I’m on holiday in the states at the moment with my family. I’ve done this before and from this UK resident’s perspective it is a constant surprise how many obese people I see and the extreme degrees of it.
I also have to note the following observations. Fattening fast food is everywhere. Everything seems ludicrously sweet and portion sizes are utterly insane. And not just restaurants, shopping in the supermarket sees me face to face with huge boxes of sugared cereal the size of barn doors. The last supermarket I was in had a Macdonalds, a Starbucks and a pizza hut…in the SUPERMARKET!
I tried to find plain, standard oats for my daughters porridge…that was hard. Any amount of sweetened and flavoured versions but only one small tub of plain oats could be found. Same with plain, unsweetened yoghurt, ridiculously difficult to find.
We choose not to eat out very much but when we do we find that even a single appetiser often provides enough food for two grown adults as a main meal. We never have three or even two courses, come to think of it I don’t think we’ve even had four adult main courses either. it is just too much food. If anything I find it very off-putting.
My go-to evening meal when in the US with work is a starter portion of chicken wings with some crudites and dip. That’s easily enough for me and I’m a big lad.
During a trip to New York I ordered a pastrami sandwich in a deli and watched as the server started to slice the meat. She kept going for some time and I thought she was just being efficient and slicing a load ready for other orders…nope, she slapped it all on my sandwich in a pile about an inch and a half thick. Ridiculous. I had to take most of it off and throw it away just to make it possible to eat the damn thing.
We had a night in a posh hotel and the breakfasts the next morning were insane. Mounds of meat, pancakes, fried potatoes, eggs, omelettes the size of a pillow and overflowing with cheeses and god knows what. Crazy.
This morning, in our kitchen, my daughter had plain porridge, fruit and plain yoghurt. Me, my wife and son had two soft-boiled eggs each, some toast, coffee and orange juice. And we were completely full considering that to be a pretty big breakfast.
I have no idea how this came about but the ubiquity of cheap fattening food and the normalisation of the consumption of it in large portions is definitely a thing.
We clean our plates of large portions because “other people are starving” (yes, that doesnt make sense, but) other clear their plates of small portion as that’s all they can get.
Never-ending feasts take place at weddings, baptisms, First Communions, Christmas and the occasional “Giorgio just returned from living abroad” celebration. Call it half a dozen in a year. And while they do last a long time, it’s a long time with a lot of pauses and you can call off.
Those few weeks were a continuous never-ending feast… and one where you couldn’t even say “I’m sorrrrrry Mamma, I’d love to finish that cake, I would, it’s looking at me, it’s saying ‘eat me’, but I got no more room, Mamma!” Because even when bellies were full, and the food was incredibly calorie-dense (c’mon, one of the ingredients in the pizza’s cheese was PALM OIL! No proper Mamma has ever put on a pizza “cheese” that has palm oil as an ingredient), it never really satiated.
Sigh. Apparently this is one of those things in which Americans are just the same as everybody else while being convinced you’re unique.
That particular phrasing is used by people from every continent, so long as those people have heard of “missionary work”; other places use “clean your plate, it took me a lot of time to cook it”, “clean your plate, your father worked real hard to get that food”… the phrasing is irrelevant, what matters is that people all over the world are expected to clean their plates whether the amount in them is insufficient, sufficient or ridiculously large.
When my team in Costa Rica received our last batch of members they, like many other people in a particularly significant trip abroad, went through that phase of “I feel like I’ve just walked into a movie”; for that particular team, there were mentions of “DOMUND movies”, movies about missionary work. We’d see children in school uniforms get off an ancient American school bus at the edge of a sugarcane field and walk, hop, skip to a shack made of banged-up-together canes and flattened cans.
And those kids? They were told to eat their rice and beans, because there are kids starving in Somalia. How do I know this? Because their mother was one of our coworkers. One time the conversation came up, she told us.
In my amateur opinion, it seems like old traditional cultures with a long history of a congruent diet, seem to be fine tuned to an ideal weight. The foods play well together. But in the US, we eat italian one night, then chinese the next, then mexican, then German, then modern US manufactured anything goes food(hot pockets, frozen pizza, hamburgers, etc.) it all combined doesn’t play well together, and of course the richest foods from each culture is the most consumed.
Nope. Oh sure, increasing individual self-discipline could help more Americans push back harder against our harmful cultural norms around food and activity. But the chief question in this thread is, why are American cultural norms so much more conducive to weight gain than comparable norms in much of the rest of the world? In other words, why do Americans need so much more self-discipline to avoid obesity?
As scr4 replied to you, by most other metrics Americans aren’t really less “self-disciplined” than most other people. But our society is set up so that our default daily routine involves lots of driving and very little exercise, and our default food options are excessively large portions of mostly calorie-dense food.
As asahi mentioned, in cultures where communities are designed for more people to walk or take public transit most places they go, and the standard convenience foods are small portions of lighter noodle dishes and so on instead of huge portions of fatty, starchy and sugary calorie bombs, there tends to be less obesity. It’s not individual “self-discipline” that’s causing the average Japanese person to walk much more and eat much less, and consequently to be thinner, than the average American: it’s chiefly the way that their society is set up.
What I mean to say is,Maybe in 1000 years, if the American diet stays the same, nature will select for people that can eat this diet and still maintain a healthy weight
What exactly does it mean for foods to “not play well together”? Are you suggesting a combination of Italian food and Chinese food can be more fattening than eating one or the other every day? What would be the mechanism?
Anyway, the Japanese diet is far from being congruent. It’s an amalgamation of “traditional” Japanese cuisine with foods from various cultures, mostly imported into Japan during the 20th century. Curry and “Hamburg steak” (similar to Salisbury steak) are very popular, for example.
What I mean, and to clarify again, I’m no dietician or even a scientist. But several of my friends are on the keto diet and loosing quite a bit of weight. Which seems like certain foods don’t play well together.
In both Japan and Taiwan, mass transit is not particularly great outside of the major cities and yet there aren’t American levels of obesity in the countryside.
In the city where I live close to the few passes are mostly used by high school students. Everyone else either drives or rides a scooter. Yet people are not any different than those living in Taipei.
The other things you mentioned, such as large portions and sugar bombs certainly are factors, but I wonder if that’s not part of the American culture and not necessarily related to the availability or lack of mass transit.
Not likely. The health problems that tend to go along with being oveweight/obese shave may shave a few years off of your life, but they rarely kill you before you’ve had a chance to make babies and raise them to adulthood.
As I mentioned, I’m only recounting my anecdotal experiences (years ago now). I know that my lifestyle in Japan was certainly different, and I had smaller portions, which usually left me feeling fuller after eating considerably less. I knew other males who reported losing weight as well. OTOH, it seemed that some of the Western females I knew actually gained some weight. Most did not, but some did, and I suspected it was due to cultural alienation and perhaps mild depression in the specific cases I can recall.
The other time I recall putting on a lot of weight in a short span of time was during the summer after I finished my undergrad program. I gained 15 pounds in like 3 months! I was a toothpick until about my early 20s, almost always wishing I could put on weight. It wasn’t until I developed a regular weightlifting routine that I started putting on muscle and weight, but around that same time I noticed I was just starting to put on pounds I didn’t need or want. Like my Japan transition, it was the result of a disruption to my routine. I was now working long hours and pigging out at night to deal with stress.
There are a lot of factors at play with respect to obesity. We know that it typically starts very early in life and once a child becomes overweight it’s difficult to maintain weight in adult life. For people like me who occasionally wrestle with weight problems as adults, it’s easier to take off the weight but the underlying psychological factors have to be addressed, I think.
I always thought a major contributing factor was that USA has long been a sodapop culture. Most other places, like here in Japan, people don’t drink soda with meals or even during the day. I have maybe one of two cokes a year. Daily drinks are just water or unsweetened tea (green or brown).
I’m English, and ‘Don’t waste food, there are children starving in Africa’ was a cliche when I was a kid (my head teacher was especially fond of it). It was when my parents were kids as well, with the location of the starving children moving occasionally.
If no-one’s getting enough food, I doubt the kids would need a lot of prompting to eat up. The concept is only really relevant if children think they might get something ‘better’ by leaving what’s on the plate.
I wonder how much the concept that hunger is an enemy that’s been vanquished has to do with things. Americans don’t need to be hungry, having plenty is great, so hunger is a Bad Thing, and not a normal part of life. It’s not as though we were short of food when I was a kid, but the attitude was that you could wait for dinner, I was very rarely allowed snacks, no ‘You can have some fruit’, just wait. Being hungry won’t hurt you.
Even in rural areas of Japan, there is a lot more walking than in rural areas of the US. I found this article that has a survey of 5th graders on how they get to school (multiple answers possible), the results are:
Walk: 94.3%
Bicycle: 1.3%
School bus: 2.2%
Regular bus, train or car: 6.1%
Those (blue bars) are nationwide numbers for Japan. The red bars are for Okinawa, and even there, 80% of 5th graders walk to school at least some of the time. The lower chart is for 8th graders.
So what if children are being pressured for different reasons to clean their plates? There is absolutely no relationship between the reasons why children are being told to clean their plates and how fat people are. None whatsoever. That’s frankly quite absurd.
I don’t buy that there’s a relationship between children being told to clean their plates and then becoming fat as adults, in the first place, but it’s silly to say that because American children are given a different reason for finishing all their food this somehow contributes to American and only American obesity is illogical.
If “clean your plate” were actually ingrained in American culture, we would be complaining that the restaurants serve too much food. As my Japanese parents kept doing when they recently visited the US. Every time I asked them where they want to go for dinner/lunch, they actually said “somewhere with smaller portions” and I had to explain that really wasn’t an option.
Really? There are multiple kinds in my local grocery- steel cut, rolled, and instant oats (non sweetened, salted, etc…), in several brands- Quaker, house-brand and McCann’s (the steel-cut).
Same with plain yogurt- you can get regular yogurt and Greek yogurt, in several fat levels (0%, 2% and whole). And in multiple brands (Chobani, Fage and Dannon all sell their versions) and types (there are 2-3 organic brands as well- Stonyfield and Greek Gods are common), and of course, there are house brand versions of those options as well.
US groceries have everything one needs to eat healthy, AND they have everything you need to eat yourself into an early grave. It’s up to you.
I just want to point out that NY deli sandwiches are intentionally ridiculous. That’s not the usual sandwich anywhere else in the country, except for other NY style delis. For example, the standard Subway (a nationwide sandwich chain) sandwich would probably be a 6" Cold Cut Combo, which fully loaded is around 350-400 calories.
Personally, I think the biggest issues are that processed food products are often WAY higher in calories than the “traditional” equivalent- makers add stuff like fat and sugar to make them more palatable, which adds calories. So a coffee shop muffin might have 700 calories, where an equivalent home-made one might have 400 at most.
Combine that with our portion sizes getting skewed by a combination of inexpensive food and outsized restaurant portions, and a decidedly less active society, and you get fat people.
