overweight people live. It's choices all day, every day. Some of us were geared this way by our folks or by an early medical dx that we had to manage, but maintaining a healthy body is an every day, all day, lifetime job. It's not using food to blunt emotions. Also, once you are overweight and insulin resistant, your body wants to stay that way and it is harder. But it is like that with any part of us we abuse...even our brains. Anyway...Will read later.
You can say the same about people who aspire to become and do become doctors vs. people who don't reach their career goals. But yet, it was the aspiring doctor who didn't go to the mall instead of studying for the chem test, and the underachieving person who did. People can't conceive of the time and effort it takes to actually do things and the sacrifices required.
Wait, this is quite likely be happening to other non-human species as well, domestic and feral! How does this change the analysis?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.1890
Abstract, cut and pasted
A dramatic rise in obesity has occurred among humans within the last several decades. Little is known about whether similar increases in obesity have occurred in animals inhabiting human-influenced environments. We examined samples collectively consisting of over 20 000 animals from 24 populations (12 divided separately into males and females) of animals representing eight species living with or around humans in industrialized societies. In all populations, the estimated coefficient for the trend of body weight over time was positive (i.e. increasing). The probability of all trends being in the same direction by chance is 1.2 × 10−7. Surprisingly, we find that over the past several decades, average mid-life body weights have risen among primates and rodents living in research colonies, as well as among feral rodents and domestic dogs and cats. The consistency of these findings among animals living in varying environments, suggests the intriguing possibility that the aetiology of increasing body weight may involve several as-of-yet unidentified and/or poorly understood factors (e.g. viral pathogens, epigenetic factors). This finding may eventually enhance the discovery and fuller elucidation of other factors that have contributed to the recent rise in obesity rates.
My whole adult life I've driven a car everywhere , because it's the only practical thing to do in the suburbs. For most of it I was taught to eat low fat and ate low fat packaged foods, thinking they were healthier than home cooked higher fat foods. this was all in accordance with the Nutrition class I took in college. Now, in the last (hopefully) one third of my life, I have to dedicate 10-15 hours of my week going to the gym and using the sauna and cooking at home. I don't mind spending time on these things, but I don't see how the average 40+ hour a week commuting parent can easily afford the time and cost just to offset the damage of the modern lifestyle.
Love your article & most all the comments.
I felt as you did...
I read it more than once & my thought was "Where does personal responsibility come into play"?
[and yes I understand all the processed food, etc. debacle]
I was slowly gaining about 3 pounds a year, & although I have great blood pressure & no diabetes, I felt SO MUCH better when I decided to lose weight over a year ago & keep it off.
I have had to learn not to fall for the SUGAR trap.
I always had trouble gaining weight until I was in my 50's & then let myself eat so much more processed & full of sugar food & it showed all over my body & with how I felt.
I have learned to eat "food" that is better for me & makes me feel full.
...AND the good news is my Chronic Fatigue & Fibromyalgia, that I have suffered with for over 27 years, seems to be almost in remission.
It has shown me that all the sugar was impacting me EVERY single day.
Now, at 70 I feel alive again & can "move about" with more zest than ever!!!
Maybe we should stop using BMI as a measurement of "obesity"
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/101296
Something has happened over the past fifty years to cause the huge increase in obesity we see today.
It's clear that our genes haven't changed in such a short time. Nor has our basic willpower. And yet we see obesity everywhere we look.
One thing that has changed dramatically is our food industry.
Sometimes my wife asks me to pickup various things from the grocery store, and I realize when I am walking through the store looking for them, that there are entire aisles that I have never been down because we don't buy the things in those aisles. And those aisles are generally prepared meals or processed foods. I'm not saying this to virtue signal, but to point out that there but for the grace of God go I. My wife likes to cook and has the time to cook so we buy basic ingredients for cooking rather than prepared foods. Thus our diets haven't been materially affected by the dramatic changes in what is available in the grocery stores.
Another unintended benefit of my wife's cooking is that we rarely eat fast food. Again, not virtue signalling, it's simply that we get better food at home and so don't need to eat fast food. We do love McDonald's french fries though!
Robert Lustig's book, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, was eye-opening for me as it presents a simple idea that explains a lot of what I observe personally: sugars added to food to make them taste better and last longer have fundamentally changed what we eat.
My Dad who was born in 1925 , didn't do a lick of exercise, was 6' and weighed 140lbs. I was born in 1960, exercise a lot, am 6', and weigh 175lbs. I find this curious.
Doctors telling overweight patients to eat less and exercise more obviously makes almost zero difference.
As a society we need to come up with a better plan for tackling this problem or all of our children and grandchildren are going to end up looking like the characters in Pixar's Walle and will have terrible health problems.
Finally, we have to figure out a way to talk about the obesity epidemic without being labeled fat-shamers.
Fattest women are those who follow food channel recipes cooking from scratch. The study is kind of funny to read.
A completely tangential comment: Your mail carrier probably wouldn't describe the catalogs he or she delivers as a burden. In 2019, direct-marketing mail accounted for 16.3 billion dollars of the USPS's total revenue of 71 billion. No matter how the customer might feel about the environmental impact or the inconvenience of receiving it, that "junk" pays a lot of salaries!
If you want to know what is making people gain weight, next time you are at the grocery store, look at what is in the carts that are piled high. The question should not be "What makes people gain weight?” It should be "What makes people keep buying and eating the stuff that is killing them?" Until you address that, the rest of this discussion about why there are so many overweight and obese Americans is irrelevant for most people.