8 ms·

More Women Than Men Are Obese in America, and Gap Is Widening (2015)

46 points by neverminder 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
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mamon 10y ago
Women has naturally higher body fat percentage, plus pregnancy and then menopause are both big hormonal shocks that induce weight gain, so this is hardly suprising.
- vixen99 10y ago
  Your suggestion does not appear to be valid for the UK. "Data on overweight and obesity among adults are mainly from the Health Survey for England (HSE). Results for 2014 showed that 61.7% of adults were overweight or obese (65.3% of men and 58.1% of women). The prevalence of obesity is similar among men and women, but men are more likely to be overweight." Projection from WHO: "74% of men and 64% of women in UK to be overweight by 2030" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/05/obesity-crisis-projections-uk-2030-men-women https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/05/obesity-cris...
  - chongli 10y ago
    This is using BMI. BMI does not distinguish between body fat and muscle mass, causing it to be exceptionally inaccurate for men with a lot of muscle mass.
    - smcl 10y ago
      That's true, but if you take a walk around any random city in the UK you'll encounter far more fat people than muscly people. It's not even close. And I'm not talking about Mr-Universe-Era Arnie vs technically-but-not-terribly overweight, I mean just vaguely in shape vs visibly overweight
      - neverminder 10y ago
        This may be anecdotal, but in my gym (Central London) most of the guys are skinny and most of the women are fat. I do notice the same in the street as well, so personally it's really hard to believe that there's actually more obese men in UK than women. Maybe city demographics is just different.
      - Someone 10y ago
        Yes, but if only one in ten of the men reported as overweight on BMI isn't overweight but muscular (and none of the women are), that explains almost all the difference between 65.3 and 58.1 percent.
    - douche 10y ago
      BMI is ridiculous because it also doesn't take into account body frame. There's a huge amount of difference between the amount of weight that someone with a 50" chest should carry and what someone with a 35" chest should carry. I think according to BMI, I'm supposed to weigh like 180 pounds as a healthy weight. The lightest I have ever been was 210, after I spent an entire summer hiking 10-15 miles a day through the White Mountains, packing fifty pounds of tools, building trails and working with a crew that was half-vegan, so we subsisted on starvation rations.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      The vast majority of people don't exercise anywhere near enough for this flaw in BMI to be a problem.
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  > Women has naturally higher body fat percentage Isn't that taken into account when drawing the line for what is considered to be obesity?
  - geon 10y ago
    Apparently, the limit for what is considered obesity for a 1.8 m tall person is 97 kg. I'd say the extra natural body fat of a woman doesn't make much difference.
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    No it is not. Their criterion - and most everybody else's - is BMI>30. Which means that the only factor taken into account is height, nothing else. Not sex, not muscle mass, not age. The reason why it still works for large populations is that very few people are freakishly short or tall, and pretty few are roided-up body builders.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  The study doesn't say they have more body fat. That we already know since woman are biologically prepared to do so. The study says that more woman are obese: I.E.: Looking at healthy body fat in the two genders (where the healthy body fat levels for woman are already higher then men), more woman are above those levels.
  - cauterized 10y ago
    Women may be more predisposed to put on fat more easily, because bearing and (even more) nursing a baby both add an enormous amount to a woman's energy needs. Even today, when food isn't scarce, many women lose their "baby weight" and more while nursing. Secondly, with less testosterone, women put on and maintain muscle with less ease than men. Since muscle burns more resting calories than fat, women must restrict their calorie intake more strictly than men do - even at the same weight and activity level - if they want not to gain.
    - jbmorgado 10y ago
      Ok, again: That is already accounted for when you talk about the healthy body fat levels for each gender. The study is about people that go above these levels.
      - HowardStark 10y ago
        I think the point he's trying to make is that while the natural level may vary between genders and be accounted for, they very likely didn't account for ease of weight gain.
        jbmorgado 10y ago
        Why should they account for the "ease of weight gain"? The study is about unhealthy fat levels, not if you easily gain more fat or not. The study conclusion is simple: Obesity in men stabilized, obesity in woman is increasing.
  - sarah2079 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
danieltillett 10y ago
Isn't the issue the huge numbers of people who are obese, not their gender.
- static_noise 10y ago
  It's not an issue either, it's a business opportunity.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Well if you are cynical I guess. The food scientists are far too good at their job. I have a dream that they will agree in the spirit of humanity to detune the taste of food to get the population's weight down.
    - venomsnake 10y ago
      It is quite the opposite. They compensate lack of flavor with pumping up the calories. They increase salt/sugar and fat until the bland food tastes like something. If you want to see food scientists at work - look at modernist cuisine - where the goal is to pump the flavor to the max while keeping the calories in check.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        The food scientists work within a budget to achieve maximum consumption. The local optimum is to pump up the calories and salt levels. Modernist cuisine is far too expensive and complex to be an option for industrial production. Seriously if the food scientists made cheap industrial food with lower levels of sugar, fat and salt it would stop people eating so much and as a population we would be much thinner and healthier. The trouble is each food company is competing against each other leading to them creating an outcome which is sub-optimal for us all.
        peyton 10y ago
        Is it really the evil corporations behind all this? If so, how does a country like Japan get away with a 3~5% obesity rate when junk food is so prevalent in modern Japanese society? Taking responsibility works.
jdoe450 10y ago
Those women clearly need feminism
cheez 10y ago
I hosted a family of giant fat people yesterday. The teenagers were all girls and grossly obese. The mother was the same. The father was the same. They were loud, crass and annoying. The most thin child (still fat) was the easiest to get along with. As an on-and-off fat person myself, fattiness is most associated with a state of mind and not gender. But if you combine this data with the so-called "happiness gender gap" (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_there_a_happiness_gender_gap/ http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_there_a_happ...), you see that this outcome is inevitable. > for better or worse, women are increasingly expecting more of themselves—to have families, work, nurture others, be competitive, and be thin and beautiful, all at once. What could have led women to think this way? Oh yeah, other women :)
jcbeard 10y ago
Guess we can't have the cake and eat it too. Or perhaps if we do we need to go for a triathlon. Seriously though, I wonder how much of this is correlated with our sitting problem, back problems, knee problems that result from a sedentary + high calorie lifestyle. Stop looking at going to the gym to be like <insert god-like body reference here> and just get out for a freaking walk, do some pushups occasionally, maybe a few sit-ups. Even small steps can improve overall fitness. But yeah....probably a good IoT biz opportunity.
- goda90 10y ago
  I recently learned about a product that clips to your shirt near your neck and vibrates when your posture is bad. I'd love to see more devices that don't just track your fitness, but remind you constantly in subtle ways like that. I know smartphone notifications don't work for me.
  - benevol 10y ago
    Or you could learn to live what is often called "mindfully", by practicing mindful meditation. This has the benefit of increasing the quality of your life overall (besides the fact that you don't need to spend money for that).
xiphias 10y ago
It would be so cool to have a high tax on sugar (and saturated fat). It has at least as much damaging effect as weed. I know it's not the perfect solution but it would force companies who want to sell in shops to decrease using it.
- redtuesday 10y ago
  The people could also just eat healtier, right (if they can afford it, that is)? "All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dosage makes a thing not poison." But I guess if sugar etc. would get a high tax, the tax money could be used to better educate the people which could possibly turn them away from too much sugar. And if we are at it, remove mc donalds, burger king etc. from the school grounds and sell healtier food.
  - benevol 10y ago
    > The people could also just eat healtier Or we could consider sugar "food pollution" (which it actually mostly is) and regulate it like air and water pollution.
  - xiphias 10y ago
    It's not as easy as you think. I try to eat healthy (low sugar, no trans-fat, low saturated fat), but generally if I see ,,no sugar'' advertised on something, I know it has high saturated fat content, and if I see ,,0% fat'', I know it's something full of sugar.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  >It would be so cool to have a high tax on sugar To some degree we have that, with tariffs on sugar coming into the US, which raises the price high enough that everyone uses alternatives.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    Well, having a tax on one form of sugar while subsidizing another (HFCS) means that in practice, you have a sugar subsidy that makes it economic to add bad calories because it's cheap.
Bromskloss 10y ago
Well, it's going to be either women or men, and it's going to be either growing or shrinking.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
getgoingnow 10y ago
Is it any wonder that American men are going to Eastern Europe and Asia to find a partner? Most women there are thin, feminine and treat foreigners better than locals. Is it any wonder that men working in tech love [1] Asian girls? BTW, the number of obese people is projected to grow even more [2]. Plus there are people who are overweight. God help us all. We're going to have a nation of entitled land whales walking around promoting fat acceptance. [1] https://li.st/l/0rxOcNfFIoDGd9n4AAAMna https://li.st/l/0rxOcNfFIoDGd9n4AAAMna [2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-trends/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...
- colmvp 10y ago
  Re 1: It's funny to hear Asian women gripe about white guys liking Asian women, when it's really the other way around. If you look at online dating stats, like eHarmony, OkCupid, and CoffeeMeetsBagel, white men generally respond to messages from Asian women with the same sort of approval rate as white women, albeit slightly less so. Whereas for Asian women, they respond to messages from white men at a noticeably higher rate than from Asian men. [1] CoffeeMeetsBagel also showed that for users who select a single desired ethnicity, a larger percentage of Asian women exclusively note that they want to date white men, compared to the behavior of white men [2a][2b] [1] http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/race_affects/Reply-By-Race-Male.png http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/race_affects/Reply-By-Race-Male.p... [2a] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/LYIF_dnAfV2FunBTom8Ib5b1eb_nmZy6Un48t_wW_KAVS7udtJcc_2dflJiog7sVk1nNjEJVIse9kTLJfpr1P1wYzGN6PZYo7hEPkQ_KEwEaJXHxacBYgbwi7A https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/LYIF_dnAfV2FunBTom8Ib5b1eb... [2b] https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Nj7r7XKugOdq0RjBfnnB2hEFgx-E4SKavFVw_cmj9Ggcy6KZQxlV5heNfCO7SNOtgzi2hP6QD7cPN-hWKKVk0xPG05mBX4q7-A9pbF2e2y-Vn4zqWZrQZKSrHQ https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Nj7r7XKugOdq0RjBfnnB2hEFgx...
  - teratins 10y ago
    Not really that funny since the vast majority of Asians marry other Asians (72%)[1] so it would seem that the Asian women that are complaining are not the sames ones that use American dating sites. So those sites have those results mainly as a selection bias. Because if you use Asian dating sites like BeeTalk, Jiayuan, Baihe and the like, the women there almost exclusively want men that are the same ethnicity (i.e. not just Asians in general but Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc..) I would also say this matches what I see among friends as well. I'm a mixed race (Asian/white) guy that basically passes for white and I'm fluent in Chinese. And what I see is that the majority of my Chinese-speaking friends don't use American/English-language sites to find dates. They basically screen out white guys (or just non-Chinese guys) by using Chinese-language sites. And I see the same behavior with my Korean friends as well. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/fashion/more-asian-americans-marrying-within-their-race.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/fashion/more-asian-america... (The article also states that 2nd and 3rd generation Asians are increasingly marrying other Asians as well, rather than just those Asians that are the same ethnicity.)
colmvp 10y ago
This article is from November. Why bring this up now? Anwyays, > After decades of increases, obesity rates do seem to be flattening out. > And another note of optimism: The CDC finds childhood obesity has leveled off. In many states, as we've reported, obesity rates are falling among preschool-aged kids. Good. Maybe in a few years we'll see a drop? > Across all adult age groups, about 38 percent of women are obese, while 34 percent of men were obese. 4% seems like a pretty small gap. > And, the divide becomes even greater for some women of color. The obesity rate among African-American women is 57 percent and 46 percent among Hispanic women. I'm assuming that Asians were the exception? Is it because of genetics? Or income-level?
- wongarsu 10y ago
  >> Across all adult age groups, about 38 percent of women are obese, while 34 percent of men were obese. >4% seems like a pretty small gap. It's just 4 percentage points, but a different way to phrase it is that women are 10% more likely to be obese than men. That's not a gigantic gap, but it's still quite significant.
- rsmsky1 10y ago
  As with many surveys etc Asians are too small a number to be listed. That's why for many cases, I just tend to look at the white response as I figure that is the closest group to Asians.
benevol 10y ago
Here's the main hack: Do not eat anything that contains sugar. To start off, try it for just 1 week. You will realize that sugar is a drug to our brain. Once you are clean, reduce the "hidden sugar", carbs, to a minimum, and increase vegetables to reach 60% of the volume of your food. You'll feel great again.
- sargun 10y ago
  I was totally off sugar for a while. My diet shifted to consist mostly of meat. Unfortunately, my cholesterol shot up like anything. Eating vegetarian, or white meat that's quick is very hard to do without sugar. I eat Soylent, and it's super sugary, but easy to consume. On the other hand, I've tried a bunch of protein bars / powders, and literally none of them are savory. But, yeah, I agree with you, I would kill for an easy, pure vegetable diet.
  - crusso 10y ago
    There are low-carb alternatives to Soylent. Keto Chow is the one I use. I definitely prefer the taste of Keto Chow to Soylent. It's more like a milk shake. Also, Soylent gave me consistent acid reflux. https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/ https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/
    - sargun 10y ago
      Ah, but these flavours all still seem sweet. Once I have sweetness on my palate, I find it difficult to abstain from sugar.
  - charlesism 10y ago
    The need for Cholesterol levels (or something like them) to be meaningful is stronger the evidence that lowering them is useful. You're probably better ignoring them, and just getting regular exercise instead.
    - sargun 10y ago
throwaway13337 10y ago
Women on average are not always the most obese ones. In some countries like Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and Italy, it's the men who have the higher obesity rates. Interesting to note that Mexican, Turkish, and especially South African women are quite a bit more obese than the men. OECD publishes a lot of stats in this area: http://www.oecd.org/health/Obesity-Update-2014.pdf http://www.oecd.org/health/Obesity-Update-2014.pdf Could it be cultural differences? In the countries where the men are more obese, the average obesity rate is much lower.
logicallee 10y ago
There is a recent movement in America that can be neutrally summarized as obesity prescriptivism. (I won't use the language either of its proponents or critics. By the way, I am super-proud of everyone in this thread as of the time I'm posting - though it's only 9:30 AM East coast, 6:30 West Coast on a Sunday, so that the quality of responses might drop soon. Let's do our best to keep it high.) My recommendation is to be able to opt out, for example via a smart phone setting that shows that an individual has opted out of obesity prescriptivism. As a practical matter, for example this may allow them to be shown menus with 500-1100 calorie entrees (or less), whereas obesity prescriptivism would require that such choices not be shown. I'm careful not to use the language of either side. These are the facts of the current situation.
acconrad 10y ago
As much as I don't want to excuse or allow obesity, or that the advice in this thread is extremely applicable in reducing the rates of obesity, I will say that fat loss for women is indeed harder. This video[1] explains in greater detail, but essentially all of the hormonal changes a woman goes through on a month-to-month basis can have drastic effects on their ability to lose fat, to keep up performance while exercising, as well as water/nutrient absorption on a week-to-week basis. These changes do not happen to men, and they are additional considerations when a woman needs to lose weight. Not that they aren't insurmountable, or that the topic itself isn't for more advanced athletes, but we can generalize this to say that it is more difficult for women, so I'm not surprised that the gap would widen given those additional constraints. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6846ZTBu08k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6846ZTBu08k
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
charlesism 10y ago
We put more pressure on women to diet, and most dietary advice is horse crap. If your diet consists of "low fat" garbage, and a bunch of fruits/grains... you will wind up fat. If more men were lost to the "weight loss" industry, I'm sure they'd be equally as obese.
- gaur 10y ago
  Every time I look at the US food pyramid I'm blown away by what an obvious unhealthy scam it is. 6 to 11 servings per day from processed grain products? I don't think so. The agriculture department should not be in charge of US nutritional guidelines.
charlesism 10y ago
We put more pressure on women to diet, and most dietary advice is horse crap. If your diet consists of "low fat" garbage, and a bunch of fruits/grain... you will wind up fat.
notacoward 10y ago
Quite a while ago, I worked for a bit in Norway. Almost everyone there seemed fit. When I commented on it, my coworkers said it was kind of an in-joke that Americans came in two types. There's a small minority of younger fitness junkies, who often look unhealthily thin, and then a much larger number of people who are distinctly overweight. I've never seen anything to contradict that "bimodal distribution" idea. It's one reason that I take diet or exercise advice based on what worked for one guy in his twenties with a huge grain of salt (heh). Come back when you're forty, and we'll talk. Better yet, let's try looking at large-scale peer-reviewed studies of what works and what doesn't across ages and genders, instead of spreading anecdotes and flimsy theories.

46 points by neverminder 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mamon 10y ago

Women has naturally higher body fat percentage, plus pregnancy and then menopause are both big hormonal shocks that induce weight gain, so this is hardly suprising.

vixen99 10y ago
Your suggestion does not appear to be valid for the UK. "Data on overweight and obesity among adults are mainly from the Health Survey for England (HSE). Results for 2014 showed that 61.7% of adults were overweight or obese (65.3% of men and 58.1% of women). The prevalence of obesity is similar among men and women, but men are more likely to be overweight." Projection from WHO: "74% of men and 64% of women in UK to be overweight by 2030" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/05/obesity-crisis-projections-uk-2030-men-women https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/05/obesity-cris...
- chongli 10y ago
  This is using BMI. BMI does not distinguish between body fat and muscle mass, causing it to be exceptionally inaccurate for men with a lot of muscle mass.
  - smcl 10y ago
    That's true, but if you take a walk around any random city in the UK you'll encounter far more fat people than muscly people. It's not even close. And I'm not talking about Mr-Universe-Era Arnie vs technically-but-not-terribly overweight, I mean just vaguely in shape vs visibly overweight
    - neverminder 10y ago
      This may be anecdotal, but in my gym (Central London) most of the guys are skinny and most of the women are fat. I do notice the same in the street as well, so personally it's really hard to believe that there's actually more obese men in UK than women. Maybe city demographics is just different.
    - Someone 10y ago
      Yes, but if only one in ten of the men reported as overweight on BMI isn't overweight but muscular (and none of the women are), that explains almost all the difference between 65.3 and 58.1 percent.
  - douche 10y ago
    BMI is ridiculous because it also doesn't take into account body frame. There's a huge amount of difference between the amount of weight that someone with a 50" chest should carry and what someone with a 35" chest should carry. I think according to BMI, I'm supposed to weigh like 180 pounds as a healthy weight. The lightest I have ever been was 210, after I spent an entire summer hiking 10-15 miles a day through the White Mountains, packing fifty pounds of tools, building trails and working with a crew that was half-vegan, so we subsisted on starvation rations.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    The vast majority of people don't exercise anywhere near enough for this flaw in BMI to be a problem.
Bromskloss 10y ago
> Women has naturally higher body fat percentage Isn't that taken into account when drawing the line for what is considered to be obesity?
- geon 10y ago
  Apparently, the limit for what is considered obesity for a 1.8 m tall person is 97 kg. I'd say the extra natural body fat of a woman doesn't make much difference.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  No it is not. Their criterion - and most everybody else's - is BMI>30. Which means that the only factor taken into account is height, nothing else. Not sex, not muscle mass, not age. The reason why it still works for large populations is that very few people are freakishly short or tall, and pretty few are roided-up body builders.
jbmorgado 10y ago
The study doesn't say they have more body fat. That we already know since woman are biologically prepared to do so. The study says that more woman are obese: I.E.: Looking at healthy body fat in the two genders (where the healthy body fat levels for woman are already higher then men), more woman are above those levels.
- cauterized 10y ago
  Women may be more predisposed to put on fat more easily, because bearing and (even more) nursing a baby both add an enormous amount to a woman's energy needs. Even today, when food isn't scarce, many women lose their "baby weight" and more while nursing. Secondly, with less testosterone, women put on and maintain muscle with less ease than men. Since muscle burns more resting calories than fat, women must restrict their calorie intake more strictly than men do - even at the same weight and activity level - if they want not to gain.
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    Ok, again: That is already accounted for when you talk about the healthy body fat levels for each gender. The study is about people that go above these levels.
    - HowardStark 10y ago
      I think the point he's trying to make is that while the natural level may vary between genders and be accounted for, they very likely didn't account for ease of weight gain.
      - jbmorgado 10y ago
        Why should they account for the "ease of weight gain"? The study is about unhealthy fat levels, not if you easily gain more fat or not. The study conclusion is simple: Obesity in men stabilized, obesity in woman is increasing.
- sarah2079 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

danieltillett 10y ago

Isn't the issue the huge numbers of people who are obese, not their gender.

static_noise 10y ago
It's not an issue either, it's a business opportunity.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Well if you are cynical I guess. The food scientists are far too good at their job. I have a dream that they will agree in the spirit of humanity to detune the taste of food to get the population's weight down.
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    It is quite the opposite. They compensate lack of flavor with pumping up the calories. They increase salt/sugar and fat until the bland food tastes like something. If you want to see food scientists at work - look at modernist cuisine - where the goal is to pump the flavor to the max while keeping the calories in check.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      The food scientists work within a budget to achieve maximum consumption. The local optimum is to pump up the calories and salt levels. Modernist cuisine is far too expensive and complex to be an option for industrial production. Seriously if the food scientists made cheap industrial food with lower levels of sugar, fat and salt it would stop people eating so much and as a population we would be much thinner and healthier. The trouble is each food company is competing against each other leading to them creating an outcome which is sub-optimal for us all.
      - peyton 10y ago
        Is it really the evil corporations behind all this? If so, how does a country like Japan get away with a 3~5% obesity rate when junk food is so prevalent in modern Japanese society? Taking responsibility works.

jdoe450 10y ago

Those women clearly need feminism

cheez 10y ago

I hosted a family of giant fat people yesterday. The teenagers were all girls and grossly obese. The mother was the same. The father was the same. They were loud, crass and annoying. The most thin child (still fat) was the easiest to get along with. As an on-and-off fat person myself, fattiness is most associated with a state of mind and not gender. But if you combine this data with the so-called "happiness gender gap" (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_there_a_happiness_gender_gap/ http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_there_a_happ...), you see that this outcome is inevitable. > for better or worse, women are increasingly expecting more of themselves—to have families, work, nurture others, be competitive, and be thin and beautiful, all at once. What could have led women to think this way? Oh yeah, other women :)

jcbeard 10y ago

Guess we can't have the cake and eat it too. Or perhaps if we do we need to go for a triathlon. Seriously though, I wonder how much of this is correlated with our sitting problem, back problems, knee problems that result from a sedentary + high calorie lifestyle. Stop looking at going to the gym to be like <insert god-like body reference here> and just get out for a freaking walk, do some pushups occasionally, maybe a few sit-ups. Even small steps can improve overall fitness. But yeah....probably a good IoT biz opportunity.

goda90 10y ago
I recently learned about a product that clips to your shirt near your neck and vibrates when your posture is bad. I'd love to see more devices that don't just track your fitness, but remind you constantly in subtle ways like that. I know smartphone notifications don't work for me.
- benevol 10y ago
  Or you could learn to live what is often called "mindfully", by practicing mindful meditation. This has the benefit of increasing the quality of your life overall (besides the fact that you don't need to spend money for that).

xiphias 10y ago

It would be so cool to have a high tax on sugar (and saturated fat). It has at least as much damaging effect as weed. I know it's not the perfect solution but it would force companies who want to sell in shops to decrease using it.

redtuesday 10y ago
The people could also just eat healtier, right (if they can afford it, that is)? "All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dosage makes a thing not poison." But I guess if sugar etc. would get a high tax, the tax money could be used to better educate the people which could possibly turn them away from too much sugar. And if we are at it, remove mc donalds, burger king etc. from the school grounds and sell healtier food.
- benevol 10y ago
  > The people could also just eat healtier Or we could consider sugar "food pollution" (which it actually mostly is) and regulate it like air and water pollution.
- xiphias 10y ago
  It's not as easy as you think. I try to eat healthy (low sugar, no trans-fat, low saturated fat), but generally if I see ,,no sugar'' advertised on something, I know it has high saturated fat content, and if I see ,,0% fat'', I know it's something full of sugar.
ktRolster 10y ago
>It would be so cool to have a high tax on sugar To some degree we have that, with tariffs on sugar coming into the US, which raises the price high enough that everyone uses alternatives.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Well, having a tax on one form of sugar while subsidizing another (HFCS) means that in practice, you have a sugar subsidy that makes it economic to add bad calories because it's cheap.

Bromskloss 10y ago

Well, it's going to be either women or men, and it's going to be either growing or shrinking.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

getgoingnow 10y ago

Is it any wonder that American men are going to Eastern Europe and Asia to find a partner? Most women there are thin, feminine and treat foreigners better than locals. Is it any wonder that men working in tech love [1] Asian girls? BTW, the number of obese people is projected to grow even more [2]. Plus there are people who are overweight. God help us all. We're going to have a nation of entitled land whales walking around promoting fat acceptance. [1] https://li.st/l/0rxOcNfFIoDGd9n4AAAMna https://li.st/l/0rxOcNfFIoDGd9n4AAAMna [2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-trends/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...

colmvp 10y ago
Re 1: It's funny to hear Asian women gripe about white guys liking Asian women, when it's really the other way around. If you look at online dating stats, like eHarmony, OkCupid, and CoffeeMeetsBagel, white men generally respond to messages from Asian women with the same sort of approval rate as white women, albeit slightly less so. Whereas for Asian women, they respond to messages from white men at a noticeably higher rate than from Asian men. [1] CoffeeMeetsBagel also showed that for users who select a single desired ethnicity, a larger percentage of Asian women exclusively note that they want to date white men, compared to the behavior of white men [2a][2b] [1] http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/race_affects/Reply-By-Race-Male.png http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/race_affects/Reply-By-Race-Male.p... [2a] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/LYIF_dnAfV2FunBTom8Ib5b1eb_nmZy6Un48t_wW_KAVS7udtJcc_2dflJiog7sVk1nNjEJVIse9kTLJfpr1P1wYzGN6PZYo7hEPkQ_KEwEaJXHxacBYgbwi7A https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/LYIF_dnAfV2FunBTom8Ib5b1eb... [2b] https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Nj7r7XKugOdq0RjBfnnB2hEFgx-E4SKavFVw_cmj9Ggcy6KZQxlV5heNfCO7SNOtgzi2hP6QD7cPN-hWKKVk0xPG05mBX4q7-A9pbF2e2y-Vn4zqWZrQZKSrHQ https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Nj7r7XKugOdq0RjBfnnB2hEFgx...
- teratins 10y ago
  Not really that funny since the vast majority of Asians marry other Asians (72%)[1] so it would seem that the Asian women that are complaining are not the sames ones that use American dating sites. So those sites have those results mainly as a selection bias. Because if you use Asian dating sites like BeeTalk, Jiayuan, Baihe and the like, the women there almost exclusively want men that are the same ethnicity (i.e. not just Asians in general but Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc..) I would also say this matches what I see among friends as well. I'm a mixed race (Asian/white) guy that basically passes for white and I'm fluent in Chinese. And what I see is that the majority of my Chinese-speaking friends don't use American/English-language sites to find dates. They basically screen out white guys (or just non-Chinese guys) by using Chinese-language sites. And I see the same behavior with my Korean friends as well. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/fashion/more-asian-americans-marrying-within-their-race.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/fashion/more-asian-america... (The article also states that 2nd and 3rd generation Asians are increasingly marrying other Asians as well, rather than just those Asians that are the same ethnicity.)

colmvp 10y ago

This article is from November. Why bring this up now? Anwyays, > After decades of increases, obesity rates do seem to be flattening out. > And another note of optimism: The CDC finds childhood obesity has leveled off. In many states, as we've reported, obesity rates are falling among preschool-aged kids. Good. Maybe in a few years we'll see a drop? > Across all adult age groups, about 38 percent of women are obese, while 34 percent of men were obese. 4% seems like a pretty small gap. > And, the divide becomes even greater for some women of color. The obesity rate among African-American women is 57 percent and 46 percent among Hispanic women. I'm assuming that Asians were the exception? Is it because of genetics? Or income-level?

wongarsu 10y ago
>> Across all adult age groups, about 38 percent of women are obese, while 34 percent of men were obese. >4% seems like a pretty small gap. It's just 4 percentage points, but a different way to phrase it is that women are 10% more likely to be obese than men. That's not a gigantic gap, but it's still quite significant.
rsmsky1 10y ago
As with many surveys etc Asians are too small a number to be listed. That's why for many cases, I just tend to look at the white response as I figure that is the closest group to Asians.

benevol 10y ago

Here's the main hack: Do not eat anything that contains sugar. To start off, try it for just 1 week. You will realize that sugar is a drug to our brain. Once you are clean, reduce the "hidden sugar", carbs, to a minimum, and increase vegetables to reach 60% of the volume of your food. You'll feel great again.

sargun 10y ago
I was totally off sugar for a while. My diet shifted to consist mostly of meat. Unfortunately, my cholesterol shot up like anything. Eating vegetarian, or white meat that's quick is very hard to do without sugar. I eat Soylent, and it's super sugary, but easy to consume. On the other hand, I've tried a bunch of protein bars / powders, and literally none of them are savory. But, yeah, I agree with you, I would kill for an easy, pure vegetable diet.
- crusso 10y ago
  There are low-carb alternatives to Soylent. Keto Chow is the one I use. I definitely prefer the taste of Keto Chow to Soylent. It's more like a milk shake. Also, Soylent gave me consistent acid reflux. https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/ https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/
  - sargun 10y ago
    Ah, but these flavours all still seem sweet. Once I have sweetness on my palate, I find it difficult to abstain from sugar.
- charlesism 10y ago
  The need for Cholesterol levels (or something like them) to be meaningful is stronger the evidence that lowering them is useful. You're probably better ignoring them, and just getting regular exercise instead.
  - sargun 10y ago

throwaway13337 10y ago

Women on average are not always the most obese ones. In some countries like Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and Italy, it's the men who have the higher obesity rates. Interesting to note that Mexican, Turkish, and especially South African women are quite a bit more obese than the men. OECD publishes a lot of stats in this area: http://www.oecd.org/health/Obesity-Update-2014.pdf http://www.oecd.org/health/Obesity-Update-2014.pdf Could it be cultural differences? In the countries where the men are more obese, the average obesity rate is much lower.

logicallee 10y ago

There is a recent movement in America that can be neutrally summarized as obesity prescriptivism. (I won't use the language either of its proponents or critics. By the way, I am super-proud of everyone in this thread as of the time I'm posting - though it's only 9:30 AM East coast, 6:30 West Coast on a Sunday, so that the quality of responses might drop soon. Let's do our best to keep it high.) My recommendation is to be able to opt out, for example via a smart phone setting that shows that an individual has opted out of obesity prescriptivism. As a practical matter, for example this may allow them to be shown menus with 500-1100 calorie entrees (or less), whereas obesity prescriptivism would require that such choices not be shown. I'm careful not to use the language of either side. These are the facts of the current situation.

acconrad 10y ago

As much as I don't want to excuse or allow obesity, or that the advice in this thread is extremely applicable in reducing the rates of obesity, I will say that fat loss for women is indeed harder. This video[1] explains in greater detail, but essentially all of the hormonal changes a woman goes through on a month-to-month basis can have drastic effects on their ability to lose fat, to keep up performance while exercising, as well as water/nutrient absorption on a week-to-week basis. These changes do not happen to men, and they are additional considerations when a woman needs to lose weight. Not that they aren't insurmountable, or that the topic itself isn't for more advanced athletes, but we can generalize this to say that it is more difficult for women, so I'm not surprised that the gap would widen given those additional constraints. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6846ZTBu08k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6846ZTBu08k

deleted 10y ago
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charlesism 10y ago

We put more pressure on women to diet, and most dietary advice is horse crap. If your diet consists of "low fat" garbage, and a bunch of fruits/grains... you will wind up fat. If more men were lost to the "weight loss" industry, I'm sure they'd be equally as obese.

gaur 10y ago
Every time I look at the US food pyramid I'm blown away by what an obvious unhealthy scam it is. 6 to 11 servings per day from processed grain products? I don't think so. The agriculture department should not be in charge of US nutritional guidelines.

charlesism 10y ago

We put more pressure on women to diet, and most dietary advice is horse crap. If your diet consists of "low fat" garbage, and a bunch of fruits/grain... you will wind up fat.

notacoward 10y ago

Quite a while ago, I worked for a bit in Norway. Almost everyone there seemed fit. When I commented on it, my coworkers said it was kind of an in-joke that Americans came in two types. There's a small minority of younger fitness junkies, who often look unhealthily thin, and then a much larger number of people who are distinctly overweight. I've never seen anything to contradict that "bimodal distribution" idea. It's one reason that I take diet or exercise advice based on what worked for one guy in his twenties with a huge grain of salt (heh). Come back when you're forty, and we'll talk. Better yet, let's try looking at large-scale peer-reviewed studies of what works and what doesn't across ages and genders, instead of spreading anecdotes and flimsy theories.