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

In My Humble Opinion
61

It isn’t just the food. Not the carbs, not the high fructose corn syrup, life is just a lot easier, a lot.

Unless we are very poor we really do not have to do much in the way of physical activity to get through our day. We go to work and mostly sit. We come home and mostly sit. The travel between going to work and coming home, we mostly sit. Even those of us who have physically active jobs are doing less work. More machines, better working conditions, better safety rules, even the hard trades mostly sit. My wife runs a crew at a paper mill. It used to be a hard working job, but now she mostly sits and monitors the machines and acts only when needed.

Working to produce our own food is almost unheard of, it is a hobby now. Professional farmers have things much better now. The sprinkler system can be controlled from your computer, the system can read the moisture of the soil and adjust watering, or leave it alone. The average professional farmer is no longer breaking their back with hard labor, they are monitoring and adjusting.

In our day to day life we really don’t have to put in much effort to keep things running. Cars go 100,000 miles before the spark plugs even need to be changed, and then someone else does it. We don’t even need to go on common errands to do things any longer. If someone pays me with an actual, physical, check, I can take a picture of it on my phone and deposit it right into my bank account without leaving home. I can manage all my banking on the computer, pay my bills on line, hell, I don’t even have to check my actual mailbox with any sort of urgency. Even the walk to the mailbox has been eliminated.

The internet and other improvements in our day to day lives are great, but this has also eliminated a lot of things that we used to have to do as part of out daily lives. I work with young people, and they are not out riding their bicycles because the roads and society are less safe than sitting in their rooms gaming.

I could go on, but my point is that improvements in life style are at the root of our fatness. I spend all Summer swinging a weed eater and working in my garden, not because it is necessary but because I need the activity. I just got off work, mostly sitting for 10 hours, and here I am sitting in front of a machine talking to you.

It isn’t something in our diet that needs to be eliminated.

62

I do not claim that the amount eaten and the lack of physical exercise has nothing to do with obesity, all I am saying is that the change was so sudden that it looks like a switch was flipped. So I asked you all if you can give me a hint what this sudden switch might have been if there was one. It also seems notheworthy to me that the transition to overweightness happens in many countries, but with a time lag. So if there was such a switch, it would have to correspond with the time lag. But no convicing switch has been proposed: computer and screen time? It happened too late. Smoking bans? Interesting, but too late too. And so on.
What still strikes me as new are the people with normal torso and arms but obese hips and legs. I (born 1964) do not remember seeing that in the 70s, started noticing it with American tourists in the 80s and see it today in Europe among locals. It is not very frequent, but I would not call it rare either. Is it a biased observation on my part or is this a strange way to gain weight? This and this I found after a quick search, I know there are much more extreme cases, I may not have chosen the best search criteria (maybe it is photoshop?). Or is this a separate medical condition and thus not relevant for the subject I proposed?
Your objection about the control group that reamins thin by eating less and exercising more is of course very pertinent. And falsifiable: Now I need somebody who eats little, practices sports and still gains weight. Not an easy task, I admit.

63

The only reason I have to suspect that something more (not something different, I am not denying that eating makes you fat) is having an influence is that the change seems to happen so fast, faster in my view (and here I may be wrong) that the rate of change of our eating habits and sedentarism. So I asked. And the response is no, no one believes that. I guess it would have been too easy.
The idea with the sunspots is interesting, though, should have thought of it myself :smack:

64

While mentioned a couple times in this thread I want to stress how the economics of portion size affects restaurants marketing decisions.

The wholesale cost of the food isn’t a major factor in the cost of a meal. So a restaurant can advertise a double size meal for far less than twice the cost of a regular meal.

And people love that “logic”. “Hey, I can get twice the food for not much more money.”

And, as mentioned, this creates a race between chains to draw in people by upping the portion sizes. Hence, bacon-chili-double-cheeseburgers with extra large fries and 24oz sodas.

On those rare occasions I eat at a McDonald’s type place I will order either fries or a smaller burger and be quite satisfied.

Throw in people being averse to walking away from food they just paid money for, they are going to eat too much of this extra food and that’s not good.

65

All of that depends on how much cutting down is done, doesn’t it? If someone is maintaining their weight at 2500 calories a day, they are not going to be successful long-term at cutting their calorie intake to 1200 calories. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be successful if they cut out 3-400 calories a day, by eating a 4 ounce serving of steak instead of 8 ounces and half a cup of rice instead of a full cup or by replacing two bottles of soda per day with a calorie-free drink. The thing is though, you hardly ever see people do that. In part, because it’s not obvious to other people - but in my opinion, the other part is because it’s not fast enough. People don’t want to lose less than a pound a week - so they cut out more calories and are unsuccessful in the long-term.

66

Q. Do you know how farmers fatten livestock?

A. They feed them small doses of antibiotics, especially when they are young. It results in the animals getting obese. It works with a whole range of animals.
Scientific paper (one of many):

Obesity: A New Adverse Effect of Antibiotics?
Frontiers of Pharmacology (2018)

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Missed edit window:

The practice of using antibiotics as growth promoters was outlawed by the European Union in 2006 and the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2017. But the effects of antibiotics on humans are still with us.

68

Any proposed most primary cause must minimally correlate with the spread of obesity across regions of the globe. The single factor that correlates best with worldwide obesity dynamics is the greater degrees of Western (really American) dietary habits in the cultures, specifically more oil intake, more added sweeteners, and more animal sourced foods. Often also correlated has been greater inactivity both at work and in leisure time activity (from television ownership rates to screen time in general).

This does not however falsify antibiotic overuse as a major factor as well - dramatically increased animal sourced foods consumption in regions often goes hand in hand with greater use of antibiotics in the production chain to increase output, and could correlate with greater individual exposure to antibiotics from an earlier age in many regions.

69

These are the factors, though by themselves there is no single cause:

  • the increased availability of food.

  • the increased availability of sugary foods and beverages

  • the increased availability of sugary foods and beverages for school age children when people begin forming their lifelong dietary habits and when they grow physically.

  • consequently, the increased frequency with which people get snacks (I recall reading somewhere that we snack twice as often as we used to in the 1970s, but my memory may be incorrect).

  • the larger portion sizes of meals and drinks (if you dine out, you’re likely consuming twice as many calories as you did in the 1980s and 90s).

  • a decrease in regular, routine physical activity - a trend that may have started more than 100 years ago. The automobile and the climate-controlled home and office are probably factors in this regard, as well as less physically demanding work.

70

A study of an Amish community found that they ate a diet considered very ‘unhealthy’ (lots of carbs and calories, although they also ate fruit and vegetables) but had a much lower obesity rate than the general population. The difference was the amount of physical activity the Amish engage in while working. They averaged around forty hours a week of moderate activity. The men averaged ten hours a week of *heavy *activity (the women, four hours), things that would qualify as hard workouts in the gym.

Whatever other factors there are, decreased physical activity is a big one.

71

The Old Order Amish eat almost no highly processed foods. They eat lots of pork, potatoes, gravy … but it is not highly processed food. Even homemade cakes and pies in moderation are not per se unhealthy. And yes, lots of vegetables and fruits. Yes those quote around “unhealthy” should be there.

Their average level of physical activity is also way above pre-obesity epidemic activity levels.

Lastly they are also a potential data point in favor of the bacteria hypothesis. Their meat is not industrially raised with antibiotics (and they use little of the stuff themselves) and they have been otherwise studied for how their constant exposure to a variety of farm origin bacteria protect them from other modern diseases (low rates of allergy and asthma).

72

When people ask me how I stay so thin, I tell them that after a couple of decades where I was either dieting (and not eating when I was hungry) or bingeing (and eating when I was not hungry), I spent a year only eating when I was hungry and eating whatever I felt like eating. I almost made it a point to walk outside at least an hour every day.

It worked for me, and for everyone I know who has tried it for a year.

The idea of only eating when you are hungry has become obsolete. People eat because it’s mealtime, because it looks good, because everyone else is eating, because everyone else has dessert, yada, yada, yada.

And as for passing judgment on food, forget about it. Eat what you want to eat. A group of women were once discussing the best diet foods, and one of them asked me what I thought. I replied “I think real food tastes better.” There was a dead silence, and finally one of them said “You know, you’re right.”

73

Not quite no one, or at least I think the question is worth examining more closely as to recent changes in the obesity rate. And examining with mind open to less simple answers.

Again ‘jobs are more sedentary’ and ‘we drive everywhere’ have been true in the US for a long time. Those are
a) not a clear explanation why obesity has increased in say the last generation or so and
b) ignores pretty obvious cross currents, like again upper middle class and rich Americans aren’t that often very fat. Working and lower class Americans are now much more likely to be really fat, mainly. Broad brushes like ‘jobs have become sedentary’ or ‘we have cars now’ don’t seem directly relevant to that difference. For example since around the turn of the century the obesity rate of college educated males has barely changed, that of ‘some college’ has gone up around 10%-points. That’s not the advent of cars or sedentary jobs.

Once again, I think the decrease in stigma against being overweight in various strata and sub cultures of US society is something to look at wrt to recent changes in obesity rates. Does it have no effect on young people’s management of their weight if their urban or rural lower or working class school already has a large number of obese kids, and their parents too, as opposed to kids in an upper middle class suburban school where obese classmates and parents are more the outlier. No, it’s just cars and Micky D’s? Exaggerating some other poster’s certainly about simple explanations maybe, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple if you consider recent times, again cars and McD’s have been around for a long time, few people have made a living at hard labor for a long time, and people are social creatures.

74

In point of fact it has been studied. More stigma leads to greater obesity and more other comorbid health problems.

75

Not really that long a time. As I said earlier, fast food restaurants were where you went for small portions of quick meals. McDonald’s didn’t even introduce the Quarter Pounder until 1971. Decades passed before the giant portions became the norm.

Same with cars. It isn’t the mere fact of cars that make people obese. A larger pattern of urban sprawl and lack of walkable places is the real factor. Modern car-oriented metropolises took off after WWII and became the norm a generation later, when cities were at their low point. This was the same time schedule for the decrease in jobs requiring heavy physical labor.

All of us are saying that several different trends that encouraged obesity emerged and converged in the last few decades. All these trends lowered average physical activity and increased average calorie consumption. Looking for anything simpler than a multitude of trends is what’s foolish.

76

I don’t know if this has been mentioned already, but I think sleep deprivation may explain some of it.

I always get in the snacking mood whenever I’m drowsy at work. But I rarely get in that mood when I’m full of energy.

Perhaps people overeat because they are tired. Perhaps if we were encouraged to nap during our lunch breaks, we would see a difference in our waistlines.

Re sedentary jobs. The other day I passed by a bunch of construction workers who were working on a city project. The younger guys were lean, but the middle-aged guys were pretty rotund despite moving around a lot. I’d say they were more rotund than your average office worker. It’s possible we could shave an inch or two off our collective waistline by increasing our activity levels, but I predict we would still be an overweight populace. I know that when I worked a physically intensive job (back when my coworkers were alligators), my overall food consumption rate was higher than it is now. Turns out that physical activity stimulates the appetite, whodathunkit. Physically demanding jobs also tend to be stressful ones, and stress-eating is a real thing. I was constantly in a state of stress back in my field days. So it doesn’t surprise me that I’m about the same size as I was back then as I am now.

No doubt, we have always had stressful, physically demanding jobs. But we have not always had 24/7 access to convenience food that has been designed to be highly addictive. We have also not always been bombarded by marketing and advertising encouraging us to pig out. And we have not always had social pressure to stay up later than we should. I’ve given up countless hours to the SDMB and Reddit that could have been devoted to sleep. For other people, it’s countless hours on video games, Facebook, Netflix, or worse, work. Sixty years ago, only a small portion of the population would be working at 10:00 PM. Now, it’s not usual for people to have part-time jobs or side-hustles after they’ve already put in an eight-hour workday. And side hustles don’t follow banker’s hours. It is really hard not to be tempted by calorie-dense processed foods if you are working 12-16 hour days.

77

It’s Reptilian-Republican collusion. Scaly aliens conspire with human conservatives to Terraform Earth to suit aliens via global warming, and fatten humans via McFood to be grazing stock for alien diets. WE are the food product.

78

But if they once went on the 1200 calorie diet, if they then return to eating 2200 calories a day (because they can’t meet their nutritional needs on 1200 calories, and every time they stand up they nearly pass out, plus which they’re so hungry all the time that they can’t concentrate on anything because all they can think of is food): they may then find they’re gaining weight on 2200 calories a day, because that diet screwed up their metabolism. Even though it is 300 calories a day less than they were eating when they were fatter, and maintaining steady weight at 2500 calories.

And, for a lot of people who went on that first restrictive diet, “fatter” wasn’t actually fat; it was just somewhere in the top half of normal weight range for their height and build, but they thought they ought to be in the bottom half of that range. Or they were a bit out of what’s now defined as normal weight range (which is lower, not higher, than it used to be; the definitions were lowered in the USA in 1998), due to some particular quirk of their bodies, or maybe even to having a lot of muscle; because modern definitions go by BMI, which doesn’t work at all well when applied to individuals.

But now, even though they’re eating less than they did originally, they’re back to the original weight, plus ten or twenty pounds. So, all too often, they go on another 1200 calorie diet, or even on a stricter one . . .

Rinse, repeat.

I don’t have the time to hunt up references right now; but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen multiple references over the past several years to that effect.

79

Anecdotally, I just retired and moved. I made a transition to a completely different lifestyle and I moved from an urban area to a suburban one.

In my old life, I walked everywhere , frequently while carrying a heavy backpack. I didn’t work in an office, I did specialized work at private homes and construction sites. Sometimes I was at the same place all day, but more often I went to 2-4 sites per day, walking and using mass transit. Then it was a half mile walk to yoga, at least 5 times a week. Almost every errand or dinner out required a long walk. Cabs were a luxury for special occasions or transporting heavy or awkward items.

Now, I wasn’t obese or even overweight, but slender had gotten away from me. I was a mindful eater but I was always hungry. I would eat my mindful portion controlled dinner and I’d still be hungry and start rooting around in the cabinets for snack food or sipping a sugary drink. I added a substantial late afternoon snack to my diet, usually a 250-300 calorie yogurt parfait and that helped, but it was still an add to the calorie load.

I went into a much more sedentary lifestyle. Less stressful, too. I take walks around the neighborhood recreationally and I still take 4-5 yoga classes a week. One of my biggest concerns with this transition was I thought I might start gaining weight. But a couple of weeks in I realized I just wasn’t that hungry anymore. The mindful portions were satisfying. The TV food porn didn’t set off cravings. “What do you feel like eating?” wasn’t as easy of a question as it used to be.

So I’m not worried so much about weight gain now. Maybe I’ll even drop a few pounds. Maybe there is good and bad exercise - good exercise being things like yoga and going to the gym and bad exercise being things like walking a mile and climbing up 4 flights of subway* stairs with a 40 pound backpack, while under time constraints. Which might burn calories but it makes you hungry and screws up your knees.

  • sounds like an oxymoron but some of my subway stations were not only above ground but pretty seriously elevated.
80

Yup. Which reveals the following hot take as exactly backwards:

It’s not social “normalization” of obesity that’s causing obesity. Nobody (well, maybe a tiny number of people statistically indistinguishable from zero) is becoming obese because they want to be obese or believe it’s trendy to be obese.

Rather, what we’ve got is all these other factors causing rising obesity rates in the first place, and then as DSeid noted, societal stigma and shaming and guilt exacerbating the trend to excess weight and associated health problems.

“Body positivity”, on the other hand, is good for people’s health no matter what they weigh. People with positive body image tend to eat more healthily, exercise more, and have better overall health than similar-sized people with negative body image.

If we want to reverse the trend toward increasing obesity, trying to shame fat people out of being happy in their bodies and accepting the way they look isn’t going to help. We’ll just end up with more and fatter and sicker and unhappier fat people.