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Nah. EBM does explain the obesity crisis. We're just eating more. The average American consumes more than 3,600 calories daily – a 24% increase from 1961, when

Nah. EBM does explain the obesity crisis. We're just eating more. The average American consumes more than 3,600 calories daily – a 24% increase from 1961, when the average was just 2,880 calories. And that's just the average.

briHass 5y ago
Yes, but why are we eating more? It's not like people in 1961 had more willpower than those in 2021. I think there's some truth to the CIH and palatability. It's pretty hard to argue that food engineering hasn't made super tasty snacks designed to get you hooked. Those same snacks just so happen to mostly be high-carb as well.
- solarmist 5y ago
  Note: This ignores the factors in the article to keep it simple, those affect many things which contribute to or decrease hunger, satiety, etc. I think it's as simple as the availability and quantity of food in front of us at all times. We're eating just as often as in the past, but portions (of everything) are so much larger and our bodies will eat more if it's available. Satiety is always a lagging indicator to stop eating, so by default we'll over eat if we can. Combine this with food always being available and it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the trend is going to go. This feels even more accurate to me as I've started doing alternative day fasting (because I'm about 50 lbs overweight), but I've been tracking my food intake on days I eat and I'm almost always eating 2500-3500 calories. Stuff adds up quickly. * 500 calories for a bowl of cereal with milk * 1,000 calories for a sandwich from a sandwich shop * 1,000 calories for dinner * 500+ calories from drinks And eating all of that doesn't make me feel stuffed. It's what makes me feel full. Which I know is a good bit more than "just enough" which I've done when I was working out a lot and watching every calorie I ate.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Jesus, all of those quantities are shocking to me. A cup of cereal is under a hundred calories, and a cup of milk less than 200, so a bowl of cereal with milk should run about 2-300 calories. 500 calories is a Big Mac. Are you spooning sugar into it? Cream? What the heck kind of sandwich has 1000 calories? Okay, a fully loaded footlong from Subway maybe, but you seriously have that for lunch? A normal sandwich, such as you might make at home, has 300-500 calories. No 6 inch sub has more than 600 calories. Why is your lunch the same size as your dinner? 1000 calories for dinner is more reasonable, but still - that's a huge dinner. That's like a generously large platter of spaghetti bolognese. I don't know how you could be hungry for that after downing an equivalent meal at lunchtime. 500 calories from drinks is truly horrifying because unless you're chugging milkshakes that's probably all high fructose corn syrup. A quarter of your recommended daily caloric intake, in the form of pure refined sugar! That's an express ticket to diabetes-ville right there. 4+ cans of coke daily is not a healthy intake. I'm not trying to lay into you here. I'm glad you're experimenting with fasting. But, reality check - I would physically struggle to eat that quantity of food without being sick. I wonder if all that soda is messing with your appetite?
    - barefoot 5y ago
      I’ll bite, here are a few relevant observations. I like honey bunches of oats cereal. It’s delicious. The variety I like is also ~200 calories _per cup_. That’s before adding milk of any kind. Add a little bit of milk and tip the box a bit more than usual (I imagine a lot of folks are not very precise when measuring breakfast cereal) and we’re easily sailing over 500 calories. I eat a modest 1700 calorie diet most days and I could easily crush 1,000 calories of this cereal without even feeling full. Likewise for sandwiches. The best rated local sandwich shops near me offer a selection of (very likely) 1,000+ calorie sandwiches. They also do not list calories so my estimates are based on casually deconstructing them and plugging in constituent ingredients into MyFitnessPal ensembles with surprising results. It’s surprising because I’ve proven I can eat more than one without feeling full. It doesn’t take a mad genius in an evil food lab somewhere underground to make food that’s guaranteed to derail a diet. The ingredients are cheap, easy, and abundant everywhere. That’s the problem.
    - solarmist 5y ago
      Breakfast (560 - 640 Cal) * Two servings of frosted mini-wheats (120g - 400 Cal) * 1 or 1 1/2 cups (240/360 ml - 160/240 Cal) of whole milk To fill out a day when I was eating super carefully my lunches (1/2 each) would be 1 cups of steamed broccoli and 1/2 a Turkey sandwich. Lunchs Total (566 Cal) - 1/2 per lunch * Broccoli (200g - 72 Cal) * 2 Slices Oroweat whole wheat bread (200 Cal) * 4 oz deli Black Pepper Turkey (164 Cal) * 2 Tsp whole grain mustard (30 Cal) * 1 Tbsp Miracle Whip (25 Cal) / 1 Tbsp Mayonnaise (100 Cal) Pair that with a dinner of Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie (600 - 930 Cal) * 10 Oz Chicken Pot Pie (600 Cal) / 15 Oz (930 Cal) So without any snacks or beverages that puts me at 1,726 Cal - 2,136 Calories. If I had a glass of milk with lunch and dinner and some Almonds for a snack (1 oz 175 Cal) that would add another (495 - 655 Calories). Total of 2,221 Cal - 2,791 Cal. And this is me watching what I eat, but just getting a little sloppy around snacks and beverages. I could easily blow past that by having a Red Bull or soda. Maybe some dessert at some point in the day. It could be easy to add another 1,000 Cal.
      - nmfisher 5y ago
        I don’t mean to sound rude, but frosted cereal, miracle whip and pot pie are not indicators of a good diet. Once you start eating whole foods (mostly meat, vegetables, nuts and eggs), you’ll realize how easy it is to lose weight (particularly once you start exercising). I think the trouble is that most people have conditioned their tastebuds to respond to highly processed food, so they think they can’t eat “normally”.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Calories from drinks are a good example of stuff with a very different balance between calories and satiety, the carbs in drinks don't really create a feeling satiety even if consumed in huge amounts but do provide loads of energy. Eating 500 calories worth of non-starchy vegetables, on the other hand, would be much harder, because you would feel stuffed.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    Drinking 500+ calories a day is almost 1.5lbs a week, cutting that alone would contribute a lot to weight loss. Try drinking a gallon of water a day instead.
    - solarmist 5y ago
      Yup. Totally. I don't actually do that any more. But it wouldn't be unusual for me to have three cans of soda a day if I'm not paying attention. Two during the work day and one with dinner, so that's still 500 Calories. In the last year I've figure out one of the causes for this. I'm, apparently, very sensitive to the flavor of water. I picked up a home reverse osmosis filter and my water consumption has gone back through the roof and soda consumption down to 1 every few days just because I like the flavor.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Yea - cramming everything full of sugar to encourage over-consumption might be habit forming even for the individuals that try to minimize consuming those sugar laden goods in their adult life. Maybe a big chunk of folks can naturally avoid this but, honestly, modern life is basically about being bombarded continuously with advertising to over-consume while blaming everyone who falls victim to it - whether it be racking up credit card debt or overeating.
- baggy_trough 5y ago
  We can afford more enticing food.
- xg15 5y ago
  > It's pretty hard to argue that food engineering hasn't made super tasty snacks designed to get you hooked. Those same snacks just so happen to mostly be high-carb as well. I mean, this pretty much answers the question. Also, I suspect, more hidden fat and sugar. It would be interesting to track the calories of processed food that you generally wouldn't associate with snacks, such as bread or salad dressings. I could imagine those got a higher sugar amount over the decades. The other side of the equation might also be to blame - less energy output: Today, more areas are optimised for cars, not for walking. We also spend more time in front of a screen - both at work and for leisure.
  - ericb 5y ago
    > I mean, this pretty much answers the question. It really doesn't though. Wild animals and lab rats have been gaining weight.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kortex 5y ago
EBM is just begging the question. You gain weight when you have a positive energy balance, and you have a positive energy if you eat more than burn. It's trivially true, otherwise you are violating laws of conservation of energy. Therefore, it has no real explanatory power. Biology is all about homeostasis, cybernetics, and feedback loops. People aren't universally overweight in industrialized countries, therefore it suggests something is messing with those feedback loops. These feedback loops are myriad and complex, ranging from the simple control loop that tries to keep blood sugar in range, to the choices you make based on concepts such as self image.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  One of the shocking things I figured out when researching this that no one ever talks about is just how efficient fat is. If you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2000 calories a day, you are in a steady state. Won't gain or lose any weight. But if you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2100 calories a day, you have a 100 calorie gain. This should all be obvious. So you do that a month and a few days, and after a month or so you are up 3500 calories, which is one pound. Now that you are one pound of fat heavier, you now burn an additional couple calories per day. If you continue to eat 2100 calories, you will gain 10 pounds before you reach your equilibrium weight from consuming 2100 calories. Every 10 daily calories is worth 1 pound. Every daily apple is worth 10 pounds long-term. The 720 calorie average above is worth 72 pounds of fat. And that's even before we consider if now that you burn more calories, you will start eating more calories to keep the same offset?
- edanm 5y ago
  > EBM is just begging the question. You gain weight when you have a positive energy balance, and you have a positive energy if you eat more than burn. It's trivially true, otherwise you are violating laws of conservation of energy. Therefore, it has no real explanatory power. That's not true. You can see it's not true by the fact that so many people do in fact dispute consequences of this claim, despite it both being trivially true and proven multiple times in studies with actual humans. If you eat at a calaoric defict, no matter what you are eating, you will lose weight. That is both undeniable and widely denied, and has lots of explanatory power, because at the end of the day, a correct question to ask about the world is "why are people eating more calories?". There are certainly other factors which matter, depending on why you are asking the question: if it's for personal weight loss reasons, a good question to ask is "what kind of diet will allow me to eat less calories in the easiest way". If it's to explain the obesity epidemic, the answers are "why are people in general consuming more calories now than they were in the past". But if you discard the base mechanism by which people are gaining weight, you don't even know what questions to ask.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
solarmist 5y ago
I'd say it's a necessary explanation, but not sufficient.
inglor_cz 5y ago
N == 1, but when I eat in certain way (lots of veg + fruit, reduce white bread and pastry, no caloric drinks), my body stays the same weight, as measured by clothing size, without any further conscious effort. I suspect that this is the way how our ancestors in the 1950s-1970s stayed slim (at least compared to us) without calorie counting or even knowing what calories were, even though they held white collar jobs too. Body tries to find an in/out equilibrium, and ultra processed foods disrupt this process. Take any photo of an engineering or academic team from that period and compare it to a photo of people doing similar jobs today. A massive difference in size, though the job's physical demands aren't that different.
BizarroLand 5y ago
Why are we eating more though? Normally you would expect what, maybe people get pudgy when they live in a realm of excess availability and little exertion, but the percentage of 300+ lb people rising so dramatically in the last 30 years isn't so simply explained. I would suspect multiple things at play, some combination of processed food, food scientists tweaking flavors so that we don't burn out on eating foods, increased carbohydrate and calorie density, PFAs and endocrine disruptors in the food and water, plastic gloves leaking human analogue hormones into fast food fry grease or some currently unidentified hidden factor is a play here. Somehow these things the combination has to be shorting out the satiation signal so that people don't stop eating when they have enough. Trying to listen to your body when your body is being lied to. It's not as simple as people eat too much. Something is creating the hole that they are trying to fill.

briHass 5y ago

Yes, but why are we eating more? It's not like people in 1961 had more willpower than those in 2021. I think there's some truth to the CIH and palatability. It's pretty hard to argue that food engineering hasn't made super tasty snacks designed to get you hooked. Those same snacks just so happen to mostly be high-carb as well.

solarmist 5y ago
Note: This ignores the factors in the article to keep it simple, those affect many things which contribute to or decrease hunger, satiety, etc. I think it's as simple as the availability and quantity of food in front of us at all times. We're eating just as often as in the past, but portions (of everything) are so much larger and our bodies will eat more if it's available. Satiety is always a lagging indicator to stop eating, so by default we'll over eat if we can. Combine this with food always being available and it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the trend is going to go. This feels even more accurate to me as I've started doing alternative day fasting (because I'm about 50 lbs overweight), but I've been tracking my food intake on days I eat and I'm almost always eating 2500-3500 calories. Stuff adds up quickly. * 500 calories for a bowl of cereal with milk * 1,000 calories for a sandwich from a sandwich shop * 1,000 calories for dinner * 500+ calories from drinks And eating all of that doesn't make me feel stuffed. It's what makes me feel full. Which I know is a good bit more than "just enough" which I've done when I was working out a lot and watching every calorie I ate.
- dTal 5y ago
  Jesus, all of those quantities are shocking to me. A cup of cereal is under a hundred calories, and a cup of milk less than 200, so a bowl of cereal with milk should run about 2-300 calories. 500 calories is a Big Mac. Are you spooning sugar into it? Cream? What the heck kind of sandwich has 1000 calories? Okay, a fully loaded footlong from Subway maybe, but you seriously have that for lunch? A normal sandwich, such as you might make at home, has 300-500 calories. No 6 inch sub has more than 600 calories. Why is your lunch the same size as your dinner? 1000 calories for dinner is more reasonable, but still - that's a huge dinner. That's like a generously large platter of spaghetti bolognese. I don't know how you could be hungry for that after downing an equivalent meal at lunchtime. 500 calories from drinks is truly horrifying because unless you're chugging milkshakes that's probably all high fructose corn syrup. A quarter of your recommended daily caloric intake, in the form of pure refined sugar! That's an express ticket to diabetes-ville right there. 4+ cans of coke daily is not a healthy intake. I'm not trying to lay into you here. I'm glad you're experimenting with fasting. But, reality check - I would physically struggle to eat that quantity of food without being sick. I wonder if all that soda is messing with your appetite?
  - barefoot 5y ago
    I’ll bite, here are a few relevant observations. I like honey bunches of oats cereal. It’s delicious. The variety I like is also ~200 calories _per cup_. That’s before adding milk of any kind. Add a little bit of milk and tip the box a bit more than usual (I imagine a lot of folks are not very precise when measuring breakfast cereal) and we’re easily sailing over 500 calories. I eat a modest 1700 calorie diet most days and I could easily crush 1,000 calories of this cereal without even feeling full. Likewise for sandwiches. The best rated local sandwich shops near me offer a selection of (very likely) 1,000+ calorie sandwiches. They also do not list calories so my estimates are based on casually deconstructing them and plugging in constituent ingredients into MyFitnessPal ensembles with surprising results. It’s surprising because I’ve proven I can eat more than one without feeling full. It doesn’t take a mad genius in an evil food lab somewhere underground to make food that’s guaranteed to derail a diet. The ingredients are cheap, easy, and abundant everywhere. That’s the problem.
  - solarmist 5y ago
    Breakfast (560 - 640 Cal) * Two servings of frosted mini-wheats (120g - 400 Cal) * 1 or 1 1/2 cups (240/360 ml - 160/240 Cal) of whole milk To fill out a day when I was eating super carefully my lunches (1/2 each) would be 1 cups of steamed broccoli and 1/2 a Turkey sandwich. Lunchs Total (566 Cal) - 1/2 per lunch * Broccoli (200g - 72 Cal) * 2 Slices Oroweat whole wheat bread (200 Cal) * 4 oz deli Black Pepper Turkey (164 Cal) * 2 Tsp whole grain mustard (30 Cal) * 1 Tbsp Miracle Whip (25 Cal) / 1 Tbsp Mayonnaise (100 Cal) Pair that with a dinner of Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie (600 - 930 Cal) * 10 Oz Chicken Pot Pie (600 Cal) / 15 Oz (930 Cal) So without any snacks or beverages that puts me at 1,726 Cal - 2,136 Calories. If I had a glass of milk with lunch and dinner and some Almonds for a snack (1 oz 175 Cal) that would add another (495 - 655 Calories). Total of 2,221 Cal - 2,791 Cal. And this is me watching what I eat, but just getting a little sloppy around snacks and beverages. I could easily blow past that by having a Red Bull or soda. Maybe some dessert at some point in the day. It could be easy to add another 1,000 Cal.
    - nmfisher 5y ago
      I don’t mean to sound rude, but frosted cereal, miracle whip and pot pie are not indicators of a good diet. Once you start eating whole foods (mostly meat, vegetables, nuts and eggs), you’ll realize how easy it is to lose weight (particularly once you start exercising). I think the trouble is that most people have conditioned their tastebuds to respond to highly processed food, so they think they can’t eat “normally”.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Calories from drinks are a good example of stuff with a very different balance between calories and satiety, the carbs in drinks don't really create a feeling satiety even if consumed in huge amounts but do provide loads of energy. Eating 500 calories worth of non-starchy vegetables, on the other hand, would be much harder, because you would feel stuffed.
- rkk3 5y ago
  Drinking 500+ calories a day is almost 1.5lbs a week, cutting that alone would contribute a lot to weight loss. Try drinking a gallon of water a day instead.
  - solarmist 5y ago
    Yup. Totally. I don't actually do that any more. But it wouldn't be unusual for me to have three cans of soda a day if I'm not paying attention. Two during the work day and one with dinner, so that's still 500 Calories. In the last year I've figure out one of the causes for this. I'm, apparently, very sensitive to the flavor of water. I picked up a home reverse osmosis filter and my water consumption has gone back through the roof and soda consumption down to 1 every few days just because I like the flavor.
munk-a 5y ago
Yea - cramming everything full of sugar to encourage over-consumption might be habit forming even for the individuals that try to minimize consuming those sugar laden goods in their adult life. Maybe a big chunk of folks can naturally avoid this but, honestly, modern life is basically about being bombarded continuously with advertising to over-consume while blaming everyone who falls victim to it - whether it be racking up credit card debt or overeating.
baggy_trough 5y ago
We can afford more enticing food.
xg15 5y ago
> It's pretty hard to argue that food engineering hasn't made super tasty snacks designed to get you hooked. Those same snacks just so happen to mostly be high-carb as well. I mean, this pretty much answers the question. Also, I suspect, more hidden fat and sugar. It would be interesting to track the calories of processed food that you generally wouldn't associate with snacks, such as bread or salad dressings. I could imagine those got a higher sugar amount over the decades. The other side of the equation might also be to blame - less energy output: Today, more areas are optimised for cars, not for walking. We also spend more time in front of a screen - both at work and for leisure.
- ericb 5y ago
  > I mean, this pretty much answers the question. It really doesn't though. Wild animals and lab rats have been gaining weight.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kortex 5y ago

EBM is just begging the question. You gain weight when you have a positive energy balance, and you have a positive energy if you eat more than burn. It's trivially true, otherwise you are violating laws of conservation of energy. Therefore, it has no real explanatory power. Biology is all about homeostasis, cybernetics, and feedback loops. People aren't universally overweight in industrialized countries, therefore it suggests something is messing with those feedback loops. These feedback loops are myriad and complex, ranging from the simple control loop that tries to keep blood sugar in range, to the choices you make based on concepts such as self image.

ItsMonkk 5y ago
One of the shocking things I figured out when researching this that no one ever talks about is just how efficient fat is. If you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2000 calories a day, you are in a steady state. Won't gain or lose any weight. But if you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2100 calories a day, you have a 100 calorie gain. This should all be obvious. So you do that a month and a few days, and after a month or so you are up 3500 calories, which is one pound. Now that you are one pound of fat heavier, you now burn an additional couple calories per day. If you continue to eat 2100 calories, you will gain 10 pounds before you reach your equilibrium weight from consuming 2100 calories. Every 10 daily calories is worth 1 pound. Every daily apple is worth 10 pounds long-term. The 720 calorie average above is worth 72 pounds of fat. And that's even before we consider if now that you burn more calories, you will start eating more calories to keep the same offset?
edanm 5y ago
> EBM is just begging the question. You gain weight when you have a positive energy balance, and you have a positive energy if you eat more than burn. It's trivially true, otherwise you are violating laws of conservation of energy. Therefore, it has no real explanatory power. That's not true. You can see it's not true by the fact that so many people do in fact dispute consequences of this claim, despite it both being trivially true and proven multiple times in studies with actual humans. If you eat at a calaoric defict, no matter what you are eating, you will lose weight. That is both undeniable and widely denied, and has lots of explanatory power, because at the end of the day, a correct question to ask about the world is "why are people eating more calories?". There are certainly other factors which matter, depending on why you are asking the question: if it's for personal weight loss reasons, a good question to ask is "what kind of diet will allow me to eat less calories in the easiest way". If it's to explain the obesity epidemic, the answers are "why are people in general consuming more calories now than they were in the past". But if you discard the base mechanism by which people are gaining weight, you don't even know what questions to ask.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

solarmist 5y ago

I'd say it's a necessary explanation, but not sufficient.

inglor_cz 5y ago

N == 1, but when I eat in certain way (lots of veg + fruit, reduce white bread and pastry, no caloric drinks), my body stays the same weight, as measured by clothing size, without any further conscious effort. I suspect that this is the way how our ancestors in the 1950s-1970s stayed slim (at least compared to us) without calorie counting or even knowing what calories were, even though they held white collar jobs too. Body tries to find an in/out equilibrium, and ultra processed foods disrupt this process. Take any photo of an engineering or academic team from that period and compare it to a photo of people doing similar jobs today. A massive difference in size, though the job's physical demands aren't that different.

BizarroLand 5y ago

Why are we eating more though? Normally you would expect what, maybe people get pudgy when they live in a realm of excess availability and little exertion, but the percentage of 300+ lb people rising so dramatically in the last 30 years isn't so simply explained. I would suspect multiple things at play, some combination of processed food, food scientists tweaking flavors so that we don't burn out on eating foods, increased carbohydrate and calorie density, PFAs and endocrine disruptors in the food and water, plastic gloves leaking human analogue hormones into fast food fry grease or some currently unidentified hidden factor is a play here. Somehow these things the combination has to be shorting out the satiation signal so that people don't stop eating when they have enough. Trying to listen to your body when your body is being lied to. It's not as simple as people eat too much. Something is creating the hole that they are trying to fill.