Steve
Penultimate Amazing
All understood. I have no issue. See my edit above.
The Global Obesity Epidemic
- Thread starter Skeptical Greg
- Start date
All understood. I have no issue. See my edit above.
Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
There is a so-so documentary about the benefits of switching to a low-carb, high ( healthy ) fat diet, that includes a group of Australian Aborigines.. ( Note: The diet did not include Australian Aborigines as an entree.. 
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The Magic Pill
)The Magic Pill
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The Atheist
The Grammar Tyrant
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There is a so-so documentary about the benefits of switching to a low-carb, high ( healthy ) fat diet, that includes a group of Australian Aborigines.. ( Note: The diet did not include Australian Aborigines as an entree..
Pity about the doco, because the science appears to be coming solidly in on it.
There's a group of GPs over here who have started making news about the superior results they've been achieving with obese patients.
It'll catch on with any luck.
Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
Glad you're skeptical of The Magic Pill. Avoid anything with Pete Evans to prolong your life.
I know of Noakes and Ludwig, Lustig, Taubes and the other LCHF/Keto white patriarchy.
They're ridiculed quite a bit in Science Twitter.
They have done a fair few studies, but they also distort those studies.
The debate on Joe Rogan between Gary Taubes and Stephan Guyenet was rather good.
I know of Noakes and Ludwig, Lustig, Taubes and the other LCHF/Keto white patriarchy.
They're ridiculed quite a bit in Science Twitter.
They have done a fair few studies, but they also distort those studies.
The debate on Joe Rogan between Gary Taubes and Stephan Guyenet was rather good.
Minoosh
Penultimate Amazing
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This seems like a contradiction to me. It's all fat people's fault, but it's the fault of companies pushing processed food. That's an environmental issue, not a psychological one.
So - could the problem be a bit of both?
I read an article about a study that showed that people today are getting fatter despite evidence that people in the '70s with comparable diets and exercise habits were much thinner. If I find it I'll post a link. It was quite recent and I don't remember that a cause was ever determined but it might have something to do with bacteria or the lack of it in people's guts.
Also, remember that once you're overweight, you can eat very moderately yet still remain obese. And, that crash diets may leave you with less muscle and more metabolically inert mass (fat). Thousands of years of evolution has left us with strong tendencies to eat when food is available. Now for many of us it's available all the time. With no evolutionary "off" switch you're fighting your body's instinct to keep shoveling it in while you can. It once served us well, now not so much at least in modern, developed countries.
Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
It's ultimately fat people's choice...
Not if they can't afford healthy food and living conditions, for instance.
You obviously don't understand how biologically complex the condition of being overweight is - the interaction between genes, the bacteria in your gut, your metabolism, appetite and diet, and a number of other factors.
To turn it into "ultimately fat people's choice" only serves the purpose of fat shaming.
You obviously don't understand how biologically complex the condition of being overweight is - the interaction between genes, the bacteria in your gut, your metabolism, appetite and diet, and a number of other factors.
To turn it into "ultimately fat people's choice" only serves the purpose of fat shaming.
Some good lists and interactive maps:
Most obese countries (World Population Review)
List of countries by BMI (Wikipedia)
Graphics (World Obesity Data)
Prevalence of overweight among adults, ages 18+, 1975-2016 (age standardized estimate): Both sexes, 2016 (WHO)
Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
You are just limiting their choices. What can we do to improve that?
Turning it into a fat shaming issue is just avoiding the real issue, and derailing this thread.
All you have to do is read my comments on nutrition to know I understand this a lot more than you think.. I am also a formerly obese person, who knows how I got that way.
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The Atheist
The Grammar Tyrant
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I give Pasifika people a bit of a free pass, because they evolved to survive with very low metabolism thanks to a fish-based diet.
When NZ & Aus started pushing cheap food on them, it seemed like a simple answer for them: more free time.
Hasn't worked out so well.
Getting back to this thread, there's this:
https://bodyforwife.com/what-is-the-solution-to-obesity/
I'm not posting the summary.
Obesity, its causes, and solutions are not a soundbite or two.
Instead, I'll post my additional comments.
We've evolved to what we are today because of improvements in efficiency.
We are so efficient now at producing food, we waste 30% of it globally.
It's so easy to feed ourselves, we need to go against our genetics and do things with the sole purpose of removing excess food stores.
Biologically, we want to do things the quickest, simplest way.
Hence fad diets, extreme diets.
Hence arguments about the one cause or cure of obesity.
As Nobel Prize winner, economist and psychologist Daniel Kahnemann's many studies show, the very act of thinking hard in itself depletes us of energy.
We want a quick fix, like our quick reactions in simply running from bears or hunting them.
Our bodies including the brain organ don't like expending energy we will then have to replenish.
In the 12,000 years since we started farming, we have grown taller, and are now living longer, becoming more obese, but it's not obvious we have evolved in such a short time.
Instead, though, our knowledge has grown.
It's up to us to use the collective knowledge of our tribe to help each other make learning easier, buying the right food easier, and to help make regulating our weight easier to do and understand.
It's up to us to stop insisting on extremist, over-simplified, and/or fad approaches that we can't sustain long enough to make all the required changes.
https://bodyforwife.com/what-is-the-solution-to-obesity/
I'm not posting the summary.
Obesity, its causes, and solutions are not a soundbite or two.
Instead, I'll post my additional comments.
We've evolved to what we are today because of improvements in efficiency.
We are so efficient now at producing food, we waste 30% of it globally.
It's so easy to feed ourselves, we need to go against our genetics and do things with the sole purpose of removing excess food stores.
Biologically, we want to do things the quickest, simplest way.
Hence fad diets, extreme diets.
Hence arguments about the one cause or cure of obesity.
As Nobel Prize winner, economist and psychologist Daniel Kahnemann's many studies show, the very act of thinking hard in itself depletes us of energy.
We want a quick fix, like our quick reactions in simply running from bears or hunting them.
Our bodies including the brain organ don't like expending energy we will then have to replenish.
In the 12,000 years since we started farming, we have grown taller, and are now living longer, becoming more obese, but it's not obvious we have evolved in such a short time.
Instead, though, our knowledge has grown.
It's up to us to use the collective knowledge of our tribe to help each other make learning easier, buying the right food easier, and to help make regulating our weight easier to do and understand.
It's up to us to stop insisting on extremist, over-simplified, and/or fad approaches that we can't sustain long enough to make all the required changes.
Nowadays, machines chop up bones, sinews and intestines to make them edible for humans or animals or to use them as fertilizer. I guess that our ancestors wasted much more than 30%, i.e. let other creatures eat the rest, i.e. let nature 'recycle' the parts of their prey that they didn't consume themselves.
No, not always. When we are full, we sometimes do things in slow (or fast) and very complicated ways for entertainment. Even birds and mammals play.
How do you explain surfing, dancing and chess? Many of us actually enjoy expending energy with "our bodies including the brain organ." But a lot of those things aren't free. Some neighborhoods make you want to take a stroll through the park or by the beach. Others don't. You usually find those where poor people live. (And healthy as well as tasty food tends to be more expensive than the sugary trans-fatty foods you find in all supermarkets.)
Obesity and poverty paradox in developed countries. (PubMed, 2014)
Obesity: Economic impact (Wikipedia)
It didn't take 'us' 12,000 years to become obese! It took only a fraction of that time:
'We' aren't really the ones who decide how "to use the collective knowledge of our tribe," and it is very important to most societies to exclude a vast number of people from the "collective knowledge." And the ones who are excluded most efficiently are much more likely to be(come) obese:
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Just look at all the starving fat poor people in Africa.
People in the US are lazy and coddled. I'm pretty poor and I don't waste my money on Slurpees and Ho-Ho's. Being poor is a great way to eat better. A box of cookies is a hell of a lot more expensive than fresh veggies.
It's about priorities. What do you need more, a $1,000 phone, HBO, or better food? Weed, beer, eating at McD's? The good cheap food is there if people want to buy it.
I went to a side-show once at a carnival. There was a "fat lady" on display. My friend's Mom talked to her for awhile.
You don't need to go to the circus anymore to see this. I see bigger people walking around every day.
Elvis666
Muse
Here in Nashville, we have an urban area comprising several square miles within which there is no source of fresh food, barring that available in some convenience stores. There is no way most of the inhabitants of that area to have a diet that is not composed of mostly fast and/or prepackaged food.
What you are saying is not incorrect, but there are factors in play other than expense.
Not calorie for calorie. The cookies are much cheaper per calorie.
You can get a 12-16oz package of cookies for a dollar at a dollar store. That's 1500 kcals or more. You can't buy an apple there. At a bodega or convenience store, an apple (100 kcals) is at least a dollar.
So, can the poor afford to pay 15 times more per calorie? An overweight individual might benefit a lot from buying fewer higher-quality food calories. But what about people feeding families?
You don't even see the contradiction, do you?
On the one hand, poor people get fat because they waste their money on expensive gadgets so they can't afford to buy healthy food, but on the other hand, healthy food is supposed to be much cheaper than unhealthy fattening foods so you would expect them to be unable to buy anything other than "fresh veggies" after having spent most of their money on iPhones and weed.
I bet they also can't afford to live in gated communities that offer "activities, events and fun gathering spaces" because they waste their money on beer and flat-screen TVs ...
I wasn't arguing with you or against any of that. I know all that, and agree.
I don't know who is arguing with whom in this thread.
I didn't want to become biased towards or against any participants.
Did you think I was blaming fat people?
Did you read the link from James Fell?
"We" are the majority of the US and Australia populations, who are overweight - who need to drive to a fitness centre and usually quit after the first month of membership, or who sit in front of screens for work and for recreation.
The people who mean that malnutrition due to obesity is a bigger problem in the world than malnutrition due to famine.
Me, I fell in love with running 4 years ago. I'm using a sympathetic "we", even thought "fat shaming" thoughts sometimes pop up uninvited in my mind when I see overweight people.
Anything in my previous post you agree with?
I'd check out my other post from last night if you think I'm unsympathetic in any way towards Level 4 nations.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=12854255#post12854255
This is not just about obesity. It's also about climate change, war, inequality. All of this and more.
I didn't think that you were arguing with me about this or that you were biased against fat people. And I did read the article in your link. I'll get back to that.
I notice primarily that the world has been organized in a way that makes it necessary for people to compensate in their spare time for the kind of sedentary work that they have to perform + the sedentary transport to and from on top of that. The spare time that they have left isn't much so it's hard to blame them for not wanting to spend it on the activities that are necessary for them to stay fit ... for what, exactly? It ought to be for life, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that what they are staying fit for (if at all) is work.
I am not sure that you are right about that. In many parts of the world, going hungry is still a thing: World hunger is still not going down after three years and obesity is still growing – UN report - More than 820 million people are hungry globally (WHO, July 15, 2019)
And to some extent (we agree that there is more than one cause), obesity is due to the modern kind of malnutrition, not the other way 'round.
Pop culture contains a lot of entertainment and jokes on fat people's expense, so it's easy to slip into the fat-people-are-lazy-slobs way of thinking, cf. Bill Maher versus James Corben:
I don't think that you are.
Well, in this thread we focus on The Global Obesity Epidemic, and I hope that mgidm86's post makes it obvious with whom I really disagree!
When the conditions of work, transport and access to nutrition have created an epidemic of obesity, I find it idiotic to focus on the responsibility of individuals to make sure that they spend a considerable part of what little spare time and money they've got left on keeping themselves fit for work! A rational way of dealing with the problem would be to organize society in a way so that people work to live instead of living (and dieting and exercising) to work.
And I think that James Fell ignores that part of the problem.
In other words, class struggle and rallies against the present conditions are the kind of meaningful exercise that I would recommend!