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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.