Portion size has a lot to do with why people are so much fatter now. One study is Bad popcorn, big bowl. Participants were given fresh or stale popcorn in big or small containers. They found that even when the popcorn was stale, people ate 33% more popcorn if it they had a big container versus a small container.
Another study is Bottomless Bowl. Participants were either given a normal bowl or one which would be secretly refilled from a hidden tube. The participants who had the refilling bowl ate 73% more soup, although they didn’t report they were any more full than those who at the from the normal bowl. From that study:
Regarding that whole “eat one extra cracker a day and add X pounds a year”.
Yes, the math does add up and I do think that to be true.
However, whenever I eat out the REALLY big people around me are often eating somewhere between 2 and 4 times what I eat while there. Not only that, I imagine they are ALSO eating some serious breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. Me? My breakfast is usually a cup of coffee with some sugar and milk in it. Lunch? A can of soup or a small sandwich or a small hamburger or the like (and if I have big lunch, my dinner is usually more like a light lunch). And my daily snacks really are just a smidge here and there.
These REALLY big folks are not in my estimation just eating an extra cracker a day so to speak.
a. People are mostly normal weight eating normal portions and getting normal exercise during daily life until 1970 or so. People would probably eat more food if it was there, but food is expensive, in short supply, and people are accustomed to eating less so they don’t feel hungry.
b. Restaurants slowly begin to increase portion sizes in an effort to out-compete other nearby restaurants, because serving more food becomes an increasingly economically viable way of drawing in customers as food availability increases due to improved food production and shipping after the second world war.
c. everyone cleans their plates, gets in their car, and drives back to their house where all their chores are essentially automated, and gets fat.
Add in television, video games, and an economy that encourages women to work outside the home rather than stay home and prepare meals, and I’d say you have a pretty good reason for rampant obesity.
You’re massively oversimplifying in an effort to make this seem unreasonable, but that doesn’t mean that it *is *unreasonable.
Stoid, it sounds like you see only one answer. It seems to me there are a number of factors contributing to obesity in America. ‘‘Bigger portion sizes’’ is not right and not wrong… just a smaller part of the bigger picture. IMO we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to narrow it down to one cause.
And really the cause doesn’t matter as much as the solution does.
There’s nothing magical about this.
It’s obvious to anyone who has lost weight that changing eating habits and exercising result in weight loss. People are simply too sedentary, too lazy, and too undisciplined about what they eat. They think that they can eat triple-cheeseburgers and ice cream every day and then sit in front of the TV (or computer) and not get fat. Sadly, that’s not the case.
By the millions in one country starting at the same time there was a wholesale change in the fundamental character of a huge segment of the population, a segment of the population growing each year. For no particular reason.
I think part of the problem is the “clean your plate” mentality that people were brought up with following the Depression. People eat even after they’re hungry because they don’t want to waste the food (or deal with putting it up for later).
Ok, as a scientist, but not a physiologist, I’ll bite on this. I read the first two sources you linked. Neither is research. The second is an opinion piece by someone claiming some authority. Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. It is not research. The first piece is a NY Times piece describing someone’s study. Close to research? Perhaps, but back in the 80’s I could read about cold fusion in the press, and confirm with the appropriate experts that there was no way it could be true. Sure enough, irreproducibility confirmed problems in the study.
Let’s assume the journalist accurately portrayed the experiment and the result. No mean assumption, but lets make it. The particular study cited does not look at calories burned during exercise, or even after. It examines how much fat was presumably metabolized based on calculations, meaning theoretical models, which used parameters derived from calorimeter studies of the subjects who were locked in the calorimeters after exercising. So, they measured heat loss (why else use a calorimeter) to determine fat metabolized.
Now, I could point out a bunch of reasons why I would ignore this study, such as, who cares about a model of how much fat was metabolized after all fat metabolizing isn’t strictly necessary because maybe runners just crap more - but there is no need. Or that if one of the benefits of exercising is you are more vigorous so you burn more calories as you roam around, and these guys were locked in a room. But there is no need.
In order to determine whether exercise leads to weight loss, you need a different study. You need a study with two groups on identical diets, with one group exercising and one group not. Then all the other variables, such as whether it affects your digestive track, or if burning gylcogen instead of fat matters, are immaterial. You know whether or not it works. The precise mechanism by which it works, if it works, are determined later.
They didn’t do it out of the blue. Portion sizes have been creeping up over the years. It started out with an appropriate portion, then crept up a little at a time until they got to be the gargantuan portion sizes we’ve come to expect, and prices have gone up accordingly. Restaurants are not losing any money, believe me. Add in the “clean plate” culture and that’s where the problem lies, at least as far as eating out is concerned.
It makes perfect sense if you assume that portion sizes didn’t double overnight, which they haven’t. It’s just like the old metaphor: If you put a frog in a pot of water and gradually turn the heat up, the frog won’t notice that the water is getting hot until it’s too late. That’s what happened to portion sizes, not just at restaurants but at home.
If everyone can be seduced into overeating by the mere existence of the food in front of them ( consistently and excessively and beyond what they genuinely want, to the point where they can barely walk) how does this explain his Jimm and his friend being “barely able” to finish one appetizer while his obese co-worker desired and consumed quadruple or quintuple that amount? Who is special, Jimm and friend, or obese co-worker?
As to whether or not it works, there is one poster above stating that it works. I’m a different kettle of fish, but it works for me, too. I run and do triathlons. When I gear up for a big race, I up my mileage to drop my body fat. I do not change my diet. I eat the same breakfast and lunch every weekday, regardless of whether I am racing, and my dinners are determined by my kids, ultimately, not my racing schedule. So, exercise decreases my body fat over a period of a few months by a few percent. Again, I am not morbidly obese aiming to lose 50 lbs, I am a fit man aiming to get into competition shape. (I go from 10-11% body fat, to 7-8%.) But, it works for both of us.
The fact is Laplanders eat an almost pure red meat diet. The Chinese eat a largely carbo diet. Neither has a noticeable percentage of obese people.
Why do I think we’ve gotten so fat. Over my lifetime, which more or less corresponds to the obesity epidemic, I’ve noticed two big changes: the increased consumption of processed foods (I include eating out and eating manufactured food), and a decrease in movement. In the 70’s, eating out wasn’t a daily activity, now it is, for most families. (And people were poorer and spent a greater percentage of time working and doing chores then.) It isn’t carbs so much, unless you call using a potato as a fat and salt delivery mechanism, like french fries and potato chips, eating carbs. It is the pure calories involved in eating manufactured food versus healthy food. (Yes, you can manufacture healthy food, but the vast majority of calories consumed in this country does not come from Atkins bars.) And people get way less exercise. Just yesterday I was talking with a fellow 50+ guy about how we got to work as teenagers. For most of us, it was bike or hike. There was no drive. No, almost everyone works behind a desk and drives almost everywhere.
No, you’re mis-characterizing this whole thing. The ‘fundamental character’ of people didn’t change. People have always liked food, especially delicious fatty food. Read old books and plays - characters commonly speak fondly of huge banquets and feasts, and dream of the gluttony afforded to the rich. But in the past food was harder to come by, more expensive, and it was not as socially acceptable to overindulge.
Numerous small changes have conspired to make food cheap and available, make life less physically demanding, and reduce the amount of time available to many families for cooking. Slowly, over time, society has changed, and slowly, over time, people have become accustomed to eating more and more food. You have to work up to eating huge portions, but Jimm and friend could probably do it if they ate a little bit more every day until they were ready for the nachos, hamburger, and dessert. It creeps up on a lot of people, and eventually anything less than pigging out feels like depriving yourself. But that’s a psychological thing - most people eat may beyond what is necessary to sate their hunger, because they’re used to it.
It’s not like 1/3 of America woke up on January 1st 1970 and suddenly thought ‘my god, I’m going to stuff my face from now on!’. Your desire to present it that way is the ‘magical thinking’.
In this context, jjimm was a foreigner from a culture that isn’t in the same place in the process. And nobody is claiming that everyone can be seduced into vastly increasing their intake all in one go - it’s incremental.