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> Koreans tend to walk (exercise) more. Walk (partway) during commute, walk to lunch, walk to do errands, etc. In the US people just sit in their cars. People

> Koreans tend to walk (exercise) more. Walk (partway) during commute, walk to lunch, walk to do errands, etc. In the US people just sit in their cars. People are always going on about walking, but I have a very hard time believing that the lack of low-intensity walking is a major contributing factor for the 250-pound bodies that are so common in the US (especially south and midwest). When you're overwhelming your body with fried food every day and coke at every meal, you ain't gonna keep up with those calories by getting in more steps.

bravetraveler 2y ago
Granted, this is hardly accurate/scientific - try out a solid hour walk on a treadmill. A lot of steps for a pittance of calories [based on whatever hand-wavy math it's doing, admittedly]. We're frustratingly efficient. I forget exactly, it was something dumb like half a candy bar. I've heard people say "you won't outrun your mouth", in this context... and others. It's true. I've managed to drop my body weight ~half, it happened by controlling what I ate; not how I exercised. When I stopped skateboarding due to an injury, I ballooned. I stopped eating like that over a decade later, I shrunk. In that time I also got older, moved, and went to college. It's worth considering what's easier/more likely/realistic to maintain
- donw 2y ago
  The saying in weightlifting / bodybuilding circles is "you can't out-train a bad diet".
- bart_spoon 2y ago
  I think that pittance of calories is only the surface benefit. Consistent activity keeps your metabolism much higher, meaning you burn more calories throughout the day even when you aren’t moving.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Absolutely, very good to keep things burning. It's also good to not need to burn them. We can be remarkably efficient with the right conditioning. I eat once/day and would do less if not for literally boredom. I do next to nothing physically all day. I'm fine, I just don't need a lot of upkeep. I have all the metabolism I need! My health may be suffering for it, but I enjoy getting back a solid chunk of the day. Eating is such a time sink... now it's exercise too?! I know it's nuts, I have an unhealthy relationship with food lol. Even the social side, it's hard to explain but people get mad when you don't want to eat with them.
- spudlyo 2y ago
  Put a morbidly obese person on a treadmill for a solid hour, and they'll likely spend a fair amount of time in zone 4-5. Walking is excellent exercise for some, not so great for others. Generalizing here is pointless.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    > Generalizing here is pointless Comment sections summarized excellently in four words. None of this was presented as universal truth, so I'd appreciate some leniency like I'm giving to you My post provided a personal anecdote. What does yours have? Criticism we'd all be better off without. It's clear the effect exercise had on me, it was keeping my eating in check. I can do that too at intake. I didn't even need a miracle drug. I just stopped eating so much, but here I go slipping into moral judgement. I'm trying to help people, not reinforce a lifestyle.
    - spudlyo 2y ago
      Apologies for my rudeness, I'm afraid I let a pet peeve get the better of me. I often read health and wellness content on Reddit. There you'll find highly ranked comments expressing opinions such as "you should never eat below 1200 calories", or "walking on a treadmill burns a pittance of calories". In my opinion, these sorts of observations are uninteresting at best, and misinformative at worst. Hacker News, as you may well know from your nearly three year comment history here, is a place where detail and nuance are roundly appreciated.
viburnum 2y ago
I don’t know the science of it but for me at least walking suppresses my appetite. My hunch is that by not walking the body goes into “must be sick, should probably eat some more” mode.
- veidr 2y ago
  I hate the join the "unreliable anecdata faction" in a thread where we are talking about well-established science-backed points (eating 1000+ extra kcal of trash most days contributes to being overweight; walking 10x more every day does the reverse), but I too believe there is something magical (meaning we don't fully understand the science) about walking. I have three kids, and after each one of them, I tend to put on 10-15kg of body mass, mostly the wrong kind. So I have three experiences of "fixing it". The first two times, I ran, lifted weights, ate salads and dropped alcohol, all that shit... it worked, but it was hard. Hard like when I quit smoking cigarettes (before the first kid). I was hungry. Irritable. Sometimes, I'd be like "oh, fuck it!" at 1AM and make a big ass instant Japanese ramen with scrambled eggs on the side, I was so hungry. The third time, I eventually bought one of those under-desk treadmills, because despite my vows to walk 10km per day I just "don't have time". It took about a day to acclimate. After that, and forever more, I can easily do computer work (writing code, reading code, architecture diagrams, writing docs) while walking 3kph (slow). When I am just reading stuff, I ramp it up to 4-5kph. There are a bunch of other things that made me feel dumb for not doing it years earlier, which one day I might blog about or something. I suspect it actually helps my productivity — including learning rate and retention — for some reason (bleeding off extra energy that my mind might otherwise use to poke me with small, fascinating distractions?). But sticking to this topic, the main point is this: I was no longer super hungry with only 2000 kcal a day. When I would run 750kcal off, sure I burned the calories, but I was soo hungry later that I would override my caloric restriction plan, and often end up eating more extra than I'd burned off. Not at all the case with walking, either on the desk treadmill, or in the relatively uncommon case that I get to walk 10km in the real world (maybe once a week I will walk to/from work and take some detours). My weight dropped steadily — which, of course, it does any time I manage to consistentely burn ~500kcal per day more than I consume — but the point is it dropped easily. Walking 10km/day, I can eat at a deficit without it being so... annoying. Eating to maintain weight is also easy. And unlike lifting weights, or HIIT, or running hard — you can literally walk 10km every single day. You can take a day off if you want, but you don't need to[1]. Your muscles don't need rest. Your joints don't wear out. It's literally the activity your body was designed for. You can do it every single day for 10 years if you want. I should really write that blog post. I suspect some science-type should dig into it more and write a whole book. [1]: the only real worry is that if you have already gotten super out of shape (very fat, very low cardio fitness, etc) then you should start with less walking per day, and work your way up gradually.
KptMarchewa 2y ago
Walking tends to affect digestion in ways other than raw calorie intake.
kalleboo 2y ago
The walking may not be what actually loses the calories but it probably also affects how you look at your own fitness. It gets a lot harder to walk when you're heavy, and you'll notice quickly when you get start getting winded just going to work every day.
rstuart4133 2y ago
People think of the 250lb and 1000 steps in the context of one meal, or maybe a 6 month diet. But 250lb is not added in one meal, or over 6 months. It usually takes a couple of decades. Let's say that's 10,0000 days. Because I'm Australian and like round numbers and am lazy (these numbers are all very rounded), call 250lb 100kg. 1,0000 steps a day consumes about 20 kiljoule. If those kilojoules come from eating fat, you either add 1/2 a gram of fat or walk those 1,000 steps. I know, 1/2 a gram, 0.02oz - almost insignificant, right? Now multiply it by 10,000 and see that over those decades it contributed 50kg of the 100kg we are talking about. For the same reason exercise doesn't make a lot off difference to a 6 month or even 2 year diet. But when you are trying to explain to difference between trim Koreans and 250lb Americans those extra 3,000 steps a day explain the entire difference, then some.
- khazhoux 2y ago
  I think you're doing bad math. My point is that a shitty, low-cost middle-American diet greatly exceeds the caloric burn of walking, across any time window you choose. I mean, it's obviously better to walk than to not, but I'm claiming the dominant factor is sugar-bomb drinks and fatty foods (which isn't at all a novel claim anyway). Walking only barely chips away at that.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    Why is the math bad? It seems to check out what he is saying and matches approximately the numbers I can find on online.
  - ruszki 2y ago
    Using public transport (aka walking) means to me to burn 500-1000 additional calories per day compared to using cars the whole day. That’s not insignificant at all. Of course, you need to live somewhere where this is a possibility.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    My gut fully agree with this. American junk foods had gone way too far wrt paperclip maximization.
donw 2y ago
Food in the US seems designed to make people obese. When you look at ingredient labels in Japan or Germany, you see a short list of what you would expect, plus maybe a preservative. In the US, you see an entire chemistry lab: artificial colors and flavors, bizarre substitutes for real sugar, oils that a hundred years ago would not be considered fit for human consumption, and so on.
pedalpete 2y ago
We can rely on the research here -> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071659/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071659/ Only 25% of Americans are getting the recommended aerobic activity. Which is 20 minutes per day of moderate activity (walking). It is difficult to comprehend how little most Americans walk. In many suburbs, the local store is more than a mile, which would equate to a 40 minute round trip walk. How often do you walk for 40 minutes when you can drive in 8 minutes. Of course, delivery services only exacerbate the issue, as you're not even walking through the parking lot now.
keltor 2y ago
Basically it's all about Calories and Americans have added 25% to their caloric intake since 1961 when it started increasing. Its also not really magical, they didn't just add sugar, they added meat, sugar, grains and oil (replacing butter mostly) - all together it adds up to 720 kcal extra per day per capita. Koreans eat about 1500 kcal less per day (they are also quite a bit smaller on average so it's not 1 ot 1 of course.) Japanese eat even less (like 200 kcal less) but are also even a bit smaller on average. Both countries happily eat terrible food just as much as Americans do these days, they just eat a lot less food in total. There's an idea that American eat out more and that the calories at dining establishments about increased about 35%.
- nazgul17 2y ago
  If it were walking what keeps Asians slim, you'd see more variation, imo. The small portions and generally healthier food are what keeps them slim. True that the Japanese eat fried chicken and cakes, but not as often as Americans, and not as much each time.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    There's a certain positive status associated being "fat and happy" in the US. Americans are also, on the whole, gigantic people. Tall, wide, huge frames and/or a lot of meat on the bone. Only some of that is accounted for by diet. I think there's more to do in Japan locally, or at least more general social/physical freedom, which I attribute to low costs and high mobility. Nature in the US is generally privatized, far out of the way, or has limited access or parking. If you travel by walking in the US, middle class people think you're poor or your car has broken down. There's a bit of a stigma in some cases and places against not being sedentary and large (or, having to move and sweat for anyone).
    - deprecative 2y ago
      It's really quite simple to me. I don't quite understand why folks seem to argue about why the US is obese and Japan isn't. It comes down to one thing but I suspected aided by another three things: In Japan a mindset of just enough seems to be prevalent. They do not seem to be as prone to glorifying excess in all ways like us Americans tend to be. I think this is a / the key aspect which is supported by these: Americans are not active. Japanese people tend to be active and walking absolutely contributes to this. Americans eat low quality food. We eat a lot of food with added sugar. We feed candy to children in sugary water-fat for breakfast. We eat processed and ultra processed foods regularly even when we primarily prepare meals at home. Americans are anti-conformist. Japan is very conformist. This relates to social pressure(fat shaming, diet) and social activity cohesion (exercise, dieting). It seems quite evident at even a glance why one country would be overweight while the other tends to be fit. In the US our culture rewards excess. We value cars more than people. We care about profits over people, too, really. Things like healthcare and food come to mind here.
bart_spoon 2y ago
Japanese people fry all kinds of food. They have plenty of soda as well, and there are plenty of Americans who struggle with obesity despite not drinking much soda. It 100% has to do with walking/biking and portion sizes. Low intensity exercise throughout the day is as if not more effective than high intensity exercise for burning calories and keeping your metabolism from crashing.
milesvp 2y ago
I know a person with sort of an odd type of diabetes that requires multiple different ways of treating to keep her blood sugar low. She was taught to walk daily, not to help her blood sugar today, but to literally help it tomorrow. Her data seems to back this up. Whatever the cause, there seems to be a causal relationship with brisk walking and lower blood sugar the following day.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Granted, this is hardly accurate/scientific - try out a solid hour walk on a treadmill. A lot of steps for a pittance of calories [based on whatever hand-wavy math it's doing, admittedly]. We're frustratingly efficient. I forget exactly, it was something dumb like half a candy bar. I've heard people say "you won't outrun your mouth", in this context... and others. It's true. I've managed to drop my body weight ~half, it happened by controlling what I ate; not how I exercised. When I stopped skateboarding due to an injury, I ballooned. I stopped eating like that over a decade later, I shrunk. In that time I also got older, moved, and went to college. It's worth considering what's easier/more likely/realistic to maintain

donw 2y ago
The saying in weightlifting / bodybuilding circles is "you can't out-train a bad diet".
bart_spoon 2y ago
I think that pittance of calories is only the surface benefit. Consistent activity keeps your metabolism much higher, meaning you burn more calories throughout the day even when you aren’t moving.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Absolutely, very good to keep things burning. It's also good to not need to burn them. We can be remarkably efficient with the right conditioning. I eat once/day and would do less if not for literally boredom. I do next to nothing physically all day. I'm fine, I just don't need a lot of upkeep. I have all the metabolism I need! My health may be suffering for it, but I enjoy getting back a solid chunk of the day. Eating is such a time sink... now it's exercise too?! I know it's nuts, I have an unhealthy relationship with food lol. Even the social side, it's hard to explain but people get mad when you don't want to eat with them.
spudlyo 2y ago
Put a morbidly obese person on a treadmill for a solid hour, and they'll likely spend a fair amount of time in zone 4-5. Walking is excellent exercise for some, not so great for others. Generalizing here is pointless.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  > Generalizing here is pointless Comment sections summarized excellently in four words. None of this was presented as universal truth, so I'd appreciate some leniency like I'm giving to you My post provided a personal anecdote. What does yours have? Criticism we'd all be better off without. It's clear the effect exercise had on me, it was keeping my eating in check. I can do that too at intake. I didn't even need a miracle drug. I just stopped eating so much, but here I go slipping into moral judgement. I'm trying to help people, not reinforce a lifestyle.
  - spudlyo 2y ago
    Apologies for my rudeness, I'm afraid I let a pet peeve get the better of me. I often read health and wellness content on Reddit. There you'll find highly ranked comments expressing opinions such as "you should never eat below 1200 calories", or "walking on a treadmill burns a pittance of calories". In my opinion, these sorts of observations are uninteresting at best, and misinformative at worst. Hacker News, as you may well know from your nearly three year comment history here, is a place where detail and nuance are roundly appreciated.

viburnum 2y ago

I don’t know the science of it but for me at least walking suppresses my appetite. My hunch is that by not walking the body goes into “must be sick, should probably eat some more” mode.

veidr 2y ago
I hate the join the "unreliable anecdata faction" in a thread where we are talking about well-established science-backed points (eating 1000+ extra kcal of trash most days contributes to being overweight; walking 10x more every day does the reverse), but I too believe there is something magical (meaning we don't fully understand the science) about walking. I have three kids, and after each one of them, I tend to put on 10-15kg of body mass, mostly the wrong kind. So I have three experiences of "fixing it". The first two times, I ran, lifted weights, ate salads and dropped alcohol, all that shit... it worked, but it was hard. Hard like when I quit smoking cigarettes (before the first kid). I was hungry. Irritable. Sometimes, I'd be like "oh, fuck it!" at 1AM and make a big ass instant Japanese ramen with scrambled eggs on the side, I was so hungry. The third time, I eventually bought one of those under-desk treadmills, because despite my vows to walk 10km per day I just "don't have time". It took about a day to acclimate. After that, and forever more, I can easily do computer work (writing code, reading code, architecture diagrams, writing docs) while walking 3kph (slow). When I am just reading stuff, I ramp it up to 4-5kph. There are a bunch of other things that made me feel dumb for not doing it years earlier, which one day I might blog about or something. I suspect it actually helps my productivity — including learning rate and retention — for some reason (bleeding off extra energy that my mind might otherwise use to poke me with small, fascinating distractions?). But sticking to this topic, the main point is this: I was no longer super hungry with only 2000 kcal a day. When I would run 750kcal off, sure I burned the calories, but I was soo hungry later that I would override my caloric restriction plan, and often end up eating more extra than I'd burned off. Not at all the case with walking, either on the desk treadmill, or in the relatively uncommon case that I get to walk 10km in the real world (maybe once a week I will walk to/from work and take some detours). My weight dropped steadily — which, of course, it does any time I manage to consistentely burn ~500kcal per day more than I consume — but the point is it dropped easily. Walking 10km/day, I can eat at a deficit without it being so... annoying. Eating to maintain weight is also easy. And unlike lifting weights, or HIIT, or running hard — you can literally walk 10km every single day. You can take a day off if you want, but you don't need to[1]. Your muscles don't need rest. Your joints don't wear out. It's literally the activity your body was designed for. You can do it every single day for 10 years if you want. I should really write that blog post. I suspect some science-type should dig into it more and write a whole book. [1]: the only real worry is that if you have already gotten super out of shape (very fat, very low cardio fitness, etc) then you should start with less walking per day, and work your way up gradually.

KptMarchewa 2y ago

Walking tends to affect digestion in ways other than raw calorie intake.

kalleboo 2y ago

The walking may not be what actually loses the calories but it probably also affects how you look at your own fitness. It gets a lot harder to walk when you're heavy, and you'll notice quickly when you get start getting winded just going to work every day.

rstuart4133 2y ago

People think of the 250lb and 1000 steps in the context of one meal, or maybe a 6 month diet. But 250lb is not added in one meal, or over 6 months. It usually takes a couple of decades. Let's say that's 10,0000 days. Because I'm Australian and like round numbers and am lazy (these numbers are all very rounded), call 250lb 100kg. 1,0000 steps a day consumes about 20 kiljoule. If those kilojoules come from eating fat, you either add 1/2 a gram of fat or walk those 1,000 steps. I know, 1/2 a gram, 0.02oz - almost insignificant, right? Now multiply it by 10,000 and see that over those decades it contributed 50kg of the 100kg we are talking about. For the same reason exercise doesn't make a lot off difference to a 6 month or even 2 year diet. But when you are trying to explain to difference between trim Koreans and 250lb Americans those extra 3,000 steps a day explain the entire difference, then some.

khazhoux 2y ago
I think you're doing bad math. My point is that a shitty, low-cost middle-American diet greatly exceeds the caloric burn of walking, across any time window you choose. I mean, it's obviously better to walk than to not, but I'm claiming the dominant factor is sugar-bomb drinks and fatty foods (which isn't at all a novel claim anyway). Walking only barely chips away at that.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  Why is the math bad? It seems to check out what he is saying and matches approximately the numbers I can find on online.
- ruszki 2y ago
  Using public transport (aka walking) means to me to burn 500-1000 additional calories per day compared to using cars the whole day. That’s not insignificant at all. Of course, you need to live somewhere where this is a possibility.
- numpad0 2y ago
  My gut fully agree with this. American junk foods had gone way too far wrt paperclip maximization.

donw 2y ago

Food in the US seems designed to make people obese. When you look at ingredient labels in Japan or Germany, you see a short list of what you would expect, plus maybe a preservative. In the US, you see an entire chemistry lab: artificial colors and flavors, bizarre substitutes for real sugar, oils that a hundred years ago would not be considered fit for human consumption, and so on.

pedalpete 2y ago

We can rely on the research here -> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071659/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071659/ Only 25% of Americans are getting the recommended aerobic activity. Which is 20 minutes per day of moderate activity (walking). It is difficult to comprehend how little most Americans walk. In many suburbs, the local store is more than a mile, which would equate to a 40 minute round trip walk. How often do you walk for 40 minutes when you can drive in 8 minutes. Of course, delivery services only exacerbate the issue, as you're not even walking through the parking lot now.

keltor 2y ago

Basically it's all about Calories and Americans have added 25% to their caloric intake since 1961 when it started increasing. Its also not really magical, they didn't just add sugar, they added meat, sugar, grains and oil (replacing butter mostly) - all together it adds up to 720 kcal extra per day per capita. Koreans eat about 1500 kcal less per day (they are also quite a bit smaller on average so it's not 1 ot 1 of course.) Japanese eat even less (like 200 kcal less) but are also even a bit smaller on average. Both countries happily eat terrible food just as much as Americans do these days, they just eat a lot less food in total. There's an idea that American eat out more and that the calories at dining establishments about increased about 35%.

nazgul17 2y ago
If it were walking what keeps Asians slim, you'd see more variation, imo. The small portions and generally healthier food are what keeps them slim. True that the Japanese eat fried chicken and cakes, but not as often as Americans, and not as much each time.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  There's a certain positive status associated being "fat and happy" in the US. Americans are also, on the whole, gigantic people. Tall, wide, huge frames and/or a lot of meat on the bone. Only some of that is accounted for by diet. I think there's more to do in Japan locally, or at least more general social/physical freedom, which I attribute to low costs and high mobility. Nature in the US is generally privatized, far out of the way, or has limited access or parking. If you travel by walking in the US, middle class people think you're poor or your car has broken down. There's a bit of a stigma in some cases and places against not being sedentary and large (or, having to move and sweat for anyone).
  - deprecative 2y ago
    It's really quite simple to me. I don't quite understand why folks seem to argue about why the US is obese and Japan isn't. It comes down to one thing but I suspected aided by another three things: In Japan a mindset of just enough seems to be prevalent. They do not seem to be as prone to glorifying excess in all ways like us Americans tend to be. I think this is a / the key aspect which is supported by these: Americans are not active. Japanese people tend to be active and walking absolutely contributes to this. Americans eat low quality food. We eat a lot of food with added sugar. We feed candy to children in sugary water-fat for breakfast. We eat processed and ultra processed foods regularly even when we primarily prepare meals at home. Americans are anti-conformist. Japan is very conformist. This relates to social pressure(fat shaming, diet) and social activity cohesion (exercise, dieting). It seems quite evident at even a glance why one country would be overweight while the other tends to be fit. In the US our culture rewards excess. We value cars more than people. We care about profits over people, too, really. Things like healthcare and food come to mind here.

bart_spoon 2y ago

Japanese people fry all kinds of food. They have plenty of soda as well, and there are plenty of Americans who struggle with obesity despite not drinking much soda. It 100% has to do with walking/biking and portion sizes. Low intensity exercise throughout the day is as if not more effective than high intensity exercise for burning calories and keeping your metabolism from crashing.

milesvp 2y ago

I know a person with sort of an odd type of diabetes that requires multiple different ways of treating to keep her blood sugar low. She was taught to walk daily, not to help her blood sugar today, but to literally help it tomorrow. Her data seems to back this up. Whatever the cause, there seems to be a causal relationship with brisk walking and lower blood sugar the following day.