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>I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. I had the same question and did

• _alternator_ 10mo ago
  The decrease in spend was at the household level, not aggregate, so it’s a 5% decrease across 16% of households, or a bit less than 1% overall. The overall weight loss seems to be because the spending decreases most heavily in calorie dense foods like savory snacks; yogurt and fresh fruit spending goes up a bit.
• stewarts 10mo ago
  I'm not sure how this math checks out. 1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories. Given 500 calories a day of excess, that would lead to 1lb of fat gain per week. 52 pound average gain per year?
  • jmpetroske 10mo ago
    As you gain weight, your base metabolic rate also increases. Having fat means you inherently burn more calories, even if you don’t exercise any more. Take one person, say they eat 2000 calories to maintain bodyweight. If they start eating 2500 calories a day, they won’t gain 1lb of fat a week forever. As they gain fat, their body naturally burns more calories due to the increased body weight, and eventually a stable weight (higher than their original weight) will be reached. So yeah if you’re eating 500 calories above your metabolic weight, you’ll theoretically gain weight forever. But in this case your metabolic rate is rising over time, so you would be eating more and more calories per day.
    • whatshisface 10mo ago
      Fat does not raise your metabolism by a lot (relatively), and tiny changes in diet lead to massive swings in the equilibrium implied by basal metabolic rate formulas. In fact, some formulas do not include weight due to body fat. If you think about it, that fact touches on the idea that your natural weight is being maintained by another body system, one related to GLP-1. By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.
      • margalabargala 10mo ago
        The potential for overeating chronically has not been possible for most people, in most societies, throughout most of human history. Our current caloric abundance being available to literally everyone in Western society is something unique to the past century.
        • whatshisface 10mo ago
          If you eat 1% fewer calories than you burn every day you will die. You will also die if you eat 1% more calories than you burn every day. Is it possible, really, to suggest that the availability of calories was 100% of the daily requirement of our ancestors, and not 99%, or 101%? That is a level of accident that exceeds belief. It is incredible to think this precise balance could be maintained by anything other than a closed loop of biological control. How would the wheat on a medieval farm know how much to grow each season? If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died... unless they had a mechanism for satiation. How do you think our microbial ancestors maintained internal salinity, through the limited availability of salt in the ancient ocean?
          • cogman10 10mo ago
            > unless they had a mechanism for satiation It ends up being the opposite. Rather than the body having a satiation response, it controls the metabolism. If you've ever fasted, you've experienced this. You just don't have the energy to do much other than sit around when you are hungry. Ancient societies realized this, it's why they'd give out calorie dense meals to their farm labor. For a serf in England, harvest time was often met with a very calorie dense meal. For roman soldiers, they had a diet of meats and cheeses. I'd also point out that you don't need to have exactly 100% daily calorie intake. You can go a week with just 99% and catch up with 101% the next week just fine.
  • rootusrootus 10mo ago
    This hits on something that seems to get lost in most of these "obese people are lazy fat slobs" circle jerks. A typical American gains 1 or 2 pounds per year as they age. This is not a candy problem, or a binge eating problem, this is way more subtle than that.
    • moi2388 10mo ago
      More subtle as in still not a healthy diet with exercise?
      • deleted 10mo ago
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      • anon84873628 10mo ago
        Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake. Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle. Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a small excess the effects that would lead you to regulate are much more... subtle.
        • throwaway173738 10mo ago
          10 calories a day is like the BMR difference between 20 and 30.
        • mathgradthrow 10mo ago
          Meanwhile, tracking consumption involves error bars that span a factor of 2. Go figure out how many calories are in an avocado. Is that per gram figure amortized for the weight of the pit, or is this just for the flesh? Counting calories precisely was invented by the processed food industry.
      • rootusrootus 10mo ago
        Judging from the downvotes my observation got, you're not the only person who skipped math class. I couldn't say it any better than the comment below this one that already replied to you. 10 calories a day, expressed in candy, is two M&Ms.
  • premiumLootBox 10mo ago
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• vasco 10mo ago
  > That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20% I doubt that $ spend on the top end of caloric intake scales linearly with # of calories because of high caloric density foods. If I spend $500 a month on groceries, lets say I need $400 to keep me alive and hygienic and the last $100 are going to be the candy and sodas that make me fat. So to give an example, reducing the caloric intake by 50% could be achieved by reducing spend by only 5% if there's very caloric foods making me fat.
  • anon84873628 10mo ago
    Also need to account for restaurant spending.
• jjk166 10mo ago
  > The data I have seen says the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories, and 3600 daily calories total. That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%. You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost. Unfortunately the big problem with ultra processed food is that calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods. Cutting out the cheapest items is going to reduce spending less.
  • CGMthrowaway 10mo ago
    >You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost Not falsely. Back of the envelope. If you want to improve the model go right ahead, but I was upfront with its limitations.
    • carlmr 10mo ago
      I got some similar responses on my post above. HN discussion quality is really suffering recently. Wondering how many LLMs are involved here at this point.
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • zahlman 10mo ago
    > calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods I hear this a lot but I really don't see good evidence for it. And people keep peddling stereotypes about "fast food" consumption after QSRs saw much larger price increases than grocery stores. For that matter, the UPFs are where I see people most commonly reach for overpriced name brands over the generics.
  • webnrrd2k 10mo ago
    > jjk166: You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost Give the guy some credit... No, clearly CGMthrowaway is not assuming that at all, it's purposly left out. The first sentence mentions "back of the envelope math" and makes it clear it's a rough order-of-magnitude estimate. Also it's in response to a statement about "wondering how you could get such a high impact overall". Also, also, the last sentence is "So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet." It's perfectly fine for people to do rough estimates to understand a situation, especially in informal discussions. It not a dissertation for a Ph.D. or formal position paper.
• derektank 10mo ago
  > But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining) I would not assume this. Most people remain on GLP-1 agonists after they reach their goal weight, as without it cravings return and weight starts coming back on. I would guess a substantial fraction of people on the drugs are on a maintenance dose
• criddell 10mo ago
  > If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20% Probably not. Americans (households, grocery stores, and restaurants) throw away an insane amount of food.
• tsimionescu 10mo ago
  These calorie numbers don't make much sense to me. The typical recommendation for how much a man should eat is 2000-2800 Cal/day, and for the average woman that is 1600-2200 Cal/day, depending on age and exercise levels [0]. So if it were true that the average American ate 3600 Cal/day, they would be eating 800-2000 excess Cal, not 400-700. Even if we assumed that average food cost/Cal is a meaningful concept, the reduction would be much higher. [0] https://www.ummhealth.org/health-library/eating-the-right-number-of-calories-2020-2025-guidelines https://www.ummhealth.org/health-library/eating-the-right-nu...
  • CGMthrowaway 10mo ago
    You're right I seem to be referencing bad data, and the excess is probably more like 10-50 cals/day. Whatever the figures are, what's interesting to me is the growing secular impact on an entire sector of the economy (the most stable and inelastic sector). If eating right means spending 5% less, extrapolating that across the entire sector, not just for the 16% using GLPs today, could be catastrophic I suspect ultimately though supply will meet demand and prices may even rise for the food people are still eating
• malfist 10mo ago
  > the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories This can't possibly be true. A caloric surplus of 500cal/day adds a pound of weight per week. That'd mean in a decade of life the _average_ American would add an additional 260 pounds. In 4 decades Americans would add half a ton to their waistline, on average. That'd mean at then end of their life the average American would die weighing over 2 tons
  • carlmr 10mo ago
    The question is how you calculate or define excess. For one, excess calories aren't 100% stored as fat. We're not that efficient. Additionally the fatter you are the more calories you use at rest. So there's a point where if you consistently eat too much you'll stop gaining weight. The biggest source of error here will be the calories in the garbage bin though. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is stored in the waste disposal, not the waist disposal.
    • malfist 10mo ago
      If I throw away 500 calories of food, I'm not eating an excess 500 calories. Let's not engage in equivocation
      • carlmr 10mo ago
        If you don't read the main part of my reply, why do you even reply with snarky nastiness.
  • thefz 10mo ago
    Assuming a steady surplus of 500, and considering that a kg of human fat is roughly 8000kcal, it will take two weeks to gain a kilo. But a larger person consumes more to simply stay alive so the curve flattens out once a certain mass is reached.
    • malfist 10mo ago
      Excess means above what your metabolism consumes. If I'm 200 pounds and my metabolism consumes 3200 calories per day, eating 3200 calories per day isn't 500 calories in excess. Same as if I'm 600 pounds and 4000 calorie metabolism. It isn't excess unless its excess.
• DontchaKnowit 10mo ago
  There is no direct correlation between dollars and calories though. I could spend 10 dollars on 400 calories of strawberries or 10 dollars on 4000 calories worth of cheetos. So theres no way to do that kind of math on this, really