Fruit juice has about the same amount of sugar and calories as soda. But the main thing is that when people drink juice they do so in smaller portions. When coke first came out it came in 6 oz portions. Then Pepsi came out in 12 oz portions for about the same price.
MacDonald’s small is 16 oz with some ice. Medium is 21 oz and Large is 30 oz.
In general portion sizes have been increasing. My grandmother’s nice china set the dinner plates are much smaller than the typical dinner plates available for home use now.
I read an article a few years ago that was about the increase in obesity in Mexico over the last 40 years (following the US pattern but trailing it by some time period). The conclusion of the people studying the issue was the following:
1 - Shift from rural to urban lifestyle (I think they said reduction in exercise)
2 - Increase in unhealthy food availability (e.g. like the stuff we eat in the US)
I bet it’s multifactorial. I can confidently say that portion sizes have grown considerably over the past quarter-century. Remember when McDonald’s “quarter pounder” was the BIG burger that only someone’s dad got? Nowadays, that’s a middling-sized burger, and the smaller ones are for children. Same with sodas; 22 oz used to be a medium or even a large; today they’re the small in a lot of places. The 7-11 “Big Gulp” was HUGE when I was a kid; now it’s on the smaller end of what they sell, and the same size cup is a medium at many fast food places.
Same thing for a lot of other stuff- people just used to eat less. I think that a lot of it is that food marketers have decided to compete on size, and since cost isn’t much of a factor anymore, we have a “race to the top” so to speak, where they try and outdo each other on portion size.
People quickly get used to this and recalibrate their ideas of what is normal, and that’s how you get people eating half-pound hamburgers as a standard size, instead of a more normal 1/4 - 1/3 lb burger.
I think all the things cited above are a factor (with the possible exception of “people are stuffing their fat faces”); but I’d like to add another into the mix; and that, counterintuitively, is the increasing prevalance of people going on weight-loss diets, starting sometimes at quite young ages.
There’s by now a significant body of evidence that this changes metabolism so that the same amount of calories, eaten after such a diet, will lead to greater weight gain. Leading, very often, to going on another such diet (possibly of a different variation, depending on what the weight-loss industry and/or the news are pushing at the time.) Leading, very often, to another and greater weight bounce due either to giving in to temptation and the force of millions of years of evolution, and/or to the fact that eating an amount of food that wouldn’t previously have caused weight gain, due to the more efficient metabolism, now does so. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
Yeah, true enough. The best and most effective weight loss program is just portion control and exercise. Add to that an increase in fruits and veggies, and your health improves dramatically. Basically, you can eat anything in moderation without suffering ill effects. Feel like having some ice cream? Go ahead, but make it a small cone, not a triple scoop. Same for other snack foods; pay attention to the portion size on the carton and try not to exceed it. It can be difficult to get into a program like that in a society that loves its buffet lines and that thinks that large plates of food means it’s a good deal.
One theory I’ve heard (I’m not sure if this is the food reward hypothesis or something else) is that our brains look for signals in the food we eat to determine how plentiful calories are in our environment. Signals like how easy to digest the food is, caloric density, intensity and combinations of flavors, etc. are all signals that calories are easy to obtain.
When food has these attributes, the brain basically says ‘we are living in bountiful times. Raise the bodyweight set point so we can gain fat during these abundant times to prepare for the inevitable famine’. So people’s set points go up and we gain weight. And obviously the famine never comes (except for intentional dieting, which also seems to raise the set point).
Anyway, food marketers are trying to sell their products, and the way to sell food products is to make them palatable, and the way to make them palatable is to do as above, make food easy to digest (many foods are pre broken down to be easier to digest), have intense flavors, caloric density, etc. Which means that the free market is inadvertently inventing foods that keep pushing our bodyweight set point higher. Then people diet to try to lose weight, which also causes the set point to increase.
I think there is a genetic component too. Pacific islanders are generally far more obese than east asians, despite both leading unhealthy lifestyles. But everyone’s weight is going up from what I can tell.
That’s a generally good program for how to eat, presuming that “portion control” doesn’t mean “always eat less than one’s body needs for sustenance”; and it may well prevent or at least minimize weight gain. But I’d like to see a cite for “most effective weight loss program” – at least, if that’s taken to mean “effective weight loss program”.
I’ve asked, on various sites, for a study showing any weight loss program that produces long-term significant weight loss – long term as in over five years – in half or more of its participants. I’ve seen others ask the same thing. I haven’t, yet, seen such a study. Have you got any?
Yes I do. It’s because we eat all the time. Used to be people ate three meals a day and that was it. Now there’s often a half dozen eating opportunities during the day. Breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, a little something in the afternoon, dinner, then chips or a light snack while watching TV in the evening. Your insulin levels never have a chance to drop off, and insulin is a fat storing hormone. Used to be that when kids came home from school their mothers would smack their hand if the reached for a snack, “You’ll spoil your dinner”, now, kids aren’t expected to play a quarter of soccer without some orange wedges for energy.
Diets lead to lower metabolism. Your body doesn’t know you are dieting, it just knows iut’s not getting enough calories, so it lowers the metabolism. Then when you start eating too much in response to the diet, you get fatter.
I like the simple Physics Diet: Expend more calories than one consumes. We don’t, so we bloat. We blame portions, sugars, sodas, burgers, deep-fries, snacks, instinct, et al but it’s mostly a matter of self-control. Am I victim-blaming? Yes.
“…findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis indicated that internet use was positively associated with increased odds of being overweight and obese. In particular, the most frequent internet users had 47% greater odds of being overweight or obese when compared to the most infrequent internet users.”
It is tempting for some to blame altered gut flora, microplastics, pesticides, GMOs etc. for increasing obesity. What the problem overwhelmingly boils down to however was summarized neatly (though not with extreme sensitivity) by an ER doc of my acquaintance, who once informed a morbidly obese patient “You need to eat less.”.
Yes, you mentioned also in opening, but many responses make the reason subjective lifestyle/cultural changes in the US. But the trend isn’t a US-only one, not nearly. The US ‘scores high’ in obesity still, but it long has. The trend toward more obesity is global.
That said, the simple Econ 101 explanation of trend to relatively cheaper food is true both in the US and globally. Not saying that’s the explanation or that one can prove quantitatively the causality factors, but I don’t think one can find a lot of evidence of long run rise in obesity rate where relative food purchasing power is in a long term downtrend.
Also though on a snapshot in time comparing various countries, ethnicity plays a role in some cases, whether via culture or genetics. The leading positions of various nations with populations mainly under the ‘Pacific Islander’ ethnic group in the obesity rankings, the entire top 10 per the CIA World Fact Book, presumably has something to do with culture and/or genetics of that population though hard to say how much of each if the two factors could even be separated. Which might also have some relationship to US obesity rate v other rich countries which are actually demographically fairly different than the US. Although again that sort of difference doesn’t address why the rates have tended to go up most places. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2228rank.html
Further on culture, one self reinforcing trend might be greater acceptance of obesity from an aesthetic POV. Of course it would be a game of make believe to say many or most people don’t still find slim people more attractive as a rule. But now you aren’t ‘supposed’ to be down on fat people, or at least not if explicitly (for example maybe if they are politically opposed to you you can make fun of people’s weight as supposedly typical of people of their political leaning, but if they had the ‘right’ politics, your side’s, it’s generally nowadays a no no to make fun of weight). At one time it was, even in my memory, more acceptable to openly say you found fat people to be ugly, or even morally deficient for having ‘let themselves go’. That lesser stigma, again it’s certainly not zero stigma in the real world of US mainstream culture at least, might cause more obesity. Health is a valid reason to avoid obesity, but avoiding scorn is probably a stronger reason for a lot of people.
I’m gonna go with “compare the quantity of fast food sold 50 years ago v. today.”
Might not explain all of it, but there’s no way we’re all eating more healthily than we were 50 years ago in all the rest of our meals, let alone eating healthier enough to counterbalance the fattening nature of the fast food diet.
I misspoke: It’s not a program; it’s a lifestyle, unlike fad diets which are unsustainable and even harmful. You have to eat enough to maintain your weight, of course (assuming you’re not already too heavy). This is what the Weight Watchers system is based on. It works to either help drop excess pounds or to maintain the weight you wish to stay at. It does this through portion control, and not by only eating rutabagas or kale or some such nonsense, but by eating what you like in moderation. Most people have no idea what a ‘normal’ portion of, say, beef is. Instead, we have restaurants offering a 20 oz porterhouse.
Lol. Are you sure people aren’t getting obese because they won’t get off your lawn? The internet? Lol, again.
I think it is becoming clear that a whole bunch of chemicals we use for preservation and sugar replacement fuck up our body’s monitoring/decision trees wrt fat storage/consumption levels. Of course, availability of easy to grab fatty foods contributes.