Do you have a theory about why people are getting more obese?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I mean… “track your calories and monitor your weight” is about as basic as it gets. Whether or not it’s easily doable is another thing, but apart from that—manage the calories—what else is there to do? Not a fad, just a numbers thing (albeit one in which the calories burned may well be influenced by how the body responds to the calories taken in). But one way or the other, you need to figure out how many calories it takes to maintain, and then try doing less than that if you want to lose weight (and if “less” still doesn’t do it, then start doing “less than “less””, eventually you have to hit a number). I think it’s the programs that focus on one particular source of calories as “the culprit” that need to prove themselves.

Here’s a couple well-sourced articles from VOX that provide backing for the idea that caloric intake management is key, even over exercise, where weight is concerned (obviously other things are important for general health, but we’re talking weight here):

Why you shouldn’t exercise to lose weight, explained with 60+ studies

The science is in: exercise won’t help you lose much weight

42

I tell my patients to “put less food in your mouth, move your body around more”. It’s still the most successful strategy for sustained weight loss. With the fewest untoward side-effects.

43

Part of it is self control. But there are a lot of parts you can’t control.

  • The trend towards more sedentary desk-bound jobs
  • Communities designed around the automobile vs foot traffic
  • Industrial food processing that relies on corn syrup and other embiggening ingredients
  • Fast-paced lifestyles that cause people to turn to easy to make/quick to buy foods that are less healthy
  • More sedentary recreation such as videogames and binge-watching TV

Unless you live in someplace like Manhattan or Boston’s Back Bay, think about how little you actually walk.

44

We quit smoking and started eating. At work we used to smoke at our desks. Now we eat. At home in the evening we used to smoke in front of the TV. Now we eat. Nicotine raises your heart rate so just by sitting in one spot you’re burning fewer calories when you quit smoking. Combine that with eating instead and…well…it’s certainly one cause of weight gains.

45

My personal favorite theories revolve around the nature of the work we do changing. Even mills and assembly lines today are generally automated. Even with something like secretarial; 25 years ago the Old Wench was always having to run somewhere for one reason or another and anymore she barely leaves her cube until its time to go home.

The fact that I went from a desk job to a warehouse-ish job and lost 80 pounds while eating the same hasn’t shaded my opinion at all. :wink:

46

As I mentioned in the food drive thread, it’s about impossible to eat low-carb when you are poor. Protein can be very expensive, and pasta, rice, bread, and potatoes are cheap eats.

47

So it boils down to “eat less, move more”? The only relevant thing that has changed in the last 40 yrs. concerning weight is that people eat more and move less? I don’t know: I agree that your point is relevant, but I doubt that it is the main reason for such an extreme and sudden change. Unless the change is not so relevant as it seems: the one thing that I find interesting in this thread is that nobody has put the premise in doubt. The other is that the explanations/solutions seem easy, but they are not working. My question stands: What has changed? I insist: we are not only getting fatter, there is something different about the way we are getting fatter.

48

But that’s not an explanation why there is an increase in obesity. Those have been cheap eats forever.

49

Obesity has become normalized. It is now so prevalent, and “body positivity” so emphasized, that it is no longer seen as something unusual.

50

Do you have a cite that most people on Weight Watchers lose significant amounts of weight and keep it off continuously for more than five years?

Serious question.

ASL, of course if the amount of food eaten is cut down low enough the person will lose weight. Even very fat people can starve to death, after all. The question is whether cutting it down that low, for a particular person, allows for sufficient nutrition and energy to not only stay alive through the day, but to remain generally healthy, and to get one’s other work done.

51

I think the consensus here is that you’re wrong in this assumption. I know of no backing for it outside of wacky conspiracy theories.

The obvious fact is that we - and we means most westernized societies that have largely eliminated subsistence living - are eating far more empty calories while we generally no longer do much physical labor and don’t walk nearly as much as was standard.

Do we have a control group? Sure. People who eat nutritiously and move their bodies regularly. They’re all around. But not very round, more like skinny.

If something other than poor habits were to blame these people would also be affected. If you want to make that case, you need to account for them. I don’t think you can but you haven’t made any effort so far.

52

Like many appalling modern trends, there is not one simple explanation, but a confluence of many changes.

When I was a kid (I was born in 1956), I had a bowl of cold cereal for breakfast on school mornings, with milk and sometimes fruit. It was cornflakes or shredded wheat or something like that. I either had a school lunch in the cafeteria – they were very good lunches, California put a lot of money into their public schools then, or came home and had a small bowl of Campbell’s soup and saltine crackers, which was about the limit of our housekeeper’s abilities. We had a sit-down dinner with a set table, and the meals, since my mother worked, were simple and repetitive – cheap beef cuts or chicken, macaroni and cheese, iceberg lettuce salad. Rarely was there dessert on weekdays. There was one serving plus seconds, that’s it. There were no sodas. There were no commercial snacks like potato chips. At all. We entertained ourselves by playing outside, or with board games, reading books, drawing pictures, inventing games. Television was allowed after dishes and homework was done and before bed time which was like 8 o’clock on school days.

We ate out more often than most other families because it was something my parents really enjoyed. So we might have done that at most twice a month, a friday or saturday night, and it was either a spaghetti restaurant or a hole in the wall Japanese restaurant where all the other diners were ethnic Japanese. (San Jose had a big Japantown nearby). Fast food places were very limited as yet. It was the kind of food we’d get at the county fair once a year, not something you’d eat regularly.

Although this might have been a wee bit more austere than many typical middle class homes, it was not way out there either. People didn’t snack much, home cooked dinners were the norm, and children were supposed to be outside where they wouldn’t be underfoot. We spent most daylight hours not in school more or less roaming in packs around the neighborhood, usually on bikes.

I didn’t know any obese children, although there were usually one or two pudgy ones. Obese adults were rare, although women past menopause usually got rather matronly.

Now just count all the ways people live and eat differently now. It’s ALL different. Every single thing. People eat exactly like they would if they really are *trying *to get fatter and fatter. There really is nothing surprising about it if you look at the broad picture.

53

Those aren’t the only things, but they are things that AFAIK we very clearly know are happening, and we know that they cause weight gain.

Almost all the other factors that have been identified here are secondary causes whose impact on obesity rates involves causing people to eat more and/or move less.

For example, increasingly sedentary jobs and recreational activities, along with less leisure time for recreation (and the general decline in physical activity among aging populations), are causing people to move less. Increasing portion sizes and availability of calorie-dense foods, along with habits of constant snacking and consuming more prepared foods, are causing people to eat more.

[QUOTE=Pardel-Lux]
I don’t know: I agree that your point is relevant, but I doubt that it is the main reason for such an extreme and sudden change.
[/quote]

Why? We know all these things that result in eating-more-and-moving-less are happening, at levels unprecedented in US and most world societies, and we know that they result in a tendency to consume more calories than expended, which we know causes weight gain.

Why are you looking for a more mysterious reason involving “something different about the way we are getting fatter”, when the reasons we can clearly identify provide an adequate explanation?

This is sort of like talking to climate change deniers who insist that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions aren’t changing the climate, there must be some other explanation. Why? We know for certain that anthropogenic GHG emissions are changing the composition of the atmosphere. We know by basic physics that increasing the atmospheric concentration of GHGs has a warming effect. What’s the logic behind postulating “some other explanation” rather than the one that’s staring us in the face?

In both situations, we’ve got a clearly identified phenomenon and a solid causal explanation for why we can expect it to produce the observed effect. What rational reason is there for insisting that the true cause of the observed effect must be some other phenomenon that we haven’t yet figured out?

[QUOTE=Pardel-Lux]
The other is that the explanations/solutions seem easy, but they are not working.
[/quote]

The basic explanation may be easy (although sorting out all the contributing factors to the eating-more-and-moving-less phenomenon is complicated), but I never heard anyone claim that the solution to widespread obesity “seems easy”.

Everybody and their brother is well aware (often from bitter personal experience) that it’s far easier for most people, in situations where calorie abundance is readily available and most activities are sedentary, to gain weight than to lose it. Just because we know basically why it’s happening doesn’t mean anyone thinks it’s easy to fix it.

[QUOTE=Pardel-Lux]
My question stands: What has changed? I insist: we are not only getting fatter, there is something different about the way we are getting fatter.
[/QUOTE]

If by “something different” you mean that the eating-more-and-moving-less trend is not the main cause of the current tendency to increased obesity, you are almost certainly flat-out wrong.

There are certainly a wide variety of factors contributing to the eating-more-and-moving-less trend, but there is not some separate unrelated factor (microplastics affecting metabolism? estrogen? sunspots?) that is outweighing it (no pun intended) in its influence on rising obesity rates.

54

It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. And ‘eat less, move more’ is just the most successful way found thus far to treat the problem for most people. Why we have such a huge upsurge in obesity worldwide is an incredibly complex issue, that we don’t fully understand yet.

But it does seem to me that we get fat the old fashioned way, more calories consumed than burned.

55

A fat body once showed you could afford to eat. Now it shows you can’t afford to eat right, or haven’t the time or training to.

Beans are good for incomplete proteins but take a bit of cooking. Chicken now provides pretty cheap protein. Chicken was much costlier before the obesity explosion, a specialty item for Sunday dinner. Eggs are also cost-effective protein sources. Potatoes aren’t bad. But exploiting any food supply takes time, effort, and skill.

I mentioned self-control as a major factor. Yes, the vast proliferation of maize corn products, mainly oil and syrup, has tremendous impact. Not all the world has gone from manual labor to desk jobs; not all the world has scarfed-up McFood; but too many of us have traded calories and satisfaction for nutrition. Will we see a Darwinian result?

56

I suspect we’ll see targeted mutations or enhancements to our DNA before we reach a timeline for natural selection to matter. At least as far as humans are concerned, and assuming we survive a few more decades.

ETA:

It’s tough, but sure, why not? What other way is there to lose weight than to consume fewer calories than one expends? That some people (including me) have lost weight without dropping out of society surely suggests it’s possible. Again, not easy, but what other way is there, with or without exercise?

57

Of course it is multifactorial.

We live in an obesogenic environment in many ways. Traits that worked fine for most of evolutionary history are maladaptive for this specific environment. And there is even some evidence that a predisposition to the harms of that environment can be passed on through generations by epigenetic means. (Mouse study but still interesting.)

If I had to pick one most harmful environmental factor I’d identify the constant intake of sweet beverages, from juice boxes at early ages to soda and Gatorade. Next is the amount of more highly processed foods which tend to hit hard on the brain centers that say eat more (hedonic centers) and not so much on the ones that say enough already (satiety centers).

58

You can’t watch TV for five minutes without seeing someone eating something. And they aren’t eating carrots.

59

Or alternatively, ‘people consume more calories and don’t exercise as much’ is too shallow an answer, the ‘why’ being the actually important question.

It’s kind of like when the stock market goes down a lot, somebody asks ‘why?’ and a wise ass answers ‘more sellers than buyers*’. Also perhaps like that in that it’s always somewhat of an onion you peel away, the causes behind the initial set of causes, then the further ones behind those, etc.

Anyway I don’t think this is a complete nitpick, because the position ‘it’s obvious’ seems to tend to assume things which aren’t necessarily true or at least pretty clearly missing part of the picture. Take for example ‘jobs have gotten more sedentary’. Have ‘jobs’ gotten significantly more sedentary just recently as opposed to multiple decades ago? I don’t think that necessarily holds up or at least needs citation. Also one of the apparent patterns of recent times in the US at least is the increase in obesity rate of working and low class people compared to upper middle class and rich people. But upper middle and very high paying jobs tend to be more sedentary. The upper middle class lifestyle though not as much. And how many ‘fat cats’ as in big time lawyers, bankers, C suite corporate people, entrepreneurs are actually fat? Not that many from casual observation. Those kind of social currents are not particularly explained by simple statements like ‘jobs have gotten more sedentary’.

I think the same might go for some other simple explanations, including the one I myself partly signed onto in a previous post: it is true (worldwide) that the average person’s purchasing power to buy food has gone up. And I that simple economic relationship probably explains part of the increase in obesity. But focusing on the simple might obscure significant but less simple causes.

Also as I mentioned before, one can debate how widely and truly deeply it goes in US society, but it’s definitely more common to hear at least that heavy people (heavy women it usually is, because women have more often been insulted and ridiculed over their weight, which is wrong to do to a person, make no mistake) are beautiful too. That’s a change. If there isn’t as much stigma to being overweight, that might also cause more people to obese. As in recently, not ‘we drive everywhere nowadays’ or ‘jobs are more sedentary’ which are changes from much longer ago.

On a personal note I can say that though in the limit a change just in exercise or calorie intake can get you to a very low or high weight without changing the other, practically speaking calorie intake dominates for me. I exercise much more than the average American my age (60’s). I still gain weight gradually if I eat as I please (I like sweets, and fast food sometimes, but a lot of ‘natural’ stuff is also high calorie). I have to eat less than I’d really like to in order to stay at my desired weight. Controlling calories is the key for me.

*there would be more shares on offer than shares bid at the previous price level, they mean to say, the common locution ‘more sellers’ is kind of sloppy, there must be a buyer for every share sold, and the number of people buying v selling is irrelevant. Anyhow…

60

Untrue: Many of us older folks had just such a brave icon on TV, eating carrots pour encourager les autres.