That’s a pretty good article. UPFs, HFCS/cheap sugar, fast food all seem like valid causes. Companies make delicious products that are addictive, and they find ways to make them sit on a shelf for a year without going bad.
I assume there is also a tie in to the glycemic index of various foods. I know whenever I have something with a high GI, I crave more of it. If I didn’t have access to lower GI options, I would always be hungry, eat more junk, and feed into the cycle. Would adding the GI of foods to labels help?
People need to understand the index and what it means, but this could dumbed down into something easy to understand. I think the food industry would lobby hard against it along with retailers like DG and Walmart and promote a bunch of misinformation about it. 50 years of research has gone in to the stuff we find on the shelves today, and this would instantly show up as a bad mark against all of them.
I’d be interested in rates after adjusting for demographics-- age, gender, race, sts, and then urban vs rural. None of it is exactly even.
But also all of it is increasing steadily, so I don’t think it quite makes sense to point at rural areas as though urban areas are just fine.
Likewise, I don’t think we can really focus on the US. Obesity is rising steadily everywhere in the world. It basically just started happening in the US sooner.
Probably because we started producing addictive fattening foods-- soda, french-fries, twinkies, cakes, etc. sooner than other nations? I don’t know.
And we’ve been on some kind of trend line ever since those foods have become ubiquitous.
I have no idea about GI, I guess you’d need to look it up.
I don’t think there’s much to be said for education until we have a solid idea of what constitutes a good diet.
And even then, it’s not like most people have the willpower to follow any diet forever.
This is the biggest issue.
I have a book from the early 2000’s that discusses the G.I. Had a chart and everything.
Short version is that the more processed the food, the higher the G.I. Even things like an orange versus orange juice are different. One has more fiber. It was a book about weightlifting AND changing diet to lose fat, and it really zeroed in on dumping high G.I. products.
I agree it is a problem everywhere. The same shitty food is available everywhere. The healthier options are the one that exist closer to cities and money. Discussing rural vs Urban is more an opportunity to create stronger links to the underlying problem.
I dont think willpower to diet is the issue when food itself is broken. Calories turn into energy or weight and we are taught that all calories are equal from the perspective. How do we change the narrative so we can understand the link between food we eat and how we feel?
I started paying attention to GI around the same time. I stopped eating a lot of certain fruits, especially different types of melon, bananas and mangos and sought out berries and grapefruit. I didn’t eat potatoes for a long time but have recently reintroduced them in moderation because there are a lot of nutrients in them. Most cereals are bad, but not oatmeal. Any sort of juice is verboten (except pickle juice!).
This is a huge problem in the US. If you compare similar products in Europe vs US, the US ones always have added sugar (usually via HCFS).
Over 30 years, that type of difference when you over-consume food leads to increases in type II diabetes and obesity (which is what we have seen in the US vs Europe)
I think the real problem I am trying to articulate (and doing poorly) is an understanding of how important that food quality matters when we think about it in terms of obesity and related diseases. We think of these decisions are simple choices in the food we eat, but when you end end up picking the low quality food regularly, you get pulled into a long term cycle where you crave those foods more, consume more of them since they are cheap and available, which creates a dependency on them.
It’s a weaker addiction than alcohol or tobacco - it doesn’t create the same measurable markers of addiction, but there are studies that show the brain rewarding consumption of certain foods in similar ways.
How is activity defined? For me, 1000 steps translates into about 50 calories burned, and there are days on the weekend when I am just busy around the house and pile on an extra 5000 steps throughout the day without really thinking about it.
That’s 10% in daily calories, and if I stopped doing that because of video games or computers, I will certainly gain weight until I hit a higher equilibrium, which is going to be about a 10% increase.
So I can see how activity levels could translate into those sorts of differences, but what we are seeing in obesity rates is much higher than can be explained by that.
You are correct there from a physiological standpoint.
From research done on diabetics (type II) its the constant insulin increases due to higher GI food which lead to insulin resistance, and the need to keep eating poorer (high GI) food to stabilise the levels of blood glucose and insulin in the bloodstream. Over decades this leads to damage to the pancreas (the beta cells that release insulin into the bloodstream become damaged and we have no way of fixing them once that happens).
When this is done over decades, changing the behavior that caused that is really, really difficult because not only do you have to get people used to the taste of healthier foods (can be hard), but it also tends to be more expensive initially (as healthier foods are more expensive vs mass commercial ones). Once people make the shift (from poor quality food to healthier food), the costs scale down a bit as you get better at making healthier food (requires cooking knowledge), but making the initial transition is the real difficulty. The majority of people fail at this.
I’ve only read the first page and I’ve got a few major disagreements.
1.) obesity doesn’t just happen with people consuming substantially more calories than they burn. In many cases, it’s a small excess over time that leads to obesity e.g. half an apple or cookie a day more than you need over a year leads to a 5-10 lb weight gain. Times 5 to 10 years is 25 lbs to 100 lbs overweight.
2.) Looking at active jobs over time to say physical activity hasn’t changed that much or that jogging took off in the 1970s glosses over a lot of changes in activity. If you go to a construction site these days, lots of nails are getting hammered in and boards are being cut and stuff is being carried around the construction site, just like the 1970s. On the other hand, they’re using nail guns rather than hammers, power tools rather than hand saws, and things like Bobcats or lift trucks rather than brute force.
I also blame more inactive leisure time. My nephews are 8 and 12 I think, and it takes colossal forces to drag them away from their iPads and video games. When I was their age (god that phrase makes me sound old), I was playing street hockey, building Lego, riding my bike on trails and playing 2 sports through the winter. Fortunately, thus far, both of them are skinny as they both seem to have issues around eating (they are both crazy picky about food and dinners are painfully dragged out). On the other hand, many similar kids do like food, and are quite obese.
Cleaning house is also less active where we’ve got a lot of sprays and appliances that make things easier.
3.) I’m still hesitant on the ultra processed foods being the problem thing. Depending on the definition used, home made stew, spaghetti with meat sauce, fruit pies, and soup are all ultra processed foods and therefore bad for you. Most cultures have been eating similar foods for millenia and the obesity issue didn’t start happening until 40 or 50 years ago. The definition needs to be cleaned up a bit. We need to be able to better separate twizzlers and gummi bears from some of our more traditional desserts. I’m also a bit bothered by the claim that frozen pizza is bad for you but a sandwich is alright. Is focaccia bread with some veggie toppings and a bit of oil and balsamic vinegar “bad” food like pizza?
People were keeping exercise logs and food diaries for the study.
ETA: the study wasn’t trying to explain all of the increase in obesity. It was just finding that for a given amount of calorie consumption and activity, people for the 2000s were heavier than people from the 70s and 80s. From what I read, it didn’t address the overall change in calorie consumption between the two periods.
Obesity happens because people constantly eat 105% of the calories they burn, not eat an extra apple a day. As someone gains wait, their caloric need increases, and they should hit equilibrium if they have a fixed calorie intake. This is why shows like “The Biggest Loser” can have contestants losing a lot of weight (in pounds) in the early weeks, and why it needs to be a % of body weight. Something is leading to a life long imbalance.
I agree we need better definitions for UPFs, but I think it is something that clearly changes in the 70s where UPFs became much more available. Pizza - in moderation nothing is bad, but an average slice of pizza probably has an ounce of cheese on it, a small amount of meat/protein, and very few actual vegetables. Most people will have at least two slices, probably three, so they are consuming a lot more in cheese and refined bread/carbs than a sandwich in order to get a comparable amount of meat/veggies.
Either the calories were different, or the activity was different. The laws of physics did not change.
If all you are measuring is intentional exercise minutes in the logs, you could miss out on a lot of calories burned throughout the day just moving around in increments too small to log.