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.

Comments

This is a good thing.

[BitterOak]

Although obesity may seem like a problem in developed countries, the fact that there are more obese people than underweight people in the world means that starvation is much less of a problem than it used to be. We now have enough food to feed the world. This is a good thing. Better to be a bit chubby than die of starvation which in some parts of the world, people used to do.

Re:This is a good thing.

[gstoddart]

In the US, the poorest people are the fattest. That sounds counter-intuitive, but believe me it's true.

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.

Re:This is a good thing.

[PmanAce]

You have things backwards. Poor people eat cheap food, which is cheap for a reason, because it isn't good for you. Fast food, while cheap, makes you fat. Lazy people also eat cheap food because the society which they live in encourages laziness and having no time. Ever wonder why cancer rates are up? You are what you eat isn't just a cute little moniker.

Re:This is a good thing.

[negRo_slim]

Processed food last longer on the shelf and requires little to no preparation. Simple as that.

Re:This is a good thing.

[frovingslosh]

That's because a Big Mac is cheaper to buy than groceries.

Really? The problem that I have with such a comment is that you supposedly can't buy a Big Mac with food stamps. So if you are poor then groceries, even nutritious ones, are free, and Big Macs are not. Maybe it is more about being lazy than poor (not that I don't admit that there is a strong correlation). Of course, being lazy can lead to obesity in other ways too.

Re:This is a good thing.

[Kohath]

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.

Re:This is a good thing.

[alvinrod]

While this is certainly true in many places, if you live in the Southern U.S. it's pretty easy to get access to cheap and fresh produce year round. However that does require people to have the time and disposition to cook their own meals. Too many people would just rather scarf down a burger or toss something in the microwave instead of doing some cooking and make the mistake of thinking that a potato still counts as a vegetable after being thinly sliced and fried in oil. Soda is probably the worst offender for most people. A 20 oz. bottle has somewhere between 200 - 300 calories (pretty much all of it from sugar) and I'm sure everyone has known someone who comes close to the daily recommended calorie intake from soda alone.

Re:This is a good thing.

[blindseer]

Ever wonder why cancer rates are up?

No, not really. Cancer rates are up because of all the ways for people to die cancer is one that we haven't figured out yet. Modern farming has allowed us to avoid starvation. Finding out how to make heat and light from coal and oil has made it much less likely to die of food poisoning, freezing, and bumping into wild animals at night. Modern medicine has kept us from dying from industrial accidents, wars, infections, heart attacks, diabetes, and on and on. Electricity, electronics, and school systems educate the masses on nutrition, how to safely cross a street, first aid, and more. The only thing left that we have not found out how to keep from killing us is cancer.

Basically we are now living long enough that our chances of having cancer kill us is growing. I recall hearing somewhere that the chances of a male dying from cancer is about 50%. I'm not sure if this was in the USA, world wide, some other nation but that stuck with me.

You are what you eat isn't just a cute little moniker.

With all we know now on what can cause cancer I doubt it's what we eat that causes this.

Re:This is a good thing.

[AcidPenguin9873]

But it takes work.

It takes time. Time is not free. Especially if you're poor and are working a bunch of hours/jobs to pay rent, utilities, afford some sort of food.

Re:This is a good thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is a good thing.

[guises]

It's not that simple. That's part of it, but it's also predatory food manufacturers - people who are concerned about their health can be squeezed for more money than those who don't care. Take just one example: Frito-Lay makes two types of potato chips which are distinguished from one another only by their calorie-content and target market, baked and fried. The difference in cost to manufacture these is trivial, and the volume for both is high enough that neither could be considered a niche product (with it's associated overhead). Yet on the store shelves, the fried product gets sale after sale while the baked one rarely goes on sale and is subsequently more expensive to the customer.

It's simply a matter of charging more to people who are willing to pay more, but this means that healthy eating is out of the price range of some people.

Re:This is a good thing.

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.)

Re:This is a good thing.

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.

Re:This is a good thing.

[AbRASiON]

Actually the way the BMI scale works, being underweight on it, isn't necessarily as bad a thing as being overweight.
The _vast_ majority of people who live an extremely long life (exceeding 90 years) are generally very thin people.

Re:This is a good thing.

[hambone142]

One can purchase a Papa Murphy's take and bake pizza with an EBT card. They even state it on their window signs. It is much cheaper to cook a meal for a family than to buy fast food but it takes effort.

Re:This is a good thing.

[serviscope_minor]

It is much cheaper to cook a meal for a family than to buy fast food but it takes effort.

It takes effort, time and knowledge.

Re:This is a good thing.

[dbIII]

you could *smell* the fresh vegetables as soon as you walked in the door. The whole place smelled almost like a garden

As an aside that's by deliberate design which is why the potatoes etc that don't smell as strongly are not as close to the main entrance.
Being a place where frozen water doesn't drop out of the sky all that often helps as well. It was cold last night. I may have to shut one of the windows tonight.

Re:This is a good thing.

[dbIII]

With all we know now on what can cause cancer

There are many causes of cancer because it's uncontrolled cell growth due to damage and eating the wrong stuff causes some of them. It's like a lottery and the more "tickets" you buy the more chances there are of it happening. Asbestos in the lungs for instance increases the chances massively due to cell damage and later growth with every breath, so a tiny chance with every breath adds up to near certainty over time. Certain chemicals in some of the charred fatty stuff that tastes so good also cause some damage with a tiny chance every time you consume them of the damaged cells becoming cancerous.

The only thing left that we have not found out how to keep from killing us is cancer

There is a lot of other stuff but cancer is a pretty huge category of problems. Curing cancer is probably in the same ballpark as curing every single virus then going after the prions.

Re:This is a good thing.

[Maxo-Texas]

Cancer incidents, among children, in the 1st world, has been rising since the 1970s.

Here's a nice graph for UK.

http://healthandenvironmentblo...

The incidence (not survival) of every major cancer variety except bladder cancer went up from 1971 to 2003.

Rising pseudo-estrogens, declining nutrient levels in raw vegetables, declining nutrient values in various raw meats, and sharply declining nutrient values in processed foods contributed. Lack of adequate sleep was also a factor.

It's true for men too.

Several factors.
1) Cost cutting. You can compare the list of more expensive foods to cheaper foods and the more expensive foods are made of food while the cheaper foods are made of weird stuff. For example: Soy sauce can be "Soy + water + salt" or "soy and corn protein, caramel coloring, high fructose corn syrup, salt, yada yada yada". They make some franken food that looks like and sort of tastes like real food but which is much cheaper.

2) Burned out soil. While we raise the amount of fruits and vegetables we get out of a plot of soil- the nutrients are being leached out by over farming. We are losing topsoil in the U.S.

3) Use of anti-biotics, cages resulting in unhealthy bloated animals.

4) Water. Lots and lots of water. Ham and chicken can be as high as 32% water now. It's not really as cheap as it seems since the water boils off in cooking so a pound of chicken has the nutrition of 2/3 of a pound of chicken.

5) Non-GMO fruit and vegetables bred for high shelf life with higher cellulose content than fruit and vegetables used to have. For humans, cellulose is not a nutrient.

it doesn't matter so much once you hit the last 15 years of your life. it might make a difference of a year or two. but for kids, it can have a huge effect. Especially the psuedo-estrogens.

Re:This is a good thing.

[Jason Levine]

It is much cheaper to cook a meal for a family than to buy fast food but it takes effort.

This is where "cheap, but bad for you fast-food" wins out over "healthy home cooked meals", unfortunately. Some families have both parents working - sometimes multiple jobs per parent. In addition, you might have a single parent house. So "free time" to cook meals is nonexistent. It might not be healthy, but stopping at McDonald's to feed the kids or using a microwave meal (loaded with sodium because apparently that's the only spice frozen meals use) before going to your second job gets the kids fed for many people. It might result in more health issues later, but it's a matter of having to deal with current fires and having no time to prevent future ones.

Americans Are Gorging Themselves on Cheap Meat

[walterbyrd]

Somewhat related:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/03/us-increase-meat-consumption-europe-less-meat-sustainability

Re:News for Nerds

[negRo_slim]

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.

cultural changes caused it - needs a cultural fix

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What an astounding accomplishment

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:What an astounding accomplishment

[SQL Error]

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.

Food stamps

[huckamania]

In Belgium they have an egg and milk fund that every family with children gets every month. You can't use it to buy processed foods.

In the United States of America, food stamps (well, credit cards now) can be used to buy processed foods. It's too demeaning to have any proper controls and limit things to rice, flour, sugar, eggs, milk, etc. The big food manufacturers love it, the poor love it and changing it back to the basics (remember government cheese), will be next to impossible to do.

I've noticed that there is a correlation to the people who use food credit cards that they usually have two carts with free food and another with beer and yet more crap that isn't free. Usually they are in front of me in line and yes they are usually fat pushing obese.

I have three kids. I like the way Belgium does it better. The rich have always had a really good deal in the US, because taxes are based on non-investment income (why Warren Buffet still pays a lower percentage in taxes then his secretary). Now the poor also have a good deal. The middle class get jack all in this country. Poor kids get free breakfast and lunch and free after school programs (50$ for my kids). Poor families get free phones, free cable, free housing, free food, etc. But being poor is based on reported income. So there are literally millions in this country who get all the free stuff and can still drive around in a brand new mega truck cause they don't report their income.

More and more are gaming the system and for some getting on the government dole is the new American dream. And in instead of doing anything about this, the government keeps rolling out more and more programs for the fraudsters. I blame the baby boomers and their offspring, of which I am neither.

Re:Food stamps

[gstoddart]

But being poor is based on reported income. So there are literally millions in this country who get all the free stuff and can still drive around in a brand new mega truck cause they don't report their income.

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?

Re:News for Nerds

[OrangeTide]

If the definition of obese is a BMI over 30. The average slashdot user is probably American and probably between the ages of 26-44, then it would be pretty reasonable to argue that typical (average) slashdot user is likely obese.

We could probably drill down on the details and make vegas style odds on if the first post of the next article is obese.

Re:cultural changes caused it - needs a cultural f

[Anonymous Coward]

The largest cultural shift to happen in your time frame has been two-income households and on top of that most people are working longer hours than ever before.

That means less time to cook nutritious meals, less time to monitor what the kids are doing, and less time for recreation.

This notion of a qualitative shift within a few generations is asinine. There's a reason energy drinks happened within this generation. People are tired and harried.

Not really

[rsilvergun]

I gave up soda pop and believe me, it helped, but only about 5lbs worth. The trouble with Americans is that junk food is a cheap pleasure in a world that doesn't give out many pleasures to the poor. At the end of a long, miserable day it's hard to say no to a cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate shake. The fact that I can get all that for $6 bucks (no tip, it's fast food) is just icing on the cake (there's a pun in that somewhere). It doesn't help that vegetables are expensive and unsubsidized and that just about everything has added sugar...

Food isn't too cheap

[rsilvergun]

nutritious food is too expensive. Also companies are modifiying our food supply to make it addicting and encourage overeating (it's not an accident that eating chips goes well with soda pop). Plus people are turning to junk food to cope with the misery in life and to get a quick boost to get them through a long day.

When you look at wealthy folk they're rarely overweight. It's poor people getting shafted by a bad system. That's where the hate is coming from...

Re:It's simple

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Hmm... your post made me hungry.

I'm a Stranger Here Just Lookin Around

[germansausage]

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.

Re:I'm a Stranger Here Just Lookin Around

[Daemonik]

Make a restaurant and advertise that you have portion sizes 1/2 everyone elses, see how long you stay in business. It's an ingrained mindset that's carried over for yes, two generations.

Also this?:

No, the problem simply lies in the mentality of 'bigger is better'.

Well duh-huh, that's exactly what I said. Larger sizes were presented as being more value for the buck when eating out, so to American minds, BIG = VALUE.

As for the countries hit hardest by WWII? Again, duh-huh, they were hit hard by WWII. They didn't have the immediate economic boom the US did afterwards, have tended to be more protectionist towards traditional culture (In the face of otherwise omnipresent Americanism) and have different perceptions of value.

Re:I'm a Stranger Here Just Lookin Around

[thinkwaitfast]

No, the problem simply lies in the mentality of 'bigger is better'.

This is hardwired into the human brain. Studies show that even babies understand bigger is better.

http://www.livescience.com/116...

Re:News for Nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

"News for Nerds.... Stuffed with Matter"

FTFY Fatties!

Re:Not so fast

[AnotherBlackHat]

Has the method (however flawed) changed in the last 20 years?
Because the percentage of people who are obese has gone up in that time.

Re:News for Nerds

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Re:Ug, here we go

[AthanasiusKircher]

Wow. This is just chock full of bogosity.

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

Re:Ug, here we go

[sociocapitalist]

a. After a 60 hour work week plus dealing with the kids you didn't want to have (but couldn't stop yourself from having because a substantial portion of our electorate is trying to keep you from affordable birth control options because little hussies like you should have to have kids in exchange for sex) you're in no shape to clean. You live in a cheap, shitty apartment. That means bugs, and lots of them. I'm not the first one to make this observation. It was made in a rather famous essay kicking around google from a single mom with bad teeth who lived homeless for sometime because the bad teeth kept her from getting a job.

b. Cheap junk food and TV are the only pleasures the 1% let the working poor have. They don't get vacations or even time off. They're kids are miserable because so are they. They're poor education means enjoying literature is beyond them and the lack of birth control and a social safety net means they have to be careful with sex.

We here in America like punishing people. We just do. Well, not all of us, but the ones that do vote. And the ones that vote make the rules. So there you go.

You overstate things. I was born to a pair of mentally ill parents and grew up in a home for children funded by the state. A lot of the other kids there made worse choices than I did, and the consequences for them were worse than for the bad decisions I made. As it turns out, I have a good life and most of them do not.

Choices and decisions when we are young have a huge effect on us the rest of our lives - something that American children just do not seem to be taught; perhaps because their parents aren't teaching them this, as they themselves didn't learn it until much too late (if ever).

There is still chance and opportunity in the US and how people end up is a question of the decisions they make more than just what the 1% 'allows'. That this decision making process seems to be broken in much of the US is a societal problem but cannot be blamed on the 1% but on our own parents (or caregivers, whatever).

Birth control is freely available in most parts of the US, if not all (walk into a planned parenthood if nothing else - walk out with free condoms). Getting it and using it are choices that people make.

Spending your time watching garbage on TV vs. that same time at a (shitty probably) part time job to build up some cash to pay your way through school (or to pay for dental work) is a decision. I, with no parents and no family to support me, managed to make this happen - so can others, if they chose.

I do think that there are things that need to be fixed - tax dodges for the very rich who throw everything into 'family directed charity organizations', tax dodges for corporations who shift their profits offshore to avoid paying tax in the place where they make their real profits, usurious interest rates on credit cards and other debt that traps the unwary and this ridiculous system of student loans being a few of them. But even so, success in America is still possible and at the end it depends on the decisions that we as young people make, one way or the other.

Who is surprised ?

[aepervius]

"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" I am surprised that the rate is not higher. Who ever is surprised that it is at least 20%/25% has not visited the US in the last 10 years or has not been able to compare to other countries. I have flown all over the world. But when I am in the US, it is always shocking me with abandon.

Re:Not so fast

[serviscope_minor]

I recently read an article that showed the method most western governments use to measure who is over weight is actually not that accurate.

Define: not that accurate.

What you do is take a single variable measurement (height doesn't vary). Not only that but it has to be one that more or less everyone has access to and is pretty much impossible to do wrong (i.e. not waist measurement). That leaves... weight.

So, take weight, height, apply a simpe calculation (or lookup table) and hreshold the result. That's BMI. It's actually pretty good, very good when you look into it deeper. Obviously it's never going to be perfect.

First, the thresholds for obese are set with a high precision and low recall. I.e. if it says you're obese, you very likely are, if it says you're not, then you still might be. People have crunched the numbers and come up with statistics. If it says you're obese, statistically, there's a 5% chance it's wrong.

In fact many professional sports people or gym junkies would be classified as overweight based on the measurement systems used

I looked up a bunch of sports people last time this came up (footballers, tennis players, swimmers, and a few others) and none of them came up as overweight. So, actually plenty of professional athletes come up as normal.

Secondly, it really doesn't matter. If you're a pro athlete, you'll have better tools available to you than BMI. So, fine, don't use it. If you're into serious lifting (and you have to be WAY serious to get an "obese" BMI) then... you have better tools available to you.

For the remaining 95% of the population, BMI is just fine.

It's silly to discount something that's 95% accurate on average and applies least well to the people who have the best ability to use something better.

Re:The "obese" live longer than the "underweight".

[serviscope_minor]

Overweight people live longer than underweight people.

Many diseases cause people to become very underweight. What do the statistics look like when you remove people who are underweight because of an illness?

Re:News for Nerds

[serviscope_minor]

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".

Re:The problem is the perception of obesity

[serviscope_minor]

Yeah yeah and everyone who has an obese level BMI is a special fucking snowflake world champion bodybuilder.

Re:Diet and medication

[jandersen]

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.

Re:News for Nerds

[Jason Levine]

BMI isn't a great indicator for whether someone is overweight or not. A few years back, I got serious about weight loss. I was at 255 and really not feeling good. I watched what I ate (did a Weight Watchers-style thing) and eventually got down to 175. For the first time, I wasn't overweight as far as BMI was concerned. I was normal weight. Everyone who saw me, though, told me that I looked too skinny. (The first time in my life I had ever heard those words referencing me.) Sure enough, I had bones sticking out everywhere. I've found that my ideal weight is about 190. BMI-wise, that's still overweight, but it's good for me.

Re:Diet and medication

[Anne Thwacks]

Interestingly, there are reports that small furry mammals from parts of the world where there are no people are also becoming overweight. Which suggests that it is probably pollution causing it, rather than gut bacteria.

I blame the plastics that mimic female sex hormones, but it could be the huge quantities of birth control hormones themselves.

Or any number of other things. I am not always right!

Also, do not discount the fact that a load of idiots think size eight is healthy for grown women, when the optimum weight for healthy women is size FOURTEEN!. It is probably due to the fact that the fashion industry is run by gays and women, who think boys are attractive - MEN are indeed healthier when thin - probably because they do not need to feed babies with their own body fat.

(These are UK sizes. I dont know how to convert them to US sizes, but Google can probably tell you).

Horsemen

[HeckRuler]

We kicked the shit out of that horseman and threw him on top of Pestilence. Now we're coming for you DEATH!

Sadly War seems to linger around, although we've shrunk him down quite a bit.