Speaking as an American, we the people are fat. We’re not the fattest - we’re only #17 - but we’re pretty close, and more to the point, we’re fatter than we were just a few short decades ago.
Why is that? There are other countries out there that have fast food restaurants and cars and remote controls and whatever else you can think of. I would have thought they would also have the same market forces at play, i.e. purveyors of processed food who load it with sugar/fat/salt to make it difficult to resist, and restaurants who jack up portion sizes in pursuit of greater profits. So what makes America so different from, say Canada (#44) or the UK (#40) or Switzerland (#120)?
What makes us so different from Japan (#166)? Sure, they have a stronger reliance on public transport, which builds a fair bit of walking into your day. But they also eat healthier foods, and they eat smaller portions. But why do they eat healthier foods and smaller portions than the US? They have fast-food restaurants, and grocery store shelves with plenty of extremely processed foods, and they have restaurant owners who would surely love to make more money by serving larger portions. Why are they not succumbing to market forces the way we are?
I’d like to add that there is food everywhere in America, and many of the places that sell it sell high fat/high calorie food. Also, it seems that the people who sell the unhealthiest food (McDonalds, Burger King, sports bars in general, Kentucky Fried, etc.) advertise the most.
Yes, as a tourist I know it’s easy to overeat in the USA.
When I visited Las Vegas, every hotel / casino had an ‘all-you-can-eat’ restaurant for a set price.
Now on the occasional day I ate ‘all-you-can-eat’ (jolly good food ), I would just have a salad for breakfast and something light in the evening.
However, I noticed that there was an option to have three ‘all-you-can-eat’ meals in one day, also for a set price. :eek:
That is an absurd amount of food. :smack:
Indeed, and we seem to actually encourage it. Speaking of Vegas, there is one place that will not charge you for their three pound burger if you can eat it all in one sitting. Another place lets people over 350 lbs eat for free. One of those places has had two separate incidents where patrons had a heart attack while eating there.
Basically, in the 60s, food was cheap. Incredibly so. In the post-war era, the government was subsidizing food production and it lead to really, really cheap food. Because of this, the food itself served at restaurants was not the expensive part of the business. It was labor, rents and utilities. The question became then, how do we as restaurants increase profits and the answer was simple - sell more food to the same person. What they realized though is that people were unlikely to buy more discrete quantities of food. We’re still the same way. It’s rare for us to finish a Big Mac and then go and get another one. What Wallerstein ( a movie theater operator) figured out though was that you could introduce sizing and that fed upon a person’s instinct to maximize their resources. If you had a small popcorn for a dime and twice as much popcorn for 17 cents, people would buy the larger size. Since the food itself was not terribly expensive, you could raise profits significantly. Wallerstein took this knowledge to Ray Kroc - owner of McDonald’s and in the early 70s, McDonald’s introduced sizing. Other restaurants scrambled to copy the idea. Over time, we began to get used to the larger sizes, so there was essentially a war to see how big they could push quantities of food to show that their eatery was a better deal. We became very used to these large sizes.
Where we differ from Europe and Japan is that they did not enjoy the cheap post-war food boom. We tend to view Europe now as very wealthy, but in the post-war period, it was not. There was much more food insecurity and food prices were not anywhere near as cheap as they were in the United States (although by the 80s, things were humming along.) Also, the US has often served as a more experimental economy than Europe. They usually tend to get our ‘innovations’ after we do. Obesity is one of those things. It’s actually increasing in Europe and is roughly about where ours was in 1990. Some countries though like the UK are making great strides to catch up with our corpulence.
Canadians are only slightly thinner than Americans, but whenever I cross the border I can tell because of the size of the people.
I have several WAGs.
Portion size at restaurants in the U.S. is absolutely ridiculous. I’ve been served meals that have enough calories to feed me for two or three days. Drink sizes are also very large. Trying to get a small tea or coffee or soft drink is really hard at most places.
Sugar (or high-fructose corn syrup) has snuck its way into countless items that did not have sugar in past decades.
There may be U.S. dietary guidelines, but nobody has heard of them. Instead whackjobs fill the void in the marketplace of ideas with bizarre notions. I’d wager it’s because it’s only in the U.S. that the dominant political party actually seeks to hobble the idea that government exists to serve the public good.
Ketchup (or pickle relish, or pizza sauce) as a vegetable.
Football and the corresponding worship of really fat people as being athletes to admire.
The book “The Case Against Sugar” puts forward the thesis that sugar manufacturers deliberately set out to demonize fat as part of the diet to convince people that fat, not sugar, caused obesity. Also claims that sugar is the biggest trigger for insulin which ensures the storage of calories in the body as fat - so “low fat” foods, which tend to have much more sugar to compensate, are in fact a factor in increased obesity.
But there’s no doubt portion size is also to blame. The McD hamburger used to be a standard meal. Nowadays, it’s mainly for the little kids. An 8-oz (or 10-oz) classic glass Coke bottle held what used to be a normal sized serving. Those tiny TV dinners were a full meal. We probably eat 2 to 3 times more than we need to get by, at a very minimum.
There’s also a strong correlation between obesity and time spent driving a car. Americans tend to spend much more time behind the wheel than Europeans, on average (though Europeans AFAIK are increasing their private car ownership/use rates these days, and perhaps not coincidentally, getting fatter).
I concur with the posts above (portion sizes, lots of use of sugar in various forms, willful ignorance and/or disregard for dietary guidance).
I’ll also suggest that the traditional American diet – heavy on the meat and starches – may also play a role. It’s the sort of food that most of us grew up on, and makes a lot of us happy, but it’s also a diet that was more ideal for our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, who worked on farms, or in manual labor. Those of us who work the sedentary jobs that are common today (especially for the majority who get no regular exercise) don’t need to eat like farmers.
I think I’d reverse those two. **Senoy **is dead on target about this topic.
In my lifetime(I’m 46), I’ve seen the following things, just to name a few:
[ul]
[li]32 oz Fountain Sodas being absurdly large when I was young, to being a “medium” now.[/li][li]The “big” burgers at the fast food places (Big Mac, Whopper, Quarter Pounder), becoming the default choice.[/li][li]Snack chip bags used to come in smaller bags- the smallest size you can buy at the grocery now used to be the largest.[/li][/ul]
This sort of thing has taken place across the food spectrum. Candy bars are bigger. Sodas are bigger- it used to be that Coke machines served either 8 or 10 oz bottles (can’t recall which), and 12 oz were the “large” ones, with larger quantities being quart bottles sold in six-packs. The implication was that nobody was drinking an entire quart at a time.
I’m not so sure that sugar is the villain, at least not as much as portion size. The quantity of sugar in things wouldn’t be such an issue if we ate like we did in 1960.
I don’t get the impression that fat linemen are really the footballers being admired. Usually it seems that the poster or marketed football athletes are the quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, etc. - speed or precision more than girth.
Both offensive and defensive linemen in the modern NFL are bloody huge, compared to any normal person, but it’s really only defensive tackles who’re typically, visibly fat (though they also have to be very strong).
It appears that most of the responders above didn’t bother to read the OP, but one of the key reasons for the difference in the obesity rate between the US and Japan is that Japan still practices fat-shaming, whereas we have largely abandoned this practice.
There was a time when this was pretty much the truth, and that was when the running game was much more important to NFL offenses. Defenses needed BIG defensive tackles to plug the middle and offenses needed BIG linemen to move them. William “The Refrigerator” Perry, a 350 lb. lineman was the rage for a while.
Now, when passing is everything, defenses need relatively lean and fast linemen in order to get to the quarterback as quickly as possible, and offenses need quick tackles to counter their quickness. It’s a different game than it used to be.
Thanks. Maybe I didn’t emphasize my point of query clearly enough. It’s easy to point to specific factors that are driving the epidemic of obesity in the US. What I’m wondering is why those factors aren’t present to the same extent in other developed countries as well, since (to my ignorant eye) consumers in those countries appear to have the same freedom of choice we do, and businesses in those countries appear to have the same ability to shape the market to serve their interests rather than those of the consumer (i.e. by advertising/selling large portions of cheap, highly processed foods). Senoy and you seem to have caught this point; now that I’m spotlighting it, I’m hopeful that others might continue to offer perspective along those same lines.
Japan admires their sumo wrestlers to a much higher degree than America cares about it’s linemen. Yet, they’re #166. It’s not athlete worship making Americans fat.
Food in the U.S. has become very cheap (when measured as a percentage of income). Thus demand for it has increased.
There is no scarcity of food; it is always in front of us. And there’s a fast food restaurant on every corner. (Well, not really. But you know what I mean.) If you give a dog or cat unlimited access to food, it will become fat. The same is true for humans.
As more people become obese, obesity becomes more acceptable. Which means more people will become obese, and obesity becomes even more acceptable. And so on. Positive feedback.
People in the U.S. spend a lot of time in front of the TV. Not only are they not burning many calories, but they’re usually eating/snacking while watching it.
), I would just have a salad for breakfast and something light in the evening.
