In many countries around the world statistics on weight seem to indicate we are getting fatter and fatter, a trend that seems to accelerate after it startedaround the 70s. I am a person that believes in causality, I think that things happen because something makes them happen (that is not the same as teleology: I am not talking about conspiracy theories, the will of some superior being or anything finalistic). So this is my question: what could the reason or reasons be? Why are we getting fatter? And is the way we are getting fatter changing? I do not remember people getting obese from the hip down while mantaining a *normal *upper half, something I see regularly now.
I will start with some possible explanations: We eat more. We exercise less. Food has more calories than it used to have. Corn sugar. Antibiotics have messed up our gut flora. Soft drinks. Hormones added to feed. The human race is evolving in this direction. All/none of the above.
Can we reverse the trend?
NM. I see this is GQ.
For a forager, it’s a good survival strategy to eat all the calories you can find, because you’re probably not going to find that many. So that tendency gets selected for. Now that we have access to all the calories, that trait is coming back to haunt us.
My theory is two-fold, and is strictly based on economics:
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In the U.S., food is cheaper than it has ever been. And the cheaper something is, the greater the demand. I don’t have the data, but I would guess the situation is similar in many other countries.
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The availability of food is greater than it has ever been. And the number of restaurants (including fast food) is at an all time high in the U.S. Greater availability leads to greater demand.
If you want people to be of normal weight again, make food much more expensive and decrease the availability of it.
Two major reasons: 1) cellphone usage and the Internet (especially important in childhood obesity, as online pursuits replace sports). 2) so very many good things to eat (“good” as defined by high levels of fat, grease, salt and sugar) advertised constantly on TV.
No matter what programs I watch, there always seems to be a succession of ads for fast food and pizza places featuring oozing melted cheese, succulent burgers and calorie-filled plant-based substitutes. No wonder people gain weight.
The trend started before widespread use of Internet and cell phones. It may play a role, but I doubt it is the main reason.
In the U.S. at least, portion size is a factor.
When McDonald’s and their competitors started, they had one hamburger with 1/10 lb of meat. With bun that was 250 calories. Today, the quarter pounder is standard, and double and triple burgers are common. Nor are those burgers plain. They come with cheese and bacon and anything else that won’t slide off the bun. The conference hotel I stayed in last week had only 3/4 lb burgers, nothing smaller.
Most casual restaurants are like this these days. They compete on size and calories, always trying to top one another, often quite literally by loading more toppings onto foods. I find I can get two or three leftover meals from a doggie bag.
Another problem is that snacking is now a day-long normal. In my childhood, a snack meant a bowl of Jello after school. Today people have snacks with them at all times, and have them constantly, between meals and often in place of meals. Snacks are designed to be the emptiest of calories, i.e. with little nutritional value. Today’s buzzword for these are “ultraprocessed foods.” If the term scares people away from them, all to the good. But the amount of processing is irrelevant. Only the calories/nutrition level of the final product really matters.
I disagree slightly with Crafter_Man. There are more restaurants today because people no longer regularly eat with their families and because work/school schedules make it difficult to coordinate the kind of stay-at-home-mom cooking of the 1950s. In many places, convenient supermarkets are hard to find, as well. Despite the foodie movement, most people seem to think that spending time on cooking is unrewarding. Restaurants are responding to demand. The U.S. has too many restaurants accordingly, and they need to feverishly compete by constant advertising and those eye-catching calorie-laden meals I mentioned.
BTW, Food may have more calories but it isn’t because of corn sugar. Corn sugar has exactly as many calories per weight as every other sugar. The real cause is that various types of sugar - and fat - are often added to supermarket packaged food to make it more palatable.
Good points, but then why is obesity spreading in places like the Pacific Islands, Greece & Cyprus or the Mediterranean Arab Countries? They do not have that many restaurants (many cater for tourists and close seasonally) and they are not very rich.
As others have said, we are deeply and redundantly hardwired to store calories (which makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective).
When we, with our genes and their tendency to cause us to build up fat, are placed in an environment where calories are abundant and readily obtainable, and little physical energy is used to find them (or, in fact, for anything else for most people), the outcome seems inevitable.
To make matters worse, most everyone likes a nice dopamine hit. Eating gives us one (unless you’re getting it from a vice like drugs, sex, or gambling). Eating is a socially acceptable vice. Growing obese not so much.
The obesity problem pretty clearly began before cellphones and the Internet.
As mentioned above, food in the US is cheaper than its ever been. This is likely the case in many other places around the world as well. I think it really is a matter of people taking in too many calories, especially carbs. Here are some of my personal beliefs on the subject.
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Carbs are easier to overindulge in and play the largest role overall. The big five IMHO are sugar(cane), wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes. As an anecdote, but one which I think applies to a large number of people, consider this. It’s a lot easier for me to drink 16 ounces of soda, or eat one pound of bread, french fries, or fried rice, than it would be for me to eat a pound of chicken breast, broccoli, or avocado.
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The whole kick about pesticides, antibiotics, and GMOs being to blame will likely turn out to have a much smaller role than expected. Let’s say someone eats a diet of the following, all treated with antibiotics, pesticides, and including GMO organisms. The diet includes varied meals with chicken breast, kale, avocados, tomatoes, salmon, almonds, apples, and olives. A second person eats organic grown, free range, no GMO and no antibiotic treated foods. They eat cheeseburgers, pizza, fries, and homemade soda. Person 1 is going to be a lot healthier than person 2.
I suspect things like gut flora, pesticides, and plastics may play a much larger role than we currently understand. That, combined with sedentary lifestyles and calorie availability has led to the accellerating increase. The 70s may have been a starting place due to increased availability, affordability, and use of convenience foods that were more loaded with sugar and fat, and increased TV watching.
We don’t know the role that plastics play yet because for a long time, it was not understood to be getting into our food. Now we know that billions of microparticles of plastic can be found in a single cup of tea made from a plastic pyramid tea bag (as far as I know, a purely aesthetic innovation), and that some of those particles are small enough to enter cells. We haven’t even begun to study what happens as a result.
Plastics and pesticides, I forgot those. Imagine somebody found out that something like that was the reason for the epidemic, as it is called. Who would be liable? We are surely talking hundreds of billions!
Where I live, the demon is coca cola. Before coke, people drank fruit/water drinks. Coke marketing, including buying up fresh water supplies has been very successful. Obesity is increasing here.
I agree. My extended family eats out several times a week and I find that a typical portion is way more than I can comfortably consume. I either take it home or waste it.
A close friend in the restaurant trade told me that food costs are one of the smaller business expenditures and it is easy to increase portion size to attract customers.
I don’t think those things are directly responsible but they certainly have had an indirect impact. Pesticides and the antibiotics we feed livestock mean that food is cheaper. Plastic packaging also means we can eat things like Twinkies with a lot less effort than we would have in the past.
Not just any calories. Our bodies are hard-wired to consume carbohydrates immediately and to store fat to consume during the famine that it thinks is on the horizon. The increase in obesity also has a direct correlation with the increase in diabetes and other nasty diseases. It seems that the fast food industry has pretty much given up on the token attempt to encourage lighter meals. All the adds you see have triple cheeseburgers and the like, with Carl’s Junior going one step further with their drooling star character. Combine the high fat intake with large portions and sedentary activity and Bob’s your uncle.
Since this GQ, here is a cite:
And another cite:
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Mexico has high levels of obesity and more than 70 per cent of the population is overweight or obese.
I do have a theory: People are stuffing their fat faces like there’s no tomorrow.