Slashdot Mirror
What's Causing the Rise In Obesity? Everything.
Mr_Blank writes "We all know — because we are being constantly reminded — that we are getting fat. Americans are at the forefront of the trend, but it is a transnational one. Apparently, it is also trans-species: Over the past 20 years, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America's laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. Researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of 9% per decade. Lab mice gained about 11% per decade. Chimps are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35% per decade. What is causing the obesity era? Everything."
Very simply food manufacturers removed the fat in the 70's and replaced it with huge amounts of sugar. The problem with sugar is the brain doesn't see it as nutrition thus it doesn't suppress your appetite when you eat sugar filled foods.
Aliens are fattening us up for the slaughter...
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
I heard something called 'mehth' can make you slim!
That title goes to Mexico. So cheer on, someone else has you beat on this.
Om, nomnomnom...
The article is so much more in depth than "it's sugar" or "it's excess calories", and reasons away these as just one of the growing body of hundreds of possible causes and proven links to obesity. Hence why this article is titled "What's Causing the Rise In Obesity? Everything." Any pithy "It's this one thing [someone] did [somewhere]" comment is highly ignorant.
Late late nights, Games, Beer and doing fuck all about it for years. But they are symptoms of depression and wanting escapism. A knee injury doesn't help. Also, a dumb sense of being able to lose a few KG with magic when I finally get the motivation to put the effort in. But Skyrim and Arkham Asylum have to take some blame, they should have sucked more so I could put them down.
Thanks for asking.
Actually obesity is the defence against the peeders. No one wants the ugly fat child. Keep Em fat and safe people!
more data should be required before we make such a broad spectrum 'everything is getting fat because of everything' claim, which is absolutely as absurd as it sounds. In the cases of laboratory controlled animals, im willing to venture a sedentary and stressful lifestyle has accumulated their girth.
in the case of people, we've stopped eating real food entirely for both convenience and lack of nutritional education. Some of us work odd hours or multiple jobs and just dont have time to cook. places like wendys offer a reasonable facimile of food but the ingredients list for even a hamburger bun starts to look more like the back pages of an organic chemistry lab book. Most 30somethings like myself havent the slightest idea, nor care, about how to cook their own food outside of a cardboard box and boil-point water. And packaged food companies agree this is the way it should be. There is no more home economics, we emerge from primary education with no more than an understanding of hunger and satiation.
I also think its a cultural thing. Jamie Oliver, for all the work hes done in targeting childhood obesity and healthy eating, still cooks an alarming number of recipes that youd never think to serve the majority of a populus thats overweight. This holds true for most chefs, celebrity or not. Browned butter and whole cream are still entirely acceptable additions to most semi-casual and upscale dining experiences despite the well proven fact theyre killing us. There are only four meats we readily consume on a daily basis yet theyve replaced hundreds of vegetables in nearly every meal of the day. Many adults simply avoid healthy vegetables like onions, tomatoes or broccoli alltogether, picking from their meal and instead focusing on pasta or meat.
articles like this that just throw in the proverbial towel arent helping. We need competent nutritional education and responsible industry to start offering food that is both nutritious and healthy. Yet as with most industries the change often comes from the consumer, and its often met half-hearted and begrudgingly.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The problem isn't that obesity runs in the family; it's rather nobody runs in the family!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Sugar, the bitter truth.
Also
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/heresthething/2012/jul/02/
(transcript)
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/heresthething/2012/jul/02/transcript/
Just try, for 2 weeks - see just how hard it is.
The author obviously has his pet topic, which is that it's not anyone's fault that anyone is fat. Sorry, but I've lived around too many fat people. They eat. They eat a lot. Honestly the author goes on far too long about "it's not their fault" and doesn't spend too much time discussing "why".
I can buy that there's something in food these days that may cause people to become heavier than they otherwise would become. But I don't buy the fact that this mystery chemical has made a nation of blobs. It may be a contributory factor, but it's not why obesity happens.
Frankly, I think that companies like McDonald's have successfully hacked the human brain and created foods that people just can't say no to. It's not all of us, I get nauseous eating McD's more than once a week (the smell outside the restaurant is enough to drive me away) but there are plenty of us who are wholly unable to resist. And by "unable to resist" I mean exactly that - your conscious mind might know it's bad, but you just can't help yourself because the food is so delicious. That this "flavor" is a bunch of old, tired cows mixed with industrial chemicals is beside the point. You've been hacked - you could say no, but you really don't want to. The idea of living without McD's for the rest of your life is repellent, a life hardly worth living at all.
I live overseas, and I've seen this myself with the locals and foreigners alike. The locals freaking love McD's and KFC. There's nothing like it in their cuisine and some of them (not all) just can't stop going there. Especially kids. Then, there are foreigners who upon discovering the local (awesome) food spit it out and won't eat anything but Western food. Seriously, I've known people who have lived locally for years and who every day eat nothing but Subway, Starbucks, McD's, KFC, Papa John's, Pizza Hut, etc. If I suggest we go and get a bowl of noodles or other local stuff and I receive a wide-eyed, "You eat that shite, mate? It's garbage!"
Look no further than the closest thing he makes to a hypothesis: "being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of âempty caloriesâ(TM), therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off." Stop right there at the "stress makes you eat" part. WTF man? No it doesn't. Maybe it does FOR YOU, perhaps FOR SOME, but it's hardly universal.
Conclusion: the guy wanted to write 4,700 words to get his name in print and support his pre-existing political views, not because he had something insightful to say.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
God i hate articles like this. Everything isnt causing obesity, lazyness is. Want to know why im fucking fat? Cus im fucking lazy and like to eat pizza while watching 4 episodes of TNG on Netflix. From people too lazy to go buy groceries ( i had someone tell me it was virtually impossible to buy groceries because they didnt have a car) to people being too fucking lazy to cook, or exercise even the slightest bit. You can eat whatever food you want, as many calories you want, if you burn it off you wont be fat, you might have other health complications but thats another story alltogether. Combined with people telling them that "its ok", "not your fault" and "out of your control" that make it worse. Obese people just go "oh its not my fault fuck it", stuff their faces with food, dont work out, baloon up, then shrug like they had no control over it. Its bullshit. People need to start accepting some personal responsibility for their actions.
Actually, I hypothesize it's a link between the focus on a decrease in recess (unordered recreational time) and an increase in environmental stress (in other words, and contrary to official accounts, we might want to shorten the work day, but increase the efficiency of the work during that shorter period). Too much stress, not enough proper outlets (because they all cost too much now...and people aren't making enough to make use of them), results in a catastrophic / cascade failure scenario.
If we have a large die-off in the future, in a short period of time, then perhaps, if these comments survive, we will have an idea where to look next time.
I am John Hurt.
That's because nobody would ever say anything so ridiculous, since it's false. Processed and manufactured food bears almost no relationship at all to natural organic food except inasmuch as some of the pure chemicals that they both contain are identical.
The bulk of industrial processed food is completely different in structure, texture, in its overall nutritional balance, in its micro-nutrients, and in the many toxins it contains. And the bad processed food is accompanied by equally bad environmental byproducts of the industrial food and farming chemical industries, such as the widespread presence of glyphosate not only in our food but in our water and even air.
That we and animals in our environment are unavoidably being affected through ingesting a manufactured diet of chemicals is not an outlier theory, it would be a miracle if it were not happening. We know it is because our gut flora is a mess, and our lab animals show the same symptoms whereas in the wild they do not.
Personally I'm a bit tired of all of these media invented excuses. If you're overweight in almost all cases with very few exceptions it's YOUR fault.
And the animals that are gaining weight, too? For instance, did we all of a sudden start overfeeding lab rats and lab mice? Did ferral dogs and cats all of a sudden start ignoring nature and quit eating when full? It's one thing for humans, it's another thing for the animals mentioned in the article.
I was about 13 when I visited a Texan diner, on the first day of a holiday. My mum ordered a salad. "What dressing do you want?" There's a choice?! She asked for the normal one.
A large bowl of salad was provided, and a bowl of pink goop -- probably 75cl or so. My mum asked what the goop was. The waitress said, "that's your thousand island dressing, here, I'll show you" and tipped the whole lot over the salad.
At a fast food place in Texas the five of us chose what we wanted. My mum ordered it "one large hotdogs, one large cheeseburger... oh, is that the large hotdog? Wow, ok, nothing else". The two items fed my parents and three children.
No one wants the ugly fat child.
What about with fava beans and a nice chianti?
Maybe it was all the nuke testing done on the planet, seriously, 500+ nukes in the air and orbit and underground, cant be healthy can it.
Ah, there's that phrase I love: can't be healthy/good for you. It seems every time I hear or see that phrase, it's someone who doesn't really quite know what they are talking about and just has a hypothesis from their gut. They want to say it's bad for you, but have absolutely no evidence of that, so they just say it can't be good.
Here is what is making people fat: (tl/dr: Sugar, cheap & plentiful fatty foods, sedentary lifestyle, stress and distracting entertainment)
Sugar - Everything is pumped so full of sugar its almost unbearable. Soda, juices candies are big sources of sugar. And that was a result of cheaper high fructose corn syrup which is added to make the food item more appealing. Just think of how much sugar in in the 2 to 4 cups of coffee you drink per day when you order it with some sweetener or flavor. You can't even buy a supposedly healthy fruit juice without it being loaded with as much sugar as a soda. I drink fresh brewed iced tea, either green tea with a bit of honey added or regular black tea both with fresh lemon. Very refreshing, a thirst quencher and good for you. I cut out soda a few years back though I do enjoy a Coke every now and then as a treat.
Low quality food - Animal fats and carbs. Two things that our body can use for nutrition but eat in too large of quantities. Our brains are also wired to enjoy savory foods through evolution to ensure we ingest enough protein. But we are overexposed to such foods and are over indulging in them as as a result. Food is cheap and plentiful in developed nations and bad food is the cheapest food. We have restaurants serving up boatloads of fatty foods loaded with carbs. Fast food is notorious for this because most of them are burger joints serving up fatty meat on a carb bun and carb fries soaked in more fat. And to top it off its cheap and fast. when you're stressed out, running around all day, have a deadline, boss harping on you, it can become overwhelming and eating can help relieve stress. So you run to McBurgerdys and pick up a triple bypass bacon cheese burger with a side of fat fries and wash it down with a tub of sugar water. Its too easy to get a hold of this junk. I am guilty of this along with many many others. I try to cook but too often am I distracted by stress to deal with it.
Sedentary lifestyle - We have many jobs where a worker sits in a chair all day. Once they return home they are burnt out by stress (see below) and plop down on a couch in front of the TV. The only time they may have free time is on weekends providing they aren't burnt out from family or partying. Life is way too fast paced and full of stress and problems.
Stress - Work, trying to make ends meet family etc all contribute to mental stress which slows people down. You escape by watching TV, playing Video games, surfing the web or some other hobby. Some hobbies involve exercise but for a majority, it doesn't. rush rush rush! go go go! now now now! This is mentality killing us. Then throw in the shitty economy where the cost of living is outpacing many peoples income.
Entertainment - We are at a point where entertainment is on demand and interactive. People get lost for hours watching TV, playing video games or surfing the web. Its too easy to plop in front of the TV or computer and be immersed in an alternate world where we can escape the daily stress of our lives. The real world sucks but video games offer an alternate world where we play a hero or are at the top of the gaming food chain. BOOM headshot! Take that bitch! Feels good doesn't it? Better than typing up TPS reports, meeting deadlines, hunting down bugs etc. Fuck work. That is why you have people who lose jobs, spouses and even their lives. The virtual world is better than the real world. And TV is the same thing, we follow an immersive story or laugh at jokes and gags which take us away from our stressful lives. Before Radio, TV and video games many people drowned their stress in alcohol at local pubs. People are always looking to escape.
I'm losing fat actually. Get some exercise and cut out the high fructose corn syrup.
Screw going to a gym, just buy this book:
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Your-Own-Gym/dp/0345528581