Obesity: Blame it on your 1950s mom.

In My Humble Opinion
21

This does seem like a weird hypothesis to me. I didn’t click on the article; did the researcher look at birth order? Because it seems to me that if weight restriction between births was an issue, you’d expect to see a correlation between weight and birth order (youngest heavier than oldest).

My mother was obese when she was carrying my sister and me. And yet we were still not getting enough nutrition, according to her doctor. So a month before we were born, she was hospitalized and fed calorie-dense foods to fatten us up. We were born on the smallish side, but I’m guessing the endeavor was a success? I don’t know how a person can be obese and have underfed babies, but apparently this happened. Yet, we did not grow into fat people. We were also not breast-fed. So I dunno. Not saying she’s wrong, though.

As for the snacking thing, yeah, I think there’s something to this. “Snackers” versus “Non-snackers”. Excluding the hungry years of adolescence, I’ve never been a big snacker. Or if I am feeling a bit snacky, I don’t need much to make that feeling go away. But why are some people snackers and others aren’t? It’s got to be physiological thing, at least in part.

22

Amazingly enough while it is just that that simple, it is also that much complex. And much of what Martin Hyde brings up is part of the complexity.

What controls calories in?

What controls calories out? (Not just exercise level, if you thought it was.)

(And if you think the answer is simply “will power” then you need to answer why there has been a spreading epidemic of weak "will power’ across the world in these last several decades.)

How do the two interact (and they do) and how does an individual’s past, from intrauterine experiences to reaching adulthood over as an obese individual impact how they interact? (Get ahold of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine article “The Fat Trap” for an interesting read.)

How do our brains’ reward centers, selected for thriving in one set of environments, deal with supernormal stimuli of our own creation (high fat, high sugar, salty foods of great calorie density and ample porions available) and what role does genetic predisposition and past experiences forming “settling points” play in how our brains and bodies respond to this fairly recently drastically altered environment?

What of the changes in society that contributed to the rise in obesity can we change to combat it? How can we do it?

All this complexity and more is included in “calories in versus calories out” when the machine is a living one existing in reality.

The fact that poor intrauterine nutrition contributes to both a risk for future obesity and for an increased risk for metabolic syndrome at any given level of obesity is well established. Believing that some middle class women keeping their weight down during pregnancy is the prime cause of obesity is however as simplistic as thinking that the obese just need to eat less and exercise more, end of story. IMHO.

monstro, How a person can be obese and have underfed babies? Placental insufficiency.

23

Thanks, DSeid.

24

Television’s probably a factor. The time frame’s right.

Television is a much more sedentary form of entertainment than the recreations it replaced. And television had the ability to direct advertisement to children from a very early age, selling them on the idea of consuming products like fast food.

25

I think a lot of it is say, 50 years ago since there weren’t 500 varieties of extremely calorie dense processed snack foods at the supermarket, that most snacking in between meals was probably on “nature’s snack food” namely relatively cheap fruits like apples and such.

People are going to snack on food in between meals, unless they’re in an environment where there is no food at all except for regular meal times. That may have been how it was at one point, but even in my childhood 50+ years ago I know my dad would often eat an apple or a peach when he’d be on the porch after work but before dinner was cooked.

What I don’t remember is having the entire lineup of Little Debbie, Hostess and etc in the cabinet available at any given time. I remember brownies and cookies and things like that, but those were special, homemade treats. My mom didn’t keep the house stocked in home made baked goods, I’m assuming because popular wisdom even then was you weren’t supposed to eat sugary foods 24/7 and also I assume she didn’t want to bake every day of her life.

So to me, the biggest difference I’ve personally seen, is the easily available snack food used to be stuff like fruit, because fruit is relatively cheap (at least things like apples/oranges/peaches, not talking exotic fruits you couldn’t even buy in 1950s America), now you can get a 1500 calorie box of snack cakes for $1.99, and to be honest I won’t hate on some Little Debbie/Hostess products, I’m sure they are made of the worst stuff in the world but they actually do taste good.

I don’t think 1950s humans were any better at passing on “found food” than we are, I just think they had fruit bowls and we have cupboards full of twinkies and such.

I truly do believe it is supermarket junk food that is the #1 “food culprit.” Fast food is often blamed, but I think it is overly blamed. For one, a recent article in the Atlantic pointed out that people who earn over $60,000 a year buy more meals at fast food places than people who are below the poverty line. The stereotype that fast food is making poor people fat turns out to not necessarily be supported by the data. That also sort of makes sense to me, fast food is cheap but it genuinely isn’t so cheap that a truly poor person can eat 3 meals a day from McD’s.

I see lower income people all the time in Wal-Mart of the supermarket, and to be honest something I always notice, is they have shopping carts literally stacked with those $0.99 single serving fruit pies, supermarket brand donuts, Little Debbie, a few bags of chips, 24 packs of regular Coca-Cola, etc. I think for the average lower income person who actually isn’t going to fast food more than maybe once a week, that mountain of junk food they view as “normal food” has more to do with obesity than McDonald’s.

That’s even part of the thrust of the First Lady’s whole “food desert” thing. I’ve seen some of that in urban areas myself, neighborhoods where you really can’t get to a good supermarket very easily, so you end up shopping at tiny stores that mostly tend to stock snack food instead of actual groceries.

26

Both my late 50s-era parents smoked like chimneys and were thin as rails. I was also thin as a rail until I turned 6 and had my tonsils taken out. After that, I ate like a field hand and still carry around 30 pounds of excess blubber.

27

In part, but I think a lot of it can also just be what you grew up with. We have pretty clear social ideas about meal times (three square meals in the morning, noon, and evening that are hopefully somewhat balanced) so even if your family raised you a bit screwy, you still have some idea of what is “normal.”

But we don’t have such a thing for snacking. Some families keep a ready supply of traditional snack food (chips, etc.) on hand and snack as desired throughout the day. Others do a small meal-like “after school snack” at a fixed time. Others don’t snack at all between meals, and will grab a piece of bread or a bit of leftovers if they need something to tide them over. Others have snacks are a rare treat. Some families share a box of Cheez-its in front of the TV, others only snack at the table. I know I snack exactly like my family did, and I’m sure most people do similarly. and probably don’t even really think about the different ways there are to manage snacks.

Your family’s snacking style probably also has a lot to do with how you interpret feelings of hunger. If you grew up without regular snacking, you probably get accustom to managing feelings of mild hunger.

28

My boss, bless his heart, buys a couple of dozen doughnuts for the group every Monday morning. There are those of us who skip the doughnuts or cut off a small piece from a doughnut and eat that. There are those of us who eat one or two whole doughnuts. If you saw a group picture, you could pick who belonged to which group with a very high accuracy.

29

I also want to say I’m not a “good calories, bad calories” person, I definitely believe 100% on a purely individual level all weight gain is explained by eating more calories than you burn. I also believe you can eat nothing but twinkies and if you’re consuming fewer calories than you burn, you will force your body to break down fat stored in your adipose tissue and you’ll lose weight. There is really, biologically, no argument about that.

But on trying to figure out why the United States and Europe have become fat, I think we have to look at human behavior. It’s been many years ago now, but when I stopped living a super active lifestyle and quickly became overweight and decided to use a calorie counting approach to fix the problem it was extremely eye opening. I used to think fat people were all gluttonous pigs, basically. But once I started actually counting calories I realized that for most of my adult life I’ve been consuming an inordinate amount of food. For much of my adult life I had been an extremely heavy weight lifter (6 days a week of lifting), purely focused on strength building, and I also did high intensity cardio 6 days a week. When I got into my 40s and basically stopped doing that I estimate I probably went from burning 3400 calories a day to burning 2600.

I also found that I didn’t have a willpower problem, willpower implied some consciousness of what was happening. When I started calorie counting and restricting my intake, I realized a huge amount of my eating was almost “unconscious” meaning I didn’t even think about it. It wasn’t that I had a craving and fed it, it’s that I’d literally go into the kitchen to get a glass of water and eat half a bag of chips without even thinking about it. Once I forced my mind to basically be always thinking about it, and always knowing I had to log exactly what I ate, it suddenly made sense to me how lots of people got fat and how I got fat. Before, with my very active lifestyle (and I think the heavy weight training was a major factor in why I wasn’t fat until 40+) I didn’t suffer the negative consequences of basically being a “free range eater.” But the moment my lifestyle changed I put on the pounds with almost unbelievable speed.

30

Mom smoked, drank alcohol, and consumed plenty of coffee; before, during, and after her pregnancies. But meals were always homemade and healthy, fast food was a treat reserved for rare occasions, and snacks tended towards things like fruit. Junk food, such as potato chips and soda, were rationed in our home–Mom was just as likely to hand me a celery stick as a cookie when I asked for a snack.

Just as important, though, was the view (shared by all parents in our neighbourhood), that kids belonged outside, playing. They did not belong inside, in front of the TV; that activity was for rainy days, or for when one was ill. And so, after school and on weekends, our neighbourhood swarmed with kids playing street hockey or baseball or football, riding bikes, playing kids’ games like hide-and-seek, and otherwise just being kids let loose. Consequently, there were very few kids I recall from my childhood who even tended towards fat, let alone obese.

Maybe the authors of the hypothesis in the OP are looking in the wrong place for a solution. Maybe they should be looking at the way we lived then, at the way parents parented then, and at the way kids were then; and the way we do all those things now.

31

I’m a '50s baby. My mother gave up smoking (because of intense vomiting, not for any health reasons, which were largely unknown), was a slender person all her life and who breastfed me.

I grew up on the three-meals-a-day, no snacking way of life.

So, I can’t blame my size on either my mother’s pregnancy behaviour or the family mealtime rules.

I’ve been a yo-yo dieter for 40 years, having first decided I need to lose weight because I was eight and a half stone. I wonder what I’d weigh now, if I’d never gone on that first diet? Probably a lot less than I do.

32

Sorry to bump a thread that has already drifted down, but this oft-repeated professor’s n of 1 project being brought up really does need to be addressed.

His “diet” was not living off Twinkies. It was running an 800 kCal/d deficit with a diet that included Twinkies (and other high sugar/high fat junk), some real vegetables, multivitamins supplements, and a protein supplement.

His result was, as anyone would expect, weight loss, but because of his diet’s poor macronutrient compositionabout 6 pounds of the 27 pounds he lost was lean body mass. Multiple studies have demonstrated that a more balanced diet (specifically one that keeps protein up at a moderate level) will preserve or even allow an increase in lean body mass during weight loss under moderately hypocaloric conditions.

He provides his past numbers on his site. Interestingly his old baseline, before he had packed some pounds on over a few years was about 77 kg with about 17% body fat. A pretty healthy body fat percent. His diet got him nearly back to that weight - to 78.8 kg, but now his body fat percent is about 25%. His body now has 6 kg more fat than it used to and 4 kg less lean body mass than it used to (before he had gained the fat).

He provides another case study of one reason why people should lose weight with a healthy balanced diet that includes adequate amounts of lean protein - if you do not you may lose weight but more of that weight loss will be from muscle and less from fat than it would be if you ran the same calorie deficit eating healthier.

33

Geez, no wonder people are all fat these days. When I was a kid we used to ride our bikes two to three hundred miles a day and then when we got bored with that we would walk four hundred miles down to the local watering hole and swim for nine or ten hours and then head back home for lunch.

34

A bump for this interesting update to the thesis of the op -

Also this. The brains of the obese and of the lean light up differently (including in the hypothalamus) and those differences are substantially lessened after weight loss by way of bariatric surgery along with elevations of CSF anti-inflammatory markers.

Thought some here might find it of note.

35

There is something to the theory that nutrient/food deprivation in the womb can lead to later obesity. It has been shown to be the case with people who were in utero during famines and whose mothers were severely malnourished. An example would be the Dutch famine during WWII Dutch famine of 1944–1945 - Wikipedia
This is obviously an extreme situation and may, or may not, be comparable to low pregnancy weight gain during non-famines.

On a personal note, I am convinced there is more to weight patterns than simple caloric math. I am at a healthy weight, and always have been. When I gain a bit of weight, say over the holidays, I count calories in and out and always loose the weight down to 125-128 lbs. After that, no reasonable amount of calorie restriction or exercise brings the weight further. 1200 calories eaten with 300 burned in exercise should make me loose more weight, but after that 125 mark I just can’t. Luckily, that is a healthy weight for my height (5’3), so I don’t worry about it. But I do wonder why the math doesn’t work at that point. I’ve seen people eating really lightly and not being able to loose weight and people eating like pigs (myself included) and not gaining significant weight. I just have a hunch that the caloric math is one part of the story, but doesn’t account for everything.

36

Exactly my story as well.

37

  1. Food is cheap. As a percentage of income, we are now spending less on food than at any other time. The cheaper food is, the more food we will buy.

  2. Proliferation of restaurants, especially fast food.

  3. As more people get fat due to reasons #1 and #2, obesity becomes more acceptable. And then it snowballs: more acceptance of obesity, therefore more obesity, therefore even more acceptance of obesity, therefore even more obesity, etc.

38

Another interesting finding. The human adult study linked above documented partial reversal of hypothalamic changes after bariatric surgery induced massive weight loss; this animal model study shows reversibility of both the weight gain and the hypothalamic changes based on changing from a high saturated fat diet (used to induce the obesity) to a diet just as high in total fat but replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats from either flax or olive oil. The effect on the CNS seems to both an anti-inflammatory one and an effect on a particular receptor.

39

Pleasantville. Breakfast. Enought said.

40

Fascinating links, DSeid - thanks for posting them. So much for the simplistic “calories in, calories out” manta that so many people are so fond of quoting (which is technically true, but simplistic to the point of uselessness). Humans aren’t walking bomb calorimeters! And as the last study you posted shows, “a calorie is a calorie” isn’t true either.