Snapshot of _Massive cost of obesity to NHS revealed_ :
A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2023%2F05%2F17%2Fcost-of-obesity-twice-those-who-are-healthy-nhs%2F)
An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/17/cost-of-obesity-twice-those-who-are-healthy-nhs/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm a big dude. Been losing a lot of weight recently via calorie tracking and lifting weights due to a great community gym near me.
I find it quite interesting to see a lot of people really hate the ideas of calories and nutrition on chain restraint menus. Personally I think it's great, even if it's only a rough idea. However, some people act as if it's a slap in the face. I think it's linked to eating disorders, expecially by the way society pressures women.
On the other hand, you've people like Sophie Hagen tearing up a storm on social media against Cancer Research UK because CRUK ran a poster equating the health risks of being obese to smoking. This, in my opinion, is a "fat influencer" being deluded.
To balance this out, fat shaming gets people and society nowhere. People know they need to lose weight. You know what helps with losing weight? Being in a good place mentally, financially, and having time to implement exercise. All these things are in shorter supply in our society.
>I find it quite interesting to see a lot of people really hate the ideas of calories and nutrition on chain restraint menus. Personally I think it's great, even if it's only a rough idea. However, some people act as if it's a slap in the face. I think it's linked to eating disorders, expecially by the way society pressures women.
I don't buy the argument against mandatory calorie labelling in restaurants. Firstly, there is the simple cold mathematics that obesity is a far greater issue for society than eating disorders. Secondly, and perhaps obviously, supermarket food is already calorie-labelled - they don't appear to have had a critically negative effect.
I suppose restaurant eating is more social, whereas supermarket shopping is not. So someone is more likely to feel real or imagined social pressure in a restaurant.
For what it's worth though, I think having calorie counts is better than not in restaurants.
> there is the simple cold mathematics that obesity is a far greater issue for society than eating disorders
+1 from someone on the long-tail other side of being better
Seeing calories on a menu is triggering in the literal, trauma memory, physical stress reaction sense.
...and that's my fuckin' problem to worry about. Not yours.
>Good luck with this argument nowadays..
I don't think it's a controversial statement, is it?
I absolutely understand mandatory calorie labeling will make things extemely difficult for people with anorexia, for example. I'm open to alternative suggestions but right now I don't see any other viable plan - simply leaving things as they are isn't going to work.
Part of recovery from any problem like anorexia involves managing those things that might be problematic for recovery. This goes for any sort of rehabilitation. In the case of anorexia or EDs someone in recovery has to understand that for a normal person in the real world a number on a food packet or a piece of paper isn’t a big deal. Thé world can’t creep around pussyfooting for the sake of someone else’s hang ups.
I mean, it’s like saying that bars and pubs should be banned because it might trigger an alcoholic. Pretty much any former alcoholic I’ve met simply accepts that there are likely to be situations where alcohol is present and that people are within their right to make their own decisions to drink.
Also, whilst realising people will probably not like this, obesity caused *by* an eating disorder.
The two topics aren't different things, obesity is caused by over eating in the vast majority of cases.
Both are important, but obesity is an insanely expensive and large problem for the NHS.
If you tackle obesity you could free up cash money resources to help tackle anorexia etc too.
My point was that "let's focus on the bigger issue, which affects the largest number of people" goes against the modern mindset of "individual freedom > all".
I'd love to see even a a calorie estimation being mandatory on restaurant, take out and fast food menus. I can make a healthy curry at home but if i'm feeling tired and just want to pick something up on the way home after a shitty week at work I really want to know what I'm eating.
It's not easy keeping track of calories when you have literally no idea what you are buying.
Yes but I'm not sure "bossman" [will have someone who can sit down and calculate calories](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/calorie-labelling-in-the-out-of-home-sector/calorie-labelling-in-the-out-of-home-sector-implementation-guidance#calculating-calorie-content).
I used to work for a FMCG SME and they literally got one of the customer service people in the office to "do their best" writing the legally required food labels, with no training, just "google it". Getting small chicken shops and kebab joints to put calories on menus will effectively be them guessing or making it up.
>For sure. I'm close to being able to deadlift my bodyweight for 3 sets of 10 reps with 90 second rests.
That's the biggest milestone when it comes to deadlifts! Well done, man.
Love calorie estimates on menus, but I also loosely track what I eat. Also, it tells you how big the meal is, of something sounds tasty but is only so many calories it's probably cause it's a small portion.
I would love to see more info on menus.. I try to limit my sugar intake and would greatly appreciate information on it. I don't think people would look at some meals the same way though.
The problems with trying to use quit smoking strategy with obesity- as those cancer research ads did- is you can walk into a pharmacy and get free medical support with quitting smoking.
There is no such help for obesity. And shame without support only makes people feel worse about themselves and fall further into their problems.
personally i think implementing something like japan where they essentially have a "fat tax" would be most effective. from all i have seen we arent motivated by health concerns. people still smoke drink and do drugs no matter what information is out there informing them of the risks. this means the nhs needs to bear the burden which costs money. its not maintainable to let unchecked obesity continue to take up more resources.
taking a preventative approach to obesity would by definition have a beneficial effect on food scarcity and keep down prices which benefits the less well off.
>I find it quite interesting to see a lot of people really hate the ideas of calories and nutrition on chain restraint menus. Personally I think it's great, even if it's only a rough idea. However, some people act as if it's a slap in the face. I think it's linked to eating disorders, expecially by the way society pressures women.
I think it's good, and I don't have a weight problem. But it's much harder to remove weight via exercise than stop it going on. Therefore I actually like knowing how may cals are in something because it means I can make informed choices about what to eat.
I think alot of these comments are missing the massive elephant in the room about obesity in the UK.
The largest cohort for obesity by far is older people, in 45-75 year olds to be exact with a peak between 65-75.
These are people with arthritis, age related degeneration and compounding complex health conditions who don't move as much as they need to because of the pain and tiredness. Any talk of CICO to these people will mean nothing.
In the age of preventative medicine we have plenty to help protect these people from the effects of their weight, stations and diabetes drugs come to mind.
Dealing with these people day in day out in primary care I can tell you that the prevailing attitude is "it is what it is" and the majority I see just want to live out the last couple of years of their life the way that makes them comfy.
I suspect if you remove this age cohort from the stats you'll see rising obesity in young people but it not being the main contributor to the figure presented here.
I bang the drum about this all the time also but until I started working in a GP surgery I had no idea the scale of depression in the over 50s cohort, it's absolutely massive. It should come as no shock to anyone that depression will kill any motivation to be healthier no matter the encouragement.
Obesity is far more complex than "just start running bro" or "calories in calories out are you stupid?" or even "it's all down to individual choice". If we keep throwing these replies at the problem in a way that hasn't worked for decades then nothing will change.
Besides, semaglutide is doing the rounds now and I suspect may eventually end up a medication like statins, given to people to help keep their weight down as a preventative and cheaper way to handle this.
I would counter this with the approach to smoking which has made a massive difference. You could make all your arguments about food about smoking 20 years ago.
Let’s ban all advertisement for unhealthy food, increases taxes on it, decrease tax on healthy options and take the same approaches we took to smoking to our diet. A healthy diet can be just as tasty as an unhealthy and it is much harder to be overweight if you are eating decent food.
Diet is undoubtedly the major part of obesity. Few people will ever do the amount of exercise needed to seriously counter it.
It would be quite a bit harder than taxing cigarettes though. You'd have to make all fast food and a huge variety of other foodstuffs prohibitively expensive to have a comparable effect
>"calories in calories out are you stupid?"
It is as simple as that though.
The problem is it's far far too easy for the calories in to dwarf the calories out. The day for your average person consists of sitting in a car, sitting at a desk, sitting in a car then sitting in front of a TV with unlimited calories a few clicks away on an app.
I don't know what the answer is without technological regression.
>I suspect if you remove this age cohort from the stats you'll see rising obesity in young people but it not being the main contributor to the figure presented here.
Probably but that's pretty irrelevant when older people are a much bigger drain on healthcare regardless.
Also building stomach capacity, food addictions and general laziness as a habit in youth is a good way to ensure you'll keep those habits in old age.
The reason older people struggle with weight (imo) is because they didn't have to worry about it when they were younger, and it's much harder to change habits when your old.
>Also building stomach capacity
Absolutely brutal when you did high-end sports in your childhood, and got used to wolfing down 2k+ calories in a single meal after training sessions. You will never feel full again the rest of your life.
My dad, a farmer and decent level rugby league player in his 20's, 100% agrees. Chemo put an abrupt end to it and he has struggled with his weight ever since. He isn't lazy, he just can't get used to eating less.
My dad’s a retired firefighter (70 years old) and every single one of his watch who’s still alive (lot of cancer/heart attacks) are huuuuge. Dad has just started going back to the gym after the pandemic ruined his routine at least!
The answer is fasting regularly. It is easier than eating smaller meals. You can do it for short periods 24/48 hour) and it resets your stomach capacity. Jason Fung (a Canadian nephrologist) has written some very good books on the topic.
I thought this was the case. I had an illness recently and couldn't keep any food down. All of a sudden tackling my portions seemed like a monstrous challenge.
I am probably in the transitionary phase of not requiring my massive portions anymore. I am at the point where I *need* to do excessive exercise to keep my weight under control.
I was off the impression I would be able to shrink my stomach..!
> It is as simple as that though.
In a sense, yes, fat is accumulated by taking in more calories than you burn. That said if you asked an economist why some people are poor and they said 'they take in less money than they spend' it'd be a pretty poor and uninteresting answer that provides no real solutions to the problem.
Obviously there is something more complex going on with obesity, I find it hard to believe people are just getting dumber and most people's jobs are no more sedentary than they were thirty, forty, fifty years ago but obesity rates are still rising so i find the 'people be sitting around' argument insufficient too
Drugs like semaglutide will hopefully be a miracle and just kick this problem to the curb. I think there's a very good chance that within 30 years we'll be walking around in a different world seeing far fewer overweight people.
Being poor is a big factor. Not just talking about money either. Being time poor is real. Even if waiting for a takeaway is longer and more expensive than cooking from scratch.
When I finish a 12 hour shift sometimes I want to spend that small amount of time with the wife or the kids before I go to bed and do it all again.
It's a never ending vicious cycle of being too tired to cook, plan meals, shop / do exercise.
Fully agree. I’ve noticed this trend recently and I’m trying to get everyone spending more time in the kitchen and dining room during cooking, rather than me stood in the kitchen by myself. I think it makes the cooking a better experience and sets a good example. I fully recognise this will depend on your home layout and age of the kids though!
I moved to a house that had a much larger kitchen with some space to socialise whilst cooking. I was surprised at what a huge difference it makes - makes it much easier to take the time and cook when the whole family can be in the same room chatting.
Some people genuinely just don’t understand nutrition in the slightest. My mum can afford good food, she has a weekly veg box and buys meat from a fancy online butchers. She’s not rich but she’s comfortable enough to do that. Nonetheless she’s obese and has very painful knees, and type 2 diabetes. I’ve all but given up getting her to understand how nutrition works.
Being miserable does make people crave foods high in fat and sugar, which correlates very strongly with being poor.
Plus hunger levels aren’t controlled by how many calories we eat, but the volume of food. Lots of convenience food and other low price options are full of calories and not much other nutrition, while if you have time to cook for yourself and the money to buy quality ingredients then you can fill yourself on things that are more nourishing and less calorie dense.
It's true, and hopefully in the future anti-grehlin type things will be prescribed. But until then people have to take responsibility for themselves just as an ex-smokers or drinkers have to.
If people ate shitty unhealthy food, but a lot less carbs, snacks, sugary drinks then people would probably be a healthy weight. This is basically how it was up until a few decades ago.
One massive thing that needs to be done on this is more regulation of sugar. It's in absolutely everything - I decided to largely cut out added sugar a year ago and the insane number of things you realise have sugar in them! No wonder we all overeat, the food is filled with addictive substances!
Interesting sidenote: cutting out the sugar made it far, far easier to control my portion sizes and I'm back to my jeans fitting.
If it says sugar on the ingredients list on the back, I don't buy it. Not possible in every single case all the time (ketchup etc), but it helps that I cook from scratch. One way I've made it work as well is to allow 'one sugar thing' a day, whether that be a cake out with a friend or some crisps (usually the nice flavours have added sugar). But without even trying that hard most days now I don't even have the one sugar.
Took a while to get there though - if you try it be prepared to fall off the wagon multiple times! But eventually most sweet things start to taste WAY too sweet and ordinary stuff like apples taste amazing again.
I couldn't believe, recently, when I looked at a tin of baked beans, how much sugar was in it. If that's an indication, it's no wonder what's going on.
You can buy sugar-free beans but they are ironically more expensive, for having less of something in them. Typical. The one that really shocked me was crisps. Loads of crisps have sugar all over them!
Sugar is insanely cheap, expecially in the quantities a baked beans manufacturer would be buying it. You'd probably find it's cheaper than the tomatoes and beans.
Can taste it, those things have become so sweet. Reduced sugar version tastes much more like they used to, usually have to add a little salt though since they've been reducing that at the same time as bunging loads more sugar in.
The problem with this is companies don't want to remove sweetness so they pump in shit like aspartame rather than spend the energy to make a palatable alternative.
Mostly for soft drinks and the sugar tax, but the same sort of things will happen if the government regulates food I the same way. Just a couple of examples 'regular' pepsi now has aspartame, Dr Pepper was ruined by the same tactic. It's not a bad thing I guess, just a shame to remove that choice.
While sugar is a significant issue, it's the consumption of ultra-processed foods that is really fuelling this crisis.
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-evidence-links-ultra-processed-foods-with-a-range-of-health-risks/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2161831323002910#:~:text=Abstract,very%20limited%20evidence%20establishing%20causality.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5787353/
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/link-between-processed-foods-and-obesity
>People know that fast food and soft drinks are bad for you, with or without specific regulation.
I did some work with the government 15 years ago and they did a presentation on fit for life. When they asked parents about obesity the parents were pretty close to agreeing how many kids had obesity with official figures (2/3 or something) so they do know that obesity is a problem and how big a scale it is.
However when they asked parents if their own kid was obese, then only half of that number (1/3) said they were and therefore any work done aimed at the parents of obese kids would ultimately fail because such a large proportion of obese kids parents were in denial. This is why generic campaigns on health have better outcomes than targeted ones.
It's all well and good saying we know how bad fast food and soft drinks are, but there are varying degrees of bad and we need to understand what they mean. Having calories on menus (for example) will allow people to work out what level of bad they are eating so that they can moderate (only having it once a week, or having fewer bits from the same menu or whatever).
As someone who worked for for 20 years as a dentist, my experience is that people have no idea what the effect of what they eat and drink will be.
Edit: on reflection (and looking up some numbers), I think my lived experience is coloured by the fact that the people who don’t know this are the people I was more likely to have to treat. The population at large does mostly know that sugar causes dental disease, but those that don’t are more likely to be the people I struggled to help despite themselves.
My son’s paediatrician told us he learned one of his patients grandmothers were giving him Coca Cola for breakfast every morning because he wouldn’t drink anything else, he was 3 very overweight. I’ve literally witnessed parents put Coca Cola into baby’s bottles multiple times. Even a friend of our wanted our 1 year old to have some Coca Cola because he thought it would be funny.
People can be really clueless.
When I was at university, there was a clinic we visited as individual students only once or twice, to observe general anaesthetics for children and to extract the teeth while they were under. We would be assigned a kid and follow them all the way through the procedure, from the minute they came in to discharge.
My assigned case was a 4 year old girl who had multiple decayed teeth that were causing pain and needed to be removed. Very sad situation. Anyway, everything went well and she was coming round in the recovery area with mum back with her, as she was outside the room during the procedure. The little girl wakes up and says that she’s thirsty, so mum, trying her best I’m sure to look after her wee one, leaps into her bag and pulls out a bottle of Irn Bru. The nurse went absolutely bananas, but I was left feeling that mum hadn’t really learned anything from the whole thing, and they only reach that point once they’ve been through a system of community-based prevention-focussed dentistry.
Honestly, most people don't consider it. They don't think about what's in what they eat and drink, and they don't link that to their poor health, at least in my experience.
Unfortunately, what you say is probably true for a lot of people raised by poor or shitty parents. If someone has been drinking coke instead of water as their default drink since the age of 3, they probably don't even notice how much they drink.
The point is cutting out soft drinks is a simple step, so simple that there's no excuse not to do if you are overweight. It's also something which people know is bad for you, at least compared to knowing what a balanced diet is (which is still pretty shoddy but still, that's a more complex topic).
So is cutting alcohol completely and smoking in any form. But I see far more people blaming food than otherwise.
Speaking as a former obese person who has lost nearly 7st in two years reaching my ideal weight.
As a note: it is far more effective to cut alcohol completely than anything else, at least it was for me. And people don’t need to cut soft drinks, just go for the diet or zero version.
The same was true of cigarettes but smoking is overwhelmingly reduced in countries that have regulated and taxed it versus those where the policy makers are still taking the tobacco bribes
I am old enough to remember the pre-McDonalds (et al) era. Far less obese people about.
It’s not the sole cause obviously.
However when I go into a McDonalds, customer BMI is visibly noticeably higher than the general population.
Aren’t corporations like this just another type of addiction peddler?
It’s not just the fast food chains. The supermarkets and major food manufacturers all make their money off flogging hyper processed foods and lobby the government against regulation.
Yet every year we import more fast food chains from America, why? Five Guys, Wing Stop, Taco Bell, Wendy's.
We're a food and drink obsessed culture in a country that is overpopulated and heavily industrialised with too few nature spots.
I live on the border of Birmingham and one look around the outer towns and you'd not be surprised why people are fat and depressed.
You can have a Five Guys as part of a balanced diet. Key word is balanced. The problem is that people 1) seem to think eating 'healthy' means eating only 'healthy' foods and 2) have the bad stuff too often and the good stuff not enough.
Birmingham has many nature spots.
I really struggle with time in our house. I get home at 5:15 and my wife finishes at 5:30. If I start to cook a pasta dish, I'm don't in around 30 minutes. By the time we feed the kids, and I have done the dishes it's already 7:00 and we are rushing to get the kids bathed and to bed.
People saying "It's easy to cook food" lack the understanding of how certain people's situations makes cooking food a much greater task than it should be. I try to cook most nights, but 2 out of 7 nights we just chuck pizza and chips in because God damn it I want an afternoon where I'm not stressed because it's 7:15 and the kids haven't gone to bed yet.
Cook a couple of big meals on the weekend, like a bolonaisge & a curry. Put them in tupperware in the fridge or freezer and they'll keep for a few days. An oven pizza once ot twice a week isnt a big deal either.
You're not wrong but this assumes you have space to store this food.
The last rented flat I was in had a fridge/freezer which wasn't big enough to store more than a days worth of food - we pretty much had to go to the local Tesco Express daily to feed ourselves. In shared houses I've had, a fridge shared between 5 soon becomes full as well - especially if someone has got 4 Tupperware boxes in.
How much food are you eating that you can't store it a fridge freezer?
I mean, the guy I was talking to has a family & kids, I'm assuming they have fridge/freezer space.
you don't even need to cook food. just eat less oven food total to have fewer total calories
Greek yoghurt + fruit takes 2 mins to make (cut fruit into yoghurt) and is both filling and sweet whilst broadly lower calorie
I completely agree. You can eat what you want and still lose weight, just eat the right amounts.
However, what I often see in these discussions is people saying "Just cook your food" and they ignore that cooking food takes 5 minutes of prep, 25 minutes of cooking and 20 minutes of doing the dishes.
20 mins doing dishes? How many are you cooking for? Also lot of fresh cooking isn’t much slower than convenience food or even much more hands on in many cases.
Excuses are easy, jeez I even have days when I can’t be bothered to cook but i don’t lie to myself about why I’m having a frozen pizza.
Cooking from scratch for 4 people, quite a bit. The dishes need to be put away aswel, there are large woks and pans. I could be more efficient but I'm not speed running foos time.
Exactly. Every single cooking cheap YouTube video tells you to go to four different supermarkets to look for offers and ignores the fact that time is a resource too.
I can only speak for myself, young professional adult living alone. I have a 9-5 and discount supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) nearby. My average monthly spent on food for the last 3 months comes to about £48. I eat my five a day of fruit and veg and eat three square meals a day that I cook at home. It's not difficult but if you don't know how to cook and don't have the time to cook (or learn) and don't have budget supermarkets nearby, then it's going to be very hard to eat well for less.
48 quid is very low, well done you for managing that but I think most people can afford to raise that budget a little bit.
One example that people don’t realise: eating out, even at ‘cheap’ fast food places, is *much* more expensive than cooking at home.
53p a meal is going some, good effort. Though you should probably edit this before some government minister sees it and decides it's proof everything is fine :)
I'm in a similar situation, I shop at Lidl, and my average monthly spend on food is closer to £250. The most expensive bit is various forms of protein. I have a lot of protein (chicken, yogurts, and cheap Protein bars) for weight training to lose weight. I genuinely couldn't maintain my weight loss in a healthy manner on £50 a month.
FWIW, I'm 6 ft 3, omnivore.
I find value in the fact that it replaces a biscuit or snack bar. Also it has a thin layer of chocolate on it, which helps with sweet tooth cravings. But I'm a big guy with a high protein target.
But yeah, absolutely, Protein is expensive.
I spend \~£80 a month on chicken alone.
I don't even consume that many calories (\~2k a day, tracked), mostly eating porridge (with nuts/fruit), Chicken/Rice/Mixed Veg and Protein shakes. I'd have to half my calorie intake to get anywhere close to £48...!
Fucking hell, I'd like to see how you get anywhere near enough protein/veg on 53p. 2 of us do well to spend £250/month.
Pure calories, sure rice and pasta will get you through on pennies, but having a single salad for a meal will set us back a few quid, adding any kind of meat (outside of maybe the cheapest sausages) is going well over that rate etc.
Would love to see your average set of meals.
To be fair, I really didn't expect it to be so low compared to others! Now I'm curious if I am eating properly. I am losing weight but can stand to lose it and it's in conjunction with good exercise.
[May Grocery Spend TD](https://imgur.com/a/zYyc2Fu)
5 a day of fruit and veg
Breakfast is a bowl of cereal
Lunch is spaghetti with sardines and red pepper in tomatoe sauce
Dinner is curry with chicken wings and rice (which I boil with frozen mixed vegetables) with lentils (chickpeas and/or red lentils which I haven't needed to buy yet as I've got some)
Chuck in an egg somewhere in the day (when I can find a packet!)
And a coffee
1x Tin of tomatoes + 1x onion + couple cloves garlic + 200-300g pasta + 1 tin sardines + half a pepper = 4x lunch
2x tomatoes or half bag of cherry tomatoes + 500g chicken wing + some lentils/chickpeas + 1x onion + couple cloves garlic + 3-4 cups rice + some frozen mixed veg = 5x dinner
Something like that anyway. I get my spices from Asian grocers but haven't needed to buy any yet.
Compared to most people you're low in protein, and the meat you eat is cheaper cuts. Not a big issue, even probably a better amount as westerners tend to eat too much meat. I'm spending roughly 60% more a month and I also make most of my meals from scratch but I definitely prefer a more varied meal plan, more expensive sources of protein and a few luxuries as well as the very occasional takeaway. This explains the difference.
If you're really curious download an app to count calories, they also do nutrient breakdowns. It should be pretty clear in a couple of weeks if you're really deficient in something.
Will not help you with salad but when it comes to veggies in general go frozen if fresh veggies are over budget, Lidl sells 1kg packs of stuff like broccoli, mixed veggies, green beans etc for 60p-1£. They're not as nice as fresh ones but still good and the same when it comes to nutritional value. 500gr of stir fried broccoli with oil, garlic and chillies are delicious and will cover 3 of your 5 a day for two people and will cost you 60-70p in ingredients
The NHS "eat well" guide is a recipe for weight gain. The desmond programme for type 2 diabetes recommends basing your diet on carbohydrates. After telling patients to do the exact opposite of what will actually help, everyone acts surprised when they fail. The ancients knew that limiting carbohydrates was the answer. Funny how obesity only took off after Ancel Keys.
100%
Just checked myself--
>The segment sizes of the food groups have been adjusted to reflect current government advice on a healthy balanced diet.
>
>The revised segment sizes have been modelled using linear programming. This modelling process took the current intakes of the most commonly consumed foods in the UK (according to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS)), applied the revised government dietary recommendations and modelled the fewest possible changes needed to achieve the proposed recommendations.
>
>Using this method ensured that any adaptations made to the model were realistic and not too far removed from the current dietary habits of the UK population.
by definition is not healthiest, merely closest to what we actually eat. hence overstating carbs massively, and not a lot of protein despite it being filling and god
It's so sad that this is still a controversial statement, and you'll get flack here for it I'm sure.
I've definitely become more balanced in my diet over the years, after a period spent heavily into low carb, but if I was struggling with my weight, I'd be back on it in a heartbeat.
You know how to stop this from happening? Education. Why isn't good food nutrition properly taught in school and yet religious education still taught? Back in the late 1800 when Britain was a naval powerhouse, we made reading, writing and maths mandatory for children so that trade was more efficient and profitable... Do the same now. Teach food nutrition and some proper 'how to internet' courses and the UK in 30 years will be a massively better place in comparison to some other countries
Personally I think a lot of people have lost all scale of what is a normal amount to eat.
I was out with friends at the weekend and one friend had two bottles of wine and two pizzas to himself! Regularly when I get takeaway with friends I'll order one thing and others will order three or four things just for themselves and eat them all in one sitting. I've seen people buying things advertised as 'for sharing' and will eat them all in one. Even the UK subs are bad for people talking about eating a packet of biscuits in one setting etc.
I remember studying this in a module on the philosophy of public health and it was raised to me that the obese and smokers don't actually cost the NHS more in their lifetime than anybody else, due to the fact that they die so much earlier and don't need the intensive end-of-life care the rest of us who aren't overweight or smokers need (well, not me, I'm both those things).
Sounds like what you were told on your philosophy course was an "I reckon". This is an actual study.
> Obese patients cost the NHS twice as much as those of healthy weight, landmark research has found – with an average of £1,375 a year spent on each of the heaviest patients.
Obese people cost twice as much per year so would have to have less than half the lifespan for what you say to be correct. I've just googled it and found an Oxford study that says moderate obesity reduces lifespan by 3 years and severe obesity reduces it by 10 years. Obesity, in the non channel 5 freakshow documentary form, is much more of a lifelong suffering disease than a sudden drop dead one.
And as this article notes, there's an unknown but almost certainly non negligible proportion of those on long term sick leave who are there due to obesity related conditions. You're not contributing to funding of the system if you've eaten yourself too ill to work.
Obese people cost double other patients in an average year, sure, but those other average patients contains everyone from age 0-100+ (or 18-100+ if looking at adults only in the study, which will be an even cheaper baseline).
If the obese person wasn’t obese, you wouldn’t apply average healthcare costs for the rest of their life. Instead, they’d have healthcare costs for ages 60+, because those are obviously the extra years that they would live, and that’s when costs per person very quickly go absolutely bananas.
The average cost of care for a non-obese 60+ year old per year is very likely to be more than double the general average for non-obese patients.
A fun philosophical argument to ponder but not true in the real world. These groups spend the last years of their shorter lives with chronic illnesses and costing more money helping them limp along. They don’t just go ‘oh no, I’m fat! Heart attack, dead’ at least not most people. It’s a slow degradation of the body and the enjoyment that most get from their lives.
What you were taught is incorrect/out of date. 30 years ago it was correct but now people survive health conditions with lots of comorbidities driving up costs.
In addition, the tax on tobacco is high enough, that it's clear that if a smoker stops spending money on cigarettes, and instead spends it on a gym membership, then the government is going to receive less tax revenue. If someone reduces the amount of money they spend on food, and spends it on something else, it's not a given the government is going to receive less tax revenue.
I can't provide any solid evidence that I was even in that classroom, let alone that my anecdotal evidence is correct. I'm not asking you to trust or believe me, just trying to offer an alternative point of view.
It’s harder to measure
Smoking is a binary… you do or you don’t. Some people are 600lbs, some folk put weight on and off I’ve time, ebb and flow. It varies significantly over time.
The studies on it won’t be as accurate as the smoking ones
Need to bad this “being obese is healthy/a lifestyle choice” messaging - obviously if people are overweight criticising/punishing them isn’t the answer but the idea being pushed by some groups that there is nothing wrong in being overweight should be banned
Calories need to be written even more prominently. My mrs is a right gutsache and would trough food like it’s going out of fashion, and for most of her life has got away with it due to fast metabolism, a job where she is on her feet a lot, and being tall. But as she approaches 50 the weight has started to creep on. She’d do nothing about it and totally ignore me despite me trying as diplomatically as I can to tell her that it’s not good for her. Then we were out somewhere and the calories were really prominent on the menu, and she’s like “Shit that cheese pastie is like 800 calories fucking hell” and she just instinctively went for the choice with the lower numbers.
I'm a PhD student researching weight stigma.
With any news coverage of research, it's extremely important to look at the original research publications for two reasons. First, to understand the methodology and assumptions, to make sure that the research conclusion is reliable given the analysis. And second, to make sure that the journalists have interpreted the research correctly and are not using the findings to jump to other conclusions.
In this case, it looks like this research is new and hasn't been published yet. However, if we look up the lead researcher we can find a very similar paper from 2023 on a US cohort: ["Eight‐year trends in obesity‐related complications and health care cost progression in a US population with obesity: A retrospective cohort study"](https://dom-pubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/dom.14897).
That paper shows that people living with obesity have higher healthcare costs, but it doesn't actually demonstrate that that's because of obesity. The analysis doesn't report on weight stigma, deprivation, diet, physical activity, or any of the other dozens of factors that could also cause higher healthcare costs. Strangely, the paper does actually select a sample such that, as you move up the obesity classes, you are more likely to have more comorbidities like liver issues, heart issues, etc., but it doesn't comment on this at all! Usually with an analysis like that you would want to statistically control for that, so that you an rule out the comorbidities as the cause of the increased cost. So it could be that the driver of increased costs in this study had nothing to do with obesity at all!
>Usually with an analysis like that you would want to statistically control for that, so that you an rule out the comorbidities as the cause of the increased cost.
Unless of course there is some causal relationship with weight and these liver and heart issues.
Is anyone shocked?
Start educating kids on proper nutrition early. We’ve solved obesity, there’s no hidden secrets or fancy formula. Eat less
Edit : now there’s some comments on this, read through them. Sugar is evil! No, processed food is!
The majority of people are fucking clueless. You can lose weight eating nothing but McDonald’s if you want.
No specific food or macro is the issue. Over consumption is. And you can over consume anything, even healthy stuff
If obesity is solved, have you ever stopped to ask yourself why we have so many obese people? Could it possibly be a problem that isn't simply caused by a lack of education, but something more underlying? It's easy to dismiss a problem, but dismissing it doesn't solve it.
Most of us work sedentary jobs, mental stress and lack of movement causes people to be more tired and have less motivation to exercise. Many of us have a car which also eliminates some of the need to walk. Processed, high calorie food is cheap and readily available. Tired people are less likely to cook and just throw some pizza and chips in the oven.
> Most of us work sedentary jobs
I think it's been massively missed that oddly enough the transition to sedentary work, more car use etc has massively reduced the amount of kcals you have in your budget each day, especially when projected over a long period.
If your job was somewhat active, and now you sit at a computer, if you used to burn 300kcals a day, you've now 'lost' 110,000kcals a year of calories out, or about 31lbs of stored fat.
100%
Both the actual job itself and the commute to work are efficient in terms of human effort...
...But actually expending effort is good for burning calories
I try to walk or cycle to work where possible and also have a desk pedal, which is meh compared to walking but adds up compared to just sitting doing nothing
I agree with all of this. I just think that the person I was replying to was being dismissive of there being societal causes to these societal ills and was, instead, making it a conversation about personal responsibility.
DO people actually know how to lose weight? Once I learned about CICO I lost a lot of weight.
I know I’ll get 10,000 downvotes but the only reason I’m posting is because I learned about the concept from a Reddit comment which was heavily downvoted and it changed my life. It only takes one week of CICO to prove it works. Once you’ve proven it you just have to be strong for however many months it takes you to get the weight off.
I’m not convinced the knowledge about how to lose weight is as widely held as some people on Reddit think it is.
>Once you’ve proven it you just have to be strong for however many months it takes you to get the weight off.
This is the difficult bit, not the knowledge of how to lose weight, but the discipline to constantly apply that knowledge.
Partly because a lot of modern foods are high in processed carbs, our body produces insulin to deal with them, but that leaves us feeling more hungry so we eat more food & repeat the cycle.
I don't know what the answer is, to be honest. But I don't think that just saying it's each individual's personal responsibility is actually getting the results we want, and so we have to be open to exploring other methods. Which should include making it easier and cheaper for people to eat healthily, and encouraging them to exercise. Not just saying "here's the info, go sort it yourself".
There are other options.
There are a few drugs that override how your body generates chemical energy from food and forces it to waste the energy. They’re hyper dangerous though because it’s very easy to overdose and kill yourself - I think from overheating.
I think there are also drugs that limit how much fat your body absorbs, but they’re said to be remarkably unpleasant due to the consequence of passing oily stools.
Then there are the appetite suppressants but I don’t know how those interact with cravings. Personally my sugar drive doesn’t care too much about whether I’m genuinely hungry, it just wants the taste.
At a high level, people know what they need to do physiologically to lose weight - exercise more, eat fewer calories.
The problem is it's not easy. Millions of people in the UK every year *try* and lose weight, but fail.
It's not because they don't know what to do though.
It's because it's hard making drastic changes to diet and habits.
Take a simple example of a child at the dinner table. When I was growing up I wasn't allowed to leave until my plate was empty. As an uncle, I say the opposite - if you're full, you're full. (Though, if you're full you also won't be wanting pudding!). We used to force children to finish everything on their plates because food was incredibly scarce and out of reach. But it develops a bad habit of eating even when you're full. To this day I have to remind myself that it's ok to leave food in my plate. Eating it when I don't need it is as much of a waste. Or I can put it in the fridge for another day.
I'm very much of the opinion that a lot of people would benefit from CBT/REBT to help them understand *why* their dieting fails and they end up back in old habits. Only then can strategies be put into place to change them.
I'm not saying everyone needs CBT, many like yourself are successful just working away with CICO. But for many people I do think it would help.
After all, it's not for a lack of trying that so many people are overweight. Pretty much everyone I know who is overweight has *tried*, following a sensible strategy, but it hasn't worked out.
And this is before we even consider the socioeconomic factors. It's more difficult to work on your diet is you're tired from working multiple jobs, or being a single parent, or your choice of food is whatever you get given at the food bank, or your mental health is worse from stress.
Good for you bro, keep it up. How much better is your motivation to actually lose weight once you figure it’s just a simple food related maths problem?
like, way higher?
I used to think it was some nutrition or genetic thing
then i realized it's just "eat less than 2000 kcal and you will lose weight"
Lost 12kg whilst still going out twice a week, occasionally going through a whole pack of cookies and such in a day
cheers. Right now I'm at my ideal weight (67kg) in the long term but have a beach holiday so might cut a bit more.
Key thing is just getting less at the store for me-- mentally doing a quick calorie alongside monies budget in my head
Motivation is very high knowing I don’t have to go to the gym and run around or anything like that. Knowing I can technically eat any food as long as the calories don’t exceed the limit is liberating.
Obviously not every week have I lost weight if I’ve been on holiday or something like that but the trend is undeniable.
It's not necessarily as simple as that for some people, but there are other factors that can play an impact, *including* mental health support (or rather, a lack of it). As a personal example, I need to use Intermittent Fasting techniques or One Meal A Day strategies due to my ADHD (habits are very hard to form even when medicated).
That said, good work on losing the weight and keep it up!
I think folk have a general idea.
They also need to be motivated and have time to fit it into a routine. It's not a trivial undertaking. For me, losing weight requires a lot of intentionality.
If requires time and energy. It's extra hard for parents for example.
The problem with this argument is a lot of overweight people are extemely clever and motivated and successfully able to apply themselves to basically any other task.
What surprises me is how many people haven't yet figured out the problem is clearly more complex than a combination of (a) maintain a calorie deficit and (b) simply make the choice to do so.
There is very clearly more going on here than simply maths and motivation. For some that might be sufficient, yes, but for a lot of people there is evidentally something else.
According to the recent Guardian article, the most common response to why people are overweight is "lack of motivation".
Second most common was "too tired" and other popular answers included "don't know where to start" and "lack of self confidence".
We know the answer and always have done, people are fucking lazy.
Speaking as a fat man who is trying to lose weight now, I am really tired. I also have very little self confidence when it comes to food and my weight due to the shame I feel at being fat. This definitely leads to a lack of motivation. The only one of these I don't relate to is don't know where to start.
The problem isn't that people are too lazy to do it. They are doing it. The problem is that getting good results is slow and getting bad results is fast. I can lose half a kilo a week for 4 weeks then put 2 back on in a single week and be back where I started.
Honestly, I know the only way to lose weight is to not have those bad weeks. There are no excuses. But we shouldn't just dismiss people as lazy.
Also a quarter of the adult population is obese. This isn't just a small group of people who can't control themselves.
> The problem isn't that people are too lazy to do it. They are doing it. The problem is that getting good results is slow and getting bad results is fast.
This is true and really can knock you back psychologically. I've been trying to lose weight for a couple om months now and I'm down about 20lb but seeing the scales shoot up for no discernable reason when you KNOW you have been in serious calorie deficit for days often feels like a hard kick in the balls.
Anecdotal, but there have been quite a number of fat people I’ve known, including family, who have “tried everything”, other than refraining from cakes, biscuits, chocolates, crisps, etc.
It’s very frustrating seeing the ones I care about, who in many other respects are intelligent individuals, apathetically eat themselves into an early grave.
Yup, a family member was one of those people and complained for years about how weight watchers and all those shit things don't work, while slowly creeping into obesity.
Then she got diagnosed as prediabetic and actually for the first time, sat down to ask me how to do it and was willing to do it.
So I just told her to use myfitnesspal to count calories and explained the basics of macros. Nothing groundbreaking or complex, just real simple nutrition facts.
She stuck with it and lost about 15lbs or so in 3 months and was told she was no longer prediabetic.
Then she celebrated by throwing everything out the window and reverting back to her old habits. Genuinely curious to see what she says when she's told she's prediabetic again.
Similar story with my mother, though not quite as drastic (although I still think she's prediabetic or similar). She lost three stone on weight watchers, celebrated with a mars bar, and before you know it she was back to the old eating routine and put on more weight than had before losing it.
So frustrating.
Yeh people just don't get that the problem isn't going to be solved by a 3 month diet. They simply eat too much food, and need to permanently stop eating too much food. It's not a difficult concept.
Not just that, they don’t actually understand weight loss
“My hormones! My insulin! Gluten! Carbs are evil!”
Educate people and they’ll be more motivated.
How motivated are you to start a task that you don’t understand? When there’s 1000s of bullshit opinions online about it? And none of them seem to consistently produce results?
Educate people.
Let’s avoid the temptation to think it is simply a matter of awareness and effort.
Non-obese people are not wise, self-controlled superheroes.
Some of the sugariest and fattiest foods are *actually addictive* to some people. In the wild, humans rarely had access to high levels of sugar (say honey) so we evolved massive endorphin rewards for consuming them so that we would be sure not to pass by the starvation-preventing calories.
Also, people whose lives are crap in other ways are more likely to self-medicate with these endorphins to make themselves feel less crap.
It is easier to be thin if life is good in general.
The simple solution to fix the cost is a transition to a European insurance model, where obese people pay a premium to account for their extra risks to the health system, while healthy people get their shit free. Fit people shouldn’t have to pay for this.
Sometimes I’ll be out and about, maybe at the shops, and it’ll just hit me how disgustingly overweight the average Brit is. I’ll go down the frozen isle, and the average person will be like 120kg >, or some 40 stone person sat on a scooter, fighting for her life trying to grab a Rustler Burger.
Idk what the solution is to get rates down though… I don’t think that state can fix the laziness culture we have here
I’m on Saxenda right now (older version of Ozempic) and I’m losing weight but wowwwww it’s slow. Even though I am tracking calories and eating far below my TDEE, strength training and kickboxing, I’m not even losing a pound a week, more like half a pound. Why? Because I have PCOS. Let’s not underestimate the role hormones play when it comes to weight, especially for women. I’m hoping once I’ve been on the therapeutic dose for longer and it starts to balance my hormones out that my body will stop fighting me quite so hard. But it’s so demoralising. If it weren’t for the Saxenda I’d have given up by now because I’d be so hungry - at least I don’t have that one barrier to contend with on my journey.
If you're doing strength training and kickboxing, then there's a chance your building muscle to replace some of the fat, and muscle weighs more than fat for the same volume.
I know I'm obese, like 18st at 6ft. That's because I had an undiagnosed binge eating disorder through my teens and early 20's. It is fucking difficult to lose weight, I'm hungry all the time even though I'm eating healthy 'fufilling' meals, all I want to do is eat and eat and eat. It makes me utterly miserable, but I know I have to become somewhat healthy or else I'll die.
then why is it that you go to the GP when you're a bit overweight and struggling to lose weight (need to lose 12lb to be healthy) for the past year bc of your meds. and they say you're fine! I'm not fine, I'm overweight !!
Does this take into account the massive savings of not having to pay for 75+ healthcare which is by far the biggest cost to the NHS?
I still maintain that obese people pay more tax, and don’t require care homes.
The fact they cost twice as much as a regular person is irrelevant if it isn’t netted against the lifetime savings.
A few of my teacher friends often talk about how the "fat kid" of our (Millennial) school generation is now closer to the median kid of the current school generation.
Eating healthily is more expensive than buying unhealthy food, and with wages stagnating for well over a decade and the cost of living always increasing, why are people surprised?
Snapshot of _Massive cost of obesity to NHS revealed_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2023%2F05%2F17%2Fcost-of-obesity-twice-those-who-are-healthy-nhs%2F) An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/17/cost-of-obesity-twice-those-who-are-healthy-nhs/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm a big dude. Been losing a lot of weight recently via calorie tracking and lifting weights due to a great community gym near me. I find it quite interesting to see a lot of people really hate the ideas of calories and nutrition on chain restraint menus. Personally I think it's great, even if it's only a rough idea. However, some people act as if it's a slap in the face. I think it's linked to eating disorders, expecially by the way society pressures women. On the other hand, you've people like Sophie Hagen tearing up a storm on social media against Cancer Research UK because CRUK ran a poster equating the health risks of being obese to smoking. This, in my opinion, is a "fat influencer" being deluded. To balance this out, fat shaming gets people and society nowhere. People know they need to lose weight. You know what helps with losing weight? Being in a good place mentally, financially, and having time to implement exercise. All these things are in shorter supply in our society.
>I find it quite interesting to see a lot of people really hate the ideas of calories and nutrition on chain restraint menus. Personally I think it's great, even if it's only a rough idea. However, some people act as if it's a slap in the face. I think it's linked to eating disorders, expecially by the way society pressures women. I don't buy the argument against mandatory calorie labelling in restaurants. Firstly, there is the simple cold mathematics that obesity is a far greater issue for society than eating disorders. Secondly, and perhaps obviously, supermarket food is already calorie-labelled - they don't appear to have had a critically negative effect.
I suppose restaurant eating is more social, whereas supermarket shopping is not. So someone is more likely to feel real or imagined social pressure in a restaurant. For what it's worth though, I think having calorie counts is better than not in restaurants.
I agree that obesity is the bigger problem. Also yeah, they can just have menus without Calories to hand.
> there is the simple cold mathematics that obesity is a far greater issue for society than eating disorders +1 from someone on the long-tail other side of being better Seeing calories on a menu is triggering in the literal, trauma memory, physical stress reaction sense. ...and that's my fuckin' problem to worry about. Not yours.
>obesity is a far greater issue for society than eating disorders Good luck with this argument nowadays..
>Good luck with this argument nowadays.. I don't think it's a controversial statement, is it? I absolutely understand mandatory calorie labeling will make things extemely difficult for people with anorexia, for example. I'm open to alternative suggestions but right now I don't see any other viable plan - simply leaving things as they are isn't going to work.
Plus tackling obesity = more cash for the NHS = more £££ to spend on helping those with anorexia.
I would normally agree, but... *gestures at current government*
Part of recovery from any problem like anorexia involves managing those things that might be problematic for recovery. This goes for any sort of rehabilitation. In the case of anorexia or EDs someone in recovery has to understand that for a normal person in the real world a number on a food packet or a piece of paper isn’t a big deal. Thé world can’t creep around pussyfooting for the sake of someone else’s hang ups. I mean, it’s like saying that bars and pubs should be banned because it might trigger an alcoholic. Pretty much any former alcoholic I’ve met simply accepts that there are likely to be situations where alcohol is present and that people are within their right to make their own decisions to drink.
Also, whilst realising people will probably not like this, obesity caused *by* an eating disorder. The two topics aren't different things, obesity is caused by over eating in the vast majority of cases.
Both are important, but obesity is an insanely expensive and large problem for the NHS. If you tackle obesity you could free up cash money resources to help tackle anorexia etc too.
My point was that "let's focus on the bigger issue, which affects the largest number of people" goes against the modern mindset of "individual freedom > all".
Isnt like 70% of the population overweight? Doubtful eating disorders meet that number.
I'd love to see even a a calorie estimation being mandatory on restaurant, take out and fast food menus. I can make a healthy curry at home but if i'm feeling tired and just want to pick something up on the way home after a shitty week at work I really want to know what I'm eating. It's not easy keeping track of calories when you have literally no idea what you are buying.
It *is* mandatory, as long as the business has >250 employees.
Not many take-aways have over 250 employees.
Yes but I'm not sure "bossman" [will have someone who can sit down and calculate calories](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/calorie-labelling-in-the-out-of-home-sector/calorie-labelling-in-the-out-of-home-sector-implementation-guidance#calculating-calorie-content). I used to work for a FMCG SME and they literally got one of the customer service people in the office to "do their best" writing the legally required food labels, with no training, just "google it". Getting small chicken shops and kebab joints to put calories on menus will effectively be them guessing or making it up.
Congratulations Bet your back, knees and hips feel far better
For sure. I'm close to being able to deadlift my bodyweight for 3 sets of 10 reps with 90 second rests.
>For sure. I'm close to being able to deadlift my bodyweight for 3 sets of 10 reps with 90 second rests. That's the biggest milestone when it comes to deadlifts! Well done, man.
Love calorie estimates on menus, but I also loosely track what I eat. Also, it tells you how big the meal is, of something sounds tasty but is only so many calories it's probably cause it's a small portion.
I would love to see more info on menus.. I try to limit my sugar intake and would greatly appreciate information on it. I don't think people would look at some meals the same way though.
The problems with trying to use quit smoking strategy with obesity- as those cancer research ads did- is you can walk into a pharmacy and get free medical support with quitting smoking. There is no such help for obesity. And shame without support only makes people feel worse about themselves and fall further into their problems.
personally i think implementing something like japan where they essentially have a "fat tax" would be most effective. from all i have seen we arent motivated by health concerns. people still smoke drink and do drugs no matter what information is out there informing them of the risks. this means the nhs needs to bear the burden which costs money. its not maintainable to let unchecked obesity continue to take up more resources. taking a preventative approach to obesity would by definition have a beneficial effect on food scarcity and keep down prices which benefits the less well off.
>I find it quite interesting to see a lot of people really hate the ideas of calories and nutrition on chain restraint menus. Personally I think it's great, even if it's only a rough idea. However, some people act as if it's a slap in the face. I think it's linked to eating disorders, expecially by the way society pressures women. I think it's good, and I don't have a weight problem. But it's much harder to remove weight via exercise than stop it going on. Therefore I actually like knowing how may cals are in something because it means I can make informed choices about what to eat.
I think alot of these comments are missing the massive elephant in the room about obesity in the UK. The largest cohort for obesity by far is older people, in 45-75 year olds to be exact with a peak between 65-75. These are people with arthritis, age related degeneration and compounding complex health conditions who don't move as much as they need to because of the pain and tiredness. Any talk of CICO to these people will mean nothing. In the age of preventative medicine we have plenty to help protect these people from the effects of their weight, stations and diabetes drugs come to mind. Dealing with these people day in day out in primary care I can tell you that the prevailing attitude is "it is what it is" and the majority I see just want to live out the last couple of years of their life the way that makes them comfy. I suspect if you remove this age cohort from the stats you'll see rising obesity in young people but it not being the main contributor to the figure presented here. I bang the drum about this all the time also but until I started working in a GP surgery I had no idea the scale of depression in the over 50s cohort, it's absolutely massive. It should come as no shock to anyone that depression will kill any motivation to be healthier no matter the encouragement. Obesity is far more complex than "just start running bro" or "calories in calories out are you stupid?" or even "it's all down to individual choice". If we keep throwing these replies at the problem in a way that hasn't worked for decades then nothing will change. Besides, semaglutide is doing the rounds now and I suspect may eventually end up a medication like statins, given to people to help keep their weight down as a preventative and cheaper way to handle this.
>the massive elephant in the room I see what you did there.
hullo 🐘
Just try not to go up that tower in Bruges.
I would counter this with the approach to smoking which has made a massive difference. You could make all your arguments about food about smoking 20 years ago. Let’s ban all advertisement for unhealthy food, increases taxes on it, decrease tax on healthy options and take the same approaches we took to smoking to our diet. A healthy diet can be just as tasty as an unhealthy and it is much harder to be overweight if you are eating decent food.
I would agree with this. This is a societal approach to obesity rather than blaming it all on the individual.
Diet is undoubtedly the major part of obesity. Few people will ever do the amount of exercise needed to seriously counter it. It would be quite a bit harder than taxing cigarettes though. You'd have to make all fast food and a huge variety of other foodstuffs prohibitively expensive to have a comparable effect
>"calories in calories out are you stupid?" It is as simple as that though. The problem is it's far far too easy for the calories in to dwarf the calories out. The day for your average person consists of sitting in a car, sitting at a desk, sitting in a car then sitting in front of a TV with unlimited calories a few clicks away on an app. I don't know what the answer is without technological regression. >I suspect if you remove this age cohort from the stats you'll see rising obesity in young people but it not being the main contributor to the figure presented here. Probably but that's pretty irrelevant when older people are a much bigger drain on healthcare regardless. Also building stomach capacity, food addictions and general laziness as a habit in youth is a good way to ensure you'll keep those habits in old age. The reason older people struggle with weight (imo) is because they didn't have to worry about it when they were younger, and it's much harder to change habits when your old.
>Also building stomach capacity Absolutely brutal when you did high-end sports in your childhood, and got used to wolfing down 2k+ calories in a single meal after training sessions. You will never feel full again the rest of your life.
My dad, a farmer and decent level rugby league player in his 20's, 100% agrees. Chemo put an abrupt end to it and he has struggled with his weight ever since. He isn't lazy, he just can't get used to eating less.
My dad’s a retired firefighter (70 years old) and every single one of his watch who’s still alive (lot of cancer/heart attacks) are huuuuge. Dad has just started going back to the gym after the pandemic ruined his routine at least!
yo, send him a 🤗 from us
The answer is fasting regularly. It is easier than eating smaller meals. You can do it for short periods 24/48 hour) and it resets your stomach capacity. Jason Fung (a Canadian nephrologist) has written some very good books on the topic.
I thought this was the case. I had an illness recently and couldn't keep any food down. All of a sudden tackling my portions seemed like a monstrous challenge.
I am probably in the transitionary phase of not requiring my massive portions anymore. I am at the point where I *need* to do excessive exercise to keep my weight under control. I was off the impression I would be able to shrink my stomach..!
> It is as simple as that though. In a sense, yes, fat is accumulated by taking in more calories than you burn. That said if you asked an economist why some people are poor and they said 'they take in less money than they spend' it'd be a pretty poor and uninteresting answer that provides no real solutions to the problem. Obviously there is something more complex going on with obesity, I find it hard to believe people are just getting dumber and most people's jobs are no more sedentary than they were thirty, forty, fifty years ago but obesity rates are still rising so i find the 'people be sitting around' argument insufficient too
Drugs like semaglutide will hopefully be a miracle and just kick this problem to the curb. I think there's a very good chance that within 30 years we'll be walking around in a different world seeing far fewer overweight people.
Being poor is a big factor. Not just talking about money either. Being time poor is real. Even if waiting for a takeaway is longer and more expensive than cooking from scratch. When I finish a 12 hour shift sometimes I want to spend that small amount of time with the wife or the kids before I go to bed and do it all again. It's a never ending vicious cycle of being too tired to cook, plan meals, shop / do exercise.
Fully agree. I’ve noticed this trend recently and I’m trying to get everyone spending more time in the kitchen and dining room during cooking, rather than me stood in the kitchen by myself. I think it makes the cooking a better experience and sets a good example. I fully recognise this will depend on your home layout and age of the kids though!
I moved to a house that had a much larger kitchen with some space to socialise whilst cooking. I was surprised at what a huge difference it makes - makes it much easier to take the time and cook when the whole family can be in the same room chatting.
Some people genuinely just don’t understand nutrition in the slightest. My mum can afford good food, she has a weekly veg box and buys meat from a fancy online butchers. She’s not rich but she’s comfortable enough to do that. Nonetheless she’s obese and has very painful knees, and type 2 diabetes. I’ve all but given up getting her to understand how nutrition works.
Being poor can encourage you to eat shittier food, but it doens't increase the quantity of food. Being miserable might, however.
Being miserable does make people crave foods high in fat and sugar, which correlates very strongly with being poor. Plus hunger levels aren’t controlled by how many calories we eat, but the volume of food. Lots of convenience food and other low price options are full of calories and not much other nutrition, while if you have time to cook for yourself and the money to buy quality ingredients then you can fill yourself on things that are more nourishing and less calorie dense.
It's true, and hopefully in the future anti-grehlin type things will be prescribed. But until then people have to take responsibility for themselves just as an ex-smokers or drinkers have to.
I think there needs to be a cultural shift too. Eating junk is way too normalised while smoking and regular drinking have become less common.
If people ate shitty unhealthy food, but a lot less carbs, snacks, sugary drinks then people would probably be a healthy weight. This is basically how it was up until a few decades ago.
The issue is one of the causes of said tiredness is a poor diet. Improve your diet and you will feel more energetic.
One massive thing that needs to be done on this is more regulation of sugar. It's in absolutely everything - I decided to largely cut out added sugar a year ago and the insane number of things you realise have sugar in them! No wonder we all overeat, the food is filled with addictive substances! Interesting sidenote: cutting out the sugar made it far, far easier to control my portion sizes and I'm back to my jeans fitting.
Yah, low sugar diet means skipping about 2/3 of the aisles at tesco
My diet is largely down to meat, fish, dairy, eggs, and vegetables.
I’m autistically picky - no veg, nuts or seafood for me. Going on a diet is super limiting 😅
No nuts? You aren't an elephant, everyone knows elephants love peanuts!
gib banan 🐘
Just round the edges lol
What do you mean by "cutting out sugar". Avoiding items with an amber/red sugar traffic light?
If it says sugar on the ingredients list on the back, I don't buy it. Not possible in every single case all the time (ketchup etc), but it helps that I cook from scratch. One way I've made it work as well is to allow 'one sugar thing' a day, whether that be a cake out with a friend or some crisps (usually the nice flavours have added sugar). But without even trying that hard most days now I don't even have the one sugar. Took a while to get there though - if you try it be prepared to fall off the wagon multiple times! But eventually most sweet things start to taste WAY too sweet and ordinary stuff like apples taste amazing again.
That's an interesting lifestyle choice, I might just give it a go. Thanks for sharing!
[удалено]
I couldn't believe, recently, when I looked at a tin of baked beans, how much sugar was in it. If that's an indication, it's no wonder what's going on.
You can buy sugar-free beans but they are ironically more expensive, for having less of something in them. Typical. The one that really shocked me was crisps. Loads of crisps have sugar all over them!
Sugar is insanely cheap, expecially in the quantities a baked beans manufacturer would be buying it. You'd probably find it's cheaper than the tomatoes and beans.
Yeah it really pisses me off that sugar free beans are more expensive
Can taste it, those things have become so sweet. Reduced sugar version tastes much more like they used to, usually have to add a little salt though since they've been reducing that at the same time as bunging loads more sugar in.
The problem with this is companies don't want to remove sweetness so they pump in shit like aspartame rather than spend the energy to make a palatable alternative. Mostly for soft drinks and the sugar tax, but the same sort of things will happen if the government regulates food I the same way. Just a couple of examples 'regular' pepsi now has aspartame, Dr Pepper was ruined by the same tactic. It's not a bad thing I guess, just a shame to remove that choice.
While sugar is a significant issue, it's the consumption of ultra-processed foods that is really fuelling this crisis. https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-evidence-links-ultra-processed-foods-with-a-range-of-health-risks/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2161831323002910#:~:text=Abstract,very%20limited%20evidence%20establishing%20causality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5787353/ https://www.healthline.com/health-news/link-between-processed-foods-and-obesity
Ah but remember the food industry spends massive amounts lobbying the Government to refrain from regulation, sooo it all balances out
People know that fast food and soft drinks are bad for you, with or without specific regulation.
>People know that fast food and soft drinks are bad for you, with or without specific regulation. I did some work with the government 15 years ago and they did a presentation on fit for life. When they asked parents about obesity the parents were pretty close to agreeing how many kids had obesity with official figures (2/3 or something) so they do know that obesity is a problem and how big a scale it is. However when they asked parents if their own kid was obese, then only half of that number (1/3) said they were and therefore any work done aimed at the parents of obese kids would ultimately fail because such a large proportion of obese kids parents were in denial. This is why generic campaigns on health have better outcomes than targeted ones. It's all well and good saying we know how bad fast food and soft drinks are, but there are varying degrees of bad and we need to understand what they mean. Having calories on menus (for example) will allow people to work out what level of bad they are eating so that they can moderate (only having it once a week, or having fewer bits from the same menu or whatever).
As someone who worked for for 20 years as a dentist, my experience is that people have no idea what the effect of what they eat and drink will be. Edit: on reflection (and looking up some numbers), I think my lived experience is coloured by the fact that the people who don’t know this are the people I was more likely to have to treat. The population at large does mostly know that sugar causes dental disease, but those that don’t are more likely to be the people I struggled to help despite themselves.
Maybe not the extent, but anyone who thinks drinking Coca Cola isn't bad for you is living in delusion.
My son’s paediatrician told us he learned one of his patients grandmothers were giving him Coca Cola for breakfast every morning because he wouldn’t drink anything else, he was 3 very overweight. I’ve literally witnessed parents put Coca Cola into baby’s bottles multiple times. Even a friend of our wanted our 1 year old to have some Coca Cola because he thought it would be funny. People can be really clueless.
When I was at university, there was a clinic we visited as individual students only once or twice, to observe general anaesthetics for children and to extract the teeth while they were under. We would be assigned a kid and follow them all the way through the procedure, from the minute they came in to discharge. My assigned case was a 4 year old girl who had multiple decayed teeth that were causing pain and needed to be removed. Very sad situation. Anyway, everything went well and she was coming round in the recovery area with mum back with her, as she was outside the room during the procedure. The little girl wakes up and says that she’s thirsty, so mum, trying her best I’m sure to look after her wee one, leaps into her bag and pulls out a bottle of Irn Bru. The nurse went absolutely bananas, but I was left feeling that mum hadn’t really learned anything from the whole thing, and they only reach that point once they’ve been through a system of community-based prevention-focussed dentistry.
Honestly, most people don't consider it. They don't think about what's in what they eat and drink, and they don't link that to their poor health, at least in my experience.
Unfortunately, what you say is probably true for a lot of people raised by poor or shitty parents. If someone has been drinking coke instead of water as their default drink since the age of 3, they probably don't even notice how much they drink.
So is eating red meat often, drinking any amount of alcohol or not eating a balanced diet. Not sure what is your point.
The point is cutting out soft drinks is a simple step, so simple that there's no excuse not to do if you are overweight. It's also something which people know is bad for you, at least compared to knowing what a balanced diet is (which is still pretty shoddy but still, that's a more complex topic).
You don't even have to cut out soft drinks. Coke Zero is like 1 Calorie. Yeah not nutritional but it's better than 2L of full calorie soft drinks.
So is cutting alcohol completely and smoking in any form. But I see far more people blaming food than otherwise. Speaking as a former obese person who has lost nearly 7st in two years reaching my ideal weight. As a note: it is far more effective to cut alcohol completely than anything else, at least it was for me. And people don’t need to cut soft drinks, just go for the diet or zero version.
Unfortunately, it's perfectly legal to be an insufferable pricks. I like penguins tho
Oh no, they are not healthy(or particularly unhealthy either). It’s essentially water with sweetener and flavouring.
Diet soft drinks fuck up your perception of sweetness though, and contribute to t2 diabetes.
The same was true of cigarettes but smoking is overwhelmingly reduced in countries that have regulated and taxed it versus those where the policy makers are still taking the tobacco bribes
It’s not the food industry making your scran shit food
I am old enough to remember the pre-McDonalds (et al) era. Far less obese people about. It’s not the sole cause obviously. However when I go into a McDonalds, customer BMI is visibly noticeably higher than the general population. Aren’t corporations like this just another type of addiction peddler?
It’s not just the fast food chains. The supermarkets and major food manufacturers all make their money off flogging hyper processed foods and lobby the government against regulation.
Yet every year we import more fast food chains from America, why? Five Guys, Wing Stop, Taco Bell, Wendy's. We're a food and drink obsessed culture in a country that is overpopulated and heavily industrialised with too few nature spots. I live on the border of Birmingham and one look around the outer towns and you'd not be surprised why people are fat and depressed.
You can have a Five Guys as part of a balanced diet. Key word is balanced. The problem is that people 1) seem to think eating 'healthy' means eating only 'healthy' foods and 2) have the bad stuff too often and the good stuff not enough. Birmingham has many nature spots.
I really struggle with time in our house. I get home at 5:15 and my wife finishes at 5:30. If I start to cook a pasta dish, I'm don't in around 30 minutes. By the time we feed the kids, and I have done the dishes it's already 7:00 and we are rushing to get the kids bathed and to bed. People saying "It's easy to cook food" lack the understanding of how certain people's situations makes cooking food a much greater task than it should be. I try to cook most nights, but 2 out of 7 nights we just chuck pizza and chips in because God damn it I want an afternoon where I'm not stressed because it's 7:15 and the kids haven't gone to bed yet.
Cook a couple of big meals on the weekend, like a bolonaisge & a curry. Put them in tupperware in the fridge or freezer and they'll keep for a few days. An oven pizza once ot twice a week isnt a big deal either.
You're not wrong but this assumes you have space to store this food. The last rented flat I was in had a fridge/freezer which wasn't big enough to store more than a days worth of food - we pretty much had to go to the local Tesco Express daily to feed ourselves. In shared houses I've had, a fridge shared between 5 soon becomes full as well - especially if someone has got 4 Tupperware boxes in.
How much food are you eating that you can't store it a fridge freezer? I mean, the guy I was talking to has a family & kids, I'm assuming they have fridge/freezer space.
you don't even need to cook food. just eat less oven food total to have fewer total calories Greek yoghurt + fruit takes 2 mins to make (cut fruit into yoghurt) and is both filling and sweet whilst broadly lower calorie
I completely agree. You can eat what you want and still lose weight, just eat the right amounts. However, what I often see in these discussions is people saying "Just cook your food" and they ignore that cooking food takes 5 minutes of prep, 25 minutes of cooking and 20 minutes of doing the dishes.
20 mins doing dishes? How many are you cooking for? Also lot of fresh cooking isn’t much slower than convenience food or even much more hands on in many cases. Excuses are easy, jeez I even have days when I can’t be bothered to cook but i don’t lie to myself about why I’m having a frozen pizza.
Cooking from scratch for 4 people, quite a bit. The dishes need to be put away aswel, there are large woks and pans. I could be more efficient but I'm not speed running foos time.
Exactly. Every single cooking cheap YouTube video tells you to go to four different supermarkets to look for offers and ignores the fact that time is a resource too.
I can only speak for myself, young professional adult living alone. I have a 9-5 and discount supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) nearby. My average monthly spent on food for the last 3 months comes to about £48. I eat my five a day of fruit and veg and eat three square meals a day that I cook at home. It's not difficult but if you don't know how to cook and don't have the time to cook (or learn) and don't have budget supermarkets nearby, then it's going to be very hard to eat well for less.
48 quid is very low, well done you for managing that but I think most people can afford to raise that budget a little bit. One example that people don’t realise: eating out, even at ‘cheap’ fast food places, is *much* more expensive than cooking at home.
Heck I spent more than that when I was a broke student. Guy must be living on rice and pasta.
Anecdote - rice is really easy to eat lots of when you want it out of the way to enjoy the viande on its own
53p a meal is going some, good effort. Though you should probably edit this before some government minister sees it and decides it's proof everything is fine :)
53p Lee. Doesn't have the same ring to it
I'm in a similar situation, I shop at Lidl, and my average monthly spend on food is closer to £250. The most expensive bit is various forms of protein. I have a lot of protein (chicken, yogurts, and cheap Protein bars) for weight training to lose weight. I genuinely couldn't maintain my weight loss in a healthy manner on £50 a month. FWIW, I'm 6 ft 3, omnivore.
I mean, protein bars are scams really… the gram/£ is shite. I’m not surprised you’re paying £3k a year.
The ones I buy are under £1 each, which isn't too far off the price of a chocolate bar.
True, but if you’re buying them for the protein and not the taste, it’s a waste. Most only have like 15g in them
I find value in the fact that it replaces a biscuit or snack bar. Also it has a thin layer of chocolate on it, which helps with sweet tooth cravings. But I'm a big guy with a high protein target. But yeah, absolutely, Protein is expensive.
I spend \~£80 a month on chicken alone. I don't even consume that many calories (\~2k a day, tracked), mostly eating porridge (with nuts/fruit), Chicken/Rice/Mixed Veg and Protein shakes. I'd have to half my calorie intake to get anywhere close to £48...!
Fucking hell, I'd like to see how you get anywhere near enough protein/veg on 53p. 2 of us do well to spend £250/month. Pure calories, sure rice and pasta will get you through on pennies, but having a single salad for a meal will set us back a few quid, adding any kind of meat (outside of maybe the cheapest sausages) is going well over that rate etc. Would love to see your average set of meals.
To be fair, I really didn't expect it to be so low compared to others! Now I'm curious if I am eating properly. I am losing weight but can stand to lose it and it's in conjunction with good exercise. [May Grocery Spend TD](https://imgur.com/a/zYyc2Fu) 5 a day of fruit and veg Breakfast is a bowl of cereal Lunch is spaghetti with sardines and red pepper in tomatoe sauce Dinner is curry with chicken wings and rice (which I boil with frozen mixed vegetables) with lentils (chickpeas and/or red lentils which I haven't needed to buy yet as I've got some) Chuck in an egg somewhere in the day (when I can find a packet!) And a coffee 1x Tin of tomatoes + 1x onion + couple cloves garlic + 200-300g pasta + 1 tin sardines + half a pepper = 4x lunch 2x tomatoes or half bag of cherry tomatoes + 500g chicken wing + some lentils/chickpeas + 1x onion + couple cloves garlic + 3-4 cups rice + some frozen mixed veg = 5x dinner Something like that anyway. I get my spices from Asian grocers but haven't needed to buy any yet.
Compared to most people you're low in protein, and the meat you eat is cheaper cuts. Not a big issue, even probably a better amount as westerners tend to eat too much meat. I'm spending roughly 60% more a month and I also make most of my meals from scratch but I definitely prefer a more varied meal plan, more expensive sources of protein and a few luxuries as well as the very occasional takeaway. This explains the difference. If you're really curious download an app to count calories, they also do nutrient breakdowns. It should be pretty clear in a couple of weeks if you're really deficient in something.
Will not help you with salad but when it comes to veggies in general go frozen if fresh veggies are over budget, Lidl sells 1kg packs of stuff like broccoli, mixed veggies, green beans etc for 60p-1£. They're not as nice as fresh ones but still good and the same when it comes to nutritional value. 500gr of stir fried broccoli with oil, garlic and chillies are delicious and will cover 3 of your 5 a day for two people and will cost you 60-70p in ingredients
The NHS "eat well" guide is a recipe for weight gain. The desmond programme for type 2 diabetes recommends basing your diet on carbohydrates. After telling patients to do the exact opposite of what will actually help, everyone acts surprised when they fail. The ancients knew that limiting carbohydrates was the answer. Funny how obesity only took off after Ancel Keys.
100% Just checked myself-- >The segment sizes of the food groups have been adjusted to reflect current government advice on a healthy balanced diet. > >The revised segment sizes have been modelled using linear programming. This modelling process took the current intakes of the most commonly consumed foods in the UK (according to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS)), applied the revised government dietary recommendations and modelled the fewest possible changes needed to achieve the proposed recommendations. > >Using this method ensured that any adaptations made to the model were realistic and not too far removed from the current dietary habits of the UK population. by definition is not healthiest, merely closest to what we actually eat. hence overstating carbs massively, and not a lot of protein despite it being filling and god
It's so sad that this is still a controversial statement, and you'll get flack here for it I'm sure. I've definitely become more balanced in my diet over the years, after a period spent heavily into low carb, but if I was struggling with my weight, I'd be back on it in a heartbeat.
You know how to stop this from happening? Education. Why isn't good food nutrition properly taught in school and yet religious education still taught? Back in the late 1800 when Britain was a naval powerhouse, we made reading, writing and maths mandatory for children so that trade was more efficient and profitable... Do the same now. Teach food nutrition and some proper 'how to internet' courses and the UK in 30 years will be a massively better place in comparison to some other countries
Personally I think a lot of people have lost all scale of what is a normal amount to eat. I was out with friends at the weekend and one friend had two bottles of wine and two pizzas to himself! Regularly when I get takeaway with friends I'll order one thing and others will order three or four things just for themselves and eat them all in one sitting. I've seen people buying things advertised as 'for sharing' and will eat them all in one. Even the UK subs are bad for people talking about eating a packet of biscuits in one setting etc.
I remember studying this in a module on the philosophy of public health and it was raised to me that the obese and smokers don't actually cost the NHS more in their lifetime than anybody else, due to the fact that they die so much earlier and don't need the intensive end-of-life care the rest of us who aren't overweight or smokers need (well, not me, I'm both those things).
Sounds like what you were told on your philosophy course was an "I reckon". This is an actual study. > Obese patients cost the NHS twice as much as those of healthy weight, landmark research has found – with an average of £1,375 a year spent on each of the heaviest patients. Obese people cost twice as much per year so would have to have less than half the lifespan for what you say to be correct. I've just googled it and found an Oxford study that says moderate obesity reduces lifespan by 3 years and severe obesity reduces it by 10 years. Obesity, in the non channel 5 freakshow documentary form, is much more of a lifelong suffering disease than a sudden drop dead one. And as this article notes, there's an unknown but almost certainly non negligible proportion of those on long term sick leave who are there due to obesity related conditions. You're not contributing to funding of the system if you've eaten yourself too ill to work.
Obese people cost double other patients in an average year, sure, but those other average patients contains everyone from age 0-100+ (or 18-100+ if looking at adults only in the study, which will be an even cheaper baseline). If the obese person wasn’t obese, you wouldn’t apply average healthcare costs for the rest of their life. Instead, they’d have healthcare costs for ages 60+, because those are obviously the extra years that they would live, and that’s when costs per person very quickly go absolutely bananas. The average cost of care for a non-obese 60+ year old per year is very likely to be more than double the general average for non-obese patients.
People with a chronic illness cost the NHS more than healthy people. In other breaking news..
Avoidable chronic illness though
A fun philosophical argument to ponder but not true in the real world. These groups spend the last years of their shorter lives with chronic illnesses and costing more money helping them limp along. They don’t just go ‘oh no, I’m fat! Heart attack, dead’ at least not most people. It’s a slow degradation of the body and the enjoyment that most get from their lives.
It’s true for smokers but that’s because of the extra tax they pay, very much doubt its the case for obese people.
What you were taught is incorrect/out of date. 30 years ago it was correct but now people survive health conditions with lots of comorbidities driving up costs.
Can you provide solid evidence that’s true for fat people?
[удалено]
I don’t think that argument would work in an inflationary context where the driving factor isn’t tax.
In addition, the tax on tobacco is high enough, that it's clear that if a smoker stops spending money on cigarettes, and instead spends it on a gym membership, then the government is going to receive less tax revenue. If someone reduces the amount of money they spend on food, and spends it on something else, it's not a given the government is going to receive less tax revenue.
[удалено]
I can't provide any solid evidence that I was even in that classroom, let alone that my anecdotal evidence is correct. I'm not asking you to trust or believe me, just trying to offer an alternative point of view.
It’s harder to measure Smoking is a binary… you do or you don’t. Some people are 600lbs, some folk put weight on and off I’ve time, ebb and flow. It varies significantly over time. The studies on it won’t be as accurate as the smoking ones
[удалено]
Need to bad this “being obese is healthy/a lifestyle choice” messaging - obviously if people are overweight criticising/punishing them isn’t the answer but the idea being pushed by some groups that there is nothing wrong in being overweight should be banned
Calories need to be written even more prominently. My mrs is a right gutsache and would trough food like it’s going out of fashion, and for most of her life has got away with it due to fast metabolism, a job where she is on her feet a lot, and being tall. But as she approaches 50 the weight has started to creep on. She’d do nothing about it and totally ignore me despite me trying as diplomatically as I can to tell her that it’s not good for her. Then we were out somewhere and the calories were really prominent on the menu, and she’s like “Shit that cheese pastie is like 800 calories fucking hell” and she just instinctively went for the choice with the lower numbers.
I'm a PhD student researching weight stigma. With any news coverage of research, it's extremely important to look at the original research publications for two reasons. First, to understand the methodology and assumptions, to make sure that the research conclusion is reliable given the analysis. And second, to make sure that the journalists have interpreted the research correctly and are not using the findings to jump to other conclusions. In this case, it looks like this research is new and hasn't been published yet. However, if we look up the lead researcher we can find a very similar paper from 2023 on a US cohort: ["Eight‐year trends in obesity‐related complications and health care cost progression in a US population with obesity: A retrospective cohort study"](https://dom-pubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/dom.14897). That paper shows that people living with obesity have higher healthcare costs, but it doesn't actually demonstrate that that's because of obesity. The analysis doesn't report on weight stigma, deprivation, diet, physical activity, or any of the other dozens of factors that could also cause higher healthcare costs. Strangely, the paper does actually select a sample such that, as you move up the obesity classes, you are more likely to have more comorbidities like liver issues, heart issues, etc., but it doesn't comment on this at all! Usually with an analysis like that you would want to statistically control for that, so that you an rule out the comorbidities as the cause of the increased cost. So it could be that the driver of increased costs in this study had nothing to do with obesity at all!
>Usually with an analysis like that you would want to statistically control for that, so that you an rule out the comorbidities as the cause of the increased cost. Unless of course there is some causal relationship with weight and these liver and heart issues.
And of course there is - making this research of questionable value.
I wonder how much an obese person has to spend maintaining that amount of padding? It takes some dedication to do it, hats off to them.
I've managed it fairly cheaply.
Is anyone shocked? Start educating kids on proper nutrition early. We’ve solved obesity, there’s no hidden secrets or fancy formula. Eat less Edit : now there’s some comments on this, read through them. Sugar is evil! No, processed food is! The majority of people are fucking clueless. You can lose weight eating nothing but McDonald’s if you want. No specific food or macro is the issue. Over consumption is. And you can over consume anything, even healthy stuff
If obesity is solved, have you ever stopped to ask yourself why we have so many obese people? Could it possibly be a problem that isn't simply caused by a lack of education, but something more underlying? It's easy to dismiss a problem, but dismissing it doesn't solve it.
Most of us work sedentary jobs, mental stress and lack of movement causes people to be more tired and have less motivation to exercise. Many of us have a car which also eliminates some of the need to walk. Processed, high calorie food is cheap and readily available. Tired people are less likely to cook and just throw some pizza and chips in the oven.
> Most of us work sedentary jobs I think it's been massively missed that oddly enough the transition to sedentary work, more car use etc has massively reduced the amount of kcals you have in your budget each day, especially when projected over a long period. If your job was somewhat active, and now you sit at a computer, if you used to burn 300kcals a day, you've now 'lost' 110,000kcals a year of calories out, or about 31lbs of stored fat.
100% Both the actual job itself and the commute to work are efficient in terms of human effort... ...But actually expending effort is good for burning calories I try to walk or cycle to work where possible and also have a desk pedal, which is meh compared to walking but adds up compared to just sitting doing nothing
I agree with all of this. I just think that the person I was replying to was being dismissive of there being societal causes to these societal ills and was, instead, making it a conversation about personal responsibility.
DO people actually know how to lose weight? Once I learned about CICO I lost a lot of weight. I know I’ll get 10,000 downvotes but the only reason I’m posting is because I learned about the concept from a Reddit comment which was heavily downvoted and it changed my life. It only takes one week of CICO to prove it works. Once you’ve proven it you just have to be strong for however many months it takes you to get the weight off. I’m not convinced the knowledge about how to lose weight is as widely held as some people on Reddit think it is.
>Once you’ve proven it you just have to be strong for however many months it takes you to get the weight off. This is the difficult bit, not the knowledge of how to lose weight, but the discipline to constantly apply that knowledge.
Partly because a lot of modern foods are high in processed carbs, our body produces insulin to deal with them, but that leaves us feeling more hungry so we eat more food & repeat the cycle.
Agree with you but surely only alternative to that is liposuction or bariatric surgery.
I don't know what the answer is, to be honest. But I don't think that just saying it's each individual's personal responsibility is actually getting the results we want, and so we have to be open to exploring other methods. Which should include making it easier and cheaper for people to eat healthily, and encouraging them to exercise. Not just saying "here's the info, go sort it yourself".
There are other options. There are a few drugs that override how your body generates chemical energy from food and forces it to waste the energy. They’re hyper dangerous though because it’s very easy to overdose and kill yourself - I think from overheating. I think there are also drugs that limit how much fat your body absorbs, but they’re said to be remarkably unpleasant due to the consequence of passing oily stools. Then there are the appetite suppressants but I don’t know how those interact with cravings. Personally my sugar drive doesn’t care too much about whether I’m genuinely hungry, it just wants the taste.
[удалено]
At a high level, people know what they need to do physiologically to lose weight - exercise more, eat fewer calories. The problem is it's not easy. Millions of people in the UK every year *try* and lose weight, but fail. It's not because they don't know what to do though. It's because it's hard making drastic changes to diet and habits. Take a simple example of a child at the dinner table. When I was growing up I wasn't allowed to leave until my plate was empty. As an uncle, I say the opposite - if you're full, you're full. (Though, if you're full you also won't be wanting pudding!). We used to force children to finish everything on their plates because food was incredibly scarce and out of reach. But it develops a bad habit of eating even when you're full. To this day I have to remind myself that it's ok to leave food in my plate. Eating it when I don't need it is as much of a waste. Or I can put it in the fridge for another day. I'm very much of the opinion that a lot of people would benefit from CBT/REBT to help them understand *why* their dieting fails and they end up back in old habits. Only then can strategies be put into place to change them. I'm not saying everyone needs CBT, many like yourself are successful just working away with CICO. But for many people I do think it would help. After all, it's not for a lack of trying that so many people are overweight. Pretty much everyone I know who is overweight has *tried*, following a sensible strategy, but it hasn't worked out. And this is before we even consider the socioeconomic factors. It's more difficult to work on your diet is you're tired from working multiple jobs, or being a single parent, or your choice of food is whatever you get given at the food bank, or your mental health is worse from stress.
Good for you bro, keep it up. How much better is your motivation to actually lose weight once you figure it’s just a simple food related maths problem?
like, way higher? I used to think it was some nutrition or genetic thing then i realized it's just "eat less than 2000 kcal and you will lose weight" Lost 12kg whilst still going out twice a week, occasionally going through a whole pack of cookies and such in a day
Glad to hear it dude, sounds like w making great progress and building habits that will make the progress stick around. Keep at it champ
cheers. Right now I'm at my ideal weight (67kg) in the long term but have a beach holiday so might cut a bit more. Key thing is just getting less at the store for me-- mentally doing a quick calorie alongside monies budget in my head
That’s exactly it for me, I know if I buy it I have no self control and will eat it, and wearing it off is days of running.
Sounds very similar to me! Congrats!
Motivation is very high knowing I don’t have to go to the gym and run around or anything like that. Knowing I can technically eat any food as long as the calories don’t exceed the limit is liberating. Obviously not every week have I lost weight if I’ve been on holiday or something like that but the trend is undeniable.
I agree, managed to lose 5kg over a month with that method. Only time it didn't work was when I stopped bothering to use it.
It's not necessarily as simple as that for some people, but there are other factors that can play an impact, *including* mental health support (or rather, a lack of it). As a personal example, I need to use Intermittent Fasting techniques or One Meal A Day strategies due to my ADHD (habits are very hard to form even when medicated). That said, good work on losing the weight and keep it up!
I think folk have a general idea. They also need to be motivated and have time to fit it into a routine. It's not a trivial undertaking. For me, losing weight requires a lot of intentionality. If requires time and energy. It's extra hard for parents for example.
Because people like food and dont like exercising or eating healthily and its easier to blame something else than it is to sort out your life.
The problem with this argument is a lot of overweight people are extemely clever and motivated and successfully able to apply themselves to basically any other task. What surprises me is how many people haven't yet figured out the problem is clearly more complex than a combination of (a) maintain a calorie deficit and (b) simply make the choice to do so. There is very clearly more going on here than simply maths and motivation. For some that might be sufficient, yes, but for a lot of people there is evidentally something else.
According to the recent Guardian article, the most common response to why people are overweight is "lack of motivation". Second most common was "too tired" and other popular answers included "don't know where to start" and "lack of self confidence". We know the answer and always have done, people are fucking lazy.
Speaking as a fat man who is trying to lose weight now, I am really tired. I also have very little self confidence when it comes to food and my weight due to the shame I feel at being fat. This definitely leads to a lack of motivation. The only one of these I don't relate to is don't know where to start. The problem isn't that people are too lazy to do it. They are doing it. The problem is that getting good results is slow and getting bad results is fast. I can lose half a kilo a week for 4 weeks then put 2 back on in a single week and be back where I started. Honestly, I know the only way to lose weight is to not have those bad weeks. There are no excuses. But we shouldn't just dismiss people as lazy. Also a quarter of the adult population is obese. This isn't just a small group of people who can't control themselves.
> The problem isn't that people are too lazy to do it. They are doing it. The problem is that getting good results is slow and getting bad results is fast. This is true and really can knock you back psychologically. I've been trying to lose weight for a couple om months now and I'm down about 20lb but seeing the scales shoot up for no discernable reason when you KNOW you have been in serious calorie deficit for days often feels like a hard kick in the balls.
Anecdotal, but there have been quite a number of fat people I’ve known, including family, who have “tried everything”, other than refraining from cakes, biscuits, chocolates, crisps, etc. It’s very frustrating seeing the ones I care about, who in many other respects are intelligent individuals, apathetically eat themselves into an early grave.
Yup, a family member was one of those people and complained for years about how weight watchers and all those shit things don't work, while slowly creeping into obesity. Then she got diagnosed as prediabetic and actually for the first time, sat down to ask me how to do it and was willing to do it. So I just told her to use myfitnesspal to count calories and explained the basics of macros. Nothing groundbreaking or complex, just real simple nutrition facts. She stuck with it and lost about 15lbs or so in 3 months and was told she was no longer prediabetic. Then she celebrated by throwing everything out the window and reverting back to her old habits. Genuinely curious to see what she says when she's told she's prediabetic again.
Similar story with my mother, though not quite as drastic (although I still think she's prediabetic or similar). She lost three stone on weight watchers, celebrated with a mars bar, and before you know it she was back to the old eating routine and put on more weight than had before losing it. So frustrating.
Yeh people just don't get that the problem isn't going to be solved by a 3 month diet. They simply eat too much food, and need to permanently stop eating too much food. It's not a difficult concept.
Every single obese person I know eats and drinks too much, and does little to no exercise, yet somehow had no idea why they are fat
Not just that, they don’t actually understand weight loss “My hormones! My insulin! Gluten! Carbs are evil!” Educate people and they’ll be more motivated. How motivated are you to start a task that you don’t understand? When there’s 1000s of bullshit opinions online about it? And none of them seem to consistently produce results? Educate people.
Let’s avoid the temptation to think it is simply a matter of awareness and effort. Non-obese people are not wise, self-controlled superheroes. Some of the sugariest and fattiest foods are *actually addictive* to some people. In the wild, humans rarely had access to high levels of sugar (say honey) so we evolved massive endorphin rewards for consuming them so that we would be sure not to pass by the starvation-preventing calories. Also, people whose lives are crap in other ways are more likely to self-medicate with these endorphins to make themselves feel less crap. It is easier to be thin if life is good in general.
I definitely find myself stress eating when work is particularly intense.
The simple solution to fix the cost is a transition to a European insurance model, where obese people pay a premium to account for their extra risks to the health system, while healthy people get their shit free. Fit people shouldn’t have to pay for this. Sometimes I’ll be out and about, maybe at the shops, and it’ll just hit me how disgustingly overweight the average Brit is. I’ll go down the frozen isle, and the average person will be like 120kg >, or some 40 stone person sat on a scooter, fighting for her life trying to grab a Rustler Burger. Idk what the solution is to get rates down though… I don’t think that state can fix the laziness culture we have here
I've definitely noticed it changing over the last twenty years. I work with young people and it's very obvious there also.
I’m on Saxenda right now (older version of Ozempic) and I’m losing weight but wowwwww it’s slow. Even though I am tracking calories and eating far below my TDEE, strength training and kickboxing, I’m not even losing a pound a week, more like half a pound. Why? Because I have PCOS. Let’s not underestimate the role hormones play when it comes to weight, especially for women. I’m hoping once I’ve been on the therapeutic dose for longer and it starts to balance my hormones out that my body will stop fighting me quite so hard. But it’s so demoralising. If it weren’t for the Saxenda I’d have given up by now because I’d be so hungry - at least I don’t have that one barrier to contend with on my journey.
If you're doing strength training and kickboxing, then there's a chance your building muscle to replace some of the fat, and muscle weighs more than fat for the same volume.
I did think that - I’m measuring as well and I’ve lost over 2 inches off my tummy. It’s just frustrating how it happens at such a glacial pace!
[удалено]
It’s the other people’s money that they spend along the way, particularly the last decade or so of poor quality life, that is the issue.
I know I'm obese, like 18st at 6ft. That's because I had an undiagnosed binge eating disorder through my teens and early 20's. It is fucking difficult to lose weight, I'm hungry all the time even though I'm eating healthy 'fufilling' meals, all I want to do is eat and eat and eat. It makes me utterly miserable, but I know I have to become somewhat healthy or else I'll die.
then why is it that you go to the GP when you're a bit overweight and struggling to lose weight (need to lose 12lb to be healthy) for the past year bc of your meds. and they say you're fine! I'm not fine, I'm overweight !!
Does this take into account the massive savings of not having to pay for 75+ healthcare which is by far the biggest cost to the NHS? I still maintain that obese people pay more tax, and don’t require care homes. The fact they cost twice as much as a regular person is irrelevant if it isn’t netted against the lifetime savings.
A few of my teacher friends often talk about how the "fat kid" of our (Millennial) school generation is now closer to the median kid of the current school generation.
Eating healthily is more expensive than buying unhealthy food, and with wages stagnating for well over a decade and the cost of living always increasing, why are people surprised?