What’s the proportion of macronutrients Americans eat vs other developed countries?
I noticed something while fasting: A few hours after eating, I would get a sensation that compelled me to eat but if I held, it would eventually transform into real hunger after about a day. So what was the sensation I got after a few hours? Probably low blood sugar.
Consuming a lot of carbs, especially sugar, makes blood sugar spike which makes insulin spike which lowers blood sugar too low, which then can compel to eat more carbs and so on; you get an amplifying yo-yo movement of blood sugar levels. Sugar can be somewhat like a drug in that it’s soothing and pleasurable to have it, especially in refined form, and can create withdrawal. You may also need increased doses to maintain the same effect; If you’re used to sugar, you can gulp down a lot of sugary soda but if not, the same amount would sicken you.
So I’m guessing it’s mainly carb, especially sugar, consumption but I’m having a difficult time finding a study that breaks down caloric intake by macronutrient when comparing the US to another country.
Hasn’t that always been the case, though? People have been going to dinner and a movie or dinner and a play for decades. Movie theaters started selling concessions in the 1930’s. A Sunday drive with a stop for ice cream was a tradition for some families. And people have invited each other out for coffee since the first café, the difference there being that “coffee” usually meant an 8 oz. cup with sugar, and possibly cream (66 calories for both), not a 20 oz. double chocolate frappuccino (520 calories). Similarly, movie theater popcorn in the Thirties meant a small bag (220 calories), not a large bucket (1,030 calories).
Everyone (mostly) has enough money to buy food. Even our poor people are fat, and no-one is starving to death (unless they choose).
Unhealthy, calorie-rich food is ubiquitous and cheap. Healthy, nutrient-rich food is harder to get and more expensive.
Portion sizes at restaurants are determined based on what makes sense from a business perspective (profit), and not from a health perspective (healthy). It’s quantity over quality, because that is how business operates.
And,
Food lobbies are powerful. Say anything or try to pass laws restricting bad things and try to promote good things, and you will soon be confronted by lawyers. These lobbies exist to further the interests of their said product (sugar, beef, etc.) and to ensure no one does or says anything that may hurt that product. Examples: Oprah vs the Beef industry, efforts to rid schools of soda and candy machines, school lunch programs influenced by various lobbies.
I think our dependence on cars is a huge factor. Over 70% of Americans live in suburbs or rural areas. This article says 76% of commuters drive alone, and another 9% carpool. That’s 85% of commuters who are dependent on cars. And presumably, most of those people use cars for almost all their non-commuting trips as well (grocery shopping, taking kids to school, etc).
I can’t find a country-by-country comparison for this, but this (PDF) says 62% of all “trips” in UK are by car.
I hardly think that toning down the fat shaming caused people to be obese. It stands to reason that being fat needs to be the standard before it becomes normalized enough to be accepted.
I mean like, we didn’t put “Mike & Molly” on the air and then Americans all became fat. Rather we were all fat enough as a society by 2010 to warrant being comfortable with seeing two fat people in love on prime time tv.
I’m going with the points others have made:
Extra sugar in foods
Low costs of unhealthy foods
Lack of exercise in work and play
Over eating as a coping mechanism for depression
I’m not buying the “everything revolves around food now” theory. Everything has always revolved around food for all of time, in every culture.
I also don’t see how portion sizes would CAUSE obesity. Like body positivity, I see it as a result of obesity. I mean like as a fat person, I don’t need a McDonalds large fry to be larger in order to get my fry fix. I am very capable of ordering 1-4 small fries if I need them. And my parents, who eat like birds (old birds) aren’t getting fat because the portions at Bob Evans are bigger than they were in 1974. My parents are just leaving more on the plate. If I’m super fat and the portions at a restaurant are super big I’m simply not having a snack when I get home.
No one is suddenly eating more food cuz it’s there on their plate. They’re eating more food in one place instead of another.
Um, do you really not see the difference between a couple of short-term tightly-controlled calorie-limited stunt “diets” consisting only of fast food, and the everyday eating habits of ordinary people trying to manage their eating choices among food options where fast food is drastically overrepresented?
If so, let me help you out with a few excerpts from your linked articles:
In other words, when highly active fit people devise or are handed a carefully managed short-term diet consisting only of fast food with caloric intake tightly controlled, while still maintaining high activity levels, then surprise surprise, they can lose weight on it.
That doesn’t mean that fast food overall doesn’t still have unhealthily high fat levels and calorie content that significantly contribute to American obesity.
Really? When I eat out in Japan or Europe and order a standard portion of a main course, I can always finish it and feel satiated, but not feel overly full. If I want to feel really full, I’d specifically need to choose a type of restaurant that allows for it (e.g. sushi restaurants, where you keep ordering more food till you feel full). It just isn’t the norm.
When I eat out in the US, I often can’t finish a meal. And if I do, I feel physically full, not just satiated.
I don’t know if this is a major contribution to the obesity epidemic, but surely it is a non-negligible factor.
This one really kills me. As a single person who’s always on the move (I move for every contract and my last few contracts have been for three, three, six and four months), it is relatively easy to be able to cook for myself but stuff such as tomato sauce or tomato puré make it so much easier.
Right now I live in a tiny French town that’s got half a dozen supermarkets. Every single tomato sauce brand and variety has sugar. Why? I’ve never met a cook that put sugar in tomato sauce! It’s not supposed to have sugar! I’ve found one brand of tomato puré that’s tomato, tomato and tomato, but soon if I want my tomato sauce to have no added sugar I’ll need to go ask my mother for her manual blender. The way things are going, I’m not sure I can trust Braun to make a blender that won’t magically add sugar…
Not “suddenly” but a lot of the US has a traditional expectation of “cleaning your plate.” If it’s there, they feel obligated to eat it, and if you don’t there are often comments. And not just among family, which I get all the time; I’ve heard a lot of “you didn’t like it?” at restaurants because I didn’t finish a trough of pasta.
To me, the most hilarious portion issue is soda. I run a marathon and I’m offered about six ounces of water every four miles, and typically I’ll take a couple of cups. But apparently I need a quart of soda to make it thru a movie, or wash down a Wendy’s single with large fries.
I’m a little surprised to see Australia is 44 on the list in the OP.
I remember fat people being very rare when I was a kid in the 70s. Nowadays, I see a lot more of them.
I’m a skinny guy, which is due to a number of reasons, but being active is one of them. I walk around 9 - 10 km a day. That’s approx 6 miles. Not a huge amount, but considerably more than average. However, before cars were common, that was the average amount people walked, according to what I’ve read.
In conclusion, I’d say inactivity is a BIG part of why so many people are fat.
Portion sizes combined with “finish what’s on your plate!” The US had The Great Depression; Europe has the Postwar (multiple ones, depending on location). A lot of our obesity-prevention campaigns are focusing on portion control: don’t give your 2yo double his mother’s portion, if you haven’t chosen your portion and it’s too large it’s OK to leave some… American portions tend to be about twice the size of a Spanish “truck drivers’ portion”. The portions in my local cantina are perfectly fine meals for office and factory workers: I sometimes see people leaving their dessert or, if it’s the packaged kind, returning it to the fridge (the returned ones are put on the side, so we all know that yoghurt standing away from its brothers spent a few minutes in the room; some people will specifically take that one). We’ve had American visitors who instead of portion and one or two sides took portion and each of the four available sides (the cooks needed to give him a second plate), plus two desserts. Dude wasn’t round yet, but he was well on his way; you could have gotten two of our younger guys out of him.
In Spain at least it’s going down or stable depending on which statistic you look at, the multi-car-house model seems to have reached a plateau. We’re getting scare articles about “young people aren’t getting their licenses at 18!!!” but that was also the case 30 years ago and the reasons are the same now as back then. Thing is, we can “afford” not to get driver’s licenses as early as Americans for the same reasons we did back then: zoning is a lot more mixed than in the US (you don’t need a car to do your shopping) and in places without a decent public transportation network it’s perfecty normal to hitchike. There have been attempts at American-style zoning but they tend to get buckled down as soon as people realize how horribly inconvenient and un-neighborly it is to have a fully-residential neighborhood with not a bar or corner store in sight.
When I lived in the Netherlands I was amazed to read the ingredients of the regular store brand cookies at my local Albert Heijn (large supermarket chain in Holland). I don’t recall exactly but it had a short ingredient list*. Something like: flour, sugar, butter, egg, milk poeder, emulsifier, natural flavors and artificial colors.
They were delicious and cheap. Your most basic, generic, packaged Dutch supermarket cookie tastes better than ANY mass-marketed cookie found on most American supermarket shelves. They don’t have all the fillers, gums and preservatives American cookies have.
I wonder what would happen if a European supermarket somehow magically switched their cookie aisle to an American one at the snap of their fingers? What would the reactions of shoppers be when they read the labels or Og forbid, tasted the product?
What does this have to do with obesity? Just this: America values corporate profit-making over almost everything else. Supermarkets ain’t gonna sell cookies with decent ingredients in them if they don’t have to, Far more important is long shelf-life and adding as much fillers as possible.
Profits over quality (and nutrition, and safety) in the USA doesn’t only lead to crappy store-brand cookies, it has profound effects on the food-consumption behaviors of Americans some of which has already been mentioned in this thread (e.g. dollar menus and supersizing)
Our food industry and our relationship with it is pretty fucked up.
*re: ingredient lists. There’s also the 18 or so ingredients in US McD’s french fries compared to four in the UK fries and similar discrepancies in Kraft Mac & Cheese and zillions more. I’m sure.
I post on this other site called city data (not sure if this is allowed mods) and this came up a few years ago. The discussion was originally about bland foods Americans like versus other cultures and it turned into obesity.
Being the child of European immigrants myself I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I’d say that most Americans, and by that I mean your stereotypical white, corn fed, blue blooded American tends to eat bland-ish food and doesn’t really know portion size if proper portions weren’t instilled into them by family. I’m going to just guess off the top of my head that most obesity cases are in the midwest and southern states that may have a few seasonings but nothing fancy.
I see lack of flavor as more a reason to eat more of something. I’m not fat or overweight myself, but I’d sooner eat 1-2 Keebler Samoas/Coconut Delights over a large slice of sponge cake with a heavy dusting of powdered sugar and cocoa. Or better yet, I’d rather eat a small bowl of fiery hot Thai food than eat a burger with a plate of fries or chips, and a bowl of slaw.
You make a good point about the blandness of food. Now that I think about it, a lot of obese people I’ve known did tend to eat bland foods. If you’re eating well-done steak with ketchup, it might take a lot of it to give you some satisfaction, especially since sugar tends to dull taste buds. Many of them smoke which further dulls taste.
I’d also note that people who have anxiety, depression or less openness tend to be less adventurous and so may go for bland food. Depression can make all food taste bland so there may be an effort to “up the dose” of their makeshift anti-depressant.
