6 ms·

The obesity era: The problem may be bigger than any of us (2013)

66 points by kevbin 12y ago

GuiA 12y ago
> A restaurant on a warm day whose air conditioning breaks down will see a sharp decline in sales (yes, someone did a study). Ugh, then link to the fucking study! I've spent a few minutes in Google/Google Scholar trying to find said study, to no avail. Would love to see it if someone finds it.
- kbaker 12y ago
  This is where the article pulls that quote from I believe [1]: > Herman cited a consumer survey suggesting that after an air-conditioning breakdown, restaurant sales drop dramatically. Which refers to this paper [2], it references this survey to support some conclusions in the paper. > This literature has been supplemented by a survey designed specifically for this chapter (consumer survey, University of Toronto, unpublished data, 1991). Because of the anticipation that the scientific literature, especially on humans, might be skimpy, a questionnaire was sent to a number of restaurant and grocery chains in the metropolitan Toronto area asking about shifts in customer purchasing behavior as a function of environmental heat. This survey is by no means scientific, but it reflects the accumulated experience of merchants whose livelihood depends to some extent on accurately assessing how people's food purchases vary with the heat. > More parochially, one Toronto restaurateur (unpublished data from consumer survey, 1991) conceded that "sales plunge during a heat wave .... People do not have the appetite for a large heavy meal when it is hot." So not that much of a study... [1] http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v30/n11/full/0803326a.html#bib45 http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v30/n11/full/0803326a.html... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236229/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236229/
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. As the top commenter points out, this is incredibly misleading. Just because the macronutrient ratios of lab animals has remained the same does not say anything about the contents of what they are being fed. For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference. The fact of the matter is that the companies that are producing the foods that the lab animals eat are under the same market pressures as those producing food for humans: they try to do their best to minimize costs, even if it comes at the expense of the consumers' health. So it isn't at all surprising that lab animals have gotten fatter along with humans. I think as a nation we need to stop chasing overly complicated explanations of the obesity phenomenon and apply Occam's Razor. A ton of people have been able to successfully lose weight by paying attention to what and how much they eat. Go to any bodybuilding forum on the Internet and look at before-and-after photos and read accounts of how the transformation was accomplished. It really, really isn't rocket science. If someone isn't able to lose weight when they eat less, it is much more likely that they are doing something wrong than that there are hidden factors that are preventing their weight loss. (I don't blame them because there is an insane amount of misinformation on the topic these days, partially thanks to "experts" who try to justify their research and employment by sowing doubt and muddying the waters.)
- wrl 12y ago
  > For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference. Do you have a citation for this? For what it's worth, I avoid soy products in general because of concerns about hormonal effects, but I'm not quite up on the state-of-the-art in terms of the research.
- dkural 12y ago
  Hey I fully agree with your overall point. If you don't eat more than you need in calories, you won't gain weight. Simple as that. I did have an objection regarding egg protein v.s. soy protein - perhaps you meant impurities etc. If you are feeding them protein, and protein only, you won't notice a difference. Proteins = amino acids. Egg protein is the same thing as soy protein, which is the same thing as "meat" protein.. All of life uses the same set of amino acids, which are made according to the blueprint in genes (i.e. DNA), using essentially the same genetic code. It's literally the same physical thing.
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    This is as uninformed as it is vigorously stated. Different foods have different amino acid profiles, meaning that the amount of each amino acid varies, in some cases considerably, from food to food. Some amino acids the body can make itself; others can be gotten only from food. As ever, Wikipedia has a good starting point[0]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
    - judk 12y ago
      Note however that in practice it is very hard to construct a diet (evan a vegan diet) lacking in essential amino acids, unless you use an extreme monoculture such as.... Only corn.
    - dkural 12y ago
      For caloric purposes this makes no difference. Thus - again, soy protein = egg protein. Both will give you energy. Even with fairly low levels of food consumption (i.e. not average american), as long as it is varied, we get all the essential amino acids. Please note that even people on pretty intense weight loss diets don't suffer from "essential amino acid depletion" The bacteria in our gut can synthesize all the amino acids by the way, including essential ones, from pretty much any source of nutrients.
nardi 12y ago
That is an amazing title. Bravo.
steakejjs 12y ago
Obesity is a great example of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure. Having been overweight and borderline obese I have a certain mindset that my level of fitness is achievable by anyone who puts in the effort. I firmly believe this. There is a load of research supporting this, that a calorie is a calorie, and I suspect it will stay that way...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ericb 12y ago
  Yes, and anyone should be able to hold their breath for 3 minutes. Oh wait, that's hard? Is it possible there is a strong biological drive that makes it difficult? So does that mean these drives affect our behavior? Imagine there was a similar drive for food. Let's call it "hunger." If such a drive existed, it is conceivable it would vary from person to person, and things would be more complicated than "a calorie is a calorie" because there's this whole strong drive drive influencing things. What if other factors could mess with the strength of this drive? Thank goodness this is all hypothetical, otherwise "a calorie is a calorie" might be just a meaningless platitude.
  - judk 12y ago
    Your analogy and message would be more pleasant if you didn't wrap it in the confusing and unfriendly sarcasm.
    - ericb 12y ago
      A fair point. I have tried putting this in friendlier terms at times, but my perception is that most people who hold the reductionist view want fatness to be a morality tale where bad things happen to people who deserved it. That notion offends me, and it seems far-fetched since this is happening in animals, too. That or someone is generalizing from their n of one anecdote to all people. Even worse, I feel like this platitude is used as an excuse to stop thinking. The least interesting part of this whole thing is the thermodynamics--to the point of being so uninteresting that I can't believe it gets talked about. How about why are people eating more? Do some foods satiate hunger better? Why is the problem accelerating over time? What is causing animals to weigh more--has their willpower diminished? A calorie is a calorie misses the point so thoroughly it infuriates me. Apologies for the tone.
greglindahl 12y ago
It would be nice if articles like this didn't attack a strawman: Most people who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness.
- Afforess 12y ago
  I disagree. Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people. This is not helped by the rather silly trend of the fat-is-beautiful group, which only encourages the opposite fat-shaming groups.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people. "Most people who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity" and "the loudest voices on the internet forums Afforess frequents who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity" are not the same groups of people.
- ericb 12y ago
  > Most ... don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness Can you support this claim? I think "most" still may think that and would be interested to see data.
- jostmey 12y ago
  The article takes a simplified theory about obesity based on caloric intake and thermodynamics and pokes holes in it. But of course there are holes, it is a simplification!
WBrentWilliams 12y ago
First, a snark admission. I read the article and the comments concurrently. I was not disappointed in how quickly the reductionists came out to defend their favorite theory of caloric thermodynamics. That said, I will provide an personal anecdote for your perusal and make one suggestion. First, the anecdote: I dropped from a weight of 205 - 210 pounds to a weight of 145 pounds over the course of three years. I am back up to 155 pounds. Yes, that last detail is important to my story. I am 5-foot-8-inches, so this is a radical change of BMI. Why did I lose so much weight? A radical change in diet. I have a medical condition for which I was trying to avoid the most expensive treatments. I moved (not overnight) to a diet that removed virtually all grain-based and tuber-based carbohydrates. My carbohydrates came from fruits and leafy vegetables. No, I do not advise this diet for anyone unless they are trying to avoid the drugs that comes with my condition. It worked. I went off the over-priced 1890's-era anti-inflammatory medication and stayed it for three years. Then, my symptoms returned. New doctor, who said nothing about my diet and threw steroids and more anti-inflammatory meds at me. Those did not work. I lost even more weight, down to 135 pounds. I even went off my diet. Yes, it was good to eat bread, potatoes, and rice again. Finally, I gave in and accepted that I would be on a ludicrously priced biological. Symptoms arrested. Now, back to my old diet. I have ten pounds to lose to get to my target weight. What I am suggesting is that reductionism works. My diet notebooks shows a slight reduction in calories by removing grain-and-tuber carbs. However, it only takes you so far. There is room for wholism and seeking an understanding of exactly how a given source of nutrients is metabolized.
- frio 12y ago
  If you don't mind my asking -- what is your condition? I've got Ulcerative Colitis, and tried a similar diet (the Specific Carbohydrate Diet) to reasonable success. I've also had a few rounds of Infliximab (Remicade), which has helped me reach remission.
  - WBrentWilliams 12y ago
    You quite correctly diagnosed my ailment and diet. I wasn't (and still am not) wild about being on Infliximab, but it's better than the alternative. I'm also quite thankful for my University position and the very good insurance that comes with it.
ghouse 12y ago
Perhaps the US tax code should stop subsidizing corn syrup and other processed food inputs. As it is now, the tax payers pay twice -- once for the subsidy, and then again for healthcare.
- alecco 12y ago
  Indeed. Also, why not do the same that worked before with big tobacco? Ban soft drink sport sponsorships. Ban advertisement of high sugar/hfcs foods to children. Add surgeon general notes to junk foods. Health consequences are paid by the rest of society, in one way or another. Nurses say hospitals are filled with obese patients. It's getting out of control.
  - jaggederest 12y ago
    Or just add a calorie tax. That would pretty effectively do the trick. Would negligibly affect the cost of low-calorie-density food, but boy that soda and/or butter becomes expensive.
    - cpr 12y ago
      Real butter is quite healthy in moderation. And already expensive enough!
    - mendort 12y ago
      That'd be great way to establish a regressive tax. Luxury foods don't have more calories than cheap ones so as a percentage of cost cheap food prices would increase more. Not to mention that percentage of income spent on food for low income people is much higher than % of income spent on food by rich people.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - humanrebar 12y ago
        Then add: a more aggressive earned income tax, a more generous child tax credit, or a guaranteed minimum income (or some kind of hybrid plan). If the problem is that some people can't afford things, attack that problem directly. Legally guaranteeing that parents can put their 26-year-olds on their family healthcare plan is also regressive (it doesn't help uninsured families), but that didn't stop it from being enacted.
alecco 12y ago
I'm a skeptic. But this article rings way too much like what the tobacco industry published back in the 50s and 60s. And what climate change deniers published more openly in recent times. Ask any dietician, in particular pediatrics. Ask any obesity researcher. They are super clear on what's going on with the current obesity epidemic. And they squarely blame soft drinks and processed foods with their multibillion dollar advertising budgets. Confusion and distraction. That's what trillion-dollar industries do when they are cornered. Remember, many contrarian science authors were later exposed as shills. Like Malcolm Gladwell. Also, it might not be a matter of influence. Contrarian articles get a lot more viewers by people in denial, guilt-shifting and all. So, I'm very skeptical to this skeptical piece. But it's worth reading.
- WBrentWilliams 12y ago
  You are quite correct to be skeptical. See my reply below. That said, a single pattern noticed is only correlation. It is far better to ask three questions: What do we know? How do we know it? What does the shape of what we don't know look like? Hence my call for a match on the wholism side to the reductionist methods on weight management.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  I work in public health research and the blame on soft-drinks is not unanimous. Soft drinks are pointed-at because they're the simplest target. Dropping soft-drinks is not a life-shatteringly hard change to make, and it's effective. But at the same time, other things are being assessed for their contribution. Suburban sprawl, the dual-income household, and the rise of more sedentary hobbies are all being examined. Now, soft drinks are still a cause for the modern obesity epidemic, just not the cause. There are many other shifts in modern lifestyles that are also contributing. edit: clarification. Also, caveat: I'm IT in public health, not a researcher.
  - AJ007 12y ago
    Anything that spikes blood sugar is going to cause problems because the individual is stuck riding a sugar high and attempting to prevent or get out of the following crash. This is a daily, hour to hour struggle. Describing it as anything less would be a disservice. Trying to not eat after a blood sugar crash is as difficult as a male with peak testosterone passing up sex. Dropping soft drinks, if you substitute with water/tea/coffee, will be a life altering change. I did it, dropped 10 pounds within a month, never gained it back, (already fairly thin at that point) and stopped getting cavities. Over the following years it made it so much easier to convert my diet from pizza/frozen foods to fresh vegetables and unprocessed meat. I drink minimal alcohol, but for those individuals who drink heavily giving up soft drinks may not prove to have much or any impact. There are food products that should be consumed rarely -- holidays, and humans are consuming them every day. The behavior goes from every day to perhaps 50% of the food consumed is stuff that any registered dietician will say isn't very healthy for you. Just sit in a grocery store and watch what morbidly obese people purchase verse someone who is thin and fit (and not a drug addict.) Night and day. The science has come a really long way since I was a child in only the 1990s. We believed the only healthy diets were extremely low fat. Get rid of fat whenever possible, exercise, and you will be very healthy. No on credible believes that anymore. The problem now is largely behavior modification methods. Perhaps a success with behavior modification will trigger challenges pivoting the US food supply off corn/soy/wheat production but that is solvable.
sheepmullet 12y ago
The real issue is nobody wants the slow and steady option. If you are overweight you can lose a pound/month with only a few minor changes to your diet. You won't feel any more hungry than you usually do. You won't feel a lack of energy or ability to think. But a person who is 60 pounds overweight won't do this because it will take 5 years to lose the weight. Instead they will jump from one diet to the next to the next binge to the even stricter diet and in 5 years be no better off than when they started.
- silencio 12y ago
  It's frustrating. You get a LOT of fat shaming, you get discouraged at a slow pace, you don't see the firsthand/obvious benefits for a long time. I've lost ~30lbs since February, which is around one pound a _week_. I still can't tell the difference. The only thing that's changing is the number on the scale every week. Still the same clothes, the same fat arms, the same belly fat. Just a little more fit because I've been doing more exercise. And because I'm female, I get the additional hassle of being assumed I'm pregnant when I'm not, and clothes are hard to fit (and I can't even look at plus sized clothes most days... too big for me, what). I aim to lose another 50lbs or so (the low end of normal weight) in the next couple years and I need to maintain the diet/exercise I'm doing now in general, but I only do this because I need to be in good shape for trying for kids in the future and for myself/my spouse. Can't think about any other objective because I will fail miserably if I do. I don't see myself ever fitting into my little black dress, or avoiding fat shaming from random strangers... not even walking around with a huge grin on my face for crossing the 30lb mark at a weighing at the doctor's office counteracts how terrible shaming feels. :(
- glenra 12y ago
  People who have been fat and then lost weight have a different metabolism than people who stayed at the same lower weight throughout. Most people who lose a significant amount of weight gain it all back and then some within three years. Your theory that losing slower would be more sustainable than losing faster is interesting, but do you have any actual evidence for it? If calories in/calories out were all there was to it, shouldn't it take no willpower to merely stay at the lower weight once achieved, regardless of how quickly that loss were achieved? As for me, I think the real issue is that we still really have no idea why people have collectively gotten fatter and thus have no advice to give that consistently works to completely reverse that process. What we have are guesses as to what might work. And most of these guesses are wrong.
kauffj 12y ago
The fact that animals have experienced significant weight gain is by far the best evidence the author provides to support a factor exogenous to the calories-in-calories-out model. What are the leading explanations for this phenomenon?
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I can't answer your question, because I don't know (the OP covers the leading explanations, as far as I know) but... calories-in/calories-out is technically correct, but there are some complexities. Calories in: calorie counts are guesswork. For the healthier foods, there's even more uncertainty about calories. You know exactly what you're getting with Coke, but you shouldn't be drinking much of that if you're trying to lose weight. If you eat an apple instead, you're talking about 10 to 20% variation each way in calorie count. Finally, there are individual variations based on the microbes in our gut, and how we absorb nutrients. Calories out: people vary in basal metabolic rate (BMR) and we don't always know why. Even if we could get a good idea of how many calories we were taking in each day, and we can't, most of us have no idea of what we're burning. There are ways to tip the scale (build more muscle, spend more time in cold temperatures, and, obviously, be more active) but it's impossible to know, in general, how many calories you burned in a day. Given that an error of 50 calories per day is 5 pounds gained per year, precise calorie counting isn't possible. It's largely a problem with two factors: 1. Individual metabolic variation. People with shitty metabolisms are going to get fat if they eat restaurant meals portioned for 24-year-olds. For 40-50% of the population, eating portions that the median person can is going to lead to fatness. 2. Silent failure. The body punishes calorie errors on the negative side (hunger) or even tries to adapt (low energy, starvation mode) in ways that are counterproductive in modern times. It doesn't punish, in any immediate way, positive calorie errors.
  - eru 12y ago
    > Given that an error of 50 calories per day is 5 pounds gained per year, [...] As people get fatter, they need more food just to stay the same. So if I took my exact current caloric needs to stay the same weight at my level of activity, and added eg a constant 500 kCal each day, I would not in fact gain kg after kg year in year out. But rather, my weight curve would look like the charge/time curve when loading up a capacitor.
michaelochurch 12y ago
What's amazing to me, and a bit shameful, is that we haven't figured out a safe way to speed up the body's metabolism to the rate of a 95th-percentile 17-year-old. That's a level that we know is safe. (Obviously, if you increased the metabolism too far, you'd run into issues with heat stroke and malnourishment.) I'm astonished that we haven't found a treatment that can let everyone have that. I think that obesity is maybe 10 to 20% personal fault. Some people overeat, or eat stupidly, and I've seen that. However, I think that socioeconomic forces (and food supply issues, and I wouldn't be surprised if ambient toxins were involved) produce most of the remainder. There are a lot of people who eat reasonably, exercise as much as they reasonably can given their work commitments, and are still fat. We're not supposed to live in the psychological monoculture of modern work, or to have inflexible 8- to 12-hour commitments on the majority of our days. Inactivity and low energy levels (a consequence of living amid hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations in which almost everyone's a subordinate) do a lot of damage. The trans fats and high fructose corn syrup aren't doing people any favors.
tokenadult 12y ago
The article notes a fact that so far hasn't come up in the discussion here: "For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years." This is a good corrective to many theories about obesity, because cross-national comparisons will show that people can become obese on a variety of diets, and not all countries that have rising rates of obesity have the mix of foodstuffs as the United States. I saw the submission and the first few comments before I cooked a home-cooked meal for my sons. (My wife is coming home from a soccer tournament trip with our daughter, so it is definitely my turn to cook this evening.) A book recommended in an earlier thread by a Hacker News participant, The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work,[1] intrigued me enough when it was recommended here that I checked it out of my public library and read it cover to cover. The book is sensible and based on both scientific research and the author's own experience as someone who likes to eat a lot. The advice in the book boils down in large part to 1) do your own cooking, 2) know that your diet will fail every time you eat out, and 3) keep a food diary if you really want to be aware of what you eat. I do number 1 almost all the time. By the official designations on the United States federal government body-mass index website,[2] my current body mass index classifies as "overweight," but that is the optimal weight range for a middle-aged adult, epidemiologically, for longer lifespan. But correlations found in observational studies do not prove causation, and I might not be any worse off if I lost a bit of weight to come down to the "normal" weight range I was in during most of early adulthood. Until I was in my late twenties (that is, until after I got married), was thin--no, make that gaunt--because I did all my own cooking and I tried to spend as little as possible on food. I wonder how much my experience is different from that of other people I see commenting here on Hacker News because of age--I am a generation older than most participants here--and how much is different because of birth cohort--just about everyone I knew when I was growing up was slim. All around the developed world, Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising.[4] But obesity (overweight that is more excessive than just being "overweight") is still increasing in all those countries, and indeed in nearly all countries of the world. Animal experimental models are pretty convincing about obsesity-as-such causing many kinds of illness and early mortality, and it will be an interesting question to see if obesity trends outrun the other trends that are improving healthy lifespan for most people in most places at all ages. The article reminds us of the astonishing fact that this trend even cuts across species, as long as the species are in the care of current human beings: "Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. 'Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,' he told me." Exhorting lab animals to exercise more is of course not likely to help them much. After the author reviews a number of hypotheses about obesity and possible causes for obesity rates rising, most of which we have discussed before here on HN, the summary paragraph makes an important point: "No one has claimed, or should claim, that any of these 'roads less taken' is the one true cause of obesity, to drive out the false idol of individual choice. Neither should we imagine that the existence of alternative theories means that governments can stop trying to forestall a major public-health menace. These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word. It might be that every one of the 'roads less travelled' contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn't a simple school physics experiment." In other words, we still have to do a lot of research, and as I noted as I began my comment, maybe different countries have different obsesity problems with different causes. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Fix-Diets-Yours/dp/0804137579 http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Fix-Diets-Yours/dp/0804137579 [2] http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmicalc.htm http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmic... [3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-obesity-paradox/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-obesity-paradox/ [4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
ZoF 12y ago
I was 293 pounds as of last November, 199.6 as of last night(although that was after a run and before dinner so I'd actually place my weight at ~203 right now). I'm 6'3". What follows is anecdotal opinion based upon my own inherently flawed perception and interpretation of said weight loss. Even if my experiences/difficulties are representative of societies as a whole, the nature of self-analysis over a long period of time is such that any conclusions I draw here should be taken with some degree of skepticism. The three most difficult aspects of weight loss for me were: a.) Accepting that there wasn't a quick fix. b.) Accepting that I'm not rational. c.) Accepting that it was my own actions that got me to this point. (and, to some degree, forgiving myself) I ate ~600 calories a day from November 2013 - June 2014. From June 2014 - Now I've been eating ~1600 calories a day. Before that I had attempted(among a myriad of other things) eating nothing(hhehehe) with the full intention of starving myself until I had reached a healthy weight range. In retrospect, it seems entirely illogical, so many of my decisions in that time period did. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to accept that the starvation-relapse cycle was likely doing more harm than good. Similarly, the acceptance that one day of too-intense exercise wasn't worth the following 3-day recovery/justification period of inactivity. It's better to intake a sustainable amount of calories and to partake in a sustainable amount of exercise. With this realized(and a plan-of-action of some sort in place), the largest difficulty for me was irrationality. I found fighting it with logic, reasoning, and fact was the solution. Weighing myself regularly was hugely important. It was interesting to see how transient my interpretation of my own self-image was; having a record of my actual weight made it much easier to overcome any unjustified self-loathing. I had bad days, relapses, especially towards the beginning. I _strongly_ believe that weight gain, much like depression, is a vicious self-feeding cycle. Weight-loss/fitness is a self-feeding cycle as well, the difference being that eating _will_ provide you immediate satisfaction, whereas the benefits reaped from exercise/diet need to be manufactured in your own head. With regards to exercise, I started with running one mile a day, eventually two/three(and so on), I would take several day breaks in between at the beginning; as of now, the last time I ran less than six miles was over a week ago. I also started lifting back in June when I increased my caloric intake. I'm definitely interested to see how I handle maintaining my weight once I reach my target of ~185. The differences in energy/mood/confidence are amazing, highly recommended my fellow humans :)
qthrul 12y ago
If the lab animals were getting "fatter" decade over decade then I have to wonder if the lab animals were living in lab environments that were increasingly air conditioned or steady state temperatures decade over decade as well. Seeking out some kind of mystery trace compound seems like an invitation to overlook more basic environmental factors like the living conditions.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
One recent model estimated that eating a mere 30 calories a day more than you use is enough to lead to serious weight gain. The article here is being a bit misleading. The calories in/calories out model says that if you add 30 calories/day to your diet, you will get a little fatter and stop. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html If you actually experience serious weight gain, it's because you first added 30 calories/day to your diet, then added 30 more, and continued for a long time. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/inanity_of_overeating.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/inanity_of_overeating... This is nonsense that Gary Taubes was pushing a few years back - it's sad to see that it's become a mainstream meme, particularly when simple arithmetic shows it's misleading. The article goes further off the rails: Why, if body weight is a matter of individual decisions about what to eat, should it be affected by differences in wealth or by relations between the sexes? Clearly, a woman living in India will make the exact same choices as a woman in Sweden - her environment will never lead to different choices. This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. I do it regularly. About 7 months ago I was finishing up a bulk - I weighed 240lb, and added an extra 45lb for chinups. After my cut I was 196 and rocking a 6 pack. I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  > This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. This isn't necessarily true. Everyone is different. Extreme ectomorphs, for instance, can have a very difficult time gaining weight, even with professional assistance and much effort. > I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control. It's also called unhealthy. Bulking and cutting may be appropriate for competitive bodybuilders, but repeatedly gaining significant amounts of weight and then cutting to body fat percentages not much above essential levels is almost certainly no better a model for overall health and wellness than a lifestyle that results in obesity.
- aianus 12y ago
  > This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. Fat people have it easy, they only have to deal with the discomfort of eating too little. Gaining weight is on a whole different level. I can try to play through the pain and eat more when I'm already full but it doesn't do me any good if I throw it back up or have diarrhea. Both of which happen frequently as soon as I start trying to bulk.
jqm 12y ago
I can't imagine being overweight. But I don't consider this some sort of virtue. I think I just don't have the appetite some people do. Sometimes I get tired and worn out and then consciously realize it's because I haven't eaten. And this before I actually feel hunger. I assume some people just feel hunger more than others. Maybe this is because I don't eat a lot of junk. Who knows.... but we do vary. Why the epidemic? Maybe junk?

66 points by kevbin 12y ago

GuiA 12y ago

> A restaurant on a warm day whose air conditioning breaks down will see a sharp decline in sales (yes, someone did a study). Ugh, then link to the fucking study! I've spent a few minutes in Google/Google Scholar trying to find said study, to no avail. Would love to see it if someone finds it.

kbaker 12y ago
This is where the article pulls that quote from I believe [1]: > Herman cited a consumer survey suggesting that after an air-conditioning breakdown, restaurant sales drop dramatically. Which refers to this paper [2], it references this survey to support some conclusions in the paper. > This literature has been supplemented by a survey designed specifically for this chapter (consumer survey, University of Toronto, unpublished data, 1991). Because of the anticipation that the scientific literature, especially on humans, might be skimpy, a questionnaire was sent to a number of restaurant and grocery chains in the metropolitan Toronto area asking about shifts in customer purchasing behavior as a function of environmental heat. This survey is by no means scientific, but it reflects the accumulated experience of merchants whose livelihood depends to some extent on accurately assessing how people's food purchases vary with the heat. > More parochially, one Toronto restaurateur (unpublished data from consumer survey, 1991) conceded that "sales plunge during a heat wave .... People do not have the appetite for a large heavy meal when it is hot." So not that much of a study... [1] http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v30/n11/full/0803326a.html#bib45 http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v30/n11/full/0803326a.html... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236229/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236229/

enraged_camel 12y ago

>>It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. As the top commenter points out, this is incredibly misleading. Just because the macronutrient ratios of lab animals has remained the same does not say anything about the contents of what they are being fed. For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference. The fact of the matter is that the companies that are producing the foods that the lab animals eat are under the same market pressures as those producing food for humans: they try to do their best to minimize costs, even if it comes at the expense of the consumers' health. So it isn't at all surprising that lab animals have gotten fatter along with humans. I think as a nation we need to stop chasing overly complicated explanations of the obesity phenomenon and apply Occam's Razor. A ton of people have been able to successfully lose weight by paying attention to what and how much they eat. Go to any bodybuilding forum on the Internet and look at before-and-after photos and read accounts of how the transformation was accomplished. It really, really isn't rocket science. If someone isn't able to lose weight when they eat less, it is much more likely that they are doing something wrong than that there are hidden factors that are preventing their weight loss. (I don't blame them because there is an insane amount of misinformation on the topic these days, partially thanks to "experts" who try to justify their research and employment by sowing doubt and muddying the waters.)

wrl 12y ago
> For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference. Do you have a citation for this? For what it's worth, I avoid soy products in general because of concerns about hormonal effects, but I'm not quite up on the state-of-the-art in terms of the research.
dkural 12y ago
Hey I fully agree with your overall point. If you don't eat more than you need in calories, you won't gain weight. Simple as that. I did have an objection regarding egg protein v.s. soy protein - perhaps you meant impurities etc. If you are feeding them protein, and protein only, you won't notice a difference. Proteins = amino acids. Egg protein is the same thing as soy protein, which is the same thing as "meat" protein.. All of life uses the same set of amino acids, which are made according to the blueprint in genes (i.e. DNA), using essentially the same genetic code. It's literally the same physical thing.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  This is as uninformed as it is vigorously stated. Different foods have different amino acid profiles, meaning that the amount of each amino acid varies, in some cases considerably, from food to food. Some amino acids the body can make itself; others can be gotten only from food. As ever, Wikipedia has a good starting point[0]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
  - judk 12y ago
    Note however that in practice it is very hard to construct a diet (evan a vegan diet) lacking in essential amino acids, unless you use an extreme monoculture such as.... Only corn.
  - dkural 12y ago
    For caloric purposes this makes no difference. Thus - again, soy protein = egg protein. Both will give you energy. Even with fairly low levels of food consumption (i.e. not average american), as long as it is varied, we get all the essential amino acids. Please note that even people on pretty intense weight loss diets don't suffer from "essential amino acid depletion" The bacteria in our gut can synthesize all the amino acids by the way, including essential ones, from pretty much any source of nutrients.

nardi 12y ago

That is an amazing title. Bravo.

steakejjs 12y ago

Obesity is a great example of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure. Having been overweight and borderline obese I have a certain mindset that my level of fitness is achievable by anyone who puts in the effort. I firmly believe this. There is a load of research supporting this, that a calorie is a calorie, and I suspect it will stay that way...

deleted 12y ago
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ericb 12y ago
Yes, and anyone should be able to hold their breath for 3 minutes. Oh wait, that's hard? Is it possible there is a strong biological drive that makes it difficult? So does that mean these drives affect our behavior? Imagine there was a similar drive for food. Let's call it "hunger." If such a drive existed, it is conceivable it would vary from person to person, and things would be more complicated than "a calorie is a calorie" because there's this whole strong drive drive influencing things. What if other factors could mess with the strength of this drive? Thank goodness this is all hypothetical, otherwise "a calorie is a calorie" might be just a meaningless platitude.
- judk 12y ago
  Your analogy and message would be more pleasant if you didn't wrap it in the confusing and unfriendly sarcasm.
  - ericb 12y ago
    A fair point. I have tried putting this in friendlier terms at times, but my perception is that most people who hold the reductionist view want fatness to be a morality tale where bad things happen to people who deserved it. That notion offends me, and it seems far-fetched since this is happening in animals, too. That or someone is generalizing from their n of one anecdote to all people. Even worse, I feel like this platitude is used as an excuse to stop thinking. The least interesting part of this whole thing is the thermodynamics--to the point of being so uninteresting that I can't believe it gets talked about. How about why are people eating more? Do some foods satiate hunger better? Why is the problem accelerating over time? What is causing animals to weigh more--has their willpower diminished? A calorie is a calorie misses the point so thoroughly it infuriates me. Apologies for the tone.

greglindahl 12y ago

It would be nice if articles like this didn't attack a strawman: Most people who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness.

Afforess 12y ago
I disagree. Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people. This is not helped by the rather silly trend of the fat-is-beautiful group, which only encourages the opposite fat-shaming groups.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people. "Most people who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity" and "the loudest voices on the internet forums Afforess frequents who think that eating less and exercising more can help obesity" are not the same groups of people.
ericb 12y ago
> Most ... don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness Can you support this claim? I think "most" still may think that and would be interested to see data.
jostmey 12y ago
The article takes a simplified theory about obesity based on caloric intake and thermodynamics and pokes holes in it. But of course there are holes, it is a simplification!

WBrentWilliams 12y ago

First, a snark admission. I read the article and the comments concurrently. I was not disappointed in how quickly the reductionists came out to defend their favorite theory of caloric thermodynamics. That said, I will provide an personal anecdote for your perusal and make one suggestion. First, the anecdote: I dropped from a weight of 205 - 210 pounds to a weight of 145 pounds over the course of three years. I am back up to 155 pounds. Yes, that last detail is important to my story. I am 5-foot-8-inches, so this is a radical change of BMI. Why did I lose so much weight? A radical change in diet. I have a medical condition for which I was trying to avoid the most expensive treatments. I moved (not overnight) to a diet that removed virtually all grain-based and tuber-based carbohydrates. My carbohydrates came from fruits and leafy vegetables. No, I do not advise this diet for anyone unless they are trying to avoid the drugs that comes with my condition. It worked. I went off the over-priced 1890's-era anti-inflammatory medication and stayed it for three years. Then, my symptoms returned. New doctor, who said nothing about my diet and threw steroids and more anti-inflammatory meds at me. Those did not work. I lost even more weight, down to 135 pounds. I even went off my diet. Yes, it was good to eat bread, potatoes, and rice again. Finally, I gave in and accepted that I would be on a ludicrously priced biological. Symptoms arrested. Now, back to my old diet. I have ten pounds to lose to get to my target weight. What I am suggesting is that reductionism works. My diet notebooks shows a slight reduction in calories by removing grain-and-tuber carbs. However, it only takes you so far. There is room for wholism and seeking an understanding of exactly how a given source of nutrients is metabolized.

frio 12y ago
If you don't mind my asking -- what is your condition? I've got Ulcerative Colitis, and tried a similar diet (the Specific Carbohydrate Diet) to reasonable success. I've also had a few rounds of Infliximab (Remicade), which has helped me reach remission.
- WBrentWilliams 12y ago
  You quite correctly diagnosed my ailment and diet. I wasn't (and still am not) wild about being on Infliximab, but it's better than the alternative. I'm also quite thankful for my University position and the very good insurance that comes with it.

ghouse 12y ago

Perhaps the US tax code should stop subsidizing corn syrup and other processed food inputs. As it is now, the tax payers pay twice -- once for the subsidy, and then again for healthcare.

alecco 12y ago
Indeed. Also, why not do the same that worked before with big tobacco? Ban soft drink sport sponsorships. Ban advertisement of high sugar/hfcs foods to children. Add surgeon general notes to junk foods. Health consequences are paid by the rest of society, in one way or another. Nurses say hospitals are filled with obese patients. It's getting out of control.
- jaggederest 12y ago
  Or just add a calorie tax. That would pretty effectively do the trick. Would negligibly affect the cost of low-calorie-density food, but boy that soda and/or butter becomes expensive.
  - cpr 12y ago
    Real butter is quite healthy in moderation. And already expensive enough!
  - mendort 12y ago
    That'd be great way to establish a regressive tax. Luxury foods don't have more calories than cheap ones so as a percentage of cost cheap food prices would increase more. Not to mention that percentage of income spent on food for low income people is much higher than % of income spent on food by rich people.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - humanrebar 12y ago
      Then add: a more aggressive earned income tax, a more generous child tax credit, or a guaranteed minimum income (or some kind of hybrid plan). If the problem is that some people can't afford things, attack that problem directly. Legally guaranteeing that parents can put their 26-year-olds on their family healthcare plan is also regressive (it doesn't help uninsured families), but that didn't stop it from being enacted.

alecco 12y ago

I'm a skeptic. But this article rings way too much like what the tobacco industry published back in the 50s and 60s. And what climate change deniers published more openly in recent times. Ask any dietician, in particular pediatrics. Ask any obesity researcher. They are super clear on what's going on with the current obesity epidemic. And they squarely blame soft drinks and processed foods with their multibillion dollar advertising budgets. Confusion and distraction. That's what trillion-dollar industries do when they are cornered. Remember, many contrarian science authors were later exposed as shills. Like Malcolm Gladwell. Also, it might not be a matter of influence. Contrarian articles get a lot more viewers by people in denial, guilt-shifting and all. So, I'm very skeptical to this skeptical piece. But it's worth reading.

WBrentWilliams 12y ago
You are quite correct to be skeptical. See my reply below. That said, a single pattern noticed is only correlation. It is far better to ask three questions: What do we know? How do we know it? What does the shape of what we don't know look like? Hence my call for a match on the wholism side to the reductionist methods on weight management.
Pxtl 12y ago
I work in public health research and the blame on soft-drinks is not unanimous. Soft drinks are pointed-at because they're the simplest target. Dropping soft-drinks is not a life-shatteringly hard change to make, and it's effective. But at the same time, other things are being assessed for their contribution. Suburban sprawl, the dual-income household, and the rise of more sedentary hobbies are all being examined. Now, soft drinks are still a cause for the modern obesity epidemic, just not the cause. There are many other shifts in modern lifestyles that are also contributing. edit: clarification. Also, caveat: I'm IT in public health, not a researcher.
- AJ007 12y ago
  Anything that spikes blood sugar is going to cause problems because the individual is stuck riding a sugar high and attempting to prevent or get out of the following crash. This is a daily, hour to hour struggle. Describing it as anything less would be a disservice. Trying to not eat after a blood sugar crash is as difficult as a male with peak testosterone passing up sex. Dropping soft drinks, if you substitute with water/tea/coffee, will be a life altering change. I did it, dropped 10 pounds within a month, never gained it back, (already fairly thin at that point) and stopped getting cavities. Over the following years it made it so much easier to convert my diet from pizza/frozen foods to fresh vegetables and unprocessed meat. I drink minimal alcohol, but for those individuals who drink heavily giving up soft drinks may not prove to have much or any impact. There are food products that should be consumed rarely -- holidays, and humans are consuming them every day. The behavior goes from every day to perhaps 50% of the food consumed is stuff that any registered dietician will say isn't very healthy for you. Just sit in a grocery store and watch what morbidly obese people purchase verse someone who is thin and fit (and not a drug addict.) Night and day. The science has come a really long way since I was a child in only the 1990s. We believed the only healthy diets were extremely low fat. Get rid of fat whenever possible, exercise, and you will be very healthy. No on credible believes that anymore. The problem now is largely behavior modification methods. Perhaps a success with behavior modification will trigger challenges pivoting the US food supply off corn/soy/wheat production but that is solvable.

sheepmullet 12y ago

The real issue is nobody wants the slow and steady option. If you are overweight you can lose a pound/month with only a few minor changes to your diet. You won't feel any more hungry than you usually do. You won't feel a lack of energy or ability to think. But a person who is 60 pounds overweight won't do this because it will take 5 years to lose the weight. Instead they will jump from one diet to the next to the next binge to the even stricter diet and in 5 years be no better off than when they started.

silencio 12y ago
It's frustrating. You get a LOT of fat shaming, you get discouraged at a slow pace, you don't see the firsthand/obvious benefits for a long time. I've lost ~30lbs since February, which is around one pound a _week_. I still can't tell the difference. The only thing that's changing is the number on the scale every week. Still the same clothes, the same fat arms, the same belly fat. Just a little more fit because I've been doing more exercise. And because I'm female, I get the additional hassle of being assumed I'm pregnant when I'm not, and clothes are hard to fit (and I can't even look at plus sized clothes most days... too big for me, what). I aim to lose another 50lbs or so (the low end of normal weight) in the next couple years and I need to maintain the diet/exercise I'm doing now in general, but I only do this because I need to be in good shape for trying for kids in the future and for myself/my spouse. Can't think about any other objective because I will fail miserably if I do. I don't see myself ever fitting into my little black dress, or avoiding fat shaming from random strangers... not even walking around with a huge grin on my face for crossing the 30lb mark at a weighing at the doctor's office counteracts how terrible shaming feels. :(
glenra 12y ago
People who have been fat and then lost weight have a different metabolism than people who stayed at the same lower weight throughout. Most people who lose a significant amount of weight gain it all back and then some within three years. Your theory that losing slower would be more sustainable than losing faster is interesting, but do you have any actual evidence for it? If calories in/calories out were all there was to it, shouldn't it take no willpower to merely stay at the lower weight once achieved, regardless of how quickly that loss were achieved? As for me, I think the real issue is that we still really have no idea why people have collectively gotten fatter and thus have no advice to give that consistently works to completely reverse that process. What we have are guesses as to what might work. And most of these guesses are wrong.

kauffj 12y ago

The fact that animals have experienced significant weight gain is by far the best evidence the author provides to support a factor exogenous to the calories-in-calories-out model. What are the leading explanations for this phenomenon?

michaelochurch 12y ago
I can't answer your question, because I don't know (the OP covers the leading explanations, as far as I know) but... calories-in/calories-out is technically correct, but there are some complexities. Calories in: calorie counts are guesswork. For the healthier foods, there's even more uncertainty about calories. You know exactly what you're getting with Coke, but you shouldn't be drinking much of that if you're trying to lose weight. If you eat an apple instead, you're talking about 10 to 20% variation each way in calorie count. Finally, there are individual variations based on the microbes in our gut, and how we absorb nutrients. Calories out: people vary in basal metabolic rate (BMR) and we don't always know why. Even if we could get a good idea of how many calories we were taking in each day, and we can't, most of us have no idea of what we're burning. There are ways to tip the scale (build more muscle, spend more time in cold temperatures, and, obviously, be more active) but it's impossible to know, in general, how many calories you burned in a day. Given that an error of 50 calories per day is 5 pounds gained per year, precise calorie counting isn't possible. It's largely a problem with two factors: 1. Individual metabolic variation. People with shitty metabolisms are going to get fat if they eat restaurant meals portioned for 24-year-olds. For 40-50% of the population, eating portions that the median person can is going to lead to fatness. 2. Silent failure. The body punishes calorie errors on the negative side (hunger) or even tries to adapt (low energy, starvation mode) in ways that are counterproductive in modern times. It doesn't punish, in any immediate way, positive calorie errors.
- eru 12y ago
  > Given that an error of 50 calories per day is 5 pounds gained per year, [...] As people get fatter, they need more food just to stay the same. So if I took my exact current caloric needs to stay the same weight at my level of activity, and added eg a constant 500 kCal each day, I would not in fact gain kg after kg year in year out. But rather, my weight curve would look like the charge/time curve when loading up a capacitor.

michaelochurch 12y ago

What's amazing to me, and a bit shameful, is that we haven't figured out a safe way to speed up the body's metabolism to the rate of a 95th-percentile 17-year-old. That's a level that we know is safe. (Obviously, if you increased the metabolism too far, you'd run into issues with heat stroke and malnourishment.) I'm astonished that we haven't found a treatment that can let everyone have that. I think that obesity is maybe 10 to 20% personal fault. Some people overeat, or eat stupidly, and I've seen that. However, I think that socioeconomic forces (and food supply issues, and I wouldn't be surprised if ambient toxins were involved) produce most of the remainder. There are a lot of people who eat reasonably, exercise as much as they reasonably can given their work commitments, and are still fat. We're not supposed to live in the psychological monoculture of modern work, or to have inflexible 8- to 12-hour commitments on the majority of our days. Inactivity and low energy levels (a consequence of living amid hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations in which almost everyone's a subordinate) do a lot of damage. The trans fats and high fructose corn syrup aren't doing people any favors.

tokenadult 12y ago

The article notes a fact that so far hasn't come up in the discussion here: "For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years." This is a good corrective to many theories about obesity, because cross-national comparisons will show that people can become obese on a variety of diets, and not all countries that have rising rates of obesity have the mix of foodstuffs as the United States. I saw the submission and the first few comments before I cooked a home-cooked meal for my sons. (My wife is coming home from a soccer tournament trip with our daughter, so it is definitely my turn to cook this evening.) A book recommended in an earlier thread by a Hacker News participant, The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work,[1] intrigued me enough when it was recommended here that I checked it out of my public library and read it cover to cover. The book is sensible and based on both scientific research and the author's own experience as someone who likes to eat a lot. The advice in the book boils down in large part to 1) do your own cooking, 2) know that your diet will fail every time you eat out, and 3) keep a food diary if you really want to be aware of what you eat. I do number 1 almost all the time. By the official designations on the United States federal government body-mass index website,[2] my current body mass index classifies as "overweight," but that is the optimal weight range for a middle-aged adult, epidemiologically, for longer lifespan. But correlations found in observational studies do not prove causation, and I might not be any worse off if I lost a bit of weight to come down to the "normal" weight range I was in during most of early adulthood. Until I was in my late twenties (that is, until after I got married), was thin--no, make that gaunt--because I did all my own cooking and I tried to spend as little as possible on food. I wonder how much my experience is different from that of other people I see commenting here on Hacker News because of age--I am a generation older than most participants here--and how much is different because of birth cohort--just about everyone I knew when I was growing up was slim. All around the developed world, Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising.[4] But obesity (overweight that is more excessive than just being "overweight") is still increasing in all those countries, and indeed in nearly all countries of the world. Animal experimental models are pretty convincing about obsesity-as-such causing many kinds of illness and early mortality, and it will be an interesting question to see if obesity trends outrun the other trends that are improving healthy lifespan for most people in most places at all ages. The article reminds us of the astonishing fact that this trend even cuts across species, as long as the species are in the care of current human beings: "Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. 'Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,' he told me." Exhorting lab animals to exercise more is of course not likely to help them much. After the author reviews a number of hypotheses about obesity and possible causes for obesity rates rising, most of which we have discussed before here on HN, the summary paragraph makes an important point: "No one has claimed, or should claim, that any of these 'roads less taken' is the one true cause of obesity, to drive out the false idol of individual choice. Neither should we imagine that the existence of alternative theories means that governments can stop trying to forestall a major public-health menace. These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word. It might be that every one of the 'roads less travelled' contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn't a simple school physics experiment." In other words, we still have to do a lot of research, and as I noted as I began my comment, maybe different countries have different obsesity problems with different causes. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Fix-Diets-Yours/dp/0804137579 http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Fix-Diets-Yours/dp/0804137579 [2] http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmicalc.htm http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmic... [3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-obesity-paradox/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-obesity-paradox/ [4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

ZoF 12y ago

I was 293 pounds as of last November, 199.6 as of last night(although that was after a run and before dinner so I'd actually place my weight at ~203 right now). I'm 6'3". What follows is anecdotal opinion based upon my own inherently flawed perception and interpretation of said weight loss. Even if my experiences/difficulties are representative of societies as a whole, the nature of self-analysis over a long period of time is such that any conclusions I draw here should be taken with some degree of skepticism. The three most difficult aspects of weight loss for me were: a.) Accepting that there wasn't a quick fix. b.) Accepting that I'm not rational. c.) Accepting that it was my own actions that got me to this point. (and, to some degree, forgiving myself) I ate ~600 calories a day from November 2013 - June 2014. From June 2014 - Now I've been eating ~1600 calories a day. Before that I had attempted(among a myriad of other things) eating nothing(hhehehe) with the full intention of starving myself until I had reached a healthy weight range. In retrospect, it seems entirely illogical, so many of my decisions in that time period did. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to accept that the starvation-relapse cycle was likely doing more harm than good. Similarly, the acceptance that one day of too-intense exercise wasn't worth the following 3-day recovery/justification period of inactivity. It's better to intake a sustainable amount of calories and to partake in a sustainable amount of exercise. With this realized(and a plan-of-action of some sort in place), the largest difficulty for me was irrationality. I found fighting it with logic, reasoning, and fact was the solution. Weighing myself regularly was hugely important. It was interesting to see how transient my interpretation of my own self-image was; having a record of my actual weight made it much easier to overcome any unjustified self-loathing. I had bad days, relapses, especially towards the beginning. I _strongly_ believe that weight gain, much like depression, is a vicious self-feeding cycle. Weight-loss/fitness is a self-feeding cycle as well, the difference being that eating _will_ provide you immediate satisfaction, whereas the benefits reaped from exercise/diet need to be manufactured in your own head. With regards to exercise, I started with running one mile a day, eventually two/three(and so on), I would take several day breaks in between at the beginning; as of now, the last time I ran less than six miles was over a week ago. I also started lifting back in June when I increased my caloric intake. I'm definitely interested to see how I handle maintaining my weight once I reach my target of ~185. The differences in energy/mood/confidence are amazing, highly recommended my fellow humans :)

qthrul 12y ago

If the lab animals were getting "fatter" decade over decade then I have to wonder if the lab animals were living in lab environments that were increasingly air conditioned or steady state temperatures decade over decade as well. Seeking out some kind of mystery trace compound seems like an invitation to overlook more basic environmental factors like the living conditions.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

One recent model estimated that eating a mere 30 calories a day more than you use is enough to lead to serious weight gain. The article here is being a bit misleading. The calories in/calories out model says that if you add 30 calories/day to your diet, you will get a little fatter and stop. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html If you actually experience serious weight gain, it's because you first added 30 calories/day to your diet, then added 30 more, and continued for a long time. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/inanity_of_overeating.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/inanity_of_overeating... This is nonsense that Gary Taubes was pushing a few years back - it's sad to see that it's become a mainstream meme, particularly when simple arithmetic shows it's misleading. The article goes further off the rails: Why, if body weight is a matter of individual decisions about what to eat, should it be affected by differences in wealth or by relations between the sexes? Clearly, a woman living in India will make the exact same choices as a woman in Sweden - her environment will never lead to different choices. This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. I do it regularly. About 7 months ago I was finishing up a bulk - I weighed 240lb, and added an extra 45lb for chinups. After my cut I was 196 and rocking a 6 pack. I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. This isn't necessarily true. Everyone is different. Extreme ectomorphs, for instance, can have a very difficult time gaining weight, even with professional assistance and much effort. > I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control. It's also called unhealthy. Bulking and cutting may be appropriate for competitive bodybuilders, but repeatedly gaining significant amounts of weight and then cutting to body fat percentages not much above essential levels is almost certainly no better a model for overall health and wellness than a lifestyle that results in obesity.
aianus 12y ago
> This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. Fat people have it easy, they only have to deal with the discomfort of eating too little. Gaining weight is on a whole different level. I can try to play through the pain and eat more when I'm already full but it doesn't do me any good if I throw it back up or have diarrhea. Both of which happen frequently as soon as I start trying to bulk.

jqm 12y ago

I can't imagine being overweight. But I don't consider this some sort of virtue. I think I just don't have the appetite some people do. Sometimes I get tired and worn out and then consciously realize it's because I haven't eaten. And this before I actually feel hunger. I assume some people just feel hunger more than others. Maybe this is because I don't eat a lot of junk. Who knows.... but we do vary. Why the epidemic? Maybe junk?