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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.
I'm old enough (58) to have seen some cultural shifts which seem related to this. I don't think it is anything so simple that you can blame it all on a few things, but it seems to me that these cannot possibly be helping:
** When I was a school child, there were no video games or internet. When you wanted to play, you got some friends together and had a pickup game of baseball or you rode your bikes around town or did some other outdoor activity. We were physically active on a daily basis, while now the normal entertainment is to sit still and play games. There's nothing wrong with games, but every hour spent doing that is one hour not spent running around outside burning calories.
** Sugar based sodas were consumed in moderation, or often, not at all. There were no "64 Oz Big Gulps", and no one ever drank sodas in my school. Your choices were milk or water. Parents rarely let children consume sodas.
** There was less acceptance of overweight people, more social shaming. I won't say that was a good thing - shaming people can cause long term emotional harm and hurts in other ways. But one byproduct of this is that no one wanted to be "that fat kid". (My school had just one fat kid, where now childhood obesity is systemic, and I see 3rd graders who look... morbidly obese).
Now I'm nearing 60 and still normal weight. I have an easier time going up multiple flights of steps than, I would estimate, around 2/3 of the people who are in their 20's, because I'm carrying 50, 100, sometimes even 200 pounds less than they are at the same height.
I think the solution needs a cultural shift back towards valuing healthy eating and exercise. There are no shortcuts. The culture has to value this, or it won't happen.
I know this thread is going to be full of We Hate Americans - it's already started. But I just think this is really amazing. For the entirety of human existence, food has been a huge problem. Hunger was always, at most, a year or two away. Starvation is the best way to kill huge numbers of humans at once. Malnutrition, or control of food, is one of the best ways to keep them in line. Ever seen those fiftyish/sixtyish Chinese ladies who are all so short? It's because their growth was stunted as children because their government didn't provide enough for them to eat. Even without shitheads starving people to death for political reasons, lack of enough food was always a concern.
Now, we not only have solved the food problem, but we have gone too far the opposite direction. Wow! People have too much food. Food is too cheap. But that's not all, they don't just have too much food, they have the wrong kind of it! It's not just the quantity, it is the diversity and free choice that is causing all the problems. Who would have even imagined such an outcome? Did any of the visionary Sci-Fi authors of the 20th century see this coming? Because this is more earth-shattering than landing a probe on a comet (but I have been educated by the media and now understand that the shirt the spokesman was wearing when he made the announcement WAS more important than any scientific achievement humanity might have accomplished that day). Moreover this food is available just about anywhere. It tastes delicious as well, something people today barely realize, if ever.
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better. I'm not saying the people of old didn't enjoy their food, because they did. It's a universal human condition, whether you're eating oeufs au plat Meyerbeer prepared by a separate entremettier, rotisseur and saucier; or a bowl of oat porridge with pig fat. A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty. Far better than kings used to eat. It's never spoiled, either, and if it is you send it back and get a fresh one...something else we never take note of.
Yeah, unhealthy food causes disease and cancer. We all know. But this is a new, thrilling problem to combat. It's *the right kind of problem*. It's like being confronted with what to do with too much money. How can we make healthy food taste just as good or better than that fast food crap? Surely society's great minds are going to work on this one. I don't know though...I get the idea too many people out there just enjoy hating fatties, Wal-mart, Applebee's, trailer parks, and Monsanto far too much to ever think that maybe things should be better. Imagine a day when McDonald's goes out of business because people can pick more delicious foods from public orchards. A microwave burrito that is more nutritious than fresh blueberries. A boil-in bag that makes fresh spinach look like a twinkie. It can happen, if we want it to happen.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Except cancer is coming at earlier and earlier ages. What you eat impacts your body's ability to care of itself. Cancer is natural. Everyone likely has cancer at all points during their life. Cancer is simply some cells growing too much. However your body can handle that, except when it's overwhelmed or doesn't have the resources to deal with it. So yes, what you eat and do can directly impact your natural ability to keep cancer under control. Look at the cancer rate studies on nurses. Simply working the night shift instead of the day shift massively increases their chances of getting cancer. Society is getting sicker and sicker.
So, it's pretty much the same as rich assholes and corporations keeping their money in offshore accounts?
Or is it OK when you're rich to not report your income?
If it's good enough for Apple, Microsoft, and Google ... or any of those rich people who can afford a shady accountant to hide the money, it must be fine for the poor folks.
Isn't hiding your money and dodging taxes the American way?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It takes time. Time is not free.
While I absolutely agree with you that finding the time when working multiple jobs is hard for poor people, the effort and skills are another major barrier.
If you have a $10-20 crockpot and a refrigerator (or better, a freezer), you can easily make meals by dumping a few ingredients together with 15 minutes prep on the weekend or day off. 4-8 hours later you come back, and you have meals for the week. It's no harder to microwave or reheat on the stovetop than a frozen processed meal or canned dinner, but often a lot cheaper. Instead of taking 5 minutes extra to drive to the fast food place, take 5 minutes to cut up some fruit or veggies or prep a quick sidedish to eat with your bulk meals you prepped in advance.
It takes a bit of work and planning, as well as a little knowledge about how to make a regimen like this work... But it doesn't have to take more than a few minutes per day and can save significant money. (A $20 family dinner from a fast food joint looks good until you realize you could often feed your family all their meals for half that with some planning.)
I visit the USA several times a year. I come from a place where obesity is much less common, and much less extreme. These are my observations of the USA. I don't want this to sound like I'm hating on Americans, because some of you are super nice. This is just what I've seen.
The obesity axis runs diagonally, northwest to south east. People in Seattle are not much bigger then people around here. People in Mobile were appallingly huge. My theory is this correlates with biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.
It also correlates with escalators. In Seattle most people were walking up the escalators, In Mobile nobody walked up escalators.
A much bigger percentage of black people are overweight compared to white people. (Is this poverty related?).
You all drink way too much coke cola. I met people who drank 2 or three cans of soda per day at work and then drank it with every lunch and dinner.
Food servings in some restaurants are stupid big. Plates of spaghetti that two of us couldn't finish. 24 ounce prime rib. (really)
Most appalling thing I saw was whole families of fat people which is super rare here. Like mom and dad both 250 lbs plus and then 2 or 3 huge fat kids. Around here if your ten year old was 150 lbs the child welfare people would be all over you.
it's more difficult for obese people to modify their diet and have access to medication.
Why is this?
If only we knew. As anyone who has followed the news about health and medical research in the last decade or two will know, we are beginning to realise that this is a very complicated issue. On the face of it, it seems so simple: you eat more than you burn -> you get fatter. However, that doesn't address the question of why people eat more than they need, and especially why it turns out to be almost impossible for most to stop doing it.
I think a major factor is that we live in an environment where calories are far too easily and cheaply available, especially in the form of ultra-highly processed foods. I think most people have experienced this in some way: if it is inconvenient to get something to eat, you simpy ignore your beginning hunger, sometimes for a surprisingly long time. I noticed this with myself recently: when I work in the office, I generally want a snack about 1 hour after I had my last meal, but when I was digging my garden last weekend, I went on for something like 4 hours, forgetting my lunch and all. I got hungry, of course, but it was just not convenient at the time. So, one lesson to take away from this is: make sure you are not bored, if you want to lose weight.
The other thing, that I think many people don't fully realise is that there is a sometimes large difference between not feeling hungry and feeling full: most people stop feeling acute hunger after a few mouthfuls, but they keep going until the stomach is physically full, which is sometimes a very long way down the line. A good trick for losing weight is to start with a small portion - what feels like far too little, no doubt - and then wait for at least 30 minutes before eating more; in the meantime, do something that will take your mind off eating.
Finally, it matters a lot what we eat for our main meals and how we prepare and serve it. Learn to enjoy cooking, learn to enjoy eating vegetables, choose to spend the time it takes to enjoy cooking and eating; all of this is easily possible for most people, I think. If you have the time to watch TV or play computer games, then it is only a matter of priorities; if you don't have time for leisure, then you have a much more fundamental problem in your life and should probably seek a way out as a matter of some urgency.