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More People On Earth Now Obese Than Underweight, Says Study (statnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new study published in the Lancet, obese people now outnumber the underweight population for perhaps the first time in global history. Majid Ezzati, an environmental health researcher at Imperial College London who led the study, analyzed data from 1975 to 2014 across 19.2 million adults from 186 countries. They found that over the 40-year-span, the proportion of obese men worldwide more than tripled, to roughly 11 percent, and the proportion of obese woman more than doubled, to about 15 percent. Researchers estimate 18 percent of men and 21 percent of women worldwide will be obese by 2025. What some may consider more surprising is that more than 25 percent of the world's severely obese men and almost 20 percent of the world's severely obese women are American. However, the rapid rise of obesity in developing nations is most concerning as it's more difficult for obese people to modify their diet and have access to medication.
That's because a Big Mac is cheaper to buy than groceries. Soda is cheaper than bottled water. And that orange crap Americans think is cheese is also dirt cheap.
The problem is the affordable food is complete and utter garbage, and mostly filled with high fructose corn syrup so farmers can keep getting paid to grow a crop which is causing everybody to get fat and diabetic.
Eating nutritious food which hasn't been processed to death is now expensive.
Maybe you should ponder why what you say is true instead of just acting all smug about it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yes people that frequent /. are heavy users of technology and more often than not lead sedentary lifestyles and therefore are very likely to be dealing with obesity.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Processed food last longer on the shelf and requires little to no preparation. Simple as that.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
You know what's cheap and unprocessed? Eggs. Flour. Butter. Tap water. Bulk rice. Bulk beans. Whole chickens. Cheap cuts of beef and bones suitable for soup. Onions. Whatever the vegetables the store has on special this week. Bananas.
Someone who can cook a meal can make nutritious, unprocessed food cheaper than they can buy processed food. Recipes are free.
But it takes work. So nevermind. Just complain instead. It's all everyone else's fault.
Did any of the visionary Sci-Fi authors of the 20th century see this coming?
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story - 2430 A.D. - wherein all the problems of hunger and war and disease and poverty had been solved, and as a result the world population was 15 trillion. Quietly horrifying.
I recall the first time I visited an Australian grocery store. This was in a small town in NSW. I was shocked--you could *smell* the fresh vegetables as soon as you walked in the door. The whole place smelled almost like a garden. When you went near the meat department, you could *smell* the fresh meat. And the food was... beautiful. *Everything* looked and smelled like, I dunno... Heaven, maybe.
I walked around in stunned, wide-eyed, slack-jawed silence for a while. Finally, I turned to my Australian companion and said, "Wow, I didn't know a town this size would have a... um... boutique grocery. I'm impressed." She just laughed and said, "'Boutique?' Nup, it's a bog-standard chain grocery. Pretty much the same as any Wooley's shop Australia-wide, at least in all the places I've lived. Can you see now why I complained about all the grocery shops in the States while we were there?" Me: "You mean... this is *typical* here?" She: "Yup. Very."
I still remember that moment. It was like a light turned on in my brain.
American grocery stores SUCK. Even the boutique-y ones.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Most people use the World Health Organization metric of a BMI of 30 to define obesity, but it's kind of a load of crap because it assumes that everybody is the same age and gender, both of which have different ranges for what is probably healthy and what isn't. What's best is if you figure out what weight percentile you reside in for your age and gender. This calculator for example:
http://halls.md/body-mass-inde...
If you're at 45 then you're in good shape. If you're 50 or above, then you will probably benefit from weight loss, but not necessarily. Believe it or not you can be obese by every definition and still be perfectly healthy. I dropped a lot of weight myself (about 90 lbs) because I have kidney disease caused by an immune disorder (IgA nephropathy) and being at a light weight reduces the burden on my weakened kidneys, meaning they'll last longer. (Light weight includes not having a lot of muscle mass either, as more muscle means more creatinine, which is fine for healthy people but bad if your renal system is compromised.)
Also I think the #1 thing anybody can do for fat loss is to remove all sugar from their diet. Most sugars found in sodas, candy, pastries, etc, has high amounts of fructose (and no, HFCS isn't alone here, ordinary cane sugar and even fruit based sugars contain basically the same amount) which is well documented to give you a caloric load without triggering the release of leptin in your blood to signal fullness. It also raises your LDL (bad) cholesterol and triglycerides (also bad.) Using that theory worked pretty well for me.
The rising rate of obesity *may* be because sugar has lowered in price over the last few decades, so now more people can afford more of it than in the past. It's one of those things that used to be a rich man's luxury, along with salt.
the vegetables on special don't keep. When you're working poor you usually have two jobs and pull 60/hr a week. Getting to the store every day isn't happening.
You know what does keep? Frozen veggies. I see them in every value grocery store. Generally cheap and frozen at peak flavor. Or buy the ones on special and freeze yourself if you can't use them immediately.
Bananas are just sugar. That's why they're cheap.
No they're cheap because they are grown in countries where labor is cheap and companies have fought to control those labor prices and keep workers' pay as low as possible. And only one exact same genetic variety is common for those cheap bananas, meaning they all ripen at the exact predictable rate, allowing vastly better large economies of scale in transport. But they aren't a great health food -- still better than most fast food of junk food.
Whole Chickens aren't cheap when you count the calories in them. They seem cheap because the weight of the skin and bones is part of the cost.
Whole chickens are amazing things, and you can often get 3 meals of more out of them for a family. The bones and skin are the most essential parts, providing flavor in the form of fat that can be rendered for sauteing things and collogen and other elements that can be harvested for a tasty stock. First roast your chicken. Eat much of the meat for meal 1. Then pick off the remaining meat and simmer the bones and skin for stock. Refrigerate and skim fat. Make chicken and veggie soup next day. Meal 2. Use and remaining chicken bits, fat, etc. And simmer bones again (what the French call remoullage) for a second stock to be used to cook rice or beans or some other thing. Meal 3. Labor intensive, yes. But lots of cheap meals.
Cheap cuts of beef aren't. They don't really exist anymore. Even 80/20 pink slime is $3/lb in a lot of places.
Buy large packs in bulk when on sale or special. Freeze if you can't use right away. Don't ever use store-bought ground beef. Buy a cheap meat grinder instead.... It's simple, fast, and tastes so much better.
But perhaps more important: if you're poor, stop trying to eat so much meat! It's nutritious, but think of it more as a small flavorant or garnish in most meals, rather than the centerpiece. Buy the cheapest toughest cuts and use in stew, etc.
Onions aren't food. They're a garnish.
Actually, they have quite a bit of nutrients, though not very concentrated. They do provide a lot of fiber, like many veggies. When I was low on money, I often ate at least an onion per day in soup or stew or whatever... Good for bulking up the food and making it both flavorful and more filling.
Like lettuce they're cheap because their complete lack of nutritional value means they're cheap to grow.
Again, completely wrong. Iceberg lettuce has no nutrition, and it's cheap because it can be stored long, which makes for better distribution and economies of scale. Other leaf lettuce is more nutritious but also often more expensive. Better to go with spinach of another darker green (frozen, if you need really cheap).
Eggs are up to $3/dozen for the off brand. They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones. Those are $4.39/dozen.
Eggs have become expensive of late. But I have no idea what you're talking about "not keeping long." Even cheapest eggs generally keep at least a couple weeks or more.
Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
Whole grain flour has a lot more nutrients. Why do they fortify white flour? To replace the nutrition that was removed. But yeah, flour shouldn't be a central component of nutrition --yet it can provide a lot of
Most people use the World Health Organization metric of a BMI of 30 to define obesity, but it's kind of a load of crap because it assumes that everybody is the same age and gender,
First you're incorrect: BMI is segmented by gender. Second it's not a load of crap: the thresholds are set such that if it says you're obese, there's a 95% chance you are (statistically), but if it says you're not you still may be.
If you crunch the numbers, it works for 95% of the population.
It's kind of funny that on every other thread people complain about special snowflakes, yet on a fat thread, half of the posters here are the 5% of special snowflakes apparently.
PS statistical marginalisation is not "a load of crap".
SJW n. One who posts facts.