3 ms·

https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-united-states-over-last-50-years/ https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un... so,

https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-united-states-over-last-50-years/ https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un... so, what the hell happened in the 80s and 90s that caused such a large jump? what changed? Diet sodas? super size me? what caused this? Can we undo this so that we don't need a magic pill?

megiddo 3y ago
Money and economies of scale. Food got cheap, people got rich, and humans are designed to eat whatever they can see. 200,000 years of living feast to famine tells you "if can get calorically dense food, eat as much as you can, you'll need it later", except your lizard brain never gets the "there's no famine later" message because it's dumb.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Simplified to the point of stupidity. We have been rich for longer than that and wages have stagnated/flatlined compared to wealth creation since about the 80's. And (as sibling comment says) people of more means (say upper-middle class) aren't more obese than poor people. It's more like the opposite. This is just the myth of the pleasure-button rat extrapolated to humans, which has been debunked in any case.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  Food also got a lot more convenient at the same time it was being optimized toward a "bliss point" that would encourage you to always eat one more bite. Americans in the middle income quintile already had easy access to more calories than they should eat in 1960. But boiling another pot of potatoes wasn't as fast or delicious as microwaving another frozen mini-pizza, so there were fewer temptations to overeat.
- throwaway1777 3y ago
  Also processed junk food got way more cheap and common and unhealthy right? almost everyone’s brain is wired to love sugar and salt, and we found good ways to hack that.
- zamfi 3y ago
  Yeah, except this did not change in the '80s and '90s. Also obesity and wealth are typically inversely correlated within developed countries. There's more to the story.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    It happened in the 60's. Manifesting in the 80's is not surprising.
brandonmenc 3y ago
> what the hell happened in the 80s and 90s that caused such a large jump? Video games. Cable TV. More calories. Bigger portions. Sedentary lifestyles + more food = obesity. > Can we undo this so that we don't need a magic pill? Move around and stop eating so much. But these pills have their place. A lot of people need immediate help getting their weight down and shrinking their appetites.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  This is incredibly reductive. There have been several studies which have demonstrated that even with the same calorie intake and exercise levels, western adults still weigh more than their ancestors a few generations ago. It's unclear why, but there are a number of factors which may be involved, e.g. PFAs, increased stress/decreased sleep, changes in gut microbiomes, etc.
at_a_remove 3y ago
I think we're seeing multiple factors with a kind of hideous synergy: 1) Decrease in physical activity (desk jobs, social media, games, an endless stream of entertainment). 2) Federal subsidies causing a glut of some foods. 3) Increased portion sizes on many things. 4) Forever chemicals, the PFASs, xenoestrogens, bisphenols in many things we touch or what touches our food, messing with our hormones. 5) Hormone-fed livestock for weight gain, does any of that pass on to us? 6) Supranormal stimulation: we're eating and drinking things designed to stimulate us at a level we just weren't evolved to deal with. 7) Real changes in food composition -- as an example, consider the shift from cane sugar to HFCS. I think that's the most of them. So, imagine each one of them caused a teensy one percent change (caloric intake, increase in digestion efficiency, whatever). Well, that's 1.01 to the power of our seven different factors, or, if you would originally be stable at two thousand calories per day, an extra 144 calories per day. That's about a can of Coke. Doesn't sound like a lot. However, that adds up to 52,596 extra calories per annum, or a fifteen pound gain. Hideous synergy.

megiddo 3y ago

Money and economies of scale. Food got cheap, people got rich, and humans are designed to eat whatever they can see. 200,000 years of living feast to famine tells you "if can get calorically dense food, eat as much as you can, you'll need it later", except your lizard brain never gets the "there's no famine later" message because it's dumb.

avgcorrection 3y ago
Simplified to the point of stupidity. We have been rich for longer than that and wages have stagnated/flatlined compared to wealth creation since about the 80's. And (as sibling comment says) people of more means (say upper-middle class) aren't more obese than poor people. It's more like the opposite. This is just the myth of the pleasure-button rat extrapolated to humans, which has been debunked in any case.
philipkglass 3y ago
Food also got a lot more convenient at the same time it was being optimized toward a "bliss point" that would encourage you to always eat one more bite. Americans in the middle income quintile already had easy access to more calories than they should eat in 1960. But boiling another pot of potatoes wasn't as fast or delicious as microwaving another frozen mini-pizza, so there were fewer temptations to overeat.
throwaway1777 3y ago
Also processed junk food got way more cheap and common and unhealthy right? almost everyone’s brain is wired to love sugar and salt, and we found good ways to hack that.
zamfi 3y ago
Yeah, except this did not change in the '80s and '90s. Also obesity and wealth are typically inversely correlated within developed countries. There's more to the story.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  It happened in the 60's. Manifesting in the 80's is not surprising.

brandonmenc 3y ago

> what the hell happened in the 80s and 90s that caused such a large jump? Video games. Cable TV. More calories. Bigger portions. Sedentary lifestyles + more food = obesity. > Can we undo this so that we don't need a magic pill? Move around and stop eating so much. But these pills have their place. A lot of people need immediate help getting their weight down and shrinking their appetites.

jwestbury 3y ago
This is incredibly reductive. There have been several studies which have demonstrated that even with the same calorie intake and exercise levels, western adults still weigh more than their ancestors a few generations ago. It's unclear why, but there are a number of factors which may be involved, e.g. PFAs, increased stress/decreased sleep, changes in gut microbiomes, etc.

at_a_remove 3y ago

I think we're seeing multiple factors with a kind of hideous synergy: 1) Decrease in physical activity (desk jobs, social media, games, an endless stream of entertainment). 2) Federal subsidies causing a glut of some foods. 3) Increased portion sizes on many things. 4) Forever chemicals, the PFASs, xenoestrogens, bisphenols in many things we touch or what touches our food, messing with our hormones. 5) Hormone-fed livestock for weight gain, does any of that pass on to us? 6) Supranormal stimulation: we're eating and drinking things designed to stimulate us at a level we just weren't evolved to deal with. 7) Real changes in food composition -- as an example, consider the shift from cane sugar to HFCS. I think that's the most of them. So, imagine each one of them caused a teensy one percent change (caloric intake, increase in digestion efficiency, whatever). Well, that's 1.01 to the power of our seven different factors, or, if you would originally be stable at two thousand calories per day, an extra 144 calories per day. That's about a can of Coke. Doesn't sound like a lot. However, that adds up to 52,596 extra calories per annum, or a fifteen pound gain. Hideous synergy.