I’m dubious of this, because exercise has little impact on a person’s weight. A person’s weight is primarily a function of diet, not exercise.
As I found out on a recent visit to the Golden Arches, that ain’t all that far from the truth now. [in my case $7.50 for a mere fish sandwich and medium fry, no drink]
“It’s a cookbook!!!”
Seriously though…
This is another way of saying, “Have a good Health and Physical Education program in schools.” Which I’m in favor of, having once spent 10 years as a PE teacher. Unfortunately, that field is full of morons who are uninterested in teaching and only want to coach sports, which mostly services kids who are already active. And society generally encourages things like having a good football team rather than recreation programs that service entire communities, or teachers who are actually interested in teaching PE in a thoughtful way to those who need it.
So much for messaging though. As mentioned by others, it’s a bigger problem than that.
In the short run, yes. But over the long run, it keeps your metabolism running at a higher level.
IOW, if you’re trying to lose 20 pounds, it takes a shitload of exercise to lose even 5 of those pounds by exercise. But if you get a decent amount of exercise all along, you’re in a better position to maintain a healthy weight in the first place.
You’re right in that someone’s diet is usually the biggest problem. Your TDEE is still important though, too. Of course that includes things like your height, which you can’t help. But the kind of job you do, whether you walk/bike to work or drive, if you’re running after kids a decent chunk of the say - these all factor in, too. Since switching from a job in food service to an office job, I’ve gains about 10 lbs. Fortunately I recognize why this is happening, and I’m still in my healthy weight range after having lost 80 lbs in the last few years. But other people wouldn’t necessarily recognize that the issue is, or even know there’s an issue at all, since most people don’t check their weight regularly.
So I agree that diet is going to be the biggest issue for the most people, absolutely. But making small changes, including how much movement you perform in a day, factors in too.
As for the original question, honestly, I feel it’s effectively too late for most adults to really change their eating habits. Obviously not on an individual level (I did it, after all, and so do many others), and I’m not saying no help should be offered to those trying to lose weight. But as a whole, I think we NEED to start educating kids better on not only nutrition, but on just how devastating obesity-related problems can be. Junk food isn’t going to go away. Neither are cars or office jobs or Netflix. So we educate people, *especially *kids, on how to best navigate the world in a way that maintains good physical health. I would also love to see more companies partnering with gyms for employee discounts. Insurance offering better weights to those with a healthy BMI. I’d love to see more options to get something like a DEXA scan performed, although I don’t have a great way to go about that.
Including something of a small rant: I absolutely despise the “body-positive community”. I DO think everyone should love themselves and their bodies, and no one deserves ridicule or mockery based on how they look. I’m not for *shaming *fat people, but I’m also not for fat people saying, “Look, obesity can be perfectly healthy, and you’re a racist bigot if you say otherwise!” (and yes, many of them DO accuse you of racism, because they think only black women disproportionately suffer from the ‘fat gene’ or whatever :rolleyes: ). Point is, these people need to stop glorifying it. Your car isn’t ‘fat-shaming’ you because your seatbelt doesn’t fit. The airline isn’t ‘fat-shaming’ you because you can’t fit in a single seat. I don’t like a privileged life because I’m a normal weight - I worked extremely hard to get to this point, and no longer suffer the obvious consequences of being obese.
How does this message help at all? Pretty sure everybody who eats processed foods already know or suspect it.
The point repeatedly made in this thread is that a simple message isn’t going to work. The problem is those processed foods are the cheapest, fastest source of calories around and widely available. As opposed to healthier alternatives, which generally take more time, are more expensive, and not always available for people in food deserts.
The entire premise of a “message” at all is flawed. It’s like abstinence-only sex education. No amount of mere messaging is going to make it work, no matter what the scalds may say. You’re not just fighting cultural factors but millions of years of evolution as well.
Why would we want to make obesity rates “plummet dramatically”?
Let’s assume, to make it simple, that obesity shortens your life by 5 years, and that it is associated with higher morbidity while you are alive.
WRT individuals:
Every individual should be allowed to decide their own greatest good. If an individual enjoys eating and makes a choice that unrestricted eating is a greater good for them than is diminished morbidity and a longer life, should we not permit them to make that choice? Is it necessarily the case that a skinny guy who ate lettuce for 85 years had an overall richer existence than a fat guy who enjoyed delicious meals for 75 years? And why should anyone but the fat guy weigh 
in on that?
WRT society:
The least economic cost to society is a shortened life expectancy. The highest cost to society is delivering a super healthy guy into retirement. Thanks, fat people! We don’t have to expend our public funds to keep you alive for very long after retirement. Your terminal events are going to cost the health system about the same (we all die of SOMETHING), and your morbidity costs during your lifetime were mostly born by private insurers (at least, in the US).
Obesity runs up the cost of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc. because those disease become more prevalent. I don’t know the exact financial data but I would guess that it costs much more to treat such patients than it does to simply care for a healthy elderly person in his/her last years.
In addition, by this logic, why wouldn’t we want people to smoke more, do more drugs, etc.? Weed them out and die earlier? It sounds a bit like an actuarial version of a Broken Window Fallacy.
I opened this thread expecting that the bump would be due to this New York Times article (paywall warning) about a new law in Chile requiring labeling on unhealthy food. It’s had quite an impact on consumption of sugary sodas. See also this journal article.
For the modern lifestyle, perhaps. But the lifestyle from hundreds or thousands of years ago? I think activity was a significant driver of weight back then. If everyone had to spend at least 2 hours of just walking every day (which is likely even less than how most of humanity got around until very recently), I bet that would add up to some significant weight loss over time.
I agree - and my gripe is that the body-positivity community now conflates legit health warnings of obesity with “fat-shaming.” This would be like smokers pushing a “charred-lung-positivity” movement and saying, “Showing people photos of charred ashen smoker’s lungs is smoker-shaming.” Shaming isn’t the issue, the outright health facts are.
Excuse me, are you lung-shaming me?? 
I agree that there’s no message that will help, but there are tactics that can help, and they do so not by trying to get our rational minds to agree that junk food is bad for us, but by working at the irrational parts of our minds.
For example, tracking your weight and seeing it go down can provide positive feedback that helps people lose weight, but looking at your weight every day can actually provide negative feedback. Because your weight fluctuates by several pounds a day usually, and our brains are bad at trends. Eat healthy one day and see your weight go up a bit, or gorge one day and see no real change, and you can easily get the wrong association in your mind.
The solution: a scale that doesn’t tell you what your daily weight is, but does tell you the trend over time.
I have not been obese, but I have been overweight, and I found that a food/exercise tracking app made losing that weight much easier. I got a little bit of positive reinforcement each day that I met my goal. I had to take one extra step to actually record what I was eating, which sometimes led me to have a healthier snack, and sometimes led me to count out and eat, say, 15 chips with salsa rather than just pull them out of the bag mindlessly.
It’s true that the pleasure of eating fat and sugar is deeply ingrained in our bodies, but the pleasure of the little dopamine hits of winning every day is also pretty deeply ingrained, and I think so far we’ve only scratched the surface of using the latter to combat the former.
I used to think like this in my early 20s, but then I realized that society doesn’t work this way. What are you proposing, that we have some kind of scale where the more unhealthy someone’s lifestyle is, the more they pay for their medical care? That’s basically what this line of thinking leads to.
Except that the problem isn’t only sugary beverages, or ‘foods high in salt, sugar, fat or calories’, by any means. The real problem is ultra-processed foods, as the latest research has shown.
Brazil and France are now taking the approach of warning the public about the dangers of high consumption of ultra-processed foods.
I expected at least some intelligent response to the article and research I quoted, but it seems that nobody has bothered to read it.
First of all, ditch the outdated and useless BMI.
BMI was a idea by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, in like 1850. Based upon a few hundred peasants, none of whom were over 6 feet tall, and were likely not all that well nourished. It was never meant to to used as a tool to get people to lose weight. It also doesnt differ between someone fat and someone who is into body building. BMI is useless and outdated.
In addition, not too long ago, due to pressure from the diet industry :eek::rolleyes: the WHO and USA changed the definitions to make more people scale in at fat and obese. So, not only useless but full of crap and commercialized. They changed the scales just to get you to buy more diet worthless crap.
For example -Lasha Talakhadze, weighing in at 372 lb won the Gold Medal in weightlifting. He’s be considered obese, but he’s a freaking Olympic Gold medalist. World record setter.
So yeah, you can be a athlete at 372 pounds but be fat and out of shape at 160.
600 is right out, yes. 
The only way to tell if your weight is effecting your health is to get a physical. I am technically (under the new system) obese, but my doctor sez I am in great health, no blood pressure issues, etc. He sez if i lost a few pounds it’d be easier on my knees, and he’s right.
I only mentioned sodas, but the changes in Chile also addressed processed foods.
There are different categories of processed foods.
The Nova system classifies foods into 4 categories:
Nova 1 - Unprocessed or minimally processed foods
e.g.
Fresh vegetables and fruits
Chilled or frozen meat, fish, seafood.
Eggs
Milk, unsweetened yoghurt
Grains, nuts, legumes
Pasta, polenta
**Nova 2 - Processed culinary ingredients **
e.g.
Butter, lard
Sugar, molasses, honey
Vegetable oils
Salt
Nova 3 - Processed food
e.g.
Canned, pickled, or preserved foods
Salted, dried, smoked or cured meat or fish
Cheese
Fresh-baked bread
Beer, wine
(May include anti-oxidants, stabilisers, and preservatives.)
Nova 4 - Ultra-processed food
These are industrial formulations. Group 1 foods are a small proportion of, or are even absent from, ultra-processed products.
Substances only found in ultra-processed products include some directly extracted from foods, such as casein, lactose, whey, and gluten, and some derived from further processing of food constituents, such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils, hydrolysed proteins, soy protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Classes of additive only found in ultra-processed products include dyes and other colours, colour stabilisers, flavours, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners, and processing aids such as carbonating, firming, bulking and anti-bulking, de-foaming, anti-caking and glazing agents, emulsifiers, sequestrants and humectants.
Several industrial processes with no domestic equivalents are used in the manufacture of ultra-processed products, such as extrusion and moulding, and pre-processing for frying.
e.g
Carbonated drinks
Mass-produced packaged breads and buns
Poultry and fish ‘nuggets’ and ‘sticks’
Commercial sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products
Powdered and packaged ‘instant’ soups, noodles and desserts.
Margarines and spreads
Ice-cream, chocolate, candies
Breakfast ‘cereals’
‘Energy’ bars and drinks, ‘fruit’ yoghurts, ‘fruit’ drinks
The problem with Nova 4 foods is that they don’t satisfy hunger in the same way as the other groups. So we end up eating far larger quantities of food, but we still feel a craving for more.
-> Hence obesity.
Good points, but-
Breakfast ‘cereals’- some are pretty much just grain.
chocolate- cocoa & sugar.