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If a factor can't explain why non-Hispanic Asians have much lower prevalence of obesity than any other race, I tend not to trust it. Are Asians simply using les

• kgilpin 4y ago
  Is it lower consumption of alcohol?
  • brabel 4y ago
    Food. Just see what they eat (and how much). It really is simple as that.
    • imeron 4y ago
      Don't forget that Japanese actively shame fat people! This is very much frown upon in Western societies but it works for them I guess.
      • hollywood_court 4y ago
        Shame should be a powerful motivator. It doesn’t seem to work too well in the west though.
        • naikrovek 4y ago
          shame is just as unhealthy as obesity. the west recognizes that, somehow.
          • hollywood_court 4y ago
            I suppose I should have clarified that I don’t advocate for shaming others. But personal shame and shame avoidance has been the single greatest tool for my own success.
            • naikrovek 4y ago
              if you've come through that unharmed you're a miracle. shame is a fantastic motivator and holy cow is it one of the most caustic things ever to the recipient's psyche.
              • hollywood_court 4y ago
                The most important thing in the world is leverage. And shame can make for some pretty powerful leverage. I’m a hyper critical individual especially when it comes to myself. If I didn’t work to avoid shame, it’s very likely I’d be a lot more miserable and a lot less successful.
                • naikrovek 4y ago
                  > If I didn’t work to avoid shame, it’s very likely I’d be a lot more miserable and a lot less successful. Ok, I am not going to say that is incorrect or anything; you know you far better than any internet strangers. I would say that having a motivation which is based on avoiding negative outcome rather than being drawn towards positive outcome is by definition an unhealthy motivation, and that's my point about shame. It does work, it brings success, it brings money, and so on, and deep down, every last person motivated primarily by aversion to negative outcome is going to be very unhappy in their core. Those people know that just a small number of honest mistakes will bring failure and those feelings of shame, even if the source of the shame is completely internal and the mistakes that got them there trivial. These people are not happy. Not really; they are only going in the correct direction because the bad direction is artificially acutely punitive, far more than it would be on its own. Western culture does not recognize this very well at all; we are a results-driven society. In public, we openly scorn parents shovel shame onto their children, and the parents learn (via shame from the public) that they should simply do this privately, rather than openly. Shame begets shame. Fear of failure should never be a stronger motivator than the desire to succeed.
        • bergenty 4y ago
          It does except we don’t shame people completely as a society, we have a lot of niches and self assuring peer groups that negates the shame coming from some segment of the population.
      • NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
        They don't feel even slightly bad about it. It's as prevalent as obesity isn't.
        • astrange 4y ago
          There’s fat Japanese people. They drink so much it’d be a surprise if there weren’t. They’re also getting strangely more common in porn, maybe because their society is getting so old.
    • swyx 4y ago
      we eat a lot of noodles and rice though. speaking as a fat asian i feel like that factors a lot into it (that i'm actively working on now)
  • bergenty 4y ago
    Asians consume a lot of alcohol including Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Indians.
• bilsbie 4y ago
  Why not genetics?
  • scoofy 4y ago
    Any explanation to the American obesity epidemic needs to explain why it exploded in the 1980s and has accelerated since then. Genetics would exactly fail this test.
    • sdflhasjd 4y ago
      Genetics and plastic (or whatever else)?
      • scoofy 4y ago
        This is certainly plausible, but seems like a rather unreasonably complex potential solution.
  • astrange 4y ago
    There are hardly any situations where genetic differences between humans are the entire causal chain for any outcome. When someone tells you otherwise, it’s a good sign they don’t understand statistics. (Scientists commonly don’t understand statistics, since it’d be harder to get papers published if they did.) Strictly speaking it’s never true, because the environment could always contain a cure for your genetic disorder and your environment just happens to not have contained one so far in your life.
• tsol 4y ago
  Then why are lab rats also overweight?[1] What are they doing that asians aren't? Really I think you can't look at one single factor no matter how convincing you think it is 1- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-changing-our-view-of-obesity/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-...
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    This article is not stating that lab rats are overweight. It is stating that some rats were made overweight by dosing them with these chemicals. There was a 2010 study that did suggest lab animals were fatter than previous years. However, it was not statistically significant for rats. Only mice. It did not specify a causal factor.
    • nope96 4y ago
      This article is."A significant rise in obesity incidence has even been noted in laboratory rodents and primates – animals raised under strictly controlled conditions of caloric intake and exercise. The only possible factors driving weight gain for these animals, researchers believe, would be subtle chemical changes in the nature of the foods they eat, or in the materials used to build their pens."
      • spywaregorilla 4y ago
        "This article" referred to the one cited by the parent comment. The OP article does make this claim, though it does not cite a source. The only source for this claim that exists is the study I referenced, which you can read here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081766/#!po=35.2459 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081766/#!po=35...
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  diet (not dieting, but their diet)
  • rr888 4y ago
    Dieting too, esp the women seem to have a huge amount of pressure to be skinny.
• Dalewyn 4y ago
  >Are Asians simply using less plastic than other races? Considering that Japanese use an absolutely terrifying amount of plastic for food packaging and aren't landwhales, I'd say the theory from TFA's headline is bunk.
  • iszomer 4y ago
    Or it could simply be explained as the Japanese culture of eating conservatively; portions tend not be "supersized" unlike in America.
    • quietbritishjim 4y ago
      That's right, but it's consistent with what the parent comment is saying: it's not the plastic packaging causing obesity. You're agreeing with a tone of disagreement.
    • scoofy 4y ago
      The data presented is Asian-Americans. Cultural traits, sure, but trying to explain the phenomena by referring to non-American Japanese culture is a bit of a stretch.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Well if you want the One Number That Affects Asians, I think what stands out to me the most is the prevalence of lactose intolerance over there, approaching 90% the more easterly you go. They just do not do very much dairy. Less scientific, but a couple years ago I decided to transition to a more meat-lite diet and ended up turning to Asian cookbooks to make that happen. Veg entrees are just a novelty to western cuisines and everyone is stunlocked on meat substitutes instead of just doing well with the stuff that grows right out of the ground.
  • novia 4y ago
    You might be onto something. The US government has been subsidizing dairy products [1] and it has caused a huge surplus[2], which processed food manufacturers then try to add into anything they can because it's a cheap filler. But it wouldn't be a cheap filler if it hadn't been for the government propping up the production. Dairy farmers in this country make so much milk that they will sometimes dump it rather than sell it [3]. [1] https://www.farmanddairy.com/top-stories/a-brief-history-of-dairy-pricing/592392.html https://www.farmanddairy.com/top-stories/a-brief-history-of-... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/americas-cheese-stockpile-just-hit-an-all-time-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/ameri... [3] https://youtu.be/orTNTwaZauQ https://youtu.be/orTNTwaZauQ
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      About 20 yrs ago The NYT Sunday mag had an article (read: op-ed-y piece) that proposed the same about corn. That is, fed subsidies for corn ultimately made high fructose corn syrup dirt cheap. That price point. made it more appealing to add sweetness to more food products. Or made sweet products (e.g., soda) cheaper. Lower prices...higher consumption... Hello obesity as a cultural norm.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  I would say food - most asian people I know (even ones that eat a pretty western diet) still randomly incorporate a lot of things that are Real Foods or processed type foods that are close to Real Foods. They also eat a lot (generally) more mushrooms and fermented food (and great variety of fermented food - not just yeast based stuff like yogurt). Does it really make sense that Western diets basically just ignore a whole kingdom of foods? Plants, Animals, Fungi. Those are the three. Why do we eat so few of the latter?
  • less_less 4y ago
    > They also eat a lot (generally) more mushrooms and fermented food (and great variety of fermented food - not just yeast based stuff like yogurt). Not that this detracts from the rest of your point at all, but yogurt is fermented by bacteria. There are milk drinks that are fermented by SCOBY though, like kefir.
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Yogurt might be, but nearly all non-plain yogurt (in US supermarkets) is loaded with sugar. People eating such yogurt believing they're eating "healthy" are making a mistake.
  • klipt 4y ago
    Yeast is a fungus? So if you eat bread or drink wine/beer you're probably consuming some amount of fungus that way.
    • kmc059000 4y ago
      Most commercial beer completely removes the yeast though, even many microbreweries. If you don't visibly see sediment in the bottle, it has been filtered. The reason is consistency in product and consumer preferences.
• causality0 4y ago
  Exactly. Lack of obesity in Asians, like good grades, is only a mystery to people who didn't grow up with Asian friends. It's behavior. More specifically it's discipline, both personal and familial. For an Asian kid, drifting out of line often means getting insulted and humiliated at home. I'm not saying it's worth it, but someone who gets shamed for ordering extra fries tends not to grow up to eat fast food five times a week.
• noja 4y ago
  Why does the Mediterranean diet work so well? Because of the socialized healthcare. (in other words: "it's not the diet dummy", just like it's not the plastic)
  • honkdaddy 4y ago
    After living a year in Florida and then living a year in Serbia, I can't say I'm convinced it's the socialized healthcare is what makes Europeans so much skinnier than Americans.
    • imtringued 4y ago
      I think the skinnier Europeans are what makes socialized healthcare work. Lots of expensive to treat diseases are just a result of a poor diet.
    • floxy 4y ago
      Doesn't Serbia have one of the highest rates of tobacco smoking in the world?
      • honkdaddy 4y ago
        Totally. It also has friendly, hilarious, tall and broad shouldered men who love to drink and gamble on soccer, women with great fashion sense who get their nails done religiously, and some of my favorite local folk music I've ever heard. I think the point I'm trying to make is that broad, multi-faceted cultural differences that span generations are a better explanation for differing obesity rates than one single factor like the lack of socialized healthcare. I think it takes living in Europe and also living in rural America to really understand just how different we are across the Atlantic, so broad demographic differences like this aren't something we can neatly attribute to one cause, nor should we aim to.
  • astrange 4y ago
    It’s because birth certificates are particularly unreliable in that region, which causes it to appear to have older people than it actually does.
• Qem 4y ago
  Perhaps in those populations many generations consuming soy products selected for resistance against ill-effects from plant phytosterols, and against other endocrine disruptors as a side-effect.
• pseudalopex 4y ago
  The article said it isn't plastic only. The chart compared groups of Americans. Asian Americans were the only mostly immigrant group. The article said exposing mice to obesogenic chemicals before birth had effects later in their lives. 1 chemical had effects for 3 generations.
• nostromo 4y ago
  This is the blank slate fallacy, but about food. Human populations have natural variations -- and even if we all ate the same foods, some populations would be heavier than others. Imagine if you looked only to food to explain why the Dutch are taller than the Vietnamese. At best you'd get a small part of the answer.
  • musicale 4y ago
    > Imagine if you looked only to food to explain why the Dutch are taller than the Vietnamese. At best you'd get a small part of the answer Isn't Dutch height supposed be due to natural selection (taller men have more children, who are in turn tall), better nutrition (such as more high-quality dairy/cheese), and better sleep (promoting growth)? Nutrition may be an important part of the equation.
• wahern 4y ago
  Higher BMI correlates with various morbidities, but is not necessarily the direct cause.[1] East Asians have higher rates of type-2 diabetes than Caucasians, both in the U.S. and in East Asia, despite having lower BMIs. So, theoretically, plastics could absolutely be a factor here. But this nonetheless bolsters your larger point, which is that we need to better appreciate how diseases manifest and evolve across different populations, with an eye toward shared but less obvious (i.e. less superficial) similarities and pathways. And studies--or at least their conclusions--which fail to do so should receive greater scrutiny than they currently do. [1] Notably, East Asians tend to be more prone to intra-abdominal (visceral) fat, which more strongly correlates with type-2 diabetes than BMI. Plenty more East Asians are walking around with diagnosed metabolic syndrome than you would guess simply by how they look. So fat might still be directly involved, just not the obvious, subcutaneous fat which people of Caucasian and African ancestry put on faster and more evenly distributed across the body than some other populations.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• zaptheimpaler 4y ago
  BMI really isn't comparable across races. A better measure of body fat with regards to its predictive power on health outcomes is "central adiposity" i.e belly size. Asians tend to preferentially accumulate fat around the belly and have lower BMIs at similar body fat %s compared to EU and Americans. I know i've seen this tendency in myself and a lot of other Asians. There are some studies about it too [1]. Asians have as much or more heart disease and type 2 diabetes as any other race which is the outcome that actually matters. It seems to be a broader problem in medicine. A lot of ranges and typical levels on blood tests or other quantitative tests are calibrated to native populations. With more immigration and genetic mixing the levels don't make a lot of sense. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8617748/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8617748/
• bergenty 4y ago
  What exactly is a non Hispanic Asian? Aren’t virtually all Asians non Hispanic?
• bergenty 4y ago
  Asians effectively use body shaming and community/peer pressure to essentially mold people into staying fit.
  • astrange 4y ago
    That shouldn’t help unless they know effective ways to stay fit. According to the article that’s avoiding microplastics, which is not what Asian mothers are harassing their daughters into doing.
    • bergenty 4y ago
      Effective ways to stay fit is not eating a lot of food, it’s pretty straightforward.
      • astrange 4y ago
        That‘s not what the article says.