8 ms·

"Almost 3 in 4 U.S. adults is overweight or obese." Curious, Why is that ?

tamaharbor 5y ago
Laziness?
sp332 5y ago
Cheap calories are less nutritious. You know how many servings of ramen noodles you have to eat to get a reasonable amount of vitamin A? Generally, food isn't designed for nutrition. It's made to be maximally salty or crunchy or cheesy or whatever. This is true even for mid-range packaged items and not just the cheapest ones.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >Cheap calories are less nutritious. What difference does that make on the whole? You don't overeat on these foods because you didn't get enough vitamin A. You overeat them because it's delicious or because the portions are wrong or your body doesn't send the signal to stop or because you're depressed or... I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. Instead, I ate foods mostly rich in protein and fats. But once I went back onto a general carbohydrate-heavy diet, as is common in the modern world, it was very easy to eat too much. (Most of our popular foods seem to contain flour in copious amounts.) This isn't a silver bullet though. It might've worked for me while I was doing it, but might not work for others.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    > your body doesn't send the signal to stop This can be because your body is still missing some nutrition. > I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. I think that while high protein and fats is fine, a lot can be said about the type of carb you eat as well. Chips and candy is a lot worse than bread and pasta, which is a lot worse than fibrous and filling carbs like vegetables. Remember that until fairly recently in human history, meat was very expensive, and so it wasn't necessarily a thing you had for every meal.
    - Aerroon 5y ago
      >Remember that until fairly recently in human history, meat was very expensive, and so it wasn't necessarily a thing you had for every meal. Sure, but plentiful grains are also a fairly new thing. Before agriculture it would've been not that easy to overeat on carbs for every meal.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    > I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. I’ve been doing Keto (very-low carb, high fat) for 8 years now. For me, it simply helped that I was far more conscious about what I was eating. But I still overeat when making any kind of Keto-"Pizza"
- busymom0 5y ago
  Not really. I grew up in a third world country and despite poverty, one can eat healthy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sp332 5y ago
    Ok yeah that's a whole different issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert#Urban_food_deserts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert#Urban_food_deserts
- presentation 5y ago
  This fact became really obvious to me as soon as I moved from USA to Japan - I realized that what's considered "delicious" in the USA is really an arms race for how to inject the maximal amount of sugar and fat into all foods, and when I visited the USA again after being here a couple years, eating out at restaurants and tasting that kind of cuisine made me feel grossed out.
  - newby 5y ago
    You just reminded me of something that surprised me when I visited the US - sweet foods seem much sweeter than in Europe. One would say that chocolate cake is sweet anywhere, but the american chocolate cake was on another level. It felt so sweet that I could not finish it, after four or five bites I felt so full that I had to stop eating - not full like full stomach but the other kind, when it starts to feel kind of gross instead of delicious. On the other hand, I still remember and miss "Entenman's crumb coffee cake" - store-bought delicacies are usually kind of dry where I live now but that american one was really like something my grandmother would have made. I guess that the perception of sweetness is one of those things that you get used to and need more to get the same level of stimulation. The US might be just further down that road.
    - devchix 5y ago
      I'm a proficient home cook and baker, on occasion I bring baked goods to work. Invariably, people tell me this thing that I've brought is Delicious! Because it's not TOO sweet! There's a weird disconnect between the commercial manufacturer and the consumer, there's no signalling mechanism; since all manufacturers ratchet up the sugar in everything, consumers don't have a valid choice for something less sweet. The "reduced" label -- I frequently see "reduced salt" or "30% less sodium" on things like bacon, canned beans. The "reduced sugar" I typically see on Weight Watcher or "diet" products. The normal stuff is tooth-achingly sweet, and covered with additional sugar drizzle or sprinkles. People (and even sadder, little kids) are now conditioned to respond to these ridiculous excess with delight, as if it were a special reward. A while ago I went one month without any added sugar, I cut out dried fruits and reduced fruit intake. On the weekends I allowed myself one tablespoon of fruit jam. After the first week, the jam tasted incredibly sweet, but delicious. When I went back to normal eating, everything tasted incredibly sweet to me, and I thought two tablespoons of jam was unnecessary, and that was just one month! We just celebrated Halloween here in the US. I think it was more special when cane sugar was more scarce and candy was really a special non-daily treat. No kid needs a tenth of the candy haul I see them carry around, and my office is in a glut of candies that were bought by the adults but not given away.
sfink 5y ago
Diet & car culture would be my first two guesses, but they are only guesses. I'm guessing it's very unevenly distributed.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Car culture can play in to diet as well. When I was driving to and from work each day, the most tempting options by far were McDonalds and KFC because they had drive thrus which saved time on my way home when my brain was feeling fried. Then I moved to the middle of the city and I have no commute and many options for food available which are healthier. Since I no longer use a car, these fast food places are less temping.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  There was car culture in the 70's when everyone wasn't fat. The change is cable television and other inside diversions that weren't available 40 years ago.
  - xorfish 5y ago
    Car centric development just got started then and it takes time for humans to grow up. Most of Europe also has cable television and other inside diversion. However car dependence and obesity is lower. I find this video here quite enlightening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzuRL0uJnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzuRL0uJnw
etchalon 5y ago
Because the definition of "overweight" is based on BMI, which is essentially pseudoscience.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And BTW includes most of the EU as well. Countries like the US includes the EU too, at a lower level but still over 50% are supposedly overweight. [1] [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210721-2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
  - stkdump 5y ago
    These stats were made before the EU's most obese country left the union ;) If you look at obesity level per country, the most populous country in the EU is on rank 79 of 191, not far from the middle of the table, while the US is on rank 12, with mostly micro nations above it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity...
    - nradov 5y ago
      Obesity is increasing in most EU countries. Give them a few years and they'll eventually catch up to the US and UK.
- nradov 5y ago
  It's easy to criticize BMI as a metric, and it's certainly not perfect, but for research and public health purposes it's good enough. The real COVID-19 risk isn't from BMI or even obesity in general, but specifically from excess visceral fat. https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(20)30304-8/fulltext https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(20)3030... However measuring visceral fat is slow and expensive since it requires something like a DXA scan. We don't have enough equipment to scan everyone. So we usually rely on BMI as a proxy.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  You can call it pseudoscience but that doesn't do anything for the fact that far too many Americans are fat by more scientific scales as well.
derekp7 5y ago
The biggest issue from what I can see is the lack of time / skill / willingness for most people / families to do their own food preparation from base ingredients. So what you end up with is prepackaged or restaurant-served foods, often in serving sizes or nutrition profiles that have excess calories. When meal preparation is done manually from base ingredients, the calorie count is typically lower for a given level of "fullness" you feel from the food. And since it takes time and effort, the meals are prepared (and consumed) on a set schedule (breakfast, lunch, dinner). Now contrast that to ready made meals and restaurant meals. These typically have more calories than what is required for a serving (or they consists of excess servings), so over-consumption tends to happen due to easy access. And they are made to taste excessively good (because that sells better). Home cooked meals using traditional ingredients taste ok, but aren't the flavor profiles that keep you wanting to consume excess servings.
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  >The biggest issue from what I can see is the lack of time / skill / willingness for most people / families to do their own food preparation from base ingredients. You forget one important piece of that puzzle, I think: access to (affordable) base ingredients. From my outsider perspective, having read some articles and seen some activists talk about this, there seems to be a thing in the US they call "food deserts"[0] where in many, mostly not very affluent neighborhoods there simply are no stores left that do sell fresh base ingredients, only "dollar stores" that sell highly processed cheap "food". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Even in affluent locales, quality base ingredients are noticeably expensive.
    - mjevans 5y ago
      Portion size / spoilage / price per unit are also a huge issue for those who are single. I'd have to eat almost the same thing every day to properly use up most highly perishable (good for me) foods before they spoil.
WD-42 5y ago
A lifestyle built around availability and expectation of the use of personal vehicles as the sole means of transportation.
prawn 5y ago
Every advertising influence pushes you to buy more, eat more, and then address the repercussions with strategies (Ab-Roller style gym equipment) that won't work as well as just not eating so much in the first place. Small servings get ridiculed.
taeric 5y ago
I'm going to buck the trend of most responses and say that we don't fully know. Some good obvious guesses, but a very hard field to study, all told. I say this as someone that was gaining weight while biking twenty miles a day. Easy to chalk it up to previous years over eating. But I don't do most fast food that we love to demonize.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  This is not a well researched opinion, but I would think that diet makes a bigger difference than exercise. Looking at the amount of energy contained in the average food and drink and the amount burned while exercising. A long and difficult exercise session ends up using far less energy than you burned simply living.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    One thing that often gets overlooked is that muscles consume much more calories just for maintenance. So if you build a substantial amount of muscle, your base calorie consumption goes up and even if you don't love a lot on a particular day you burn more calories and gain less weight.
    - presentation 5y ago
      Is the effect really that significant? A cursory Google search suggests not. [1] Either way I don't see most Americans getting jacked any time soon. [1] https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitness-muscle-myth-20110516-story.html https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitn...
    - riffraff 5y ago
      > even if you don't love a lot That's a good typo there :)
    - taeric 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm going to guess it doesn't make a huge difference. Though, I am sympathetic to the idea that some foods encourage you to be more active. At least, some do the opposite. Eating a full pizza will almost certainly not be followed by anything active. Oddly, following anything active with eating a pizza seems better.
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kottaram 5y ago
Most people dont want to eat healthy, or hit the gym. Plus fast food is cheap there.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Gym culture is very American. Really, the issue is that routine exercise of the most basic kind is totally absent in most Americans' lives. In most of the world you can reasonably walk to school, to work, to do some quick shopping, to meet with friends, and if you're not walking directly there you can walk to a bus or a train that will get you in that general direction. In most American suburbia, these types of walking journeys are at best indirect and at worst downright dangerous with a lack of safe sidewalks or crosswalks. In 1969, half of American schoolkids walked or biked to school. In 2012, that figure declined to 19%. https://www.wnyc.org/story/284604-why-so-few-walk-or-bike-to-school/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/284604-why-so-few-walk-or-bike-to...
  - notfromhere 5y ago
    I moved from a major, transit oriented US city to a suburb, and my daily steps walked declined by like 75%. The suburbs are designed around doing as little physical movement as possible.
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jpe90 5y ago
Culturally, I think choosing to embrace being overweight rather than perceive it as a problem to solve by eating food higher in quality and lower in quantity is a large contributor. People who develop unhealthy food habits and are unwilling to view those habits as unhealthy are going to become increasingly overweight.
- deleted 5y ago
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angelzen 5y ago
Fake. Everything is fake. The polite term is "substitute", there are entire shelves of respectable economic literature on how to deliver fake goods and services to consumers so they don't notice. * The food supply is fake. Anecdote. Back in the '80s the Eastern Block went through a deep crisis, including a low grade famine. After the communism fell, the food supply improved. One item stood apart: the American frozen chicken. Three times the size of a domestic one, tasting like moist cardboard. Most people would not touch it, unless positively starving. These days, everything is tasteless fake: bread, chicken, milk, eggs, veggies. For somewhat better quality, the prices are at least 2x, possibly quite some more. Good quality produce is nearly impossible to find, the fakes have pushed real farmers into bankruptcy long ago. Even the meager subsistence farmers markets of the Eastern Block of old had noticeably higher quality offerings (caveat: in season). * Americans don't prepare food at home. The American woman was pushed into the workforce and doesn't have time, energy, will or knowhow of basic homecooking. What, you reminisce of (grand)mother's comfort food? What kind of barbaric misogynist are you? No, men didn't step up to take on the traditional feminine role. Realistically, they will never do. No amount of nagging NYT editorials will change that. The food industry happily filled the void with processed fakes. * The mass restaurant network delivers fake food. The staples are ground meat & fried potatoes, fake chicken & rice or pasta. Sometimes industrial tofu or shrimp. If you are really "health conscious", there is "gluten free" for you. Sure, there is a dazzling variety of sauces and presentations, but the basis is pauper. You have to search hard for ethnic restaurants to even find a veggie basis, and even then the most popular offering is American Indian, with dubious thick sauces. * Americans eat way too much sugar. The food industry drops ridiculous amounts of sugar in everything, including savory foods if they get a chance. Anecdote. Coming from a different culture, American sweets literally make me sick. Making sweets at home, using about 1/4 - 1/3 of the American recipe sugar recommendation is about right. * Americans don't walk. Old World cities are (were?) built in such a way that doing basic life functions require walking. Buying groceries, going to school, going to church, going to see friends, going to work (walk + public transport). Americans drive everywhere, because everything is too far away for walking. With Amazon and Amazon Fresh, even the meager shopping trips are vanishing, which will lead to an extra bump in obesity. Removing the reward for walking mostly removed walking itself. Shaming people for not hitting the gym often enough doesn't work, we are built to pick the path of least resistance. * American kids don't roam the streets. Something happened and kids simply don't just go out to play with their friends for hours on end. At the minimum the parents must setup activities, playdates & transportation. In practice, this leads to sedentary overweight depressed kids. Let's buy them the latest networked gaming console instead, that will keep them socialized, active, and healthy. * American culture is increasingly adverse to generating signals for distinguishing healthy and unhealthy. In the name of "inclusivity" we are implicitly promoting deeply unhealthy lifestyles. We are good people and wouldn't want to hurt feelings, right? Right, except that we are depriving our kids of the ability to identify and model healthy behaviors.
lmm 5y ago
Having moved internationally fairly recently, I would bet on (culturally-influenced) portion size. It's the dumbest possible explanation, but even so.
- GuardianCaveman 5y ago
  Yes. Crazy to think a lot of places won’t even let you order a small size combo anymore. Their smallest is what I remember a large to be years ago and often I’m upsized and charged for a large unless I opt out and tell them I want a medium. They don’t even ask usually. McDonald’s is the one I’m thinking of though they’re not alone. Edit also this type of restaurant portion sizes bleeds into me preparing food at home for myself or my family.
pronlover723 5y ago
Portions are enormous! Example: Chipotle, a super popular fast food restaurant, average food is like 1300kcal. It's huge and enough food for at least 3 average sized meals in Tokyo. And that's not including the giant soda most people buy. Go into any supermarket in the USA and you'll see collections of giant cookies. They are easily 4x larger than cookies from the 1950s (or for that matter 2x/3x larger than cookies in many other countries) and they come in packs of 20+, each cookie is at least 400 kcals and people easily eat half the box at a time. Chips come in giant bags. The average bag of chips in Japan is ~65g. The average bag of chips in the USA is 280g!!! Cold Stone Creamery (an Ice Cream chain), you can see how big a single portion is in their front page image https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/banner.webp https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/ba... It's also at least 3x the portion I'd get in many parts of the world. Those types portions have been arounds so long that now pretty much all of the USA takes them for granted. Anything smaller is considered a rip off. The culture is high volume, low price = best. It's crazy to see all the giant obese people all over the place. Except maybe in SF/NYC, restaurants that served smaller portions would quickly go out of business.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  This is because labor is much more expensive than food. So the cost of a $15 meal is maybe $5 food. If you make the meal 20% larger and charge 10% more for it, you do it, since then your costs go up by $1 but your revenue goes by $1.50. That process ends up in huge portions as people think they are getting a 20% more value for 20% more food (which they are) and so you may even sell more of the 20% bigger $16.50 meal. As with anything else, to get smaller meals the food/wage price ratio needs to be larger. Food in America is absurdly cheap compared to most other nations.
  - cafard 5y ago
    Upvoted. A friend of mine likes a local deli. The third or fourth time I joined him there, I remarked that the portions seemed sized for people doing hard physical labor all day--digging ditches or working on a loading dock--but that the clientele didn't seem to be laborers. He remarked that with comfort food, the ingredients are the least part of the cost.

Laziness?

Cheap calories are less nutritious. You know how many servings of ramen noodles you have to eat to get a reasonable amount of vitamin A? Generally, food isn't designed for nutrition. It's made to be maximally salty or crunchy or cheesy or whatever. This is true even for mid-range packaged items and not just the cheapest ones.

Aerroon 5y ago
>Cheap calories are less nutritious. What difference does that make on the whole? You don't overeat on these foods because you didn't get enough vitamin A. You overeat them because it's delicious or because the portions are wrong or your body doesn't send the signal to stop or because you're depressed or... I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. Instead, I ate foods mostly rich in protein and fats. But once I went back onto a general carbohydrate-heavy diet, as is common in the modern world, it was very easy to eat too much. (Most of our popular foods seem to contain flour in copious amounts.) This isn't a silver bullet though. It might've worked for me while I was doing it, but might not work for others.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  > your body doesn't send the signal to stop This can be because your body is still missing some nutrition. > I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. I think that while high protein and fats is fine, a lot can be said about the type of carb you eat as well. Chips and candy is a lot worse than bread and pasta, which is a lot worse than fibrous and filling carbs like vegetables. Remember that until fairly recently in human history, meat was very expensive, and so it wasn't necessarily a thing you had for every meal.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    >Remember that until fairly recently in human history, meat was very expensive, and so it wasn't necessarily a thing you had for every meal. Sure, but plentiful grains are also a fairly new thing. Before agriculture it would've been not that easy to overeat on carbs for every meal.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > I found that I was a lot less likely to overeat when I ate few carbs. I’ve been doing Keto (very-low carb, high fat) for 8 years now. For me, it simply helped that I was far more conscious about what I was eating. But I still overeat when making any kind of Keto-"Pizza"
busymom0 5y ago
Not really. I grew up in a third world country and despite poverty, one can eat healthy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sp332 5y ago
  Ok yeah that's a whole different issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert#Urban_food_deserts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert#Urban_food_deserts
presentation 5y ago
This fact became really obvious to me as soon as I moved from USA to Japan - I realized that what's considered "delicious" in the USA is really an arms race for how to inject the maximal amount of sugar and fat into all foods, and when I visited the USA again after being here a couple years, eating out at restaurants and tasting that kind of cuisine made me feel grossed out.
- newby 5y ago
  You just reminded me of something that surprised me when I visited the US - sweet foods seem much sweeter than in Europe. One would say that chocolate cake is sweet anywhere, but the american chocolate cake was on another level. It felt so sweet that I could not finish it, after four or five bites I felt so full that I had to stop eating - not full like full stomach but the other kind, when it starts to feel kind of gross instead of delicious. On the other hand, I still remember and miss "Entenman's crumb coffee cake" - store-bought delicacies are usually kind of dry where I live now but that american one was really like something my grandmother would have made. I guess that the perception of sweetness is one of those things that you get used to and need more to get the same level of stimulation. The US might be just further down that road.
  - devchix 5y ago
    I'm a proficient home cook and baker, on occasion I bring baked goods to work. Invariably, people tell me this thing that I've brought is Delicious! Because it's not TOO sweet! There's a weird disconnect between the commercial manufacturer and the consumer, there's no signalling mechanism; since all manufacturers ratchet up the sugar in everything, consumers don't have a valid choice for something less sweet. The "reduced" label -- I frequently see "reduced salt" or "30% less sodium" on things like bacon, canned beans. The "reduced sugar" I typically see on Weight Watcher or "diet" products. The normal stuff is tooth-achingly sweet, and covered with additional sugar drizzle or sprinkles. People (and even sadder, little kids) are now conditioned to respond to these ridiculous excess with delight, as if it were a special reward. A while ago I went one month without any added sugar, I cut out dried fruits and reduced fruit intake. On the weekends I allowed myself one tablespoon of fruit jam. After the first week, the jam tasted incredibly sweet, but delicious. When I went back to normal eating, everything tasted incredibly sweet to me, and I thought two tablespoons of jam was unnecessary, and that was just one month! We just celebrated Halloween here in the US. I think it was more special when cane sugar was more scarce and candy was really a special non-daily treat. No kid needs a tenth of the candy haul I see them carry around, and my office is in a glut of candies that were bought by the adults but not given away.

sfink 5y ago

Diet & car culture would be my first two guesses, but they are only guesses. I'm guessing it's very unevenly distributed.

Gigachad 5y ago
Car culture can play in to diet as well. When I was driving to and from work each day, the most tempting options by far were McDonalds and KFC because they had drive thrus which saved time on my way home when my brain was feeling fried. Then I moved to the middle of the city and I have no commute and many options for food available which are healthier. Since I no longer use a car, these fast food places are less temping.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
There was car culture in the 70's when everyone wasn't fat. The change is cable television and other inside diversions that weren't available 40 years ago.
- xorfish 5y ago
  Car centric development just got started then and it takes time for humans to grow up. Most of Europe also has cable television and other inside diversion. However car dependence and obesity is lower. I find this video here quite enlightening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzuRL0uJnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzuRL0uJnw

etchalon 5y ago

Because the definition of "overweight" is based on BMI, which is essentially pseudoscience.

ghaff 5y ago
And BTW includes most of the EU as well. Countries like the US includes the EU too, at a lower level but still over 50% are supposedly overweight. [1] [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210721-2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
- stkdump 5y ago
  These stats were made before the EU's most obese country left the union ;) If you look at obesity level per country, the most populous country in the EU is on rank 79 of 191, not far from the middle of the table, while the US is on rank 12, with mostly micro nations above it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity...
  - nradov 5y ago
    Obesity is increasing in most EU countries. Give them a few years and they'll eventually catch up to the US and UK.
nradov 5y ago
It's easy to criticize BMI as a metric, and it's certainly not perfect, but for research and public health purposes it's good enough. The real COVID-19 risk isn't from BMI or even obesity in general, but specifically from excess visceral fat. https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(20)30304-8/fulltext https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(20)3030... However measuring visceral fat is slow and expensive since it requires something like a DXA scan. We don't have enough equipment to scan everyone. So we usually rely on BMI as a proxy.
Gigachad 5y ago
You can call it pseudoscience but that doesn't do anything for the fact that far too many Americans are fat by more scientific scales as well.

derekp7 5y ago

The biggest issue from what I can see is the lack of time / skill / willingness for most people / families to do their own food preparation from base ingredients. So what you end up with is prepackaged or restaurant-served foods, often in serving sizes or nutrition profiles that have excess calories. When meal preparation is done manually from base ingredients, the calorie count is typically lower for a given level of "fullness" you feel from the food. And since it takes time and effort, the meals are prepared (and consumed) on a set schedule (breakfast, lunch, dinner). Now contrast that to ready made meals and restaurant meals. These typically have more calories than what is required for a serving (or they consists of excess servings), so over-consumption tends to happen due to easy access. And they are made to taste excessively good (because that sells better). Home cooked meals using traditional ingredients taste ok, but aren't the flavor profiles that keep you wanting to consume excess servings.

rndgermandude 5y ago
>The biggest issue from what I can see is the lack of time / skill / willingness for most people / families to do their own food preparation from base ingredients. You forget one important piece of that puzzle, I think: access to (affordable) base ingredients. From my outsider perspective, having read some articles and seen some activists talk about this, there seems to be a thing in the US they call "food deserts"[0] where in many, mostly not very affluent neighborhoods there simply are no stores left that do sell fresh base ingredients, only "dollar stores" that sell highly processed cheap "food". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
- angelzen 5y ago
  Even in affluent locales, quality base ingredients are noticeably expensive.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Portion size / spoilage / price per unit are also a huge issue for those who are single. I'd have to eat almost the same thing every day to properly use up most highly perishable (good for me) foods before they spoil.

WD-42 5y ago

A lifestyle built around availability and expectation of the use of personal vehicles as the sole means of transportation.

prawn 5y ago

Every advertising influence pushes you to buy more, eat more, and then address the repercussions with strategies (Ab-Roller style gym equipment) that won't work as well as just not eating so much in the first place. Small servings get ridiculed.

taeric 5y ago

I'm going to buck the trend of most responses and say that we don't fully know. Some good obvious guesses, but a very hard field to study, all told. I say this as someone that was gaining weight while biking twenty miles a day. Easy to chalk it up to previous years over eating. But I don't do most fast food that we love to demonize.

Gigachad 5y ago
This is not a well researched opinion, but I would think that diet makes a bigger difference than exercise. Looking at the amount of energy contained in the average food and drink and the amount burned while exercising. A long and difficult exercise session ends up using far less energy than you burned simply living.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  One thing that often gets overlooked is that muscles consume much more calories just for maintenance. So if you build a substantial amount of muscle, your base calorie consumption goes up and even if you don't love a lot on a particular day you burn more calories and gain less weight.
  - presentation 5y ago
    Is the effect really that significant? A cursory Google search suggests not. [1] Either way I don't see most Americans getting jacked any time soon. [1] https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitness-muscle-myth-20110516-story.html https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitn...
  - riffraff 5y ago
    > even if you don't love a lot That's a good typo there :)
  - taeric 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm going to guess it doesn't make a huge difference. Though, I am sympathetic to the idea that some foods encourage you to be more active. At least, some do the opposite. Eating a full pizza will almost certainly not be followed by anything active. Oddly, following anything active with eating a pizza seems better.

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kottaram 5y ago

Most people dont want to eat healthy, or hit the gym. Plus fast food is cheap there.

bobthepanda 5y ago
Gym culture is very American. Really, the issue is that routine exercise of the most basic kind is totally absent in most Americans' lives. In most of the world you can reasonably walk to school, to work, to do some quick shopping, to meet with friends, and if you're not walking directly there you can walk to a bus or a train that will get you in that general direction. In most American suburbia, these types of walking journeys are at best indirect and at worst downright dangerous with a lack of safe sidewalks or crosswalks. In 1969, half of American schoolkids walked or biked to school. In 2012, that figure declined to 19%. https://www.wnyc.org/story/284604-why-so-few-walk-or-bike-to-school/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/284604-why-so-few-walk-or-bike-to...
- notfromhere 5y ago
  I moved from a major, transit oriented US city to a suburb, and my daily steps walked declined by like 75%. The suburbs are designed around doing as little physical movement as possible.

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jpe90 5y ago

Culturally, I think choosing to embrace being overweight rather than perceive it as a problem to solve by eating food higher in quality and lower in quantity is a large contributor. People who develop unhealthy food habits and are unwilling to view those habits as unhealthy are going to become increasingly overweight.

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angelzen 5y ago

Fake. Everything is fake. The polite term is "substitute", there are entire shelves of respectable economic literature on how to deliver fake goods and services to consumers so they don't notice. * The food supply is fake. Anecdote. Back in the '80s the Eastern Block went through a deep crisis, including a low grade famine. After the communism fell, the food supply improved. One item stood apart: the American frozen chicken. Three times the size of a domestic one, tasting like moist cardboard. Most people would not touch it, unless positively starving. These days, everything is tasteless fake: bread, chicken, milk, eggs, veggies. For somewhat better quality, the prices are at least 2x, possibly quite some more. Good quality produce is nearly impossible to find, the fakes have pushed real farmers into bankruptcy long ago. Even the meager subsistence farmers markets of the Eastern Block of old had noticeably higher quality offerings (caveat: in season). * Americans don't prepare food at home. The American woman was pushed into the workforce and doesn't have time, energy, will or knowhow of basic homecooking. What, you reminisce of (grand)mother's comfort food? What kind of barbaric misogynist are you? No, men didn't step up to take on the traditional feminine role. Realistically, they will never do. No amount of nagging NYT editorials will change that. The food industry happily filled the void with processed fakes. * The mass restaurant network delivers fake food. The staples are ground meat & fried potatoes, fake chicken & rice or pasta. Sometimes industrial tofu or shrimp. If you are really "health conscious", there is "gluten free" for you. Sure, there is a dazzling variety of sauces and presentations, but the basis is pauper. You have to search hard for ethnic restaurants to even find a veggie basis, and even then the most popular offering is American Indian, with dubious thick sauces. * Americans eat way too much sugar. The food industry drops ridiculous amounts of sugar in everything, including savory foods if they get a chance. Anecdote. Coming from a different culture, American sweets literally make me sick. Making sweets at home, using about 1/4 - 1/3 of the American recipe sugar recommendation is about right. * Americans don't walk. Old World cities are (were?) built in such a way that doing basic life functions require walking. Buying groceries, going to school, going to church, going to see friends, going to work (walk + public transport). Americans drive everywhere, because everything is too far away for walking. With Amazon and Amazon Fresh, even the meager shopping trips are vanishing, which will lead to an extra bump in obesity. Removing the reward for walking mostly removed walking itself. Shaming people for not hitting the gym often enough doesn't work, we are built to pick the path of least resistance. * American kids don't roam the streets. Something happened and kids simply don't just go out to play with their friends for hours on end. At the minimum the parents must setup activities, playdates & transportation. In practice, this leads to sedentary overweight depressed kids. Let's buy them the latest networked gaming console instead, that will keep them socialized, active, and healthy. * American culture is increasingly adverse to generating signals for distinguishing healthy and unhealthy. In the name of "inclusivity" we are implicitly promoting deeply unhealthy lifestyles. We are good people and wouldn't want to hurt feelings, right? Right, except that we are depriving our kids of the ability to identify and model healthy behaviors.

lmm 5y ago

Having moved internationally fairly recently, I would bet on (culturally-influenced) portion size. It's the dumbest possible explanation, but even so.

GuardianCaveman 5y ago
Yes. Crazy to think a lot of places won’t even let you order a small size combo anymore. Their smallest is what I remember a large to be years ago and often I’m upsized and charged for a large unless I opt out and tell them I want a medium. They don’t even ask usually. McDonald’s is the one I’m thinking of though they’re not alone. Edit also this type of restaurant portion sizes bleeds into me preparing food at home for myself or my family.

pronlover723 5y ago

Portions are enormous! Example: Chipotle, a super popular fast food restaurant, average food is like 1300kcal. It's huge and enough food for at least 3 average sized meals in Tokyo. And that's not including the giant soda most people buy. Go into any supermarket in the USA and you'll see collections of giant cookies. They are easily 4x larger than cookies from the 1950s (or for that matter 2x/3x larger than cookies in many other countries) and they come in packs of 20+, each cookie is at least 400 kcals and people easily eat half the box at a time. Chips come in giant bags. The average bag of chips in Japan is ~65g. The average bag of chips in the USA is 280g!!! Cold Stone Creamery (an Ice Cream chain), you can see how big a single portion is in their front page image https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/banner.webp https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/ba... It's also at least 3x the portion I'd get in many parts of the world. Those types portions have been arounds so long that now pretty much all of the USA takes them for granted. Anything smaller is considered a rip off. The culture is high volume, low price = best. It's crazy to see all the giant obese people all over the place. Except maybe in SF/NYC, restaurants that served smaller portions would quickly go out of business.

rsj_hn 5y ago
This is because labor is much more expensive than food. So the cost of a $15 meal is maybe $5 food. If you make the meal 20% larger and charge 10% more for it, you do it, since then your costs go up by $1 but your revenue goes by $1.50. That process ends up in huge portions as people think they are getting a 20% more value for 20% more food (which they are) and so you may even sell more of the 20% bigger $16.50 meal. As with anything else, to get smaller meals the food/wage price ratio needs to be larger. Food in America is absurdly cheap compared to most other nations.
- cafard 5y ago
  Upvoted. A friend of mine likes a local deli. The third or fourth time I joined him there, I remarked that the portions seemed sized for people doing hard physical labor all day--digging ditches or working on a loading dock--but that the clientele didn't seem to be laborers. He remarked that with comfort food, the ingredients are the least part of the cost.