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> In the past, scientists and the public often thought that those with obesity simply lacked the willpower to lose weight. But evidence is growing that most peo

> In the past, scientists and the public often thought that those with obesity simply lacked the willpower to lose weight. But evidence is growing that most people’s bodies have a natural size that can be hard to change. In the context where we have gone from obesity rates of 13 percent to 40, to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me.

viro 4y ago
And it makes more logical sense to you that everyone is just weak-willed?
- nathas 4y ago
  How many times do you check HN each day instead of doing work?
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    That's bizarre. Should I be bending my will to exclusively work? I work better with breaks, that's not weakness, that's realism.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bioemerl 4y ago
  It makes more sense to point to the fact that we have a far more calorie dense meal palette and a far less active lifestyle.
  - ericb 4y ago
    Pets, lab rats, and wild animals have gained weight in this timeframe.
  - Eumenes 4y ago
    Both of which are choices one has to make.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  s/weak-willed/addicted/ There. Fixed it for you :) Yes, to me it seems like capitalism creates a society where most people get addicted just trying to cope with everyday life. For some it's alcohol, for some it's OxyContin, for some it's food, for some it's all-nighters in World of Warcraft. "59.3 million (21.4%) people over age 12 used illicit drugs in the past year." "Underage [..] 29% reported drinking alcohol" https://www.verywellmind.com/rates-of-illicit-drug-abuse-in-the-us-67027 https://www.verywellmind.com/rates-of-illicit-drug-abuse-in-... Looks like weed and alcohol already are 50% of all citizens... I don't find it difficult to imagine that the other half ab-uses food.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    You can’t add two unrelated stats together and say it’s 50% - there’s highly likely some crossover there…
  - pixl97 4y ago
    So before mass capitalism people didn't drink? Can I ask that you read a large number of history books across any number of cultures on addictive behaviors throughout history, because you'll find that anytime a society had an excess of time and labor/production that people find addictive behaviors to enjoy. This is not recent. This is not capitalism. This is humanity. What capitalism has done is given everybody enough free time from starvation to actually follow addictive pursuits.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Aren't there claims commonly made (I haven't reviewed the literature to know if it's compelling or not) that the medieval serf worked less than the modern worker?
      - pixl97 4y ago
        I've read a number of studies like this and at the end of the day everyone ends up at apples != oranges. If you wanted to live with the same amount of 'lifestyle' as a serf did then you'd likely only have to work a few hours a week. The issue is I don't think most people want to live that lifestyle. We like clean water to drink. We like sheltered houses with electricity. We love having a house that is too large and filling it up with an inordinate amount of crap. We love living in expensive places with a lot to do. Turns out wanting all that requires a lot of stuff. At one point in my life I was more interesting in not working and messing around and doing other things. I worked around 40 hours a month for a few years and made enough of a living to pay my bills (hey, computer work pays good). So it's not impossible for at least some people to live like that , though with rent increases not sure if it's possible these days. But with all that said, I like having all the stuff that working a full time job gives to me, so there is that.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Yes, it doesn't to you?
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I think it makes sense to someone who has never tried to starve their body. Doing that will change your appreciation for the human brain.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying the reason people don't do it is because they don't have the willpower. Yes, it is possible to choose to starve yourself, just requires a ton of willpower.
      - viro 4y ago
        Starving yourself often slows down ur metabolism even more, which makes it harder to lose weight without medical issues. the will power to put urself into coma Jesus Christ.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  That viewpoint has a strong attraction for people who's natural weight is low, because they get to see themselves as strong willed and morally superior.
- Auracle 4y ago
  Honestly, yeah? I know I'll get downvoted to hell for this but I could have absolutely nailed a quiz of "who is going to get really fat after high school." Nobody that I would have defined as a "hard worker" has gotten fat.
whodatbo1 4y ago
Absolutely agree. Unironically through the first few paragraphs I though this was some very cleverly put satirical take on modern society. There is a great book about the effects of modern food, primarily on dental health, written back in the 30s - Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. Even though it's almost a century old, the findings are quite fascinating and can be extrapolated to present day. It's quite undeniable that modern life has drawbacks and obesity is just a symptom.
- bscphil 4y ago
  I think it would be most accurate to say that people's bodies have a natural size given a particular food and social environment. That's a crucial bit of context that's very often neglected. Resisting one's environment is very difficult - it often requires you to have money, time, medicine, workout obsessed friends, or all of the above. Given changes in the environment in western countries over the last 50 years or so, weights are rising to their new "natural" levels as a consequence.
- pixl97 4y ago
  > It's quite undeniable that modern life has drawbacks and obesity is just a symptom. Yea, people tend to forget pre-green revolution people going hungry for longer periods of time and mass starvation were really common. We made a trade, between the sudden and terrible outcome of starving and hunger to one of long term consequences like obesity and disease.
  - cfn 4y ago
    That sounds to me like a false equivalence. The cause of obesity is not that food is plentiful because different rich countries have different obesity rates. There is something else driving this issue and, in my opinion, is the prevalence of processed foods and use of highly processed seed oils.
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      It’s probably a combination of factors, but look at the rate of change of obesity rates. Obesity rates have been going up almost everywhere. Essentially the rest of the world has been catching up to America. America was the first country where food was so abundant that it was essentially limitless for the majority of the population. Perhaps the effect of limitless food on obesity rates takes time to manifest and is compounded in successive generations.
8note 4y ago
That two people eating the same thing in the same amounts will retain different amounts as weight is something you can experiment on, without assigning a cause.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I think we need to really stress here just how bad our situation is. We have an obesity rate of 40 plus percent. Peoples weight just cannot be said to be a "natural number" in this environment. Something is causing this and your average person is obese because of it, not because of their "natural weight"
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    We won't solve it so long as we think of it as a moral issue.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    It's both, the difference between ourselves and our grandparents is almost all environment. The difference between 2 high school students in 2023 Susy and Bob is driven almost completely by genetics.
buryat 4y ago
people previously just couldnt grow to their natural size
- pessimizer 4y ago
  This caused me uncontrollable laughter and the desire to tell everyone about it.
tootie 4y ago
Prior to the 20th century, it was pretty routine for average people to have inadequate access to nutrition. The rise in obesity corresponded with sweeping changed in agricultural policy that backstopped the prices of staple foods with subsidies and improved land and water management to prevent dust bowls. The result is everybody has enough food available cheaply all the time. Rolling any of that back is likely to replace obesity with malnutrition which is a much worse problem. Pandemic years notwithstanding, life expectancy has increased almost hand-in-hand with obesity rates. Obviously that's correlation, not causation.
- krona 4y ago
  Obesity rates started rising in the 1980's in the US, not the turn of the 20th century. This corresponds with poor diet, not abundant nutrition.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    They were going up before the 1970s, there was a momentary blip in the mid/late 70s before they started going up steadily again.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > Rolling any of that back is likely to replace obesity with malnutrition Based on what evidence? There are plenty of countries where people are not suffering from malnutrition and yet obesity rates are low compared to the U.S.
seneca 4y ago
It's just terrible reporting, and equivocation. It being a lifestyle problem and having a natural weight can both be true. People have a natural weight, and it's difficult to drop below it. No one's natural weight is to morbidly obese. These people are taking a medical finding and blowing it wildly out of proportion to support their agenda. It's an unfortunately common tactic. I don't quite think it's entirely fair to blame on willpower in modern western society though. We have a food supply that is unnaturally calorie dense, and optimized for hyper strong flavor, shelf stability, and profit, and rarely for health. We're also much more sedentary.
- bscphil 4y ago
  IMO it's purely a question of perspective. From the point of view of individual health, you need to think like a doctor. The important question is "what can this individual do to improve their health?" From that perspective it's a "lifestyle" problem, as you put it. The individual has a food supply that is unnaturally calorie dense and unhealthy. To lose weight and improve their health the individual must make an effort to shift that; for some it might be impossible. For others it might be possible with a great deal of effort or with drugs. From the point of view of public healthy, you need to think like a public health expert. From this perspective it makes perfect sense to talk about "natural weights" as something that can change (and has risen) over time. The calorie dense food environment and sedentary lifestyles are things that exist in the background here. Given these background facts, the weights of the great majority of people (who don't have the time, means, willpower, etc to resist) are going to rise to a new higher "natural" point. For some, foods will be so calorie dense and provide so little nutrition or satiety that they experience runaway obesity. These are just predictable downstream effects of the environment, and so the perspective of the public health expert is that individuals aren't to be blamed and you have to fix the environment. Ban soda in public schools, etc etc.
russdill 4y ago
There are two problems. One is that some people have a body that drives then incredibly strongly towards a certain size. The other is they there are people that given the opportunity to eat whatever they want whenever they want will slowly gain weight year after year. Gaining 3-4 pounds in a year isn't a problem and a sign that someone has a poor lifestyle. But over 2 or 3 decades, that becomes a serious problem.
ChadNauseam 4y ago
The implication is that something has happened during the last 50-100 years that caused people's "natural weight" to change upward. (Someone's "natural weight" is normally called their "set point".) The evidence is a little slim (no pun), but there's one theory which I find quite compelling. The theory is that eating foods with high flavor-calorie association increases your set point, and eating foods with low flavor-calorie association decreases your set point. Flavor-calorie association is when your body knows that a particular flavor results in getting lots of calories in the near future. The flavor-calorie association will be higher for foods that are more flavorful or more calorically dense, and flavor-calorie associations can only be developed for foods you eat regularly. This explains why I lose a bit of weight whenever I go somewhere new – I'm trying new foods, so what I'm eating has doesn't have any flavor-calorie association, so my body's set point goes down, so I get full more quickly, causing me to eat fewer calories overall, causing me to lose weight. And since foods have gotten much more flavorful and calorically dense in the past half-century, it would explain why people's set points have gone up. There's a simple way to test this theory at home. Extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is tasteless and textureless. So, find a 2-hour window of your day when you don't taste anything with flavor, and have two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil right in the middle of that window. Since the oil has no flavor, it should have no flavor-calorie association, and your set point should go down. I've been doing this, and I've been getting full faster and that's been causing me to lose weight. (If you want to google more info, it's called the shangri-la diet.) (Note that if you try this, your toothpaste probably counts as a flavor.)
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I'd be sooner to suspect environmental contaminants (changing types of air pollution, microplastics, pesticides on food, stress hormones in factory-farmed meat, et al) as a cause. Although I suspect there's something to your hypothesis as well. I don't know about a spoonful of oil, but I have gone through phases where food seems less "rewarding" on a physiological level, and as a result I feel more satisfied with less.
  - dcolkitt 4y ago
    Air pollution seems unlikely as it's been falling for decades, and America has much lower levels than Europe. Microplastics are a perennial boogey man, and probably a genuine ecological issue, but there has no been mountains of studies done and documented health effects are virtually non-existent. Livestock and slaughterhouse conditions are certainly not good from an animal welfare perspective, but we've had similar practices for 100+ years and obesity wasn't a major issue in 1960. Pesticides in food products have been substantially reduced since the EPA changed guidelines in the 1990s, and yet obesity has exploded since then.
MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
The term "natural weight" as used here is misleading. It does not mean that people are supposed to be a particular weight. It refers to the idea that something—whether it's diet, genetics, environmental factors, or something else—influences the body's weight regulation mechanisms to "prefer" a certain body weight, and changing that is very, very hard. Think of it like body temperature: normally, your body maintains a certain core temperature, and it will respond in a negative feedback loop when the temperature deviates from that set point. Conditions like infections can induce where your body raises that set point to fight the infection, and it takes time for that set point to come back down. Something similar appears to happen with people's weight. Hormonal or other changes cause the body to gain weight, and once that happens, it resists losing weight in various ways: increasing appetite, changes to basal metabolic rate, changes to metabolic pathways involved in breaking down nutrients from food, all sorts of things. Deviously, fat cells actually produce hormones that play into these changes, which is one of many reasons why losing weight is usually harder than gaining it. And when people do manage to lose weight, often after a huge exertion of effort and willpower and major lifestyle changes, their set point may not have changed, and so as soon as they slip up even a little bit, they quickly regain back to their set point. So they're not suggesting that there's some mystical force out there that decides some percentage of the population should be overweight. They're referring to the idea of a set point for body weight that is difficult to change without drugs or bariatric surgery.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  If this were true I would not expect that changes in our lifestyle would cause broad scale weight increases like they have. I'm very skeptical humans are built with an average set weight way up in the unhealthy range. Or maybe this is the case, but it is thrown off hard by our modern diets. Our natural set point is in the healthy range, but our meal is x calories per Y food now so it ends up artificially high. The explanation just doesn't line up with what we've seen. I get that it's hard to lose weight once you've gained it, but that's different. This is absolving us of being responsible for our obesity as a whole.
  - MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
jdminhbg 4y ago
A sudden change in “natural weight” isn’t any more absurd than a sudden change in willpower.
paulpauper 4y ago
Highly palatable caloric dense food means that people are more incline to gain weight without even trying. 100+ years ago you had to make a more an effort to overeat.
- kfarr 4y ago
  And extremely sedentary lifestyle in US
  - Auracle 4y ago
    Right. When I'm walking 5 hours a day on my treadmill I can eat whatever the hell I want and not gain weight.
adamsmith143 4y ago
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... TLDR: The modern obesity epidemic is mostly a mystery, things like higher caloric food, western diet bad don't tell the whole story. Most likely answers are chemical contaminants in our foods and water i.e. lithium or PFAS chemicals. Interestingly enough both wild animals and lab animals(rats) have been getting fatter over time as well which clearly invalidates the "bad diet" theory. The Human body has a lipostat, you "natural weight" mechanism if you will and it seems these contaminants increase the lipostat and this results in widespread obesity.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  TLDR: The modern obesity epidemic is mostly a mystery, things like higher caloric food, western diet bad don't tell the whole story. I think it tells more of the story than contaminants does. A candy bar is packed with calories and not that filling. This didn't exist a long time ago.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    The article I linked is very thorough. It covers basic issues like that: "Today the rate of obesity in Italy, France, and Sweden is around 20%. In 1975, there was no country in the world that had an obesity rate higher than 15%. This wasn’t a steady, gentle trend as food got better, or diets got worse. People had access to plenty of delicious, high-calorie foods back in 1965. Doritos were invented in 1966, Twinkies in 1930, Oreos in 1912, and Coca-Cola all the way back in 1886. So what changed in 1980?"
    - CadmiumYellow 4y ago
      I love that series by Slime Mold Time Mold but I don't entirely agree with their conclusions. Sure, Doritos and Twinkies existed before 1980, but anybody who's been alive since the 60s or 70s can tell you that the food environment has changed dramatically in such a way that processed junk food is now much more accessible and makes up a larger portion of the average person's diet. There are probably multiple things going on that involve environmental contaminants, the food supply, and cultural attitudes towards food.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Obesity has increased uniformly across the US and much of the world. But in the US is fairly strongly, negatively correlated with income. And the obvious culprit here is thus processed and cheap food. Now, exactly how that manifests is probably quite complex. I see everyone offering their pet theory and that tends to muddy the waters but the basic outline seems reasonably clear.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  https://www.prb.org/resources/for-women-in-the-u-s-obesity-links-to-socioeconomic-status-and-poor-diet/#:~:text=Whereas%2026.5%20percent%20of%20men,in%20the%20highest%20income%20group https://www.prb.org/resources/for-women-in-the-u-s-obesity-l.... That correlation with income is almost entirely driven by women. Rich men aren't much thinner than middle class or poor men. Rich women are just a lot thinner than middle class or poor women. This tells a different story than cheap processed food.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Even your link ends with "Cheap Food, Unhealthy Food" and doesn't claim a refutation. It's' plausible higher income men aren't as concerned about healthy food as higher income women.
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      The claims I quoted were all facts. The article ends with a lot of interpretation of those facts that seem to be based on a lot of the authors priors and not at all based on good data.
csours 4y ago
Hunger is like a one way valve - you can gain weight and your body will not stop you, but as soon as you start to incur caloric deficit, your body will turn on lots of alarm bells. Hunger is also impossible to compare, as it is an internal sensation. Response to hunger is trained, but it is extremely hard to retrain.
ravenstine 4y ago
I've heard this referred to as body "set points", and I've yet to see anything very convincing that set points are a thing. It doesn't really make sense that the body would "prefer" a body weight that is tremendously inefficient and contraindicated. More likely, in my opinion, what may be seen as a "set point" may be more akin to metabolic damage that simply takes time to heal once the pathology is actually being properly addressed. Also, people simply can't be trusted when it comes to self-reporting of their own regimen. Whether it's not being honest with one's self, or being embarrassed, ill informed, or plain delusional, lots of people will report that they've done "all the right things" to lose weight when they in fact have not. It's far more common that people suffering from obesity remain fat because they are thwarting their own progress, or are being given shitty advice from crackpot dieticians, and less common that there is some chronic hormonal condition that can't be corrected by diet. If your pancreas is still working, as well as your thyroid, your pituitary, your hypothalamus, etc., you probably can correct your obesity without drugs. But people want the "pill" or the "shot", even though the chances are really good that they could get most of the work done cutting out exogenous sugar and alcohol. And I can't necessarily blame them because I obesity drugs can be a life changing thing for those stuck in the 300+ lbs range. What worries me about these kind of drugs is if people think it's okay to get fat and prediabetic because they can just get a prescription. I guess that's great if they can, but that also seems like a form of low level megalomania of sorts, and results in one fewer thing for people to take personal responsibility over. It's good for the mind to put effort and work into something. It infantilizes the mind to allow it to not have to put rigor into anything.
greggman3 4y ago
Is it true there are plenty of places in the world that don't have an epidemic of obesity? My belief is Japan doesn't have as much of an obesity problem. Sure, I'd love a drug that lets me eat more calories and not get fat but I'd also love it if we some how managed to stop eating so many cookies, donuts, potato-chips, sugary sodas, giant portion meals, etc.... I'd also love it if we designed more areas to be walkable and bikeable. I lived ~15 years in Japan. I never missed owning car because the country is designed not to need a car. I also spent a year in Europe and Singapore and again, never missed owning car for the same reasons. Let me also add that in Japan, at least in big cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, you are almost always 1-2 minutes away from junk food. You can walk to a convenience store and find whole aisles of pastries, chips, ice cream, candies, etc and yet somehow the Japanese manage not to pig out. Similarly there are bakeries all over full of donuts, etc... Somethings that help are the portions are often smaller. Certainly for potato chips most bags in Japan are 1/3th the size of the average bag in the USA. Similarly cookies are small and come in small portions vs the USA where pretty much any supermarket sells cookies in packages of 20 to 40 cookies and each cookie is giant 300-500 calories each. I guess this is one of those, we're not going to get people to stop eating too much so we have to find another solution? I can just imagine once I get this drug I'll start eating more because I can and companies will ramp up the portion sizes even more.... TACO TIME!!!!!
- waylandsmithers 4y ago
  > Sure, I'd love a drug that lets me eat more calories and not get fat I think the deal is that the drug suppresses your appetite so you do actually eat less
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me People do have a natural weight, and a fraction of people are genetically predisposed to be overweight regardless of lifestyle. But what I find impossible to accept is that somehow that number has mushroomed in the past half-century and particularly in the U.S. I've lived and/or worked on every continent over the past 40 years, and nowhere have I seen the degree of obesity that is commonplace in the U.S. (I have not been to the Pacific Islands--I know they have the highest obesity rates there for reasons I haven't researched, but they're also a very small population). Anecdotes aside, the obesite rate in the US is nearly twice as high as some European countries (and not because people in those countries are malnourished). It's pretty clearly the food. Living in other countries I never had to worry about weight, but as soon as I moved to the U.S. I started gaining weight right away even though I eat quite healthy. It's just very very hard to escape processed foods in the U.S. unless you 1) have money to buy more expensive food, and 2) are very conscious about it and make considerably effort to stick to fresh fruits, veggies, rice, fish, etc., no fast food, sodas, packaged foods, etc. etc. It's also well documented that obesity is correlated with income, and it's not hard to see why, when the grocery options in low-income areas have very little healthy, minimally-processed food. Nutritional inequality is a huge issue and there's very little action taken about it. Just think about how cheap and easy it is to get unlimited refills of soda -- with a soda fountain nearly everywhere you go, compared to eating fresh food. Many people have neither the time nor money to eat healthy, and despite "be healthy" slogans, etc., nearly everything around us conspires against eating healthy (unless you have lots of $). I'm happy that obesity-reduction pills are coming on the market because some people are naturally predisposed to gaining weight and will be helped greatly by the pills. But what I hope doesn't happen (but already see happening) is that being used to paper-over this huge problem of nutritional inequality that is the root cause of much (though not all) of the obesity in the U.S. at least.
- tchaffee 4y ago
  I have also noticed myself and my partner gain weight when we live in the US. I'll make it a little more concerning: I mostly don't eat processed foods. I buy the raw ingredients and cook myself.
markus_zhang 4y ago
For me it's 80KG. Once it goes over 80KG I would gradually feel all kinds of bad things so I'll start to lose weight, but then it's so easy to get back. I don't really think willpower helps here. I mean unless I can do it for the whole life, it will bounce back quickly.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  This is me exactly. At 80 kg my thighs start bothering me when I sleep. Think 67-70 is my ideal.
pfooti 4y ago
The threshold for "obese" and all such labels has changed over the years, in such a way that makes it seem like people are fatter, when in fact the labels have changed. Some history. https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-...
- tgv 4y ago
  It doesn't only seem as if people are fatter. Compare the weight statistics, or just look at pictures from the 1980s. That link is pure self-deception.
tchaffee 4y ago
The environment and our food sources have radically changed in the past hundred years. My grandparents ate a mostly organic diet because that's all that was available back then. They didn't eat food made in a factory. They didn't drink water filled with plastic microparticules. Their work was manual labor. I could easily continue with other environmental factors that are different. What seems absurd to me is to jump to conclusions instead of taking a scientific approach to eliminating factors until we find causation.
npsimons 4y ago
> In the context where we have gone from obesity rates of 13 percent to 40, to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me. It annoys me too! Human genes haven't changed radically over the last 100 years. We're not dogs or cats where generations can be measured in a year if not months, we're talking roughly 30 years between generations, so no, it's not "genes" or "set point". The answer is obvious for anyone paying even a passing interest to history: we largely went from an agrarian society to a sedentary one, eating more and moving less. It's that simple. Combine this with capitalism pushing the fast food industry to make profits at any externalized cost, and the results are obvious. As an aside, it always amuses me how people talk about "set point" but never address that it only goes up. If "set point" is a thing, you'd think there would be some people with a lower one, or at a minimum it wouldn't go up (hence it being set), but no one likes to admit that . . .

viro 4y ago

And it makes more logical sense to you that everyone is just weak-willed?

nathas 4y ago
How many times do you check HN each day instead of doing work?
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  That's bizarre. Should I be bending my will to exclusively work? I work better with breaks, that's not weakness, that's realism.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bioemerl 4y ago
It makes more sense to point to the fact that we have a far more calorie dense meal palette and a far less active lifestyle.
- ericb 4y ago
  Pets, lab rats, and wild animals have gained weight in this timeframe.
- Eumenes 4y ago
  Both of which are choices one has to make.
fxtentacle 4y ago
s/weak-willed/addicted/ There. Fixed it for you :) Yes, to me it seems like capitalism creates a society where most people get addicted just trying to cope with everyday life. For some it's alcohol, for some it's OxyContin, for some it's food, for some it's all-nighters in World of Warcraft. "59.3 million (21.4%) people over age 12 used illicit drugs in the past year." "Underage [..] 29% reported drinking alcohol" https://www.verywellmind.com/rates-of-illicit-drug-abuse-in-the-us-67027 https://www.verywellmind.com/rates-of-illicit-drug-abuse-in-... Looks like weed and alcohol already are 50% of all citizens... I don't find it difficult to imagine that the other half ab-uses food.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  You can’t add two unrelated stats together and say it’s 50% - there’s highly likely some crossover there…
- pixl97 4y ago
  So before mass capitalism people didn't drink? Can I ask that you read a large number of history books across any number of cultures on addictive behaviors throughout history, because you'll find that anytime a society had an excess of time and labor/production that people find addictive behaviors to enjoy. This is not recent. This is not capitalism. This is humanity. What capitalism has done is given everybody enough free time from starvation to actually follow addictive pursuits.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Aren't there claims commonly made (I haven't reviewed the literature to know if it's compelling or not) that the medieval serf worked less than the modern worker?
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I've read a number of studies like this and at the end of the day everyone ends up at apples != oranges. If you wanted to live with the same amount of 'lifestyle' as a serf did then you'd likely only have to work a few hours a week. The issue is I don't think most people want to live that lifestyle. We like clean water to drink. We like sheltered houses with electricity. We love having a house that is too large and filling it up with an inordinate amount of crap. We love living in expensive places with a lot to do. Turns out wanting all that requires a lot of stuff. At one point in my life I was more interesting in not working and messing around and doing other things. I worked around 40 hours a month for a few years and made enough of a living to pay my bills (hey, computer work pays good). So it's not impossible for at least some people to live like that , though with rent increases not sure if it's possible these days. But with all that said, I like having all the stuff that working a full time job gives to me, so there is that.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Yes, it doesn't to you?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I think it makes sense to someone who has never tried to starve their body. Doing that will change your appreciation for the human brain.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying the reason people don't do it is because they don't have the willpower. Yes, it is possible to choose to starve yourself, just requires a ton of willpower.
    - viro 4y ago
      Starving yourself often slows down ur metabolism even more, which makes it harder to lose weight without medical issues. the will power to put urself into coma Jesus Christ.
rootusrootus 4y ago
That viewpoint has a strong attraction for people who's natural weight is low, because they get to see themselves as strong willed and morally superior.
Auracle 4y ago
Honestly, yeah? I know I'll get downvoted to hell for this but I could have absolutely nailed a quiz of "who is going to get really fat after high school." Nobody that I would have defined as a "hard worker" has gotten fat.

whodatbo1 4y ago

Absolutely agree. Unironically through the first few paragraphs I though this was some very cleverly put satirical take on modern society. There is a great book about the effects of modern food, primarily on dental health, written back in the 30s - Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. Even though it's almost a century old, the findings are quite fascinating and can be extrapolated to present day. It's quite undeniable that modern life has drawbacks and obesity is just a symptom.

bscphil 4y ago
I think it would be most accurate to say that people's bodies have a natural size given a particular food and social environment. That's a crucial bit of context that's very often neglected. Resisting one's environment is very difficult - it often requires you to have money, time, medicine, workout obsessed friends, or all of the above. Given changes in the environment in western countries over the last 50 years or so, weights are rising to their new "natural" levels as a consequence.
pixl97 4y ago
> It's quite undeniable that modern life has drawbacks and obesity is just a symptom. Yea, people tend to forget pre-green revolution people going hungry for longer periods of time and mass starvation were really common. We made a trade, between the sudden and terrible outcome of starving and hunger to one of long term consequences like obesity and disease.
- cfn 4y ago
  That sounds to me like a false equivalence. The cause of obesity is not that food is plentiful because different rich countries have different obesity rates. There is something else driving this issue and, in my opinion, is the prevalence of processed foods and use of highly processed seed oils.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    It’s probably a combination of factors, but look at the rate of change of obesity rates. Obesity rates have been going up almost everywhere. Essentially the rest of the world has been catching up to America. America was the first country where food was so abundant that it was essentially limitless for the majority of the population. Perhaps the effect of limitless food on obesity rates takes time to manifest and is compounded in successive generations.

8note 4y ago

That two people eating the same thing in the same amounts will retain different amounts as weight is something you can experiment on, without assigning a cause.

bioemerl 4y ago
I think we need to really stress here just how bad our situation is. We have an obesity rate of 40 plus percent. Peoples weight just cannot be said to be a "natural number" in this environment. Something is causing this and your average person is obese because of it, not because of their "natural weight"
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  We won't solve it so long as we think of it as a moral issue.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  It's both, the difference between ourselves and our grandparents is almost all environment. The difference between 2 high school students in 2023 Susy and Bob is driven almost completely by genetics.

buryat 4y ago

people previously just couldnt grow to their natural size

pessimizer 4y ago
This caused me uncontrollable laughter and the desire to tell everyone about it.

tootie 4y ago

Prior to the 20th century, it was pretty routine for average people to have inadequate access to nutrition. The rise in obesity corresponded with sweeping changed in agricultural policy that backstopped the prices of staple foods with subsidies and improved land and water management to prevent dust bowls. The result is everybody has enough food available cheaply all the time. Rolling any of that back is likely to replace obesity with malnutrition which is a much worse problem. Pandemic years notwithstanding, life expectancy has increased almost hand-in-hand with obesity rates. Obviously that's correlation, not causation.

krona 4y ago
Obesity rates started rising in the 1980's in the US, not the turn of the 20th century. This corresponds with poor diet, not abundant nutrition.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  They were going up before the 1970s, there was a momentary blip in the mid/late 70s before they started going up steadily again.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> Rolling any of that back is likely to replace obesity with malnutrition Based on what evidence? There are plenty of countries where people are not suffering from malnutrition and yet obesity rates are low compared to the U.S.

seneca 4y ago

It's just terrible reporting, and equivocation. It being a lifestyle problem and having a natural weight can both be true. People have a natural weight, and it's difficult to drop below it. No one's natural weight is to morbidly obese. These people are taking a medical finding and blowing it wildly out of proportion to support their agenda. It's an unfortunately common tactic. I don't quite think it's entirely fair to blame on willpower in modern western society though. We have a food supply that is unnaturally calorie dense, and optimized for hyper strong flavor, shelf stability, and profit, and rarely for health. We're also much more sedentary.

bscphil 4y ago
IMO it's purely a question of perspective. From the point of view of individual health, you need to think like a doctor. The important question is "what can this individual do to improve their health?" From that perspective it's a "lifestyle" problem, as you put it. The individual has a food supply that is unnaturally calorie dense and unhealthy. To lose weight and improve their health the individual must make an effort to shift that; for some it might be impossible. For others it might be possible with a great deal of effort or with drugs. From the point of view of public healthy, you need to think like a public health expert. From this perspective it makes perfect sense to talk about "natural weights" as something that can change (and has risen) over time. The calorie dense food environment and sedentary lifestyles are things that exist in the background here. Given these background facts, the weights of the great majority of people (who don't have the time, means, willpower, etc to resist) are going to rise to a new higher "natural" point. For some, foods will be so calorie dense and provide so little nutrition or satiety that they experience runaway obesity. These are just predictable downstream effects of the environment, and so the perspective of the public health expert is that individuals aren't to be blamed and you have to fix the environment. Ban soda in public schools, etc etc.

russdill 4y ago

There are two problems. One is that some people have a body that drives then incredibly strongly towards a certain size. The other is they there are people that given the opportunity to eat whatever they want whenever they want will slowly gain weight year after year. Gaining 3-4 pounds in a year isn't a problem and a sign that someone has a poor lifestyle. But over 2 or 3 decades, that becomes a serious problem.

ChadNauseam 4y ago

The implication is that something has happened during the last 50-100 years that caused people's "natural weight" to change upward. (Someone's "natural weight" is normally called their "set point".) The evidence is a little slim (no pun), but there's one theory which I find quite compelling. The theory is that eating foods with high flavor-calorie association increases your set point, and eating foods with low flavor-calorie association decreases your set point. Flavor-calorie association is when your body knows that a particular flavor results in getting lots of calories in the near future. The flavor-calorie association will be higher for foods that are more flavorful or more calorically dense, and flavor-calorie associations can only be developed for foods you eat regularly. This explains why I lose a bit of weight whenever I go somewhere new – I'm trying new foods, so what I'm eating has doesn't have any flavor-calorie association, so my body's set point goes down, so I get full more quickly, causing me to eat fewer calories overall, causing me to lose weight. And since foods have gotten much more flavorful and calorically dense in the past half-century, it would explain why people's set points have gone up. There's a simple way to test this theory at home. Extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is tasteless and textureless. So, find a 2-hour window of your day when you don't taste anything with flavor, and have two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil right in the middle of that window. Since the oil has no flavor, it should have no flavor-calorie association, and your set point should go down. I've been doing this, and I've been getting full faster and that's been causing me to lose weight. (If you want to google more info, it's called the shangri-la diet.) (Note that if you try this, your toothpaste probably counts as a flavor.)

nerdponx 4y ago
I'd be sooner to suspect environmental contaminants (changing types of air pollution, microplastics, pesticides on food, stress hormones in factory-farmed meat, et al) as a cause. Although I suspect there's something to your hypothesis as well. I don't know about a spoonful of oil, but I have gone through phases where food seems less "rewarding" on a physiological level, and as a result I feel more satisfied with less.
- dcolkitt 4y ago
  Air pollution seems unlikely as it's been falling for decades, and America has much lower levels than Europe. Microplastics are a perennial boogey man, and probably a genuine ecological issue, but there has no been mountains of studies done and documented health effects are virtually non-existent. Livestock and slaughterhouse conditions are certainly not good from an animal welfare perspective, but we've had similar practices for 100+ years and obesity wasn't a major issue in 1960. Pesticides in food products have been substantially reduced since the EPA changed guidelines in the 1990s, and yet obesity has exploded since then.

MajimasEyepatch 4y ago

The term "natural weight" as used here is misleading. It does not mean that people are supposed to be a particular weight. It refers to the idea that something—whether it's diet, genetics, environmental factors, or something else—influences the body's weight regulation mechanisms to "prefer" a certain body weight, and changing that is very, very hard. Think of it like body temperature: normally, your body maintains a certain core temperature, and it will respond in a negative feedback loop when the temperature deviates from that set point. Conditions like infections can induce where your body raises that set point to fight the infection, and it takes time for that set point to come back down. Something similar appears to happen with people's weight. Hormonal or other changes cause the body to gain weight, and once that happens, it resists losing weight in various ways: increasing appetite, changes to basal metabolic rate, changes to metabolic pathways involved in breaking down nutrients from food, all sorts of things. Deviously, fat cells actually produce hormones that play into these changes, which is one of many reasons why losing weight is usually harder than gaining it. And when people do manage to lose weight, often after a huge exertion of effort and willpower and major lifestyle changes, their set point may not have changed, and so as soon as they slip up even a little bit, they quickly regain back to their set point. So they're not suggesting that there's some mystical force out there that decides some percentage of the population should be overweight. They're referring to the idea of a set point for body weight that is difficult to change without drugs or bariatric surgery.

bioemerl 4y ago
If this were true I would not expect that changes in our lifestyle would cause broad scale weight increases like they have. I'm very skeptical humans are built with an average set weight way up in the unhealthy range. Or maybe this is the case, but it is thrown off hard by our modern diets. Our natural set point is in the healthy range, but our meal is x calories per Y food now so it ends up artificially high. The explanation just doesn't line up with what we've seen. I get that it's hard to lose weight once you've gained it, but that's different. This is absolving us of being responsible for our obesity as a whole.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y ago

jdminhbg 4y ago

A sudden change in “natural weight” isn’t any more absurd than a sudden change in willpower.

paulpauper 4y ago

Highly palatable caloric dense food means that people are more incline to gain weight without even trying. 100+ years ago you had to make a more an effort to overeat.

kfarr 4y ago
And extremely sedentary lifestyle in US
- Auracle 4y ago
  Right. When I'm walking 5 hours a day on my treadmill I can eat whatever the hell I want and not gain weight.

adamsmith143 4y ago

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... TLDR: The modern obesity epidemic is mostly a mystery, things like higher caloric food, western diet bad don't tell the whole story. Most likely answers are chemical contaminants in our foods and water i.e. lithium or PFAS chemicals. Interestingly enough both wild animals and lab animals(rats) have been getting fatter over time as well which clearly invalidates the "bad diet" theory. The Human body has a lipostat, you "natural weight" mechanism if you will and it seems these contaminants increase the lipostat and this results in widespread obesity.

paulpauper 4y ago
TLDR: The modern obesity epidemic is mostly a mystery, things like higher caloric food, western diet bad don't tell the whole story. I think it tells more of the story than contaminants does. A candy bar is packed with calories and not that filling. This didn't exist a long time ago.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  The article I linked is very thorough. It covers basic issues like that: "Today the rate of obesity in Italy, France, and Sweden is around 20%. In 1975, there was no country in the world that had an obesity rate higher than 15%. This wasn’t a steady, gentle trend as food got better, or diets got worse. People had access to plenty of delicious, high-calorie foods back in 1965. Doritos were invented in 1966, Twinkies in 1930, Oreos in 1912, and Coca-Cola all the way back in 1886. So what changed in 1980?"
  - CadmiumYellow 4y ago
    I love that series by Slime Mold Time Mold but I don't entirely agree with their conclusions. Sure, Doritos and Twinkies existed before 1980, but anybody who's been alive since the 60s or 70s can tell you that the food environment has changed dramatically in such a way that processed junk food is now much more accessible and makes up a larger portion of the average person's diet. There are probably multiple things going on that involve environmental contaminants, the food supply, and cultural attitudes towards food.

joe_the_user 4y ago

Obesity has increased uniformly across the US and much of the world. But in the US is fairly strongly, negatively correlated with income. And the obvious culprit here is thus processed and cheap food. Now, exactly how that manifests is probably quite complex. I see everyone offering their pet theory and that tends to muddy the waters but the basic outline seems reasonably clear.

JamesBarney 4y ago
https://www.prb.org/resources/for-women-in-the-u-s-obesity-links-to-socioeconomic-status-and-poor-diet/#:~:text=Whereas%2026.5%20percent%20of%20men,in%20the%20highest%20income%20group https://www.prb.org/resources/for-women-in-the-u-s-obesity-l.... That correlation with income is almost entirely driven by women. Rich men aren't much thinner than middle class or poor men. Rich women are just a lot thinner than middle class or poor women. This tells a different story than cheap processed food.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Even your link ends with "Cheap Food, Unhealthy Food" and doesn't claim a refutation. It's' plausible higher income men aren't as concerned about healthy food as higher income women.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    The claims I quoted were all facts. The article ends with a lot of interpretation of those facts that seem to be based on a lot of the authors priors and not at all based on good data.

csours 4y ago

Hunger is like a one way valve - you can gain weight and your body will not stop you, but as soon as you start to incur caloric deficit, your body will turn on lots of alarm bells. Hunger is also impossible to compare, as it is an internal sensation. Response to hunger is trained, but it is extremely hard to retrain.

ravenstine 4y ago

I've heard this referred to as body "set points", and I've yet to see anything very convincing that set points are a thing. It doesn't really make sense that the body would "prefer" a body weight that is tremendously inefficient and contraindicated. More likely, in my opinion, what may be seen as a "set point" may be more akin to metabolic damage that simply takes time to heal once the pathology is actually being properly addressed. Also, people simply can't be trusted when it comes to self-reporting of their own regimen. Whether it's not being honest with one's self, or being embarrassed, ill informed, or plain delusional, lots of people will report that they've done "all the right things" to lose weight when they in fact have not. It's far more common that people suffering from obesity remain fat because they are thwarting their own progress, or are being given shitty advice from crackpot dieticians, and less common that there is some chronic hormonal condition that can't be corrected by diet. If your pancreas is still working, as well as your thyroid, your pituitary, your hypothalamus, etc., you probably can correct your obesity without drugs. But people want the "pill" or the "shot", even though the chances are really good that they could get most of the work done cutting out exogenous sugar and alcohol. And I can't necessarily blame them because I obesity drugs can be a life changing thing for those stuck in the 300+ lbs range. What worries me about these kind of drugs is if people think it's okay to get fat and prediabetic because they can just get a prescription. I guess that's great if they can, but that also seems like a form of low level megalomania of sorts, and results in one fewer thing for people to take personal responsibility over. It's good for the mind to put effort and work into something. It infantilizes the mind to allow it to not have to put rigor into anything.

greggman3 4y ago

Is it true there are plenty of places in the world that don't have an epidemic of obesity? My belief is Japan doesn't have as much of an obesity problem. Sure, I'd love a drug that lets me eat more calories and not get fat but I'd also love it if we some how managed to stop eating so many cookies, donuts, potato-chips, sugary sodas, giant portion meals, etc.... I'd also love it if we designed more areas to be walkable and bikeable. I lived ~15 years in Japan. I never missed owning car because the country is designed not to need a car. I also spent a year in Europe and Singapore and again, never missed owning car for the same reasons. Let me also add that in Japan, at least in big cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, you are almost always 1-2 minutes away from junk food. You can walk to a convenience store and find whole aisles of pastries, chips, ice cream, candies, etc and yet somehow the Japanese manage not to pig out. Similarly there are bakeries all over full of donuts, etc... Somethings that help are the portions are often smaller. Certainly for potato chips most bags in Japan are 1/3th the size of the average bag in the USA. Similarly cookies are small and come in small portions vs the USA where pretty much any supermarket sells cookies in packages of 20 to 40 cookies and each cookie is giant 300-500 calories each. I guess this is one of those, we're not going to get people to stop eating too much so we have to find another solution? I can just imagine once I get this drug I'll start eating more because I can and companies will ramp up the portion sizes even more.... TACO TIME!!!!!

waylandsmithers 4y ago
> Sure, I'd love a drug that lets me eat more calories and not get fat I think the deal is that the drug suppresses your appetite so you do actually eat less

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me People do have a natural weight, and a fraction of people are genetically predisposed to be overweight regardless of lifestyle. But what I find impossible to accept is that somehow that number has mushroomed in the past half-century and particularly in the U.S. I've lived and/or worked on every continent over the past 40 years, and nowhere have I seen the degree of obesity that is commonplace in the U.S. (I have not been to the Pacific Islands--I know they have the highest obesity rates there for reasons I haven't researched, but they're also a very small population). Anecdotes aside, the obesite rate in the US is nearly twice as high as some European countries (and not because people in those countries are malnourished). It's pretty clearly the food. Living in other countries I never had to worry about weight, but as soon as I moved to the U.S. I started gaining weight right away even though I eat quite healthy. It's just very very hard to escape processed foods in the U.S. unless you 1) have money to buy more expensive food, and 2) are very conscious about it and make considerably effort to stick to fresh fruits, veggies, rice, fish, etc., no fast food, sodas, packaged foods, etc. etc. It's also well documented that obesity is correlated with income, and it's not hard to see why, when the grocery options in low-income areas have very little healthy, minimally-processed food. Nutritional inequality is a huge issue and there's very little action taken about it. Just think about how cheap and easy it is to get unlimited refills of soda -- with a soda fountain nearly everywhere you go, compared to eating fresh food. Many people have neither the time nor money to eat healthy, and despite "be healthy" slogans, etc., nearly everything around us conspires against eating healthy (unless you have lots of $). I'm happy that obesity-reduction pills are coming on the market because some people are naturally predisposed to gaining weight and will be helped greatly by the pills. But what I hope doesn't happen (but already see happening) is that being used to paper-over this huge problem of nutritional inequality that is the root cause of much (though not all) of the obesity in the U.S. at least.

tchaffee 4y ago
I have also noticed myself and my partner gain weight when we live in the US. I'll make it a little more concerning: I mostly don't eat processed foods. I buy the raw ingredients and cook myself.

markus_zhang 4y ago

For me it's 80KG. Once it goes over 80KG I would gradually feel all kinds of bad things so I'll start to lose weight, but then it's so easy to get back. I don't really think willpower helps here. I mean unless I can do it for the whole life, it will bounce back quickly.

andromeduck 4y ago
This is me exactly. At 80 kg my thighs start bothering me when I sleep. Think 67-70 is my ideal.

pfooti 4y ago

The threshold for "obese" and all such labels has changed over the years, in such a way that makes it seem like people are fatter, when in fact the labels have changed. Some history. https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-...

tgv 4y ago
It doesn't only seem as if people are fatter. Compare the weight statistics, or just look at pictures from the 1980s. That link is pure self-deception.

tchaffee 4y ago

The environment and our food sources have radically changed in the past hundred years. My grandparents ate a mostly organic diet because that's all that was available back then. They didn't eat food made in a factory. They didn't drink water filled with plastic microparticules. Their work was manual labor. I could easily continue with other environmental factors that are different. What seems absurd to me is to jump to conclusions instead of taking a scientific approach to eliminating factors until we find causation.

npsimons 4y ago

> In the context where we have gone from obesity rates of 13 percent to 40, to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me. It annoys me too! Human genes haven't changed radically over the last 100 years. We're not dogs or cats where generations can be measured in a year if not months, we're talking roughly 30 years between generations, so no, it's not "genes" or "set point". The answer is obvious for anyone paying even a passing interest to history: we largely went from an agrarian society to a sedentary one, eating more and moving less. It's that simple. Combine this with capitalism pushing the fast food industry to make profits at any externalized cost, and the results are obvious. As an aside, it always amuses me how people talk about "set point" but never address that it only goes up. If "set point" is a thing, you'd think there would be some people with a lower one, or at a minimum it wouldn't go up (hence it being set), but no one likes to admit that . . .