4 ms·

Interesting the article does not attribute any of the obesity to lack of exercise. It doesnt matter if your live in poverty or you are well-off, if you consume

Interesting the article does not attribute any of the obesity to lack of exercise. It doesnt matter if your live in poverty or you are well-off, if you consume more calories than your burn day-over-day, you are going to gain weight.

lgeorget 7y ago
Exercising is very beneficial for your health for a lot of reasons but it cannot prevent overweight without a proper diet. The role of exercising has been exaggerated by Coca-Cola and other junk food sellers to shift the blame away from them: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=0 https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-sc....
- bena 7y ago
  As I've heard it: "You cannot outrun your mouth"
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    For example, jogging at a steady pace for an hour will burn around 700 calories (give or take some, depending on weight). If you stop at a McDonalds at the end of that run and have a Quarter Pounder with fries, you're now at a net of +70 calories from where you started.
    - decebalus1 7y ago
      Mm... yes and no. Exercising will trigger EPOC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_co... which will make you burn more than 700 calories overall. But I agree with you, the calorie to volume/satisfaction of the fast food meal is a horrible deal.
- ldoughty 7y ago
  Calories in, calories out. Important note: calories are generally estimations... calorie counting apps even more so.... so if you're not careful your 3 strips of bacon (listed, 160 calories)) can easily be 250 calories. The listed calories on many cooked foods are "average expectations" of that kind of product with "average cooking". Who defines average? No idea. But I advise people interested in loosing weight to research food labels and assume them as "ballpark" values. Failure to do so, on top of missing the extra tablespoon or 3 of coffee creamer can easily wipe out your 100-200 calorie deficit you planned. Also, look at regulating your blood sugar (diets like keto help), or, if you like carbs, do smaller meals over the day -- this reduces the spikes in blood sugar that trigger hunger.
  - maximente 7y ago
    not so much - we know that e.g. refined carbs trigger metabolic reactions differently than e.g. pure fats. the gall bladder isn't really used when carbs are ingested, but is when fats are, so there are clearly metabolic consequences. so while pedantically might be true, the mechanism of the calories does matter a lot.
    - User23 7y ago
      Also, ethanol has no storage form, but it's definitely calories in. Of course most people don't drink ethanol in a fasted state without any other macronutrients, so they still get fat since the body preferentially metabolizes the ethanol and stores the other stuff.
- joefourier 7y ago
  That's simply not true. With intense enough exercise, a diet that would cause obesity among ordinary people will leave you extremely underweight with not enough energy to get through the day. If you look at athletes such as competitive swimmers and cyclists, you can find diets of 8,000 calories a day and more. Individuals such as Antarctica explorer had to consume massive amounts of butter, sugar, chocolate and animal fat to get through the day due to the intense amount of physical activity. Of course, it is much easier and practical to eat fewer and healthier foods rather than exercise to such extreme amounts.
  - lgeorget 7y ago
    That's not my point though. It's not contradictory to say "intense exercising can cause starving if you don't eat enough" and "exercising cannot prevent overweight without a proper diet".
    - joefourier 7y ago
      How is it not contradictory? That intense exercising is doing just that, preventing you from being overweight even if you are consuming tremendous amounts of calories and unhealthy foods. You don't have to go too extreme either - take an average overweight person and put him through a certain amount of physical exercise - say, cycling multiple hours a day. He will lose weight with his original unhealthy diet, which had lead to him being initially overweight.
      - lgeorget 7y ago
        "cycling multiple hours a day" Well, I wasn't imagining _that_ level of exercising either. That's already sounds quite extreme to me. My initial point was the following: just doing more sport is not going to help if you don't even know how much and how badly you eat. You need to reflect on your diet first, and then exercise, even if Coca-Cola wants you to believe that you can drink as much soda as you want without consequences, and that it's your own fault if you get fat afterwards.
- module0000 7y ago
  The idea that exercise cannot prevent obesity without a proper diet is very misleading. Yes, if someone eats 7k calories and does not train like an olympian, they are going to gain weight. However, you can consume 5k calories a day whilst exercising(properly) 5 days a week, and remain very trim and "cut" as the term goes. Proper exercise is not popular though, because if it was easy....well everyone would do it. The idea that "you have to burn more calories exercising than you eat" is 100% false. The calories you burn while exercising make up less than half of the calories you burn because of exercising. Lean muscle mass maintenance caloric requirements exceed adipose tissue requirements by an order of magnitude. Simplified: the more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories your body will burn with zero effort to support that muscle mass. That said, a proper diet is a great idea for a ton of reasons. I replied only to point out that proper exercise carries a lot of weight(no pun intended).
  - lgeorget 7y ago
    I understand your point but food is not just a sum of calories. Not all food is metabolised the same. Athletes consume a lot of calories but avoid junk food. Edit: as I read your comment again, actually, I think we mostly agree.
timbit42 7y ago
The vast majority of weight gain is due to food, not a lack of exercise. If you eat a McDonald's cheeseburger, it takes an hour of exercise to burn it off.
- ben509 7y ago
  Worse, you are burning the cheeseburger off, and the fries, and most of the drink. There are just a few extra calories that you don't burn off, and that adds up over the course of a year. So the weight problem is technically an eating problem, but it's subject to unconscious behaviors and perceptual biases that you have to control over a long period of time.
Kaiyou 7y ago
Exercise helps with getting in shape, but does next to nothing for losing weight.
- maxk42 7y ago
  What exercise does is give you margin. If you're naturally inclined to eat more than your basal metabolic rate by 500 calories per day then it's trivial to maintain your weight if you're getting two hours of walking in per day. That's not even exercise -- that's just movement. But our lives have become so sedentary that this is a huge task for some people. So many people sit in a chair or stand stationary all day long for their jobs.
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    It's not surprising, though, what with being told to not run in the hallways and sit down in your chair all throughout school.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  Interestingly I find this personally to be almost completely untrue. In particular. When I am exercising I'm generally less likely to be bored and sitting around snacking and eating. Running, paddling, hiking, biking especially with friends take up a lot of time. Recently I haven't been excercising and so am sitting around (and yes, eating a lot more). After exercising my appetite is different. I'm hungry in a different way (I tend to eat a bit healthier etc). So after a lot of exercise I don't want the bag of Doritos or highly processed junk food. Being in shape helps tremendously with things like mobility. Even basic core strength. I've seen folks get VERY sedentary and then start eating a lot more because of mobility issues. I'm convinced in part this is because when you have mobility issues you don't have as many other things to do with your time. I have worked outside in less developed countries for a few months at a time (ie, no desk work). I ate a relatively poor diet (lots of carbs etc) but boy was I in GREAT shape. The truth is, if you spend the day outside working with your body you WILL be fit. Again, you often don't snack as much as well, it's three meals and then if you are working there isn't usually much food that's easy to snack on.
broahmed 7y ago
It's implied in a couple of places: "Their lifestyles tend to be sedentary because of their built environments, and their food tends to be served in large portions." "Employers can help, too, by providing mental and physical wellness programs, as well as discounts and subsidies for physical activity programs. These investments are inherently worthwhile, because employees who exercise tend to have better concentration and work output."
kec 7y ago
Exercise really doesn't matter all that much for weight loss, your body has evolved to be crazy efficient (and commonly available food is incredibly calorie dense). A 200lb man will burn about 200 Calories running a mile, which is on the order of one coke, or two slices of bread. Exercise can give you a bit of an edge and increase your rate of weight loss, but it doesn't do much if you're eating in excess.
UK-AL 7y ago
I highly recommend exercise, but when you look at how much calaries exercise burns off it is tiny. Eating less calaries is the only real way.
ademup 7y ago
"Calories in vs Calories" out is grossly and wrongly oversimplified to the point of likely being harmful. Consider this simple point: the Metabolic Energy of Almonds can vary by as much as 25% simply by the way they are processed. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2016/FO/C6FO01076H#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2016/FO/C6FO0...
08-15 7y ago
The article doesn't attribute anything to anything, even its recommendations make no sense, like planting legumes instead of soybeans... That's terrible reporting, possibly worse than useless. That said, the first law of thermodynamics continues to apply: calories in - calories out == weight gained. The real question is, what makes people overeat to an unhealthy extent? The feedback through leptin should stabilize your weight at slightly above normal by suppressing appetite, but somehow it doesn't seem to work? (Or not anymore?) Why is that? Lofty talk about unspecified "nutrients" doesn't help anyone. (I think it's probably fructose, especially when not accompanied by fiber. But I don't know enough detail to convince anyone.)
- mcphage 7y ago
  > calories in - calories out Calories in - (calories used + calories excreted). Of course, calories in = calories in food x extraction efficiency, and already the simple formula has become filled with inconsistent values.
  - 08-15 7y ago
    You're wrong. Calories are a measure of physiologically usable energy and already take extraction efficiency into account. Even if you had a point, which you don't, the first law of thermodynamics would still apply, and leptin would still provide negative feed back.
    - mcphage 7y ago
      > Even if you had a point, which you don't My point is simple: "calories in" is unmeasurable. It depends on the food you eat, how it's prepared, what else you eat with it, etc. "Calories out" is unmeasurable. It's based on what you do, how you move, how your body processes what you eat, etc. The first law of thermodynamics can apply all the live long day, but the statement "calories in minus calories out" is useless.
jagannathtech 7y ago
Fasting is the answer. It also resets craving for sugar.

lgeorget 7y ago

Exercising is very beneficial for your health for a lot of reasons but it cannot prevent overweight without a proper diet. The role of exercising has been exaggerated by Coca-Cola and other junk food sellers to shift the blame away from them: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=0 https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-sc....

bena 7y ago
As I've heard it: "You cannot outrun your mouth"
- crooked-v 7y ago
  For example, jogging at a steady pace for an hour will burn around 700 calories (give or take some, depending on weight). If you stop at a McDonalds at the end of that run and have a Quarter Pounder with fries, you're now at a net of +70 calories from where you started.
  - decebalus1 7y ago
    Mm... yes and no. Exercising will trigger EPOC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_co... which will make you burn more than 700 calories overall. But I agree with you, the calorie to volume/satisfaction of the fast food meal is a horrible deal.
ldoughty 7y ago
Calories in, calories out. Important note: calories are generally estimations... calorie counting apps even more so.... so if you're not careful your 3 strips of bacon (listed, 160 calories)) can easily be 250 calories. The listed calories on many cooked foods are "average expectations" of that kind of product with "average cooking". Who defines average? No idea. But I advise people interested in loosing weight to research food labels and assume them as "ballpark" values. Failure to do so, on top of missing the extra tablespoon or 3 of coffee creamer can easily wipe out your 100-200 calorie deficit you planned. Also, look at regulating your blood sugar (diets like keto help), or, if you like carbs, do smaller meals over the day -- this reduces the spikes in blood sugar that trigger hunger.
- maximente 7y ago
  not so much - we know that e.g. refined carbs trigger metabolic reactions differently than e.g. pure fats. the gall bladder isn't really used when carbs are ingested, but is when fats are, so there are clearly metabolic consequences. so while pedantically might be true, the mechanism of the calories does matter a lot.
  - User23 7y ago
    Also, ethanol has no storage form, but it's definitely calories in. Of course most people don't drink ethanol in a fasted state without any other macronutrients, so they still get fat since the body preferentially metabolizes the ethanol and stores the other stuff.
joefourier 7y ago
That's simply not true. With intense enough exercise, a diet that would cause obesity among ordinary people will leave you extremely underweight with not enough energy to get through the day. If you look at athletes such as competitive swimmers and cyclists, you can find diets of 8,000 calories a day and more. Individuals such as Antarctica explorer had to consume massive amounts of butter, sugar, chocolate and animal fat to get through the day due to the intense amount of physical activity. Of course, it is much easier and practical to eat fewer and healthier foods rather than exercise to such extreme amounts.
- lgeorget 7y ago
  That's not my point though. It's not contradictory to say "intense exercising can cause starving if you don't eat enough" and "exercising cannot prevent overweight without a proper diet".
  - joefourier 7y ago
    How is it not contradictory? That intense exercising is doing just that, preventing you from being overweight even if you are consuming tremendous amounts of calories and unhealthy foods. You don't have to go too extreme either - take an average overweight person and put him through a certain amount of physical exercise - say, cycling multiple hours a day. He will lose weight with his original unhealthy diet, which had lead to him being initially overweight.
    - lgeorget 7y ago
      "cycling multiple hours a day" Well, I wasn't imagining _that_ level of exercising either. That's already sounds quite extreme to me. My initial point was the following: just doing more sport is not going to help if you don't even know how much and how badly you eat. You need to reflect on your diet first, and then exercise, even if Coca-Cola wants you to believe that you can drink as much soda as you want without consequences, and that it's your own fault if you get fat afterwards.
module0000 7y ago
The idea that exercise cannot prevent obesity without a proper diet is very misleading. Yes, if someone eats 7k calories and does not train like an olympian, they are going to gain weight. However, you can consume 5k calories a day whilst exercising(properly) 5 days a week, and remain very trim and "cut" as the term goes. Proper exercise is not popular though, because if it was easy....well everyone would do it. The idea that "you have to burn more calories exercising than you eat" is 100% false. The calories you burn while exercising make up less than half of the calories you burn because of exercising. Lean muscle mass maintenance caloric requirements exceed adipose tissue requirements by an order of magnitude. Simplified: the more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories your body will burn with zero effort to support that muscle mass. That said, a proper diet is a great idea for a ton of reasons. I replied only to point out that proper exercise carries a lot of weight(no pun intended).
- lgeorget 7y ago
  I understand your point but food is not just a sum of calories. Not all food is metabolised the same. Athletes consume a lot of calories but avoid junk food. Edit: as I read your comment again, actually, I think we mostly agree.

timbit42 7y ago

The vast majority of weight gain is due to food, not a lack of exercise. If you eat a McDonald's cheeseburger, it takes an hour of exercise to burn it off.

ben509 7y ago
Worse, you are burning the cheeseburger off, and the fries, and most of the drink. There are just a few extra calories that you don't burn off, and that adds up over the course of a year. So the weight problem is technically an eating problem, but it's subject to unconscious behaviors and perceptual biases that you have to control over a long period of time.

Kaiyou 7y ago

Exercise helps with getting in shape, but does next to nothing for losing weight.

maxk42 7y ago
What exercise does is give you margin. If you're naturally inclined to eat more than your basal metabolic rate by 500 calories per day then it's trivial to maintain your weight if you're getting two hours of walking in per day. That's not even exercise -- that's just movement. But our lives have become so sedentary that this is a huge task for some people. So many people sit in a chair or stand stationary all day long for their jobs.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  It's not surprising, though, what with being told to not run in the hallways and sit down in your chair all throughout school.
privateSFacct 7y ago
Interestingly I find this personally to be almost completely untrue. In particular. When I am exercising I'm generally less likely to be bored and sitting around snacking and eating. Running, paddling, hiking, biking especially with friends take up a lot of time. Recently I haven't been excercising and so am sitting around (and yes, eating a lot more). After exercising my appetite is different. I'm hungry in a different way (I tend to eat a bit healthier etc). So after a lot of exercise I don't want the bag of Doritos or highly processed junk food. Being in shape helps tremendously with things like mobility. Even basic core strength. I've seen folks get VERY sedentary and then start eating a lot more because of mobility issues. I'm convinced in part this is because when you have mobility issues you don't have as many other things to do with your time. I have worked outside in less developed countries for a few months at a time (ie, no desk work). I ate a relatively poor diet (lots of carbs etc) but boy was I in GREAT shape. The truth is, if you spend the day outside working with your body you WILL be fit. Again, you often don't snack as much as well, it's three meals and then if you are working there isn't usually much food that's easy to snack on.

broahmed 7y ago

It's implied in a couple of places: "Their lifestyles tend to be sedentary because of their built environments, and their food tends to be served in large portions." "Employers can help, too, by providing mental and physical wellness programs, as well as discounts and subsidies for physical activity programs. These investments are inherently worthwhile, because employees who exercise tend to have better concentration and work output."

kec 7y ago

Exercise really doesn't matter all that much for weight loss, your body has evolved to be crazy efficient (and commonly available food is incredibly calorie dense). A 200lb man will burn about 200 Calories running a mile, which is on the order of one coke, or two slices of bread. Exercise can give you a bit of an edge and increase your rate of weight loss, but it doesn't do much if you're eating in excess.

UK-AL 7y ago

I highly recommend exercise, but when you look at how much calaries exercise burns off it is tiny. Eating less calaries is the only real way.

ademup 7y ago

"Calories in vs Calories" out is grossly and wrongly oversimplified to the point of likely being harmful. Consider this simple point: the Metabolic Energy of Almonds can vary by as much as 25% simply by the way they are processed. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2016/FO/C6FO01076H#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2016/FO/C6FO0...

08-15 7y ago

The article doesn't attribute anything to anything, even its recommendations make no sense, like planting legumes instead of soybeans... That's terrible reporting, possibly worse than useless. That said, the first law of thermodynamics continues to apply: calories in - calories out == weight gained. The real question is, what makes people overeat to an unhealthy extent? The feedback through leptin should stabilize your weight at slightly above normal by suppressing appetite, but somehow it doesn't seem to work? (Or not anymore?) Why is that? Lofty talk about unspecified "nutrients" doesn't help anyone. (I think it's probably fructose, especially when not accompanied by fiber. But I don't know enough detail to convince anyone.)

mcphage 7y ago
> calories in - calories out Calories in - (calories used + calories excreted). Of course, calories in = calories in food x extraction efficiency, and already the simple formula has become filled with inconsistent values.
- 08-15 7y ago
  You're wrong. Calories are a measure of physiologically usable energy and already take extraction efficiency into account. Even if you had a point, which you don't, the first law of thermodynamics would still apply, and leptin would still provide negative feed back.
  - mcphage 7y ago
    > Even if you had a point, which you don't My point is simple: "calories in" is unmeasurable. It depends on the food you eat, how it's prepared, what else you eat with it, etc. "Calories out" is unmeasurable. It's based on what you do, how you move, how your body processes what you eat, etc. The first law of thermodynamics can apply all the live long day, but the statement "calories in minus calories out" is useless.

jagannathtech 7y ago

Fasting is the answer. It also resets craving for sugar.