5 ms·

This Slate article from 2013 has a gif mapping obesity from 1985 - 2010 by state: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2013/04/obesit

This Slate article from 2013 has a gif mapping obesity from 1985 - 2010 by state: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2013/04/obesity_in_america_cdc_releases_gif_of_epidemic_over_time.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w... It's really shocking how quickly Americans' weights increased. The map also shows the increases are usually more pronounced in the South and Midwest first, then spread to the coasts (skipping over Colorado, of course)

Meekro 7y ago
The sheer speed with which this happened undermines many theories about what's causing it. People talk about idle desk jobs, a car-dominated culture, and abundant cheap food. Those things were just as true in 1990, though, and far fewer people were obese.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  But how long had they been that prevalent by the 90s? One does not gain 30 pounds overnight.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mc32 7y ago
    But also it doesn’t take decades to put on a couple of stone. A poor diet over a year or two will do it without trying.
- autokad 7y ago
  in 1990, we still had a lot of manufacturing jobs. I think the "idle desk jobs" still makes sense. Probably demographics is more important though. For example, median age is going up. In fact, a lot of the things we complain about today can be at least partially attributed to that.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  From personal experience I can attest to it being sitting all day and not really moving around much plus eating a lot. People always go on about how you should change but it's just so freaking hard to break out of it once you're gone.
- svachalek 7y ago
  I don't know about how much eating at home has changed, but I think people today would be shocked at how small a restaurant meal was in 1990. Back then the large, upscaled items would be the "small" of today.
  - pascalxus 7y ago
    absolutely. When my family goes out to eat, we usually only order 1 meal and split it between the 3 of us, the meals are that HUGE. half the family don't get what they want, but it is cost effective.
- pascalxus 7y ago
  the thing is, it takes a decade of delay for this to set in because fast-food and other harmful food like substances are much more harmful in child hood. So, if you were raised descently well on normal food until your 20s, then started eating horribly, it's not nearly as bad as if you started eating horribly in your childhood. We can see this clearly in China. The older generation seems to have some resistance to junk food in terms of weight gain: this is why asians have a reputation for remaining slim, even if they eat junk food. But, it's not due to their genes: they were simply lucky enough to not be introduced to those bad foods until their adulthood. If you look at the newest generation in China in the cities, their obesity rate is skyrocketing at an extremely high rate.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    > because fast-food and other harmful food like substances are much more harmful in child hood How so? Growing children can probably handle a lot more junk food and sugar without any consequences than adults.
    - graeme 7y ago
      They mean that if you do overwhelm your metabolism or fail to learn motor skills as a child, you may be ruined for life. I know some people who just hate exercise. I think they has no habit of movement of any sort. Likewise, people who were fat or weak as a child have no baseline sense of what it feels to be healthy - and neither do their bodies cells. So kids can handle more sugar, but if messed up the consequences are worse.
    - pascalxus 7y ago
      Addictions are more severe, the earlier they happen.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Based on my memory, they were somewhat less true in 1990, if you look at how much it happens and not just whether or not it happens. Focusing on kids, because that's where I've got the clearest reference for making my own comparisons: 30 years ago, kids in my neighborhood spent most their time running around outdoors. I'm not even sure everyone's parents knew where they were half the time, and it was fine as long as you made it home for dinner. Nowadays, kids seem to spend most their time playing Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever. I don't see them often on the sidewalk unless they're headed to or from school, and the playgrounds are generally pretty quiet. Over the same time period, hours of TV watched per household is up by about 2 hours per day, and consumption of the Internet has gone from zero to whatever it is right now, so that's where I'm guessing all the kids have gone.
  - philg_jr 7y ago
    In the early and mid 90s I was playing a lot of Zelda, Super Mario World, and Mario Kart on SNES, but also had a Genesis, then a Saturn, and a PS2, then N64... ;) Definitely watched a lot of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network too. I really wouldn't point to modern video games as the blame, look more toward how the food has changed. Anetdotal, but the majority of people I know eat like shit.
heymijo 7y ago
My hypothesis would look something like this: > The amount of fructose in the Standard American Diet (SAD) is a major culprit in obesity and obesity related diseases. > The body metabolizes fructose differently than other carbohydrates. Fructose has become the default cheap carbohydrate additive for food, and it is found in nearly every packaged food in America. Human bodies have not evolved to handle these levels of fructose.
- heymijo 7y ago
  A quick search on the history of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in the food chain has a timeline that works. This is where I'd start: > The first corn syrup in the United States was produced in Buffalo, New York, in 1866. A major breakthrough occurred in 1967 with the patenting of an enzymatic process to convert dextrose to fructose, a 6 carbon sugar that is sweeter tasting than sucrose. High fructose corn syrups was developed in the 1970s. Americans began producing starch sugar from cornstarch instead of potato starch. Its cheaper than table sugar. In 1971, food scientist in Japan found a way to produce a cheaper sweetener from corn. HFCS began to appear in frozen foods to protect against freezer burn and in vending machine products to preserve taste. In the 1980s, both Coke and Pepsi switched from a fifty-fifty blend of sugar and corn syrup to 100 percent high fructose corn syrup, saving them 20 percent in sweetener costs. [0] [0] https://www.world-foodhistory.com/2011/04/history-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup.html https://www.world-foodhistory.com/2011/04/history-of-high-fr...
  - cdoxsey 7y ago
    And all as a result of US sugar policy raising the price of sugar: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-time-kill-us-sugar-program https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/candy-coat.... I'm going to guess the "throwback" soda that came out a few years ago was probably almost entirely the result of corn prices rising due to ethanol production. (itself the result of government policy)
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I think that this is probably a combination of spurious correlation and a food additive whose name implies things about it that aren't necessarily true. High fructose corn syrup is, from a nutritional standpoint, pretty much equivalent to table sugar. The most substantive difference between the two is a hydrogen bond that is easily broken by even fairly weak acids - it doesn't last long at all once it hits your stomach, so what actually hits your bloodstream is (typically) a 42/58 fructose/glucose mix for solid foods with HFCS, a 50/50 mix for table sugar, and a 55/45 mix for HFCS-sweetened beverages. Those numbers also imply that, unless you just guzzle soft drinks, the industry replacing sucrose with HFCS presumably actually tilts the fructose/glucose mix in your sugar intake away from fructose. And if you do guzzle soft drinks, blaming HFCS for your metabolic situation seems just a bit dissonant. I think we should be looking first at the big picture: Overall calorie consumption over the past 50 years is way up. If you break that down, fat, having nearly doubled, comes in first, followed by complex carbohydrates (up by about 1/3), and sugar is comparatively a quite small portion of what's changed. Over the same time period, caloric expenditure from physical activity has gone way down, too. To me, that picture doesn't imply, "Nabisco changing the sugar they put in my Wheat Thins is ruining my health." It implies, "Driving my car to the supermarket and coming home with a back seat full of Wheat Thins is ruining my health." FWIW, the word "additive" also has a tendency to be a bit of a weasel word in this context. The glycemic index for starches and sugars is typically about the same, and your metabolism doesn't care that the starches are typically considered the food itself while the little bit of sweetener that's added for flavor is just an additive.
sien 7y ago
Globally it's also gone up dramatically. Our World in Data can show the change from 1975 to today. https://ourworldindata.org/obesity https://ourworldindata.org/obesity So it's more than just a US thing attributable to any particular US policies.

Meekro 7y ago

The sheer speed with which this happened undermines many theories about what's causing it. People talk about idle desk jobs, a car-dominated culture, and abundant cheap food. Those things were just as true in 1990, though, and far fewer people were obese.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
But how long had they been that prevalent by the 90s? One does not gain 30 pounds overnight.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 7y ago
  But also it doesn’t take decades to put on a couple of stone. A poor diet over a year or two will do it without trying.
autokad 7y ago
in 1990, we still had a lot of manufacturing jobs. I think the "idle desk jobs" still makes sense. Probably demographics is more important though. For example, median age is going up. In fact, a lot of the things we complain about today can be at least partially attributed to that.
dawnerd 7y ago
From personal experience I can attest to it being sitting all day and not really moving around much plus eating a lot. People always go on about how you should change but it's just so freaking hard to break out of it once you're gone.
svachalek 7y ago
I don't know about how much eating at home has changed, but I think people today would be shocked at how small a restaurant meal was in 1990. Back then the large, upscaled items would be the "small" of today.
- pascalxus 7y ago
  absolutely. When my family goes out to eat, we usually only order 1 meal and split it between the 3 of us, the meals are that HUGE. half the family don't get what they want, but it is cost effective.
pascalxus 7y ago
the thing is, it takes a decade of delay for this to set in because fast-food and other harmful food like substances are much more harmful in child hood. So, if you were raised descently well on normal food until your 20s, then started eating horribly, it's not nearly as bad as if you started eating horribly in your childhood. We can see this clearly in China. The older generation seems to have some resistance to junk food in terms of weight gain: this is why asians have a reputation for remaining slim, even if they eat junk food. But, it's not due to their genes: they were simply lucky enough to not be introduced to those bad foods until their adulthood. If you look at the newest generation in China in the cities, their obesity rate is skyrocketing at an extremely high rate.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > because fast-food and other harmful food like substances are much more harmful in child hood How so? Growing children can probably handle a lot more junk food and sugar without any consequences than adults.
  - graeme 7y ago
    They mean that if you do overwhelm your metabolism or fail to learn motor skills as a child, you may be ruined for life. I know some people who just hate exercise. I think they has no habit of movement of any sort. Likewise, people who were fat or weak as a child have no baseline sense of what it feels to be healthy - and neither do their bodies cells. So kids can handle more sugar, but if messed up the consequences are worse.
  - pascalxus 7y ago
    Addictions are more severe, the earlier they happen.
mumblemumble 7y ago
Based on my memory, they were somewhat less true in 1990, if you look at how much it happens and not just whether or not it happens. Focusing on kids, because that's where I've got the clearest reference for making my own comparisons: 30 years ago, kids in my neighborhood spent most their time running around outdoors. I'm not even sure everyone's parents knew where they were half the time, and it was fine as long as you made it home for dinner. Nowadays, kids seem to spend most their time playing Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever. I don't see them often on the sidewalk unless they're headed to or from school, and the playgrounds are generally pretty quiet. Over the same time period, hours of TV watched per household is up by about 2 hours per day, and consumption of the Internet has gone from zero to whatever it is right now, so that's where I'm guessing all the kids have gone.
- philg_jr 7y ago
  In the early and mid 90s I was playing a lot of Zelda, Super Mario World, and Mario Kart on SNES, but also had a Genesis, then a Saturn, and a PS2, then N64... ;) Definitely watched a lot of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network too. I really wouldn't point to modern video games as the blame, look more toward how the food has changed. Anetdotal, but the majority of people I know eat like shit.

heymijo 7y ago

My hypothesis would look something like this: > The amount of fructose in the Standard American Diet (SAD) is a major culprit in obesity and obesity related diseases. > The body metabolizes fructose differently than other carbohydrates. Fructose has become the default cheap carbohydrate additive for food, and it is found in nearly every packaged food in America. Human bodies have not evolved to handle these levels of fructose.

heymijo 7y ago
A quick search on the history of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in the food chain has a timeline that works. This is where I'd start: > The first corn syrup in the United States was produced in Buffalo, New York, in 1866. A major breakthrough occurred in 1967 with the patenting of an enzymatic process to convert dextrose to fructose, a 6 carbon sugar that is sweeter tasting than sucrose. High fructose corn syrups was developed in the 1970s. Americans began producing starch sugar from cornstarch instead of potato starch. Its cheaper than table sugar. In 1971, food scientist in Japan found a way to produce a cheaper sweetener from corn. HFCS began to appear in frozen foods to protect against freezer burn and in vending machine products to preserve taste. In the 1980s, both Coke and Pepsi switched from a fifty-fifty blend of sugar and corn syrup to 100 percent high fructose corn syrup, saving them 20 percent in sweetener costs. [0] [0] https://www.world-foodhistory.com/2011/04/history-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup.html https://www.world-foodhistory.com/2011/04/history-of-high-fr...
- cdoxsey 7y ago
  And all as a result of US sugar policy raising the price of sugar: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-time-kill-us-sugar-program https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/candy-coat.... I'm going to guess the "throwback" soda that came out a few years ago was probably almost entirely the result of corn prices rising due to ethanol production. (itself the result of government policy)
mumblemumble 7y ago
I think that this is probably a combination of spurious correlation and a food additive whose name implies things about it that aren't necessarily true. High fructose corn syrup is, from a nutritional standpoint, pretty much equivalent to table sugar. The most substantive difference between the two is a hydrogen bond that is easily broken by even fairly weak acids - it doesn't last long at all once it hits your stomach, so what actually hits your bloodstream is (typically) a 42/58 fructose/glucose mix for solid foods with HFCS, a 50/50 mix for table sugar, and a 55/45 mix for HFCS-sweetened beverages. Those numbers also imply that, unless you just guzzle soft drinks, the industry replacing sucrose with HFCS presumably actually tilts the fructose/glucose mix in your sugar intake away from fructose. And if you do guzzle soft drinks, blaming HFCS for your metabolic situation seems just a bit dissonant. I think we should be looking first at the big picture: Overall calorie consumption over the past 50 years is way up. If you break that down, fat, having nearly doubled, comes in first, followed by complex carbohydrates (up by about 1/3), and sugar is comparatively a quite small portion of what's changed. Over the same time period, caloric expenditure from physical activity has gone way down, too. To me, that picture doesn't imply, "Nabisco changing the sugar they put in my Wheat Thins is ruining my health." It implies, "Driving my car to the supermarket and coming home with a back seat full of Wheat Thins is ruining my health." FWIW, the word "additive" also has a tendency to be a bit of a weasel word in this context. The glycemic index for starches and sugars is typically about the same, and your metabolism doesn't care that the starches are typically considered the food itself while the little bit of sweetener that's added for flavor is just an additive.

sien 7y ago

Globally it's also gone up dramatically. Our World in Data can show the change from 1975 to today. https://ourworldindata.org/obesity https://ourworldindata.org/obesity So it's more than just a US thing attributable to any particular US policies.