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It’s easy to become obese in America. These 7 charts explain why

47 points by pmcpinto 8y ago

thomasfedb 8y ago
Seven graphs that could be boiled down to two factors - more food, more sugar - shoved in your face, and if you dare get fat it's your fault!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bitwize 8y ago
  Well, obviously it's your fault if you get fat. Any Hackernews oughta know by now that they should be eating a strict paleo diet, with ingredients sourced from farmers they know personally and cooked at home with the copious free time they have after commuting an hour each way between SV and the exurbs to work their cushy job building JS webshit for a YC-backed startup.
  - draw_down 8y ago
    Jesus. Please just stop posting.
  - gepi79 8y ago
    > should be eating a strict paleo diet This seems to be a typical US american thing as well and why it is easy to become obese and unhealthy in the USA. Tales of evil sugar and tales of good healthy high fat high protein diets with much animal products. Worldwide scientific experts warn against much sugar and much fat and much animal products (high fat, high protein).
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Exactly. American diet is excessive is people try to fix that by switching another excessive diet. Eat less, eat better foods. It's that simole. You don't need a fancy diet with a name.
      - gepi79 8y ago
        I agree although the healthiest diet has a name: vegan or better whole food plant based diet. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/vid... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/vid...
        maxxxxx 8y ago
        There are a ton of healthy diets. You can pick pretty much any diet that is not the American standard diet and you will be fine.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  Unless you are being force fed in a very literal sense, There is no person responsible for your dietary intake other than yourself. It is true that the temptations of heavily-marketed unhealthy food are stronger than they were in the past. This does not mean that it is not your fault if you get fat. Assuming your sarcasm is genuine, I find your particular line of thought to be very endemic of a particularly damaging variety of the victimhood mentality.
  - byproxy 8y ago
    I can only speak for myself, but when I was younger I never equated what I was eating to what my health was like. I really did eat whatever was prepared/purchased for me. I also did unwise things like placing a microwave burrito between to small microwave pizzas when I was feeling really hungry (not too often, mind). Never did I think "this is gonna make me fat!", instead "this is gonna taste good!" Well, I'd say poor youth habits are where all this begins and they can be tough to break. Little by little I started minding my nutrition and started losing weight. I always read the nutrition labeling, now...to the point where it might seem obsessive to an observer. Not that I'm the paragon of health and fitness, but I at least pay attention to what's going in my body - both good and bad.
belltaco 8y ago
Why doesn't the article talk about corn and meat subsidies. While meat by itself doesn't fuel obesity as much as carbs, most people typically pair with high fat and high carb foods. The decision usually is between a cheap meat based meal and a non-meat based meal, and since meat is as cheap or cheaper than vegetables, it gets picked. Also, broccoli has more protein per calorie than beef.
- tcfunk 8y ago
  > Also, broccoli has more protein per calorie than beef. It looks like this might be a myth. I'd never heard this claim before so decided to do some googling. However, I am surprised to learn that broccoli has a substantial amount of protein, regardless of whether or not it's "more than beef".
  - injb 8y ago
    You're right to be skeptical - statements like that ignore bioavailability. You won't absorb anything like 100% of the protein from broccoli.
    - mikehotel 8y ago
      Lower bioavailability in plant sources of protein does not seem to hinder their ability to help maintain positive nitrogen balance, a key to building muscle mass. Read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6686252/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6686252/ Via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1ajCmi1jk&feature=share https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1ajCmi1jk&feature=share
  - Isamu 8y ago
    Could be the "per calorie" qualifier - you'd need to eat a large pile of broccoli, since beef often has a lot of calories in fat.
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    This is old vegetable-vs-animal proteins issue. Non-animal proteins don't contain all aminoacids for the human body to be able to absorb it. Only meat & diary products naturally do. What you can do, and vegetarians/vegans have been doing, is to pair it with another plant product that is also non-complete, but has a different composition of these amino acids. Mixed together, they end up providing some sort of complete protein (meaning you have to know what to mix with what, in what ratio). Or just mix it with some animal protein. That's why broccoli is dense with protein, but most if not all just goes through your body, depending what you consume it with. This is my fitness-guy understanding, please correct me if it's incorrect.
wallflower 8y ago
> In 1800, the average person consumed approximately 22.4 grams of sugar each day (10.2 kg per year). In 1900, the average person consumed approximately 112 grams of sugar each day (40.8 kg per year). In 2009, 50 per cent of Americans consumed approximately 227 grams of sugar each day - equating to 81.6 kg per year. The seminal event for increasing per-capita sugar intake was the introduction of Coca Cola/soda. http://www.divineeatingout.com/food-1/sugar-consumption-now-vs-100-years-ago http://www.divineeatingout.com/food-1/sugar-consumption-now-... If you aren't familiar with the tragedy of sugar on traditional Native Americans, introduction of processed American foods has created an epidemic on reservation. "Type II Diabetes, the Modern Epidemic of American Indians" https://anthropology.ua.edu/bindon/ant570/Papers/King/king.htm https://anthropology.ua.edu/bindon/ant570/Papers/King/king.h... Christopher McDougall's book "Natural Born Heroes" is about the heroes of Crete during WW2 who were able to fight off the Germans by putting up extraordinary resistance by doing, among other things, hiking for miles and miles over treacherous territory for 20 hours straight. It makes an argument that a paleo-based diet is the reason why they were able to do it. With this diet, they were able to run and evade for long distances without fatigue. Meats and other proteins provide a sustainable, longer-lasting source of energy in contrast to the spike of sugar. https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Born-Heroes-Mastering-Endurance/dp/0307742229 https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Born-Heroes-Mastering-Enduran...
- byproxy 8y ago
  81.6kg ...wow, that's a bit over what I weigh. In sugar. I weighed ~113kg at the end of high-school (c. 2005) and the first step I took towards losing weight was switching out regular soda for diet variants. People say 'diet' is still bad[0], but switching definitely cut down on my caloric intake. Slowly, but surely, I started paying more attention to caloric intake...which brings me to where I am, now. [0]: https://examine.com/nutrition/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/ https://examine.com/nutrition/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/
- will_brown 8y ago
  Meats don’t exactly provide energy, they provide calories which is converted into energy through the Krebs Cycle. Protein/carbs/sugar all ultimately will be converted and used by cells as glucose/glucagon. Generally you are correct and protein shouldn’t spike insulin like sugar, but certainly some protein will spike insulin. For example I’ve been experimenting with various proteins in ketosis and even whey isolate spikes my insulin and knocks me out of ketosis. Maybe they weren’t doing paleo diets so much as high fat diets and entering ketosis where the body stops using glucose/glucogon as primary source of energy and begins using ketones for cellular energy.
jacknews 8y ago
Just search "food capitalism", eg https://www.popmatters.com/foodies-guide-to-capitalism-interview-2518372029.html https://www.popmatters.com/foodies-guide-to-capitalism-inter... or https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/a-public-option-for-food https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/a-public-option-for-f... "Food is actually the perfect example of a system in which the presence of a profit motive is having incredibly destructive human consequences. That’s because it introduces a terrible incentive: to sell people the products they’ll get addicted to rather than the products that are good for them. Americans live on junk food; they have terrible diets, with too much sodium, too many calories, too much sugar, and too few fruits and vegetables. "
- bitwize 8y ago
  The market has failed us, so let's take power over food production away from the market and give it to the government. You know, the same government that implemented corn subsidies and told everyone that a low-fat, high-carb diet was a really good idea. Wait, what?
  - jacknews 8y ago
    or just tax unhealhty food ... The proper place of government is to regulate markets, so that they deliver social good, not spiral into self-serving vortices. Adam Smith said roughly this.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      That's just the problem, innit -- if the taxation were applied according to FDA dietary recommendations, the wrong food would be taxed. Assuming that the government will make the problems with food go away with regulatory pressure relies on the assumption that the government is as enlightened about dietary needs as you are (or claim to be). In reality -- even absent the graft rampant in American politics -- that's not the case.
      - jacknews 8y ago
ponderatul 8y ago
Because it's easy is not an excuse. When you say that you become a victim and you lose any agency you might have had over this. But to each his own.
- qntty 8y ago
  What is it exactly that you're refusing to excuse people from?
trollopTheJope 8y ago
On this subject, I recommend The End of Overeating by David Kessler.
sdkjskf 8y ago
" Researchers have pointed out that if Americans actually followed the US dietary guidelines and started to eat the volume and variety of produce health officials recommend, we wouldn’t have nearly enough to meet consumer demand." Compare any American super market's fruit and veggie section to one in Canada, or EU, and this is obviously true. Even Whole Foods' is pathetically small[1]. Seeing how little space there is for F&V, if you imagine doubling the space, the production problem is quite apparent. [1]In Canada, the nearest supermarket to my folks' uses half it's floor space on vegetables and fruits. Grown in California, of course.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  If the demand for these products existed, the market would easily provide them. But why would excess supply be created if no one wants it?
  - danharaj 8y ago
    Agriculture is, like, the least free market.
    - jessriedel 8y ago
      Ignoring your hyperbole, I agree the existence of many distorting subsidies surely affects prices, but the price of all food is low across the board (compared to other industrialized countries). If people wanted to buy the healthy options at the price paid for them in Europe, they would be available.
    - georgeecollins 8y ago
      Right, in the US corn in (Blame Iowa :) ) is super subsidized.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  That's what happens when you subsidize farmers in a few counties in California and eliminate the produce industry nationwide.
codeafin 8y ago
As a non-US person, I used to think "you all just have to stop eating so much" towards those overweight in the US. But after living in the US you start to understand that it really is not easy. In other countries, bread is bread, restaurant food is one serving and the snacks your peers bring in are home-made sweets, or cheese and crackers, etc. In the US, bread is sugary and dense in calories, restaurant food is in two salty-oily servings, and the snacks your peers bring in are donuts and cupcakes. When I first moved to the US and lived as I normally would, I gained weight quickly. It sucked having to involve yourself mentally in something you normally don't have to think about.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Agreed. Bread is really bad in the US. The food culture is also terrible. Snacks are seen as a necessity. Most drinks are super sugary. Portion sizes are way too big. Vegetables always have to be processed beyond recognition, people can't often comprehend that I eat raw cucumber and pepper. Coffee used to be a small cup, now it's a gigantic Starbucks with tons of sugar and flavored syrup. You really have to put up a lot of resistance because if you follow the normal eating patterns you will get fat.
  - antisthenes 8y ago
    A lot of what you said sounds like an argument for 'just eat less'. When I tried to follow a 'normal eating pattern' in the US, it made me physically sick from the amount of food and sugar in the portions, so I had to forcibly reduce the amounts to not feel like garbage every waking day. Maybe people just don't realize how amazing they can feel if they just size down the portions?
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      "Maybe people just don't realize how amazing they can feel if they just size down the portions?" A lot of people seem to be genuinely afraid to not get enough "nutrients" or protein if they eat less. Living in the US for a while totally distorts your sense of the appropriate amount of food to eat. Even the ice cream cones kids are eating here are probably at least three times the size of what I got as kid in Germany. Candy bars are at least double the size.
gepi79 8y ago
> Healthier foods can cost more This is an outrageous lie; although they added the word "can" which is either quickly overseen or makes the statement useless. But arrogant ignorant misleading propaganda is typical for the harmful mainstream media where writers are paid for words and stories and not for content and truth. Unhealthy food and mainstream media are similar in a way. Vegan products are the cheapest products. Vegetables and fruits are cheap if one buys seasonal products. Vegan high carb (e.g. bread, rice,...) and high fat (e.g. oil) products offer always cheap calories. Besides, getting enough calories in the US is not the problem according to the article. Animal products are by far the most expensive and most harmful products. Note: They are also subsidized.
- autocorr 8y ago
  Accusing Vox of a hidden agenda and bad faith really isn't called for. And I don't see how the fact that healthier food, under some circumstances, can cost more, is a controversial statement. The chart for point 4 even supports your point, since meat is the highest cost per 100 g. But I think your comment is misplaced because the points of the article have almost nothing to do with vegan/meat choices. Taking meat out of the American diet would not significantly change the facts presented in the article. This is especially true for point 3, where we consume way, way too much (vegan) soda and (vegan) sugary beverages.
  - gepi79 8y ago
    I do not think that the author of the article has a hidden agenda but mentioning that healthy food can cost more is either misleading or useless. Quote (of a lie): "Instead, there is a range of economic and social factors that make eating enough fruits and vegetables really hard." Of course it "can" cost more if you insist on buying only the most expensive vegan food available. Try to become obese on a cheap healthy whole food plant based diet and rice and potatoes and bread without much added sugar (= normal bread in Europe). The article offers no useful information to the reader and shifts all responsibility to the evil industry and claims that healthy food is too expensive and socially unacceptable and thus out of reach and not a solution. Can you find one benefit of the article that made you smarter or a better person ?
CompelTechnic 8y ago
>Let’s start with cost: As you can see in the chart, when it comes to how many calories you get per dollar, sugar, vegetable oils, and refined grains deliver a higher bang for the buck than fruits and vegetables Somebody shopping with purpose can get cheap healthy food easily, but the chart they give did give me some thought. If you use look at chart they give, fruits and vegetables are actually slightly lower on the $/100g axis, but have a much lower calorie density. This underlines one thing I've thought about: we are kind of too busy to spend all day eating low energy-density foods. The modern lifestlye has a decent amount of pressure to minimize the amount of time spent eating so we can get back to work.
georgeecollins 8y ago
The CDC graph really confuses me. 40% of US men are overweight, 35% are obese, 5% are extremely obese. If I add that up, 80% of American men are overweight. Maybe it is because I live in Los Angeles, and it is really hard to believe that 80% of American men are overweight. Really, 4 out of 5? I get that other parts of the country are different, but I also think BMI is a really crude tool that paints some healthy people as weighing more than they should for their height. But it can be muscle, it can be body type, etc.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  Yep, I'm technically overweight even when I have a 6pack. 185 lbs at 6ft. Ive been lifting for 6 years, and my lowest weight I get is 183lbs, after this I begin to starve and overeat due to how skinny I am. I dont know the solution, but my doctor looked at me and knew I was healthy even though I was technically overweight.
  - jakemoshenko 8y ago
    That sounds like a problem with the definition of overweight, which probably uses BMI. BMI doesn't seem to scale well to athletic builds.
    - georgeecollins 8y ago
      But that is my point: that is how people get to statistics like 80% of American men are overweight. Like the poster above, I am 6'. So I am kind of tall and broad shouldered, due to genetics. If I weigh 185 I am overweight, although I think at that weight I look reasonably trim. Working out eventually makes me weigh more, because muscle weighs more. I have seen papers where people say 'Overweight' people (as defined by BMI) actually have longer life spans than normal BMI people. Keep in mind, some people get to normal BMI via chemotherapy. It is only at Obese and very Obeses that you see negative effects. For the biggest group of American men, this article is implying that they are unhealthy, when the facts are that they are actually healthy. I'm not saying this isn't among the most important health issues in the US. I just think you need a more reasonable standard or a lot of people will just throw up their hands.
MrEfficiency 8y ago
>A variety of healthier foods — especially fruits and vegetables — also need to be made more affordable and readily available to Americans. I was looking for this uninformed and incorrect statement. "Junk Food" and Fast food tends to be between 100-300 Calories Per Dollar. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables are in this same range. This doesnt include that homecooked meals are 200-300% cheaper than junk food. A meal with Chicken Rice and Veggies are closer to 600-700 calories per dollar and have protein and nutrients. There is obviously a time aspect, but that isnt what is discussed in the quote. My expertise is food, source- http://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/ http://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/
- jedberg 8y ago
  > "Junk Food" and Fast food tends to be between 100-300 Calories Per Dollar. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables are in this same range. Is that median or average? Because from my understanding, that may be true at a large supermarket in a wealthy suburb, but at a small corner market in a poor neighborhood, which is often the only market a poor person has access to, the veggies are far more expensive per calorie than junco food, if they even have the fresh fruits and veggies, which they often don’t.
  - MrEfficiency 8y ago
    Junk food ranges from 100 Calories per dollar to 300 calories per dollar. There arent junk foods that score above 400 calories per dollar. They dont exist from 5 years of searching(and if they do, let me know, I would like to study it). Those corner stores will have Apples, Oranges, and Bananas. There is a reason, they are cheap and similar cost to these junk foods. > small corner market in a poor neighborhood, which is often the only market a poor person has access to, the veggies are far more expensive per calorie than junco food This seems like an impossibility. Junk food requires a multiple stage manufacturing process, while vegetables only need to be shipped and sometimes refrigerated. The big thing is to look at the price you pay. Paying 1 dollar for a bag of carrots is cheaper than a 15 dollar tray of mixed veggies. As previously mentioned, if you have ideas for low cost foods, let me know, we study this for Efficiency Is Everything.
fallingfrog 8y ago
I think there is another factor too- there are a lot more double income households than there have been in the past, which leaves less time for cooking, so people just eat out. People are also under a lot of stress due to lack of job security, more part time or gig work, weekend and evening work, etc, which leads to stress eating. Communities are fragmenting as people have to move every couple years to find new work, or as they substitute online relationships for real ones (who has the time?), which again leads to stress eating. No doubt everything in the article is a factor too, but we are undergoing wider cultural changes that you have to take into effect. By the way, when I talk about "double income households" I'm not saying that women shouldn't be equal in the workforce, I'm saying that maybe men and women should both be working somewhat shorter hours so that they have time for their home lives.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  I hope that as time goes on more people are realizing the diseconomies that having a dual-income household creates. Chronic stress, outsourcing the maintenance of the household (cars, going out to eat, etc), higher tax brackets, childcare, a lot of it adds up faster than you think. Ambition for more fuels the dual income dream. Misplaced ambition is a killer. Another reason to save a large fraction of your income- to pay off the house quickly and get back down to a single income household, or have both people go part time. Very liberating. The big thing working against it though, is that land and luxuries are positional goods, and people will continue to work hard in order to outbid eachother in order to have more of these positional goods. This is why I'm afraid the dual-income trend will not reverse.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Most people learn to give up on chasing luxuries sooner or later. The one modern problem is "land". It's not even just that. Land is actually very plentiful, the problem is the small amount of land available in desired places. And it's again not what it looks like, because desirability is not some intrinsic characteristic of the land anymore, instead the land is desirable because for some reason all the employment opportunities are there. I really don't understand how employment got to be so much geographically restricted. But it is about this that people are fighting at current positional markets.
JDiculous 8y ago
Americans are fat because 1. Poor diet and eating too much 2. lack of exercise driven by car-dependence and sprawled out unwalkable car-centric cities. Commuting in a car 1 hour per day and sitting in an office for 8 hours doesn't exactly foster a healthy lifestyle unless one goes out of their way to be active (eg. gym), sacrificing their already sparse free time. This is part of the reason obesity is much lower in cities like NYC where people walk/bike to get around.
corerius 8y ago
It certainly doesn't help that more people type for a living, look at moving pixels on a screen for fun, sit in a car for an hour a day. The US diet seems natural to me. I think it's the result of 100 years of evolution in food design and the fact that your body wants fat-adding easy to acquire calories. Fritos didn't grow on trees. A more interesting question is to compare why countries at an equal level of wealth and technical development aren't the same. Ethnicity? Culture? Legal climate?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sametmax 8y ago
It's also about taste. Fruits and vegetables in the US taste terrible. How do you want a kid to chose this sad dry dirt stick they call carrots when they got a deliciously engineered Maillard molecules stacked burger next to it ? Every time I go to the US, I have to spend crazy money at Whole food to get something only near the quality of what I get to regular supermarkets in France. And in my country, I try to avoid regular supermarkets because there is no joy in eating their fresh good. Of course you will eat a kit kat if you have to pay 3 times the price to get something healthy, and 5 times to get something satisfying. Plus remember, this tops the effort that is already required in choosing what to buy and cook it. It's an impossible game to win for many American. And it's a vicious circle. Being fed with crap lead to less energy, more disease, and worse mood, and so you have even less chance to catch on life opportunities. And less chance to ever eat healthy again.
- mikehotel 8y ago
  Bland fruits and veggies are a result of agribusiness efforts to optimize for shelf life and visual appeal. One strategy to address this is to expand the types of fruits and veggies in your diet. Explore a local ethnic grocery to try a variety of flavors, aromas and textures. The complaint may change to sensory overload.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    > Explore a local ethnic grocery to try a variety of flavors, aromas and textures. That won't scale. I have a fine strategy for eating proper food: not leaving in the US.

47 points by pmcpinto 8y ago

Seven graphs that could be boiled down to two factors - more food, more sugar - shoved in your face, and if you dare get fat it's your fault!

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 8y ago
Well, obviously it's your fault if you get fat. Any Hackernews oughta know by now that they should be eating a strict paleo diet, with ingredients sourced from farmers they know personally and cooked at home with the copious free time they have after commuting an hour each way between SV and the exurbs to work their cushy job building JS webshit for a YC-backed startup.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Jesus. Please just stop posting.
- gepi79 8y ago
  > should be eating a strict paleo diet This seems to be a typical US american thing as well and why it is easy to become obese and unhealthy in the USA. Tales of evil sugar and tales of good healthy high fat high protein diets with much animal products. Worldwide scientific experts warn against much sugar and much fat and much animal products (high fat, high protein).
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Exactly. American diet is excessive is people try to fix that by switching another excessive diet. Eat less, eat better foods. It's that simole. You don't need a fancy diet with a name.
    - gepi79 8y ago
      I agree although the healthiest diet has a name: vegan or better whole food plant based diet. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/vid... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/vid...
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        There are a ton of healthy diets. You can pick pretty much any diet that is not the American standard diet and you will be fine.
CompelTechnic 8y ago
Unless you are being force fed in a very literal sense, There is no person responsible for your dietary intake other than yourself. It is true that the temptations of heavily-marketed unhealthy food are stronger than they were in the past. This does not mean that it is not your fault if you get fat. Assuming your sarcasm is genuine, I find your particular line of thought to be very endemic of a particularly damaging variety of the victimhood mentality.
- byproxy 8y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but when I was younger I never equated what I was eating to what my health was like. I really did eat whatever was prepared/purchased for me. I also did unwise things like placing a microwave burrito between to small microwave pizzas when I was feeling really hungry (not too often, mind). Never did I think "this is gonna make me fat!", instead "this is gonna taste good!" Well, I'd say poor youth habits are where all this begins and they can be tough to break. Little by little I started minding my nutrition and started losing weight. I always read the nutrition labeling, now...to the point where it might seem obsessive to an observer. Not that I'm the paragon of health and fitness, but I at least pay attention to what's going in my body - both good and bad.

belltaco 8y ago

Why doesn't the article talk about corn and meat subsidies. While meat by itself doesn't fuel obesity as much as carbs, most people typically pair with high fat and high carb foods. The decision usually is between a cheap meat based meal and a non-meat based meal, and since meat is as cheap or cheaper than vegetables, it gets picked. Also, broccoli has more protein per calorie than beef.

tcfunk 8y ago
> Also, broccoli has more protein per calorie than beef. It looks like this might be a myth. I'd never heard this claim before so decided to do some googling. However, I am surprised to learn that broccoli has a substantial amount of protein, regardless of whether or not it's "more than beef".
- injb 8y ago
  You're right to be skeptical - statements like that ignore bioavailability. You won't absorb anything like 100% of the protein from broccoli.
  - mikehotel 8y ago
    Lower bioavailability in plant sources of protein does not seem to hinder their ability to help maintain positive nitrogen balance, a key to building muscle mass. Read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6686252/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6686252/ Via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1ajCmi1jk&feature=share https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1ajCmi1jk&feature=share
- Isamu 8y ago
  Could be the "per calorie" qualifier - you'd need to eat a large pile of broccoli, since beef often has a lot of calories in fat.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  This is old vegetable-vs-animal proteins issue. Non-animal proteins don't contain all aminoacids for the human body to be able to absorb it. Only meat & diary products naturally do. What you can do, and vegetarians/vegans have been doing, is to pair it with another plant product that is also non-complete, but has a different composition of these amino acids. Mixed together, they end up providing some sort of complete protein (meaning you have to know what to mix with what, in what ratio). Or just mix it with some animal protein. That's why broccoli is dense with protein, but most if not all just goes through your body, depending what you consume it with. This is my fitness-guy understanding, please correct me if it's incorrect.

wallflower 8y ago

> In 1800, the average person consumed approximately 22.4 grams of sugar each day (10.2 kg per year). In 1900, the average person consumed approximately 112 grams of sugar each day (40.8 kg per year). In 2009, 50 per cent of Americans consumed approximately 227 grams of sugar each day - equating to 81.6 kg per year. The seminal event for increasing per-capita sugar intake was the introduction of Coca Cola/soda. http://www.divineeatingout.com/food-1/sugar-consumption-now-vs-100-years-ago http://www.divineeatingout.com/food-1/sugar-consumption-now-... If you aren't familiar with the tragedy of sugar on traditional Native Americans, introduction of processed American foods has created an epidemic on reservation. "Type II Diabetes, the Modern Epidemic of American Indians" https://anthropology.ua.edu/bindon/ant570/Papers/King/king.htm https://anthropology.ua.edu/bindon/ant570/Papers/King/king.h... Christopher McDougall's book "Natural Born Heroes" is about the heroes of Crete during WW2 who were able to fight off the Germans by putting up extraordinary resistance by doing, among other things, hiking for miles and miles over treacherous territory for 20 hours straight. It makes an argument that a paleo-based diet is the reason why they were able to do it. With this diet, they were able to run and evade for long distances without fatigue. Meats and other proteins provide a sustainable, longer-lasting source of energy in contrast to the spike of sugar. https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Born-Heroes-Mastering-Endurance/dp/0307742229 https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Born-Heroes-Mastering-Enduran...

byproxy 8y ago
81.6kg ...wow, that's a bit over what I weigh. In sugar. I weighed ~113kg at the end of high-school (c. 2005) and the first step I took towards losing weight was switching out regular soda for diet variants. People say 'diet' is still bad[0], but switching definitely cut down on my caloric intake. Slowly, but surely, I started paying more attention to caloric intake...which brings me to where I am, now. [0]: https://examine.com/nutrition/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/ https://examine.com/nutrition/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/
will_brown 8y ago
Meats don’t exactly provide energy, they provide calories which is converted into energy through the Krebs Cycle. Protein/carbs/sugar all ultimately will be converted and used by cells as glucose/glucagon. Generally you are correct and protein shouldn’t spike insulin like sugar, but certainly some protein will spike insulin. For example I’ve been experimenting with various proteins in ketosis and even whey isolate spikes my insulin and knocks me out of ketosis. Maybe they weren’t doing paleo diets so much as high fat diets and entering ketosis where the body stops using glucose/glucogon as primary source of energy and begins using ketones for cellular energy.

jacknews 8y ago

Just search "food capitalism", eg https://www.popmatters.com/foodies-guide-to-capitalism-interview-2518372029.html https://www.popmatters.com/foodies-guide-to-capitalism-inter... or https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/a-public-option-for-food https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/a-public-option-for-f... "Food is actually the perfect example of a system in which the presence of a profit motive is having incredibly destructive human consequences. That’s because it introduces a terrible incentive: to sell people the products they’ll get addicted to rather than the products that are good for them. Americans live on junk food; they have terrible diets, with too much sodium, too many calories, too much sugar, and too few fruits and vegetables. "

bitwize 8y ago
The market has failed us, so let's take power over food production away from the market and give it to the government. You know, the same government that implemented corn subsidies and told everyone that a low-fat, high-carb diet was a really good idea. Wait, what?
- jacknews 8y ago
  or just tax unhealhty food ... The proper place of government is to regulate markets, so that they deliver social good, not spiral into self-serving vortices. Adam Smith said roughly this.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    That's just the problem, innit -- if the taxation were applied according to FDA dietary recommendations, the wrong food would be taxed. Assuming that the government will make the problems with food go away with regulatory pressure relies on the assumption that the government is as enlightened about dietary needs as you are (or claim to be). In reality -- even absent the graft rampant in American politics -- that's not the case.
    - jacknews 8y ago

ponderatul 8y ago

Because it's easy is not an excuse. When you say that you become a victim and you lose any agency you might have had over this. But to each his own.

qntty 8y ago
What is it exactly that you're refusing to excuse people from?

trollopTheJope 8y ago

On this subject, I recommend The End of Overeating by David Kessler.

sdkjskf 8y ago

" Researchers have pointed out that if Americans actually followed the US dietary guidelines and started to eat the volume and variety of produce health officials recommend, we wouldn’t have nearly enough to meet consumer demand." Compare any American super market's fruit and veggie section to one in Canada, or EU, and this is obviously true. Even Whole Foods' is pathetically small[1]. Seeing how little space there is for F&V, if you imagine doubling the space, the production problem is quite apparent. [1]In Canada, the nearest supermarket to my folks' uses half it's floor space on vegetables and fruits. Grown in California, of course.

jessriedel 8y ago
If the demand for these products existed, the market would easily provide them. But why would excess supply be created if no one wants it?
- danharaj 8y ago
  Agriculture is, like, the least free market.
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    Ignoring your hyperbole, I agree the existence of many distorting subsidies surely affects prices, but the price of all food is low across the board (compared to other industrialized countries). If people wanted to buy the healthy options at the price paid for them in Europe, they would be available.
  - georgeecollins 8y ago
    Right, in the US corn in (Blame Iowa :) ) is super subsidized.
Spooky23 8y ago
That's what happens when you subsidize farmers in a few counties in California and eliminate the produce industry nationwide.

codeafin 8y ago

As a non-US person, I used to think "you all just have to stop eating so much" towards those overweight in the US. But after living in the US you start to understand that it really is not easy. In other countries, bread is bread, restaurant food is one serving and the snacks your peers bring in are home-made sweets, or cheese and crackers, etc. In the US, bread is sugary and dense in calories, restaurant food is in two salty-oily servings, and the snacks your peers bring in are donuts and cupcakes. When I first moved to the US and lived as I normally would, I gained weight quickly. It sucked having to involve yourself mentally in something you normally don't have to think about.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Agreed. Bread is really bad in the US. The food culture is also terrible. Snacks are seen as a necessity. Most drinks are super sugary. Portion sizes are way too big. Vegetables always have to be processed beyond recognition, people can't often comprehend that I eat raw cucumber and pepper. Coffee used to be a small cup, now it's a gigantic Starbucks with tons of sugar and flavored syrup. You really have to put up a lot of resistance because if you follow the normal eating patterns you will get fat.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  A lot of what you said sounds like an argument for 'just eat less'. When I tried to follow a 'normal eating pattern' in the US, it made me physically sick from the amount of food and sugar in the portions, so I had to forcibly reduce the amounts to not feel like garbage every waking day. Maybe people just don't realize how amazing they can feel if they just size down the portions?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "Maybe people just don't realize how amazing they can feel if they just size down the portions?" A lot of people seem to be genuinely afraid to not get enough "nutrients" or protein if they eat less. Living in the US for a while totally distorts your sense of the appropriate amount of food to eat. Even the ice cream cones kids are eating here are probably at least three times the size of what I got as kid in Germany. Candy bars are at least double the size.

gepi79 8y ago

> Healthier foods can cost more This is an outrageous lie; although they added the word "can" which is either quickly overseen or makes the statement useless. But arrogant ignorant misleading propaganda is typical for the harmful mainstream media where writers are paid for words and stories and not for content and truth. Unhealthy food and mainstream media are similar in a way. Vegan products are the cheapest products. Vegetables and fruits are cheap if one buys seasonal products. Vegan high carb (e.g. bread, rice,...) and high fat (e.g. oil) products offer always cheap calories. Besides, getting enough calories in the US is not the problem according to the article. Animal products are by far the most expensive and most harmful products. Note: They are also subsidized.

autocorr 8y ago
Accusing Vox of a hidden agenda and bad faith really isn't called for. And I don't see how the fact that healthier food, under some circumstances, can cost more, is a controversial statement. The chart for point 4 even supports your point, since meat is the highest cost per 100 g. But I think your comment is misplaced because the points of the article have almost nothing to do with vegan/meat choices. Taking meat out of the American diet would not significantly change the facts presented in the article. This is especially true for point 3, where we consume way, way too much (vegan) soda and (vegan) sugary beverages.
- gepi79 8y ago
  I do not think that the author of the article has a hidden agenda but mentioning that healthy food can cost more is either misleading or useless. Quote (of a lie): "Instead, there is a range of economic and social factors that make eating enough fruits and vegetables really hard." Of course it "can" cost more if you insist on buying only the most expensive vegan food available. Try to become obese on a cheap healthy whole food plant based diet and rice and potatoes and bread without much added sugar (= normal bread in Europe). The article offers no useful information to the reader and shifts all responsibility to the evil industry and claims that healthy food is too expensive and socially unacceptable and thus out of reach and not a solution. Can you find one benefit of the article that made you smarter or a better person ?

CompelTechnic 8y ago

>Let’s start with cost: As you can see in the chart, when it comes to how many calories you get per dollar, sugar, vegetable oils, and refined grains deliver a higher bang for the buck than fruits and vegetables Somebody shopping with purpose can get cheap healthy food easily, but the chart they give did give me some thought. If you use look at chart they give, fruits and vegetables are actually slightly lower on the $/100g axis, but have a much lower calorie density. This underlines one thing I've thought about: we are kind of too busy to spend all day eating low energy-density foods. The modern lifestlye has a decent amount of pressure to minimize the amount of time spent eating so we can get back to work.

georgeecollins 8y ago

The CDC graph really confuses me. 40% of US men are overweight, 35% are obese, 5% are extremely obese. If I add that up, 80% of American men are overweight. Maybe it is because I live in Los Angeles, and it is really hard to believe that 80% of American men are overweight. Really, 4 out of 5? I get that other parts of the country are different, but I also think BMI is a really crude tool that paints some healthy people as weighing more than they should for their height. But it can be muscle, it can be body type, etc.

MrEfficiency 8y ago
Yep, I'm technically overweight even when I have a 6pack. 185 lbs at 6ft. Ive been lifting for 6 years, and my lowest weight I get is 183lbs, after this I begin to starve and overeat due to how skinny I am. I dont know the solution, but my doctor looked at me and knew I was healthy even though I was technically overweight.
- jakemoshenko 8y ago
  That sounds like a problem with the definition of overweight, which probably uses BMI. BMI doesn't seem to scale well to athletic builds.
  - georgeecollins 8y ago
    But that is my point: that is how people get to statistics like 80% of American men are overweight. Like the poster above, I am 6'. So I am kind of tall and broad shouldered, due to genetics. If I weigh 185 I am overweight, although I think at that weight I look reasonably trim. Working out eventually makes me weigh more, because muscle weighs more. I have seen papers where people say 'Overweight' people (as defined by BMI) actually have longer life spans than normal BMI people. Keep in mind, some people get to normal BMI via chemotherapy. It is only at Obese and very Obeses that you see negative effects. For the biggest group of American men, this article is implying that they are unhealthy, when the facts are that they are actually healthy. I'm not saying this isn't among the most important health issues in the US. I just think you need a more reasonable standard or a lot of people will just throw up their hands.

MrEfficiency 8y ago

>A variety of healthier foods — especially fruits and vegetables — also need to be made more affordable and readily available to Americans. I was looking for this uninformed and incorrect statement. "Junk Food" and Fast food tends to be between 100-300 Calories Per Dollar. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables are in this same range. This doesnt include that homecooked meals are 200-300% cheaper than junk food. A meal with Chicken Rice and Veggies are closer to 600-700 calories per dollar and have protein and nutrients. There is obviously a time aspect, but that isnt what is discussed in the quote. My expertise is food, source- http://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/ http://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/

jedberg 8y ago
> "Junk Food" and Fast food tends to be between 100-300 Calories Per Dollar. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables are in this same range. Is that median or average? Because from my understanding, that may be true at a large supermarket in a wealthy suburb, but at a small corner market in a poor neighborhood, which is often the only market a poor person has access to, the veggies are far more expensive per calorie than junco food, if they even have the fresh fruits and veggies, which they often don’t.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  Junk food ranges from 100 Calories per dollar to 300 calories per dollar. There arent junk foods that score above 400 calories per dollar. They dont exist from 5 years of searching(and if they do, let me know, I would like to study it). Those corner stores will have Apples, Oranges, and Bananas. There is a reason, they are cheap and similar cost to these junk foods. > small corner market in a poor neighborhood, which is often the only market a poor person has access to, the veggies are far more expensive per calorie than junco food This seems like an impossibility. Junk food requires a multiple stage manufacturing process, while vegetables only need to be shipped and sometimes refrigerated. The big thing is to look at the price you pay. Paying 1 dollar for a bag of carrots is cheaper than a 15 dollar tray of mixed veggies. As previously mentioned, if you have ideas for low cost foods, let me know, we study this for Efficiency Is Everything.

fallingfrog 8y ago

I think there is another factor too- there are a lot more double income households than there have been in the past, which leaves less time for cooking, so people just eat out. People are also under a lot of stress due to lack of job security, more part time or gig work, weekend and evening work, etc, which leads to stress eating. Communities are fragmenting as people have to move every couple years to find new work, or as they substitute online relationships for real ones (who has the time?), which again leads to stress eating. No doubt everything in the article is a factor too, but we are undergoing wider cultural changes that you have to take into effect. By the way, when I talk about "double income households" I'm not saying that women shouldn't be equal in the workforce, I'm saying that maybe men and women should both be working somewhat shorter hours so that they have time for their home lives.

CompelTechnic 8y ago
I hope that as time goes on more people are realizing the diseconomies that having a dual-income household creates. Chronic stress, outsourcing the maintenance of the household (cars, going out to eat, etc), higher tax brackets, childcare, a lot of it adds up faster than you think. Ambition for more fuels the dual income dream. Misplaced ambition is a killer. Another reason to save a large fraction of your income- to pay off the house quickly and get back down to a single income household, or have both people go part time. Very liberating. The big thing working against it though, is that land and luxuries are positional goods, and people will continue to work hard in order to outbid eachother in order to have more of these positional goods. This is why I'm afraid the dual-income trend will not reverse.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  Most people learn to give up on chasing luxuries sooner or later. The one modern problem is "land". It's not even just that. Land is actually very plentiful, the problem is the small amount of land available in desired places. And it's again not what it looks like, because desirability is not some intrinsic characteristic of the land anymore, instead the land is desirable because for some reason all the employment opportunities are there. I really don't understand how employment got to be so much geographically restricted. But it is about this that people are fighting at current positional markets.

JDiculous 8y ago

Americans are fat because 1. Poor diet and eating too much 2. lack of exercise driven by car-dependence and sprawled out unwalkable car-centric cities. Commuting in a car 1 hour per day and sitting in an office for 8 hours doesn't exactly foster a healthy lifestyle unless one goes out of their way to be active (eg. gym), sacrificing their already sparse free time. This is part of the reason obesity is much lower in cities like NYC where people walk/bike to get around.

corerius 8y ago

It certainly doesn't help that more people type for a living, look at moving pixels on a screen for fun, sit in a car for an hour a day. The US diet seems natural to me. I think it's the result of 100 years of evolution in food design and the fact that your body wants fat-adding easy to acquire calories. Fritos didn't grow on trees. A more interesting question is to compare why countries at an equal level of wealth and technical development aren't the same. Ethnicity? Culture? Legal climate?

deleted 8y ago

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sametmax 8y ago

It's also about taste. Fruits and vegetables in the US taste terrible. How do you want a kid to chose this sad dry dirt stick they call carrots when they got a deliciously engineered Maillard molecules stacked burger next to it ? Every time I go to the US, I have to spend crazy money at Whole food to get something only near the quality of what I get to regular supermarkets in France. And in my country, I try to avoid regular supermarkets because there is no joy in eating their fresh good. Of course you will eat a kit kat if you have to pay 3 times the price to get something healthy, and 5 times to get something satisfying. Plus remember, this tops the effort that is already required in choosing what to buy and cook it. It's an impossible game to win for many American. And it's a vicious circle. Being fed with crap lead to less energy, more disease, and worse mood, and so you have even less chance to catch on life opportunities. And less chance to ever eat healthy again.

mikehotel 8y ago
Bland fruits and veggies are a result of agribusiness efforts to optimize for shelf life and visual appeal. One strategy to address this is to expand the types of fruits and veggies in your diet. Explore a local ethnic grocery to try a variety of flavors, aromas and textures. The complaint may change to sensory overload.
- sametmax 8y ago
  > Explore a local ethnic grocery to try a variety of flavors, aromas and textures. That won't scale. I have a fine strategy for eating proper food: not leaving in the US.