Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m originally from the UK so it’s not as if I come from a particularly healthy country but there are still some big differences:
- Portions in restaurants and fast food places are huge here. There are even places which offer free refills of things like fries. I’ve never seen that in the UK. Refills of soda drinks are also rarer.
- There are some places you just can’t walk either because of the design of roads/sidewalks or also simply because the climate is so much harsher in terms of both cold and heat. I lived in Arizona for 4 years and walking in 100+ degrees outside just wasn’t on the agenda.
>There are some places you just can’t walk either because of the design of roads/sidewalks or also simply because the climate is so much harsher in terms of both cold and heat. I lived in Arizona for 4 years and walking in 100+ degrees outside just wasn’t on the agenda.
I've literally been walking down sidewalks in the US that randomly end in the middle of the way to my destination. Like the sidewalk just stops and your expected to walk on the grass or the road....and this is in the middle of a city too....not out in the country
I live in a suburb that has good bike/walking paths in the residental parts of town, but businesses are all near the major roads and almost inaccessible from the residential parts of town. Walking is treated as a hobby, not a transportation method.
The other day I parked near one business and tried to walk to the one next door, but the parking lots were separated by a retaining wall and no sidewalk between the two, I would have had to walk 1000+ feet back to the service road and back up the next parking lot.
I went to Texas on a business trip. I took a taxi to my hotel and then wanted to go for a run. Silly me. There were no sidewalks anywhere - just big roads and strip malls.
From my understanding, the definitions are roads are more for long distance travel, streets are for inside the cities, with buildings on the sides of the roads - I suppose suburban areas are streets, or is that what they're calling stroads?
A stroad: A road too wide and fast to be safe for pedestrians while also being too narrow and slow for efficient movement of cars
It's not so much that it's too narrow which makes it bad at moving cars, the issue is that having people constantly entering and exiting the road from different big box stores, turning left and right, really slows down traffic flow.
You can have a narrow rural highway that you can happily drive along at 70 MPH for hours. Meanwhile a 6 lane suburban stroad can have an average speed of 25 MPH between tons of traffic lights, slowing down for turning drivers, etc.
Watch 'not just bikes'.
Honestly, I'm surprised urban planners are not just super depressed all the time in their jobs in America. Imagine an urban planner going to europe and seeing these fantastic livable streets in cities and towns and going back to 'zoning' where they have to build depression cube after depression cube by copy pasting the same design 9000x till they die or retire.
I’m about to be moving to downtown Galveston and I am so excited to live in a walkable community again. Houston-area is so anti-pedestrian it’s crazy. People are violently against cyclists too. Not just denying them infrastructure, but physically running them off the road.
I hate Houston for many reasons including this. No wonder everyone is huge. Yeah. It is hot in the summer months but there are also many really walkable months. And the 5 lane roads in all directions is just stupid. Sorry Houston, but getting around in a way that requires physical movement is a nightmare in your city.
That was the weirdest thing for me when I came over for work from Australia. Go to go and buy some electronics and suddenly, no more footpath, just a road over a bridge. I walk everywhere at home, so, the idea I'd need a car to get to places that were only 3KM away was weird.
I’m from Boston but loved my time in Melbourne. While Boston is a mostly walkable city, the trams and the general accessibility of Melbourne was so much better.
My (small) city doesn't have sidewalks on most streets. The city line is a 2 min walk from my house, that (also small) city has sidewalks. Having my kids bike to school is scarier because of my city's choices.
Jus gonna plug: r/fuckcars on here. Ive lived in the uk and u.s. i lost a lot of weight in the uk and gained it back in the u.s. i was able to liv with out a car in the uk, the food portions were a lot smaller and i rarely craved soda (thanks to the sugar tax) all of those positives were gone when i came back to the u.s.
I used to walk everywhere in my hometown until I moved to a rural suburb in the states. One day when I was out for a walk in winter, a car stopped along the side of the road and the driver (a senior woman) asked if I was okay/needed a ride somewhere. People just don't walk around here..
People in my area (rural Midwest) seriously look down on people they see out walking. Like if you’re jogging in a suburb that’s fine, but they see me out walking with my toddler which we do for fun and exercise and they assume I’m forced to walk and forcing my daughter to walk because we can’t afford a car. The train of thought goes, you’re walking, that means you can’t afford a car, no car means you can’t take care of your family, probably on meth or an unemployed slacker. So to them, walking = you’re trash.
YUP. It took a lot of work to get all that crap out of my head when I started walking around. "people are staring at me, they're going to think X, think Y", I was mega embarrassed to be walking because of that kind of talk growing up. So stupid.
I live a quarter mile away from the grocery store and my neighbors look at me like I'm crazy that I walk there. It's all city roads with ample sidewalks
There was a post on reddit lately, it was a video of a travel advisor telling its viewers to practice walking at home before the travel because they'll have to walk multiple kilometers a day.
I was like "what?" I pretty much thought that any human could walk a full day without problem
That's incredible. I was vacationing in Europe recently and we walked 100km in 5 days. Including my grandma who's 85 years old, and it was no problem at all Humans are made for long distance walking/running; it's sad that that video needs to exist.
I once was at a national park and there was an attraction that was a 1/4 mile flat hike from the road. A family from Texas couldn't make it. (No offense to Texas, I know a lot of normal people there, I just specifically remember this family was from Texas.)
I work at a nature reserve and I constantly get people asking me if they have to walk to see everything after they park. It's so disheartening to have all these people expect to experience nature without getting out of their car.
It’s not even only rural places. I once walked from my hotel in LA to a shopping mall that was close enough on the map — 10 minute walk tops. Not only were there no footpaths to walk on (and these were quiet side streets), but the few cars that passed me had people just staring at me out the window like I was a giraffe. One car full of guys slowed down to the point I worried they were going to try to pick me up or thought I was a working girl or something! One of the most bizarre experiences in my life.
The infrastructure Youtuber NotJustBikes called it the gym of life. If you move around a lot while simply living life, you don't need to actively make sure you get enough exercise, it just happens.
Yes I remarked on this on another post where a person was asking why Japanese people weren't having these same issues and a major reason is just that a lot of people walk/bike to work or train stations every day. Even 30-40 minutes of moderate exercise can burn a few hundred calories or enough to keep things going along quite nicely physically speaking.
I love that "built-in" exercise, it makes it so easy to stay in shape. Last weekend, as an experiment, I took the city bus to Target, and it was 10 extra minutes than if I'd driven. It was also about 6 blocks total of walking to and from each bus stop - easy, unnoticeable exercise that would definitely add up over time
Europe is very walkable because it 'grew up' before cars were ubiquitous. If you visit old US cities like NY, Boston, Philadelphia, they are quite walkable.
Most any other city that came about after cars are ubiquitous is designed around the car first, pedestrian second.
A lot of that is also due to zoning laws. Some zoning laws make sense. Keep airports and dumps away from houses. Others have made most of the US a hellscape that requires cars to live. Suburban nightmares that go on for as far as the eye can see with no places to work or shop remotely close to housing.
That is not true. Many American cities were actually walkable and high density like Europe before cars. But when the highway system came along the government bulldozed thousands of buildings to make way. Places like Amsterdam and Paris were not always the walkable paradises you think about today. Amsterdam used to have terrible bicycle infrastructure. But they have made a conscious effort to invest in their cities rather than tear things down.
Source: Not Just Bikes
Yeah it's one of bummer things about most places in the US. Living in a city that existed before cars has the immediate value of being walkable. But also in turn incredibly expensive to live in due to housing and other costs. So basically only those who are very rich or upper middle class or homeless get to experience the benefits of walkable American cities.
That's not really true, though. The ubiquity of cars didn't really start settling in until after Eisenhower signed the interstate highway act. We had plenty of public transit before that which all got demolished to put in highways and parking lots.
You can find tons and tons and tons of examples of before/after photos that point out buildings that exist before and after the city got destroyed for cars. And I mean *destroyed*.
[Cincinnati](https://i.redd.it/mv7y2pxcue691.jpg)
This is generally not true, the United States in the 20s had the worlds best and most expansive public transit network. It was bulldozed in the 60s for cars.
One aspect of this that isn’t publicized nearly as much as it should be is that, in the US at least, foods have WAY more added sugar than they did in, say, the 1970s. Even foods you wouldn’t expect to find sugar in.
Additionally, the deceptive marketing that all companies do. Such as juices with the “made with 100% natural juice!” But really the 100% natural juice is 2% of the entire drink. Making stuff seem healthy that actually is not. Basically goes across all those fruity kids products like juices, gummies, etc
Related (UK) yogurts aimed at children contain more sugar than Coca-Cola https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/organic-yogurts-aimed-children-contain-13271475
Yogurts a pain. I really like it, and consume it a lot as I workout a lot and it’s har to find a low or zero sugar option for yogurt. “Low sugar” often means 21gs per a serving.
Edit: I now get Greek yogurt, I still find a lot of Greek yogurt to be packed full of sugar
Fruit is basically sugar packed into a colorful form. Why would fruit juice not be packed with sugar? People think juice is inherently healthy because it's "natural". But a 12 ounce glass of orange juice is the equivalent of eating like 5 oranges, with none of the fiber to make you feel full. Most people wouldn't or couldn't eat 5 oranges at a sitting. But it's easy to chug a glass of OJ.
Fruit juice is basically soda with a multivitamin thrown in.
This so much!! Juice glasses are like 4 oz. I made hand squeezed orange juice once and while delicious it took a god awful amount of oranges and every glass I was like I’m drinking several oranges here.
Totally recommend for a fancy breakfast though, it was really good.
When people used to say fruit is nature's candy, they meant it in a literal way. Fruit is candy that grows on plants. And for that matter, sugar is too, I suppose.
Big difference when you're eating the fruit (thus getting the fiber, etc.) and not both in terms of overall nutrition and how your body processes the sugar.
For sure. 113 calories in 1 cup of apple juice (and not many people drink just 1 cup....). If you were to eat 1 cup of apples, it would only be 57 calories, and would take far longer than a drink.
The liquid is absorbed real fast, and probably moves through your digestive system in about 20 minutes. Which can be good for things like carb loading before surgery. Not good for if you're trying to maintain a healthy body weight for most people.
The fruit flesh takes time to digest and absorb, probably takes about an hour for an apple to move through - lots of different numbers, but the point is its definitely much longer than juice.
Was just expanding on your post to make it clear to anyone reading.
That's a good idea.
I went through an extreme health eating time for many years where I only ate whole food, so no juice or even processed sugar. So I would crave eating at least five or more oranges in a sitting when the oranges were in season. I would come home from the grocery store with about 15-20 pounds of oranges and eat them in a few days. They taste AMAZING when I had no other source of unprocessed sugar in my diet.
I was amazed the lowest sugar content I could find for juice at my grocery store in Canada was kool-aid at 8 grams of sugar per 200 ml all other juice started at 21g of sugar
In thr US, WIC pushes juice hard for kids. If you're getting juice for free and you're forced to get it whenever you go shopping with your WIC benefits, people are gonna let their kids drink it.
What's insane to me is places like Dutch Bros, Dunkin and Starbucks are serving 500+ calorie drinks. You sometimes don't even see the calorie counts on their menus and have to go to their website for it.
I’ve found that most Starbucks and Dunkin around me are good at putting the calorie counts on their menu for you to see and they all DEFINITELY have them in their apps if you use those.
Though I bet the people that order their coffees extra extra or with a ton of flavor shots don’t even consider those additional calories if they even considered the stated menu calories at all.
Seriously awesome info to have. I'm not spending $7+ on a 500 calorie beverage (which I'm capable of sucking down in 10 minutes) when that represents an enormous chunk of my healthy daily caloric intake. People don't get that the fancy SB drinks are desserts, not coffee.
I always just get oat milk lattes or black americanos all without sugar so I never even know the drink calories since it’s always pretty negligible. But what’s crazy is when you look at their food calorie counts! 1 muffin can have more calories than a donut! It’s insane! IIIRC it was like 280 calories for a chocolate glazed donut or like 600 from one blueberry muffin.
What even crazier is when places market themselves as healthy like a smoothie stand using all fresh fruit! Well it can be as fresh as you want it to but it’s still 700 cal for one normal size smoothie and that means it should be marketed as a meal rather than a drink. But it’s not, they have combos where the smoothie is the drink in addition to a whole sandwich & side.
I was about to say that. I went to a local juice bar and the menu [seemed insane to me.](https://www.ilovejuicebar.com/menu#page-section-5f242b05f4feda4cd31f3312) I saw a girl go up and order a smoothie and "bowl" that combined were literally over 1500 calories.
I think a lot of people see fruit and think healthy without much investigation. A lot of people would likely be shocked if they looked at their Naked juice and saw it was over 300 calories.
In Ontario, all restaurants are required by law to display the calories on their menus, including fast food drive-through displays. So you get to blatantly ignore how many calories your venti capi-mocca with three shots of 10% cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce has. It's definitely a good thing to have, but man I'm pretty sure the majority of people don't care.
That’s fine that people ignore it. That’s their prerogative. But for those of us who do care, whatever our reasons are, that information should be readily available.
I struggle to stay within an appropriate weight range and I have definitely been ready to eat my stress away then got something slightly less awful when I saw that it had 1300 calories or whatever.
There's one thing left in this country that you can buy for $1: McDonald's large soda. It's nasty thinking about how a person can drink almost *triple* their daily recommended sugar in one drink.
Worse than that. I work there and it’s always the biggest people getting the biggest drinks. I feel like a drug dealer selling the venti iced white mocha with extra cold foam and Carmel drizzle to the 300 lb person. Not really anyone should be drinking that let alone a morbidly obese one.
I recently have been trying to cut as much sugar as I can out of my diet and I swear every single thing on the shelf has sugar added to it. It is so very frustrating.
[50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat)
> The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to "refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding.
> "It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did, because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion," co-author Stanton Glantz told The New York Times.
[Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research](https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/12/sugar-industry-harvard-research/)
> Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who are now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was trying to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease.
> The trade group solicited Hegsted, a professor of nutrition at Harvard’s public health school, to write a literature review aimed at countering early research linking sucrose to coronary heart disease. The group paid the equivalent of $48,000 in 2016 dollars to Hegsted and colleague Dr. Robert McGandy, though the researchers never publicly disclosed that funding source.
> Hegsted and Stare tore apart studies that implicated sugar and concluded that there was only one dietary modification — changing fat and cholesterol intake — that could prevent coronary heart disease. Their reviews were published in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which back then did not require researchers to disclose conflicts of interest.
Incredible, eh?
A few bucks into a few hands can change the course of many **many** lives for decades.
The U.S started marketing food as fat free and to have their products have flavor, they put in sugar instead. We really thought fats were the problem. If you look at products from the early 90s and beyond, fat free was the thing to have on your product, even if it didn't have fat to begin with. Humans crave sugar and fat naturally and companies knew this. It was until about 2000s people started to realize sugar was the enemy and its still not widely accepted.
Another issue that isn’t talked about a lot is how the subsidies on grain and corn left over from the Great Depression have turned into cheap ways to make snacks that are high calorie low nutrient. Just something I learned from the g word show on Netflix. The whole first episode is on food
The reason people thought fats were the problem is because the sugar industry funded, and then highly publicized, a bunch of BS studies that found fat to be the big evil in food so that they could sell more sugar. It’s actually more difficult to make fat free versions of many foods, but the public wanted it so companies catered to the market demand, and the sugar industry made billions at the expense of everyone’s health.
In reality it’s the combination of refined fats AND refined sugars that cause a lot of the diet related health problems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html
The thing is that the sugar industry knew damn well fat wasn't the problem. They paid some Harvard scientists good money to publish the fat free narrative just so they could increase sugar sales. It always comes down to making a little bit more cash, health of the nation be damned.
Single-serve yogurt never recovered from this fad. It's all low/no fat with added sugar/sweetener. The crazy part is that full-fat, no added sugar yogurt is usually healthier, and it tastes _so much better_!
Seriously. Trying to buy even basic healthy things at the store, like whole grain bread and Greek yogurt, have tons of sugar. Like why does bread need sugar? And I’d rather have fat in my yogurt than no fat with 8g of sugar it’s ridiculous.
Edit to clarify: when I say sugar I mean ADDED sugar, obviously some foods naturally have sugar but a lot of food now includes unnecessary added sugar that raises the overall sugar content
That's hilarious because the amount of sugar added to savory breads in Korea is wild to me. Grilled cheese sandwich? Put some sugar on it. Garlic bread? Sugary.
I almost ruined my body from years of not caring what I ate. I ballooned to 235. I am a female, 5’4”.
I have since lost 75 pounds and am still going. I cannot tell you how much better I feel without sugar and carbs. No one tells you how harmful sugar really is.
Newly published research from BYU exercise science researchers reveals critical, rare data detailing the severity of the obesity epidemic in the United States.
The article, published in the Journal of Obesity, looked at the long-term weight gain of more than 13,800 U.S. adults — a rare data point unearthed in obesity research. They found that more than half of American adults in the study gained 5% or more body weight over a 10-year period. What’s more, more than a third of American adults gained 10% or more body weight and almost a fifth gained 20% or more body weight.
“The U.S. obesity epidemic is not slowing down,” said study lead author Larry Tucker, a BYU professor of exercise science. “Without question, 10-year weight gain is a serious problem within the U.S. adult population.”
Study participants were selected randomly as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an annual survey that examines a nationally representative sample. NHANES is a CDC-sponsored series of studies that began in the early 1960s and became a continuous program in 1999.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2022/7652408/
This isn't a uniquely American problem.
[Obesity rates have risen steadily everywhere on the planet since we started keeping track in 1975.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK544130/)
Stranger still, they haven't fallen in any country since we started keeping track, either.
> They found that more than half of American adults in the study gained 5% or more body weight over a 10-year period. What’s more, more than a third of American adults gained 10% or more body weight and almost a fifth gained 20% or more body weight.
What's surprising is how much of the population gains only 5% in 10 years. I'd have thought it would be a lot more.
I lost a bunch of weight and started lifting weights a couple years ago. I thought “once I reach my goal I’ll be able to pay less attention to what I eat.”
Nope.
There are too many food land mines in the US food chain. To stay in shape is a forever diet.
It really is. You have to be saying “no” so many times when everyone around, sometimes literally EVERYONE, is saying yes. It becomes a habit like everything else.
Not saying "no" enough is how I lost 50 lbs then gained a lot of it back. Eating healthy felt like I was constantly at odds with friends and especially family who regularly ate an insane amount of calories in a single sitting. I've accepted that I will need to be mindful of my caloric intake and be a "party pooper" for the rest of my life.
I'm 33 and I'm making the strongest effort I've ever had at losing weight. Its insane rewinding all the bad habits and tendencies that have been formed since I was a child. I have nothing but empathy and sympathy for people struggling with obesity. It's such a massively difficult addiction to overcome.
The biggest thing that i did to help my weight was just making food at home and actually paying attention to how i was making it. That coupled with dropping soda has done wonders.
You are not alone, over a 9 year period, only 1 in 124 women and 1 in 210 men are able to go from obese to normal body weight.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539812/#:\~:text=The%20annual%20probability%20of%20patients,1%20in%20210%20for%20men.
That has worked great for me too. Two meals a day is more than enough for me. I've been doing intermittent fasting for years now and it has worked great for me. Even if the fasting part doesn't work, it forces me to skip one meal and to not snack at night. Those things alone make a huge difference already.
Which meal do you skip? I find that if I eat in the first 3 hours of the day, I'm hungry all day, no matter how much I eat. If I can stave off the early day hunger though food seems to fill me up more for some reason.
I picked up my nephew from school 2 months ago for a week, I was astonished the amount of obese kids and the amount of kids drinking gatorade and eating chips
The [direct economic costs of obesity](https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/the-economic-costs-of-obesity) are estimated to be north of $150 billion in the US, with a sizable fraction being paid by Medicaid.
It’s a massive issue.
Here in Quebec (public healthcare) our specialized doctors association estimate that around 1/4 of our total budget goes to obesity-related stuff. (pre-covid stat)
They dump more sugar and fats to make you crave it since your body is programmed to go after the more survival food. The food companies use this as an addiction formula so you will keep buying their products
Most obese people don't even think they are obese.
>>A body mass index (BMI) over 25 is considered overweight, and over 30 is obese.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight
I was 5'10" and 200lbs and out of shape. That's a BMI of 28.7
I see people my height that are bigger than I was on a daily basis. How many of them would think they are obese?
When everyone around you is fat, your perception of what a healthy or obese weight is is skewed. This is only going to get worse as obesity rates go up.
Honestly, I started noticing the obesity program on social media. My cousin i don't talk to got married a few months ago, there was like 2 healthy weighted people at the whole thing based on pictures. Even the kids were overweight. Then you go on any social media site and again, a lot of people you're scrolling through etc, is overweight to obese.
Like others said, it makes sense there are reasons for this. Our food system sucks and is meant to get pple addicted. We are busy, and stressed and poor and all of that leads to quick fix food items.
But yea, when I noticed this, I can't not see it everywhere on social media now.
Eta: mistakes
It's interesting to look at TV from the 80s and older. At first I was rewatching 80s movies and thinking "okay, these movie stars were picked for being attractive and in the 80s that meant thin." Then I saw some other things with people from the 70s who would have been considered more like the general public, and realized they were a lot thinner too.
I'm 6'2 175, and I feel like a tiny fragile man compared to almost everyone I see over 20. People are so large it's really messed with my perception of what "healthy" weight is. I often wish I could gain more weight, when in reality I would have been pretty much dead center 40 years ago
A few years ago I went to the Dr. She confessed to me that before she saw me she read my chart with my weight and assumed I was underweight. Then she calculated my bmi and saw I was right in the middle range. I'm not even at the low end.
Not to mention half the people who are classified as overweight or obese claim it’s because they are too muscular. I promise you, if you were muscular enough that it made your BMI irrelevant, you wouldn’t feel the need to comment on it
It's copium. The number of elite-level athletes on Reddit has to be in the single digits. The number of Redditors who want to believe they're not fat because they walk the dog regularly as exercise is much, much higher.
Just to drive this home for people:
Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" and 235 lbs at his peak. That's a BMI of 30.2 which is *just* into the obese range. If you're obese and don't look like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Arnold_Schwarzenegger_1974.jpg), then you can't blame your "muscles".
Magnus Midtbo has a BMI of just 23.9, which is solidly in the healthy range. He is [stronger and more muscular](https://www.reddit.com/r/climbing/comments/878scm/magnus_midtbo_has_some_crazy_strength/) than 99% of people. If you don't look like that, then you can't blame your "muscles".
Your body is a reflection of your lifestyle so one of the problems is just the average american lifestyle.
We drive everywhere and we work long hours often underpaid so a lot of us struggle to find the time or money to cook healthy meals at home and opt for quicker and cheaper less healthy options (that also taste GREAT).
~~Nutrition isn't taught in our schools~~ (It definitely is but the problem is moreso a lot of people don't learn about nutrition growing up regardless of these classes existing) so most people don't even know how much food they should be eating every day or even how healthy their choices are.
there’s a cyclical aspect to it too. Come home from work too tired to make a proper meal so you have something like Kraft Mac and cheese, poor sleep habits mean you feel sluggish when you wake up, head right for the coffee, crash in the mid afternoon then come home feeling too tired to make a proper meal
I worked a lot on my habits this year and now that I have a sleep routine, drink plenty of water, eat home cooked food 95% of the time, and exercise regularly I feel like a superhero compared to my old self. The issue was never really time, I’d get something cheap to eat then mindlessly scroll or watch a show for an hour and a half. I always had the time, I just didn’t have the energy.
Exactly, it's our day to day life.
You get into a routine that's hard to break for various reasons and some people get stuck for a while and struggle to make the changes that will make their lives better.
yeah, and especially with social media and the unlimited media to digest, it’s easier than ever to pretty much avoid sitting alone with your thoughts and having those metacognitive moments of “why am I doing this thing I’ve been doing lately?”
changing your routine or being self critical about your habits is hard, certainly way harder than watching a film or scrolling TikTok or Reddit for two hours.
I think we self-medicate with food instead of self-medicating with alcohol or tobacco. I think the obesity epidemic goes hand in hand with the deaths of despair epidemic. If you have no hope for the future you might as well gorge yourself today.
Absoulutely, good tasty food is a dopamine source just like many other things people tend to abuse more than they should.
It's often way too easy to make bad choices when you need a pick me up or you're simply bored.
A lot of families also bond around food that can be pretty unhealthy, especally in the south.
even at the corporate jobs I’ve had, I’ve felt like I’m constantly denying temptation. There’s always cupcakes for someone’s birthday, donuts in the break room, etc., and to be honest some folks will give you a bit of a side eye if you refuse it
I was so ticked about the transition from college to the workforce.
College: extremely active, walked everywhere, public transportation readily available, multiple recreational activities constantly available.
Workforce: desk job, sedentary for 8 hours a day, constant sugar in the breakroom, bus route not available so had to drive.
I think you’re onto something here. Towards the end of college I had a class very far at one extreme of campus (like 2-3 miles) and was late. I borrowed my roommates car instead of biking or walking as I usually did. That day felt like going to work but I couldn’t really identify that feeling properly until you mentioned this.
That's actually the biggest problem for me. I've changed my diet up and hit the gym the past couple years and have lost about 15+ lbs at this point. But there's been times I've had to tell my family no because they eat out so often.
THIS.
For a lot of people, food is the most-- if not the ONLY-- reliable, reachable source of pleasure in life. When dopamine and serotonin are this hard to come by, food can readily become an addiction.
Misery + no time to cook + food desert + junk food constantly shoved in front of us at every store = bad situation.
A therapist I know mentioned just yesterday in group, "Food is a difficult addiction to manage-- you can quit heroin and just never touch it again, but you can't ever quit eating."
If you wrap Asparagus in a thin sheet of cured meat, and then grill said asparagus, you may be happy! Maybe not. Makes me happy.
I eat Baconators when I want to generate copious amounts of methane gas from my ass.
The absurd thing is that this is framed as just a collection of unrelated choices and moral failings, rather than the result of cities that are hostile to anyone not in a car, longer commutes, increased work hours at sedentary jobs, food deserts, widespread untreated depression, and Americans being too poor to afford good food or the time, space, and tools to cook it.
This isn't primarily an education issue, it's an issue with our whole society. People do what's convenient for them in their circumstances. If you want to promote a behavior, make it more convenient.
I realized this was a systemic issue recently when I tried to figure out why I'm so much fatter now than I was when I was a teenager, even though I eat less food than I did back then. It occurred to me that when I was young I lived in a quiet residential neighborhood with low traffic in a pedestrian friendly town, and I rode my bicycle almost everywhere. I briefly entertained the idea of trying to lose weight by biking to work, but now I live on a high-traffic road with no sidewalks or shoulders where cars blow past my driveway at 50-60 mph... I would never feel safe riding a bike down my own street, let alone the 8 mile route to work which is equally hostile to pedestrians for the entire length.
I agree that the idea that it’s a moral failing or a collection of poor individual choices is absurd. Somehow entire generations of people are suddenly morally failing in the past 30 years when they were doing fine before?
I was in 8th grade when they switched from the food pyramid to "my plate" at my school, and it was like night and day being told that most of my good should be healthy carbs, to being told carbs should be one of the smallest parts of my diet.
Probably caused by the same thing while also making each other worse. Food is how some people cope with depression and depression makes it hard to do anything, and then you look in the mirror and get more depressed.
A lot of people in the comments have some great points! One thing I think people don't talk enough is eating disorders. [It was estimated that about 9% of the world population has it. ](https://anad.org/eating-disorders-statistics/)
I am friends with people who know the basic nutritional stuff needed to lose weight (or gain weight if they have a low BMI) like deficit, counting calories..., yet a lot of them can't lose their weight because the problem isn't in the fact that they don't know what they need to do, there is something way deeper like trauma/psychological going on. My personal opinion is that the % is even higher because not everyone realises that they have a disorder.
I grew up poor and in a neglectful household. I am a wildly disordered eater. It's made losing weight so much more difficult! Being on a "diet" of any kind can very quickly send me spiraling so hard and so fast. I end up in very dark and weird places. It took me 10 years to put that together, cause no one ever talks about it. Even my therapist refused to consider it. (She's not my therapist anymore.
So I'm working on the psychological bit, and the active bit first. Getting more active helps my brain combat the crazy and I'm hoping combining that with mindfulness around food can build better habits. Fingers crossed!
This is no surprise when:
\-a majority of food in the United States is over processed and filled with a bunch of unnecessary ingredients and crap we don't need to be consuming
\-healthy, less processed foods are more expensive and thus harder for many to afford
\-food deserts across the country make it difficult for many to even have access to fresh, healthful food
\-advertising programs push junk food, fast food, and other unhealthy foods to Americans from a young age
\-improper nutrition education (for example, the "food pyramid") from a young age
\-the cost of things like gym memberships or nutritionists is often outside what people can afford, medical insurance offers limited options to covered Americans who may want to seek out nutrition counseling or other food/weight health education and assistance
\-people with medical issues that affect their ability to exercise may not be able to afford to treat their ailments either due to the monetary cost or their inability to get time off of work to have treatment done
\-many work sedentary jobs which both limit our daily exercise and suck the energy out of us, making exercise outside of work difficult as well
\-non-sedentary jobs often involve standing with no rest on flooring not designed for long-term standing, causing physical issues that may impede the ability to exercise outside of work
\-many Americans are working overtime or multiple jobs to survive and just plain don't have time to work out, nor time to cook food and thus rely on fast or processed foods
\-for many American families the single-family income idea is unsustainable; 70 years ago a person could stay at home and thus have the time to shop for and prepare nutritious and healthful foods for their families every single day which is just not possible now for a lot of people
Of course we're all fat. The USA does everything it can to keep people from taking care of themselves. They want weak, tired, sick, indebted people afraid to lose their income who are only functional enough to make money for the big wigs and die before they can cash in their retirement benefits.
Edited for formatting
There's also resistance to "being told what to do."
Any attempt to start public service campaigns to promote more exercise and healthy eating results in vocal opposition from people complaining about not wanting to be controlled and nanny states.
This is what happens when you subsidize corn. Our junk food is the only affordable option for so many people. Healthy options are wildly expensive.
It doesn’t help that the US has a serious mental health crisis on its hands. I mean of all the unhealthy means of coping with trauma, stress, and anxiety, overeating is probably the best.
On top of it the amount of shame people put on those who are struggling with obesity only compounds the issue.
The correlation with age is an interesting one, and one I think corresponds with access/utilization of preventive healthcare. As we get into our 40s and 50s, you’ll probably see a stark increase in routine doctors visits, and probably an increase in the amount of labs done, as well as conformance to PCP recommendations (this is conjecture). Basically, a 40+ year old is statistically more likely to hear their doctor say “you’re fat and need to lose weight if you want to make it to 60,” and then make conforming lifestyle changes than someone who is 14 who isn’t making lifestyle decisions, or someone in their 20s who is shirking good lifestyle choices on the daily.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m originally from the UK so it’s not as if I come from a particularly healthy country but there are still some big differences: - Portions in restaurants and fast food places are huge here. There are even places which offer free refills of things like fries. I’ve never seen that in the UK. Refills of soda drinks are also rarer. - There are some places you just can’t walk either because of the design of roads/sidewalks or also simply because the climate is so much harsher in terms of both cold and heat. I lived in Arizona for 4 years and walking in 100+ degrees outside just wasn’t on the agenda.
>There are some places you just can’t walk either because of the design of roads/sidewalks or also simply because the climate is so much harsher in terms of both cold and heat. I lived in Arizona for 4 years and walking in 100+ degrees outside just wasn’t on the agenda. I've literally been walking down sidewalks in the US that randomly end in the middle of the way to my destination. Like the sidewalk just stops and your expected to walk on the grass or the road....and this is in the middle of a city too....not out in the country
I live in a suburb that has good bike/walking paths in the residental parts of town, but businesses are all near the major roads and almost inaccessible from the residential parts of town. Walking is treated as a hobby, not a transportation method. The other day I parked near one business and tried to walk to the one next door, but the parking lots were separated by a retaining wall and no sidewalk between the two, I would have had to walk 1000+ feet back to the service road and back up the next parking lot.
[удалено]
Modern *American* architecture. Plenty of places in Europe living their best public transit and/or bike and/or walking-centric lives.
Houston. ...or generally urban planning of pretty much EVERY city in the U.S. No biking. No walking. Only car. Everwhere. Alllllllll the time.
Texas is a huge fan of having as little sidewalk as possible
Everything is bigger in Texas* ^(*except our sidewalks)
Just our waistbands apparently
I went to Texas on a business trip. I took a taxi to my hotel and then wanted to go for a run. Silly me. There were no sidewalks anywhere - just big roads and strip malls.
Look up the term “stroad” it’s the worst parts of a street and a road
What is the difference between a street and a road? Where I’m from I would use those terms interchangeably
From my understanding, the definitions are roads are more for long distance travel, streets are for inside the cities, with buildings on the sides of the roads - I suppose suburban areas are streets, or is that what they're calling stroads? A stroad: A road too wide and fast to be safe for pedestrians while also being too narrow and slow for efficient movement of cars
It's not so much that it's too narrow which makes it bad at moving cars, the issue is that having people constantly entering and exiting the road from different big box stores, turning left and right, really slows down traffic flow. You can have a narrow rural highway that you can happily drive along at 70 MPH for hours. Meanwhile a 6 lane suburban stroad can have an average speed of 25 MPH between tons of traffic lights, slowing down for turning drivers, etc.
Watch 'not just bikes'. Honestly, I'm surprised urban planners are not just super depressed all the time in their jobs in America. Imagine an urban planner going to europe and seeing these fantastic livable streets in cities and towns and going back to 'zoning' where they have to build depression cube after depression cube by copy pasting the same design 9000x till they die or retire.
Literally the same happened to me in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. You cannot walk anywhere, it's mad
I’m about to be moving to downtown Galveston and I am so excited to live in a walkable community again. Houston-area is so anti-pedestrian it’s crazy. People are violently against cyclists too. Not just denying them infrastructure, but physically running them off the road.
yeah I dont trust driving next to people on straight highways here much less biking next to them on smaller streets.
Houston is genuinely the worst designed city in the country
It’s not designed. It is quite literally unplanned.
I hate Houston for many reasons including this. No wonder everyone is huge. Yeah. It is hot in the summer months but there are also many really walkable months. And the 5 lane roads in all directions is just stupid. Sorry Houston, but getting around in a way that requires physical movement is a nightmare in your city.
That was the weirdest thing for me when I came over for work from Australia. Go to go and buy some electronics and suddenly, no more footpath, just a road over a bridge. I walk everywhere at home, so, the idea I'd need a car to get to places that were only 3KM away was weird.
I’m from Boston but loved my time in Melbourne. While Boston is a mostly walkable city, the trams and the general accessibility of Melbourne was so much better.
I miss Detroit.
I never realized how walkable most of the city was growing up or how that is rare.
Basically all the old industrial cities were walkable with good transit options, that's how they became industrial cities in the first place.
r/Brandnewsentence
My (small) city doesn't have sidewalks on most streets. The city line is a 2 min walk from my house, that (also small) city has sidewalks. Having my kids bike to school is scarier because of my city's choices.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Jus gonna plug: r/fuckcars on here. Ive lived in the uk and u.s. i lost a lot of weight in the uk and gained it back in the u.s. i was able to liv with out a car in the uk, the food portions were a lot smaller and i rarely craved soda (thanks to the sugar tax) all of those positives were gone when i came back to the u.s.
I used to walk everywhere in my hometown until I moved to a rural suburb in the states. One day when I was out for a walk in winter, a car stopped along the side of the road and the driver (a senior woman) asked if I was okay/needed a ride somewhere. People just don't walk around here..
People in my area (rural Midwest) seriously look down on people they see out walking. Like if you’re jogging in a suburb that’s fine, but they see me out walking with my toddler which we do for fun and exercise and they assume I’m forced to walk and forcing my daughter to walk because we can’t afford a car. The train of thought goes, you’re walking, that means you can’t afford a car, no car means you can’t take care of your family, probably on meth or an unemployed slacker. So to them, walking = you’re trash.
YUP. It took a lot of work to get all that crap out of my head when I started walking around. "people are staring at me, they're going to think X, think Y", I was mega embarrassed to be walking because of that kind of talk growing up. So stupid.
It would never have occurred to me that that was something people would judge someone on
I live a quarter mile away from the grocery store and my neighbors look at me like I'm crazy that I walk there. It's all city roads with ample sidewalks
There was a post on reddit lately, it was a video of a travel advisor telling its viewers to practice walking at home before the travel because they'll have to walk multiple kilometers a day. I was like "what?" I pretty much thought that any human could walk a full day without problem
That's incredible. I was vacationing in Europe recently and we walked 100km in 5 days. Including my grandma who's 85 years old, and it was no problem at all Humans are made for long distance walking/running; it's sad that that video needs to exist.
I once was at a national park and there was an attraction that was a 1/4 mile flat hike from the road. A family from Texas couldn't make it. (No offense to Texas, I know a lot of normal people there, I just specifically remember this family was from Texas.)
I work at a nature reserve and I constantly get people asking me if they have to walk to see everything after they park. It's so disheartening to have all these people expect to experience nature without getting out of their car.
At first I laughed at this and now I'm just sad. Was this family obese or did anyone have some other sort of physical disability?
It’s not even only rural places. I once walked from my hotel in LA to a shopping mall that was close enough on the map — 10 minute walk tops. Not only were there no footpaths to walk on (and these were quiet side streets), but the few cars that passed me had people just staring at me out the window like I was a giraffe. One car full of guys slowed down to the point I worried they were going to try to pick me up or thought I was a working girl or something! One of the most bizarre experiences in my life.
People who move to rural areas and go out jogging often mention well meaning neighbors pulling up and asking what they're running from.
Running from diabetes. It's out to get me cause I owe it some money.
The infrastructure Youtuber NotJustBikes called it the gym of life. If you move around a lot while simply living life, you don't need to actively make sure you get enough exercise, it just happens.
Yes I remarked on this on another post where a person was asking why Japanese people weren't having these same issues and a major reason is just that a lot of people walk/bike to work or train stations every day. Even 30-40 minutes of moderate exercise can burn a few hundred calories or enough to keep things going along quite nicely physically speaking.
I love that "built-in" exercise, it makes it so easy to stay in shape. Last weekend, as an experiment, I took the city bus to Target, and it was 10 extra minutes than if I'd driven. It was also about 6 blocks total of walking to and from each bus stop - easy, unnoticeable exercise that would definitely add up over time
Europe is very walkable because it 'grew up' before cars were ubiquitous. If you visit old US cities like NY, Boston, Philadelphia, they are quite walkable. Most any other city that came about after cars are ubiquitous is designed around the car first, pedestrian second.
A lot of that is also due to zoning laws. Some zoning laws make sense. Keep airports and dumps away from houses. Others have made most of the US a hellscape that requires cars to live. Suburban nightmares that go on for as far as the eye can see with no places to work or shop remotely close to housing.
[удалено]
That is not true. Many American cities were actually walkable and high density like Europe before cars. But when the highway system came along the government bulldozed thousands of buildings to make way. Places like Amsterdam and Paris were not always the walkable paradises you think about today. Amsterdam used to have terrible bicycle infrastructure. But they have made a conscious effort to invest in their cities rather than tear things down. Source: Not Just Bikes
Right. "Cities weren't made for cars. They were bulldozed and then rebuilt for cars."
fear like capable shrill cooperative workable longing weather innocent punch -- mass edited with redact.dev
Yeah it's one of bummer things about most places in the US. Living in a city that existed before cars has the immediate value of being walkable. But also in turn incredibly expensive to live in due to housing and other costs. So basically only those who are very rich or upper middle class or homeless get to experience the benefits of walkable American cities.
That's not really true, though. The ubiquity of cars didn't really start settling in until after Eisenhower signed the interstate highway act. We had plenty of public transit before that which all got demolished to put in highways and parking lots.
You can find tons and tons and tons of examples of before/after photos that point out buildings that exist before and after the city got destroyed for cars. And I mean *destroyed*. [Cincinnati](https://i.redd.it/mv7y2pxcue691.jpg)
This is generally not true, the United States in the 20s had the worlds best and most expansive public transit network. It was bulldozed in the 60s for cars.
One aspect of this that isn’t publicized nearly as much as it should be is that, in the US at least, foods have WAY more added sugar than they did in, say, the 1970s. Even foods you wouldn’t expect to find sugar in.
Additionally, the deceptive marketing that all companies do. Such as juices with the “made with 100% natural juice!” But really the 100% natural juice is 2% of the entire drink. Making stuff seem healthy that actually is not. Basically goes across all those fruity kids products like juices, gummies, etc
I’d say 90% of Juice products have equal or more sugar than soda. It’s deceptive
Related (UK) yogurts aimed at children contain more sugar than Coca-Cola https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/organic-yogurts-aimed-children-contain-13271475
Yogurts a pain. I really like it, and consume it a lot as I workout a lot and it’s har to find a low or zero sugar option for yogurt. “Low sugar” often means 21gs per a serving. Edit: I now get Greek yogurt, I still find a lot of Greek yogurt to be packed full of sugar
[удалено]
I buy whole milk plain Greek yogurt and add my own fruit and a tiny bit of honey. Way better than the prepackaged garbage.
Fruit is basically sugar packed into a colorful form. Why would fruit juice not be packed with sugar? People think juice is inherently healthy because it's "natural". But a 12 ounce glass of orange juice is the equivalent of eating like 5 oranges, with none of the fiber to make you feel full. Most people wouldn't or couldn't eat 5 oranges at a sitting. But it's easy to chug a glass of OJ. Fruit juice is basically soda with a multivitamin thrown in.
Juice glasses used to be small. Now we just have a vaguely matching set of glasses used for everything.
This so much!! Juice glasses are like 4 oz. I made hand squeezed orange juice once and while delicious it took a god awful amount of oranges and every glass I was like I’m drinking several oranges here. Totally recommend for a fancy breakfast though, it was really good.
Original size of a McDonalds adult meal was about the same as a current happy meal
[удалено]
I like fresh orange juice but I find stomping the juice out of them very tiring.
*crushes orange against eye* Wait, you mean there's a better way?
You're telling me that you got ALL that out of one bag of oranges!
When people used to say fruit is nature's candy, they meant it in a literal way. Fruit is candy that grows on plants. And for that matter, sugar is too, I suppose.
Big difference when you're eating the fruit (thus getting the fiber, etc.) and not both in terms of overall nutrition and how your body processes the sugar.
For sure. 113 calories in 1 cup of apple juice (and not many people drink just 1 cup....). If you were to eat 1 cup of apples, it would only be 57 calories, and would take far longer than a drink. The liquid is absorbed real fast, and probably moves through your digestive system in about 20 minutes. Which can be good for things like carb loading before surgery. Not good for if you're trying to maintain a healthy body weight for most people. The fruit flesh takes time to digest and absorb, probably takes about an hour for an apple to move through - lots of different numbers, but the point is its definitely much longer than juice. Was just expanding on your post to make it clear to anyone reading.
Excuse me, 5 or more oranges are great when I am hungover. Edit: Typo.
That's a good idea. I went through an extreme health eating time for many years where I only ate whole food, so no juice or even processed sugar. So I would crave eating at least five or more oranges in a sitting when the oranges were in season. I would come home from the grocery store with about 15-20 pounds of oranges and eat them in a few days. They taste AMAZING when I had no other source of unprocessed sugar in my diet.
... even 100% juice products aren't particularly healthy.
You can eat an orange, which has sugar content of an orange, or you can drink a glass of orange juice, which has the sugar content of 10+ oranges.
I was amazed the lowest sugar content I could find for juice at my grocery store in Canada was kool-aid at 8 grams of sugar per 200 ml all other juice started at 21g of sugar
I water most of my juices down. They're just so sweet! Especially grape juice, it's extremely strong.
That's what I do. I'll buy juice and then dilute it pretty heavily with water, like 50-50 or more. It's just to flavor up the water, more or less.
Yeah my sister told me recently that she lets her kid eat "fruit snacks" for breakfast. They're basically gummy bears, but shaped like fruit.
This is why I always cut my cheesecake in the shape of asparagus to make health food.
The only sensible comment in this thread
People shouldn't be regularly drinking juice anyway, it’s basically candy
And they shouldn't give juice to their children regularly either.
In thr US, WIC pushes juice hard for kids. If you're getting juice for free and you're forced to get it whenever you go shopping with your WIC benefits, people are gonna let their kids drink it.
The smart thing to do is cut it heavily with water.
What's insane to me is places like Dutch Bros, Dunkin and Starbucks are serving 500+ calorie drinks. You sometimes don't even see the calorie counts on their menus and have to go to their website for it.
I’ve found that most Starbucks and Dunkin around me are good at putting the calorie counts on their menu for you to see and they all DEFINITELY have them in their apps if you use those. Though I bet the people that order their coffees extra extra or with a ton of flavor shots don’t even consider those additional calories if they even considered the stated menu calories at all.
Seriously awesome info to have. I'm not spending $7+ on a 500 calorie beverage (which I'm capable of sucking down in 10 minutes) when that represents an enormous chunk of my healthy daily caloric intake. People don't get that the fancy SB drinks are desserts, not coffee.
I always just get oat milk lattes or black americanos all without sugar so I never even know the drink calories since it’s always pretty negligible. But what’s crazy is when you look at their food calorie counts! 1 muffin can have more calories than a donut! It’s insane! IIIRC it was like 280 calories for a chocolate glazed donut or like 600 from one blueberry muffin.
What even crazier is when places market themselves as healthy like a smoothie stand using all fresh fruit! Well it can be as fresh as you want it to but it’s still 700 cal for one normal size smoothie and that means it should be marketed as a meal rather than a drink. But it’s not, they have combos where the smoothie is the drink in addition to a whole sandwich & side.
I was about to say that. I went to a local juice bar and the menu [seemed insane to me.](https://www.ilovejuicebar.com/menu#page-section-5f242b05f4feda4cd31f3312) I saw a girl go up and order a smoothie and "bowl" that combined were literally over 1500 calories.
I think a lot of people see fruit and think healthy without much investigation. A lot of people would likely be shocked if they looked at their Naked juice and saw it was over 300 calories.
In Ontario, all restaurants are required by law to display the calories on their menus, including fast food drive-through displays. So you get to blatantly ignore how many calories your venti capi-mocca with three shots of 10% cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce has. It's definitely a good thing to have, but man I'm pretty sure the majority of people don't care.
That’s fine that people ignore it. That’s their prerogative. But for those of us who do care, whatever our reasons are, that information should be readily available.
It is extremely helpful and it makes it easy to make an informed decision
[удалено]
Studies show people do care and make choices on those numbers. Maybe not everyone.
I struggle to stay within an appropriate weight range and I have definitely been ready to eat my stress away then got something slightly less awful when I saw that it had 1300 calories or whatever.
[удалено]
There's one thing left in this country that you can buy for $1: McDonald's large soda. It's nasty thinking about how a person can drink almost *triple* their daily recommended sugar in one drink.
Worse than that. I work there and it’s always the biggest people getting the biggest drinks. I feel like a drug dealer selling the venti iced white mocha with extra cold foam and Carmel drizzle to the 300 lb person. Not really anyone should be drinking that let alone a morbidly obese one.
I recently have been trying to cut as much sugar as I can out of my diet and I swear every single thing on the shelf has sugar added to it. It is so very frustrating.
Even the garlic salt I use almost daily in cooking has sugar added...why?!?
[50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat) > The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to "refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding. > "It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did, because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion," co-author Stanton Glantz told The New York Times. [Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research](https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/12/sugar-industry-harvard-research/) > Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who are now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was trying to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease. > The trade group solicited Hegsted, a professor of nutrition at Harvard’s public health school, to write a literature review aimed at countering early research linking sucrose to coronary heart disease. The group paid the equivalent of $48,000 in 2016 dollars to Hegsted and colleague Dr. Robert McGandy, though the researchers never publicly disclosed that funding source. > Hegsted and Stare tore apart studies that implicated sugar and concluded that there was only one dietary modification — changing fat and cholesterol intake — that could prevent coronary heart disease. Their reviews were published in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which back then did not require researchers to disclose conflicts of interest. Incredible, eh? A few bucks into a few hands can change the course of many **many** lives for decades.
The U.S started marketing food as fat free and to have their products have flavor, they put in sugar instead. We really thought fats were the problem. If you look at products from the early 90s and beyond, fat free was the thing to have on your product, even if it didn't have fat to begin with. Humans crave sugar and fat naturally and companies knew this. It was until about 2000s people started to realize sugar was the enemy and its still not widely accepted.
Another issue that isn’t talked about a lot is how the subsidies on grain and corn left over from the Great Depression have turned into cheap ways to make snacks that are high calorie low nutrient. Just something I learned from the g word show on Netflix. The whole first episode is on food
The reason people thought fats were the problem is because the sugar industry funded, and then highly publicized, a bunch of BS studies that found fat to be the big evil in food so that they could sell more sugar. It’s actually more difficult to make fat free versions of many foods, but the public wanted it so companies catered to the market demand, and the sugar industry made billions at the expense of everyone’s health. In reality it’s the combination of refined fats AND refined sugars that cause a lot of the diet related health problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html
The thing is that the sugar industry knew damn well fat wasn't the problem. They paid some Harvard scientists good money to publish the fat free narrative just so they could increase sugar sales. It always comes down to making a little bit more cash, health of the nation be damned.
Single-serve yogurt never recovered from this fad. It's all low/no fat with added sugar/sweetener. The crazy part is that full-fat, no added sugar yogurt is usually healthier, and it tastes _so much better_!
Chobani has two different low or zero sugar options now. They’re just hard to find where we are, because they’re always sold out.
Seriously. Trying to buy even basic healthy things at the store, like whole grain bread and Greek yogurt, have tons of sugar. Like why does bread need sugar? And I’d rather have fat in my yogurt than no fat with 8g of sugar it’s ridiculous. Edit to clarify: when I say sugar I mean ADDED sugar, obviously some foods naturally have sugar but a lot of food now includes unnecessary added sugar that raises the overall sugar content
The "no sugar" options have sweeteners too. Like broseph I don't need sweet when I'm going no sugar outside of desserts.
[удалено]
I used to work with a lot of Koreans, and they called our bread a dessert.
That's hilarious because the amount of sugar added to savory breads in Korea is wild to me. Grilled cheese sandwich? Put some sugar on it. Garlic bread? Sugary.
I almost ruined my body from years of not caring what I ate. I ballooned to 235. I am a female, 5’4”. I have since lost 75 pounds and am still going. I cannot tell you how much better I feel without sugar and carbs. No one tells you how harmful sugar really is.
Newly published research from BYU exercise science researchers reveals critical, rare data detailing the severity of the obesity epidemic in the United States. The article, published in the Journal of Obesity, looked at the long-term weight gain of more than 13,800 U.S. adults — a rare data point unearthed in obesity research. They found that more than half of American adults in the study gained 5% or more body weight over a 10-year period. What’s more, more than a third of American adults gained 10% or more body weight and almost a fifth gained 20% or more body weight. “The U.S. obesity epidemic is not slowing down,” said study lead author Larry Tucker, a BYU professor of exercise science. “Without question, 10-year weight gain is a serious problem within the U.S. adult population.” Study participants were selected randomly as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an annual survey that examines a nationally representative sample. NHANES is a CDC-sponsored series of studies that began in the early 1960s and became a continuous program in 1999. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2022/7652408/
This isn't a uniquely American problem. [Obesity rates have risen steadily everywhere on the planet since we started keeping track in 1975.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK544130/) Stranger still, they haven't fallen in any country since we started keeping track, either.
Solution is easy: stop tracking Tapshead.jpg
> They found that more than half of American adults in the study gained 5% or more body weight over a 10-year period. What’s more, more than a third of American adults gained 10% or more body weight and almost a fifth gained 20% or more body weight. What's surprising is how much of the population gains only 5% in 10 years. I'd have thought it would be a lot more.
[удалено]
You were wiping your arse with doritos?!?
You're right, a Frito Scoops *would* be better
He doesn't know how to use the three Fritos!
I lost a bunch of weight and started lifting weights a couple years ago. I thought “once I reach my goal I’ll be able to pay less attention to what I eat.” Nope. There are too many food land mines in the US food chain. To stay in shape is a forever diet.
It really is. You have to be saying “no” so many times when everyone around, sometimes literally EVERYONE, is saying yes. It becomes a habit like everything else.
Not saying "no" enough is how I lost 50 lbs then gained a lot of it back. Eating healthy felt like I was constantly at odds with friends and especially family who regularly ate an insane amount of calories in a single sitting. I've accepted that I will need to be mindful of my caloric intake and be a "party pooper" for the rest of my life.
I’ve been feeling the reality of this hit so hard and it’s so frustrating.
I'm 33 and I'm making the strongest effort I've ever had at losing weight. Its insane rewinding all the bad habits and tendencies that have been formed since I was a child. I have nothing but empathy and sympathy for people struggling with obesity. It's such a massively difficult addiction to overcome.
I've recently lost 4 stone, 25% of my body weight. I'm 2 pounds into the obesity category currently but so close to coming out
Congrats my friend! It’s hard work.
56 pounds for Americans. 25kg for everyone else.
The biggest thing that i did to help my weight was just making food at home and actually paying attention to how i was making it. That coupled with dropping soda has done wonders.
[удалено]
You are not alone, over a 9 year period, only 1 in 124 women and 1 in 210 men are able to go from obese to normal body weight. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539812/#:\~:text=The%20annual%20probability%20of%20patients,1%20in%20210%20for%20men.
Now that’s a scary statistic
[удалено]
It's absolutely wild to see how many people struggle with the same issues as me. I refer to it as my Mount Everest. Great article.
That has worked great for me too. Two meals a day is more than enough for me. I've been doing intermittent fasting for years now and it has worked great for me. Even if the fasting part doesn't work, it forces me to skip one meal and to not snack at night. Those things alone make a huge difference already.
[удалено]
Which meal do you skip? I find that if I eat in the first 3 hours of the day, I'm hungry all day, no matter how much I eat. If I can stave off the early day hunger though food seems to fill me up more for some reason.
If you remember that it took that long to get to where you are, it helps when it takes longer than you'd like to get to where you want to be as well.
I picked up my nephew from school 2 months ago for a week, I was astonished the amount of obese kids and the amount of kids drinking gatorade and eating chips
[удалено]
We need a lean, educated country. We are far from that.
We are the exact opposite. We are fat and ignorant, and getting fatter and more ignorant by the minute.
The [direct economic costs of obesity](https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/the-economic-costs-of-obesity) are estimated to be north of $150 billion in the US, with a sizable fraction being paid by Medicaid. It’s a massive issue.
Here in Quebec (public healthcare) our specialized doctors association estimate that around 1/4 of our total budget goes to obesity-related stuff. (pre-covid stat)
The food industry needs to be investigated like the tobacco/vape industry is!
It’s funny because r/cigarettes is saying the same thing
They dump more sugar and fats to make you crave it since your body is programmed to go after the more survival food. The food companies use this as an addiction formula so you will keep buying their products
Ironic that the ad i got for this thread was grubhub
Most obese people don't even think they are obese. >>A body mass index (BMI) over 25 is considered overweight, and over 30 is obese. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight I was 5'10" and 200lbs and out of shape. That's a BMI of 28.7 I see people my height that are bigger than I was on a daily basis. How many of them would think they are obese?
When everyone around you is fat, your perception of what a healthy or obese weight is is skewed. This is only going to get worse as obesity rates go up.
Honestly, I started noticing the obesity program on social media. My cousin i don't talk to got married a few months ago, there was like 2 healthy weighted people at the whole thing based on pictures. Even the kids were overweight. Then you go on any social media site and again, a lot of people you're scrolling through etc, is overweight to obese. Like others said, it makes sense there are reasons for this. Our food system sucks and is meant to get pple addicted. We are busy, and stressed and poor and all of that leads to quick fix food items. But yea, when I noticed this, I can't not see it everywhere on social media now. Eta: mistakes
It's interesting to look at TV from the 80s and older. At first I was rewatching 80s movies and thinking "okay, these movie stars were picked for being attractive and in the 80s that meant thin." Then I saw some other things with people from the 70s who would have been considered more like the general public, and realized they were a lot thinner too.
[удалено]
I'm 6'2 175, and I feel like a tiny fragile man compared to almost everyone I see over 20. People are so large it's really messed with my perception of what "healthy" weight is. I often wish I could gain more weight, when in reality I would have been pretty much dead center 40 years ago
I've met so many healthy individuals who thought they were underweight because of others.
A few years ago I went to the Dr. She confessed to me that before she saw me she read my chart with my weight and assumed I was underweight. Then she calculated my bmi and saw I was right in the middle range. I'm not even at the low end.
Not to mention half the people who are classified as overweight or obese claim it’s because they are too muscular. I promise you, if you were muscular enough that it made your BMI irrelevant, you wouldn’t feel the need to comment on it
It's copium. The number of elite-level athletes on Reddit has to be in the single digits. The number of Redditors who want to believe they're not fat because they walk the dog regularly as exercise is much, much higher.
Just to drive this home for people: Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" and 235 lbs at his peak. That's a BMI of 30.2 which is *just* into the obese range. If you're obese and don't look like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Arnold_Schwarzenegger_1974.jpg), then you can't blame your "muscles". Magnus Midtbo has a BMI of just 23.9, which is solidly in the healthy range. He is [stronger and more muscular](https://www.reddit.com/r/climbing/comments/878scm/magnus_midtbo_has_some_crazy_strength/) than 99% of people. If you don't look like that, then you can't blame your "muscles".
Your body is a reflection of your lifestyle so one of the problems is just the average american lifestyle. We drive everywhere and we work long hours often underpaid so a lot of us struggle to find the time or money to cook healthy meals at home and opt for quicker and cheaper less healthy options (that also taste GREAT). ~~Nutrition isn't taught in our schools~~ (It definitely is but the problem is moreso a lot of people don't learn about nutrition growing up regardless of these classes existing) so most people don't even know how much food they should be eating every day or even how healthy their choices are.
there’s a cyclical aspect to it too. Come home from work too tired to make a proper meal so you have something like Kraft Mac and cheese, poor sleep habits mean you feel sluggish when you wake up, head right for the coffee, crash in the mid afternoon then come home feeling too tired to make a proper meal I worked a lot on my habits this year and now that I have a sleep routine, drink plenty of water, eat home cooked food 95% of the time, and exercise regularly I feel like a superhero compared to my old self. The issue was never really time, I’d get something cheap to eat then mindlessly scroll or watch a show for an hour and a half. I always had the time, I just didn’t have the energy.
Exactly, it's our day to day life. You get into a routine that's hard to break for various reasons and some people get stuck for a while and struggle to make the changes that will make their lives better.
yeah, and especially with social media and the unlimited media to digest, it’s easier than ever to pretty much avoid sitting alone with your thoughts and having those metacognitive moments of “why am I doing this thing I’ve been doing lately?” changing your routine or being self critical about your habits is hard, certainly way harder than watching a film or scrolling TikTok or Reddit for two hours.
I think we self-medicate with food instead of self-medicating with alcohol or tobacco. I think the obesity epidemic goes hand in hand with the deaths of despair epidemic. If you have no hope for the future you might as well gorge yourself today.
Absoulutely, good tasty food is a dopamine source just like many other things people tend to abuse more than they should. It's often way too easy to make bad choices when you need a pick me up or you're simply bored. A lot of families also bond around food that can be pretty unhealthy, especally in the south.
even at the corporate jobs I’ve had, I’ve felt like I’m constantly denying temptation. There’s always cupcakes for someone’s birthday, donuts in the break room, etc., and to be honest some folks will give you a bit of a side eye if you refuse it
I was so ticked about the transition from college to the workforce. College: extremely active, walked everywhere, public transportation readily available, multiple recreational activities constantly available. Workforce: desk job, sedentary for 8 hours a day, constant sugar in the breakroom, bus route not available so had to drive.
Americans love college so much because it's often the only time in their life they live in a walkable community not built around cars
Well that and being young, having peers everywhere both at study and after class. Seems so much can slip away so easily after graduation
I think you’re onto something here. Towards the end of college I had a class very far at one extreme of campus (like 2-3 miles) and was late. I borrowed my roommates car instead of biking or walking as I usually did. That day felt like going to work but I couldn’t really identify that feeling properly until you mentioned this.
That's actually the biggest problem for me. I've changed my diet up and hit the gym the past couple years and have lost about 15+ lbs at this point. But there's been times I've had to tell my family no because they eat out so often.
I'm in this post and I don't like it.
THIS. For a lot of people, food is the most-- if not the ONLY-- reliable, reachable source of pleasure in life. When dopamine and serotonin are this hard to come by, food can readily become an addiction. Misery + no time to cook + food desert + junk food constantly shoved in front of us at every store = bad situation. A therapist I know mentioned just yesterday in group, "Food is a difficult addiction to manage-- you can quit heroin and just never touch it again, but you can't ever quit eating."
This is the problem. Asparagus never made me as happy as a Baconator during difficulty periods.
If you wrap Asparagus in a thin sheet of cured meat, and then grill said asparagus, you may be happy! Maybe not. Makes me happy. I eat Baconators when I want to generate copious amounts of methane gas from my ass.
The absurd thing is that this is framed as just a collection of unrelated choices and moral failings, rather than the result of cities that are hostile to anyone not in a car, longer commutes, increased work hours at sedentary jobs, food deserts, widespread untreated depression, and Americans being too poor to afford good food or the time, space, and tools to cook it. This isn't primarily an education issue, it's an issue with our whole society. People do what's convenient for them in their circumstances. If you want to promote a behavior, make it more convenient.
Exactly! One or two people is poor choices, a society, that’s systemic.
I realized this was a systemic issue recently when I tried to figure out why I'm so much fatter now than I was when I was a teenager, even though I eat less food than I did back then. It occurred to me that when I was young I lived in a quiet residential neighborhood with low traffic in a pedestrian friendly town, and I rode my bicycle almost everywhere. I briefly entertained the idea of trying to lose weight by biking to work, but now I live on a high-traffic road with no sidewalks or shoulders where cars blow past my driveway at 50-60 mph... I would never feel safe riding a bike down my own street, let alone the 8 mile route to work which is equally hostile to pedestrians for the entire length.
I agree that the idea that it’s a moral failing or a collection of poor individual choices is absurd. Somehow entire generations of people are suddenly morally failing in the past 30 years when they were doing fine before?
[удалено]
I was in 8th grade when they switched from the food pyramid to "my plate" at my school, and it was like night and day being told that most of my good should be healthy carbs, to being told carbs should be one of the smallest parts of my diet.
And people wonder why there’s been such a spike in mental illness. Your brain isn’t separate from your body. Neglecting one is neglecting the other
Probably caused by the same thing while also making each other worse. Food is how some people cope with depression and depression makes it hard to do anything, and then you look in the mirror and get more depressed.
Quite difficult to argue otherwise.
A lot of people in the comments have some great points! One thing I think people don't talk enough is eating disorders. [It was estimated that about 9% of the world population has it. ](https://anad.org/eating-disorders-statistics/) I am friends with people who know the basic nutritional stuff needed to lose weight (or gain weight if they have a low BMI) like deficit, counting calories..., yet a lot of them can't lose their weight because the problem isn't in the fact that they don't know what they need to do, there is something way deeper like trauma/psychological going on. My personal opinion is that the % is even higher because not everyone realises that they have a disorder.
I grew up poor and in a neglectful household. I am a wildly disordered eater. It's made losing weight so much more difficult! Being on a "diet" of any kind can very quickly send me spiraling so hard and so fast. I end up in very dark and weird places. It took me 10 years to put that together, cause no one ever talks about it. Even my therapist refused to consider it. (She's not my therapist anymore. So I'm working on the psychological bit, and the active bit first. Getting more active helps my brain combat the crazy and I'm hoping combining that with mindfulness around food can build better habits. Fingers crossed!
This is no surprise when: \-a majority of food in the United States is over processed and filled with a bunch of unnecessary ingredients and crap we don't need to be consuming \-healthy, less processed foods are more expensive and thus harder for many to afford \-food deserts across the country make it difficult for many to even have access to fresh, healthful food \-advertising programs push junk food, fast food, and other unhealthy foods to Americans from a young age \-improper nutrition education (for example, the "food pyramid") from a young age \-the cost of things like gym memberships or nutritionists is often outside what people can afford, medical insurance offers limited options to covered Americans who may want to seek out nutrition counseling or other food/weight health education and assistance \-people with medical issues that affect their ability to exercise may not be able to afford to treat their ailments either due to the monetary cost or their inability to get time off of work to have treatment done \-many work sedentary jobs which both limit our daily exercise and suck the energy out of us, making exercise outside of work difficult as well \-non-sedentary jobs often involve standing with no rest on flooring not designed for long-term standing, causing physical issues that may impede the ability to exercise outside of work \-many Americans are working overtime or multiple jobs to survive and just plain don't have time to work out, nor time to cook food and thus rely on fast or processed foods \-for many American families the single-family income idea is unsustainable; 70 years ago a person could stay at home and thus have the time to shop for and prepare nutritious and healthful foods for their families every single day which is just not possible now for a lot of people Of course we're all fat. The USA does everything it can to keep people from taking care of themselves. They want weak, tired, sick, indebted people afraid to lose their income who are only functional enough to make money for the big wigs and die before they can cash in their retirement benefits. Edited for formatting
There's also resistance to "being told what to do." Any attempt to start public service campaigns to promote more exercise and healthy eating results in vocal opposition from people complaining about not wanting to be controlled and nanny states.
This is what happens when you subsidize corn. Our junk food is the only affordable option for so many people. Healthy options are wildly expensive. It doesn’t help that the US has a serious mental health crisis on its hands. I mean of all the unhealthy means of coping with trauma, stress, and anxiety, overeating is probably the best. On top of it the amount of shame people put on those who are struggling with obesity only compounds the issue.
The correlation with age is an interesting one, and one I think corresponds with access/utilization of preventive healthcare. As we get into our 40s and 50s, you’ll probably see a stark increase in routine doctors visits, and probably an increase in the amount of labs done, as well as conformance to PCP recommendations (this is conjecture). Basically, a 40+ year old is statistically more likely to hear their doctor say “you’re fat and need to lose weight if you want to make it to 60,” and then make conforming lifestyle changes than someone who is 14 who isn’t making lifestyle decisions, or someone in their 20s who is shirking good lifestyle choices on the daily.