There was a recent study that found that total energy expenditure has decreased since the 1990s due to a reduction in the basal metabolic rate. A 7.7% reduction (220 kcal) of the total energy expenditure for males might not seem like a lot, but it is. If you weighed 75 kg you would need about 2100 kcal to maintain your weight. If you started eating 2320 kcal instead then eventually you would weight about 93 kg.
We're somehow doing worse than an era where smoking was the norm and cola contained cocaine.
Meanwhile there is a maze of contradictory claims about what one should do/avoid.
...hard to know who/what to trust. I'm at the stage where I'm all fk it I'll just yolo this based on intuition even though I have no credible nutritional knowledge. Said intuition currently says ultra processed foods are the issue. So I cook more stuff from scratch...if I'm wrong it'll be fine
> Obesity is foremost an emotional problem, and typically needs to be addressed as such.
I think your theory here is too stuck on what is termed “morbidly” obese, rather than the wider population being discussed.
Being obese is now fairly normal in many countries, particularly the US, to the point that many people don’t even think of themselves/others who are obese that way, until they consult a bmi chart or go to their doctor.
Being overweight or obese is the default condition in America, and you have to actively design your lifestyle and habits in order to not fall in that category. It is an uphill battle the whole time, and has little to do with emotional issues, at least not specifically.
That’s a great point that there are general social factors that favor weight gain. Absolutely, no question.
In the past, it might’ve been easier for this aspect of one’s health to go on “autopilot”. And now, you’re right: you do need to be actively mindful of your lifestyle and choices in order to manage your weight.
OK, good luck designing your habits in a car-centric high-anxiety status-chasing rat race. Oh, sorry, I brought up emotions. But wait, you are using this to feel superior to all those weak-minded fat people. I hate to break it to you, but that is also an emotion.
Uh what? My comment was saying that it’s a societal problem that individuals have to fight an uphill battle against, not an individual emotional problem or failure.
Don’t be an asshole. I’m not “looking down on people” or being “morally superior”. I am personally someone who has trouble with my weight and have personal experience with the fact that the deck is stacked against me.
I don’t have an “emotional problem” things literally just creeped up on me from a lack of time to cook and an office job that led me to being sedentary.
My point was that unless you are consciously thinking about it you will end up like the default of everyone else, because our environment is always nudging us in one direction. In the past this wasn’t the case, we were more active in our jobs and built environments, and had very different foods, you didnt have to actively fight against your environment.
So anyone who has a weight problem hasn't thought about it? What about the people who yo-yo diet, or struggle to lose weight at all? Are they also unconscious?
I see you’re dead set on arguing for the sake of arguing, so I’ll just leave it at this: anyone who has a weight problem on modern America is fighting an uphill battle with their environment, regardless of their personal capacity emotional regulation.
I think it’s definitely possible that the basket of emotions we _experience_ in our lifetime is substantially different now than 50 years ago.
It’s a difficult thing to ever really quantize, but I’m comfortable with the notion that different experiences lead us to different behaviors. How much that broad phenomenon can explain the rise of obesity worldwide I do not know.
Well, suicides in people below age 21 doubled in the last two decased, at least in US. So emotions might change. Although nobody says that emotions changed without a reason.
I would say two other big factors are easier access to junk food, as well as more people adopting a sedentary lifestyle.
To the second point, a lot of people from my culture still eat the same portions of food that their ancestors did, while living in a very different lifestyle in the present day. Eating a whole plate of rice as part of a meal is necessary if you're a laborer who's farming or fishing all day, but you'll pack on weight if you eat the same diet as an office worker.
I believe you’ll find that mental health diagnoses have also increased during the same period. But anyway, you’re talking about an epidemiological question and my comment was on the individual level.
Yes, I do. When an individual has a problem that requires treatment, a physician or other provider doesn’t consult broad theories on general population trends. They instead look to what evidence-based interventions have shown success with individuals who received those interventions.
Those Physicians have failed so why are you holding them in such high regard? We have the most sophisticated technology and advances in drugs, but in the United States lifespan has dropped to the lowest point since 1996.
Maybe the parent is right and we have a mental health crisis, one the medical establishment has failed to cure. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the obesity crisis is rooted in a social problem. Maybe the cure for obesity is a stable family, friends and some fresh air, and modern society with its endless drugs and medical science has failed them.
I've never had a physician diagnose a physical issue as "emotional".
Also, aside from the last two items (the last one being the most questionable inclusion), your healthy lifestyle list, while not technically wrong, has nothing specifically to do with emotions.
You may not have personally, nonetheless when M.D. physicians refer patients for a pysch eval they're suggesting an issue can't be fixed with a splint or antibiotics.
Maybe there's an underlying chemical imbalance, perhaps not; they typically leave that to those that specialized in psychiatry; physicians that completed not just a medical degree but also a degree in clinical psychiatry.
This is irrelevant to your implication that physicians never diagnose a physical issue as "emotional" merely because you've never observed such a thing.
You've got one thing right. Over a billion people are now obese, a rate that has skyrocketed over the past 30 years. Whether physicians ever refer people for psych evaluations is irrelevant. My point is simple: I don't think it's plausible that the obesity epidemic is an "emotional problem". Beyond that, we've just fallen into sniping in a pointless way, which I have no wish to continue.
The thing about physicians is, if global amoral food conglomerates are targeting young people with unhealthy products, for example, there's little or nothing an individual physician can do about that. They can offer advice to an individual patient, but they can't really treat a societal problem. So if you're looking at it only from the perspective of an individual physician, you're missing the forest for the trees.
It would be like looking at cigarette smoking as an "emotional problem" while completely ignoring the role of the cigarette manufacturers in producing, marketing, and selling a product that they know is both addictive and deadly. Of course your physician would say don't smoke. (Ironically, some physicians smoke too.) It's no mystery that smoking is unhealthy. But it would be absurd to refer a smoker for a psych evaluation as if they were mentally ill. That's not the reason people are smoking.
> your healthy lifestyle list, while not technically wrong, has nothing specifically to do with emotions
That was actually the point, though I didn’t state it well. The point is that most people know what a healthy lifestyle entails, and what’s standing between them and that lifestyle is feelings.
It is because the world got that much wealthier. When you get wealthy you start eating like a king and not a starving peasant.
GDP per capita in China in 1990 was $320 A YEAR.
GDP per capita in India in 1990 was $360 A YEAR.
Then you get people posting on the internet about how bad things are economically, on a device that costs 5 years of labor of the average Chinese person in 1990. As if the modern world is just a given and has always been this way.
> A better way of framing this is that the vast majority of people care about themselves and their health.
This care/don't-care interpretation seems like a strange takeaway from reading, "Obesity rates among children and adolescents worldwide increased four times from 1990 to 2022."
> There's about the same number if not slightly more regular smokers.
Don't most regular smokers also start when they're young?
Depending on how they measure obesity, this 1B number may be greatly overinflated. One very popular measurement is BMI which only considers height and mass, and does not consider other factors like fat vs. muscle mass, body water, etc.
For example, using BMI I am considered “obese” but I have a very high muscle mass and fairly low fat percentage (17%). So am I one of these billion people?
This kind of sudden (in biological terms) shift comes from a changed environment.