One factor I don’t think has been mentioned is that most of us have learned to override our hunger and satiety signals. If it looks or smells delicious, we tend to eat it unless we’re past satiety and feeling stuffed. From commercials and adverts and cooking shows to the glut of fast food places, there are plenty of opportunities to stuff the stomach despite satiety.
What happened in the Seventies to change eating habits? Moms went to work. (A good thing!) There was less time to cook and more stress. Then in the Eighties we started over-scheduling kids. Between leaving work, picking up kids, dropping kids off, and picking them up again, there was no time to eat at a table, let alone cook. Fast food to the rescue! And the more you get for your money, the better–another way of overriding true hunger.
Somewhere in all that stress, food became both comfort and entertainment. You may be exhausted, overbooked, and stressed beyond measure, but by God, food is always there for you. And you don’t have to be hungry to eat.
I get incredulous at the idea of eating only when hungry. I already avoid eating at times when I’m hungry, knowing that I don’t want to run out of food.
Plus there’s gastric bypass or banding. Both of those are based on the idea that, if you eat a lot, your stomach expands, and reducing its size reduces hunger, thus allowing you to lose weight. That seems to be flat out saying that your body adapts to a certain amount of food, and feels hungry when you don’t give it.
Hunger is not directly related to the number of calories consumed. It’s related to the speed of digestion–you feel hungry when your stomach is empty, and continue until you feel sufficiently full. Digestion speed varies a lot.
I know for a fact that I get hungrier than my skinnier friends. What they think is a lot of food isn’t the same for me. So why would waiting until I’m hungry lead to me consuming the same number of calories as them?
I gotta say, this statement puzzles the everloving shit out of me. So you avoid eating when you’re hungry, which presumably means that you wait until you’re not hungry to eat. But if you haven’t eaten when you were hungry, then how do you ever attain the state of not being hungry? Don’t you just go on getting hungrier and not eating and getting hungrier and not eating and so forth?
I don’t know how you eat so maybe this doesn’t apply to you - but nobody is saying to wait until you’re so hungry you’ll scarf down your daily calories for the day in 10 minutes, “Don’t eat unless you’re hungry” means don’t eat because you’re bored or just because there’s food in front you or because you’re stressed or just because it’s 6 pm and you always have dinner at 6 even though you had a larger than usual lunch today.
BigT, the “don’t eat unless you’re hungry” advice is a good preventative of obesity. But I don’t think it works all that well for people who are already obese. Because it’s just like you said, once you’re obese, your hunger is going to reflect the calorie consumption of an obese person. Not a non-obese person.
Has it been the same or even similar sort of social factors thing as obesity has spread to Mexico, China, Pacific Island countries, Somalia, Angola, Saudi Arabia …?
No, you eat when you are hungry. When you’re bored, stressed, tired or whatever you do something else. If I can, I’ll get a cup of coffee and take a walk. If I’m at work, I’ll walk the store’s eaisles for a few minutes.
Eating ONLY when you are hungry and stopping when you are no longer hungry is my big secret.
Could be true in some cases, but ‘social science’ is basically opinion, not fact. And in this case like many it clearly fits more in certain people’s general world view to think that stigmas always have strictly negative effects. Note as I said before I’m not ‘advocating’ hassling people about their personal issues, I’m just very unconvinced of the thesis that stigma’s cause people to do the stigmatized thing more.
And the case I’m thinking of with weight is where you reach a tipping point in certain subsets of the population. Obese people are just too high a proportion to suffer much stigma in that segment, so you reach a tipping point.
I think decreased stigma due to that kind of tipping point is a possible explanation for quite recent changes in the rate, which again stuff like cars just doesn’t explain.
I also think this is an interesting reference as baseline, before coming up with supposed weightings of explanations.
Per CDC data the % of Americans ‘overweight’ (which has been mentioned in some posts though OP question was ‘obesity’) was pretty much constant 1960-present. The obesity rate increased 2.7 times, extreme obesity rate 7.3 times.
IMO that tends to undercut, not demolish necessarily, the effect of 20th century phase of industrial revolution (mass automobiles, power equipment even in ‘heavy labor’ jobs) as explanation for obesity/extreme obesity because those changes were not as intense in the later part of that transition, again use of cars and power assistance for labor isn’t a late 20th/early 21th thing, the big changes there mainly earlier.
For stuff like ‘big fast food portions’ maybe you can argue that came in a more similar time. Then again the basic onion-like nature of explaining stuff like this. Let’s say bigger portions do fit better with that period. What caused them? The basic market system didn’t cause it then as opposed to earlier, it was a capitalist ‘give the customer what he/she wants (if it makes money)’ system all along. They must to some degree have been what the customer wanted more, so why?
If it were really true the particular ingredients (corn syrup, GMO, whatever your bugaboo) were a big reason that would at least be exogenous to the customer. More customers more able (rising incomes including rising transfer payments) to pay for more food because they want more. As opposed to people specifically seeking out fattening ingredients. Former is more likely I think. However it’s actually not so clear ingredients make a huge difference.
Again I think looking at growing stratification of society is something the discussion is surprising incurious about, always ‘people’ this or that. But again we see in the US at least that being obese has shifted pretty radically from true ‘olden times’ where it tended to be associated with rich people to where it’s now decidedly the other way around. I think that also relates to normalization of obesity in subcultures. Note it could be true simultaneously the mainstream society (as say represented by an upper middle class highly educated’s MD’s moralistic opinion of the patient’s weight) is more hostile to obesity but one’s own subcultural cocoon is more welcoming of it, because it has become more normal. People are comfortable with what’s normal, among people within their field of view, not so much from studying references to see how people they don’t see live their lives.
It’s not only that, it’s that the Overton Window for portion sizes has changed to the larger side of things (so to speak).
Something like an 8 oz steak is probably actually on the big side for most people (600+ calories), but most steak-serving places start at 8, and go up from there. Same thing for hamburgers, fountain sodas and other stuff.
So when people go to order, most people probably aim at the middle and end up with a 1/3 lb burger or 12 oz steak, which would have been pretty big back in say… the 1960s.
As I’ve repeated earlier, this is simply wrong. The societal trends that lead to obesity formed in the past few decades, not earlier in the 20th century.
This is also explained by the trends I and others have mentioned. It’s far more likely that the normalization of obesity *followed *these trends rather than *caused *them.
You’re also ignoring the effect of relative poverty. Poor people earlier in the 20th century had very little money to spend on luxuries, and these included restaurants and snacks, considered to be rewards, parceled out for occasions. Today’s lower classes have relatively far more money to expend on food, which itself is relatively much cheaper than it’s ever been. A 6 oz. bottle of empty calories known as a Coke sold for $0.05 when Roosevelt was elected. That’s equivalent to $0.94 today. But you can buy a two-liter bottle of Coke, equivalent to **eleven **of the old ones, for $0.99 just about everywhere. Bigger sizes, lower relative prices. Of course people will eat more.
Demand can be created. Every marketing major knows this. Marketers are capable of inventing a problem and then selling a fix for that problem.
Yes, people are hard-wired to want more. Just like they are hard-wired to feel shame if someone tells them their vaginas are dirty and repulsive unless they use asbestos-containing baby powder. Just like they are hard-wired to associate a pickup truck with American patriotism when that pickup truck is sold as a symbol of the American heartland, with waves of grain and country music playing in the background.
Capitalism is a one-upmanship game. It’s an arms race. If all the hamburger joints sell the same sized hamburger and then one bold entrepreneur busts out of the gate with the “mega burger” that’s bigger than everyone else’s burger but worth the same price, then it would be stupid, in a capitalist sense, for the other burger bosses to not match that with their own “mega” product. And then inevitably a new burger joint starts advertising that all of their burgers are “mega”, as opposed to the"shrimpy" burgers everyone else is hawking. The other burger joints could pour their resources into making their burgers extra delicious, but it turns out that the average burger consumer cares more about quantity than quality as long as the price stays the same. So over time you’ll find all the burger joints selling bigger burgers. But the average burger consumer won’t even notice the size increase since it won’t be announced on the six o’clock news. And then before you know it, you’ll have a burger joint advertising quesadillas and chicken nuggets as “side orders” in their $5 burger combos. Because why not? And we’ll be sitting around wondering why everyone is so fat.
No one thought the average home size in 1970 was small, even though it was compared to today’s average square-footage. Developers and real estate agents were the ones who convinced folks that 1500 sq-ft wasn’t enough for a family of four and that their American dream really wouldn’t be complete without a bonus room and a finished basement and a backyard big enough for an in-ground swimming pool. And now we’re at the point where the consumer is left with little choice but to buy a 2400-sq foot house, especially if they want new construction out in the suburbs. Just like we’re left with little choice but to eat a “mega” burger when we dine out, especially if we don’t want to order off the children’s menu. Of course, a person can fight the tide by being stubborn (like by rejecting new construction out in the suburbs) and conscientious (eating only half the mega burger and saving the other half for lunch the next day). But there is social pressure against doing these things. If being a nonconformist was easy, nonconformity wouldn’t be a thing.
Sugar consumption and constant snacking/eating throughout the day. I know several people who constantly consume empty calories all day. You never see them without a Mountain Dew, coffee drink or energy drink of some sort, chips, candy, whatever. I would throw in guys who have to have a 6pack and a pizza (or some equivalent) after work. The ones I know who aren’t obese work labor jobs (doing physical work 40-70 hours a week burns a lot more calories than going to the gym a few hours) and burn enough calories but exhibit other ill health effects. My uncle, who worked a labor intense trade job, only drank coffee throughout the day and came home and had dinner. He was always around 5’10, 150. Since he retired and is around the house all day drinking Cokes and snacking, he has a gut.
I don’t get this “fatter from the hip down” thing though. I don’t see any widespread evidence of that. Fat distribution patterns vary, and some people are more fortunate or unfortunate than others, I guess. For example, I’m a man and at my heaviest I never really had a gut/belly. I just get overall thicker looking, and with my clothes on I don’t really look “that fat.” But I get a lot of fat on my back, armpits, upper thigh, etc, and you can still make out some abs depending on the time of day. If anything weight hits the face first. Then you have women who gain/lose it all in breasts, hips, and butt first while others turn blocky with big waists.
So, I read way too much material to pull the citation out of my aging brain, but recall reading about an early female anthropologist from Europe visiting NYC in the early 1900s, and examining the poorer sections of town-and at that time, that meant really, truly impoverished. She was absolutely struck by the preponderance of obese children. Turns out the cause was diets that consisted of the absolutely cheapest foods available- e.g., carbs- lots and lots of carbs/empty calories. Economically, its a lot cheaper to buy empty calories than nutritional ones, and obesity is an almost inevitable result. As of the last time I collated data across multiple HC systems, only Germany had a higher obesity rate than the US in the industrialized west.
So, Kudos to these posts:
Quote:
FlikTheBlue
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.
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.
Quote:
Exapno Mapcase
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.
Somewhat related to this, and also to the already discussed larger portion sizes – we’ve become so accustomed to large portions most people believe that if they don’t feel “full” after a meal then they haven’t eaten enough. Really, though, that full feeling is a signal that you’ve eaten too much, that you eaten beyond satiety.
That link was an Opinion piece, and I didn’t find any proof for the claim that “more stigma leads to greater obesity”. Is there an actual study that demonstrates this claim?
My question exactly. We can’t extrapolate USA socio-economic factors globally across prosperity levels, so what explanations cover the data? Has consumption of corn- and cane-based sweeteners exploded worldwide?
You’re looking at it right now. 1st it was the advent of television, then PC’s, then laptops, then cellphones. We spend too much time gazing at them and less time moving. The other stuff is just symptoms of the actual disease.