Clearly, the answer is that Americans are fat because we are awful people.
This is a good post, and I find it hard to disagree with much of what you wrote.
Maybe, then, the extra portion sizes are both a symptom and a cause? Symptomatic in that we do eat more, but causal in that it reinforces what “normal” eating looks like, thereby impacting our food culture?
So your explanation is that Americans have less self discipline than people in other countries. Do you have any evidence for that? Why doesn’t that lack of self discipline cause America to lag behind the rest of the world in other metrics such as GDP per capita, work hours, percent of homeless people, etc?
I’m going to go with portion size as a main culprit. I eat at McD’s and other fast food places fairly often (and it shows) and I RARELY see someone not finish their burger orat least half their fries; yet as I pointed out previously, that burger is about twice what used to be normal. The standard McD’s hamburger has morphed into the twice as big quarter pounder (or Royale with Cheese) and is now in the process of morphing yet again into the bigger mighty angus. The other fast food restaurants are not far behind.
(“what did they call the new really big burger at Burger King?” “I don’t know, I didn’t go into Burger King.”)
The line your mom always told you in 60’s America was- “Eat up. Don’t you know ther are starving children in China?” (Which made it into Weird Al Yankovic’s “Eat It!”: (to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It!”)
Tell me why you’re such a fussy young man,
Don’t want no Captain Crunch, don’t want no Raisin Bran,
Well don’t you know that other kids are starving in Japan?
So - Eat it!" ♫
The “clean your plate” thing was a serous guilt trip - we have it so good compared to so many others, how can you waste food? It was as much as anything to also get kids to eat foods they didn’t like.
I still feel the impulse today, even though the actual cost of the wasted food is trivial.
(Doonesbury spoofed this with some Chinese kid being told by his mother “Don’t you know that children are starving in America?!”)
But The Case Against Sugar goes deeper. Their thesis is that high blood sugar levels trigger insulin, which then triggers the body to store away fat for future starvation - a natural response when food availability was variable. The issue is less important when consuming starch (or fat or protein), as the insulin spike from starch is slower and lesser because of the time starch takes to break down to sugar. So high sugar combined with over-eating is a trigger to store a lot more body fat than would happen with over-eating without so much sugar.
Portion size is tricky. We learn to expect a certain amount of food. It’s a acquired habit.
I’m typically unsatisfied for several days when I start eating slightly smaller portions. Eventually I adjust to the new normal. But, those few adjustment days aren’t fun.
Changing plate sizes helps a lot. American dinner plates are so much bigger than needed. I bought some commercial diner plates from Ebay. I think they’re from the 1940’s or 50’s. They’re much smaller than my dinner set.
What? This(250 cals) is twice as big as this (540 cals)?
Also does anyone participating in this thread admit to actually going to restaurants and ordering large meals and finishing them all? So far I’ve only seen people observing the perceived habits of others. You can’t possibly know how much those other people have eaten that day, how much exercise they got, how often they eat that much in one sitting, and can’t even verify exactly what they ordered (unless you’re kinda creepy, which I would believe.)
I mean, if portion sizes are an actual issue in America, and most Americans are fat, people should be able to step up and say “Yes I am fat, I eat out all the time and I clean my plate and I was not this fat until restaurants started making me eat like this.”
Only **asahi **has come in and admitted that they personally noticed a difference in their weight when living in the US and Japan, and attributed it to portion sizes - AMONGST OTHER THINGS. They also seem to suggest that they ate out a lot in Japan and the US.
No it’s not. The notion of “clearing your plate” is pretty much universal. It comes more from times of famine (in your case the famines many of your foreparents escaped and the Great Depression, in Europe those same famines and the Postwars, for many people from other areas their own times of war…) than from an abundance of food. An abundance of food may be linked to portion sizes, but it’s not what triggers “clean your plate!”
The thing is that nobody notices the giant portion sizes that they’ve been eating until someone comes along and says “this is what a healthy portion looks like.” Those diet programs where you buy their food, like Jenny Craig? A major reason why they work is because the portions they send you are relatively modest.
Portion sizes in America are definitely an issue.
I know that portion size is definitely my problem. I long ago (decades) cut out fast food and sodas from my diet, although my husband and I have gotten back into the habit of eating out a lot (fast casual and brewpubs). I struggle hugely with keeping my weight down, and I mostly blame my skewed sense of portion size on a combination of things. It’s the psychology of these issues all mixed together that confuses me and makes things difficult:
- “clean your plate” during childhood
- being encouraged to eat as much as I wanted when I was a teenager, even once being encouraged by my mom to eat three whole stuffed game hens in one sitting (because she didn’t want leftovers)
- growing up on sodas, fast food and lots of junk food and processed foods
- having rheumatoid arthritis from a young age, which seriously restricted my activity levels - when it hurts to move you just don’t
- learning proper portion size from a stint in Weight Watchers, but getting frustrated with their program, and then trying to keep myself full by eating more vegetables than anything else and getting criticized by my husband for bad portion control (In my opinion, plain steamed veggies should be an exception to portion control because they fill you up without too many calories and have very little insulin response)
- The only times in my life I’ve lost weight have been times when I deliberately made myself go hungry a lot and just tried to ignore the discomfort - looking good while feeling like crap doesn’t work for me very well
- and now lately I have post-menopausal body shape changes added to the fray
One thing that I can say about portion size is that it definitely expands your capacity for eating. On one of my trips back home, I literally could not finish a meal that I had previously had no problem finishing. Maybe I could have if I hadn’t been jet lagged and had committed myself to cleaning my plate, but I just felt really full. Now that I’ve been back in the US I rarely have problems finishing most meals. I think what my brain perceives as a full meal changed both when I went to Japan and when I came back.
To your point, I agree that you could certainly get your fill regardless of whether you eat out a lot. I suspect that for some people, portion sizes are a non-factor. I can only speak for me when I say that I can see how if portion sizes can change our perceptions of how full we are, we probably have a greater capacity to snack and junk out. But I fully concede, what I’m saying is strictly anecdotal and not hard science. But maybe someone could find some hard science to back it up.
It is something that’s noticed by many visitors to the US, and in fact one of the things that immigrants are used to warning expected visitors about, but it’s generally considered bad form to talk about it with or in front of the Americans, because it’s viewed as a criticism of your hosts.
The last time I was in the US as part of a corporate group, with lunch brough in to work, we also noticed that we’d get full without getting satiated. I was the person who had most experience living in the US and I gained 5kg; other people mentioned 10 or 15. My direct manager, a hyperactive, Italo-Lebanese Belgian married to an American, had lost 5 of the extra kilos after just two weeks back home: the only “diet” he followed, at his wife’s advice, was “your mid-morning snack will be one piece of fruit that I’ll prepare for you.” She had been in the military when they met: I never got to meet her, but he mentioned that she’d said she’d lost weight during Basic with a lot of effort, and as a consequence of being deployed to Belgium with no effort. She hadn’t even gained weight on his mother’s cooking, and c’mon, BossMama was Italian: you can bet she took food seriously.
So the big Italian never-ending feasts and mamas standing over you saying “Eat! Eat!” is not a problem in Italy (or Lebanon), but a few weeks eating American Portions causes weight gain?
You’ve convinced me even more that it’s not restaurants dictating how much we eat, but our choices on WHAT we eat. I’m guessing the food at Corporate Lunch was higher in sugar, salt and fat than what’s at mama’s table.
I’m not arguing that portion sizes at American restaurants aren’t extra large. I’m arguing that the bulk of Americans don’t get the bulk of their calories from restaurants, and that restaurants themselves aren’t the problem. The food we choose to eat there? Yep. The amounts and types of foods we choose eat in a day? Yep. The underlying reasons we choose to eat that way? Yep.
I just can’t get behind the thought that “Well, there’s more food on my plate when I go to a restaurant, so that is why I’m fat.” There are so many other reasons, and I can’t get behind that sort of passing the buck.
And, once again, I am a very fat person. I refuse to blame all this on the size of fries.
Since you dislike anecdote, here’s a lit review. Portion Size: What We Know and What We Need to Know - PMC
Bottom line is that it’s impossible to prove causality, but in lab settings, increasing portion size increases caloric intake. A 50% rise in portion size indicates a 30-40% rise in energy intake. It also finds studies that find that the extra calories that we have in our diets in comparison to the 1970s are largely the result of meals eaten away from the home. The best example was the Levitsky and Youn study from the review that was done in a buffet setting. They had kids eat what they wanted and then at a later meal gave them either exactly what they had chosen before, 125% of that amount or 150% of that amount and in all cases, kids with larger portion sizes ate more than they had previously eaten when allowed to eat exactly what they wanted. It’s EXTREMELY clearcut that portion size impacts how much we eat. Eating is not simply an ‘eat until you’re full’ and exert some self control phenomenon. Our bodies take environmental and social cues about eating and they influence how much and what we eat. If I give you a small fry, you might feel full. If I give you a large fry, you’re going to eat it past being full. That’s the reality and what the science says.
Now I remember where I was going with this.
I’ll put it this way;
To sum up, the issue of obesity in the US is complex and multifaceted.
Generally, over the last few decades, there has been more emphasis on college and white collar work, and less on blue collar labor type jobs. Longer commute times, larger portions, foods designed and concocted to fill but not sate, possibly even deliberately made to be addictive, or at least have some addictive potential. Social pressure, advertising, they all play a part. I wouldn’t say discipline is an issue. It seems like there are plenty of people who work out every day for at least a couple of hours who struggle with weight loss and gain anyway.
It seems like it should be easy to distill this down to a simple one or two lines of wisdom, eat less exercise more. Even though that is the bare essence of it, each of the contributing items I listed needs to be addressed, individually and together.
As I said, I’m a laborer by inclination and choice. I don’t live or eat healthy by any means but what I do and what I eat are dictated by what makes my body feel good or better.
I’m active for a minimum of 6 hours a day doing mildly strenous work. I eat a calorie dense breakfast full of fat and salt and sugar, but a light salad of a few ounces of lettuce, and ounce each of turkey cheese raisins and vinaigrette dressing, anything else and I’m sleepy and feel crappy. Dinner is catch as catch can most nights.
And it’s always awkward when I decline a customer’s offer to buy lunch, so what senoy said about social cues seems right.
That about cover everything, or did I leave something out?
I’ve never had an Italian family, but I have visited Italy and restaurant meal portions were much smaller than in the US.
You don’t think the restaurant portion sizes correlate with home meal portion sizes? Do you really think most Americans eat reasonably sized meals at home but gorge themselves when they go out?
Yes, Nava, sorry, but I guess I didnt make myself clear. In other nations it was “Clean your plate, that’s all we have”. In America it was “Clean your plate, children are starving in China or Japan or…”
I’m going with “capitalism”.
We are all in thrall to big business, big ag, big sugar, big auto. If you want to eat healthy and get enough exercise you have to fight like crazy against the overwhelming tide. There is no countervailing power to provide cheap healthy food (subsidizing vegetable and fruit growers instead of corn growers), provide easy ways to exercise for city people, etc etc. Obesity is simply one of the natural byproducts of unfettered capitalism, in my view.
I went to a work banquet once. Very rich food. Three of us American men were sitting together. One was quite fat, I was overweight but not huge and the third was thin.
I ate pretty much everything placed before me. The thin guy would watch his portions and leave some food uneaten and the fat guy was asking people for their uneaten desserts.
I have a lot of thin friends, this being East Asia, and I see portion control as a large factor in their daily lives.
Although I believe it’s bad, I think fat shaming and the fear of it is another factor.
Another factor is that because most people are thin, people don’t want to be seen as different. My wife’s trigger point for dieting is far below what I would have.
I’m having a hard time seeing this as anything but a distinguish without a difference. My father grew up in the depression and was told to never waste food.
I think it’s as simple as overeating has become so normalized that 1) the average person is unaware that they are doing it and 2) it takes a lot of mindfulness and will power to not engage in it.
How did overeating become normalized? I think it’s due to people’s habits slowly over time rubbing off on each other.
Let’s say you have two buddies. One eats a healthy diet and doesn’t keep any yummy snacks in the pantry. The other is down for pizza and beer every other night and keeps a large supply of chips and cookies in the house. Let’s say your diet is in the middle of the road, but you’re impressionable and not particular wedded to any particular food philosophy. If the friends are equal in every way except for their relationship with food, I believe the overeating friend is going to be harder to resist. We are naturally primed to want all that sugar and salt they have in abundance; it represents fun to us. So then we spend more time with Pizza friend than the Chicken Breast friend. Not a big deal though because you only hang out with them once a week or so, right?
Well, over time his/her overeating habits start to rub off on you. Grabbing a handful of Oreos as soon as you get home from work, eating four slices of pizza instead of two like you used to, and drinking soda with meals instead of water are all behaviors you’ve picked up after being around your buddy. The kind of overeating that makes people fat isn’t insane binging; it’s a steady accumulation of excess calories in the form of dribs and drabs. This is what you start doing, and before you know it, you’re fat.
I’m gonna chip into the debate, I wonder how much stress plays a part in this, apparently the cortisol is heightened as a stress response, and this in turn increases your appetite for sugary high fat food, which then creates some sort of feedback loop which makes you crave more.