Slashdot Mirror
CDC: Americans Getting Heavier, Average Woman Weighs As Much As 1960s Man
schwit1 writes: New statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the average American has packed on the pounds in the past 50 years. Both men and women have gained a considerable amount of weight since 1960, with the average American woman now weighing 166.2 pounds — nearly identical to what American men weighed in the 1960s. U.S. men have been getting bigger too, gaining nearly 30 pounds from the 1960s to 2010 — 166.3 pounds to 195.5 pounds today. The good news is that both sexes have gained almost an inch in height since then, so that accounts for some of the overall weight gain.
You bunch of fat, dumb, and happy backwardian holdouts, you.
I call bullshit again.
It should be noted that the average US male (5'10" vs. 5'8") and female (5'5" vs. 5'3") in 2015 are both two inches taller than their 1960 counterparts. Based on the cube law, you'd expact the average female weight to have increased almost 10% as a result ((65/63)^3 = 1.098).
Increased height accounts for more than half of the weight gain noted in the study.
What is with this?
The plot uses 1971–1974, 1976–1980, 1988–1994, 1999–2000, etc. They obviously have the actual years of measurement. Are they just aggregating due to small amount of data instead of putting error bars?
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_11_12/obesity_child_11_12.pdf
Honestly, what is going on over there?
Overweight, anti fat-shaming, SJW / feminazi closing-in in 3... 2...1...
the corn subsidies and the silly food pyramid.
We eat too much, we exercise too little, and we eat the wrong things.
More fruits, veg, and yes meat... and less starchy food.
As to getting people to move their fat asses every so often... good luck with that.
My ultimate solution to all this is massive genetic engineering.
First there's no reason we couldn't make our staple crops more nutritious. If we can put beta carotene in the rice of third world farmers just imagine what we could do with our OWN food. You could turn your staple crop of choice into a fucking multivitamin.... shift the resources in it to fats and proteins. And that is just the ONE crop.
A more reeasonable way to do it would be to have about 20 different breeds of wheat etc and have each one have its own special characteristics. THEN you just blend them together in the desired ratios at the flour mill. The health nuts will blend their own and most people will be happy with a standard blend.
We can also do stuff like change gultin to something else that people aren't sometimes allergic to.
Then of course there is the human body. The body does not NEED exercise to build muscle. It is TRIGGERED to build muscle by exercise. Those triggers can be adjusted. Ideally you want them to be related to food intake. If in some future we go into famine, the body must not keep assuming it has access to our 21st century food supply. It has to adapt. And of course, if you're getting lots of food, the body shouldn't stock pile excessive amounts of fat but rather build up some healthy muscle.
On top of that, we should awaken the portions of our genes that permit regeneration. Currently we have only a few parts of our bodies that regenerate. The intestines for example still regenerate. But there is no reason it couldn't grow new internal organs, grow new limbs, grow new eyes, new ears, regenerate nerves, etc.All of that is latent in our biology.
And while we're doing that... how about raise the standard human IQ to something less obnoxiously pitiful. Because boy oh boy are there are a lot of morons.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Americans, you're just disgustingly fat, men and women: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Stop eating completely, for at least a couple of weeks.
Honestly 90% of what we consumer is not food but just piles of sugar coated shit.
Stop eating at any restaurants, Stop eating anything that comes in a box or Bag. Hell even our bread is so sweet that most europeans call it cake.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
equal Mad Women
The summary mentioned a height increase but only of an inch and only account for 10% of the gain, not two inches and half of the gain as the person you were responding to noting. If nothing else he was correcting a bad summary.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My one and only rule when it comes to dating, is I won't date a girl who weighs heavier than me. This alone puts over 50% of women out of my dating pool.
It's all that high-fructose corn syrup the food industry (in cahoots with the FDA) is forcing me to consume.
Everybody knows fructose is processed in the liver just like alcohol, so the more you drink the more addicted you get! That's the real reason Coke switched to HFCS in the 80s, to make us all a mass of shaking jelly sugar addicts.
If her name was Caitlyn and she had big manly hands, it's likely your average woman WAS a 1960s man.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
the corn subsidies and the silly food pyramid.
We eat too much, we exercise too little, and we eat the wrong things.
More fruits, veg, and yes meat... and less starchy food.
As to getting people to move their fat asses every so often... good luck with that.
Out of curiosity, what observations would invalidate your hypothesis, Mr. "random some guy on the internet"?
If there were, for example, a rise in obesity in 6-month old babies - would that invalidate the hypothesis, or does it simple mean the 6-month old babies need to get out and exercise more?
How about lab animals? If lab animals grown with the same diet and same exercise regimens were getting progressively more obese over the last few decades, would that invalidate your views, or does it mean that the lab rats should just cut down on the calories?
A lot of people expound the virtues of this-or-that theory of obesity, there's thousands of miracle cure diets and theories of nutrition to choose from. Do I want the primitive diet? The all-meat diet? The vegetarian diet? The new fancy diet from some genuine charlatan interviewed on Oprah? (It's a diet made by a doctor... and it really works!!!)
How about basic thermodynamics? If I reduce my food intake, I'm guaranteed to lose weight... right? It's basic thermodynamics after all.
How about we all read up on the subject and look at some evidence. Nothing in people's diet - either type or amount - explains the rise of obesity in our culture, and neither does anything related to lifestyle.
If you have an alternate explanation, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, stop shouting debunked views and commonly-held myths.
Modern obesity has nothing to do with diet, exercise, or lifestyle.
Total bodyweight is misleading and I'm a little dismayed that we're still discussing things in those terms. I'm ~195 pounds, but I have 10% or less bodyfat percentage. Could we please get some statistics in here with regards to average bodyfat percentage instead of just bodyweight? It's much more significant than just bodyweight.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Obesity is most common with the working poor. It's not too surprising. Cheap junk food and TV is about the only pleasure they have left what with smoking being a no-no
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The one-inch gain in height was dwarfed (so to speak) by the six-inch gain in heights listed on online dating sites.
It's cool to fantasise about changing ourselves by changing everything else through the most convoluted means, like not-at-all-controversial genetic tinkering, poking around with triggers and whatnot. But really, we don't have to go there and run the risks with all that poking our noses into stuff we don't understand at all well yet--whatever the corporations deploying the tech may claim. Come up with a less broken education system that includes the ethic that caring poorly for your body reflects poorly on you as an individual -- "mens sana in corpore sano" -- and in a few short decades the fat will dwindle.
You can already see this happen of our own volition, but you can steer it a bit by amending the highschool curriculum. We're trainable animals, so we're trainable to take proper care of ourselves. It's fairly simple, but it does require knowing how the thing works.
And, of course, IQ is really not that interesting a metric. It's what you do with it. We have lots of undereducated people doing stupid stuff, blaming everyone else, even everything else, for their own continued failures. We have very smart very well educated people still doing incredibly stupid stuff. That should show you that merely pouring knowledge on top of lots of IQ points doesn't really help, so upping the IQ artificially --should this be possible-- of the entire population isn't going to help either. We can start with figuring out how to get the maximum out of the IQ points we do have available. That would already do away with most of the moronics, and after that, ever so slowly, the overall IQ will rise too.
What we need isn't more technology, but more wisdom. We have so much, and yet achieve so little. So we need more "knowing what to do with what we have".
Does heavier necessarily mean fatter?
On that note, fasting can be good for you.
Are you really going to let the French tell you how to measure things?
Ham planets
"Then of course there is the human body. The body does not NEED exercise to build muscle..."
If you're going the gene mod route with regard the human body, why not just genetically engineer humans to want to eat less? Should be simpler than turning us all into Arnold Schwarzenegger and save a couple of million of cows and chickens from the endless cycle of rebirth (after we butcher them for one final barbeque).
Americans didn't worry about fitness until JFK started talking about it, and it took years to catch on. Today's adults are far more fit than their parents were and have more muscle mass. That's going to make them heavier, but not fatter. Yes, there are probably more tubs of lard out there now, but the fitness freaks and body builders are helping bring the average up as well. (And, as the BMI doesn't take muscle mass into account, most of them are considered obese even though they have very little body fat.)
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Why are they only telling us now of this isolated increase in gravitational pull? Can they even grasp the consequences!?!? How is this even possible!?!?
Nevermind. Finally read the summary.
Cookie? Candy? Brownie? It's no wonder those clowns are overdosing: does anyone ever eat merely an eighth (1/8) of a cookie? What idiot dreamed up that dosing scheme? I am stunned that the marijuana quack-houses haven't been sued out of business.
In the age of cheap body fat % measuring devices, why not make body fat % the standard? I'm tall and borderline overweight according to BMI, but I have about 14% body fat percentage. It's much easier to compare across body types with that metric than BMI. Yet I've never had a doctor record my body fat %, only height and weight.
"U.S. men have been getting bigger too, gaining nearly 30 pounds from the 1960s to 2010"
Pfftph! I've gained 30 pounds in the last 2 years.
She is preaching "eat healthy" and practicing kickboxing. Meanwhile, he is shoveling food stamps out the door and bankrupting or stone-walling various job creating industries. Want to lose weight? Probably the best thing you can do is be employed. Fat chance in the Pelosi-Reid-Obama economy. Oh well, at least there's hope Harry Reid gets a 3 A.M. phone call asking for the name of a good eye doctor.
Average 1960s American man versus average 2010s American woman? It's really a tossup, and I'm totally straight!
"Working poor"? Last I heard, the number of not-working was higher than ever.
In 1960, I weighed 8 pound 4 ounces. So yeah, I gained some too.
Seriously, stop eating all the cake. (For various definitions of "cake" which basically all boil down to much the same stuff - starch+fat+sugar).
Well I'm 6-4 190 so I'm good
I was born in the 60s and I've gained about 160lbs since then.
Do these weights include when women were pregnant? If women were pregnant for longer periods of time in the 1960s than in 2010 this may skew the numbers as well. I am referring to averages of time being pregnant relating to weight differences and not the statistics relating to abortions, success births, twins, etc which are increasing.
Women have become softer and more pleasurable to cuddle with!! Who in their right mind would want to snuggle with a bag of bones!!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I'm an expat lived in Asia for almost 30 years. I was watching the NBA finals yesterday morning, and was amazed to see how chunky all the cheerleaders were! All of them, with the exception here and there, looked like they could lose some pounds. I remember when I dated a cheerleader from ASU in the 89-91 time frame, and there was not an inch to be pinched anywhere. I also remember what the entire squad looked like, none of them chunky. How times have changed.
I've seen the changes in Asia, you never saw obese children 25 years ago anywhere. Now, with few exceptions, every country in the region you see fat kids, and parents feeding them KFC and McGrossalds and ice cream from 711 in the morning.
Lead is a Heavy Metal after all.
look it is well known (and I confirmed it by taste) that 95% of the beer sold in the US is shit. There is some small beer production which are better than some german beer, but the same can be true for some small beer production in germany or any other country. But as a general aspect, your average beer sold in the US is far worst than you average beer sold in UK or germany. When people speaks about which beer is better, they are speaking of the mass consumption beer. not the local 1000 bottle a week microbrew.
I completely stopped consumption of sweets, though I could not reduce significantely the consumption of starch sugar. I lost 2 pounds over a year without even trying to diet. Maybe in 20 years I'll got an ideal weight ;). But I took up on eating vegetables to attempt to fill my stomach with stuff and fill "full and satieted". When I tasted carrots I was like WTF it tasted sweet like a fruit. I looked it up online and there is a lot of sugars in carrots.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...because when I visited, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of 'heavy boned' individuals - I'd have expected the figures to be higher frankly!
have been the fattest and sickliest people for several decades, mainly due to their over-eating and unhealthy diet, so why is this suddenly news?
I think more effort should be put into investigating GMO's affect on the human organism, most likely any unfavourable findings will be buried by Monsanto
Americans are used to eating shitty food, and lots of it. But there is also the issue of .. tobacco smoking. Every time I go to Europe, I see that nearly every second person, men and women, smoke all the time. Tobacco is a great appetite inhibitor. I recall that when I myself quit smoking, I might have gained something like 15-20 pounds of weight, real fast. I have some friends from eastern Europe, and they're skinny as hell, and they also smoke. They're doctors, and whenever I start discussion the effect of smoking on health with them, they tell me they only smoke in the evening, yet the over the top filled ashtrays everywhere in their homes suggest otherwise. Despite some of the bad health/eating habits, the war on smoking is something that Americans are 10-20 years ahead of most Europe, depending on where you live, and that could possibly have some effect on the weight Americans.
And while we're doing that... how about raise the standard human IQ to something less obnoxiously pitiful. Because boy oh boy are there are a lot of morons.
I agree, although unfortunately a good chunk of your post exemplifies this. Corn and "starches" are bad, but fruit is good.... because the fructose in fruit is magically awesome but the fructose in corn is somehow tainted. And everyone knows that white rice is the most fatten of all foods, just ask the 3+ billion asians. Oh, wait.
There is certainly evidence that carbs were pushed way too hard in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the mouths of neo-Atkins/paleo/anti-corn/anti-gluten/anti-aspartame nutjobs should be believed. At the end of the day, it's about too many calories. While it's possible to alter one's metabolism a bit and/or feel fuller by eating different sorts of foods, any argument re: obesity that doesn't mention calories can be safely ignored as faddish nonsense.
I must live a sheltered oblivious life. I never noticed it had gotten so bad.
But i went to walmart the other day as they had a specific item i needed asap.
Went at the worst time i guess. A saturday during the day, place was packed.
I can not recall seeing so many fat people in one place ever before.
These were not just a little overweight either. These were land mobile lard monsters.
And if that wasn't bad enough. they don't seem to have any shame or decency and COVER UP YOUR FAT ROLLS YOU DISGUSTING BLOBS!
- A "ton of people" is now 5 people.
When it comes to online discussions regarding obesity, ~50% of commenters are unfairly evaluated hulking muscular athletic edge cases.
I personally have gained 235 lbs since 1968, when I was born.
It was also noted that the breast size of men is now on average as large as that of women in the 1960s.
Yeaaaah Baby!!!
Good - I'm glad women are getting stronger with more muscle!
Tobacco has declined, but now marijuana is ramping up. Don't worry, it miraculously cures everything, and there's no evidence to suggest otherwise.
The culprit is probably sugar, although there may be other confounding factors. Whatever the cause, metabolic disorder is going to cost more and more each year if nothing is done about it. Subsidizing the medical consequences of eating lots of refined sugar is perhaps the biggest negative externality in the economy ever.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
That the more advice the government gives us for health and nutrition, the fatter and unhealthier we get?
Decades, people. For decades we were told things like "salt causes high blood pressure" - even though that was one study in the 1950's now discredited, yet I still get that advice over and over. "New" research - now years old - shows you need a certain rare gene to have anything like a direct causal relation between salt intake and BP, and most Americans DON'T have it.
For decades we were told to beware eating saturated fats. Following government guidelines we switched to high-carb diet to avoid these fats. What does recent research show NOW? High saturated fats in blood come from high-carb diets, NOT high protein, even when that protein comes with saturated fats!
There are now dozens and dozens of examples of this sort of stuff. The real fact of the matter is that the government "guidelines" aren't based on "science," and never were, they were written by lobbiests for various food groups. Black people are far more likely to be lactose-intolerant than whites, yet the government, heavily lobbied by the dairy industry, still features lots of dairy, and no word of warning or advice for an entire population that will certainly have trouble if they heed the gov't's "advice."
It is certainly arguable at this point whether the government ever uses actual science in its' endeavors. We've all been thoroughly brainwashed about global warming, yet we still set low temperature records in the US and Europe this past winter. We are still being told about the plight of the poor polar bears, even though satellites clearly show more ice coverage at both poles than ever before in the satellite era. The GW alarmists now earnestly explain that this is because of global warming. Warming is proof of global warming. Cooling is proof of global warming. Even if the temperature does nothing it's still proof of global warming! THAT is what passes for "science" when the government just wants an excuse to do something it just plain wants to do - like regulate energy use.
We are long past the time when we should have begun paring back everything the government should be allowed to do, but instead it has grown like a cancer, sticking it's bureaucratic nose into business it should have no business being in. Michelle Obama should not be deciding what the nation's schoolchildren eat for lunch. She should pick out the White House china and keep her mouth shut, the only Constitutional role the First Lady ever had. And the rest of government should do likewise.
When the government actually shows competence in doing something, THEN and ONLY then should we think about expanding its' role. But so long as government continues shenanigans like intrusive and unconstitutional nation-wide spying that doesn't stop terrorists, or a bunch of TSA clowns who don't stop terrorists, or a nitwit president who doesn't even think terrorists need to be stopped, America should treat the government like the gigantic, bureaucratic, poorly-managed, travesty that it really is.
I see this with many of the older light airplanes. Types like the Cessna 150 and Piper Cub were designed when people weighed less, and it's difficult to get two 2015-size people plus a usable fuel load in either. There have been commercial plane crashes due to portly passengers (e.g. Air Midwest 5481).
I can fly a Cessna 152 solo with full fuel tanks, but if I have anybody in the plane with me I have to calculate how much fuel I can carry without being overweight. I can't do anything meaningful with a 150, and I'm not that heavy.
...laura
Sugar in everything, and eating out.
Back in the day, households were single-income with a full-time homemaker, whose responsibility it was to procure foodstuffs, clean, and handle regular maintenance. There was 1 TV in the home, if at all, one radio, and one telephone that was usually shared among several homes in the neighborhood via a "party line." There were no computers. Kids read books or went outside to play.
Fast forward to today. In order to support a far more consumerist lifestyle, there is no longer a homemaker. There are two incomes, but one of those incomes is spent paying someone else to maintain the home (i.e. by paying for dinners out, paying for dry cleaning, paying for laundry service, lawn service, etc) so that the co-breadwinners can spend more time playing on computers or going out. Recreational time is spent in front of one of many large TVs in the house, or on a computer or other computing device. Kids play video games and eat junk food. Parents drink and party more, trying to live a younger lifestyle. Personal responsibility is dead.
I wish the report would relate it to *height*.
I mean, height of men going into the US army:
WWI: 5'6"
WWII: 5'8"
Vietnam: 5'10"
Though I will say that a high percentage of folks *are* a lot heavier than when I was younger.
mark
Fewer jobs -> More food stamps -> Higher health care costs -> Higher taxes -> Fewer jobs.
I see I touched a nerve though, didn't I? Feel free to go on ignoring the advantages of wealth and the disadvantages of poverty. The rest of us living in the real world will read this comic and keep trying to do something about poverty besides make ourselves feel better about ignoring it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The solution is to heavily invest in public transit. People will walk more when riding the bus or local train is much better/faster/cheaper/convenient than driving a car. At the same time, start adding sidewalks to streets that are wide enough to be shared between pedestrians and bikes. Further, drop the average work time down from 40 hours to 35 hours and give people more mandatory vacation. That gives them more time to spend on living a healthy life rather than being constantly under stress.
See subject & answer it vs. you doing it here http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... so keep "puffing that pot" fool!
* :)
Gotta love it - seeing you give me guff (yet being a "ne'er-do-well" pothead with nothing better to show for yourself vs. what I've done that gives others more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity), knowing you CRIPPLE your OWN thought processes with pot is priceless, since it makes it (& I've just GOTTA say it, you're making me do it) "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" to utterly crush you by making you "eat your words", spiced with the bitter taste of SELF-defeat, + your foot in your mouth RAMMING THEM DOWN, rinsing down the puke you spewed on /. that I smacked you down with easily!
You didn't seem to throw that "food" away & ATE IT, lol, so those "munchies" got the best of you, along with your BIG MOUTH, dolt.
APK
P.S.=> Gotta LOVE pot smoking dolts - they're stupid enough to do what "stoned_ritual" did, & smash themselves into the ground everytime vs. myself, lol... apk
See subject & answer it vs. you doing it here http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... so keep "puffing that pot" fool!
* :)
Gotta love it - seeing you give me guff (yet being a "ne'er-do-well" pothead with nothing better to show for yourself vs. what I've done that gives others more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity), knowing you CRIPPLE your OWN thought processes with pot is priceless, since it makes it (& I've just GOTTA say it, you're making me do it) "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" to utterly crush you by making you "eat your words", spiced with the bitter taste of SELF-defeat, + your foot in your mouth RAMMING THEM DOWN, rinsing down the puke you spewed on /. that I smacked you down with easily!
What a hypocrite you are, incidentally: You speak of gaming here quite often from your post history, pot calling a kettle black - and you CERTAINLY GOT A DOSE OF YOUR OWN MEDICINE in "FOOD" you had to EAT (your words, lol).
APK
P.S.=> Gotta LOVE pot smoking dolts - they're stupid enough to do what "stoned_ritual" did, & smash themselves into the ground everytime vs. myself, lol... apk