Rates of obesity among US adults have increased from 14% in 1980 to 42% today, and half the world is expected to be overweight or obese by 2035, with children and teens facing the sharpest increase in obesity and its consequences. Because data doesn’t support the idea that overeating and lack of exercise are squarely to blame,
Calories in, calories out, works very well indeed. Purely anecdotally – and yes, data is not the plural of anecdote, we know that one, even though actually* it is – my weight goes up when I don’t cycle for a couple of weeks. Goes down again when I get back to it.
If you want something a bit more scientific. I have long maintained that it is actually central heating which is the cause of modern obesity. We’re mammals, our major energy use is temperature regulation. America got fat before Britain – America got efficient central heating before Britain. QED. And I’m sure that real scince™ could be done here. Track the expansion of decent central heating across a population against the rise in obesity. I am absolutely certain that there will be a correlation across nations on this. Correlation doesn’t prove causation but still, I think that will be enough to explain much of what is happening here.
Anyone any good at actual real science™ and want to have a go at this?
*Where do anecdotes come from? Things that happen. What is data? Things that happen……
Based on what the puritans tell us we should expect to see death rates amongst the “biggies” going up, and given the supposed scale of the “problem” the average age of death amongst the whole population going down. We should also expect to see more “very large” people as we go out and about. That we don’t see any of these things would suggest these loudmouths are simply getting more traction for their noise.
“Data” means (things that are) given, i.e.fact. Anecdotes may or may not be true. Of course, in the post-truth age, there isn’t actually a difference. On the substantive point, the availablity/affordability of food and central heating may well be coincidental but I’d accept a grant to research the issue.
Both the availablity/affordability of food and central heating depend upon cheap fossil fuels.
Net Zero will put and end to those, and hence to both affordable food and central heating.
Obesity cured. Hurrah!
Pol Pot was ahead of his time.
And the replacement of manual labour with desk-bound non-jobs shuffling Powerpoint may have a connection too!
While global prosperity continues to improve the proportion of people living “below the poverty line” remain unchanged (unlike the line obviously).
However for “bad things” like obesity the definition remains set in stone taking no account of present day medians. This allows the bien pensant to clutch their pearls in horror while inwardly exulting at the near certainty that levels will continue to increase. (I say near certainty to acknowledge the unpleasant fact that the WEF might actually succeed in forcing us all to “eat da bugs”).
The day one of these hypocrites makes even the mildest criticism of the gobby fatty led body-positivity movement is the day I will consider taking them seriously.
Regarding the increase in “obesity” and being “overweight” between 1982 and today in US adults… It would be of more relevance had the goalposts not been moved in the intervening period.
According to pubmed – “In 1998, the U.S. National Institutes of Health brought U.S. definitions in line with World Health Organization guidelines, lowering the normal/overweight cut-off from a BMI of 27.8 (men) and 27.3 (women) to a BMI of 25.”… Instantly making quite a big chunk of the population “overweight”.
So, just another load of quasi-scientific medibollocks really. Despite it being the “official” measure, BMI’s a pretty-useless indicator but (like CO2 in the atmosphere) it’s easy to measure and calculate, so it fits nicely into the category of “making important what you can measure rather than measuring what’s important” (C) Robert McNamara.
Its very obvious now that the ‘calories in/calories’ out argument is fallacious – or rather while superficially true, not the whole story. People who eat carbohydrate rich diets struggle to control their weight because carbs are literally drugs – you eat some, you want more, and more and more. You are never sated, you can go on stuffing carbs almost indefinitely, the sugar rush is so powerful. Whereas diets rich in non-carbs soon reach a natural point of satiation – if you eat a big steak you can’t face another one. So while calories in/calories out is true, not all diets are the same. Some are far easier to control the in/out naturally. Yes you can eat a carb rich diet and lose weight, it requires pretty strong willed people to achieve that. Most would fail. Whereas non-carb rich diets do not require strong will to stick to, you can eat as much of them as you like. You just end up not wanting to.
“So, just another load of quasi-scientific medibollocks really. Despite it being the “official” measure, BMI’s a pretty-useless indicator but (like CO2 in the atmosphere) it’s easy to measure and calculate, so it fits nicely into the category of “making important what you can measure rather than measuring what’s important” (C) Robert McNamara.”
Regardless of whether you disagree with BMI as a measure of fatness, we are all fatter however you measure it. The evidence of our own eyes tells us – just look at old photos from 50-60 years ago vs today. 99% of people were skinny back then, now the skinny person is the exception, not the rule.
In other ‘where you’re going wrong in healthcare’ news, two years ago this leading professor on oncology was lamenting the ‘misinformation’ which led some people not to take the Covid jabs.
This is something of a volte face caused by scales falling from his eyes.
https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1756038/vaccine-booster-covid-health-government-steve-barclay
It isn’t a matter of disagreement. The guy who invented the concept of BMI, Adolphe Quetelet, explicitly said that it was a statistical measure only, for use in measuring averages over populations, nothing more. It has no meaning on an individual level.
That prodnoses have attempted to make it meaningful and keep insisting that stout England rugby players are all about to keel over and die because they’re so obese demonstrates how useless it is at the level of the individual.
It is very easy to control your weight if you pay attention to what you’re putting in your mouth and don’t go wild on carbs.
Carbohydrates are peasant food that make you chubby and slow, we want to eat lots of red meat and animal fats like the Mongols did instead.
Last time I was in an NHS hospital (March) they still had big posters promoting the carbohydrate-based “balanced diet” that makes people fat.
Err, yes:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/goodharts-law-applies-to-bmi-as-well-you-know
I have long maintained that it is actually central heating which is the cause of modern obesity.
Taking that concept a step further, is that why Pacific Islanders (for example) are so fucking huge – because of the hot climate?
‘We should also expect to see more “very large” people as we go out and about. That we don’t…’ is probably because nobody gets hospital appointments any more.
Yet Indians, Malays, Indonesians and so on live in a similar tropical climate and for the most part are comparatively svelte.
When Mr. Christian was busy mutineering, I didn’t hear him bitching about Pacific Islanders rolling around like billiard balls, instead they were lithe and phuqed like rabbits (as Hashem intended).
Central heating again or carbohydrates?
Certainly my photos in the mid-1980s when there was ice on the inside of my bedroom window show me thin as a rake, having to punch extra holes in belts, etc. I only started to really put on the pounds after living in Hong Kong.
The Pacific islanders that survived the voyage to reproduce were probably a small sub set of the population that set off. Perhaps there was a survival advantage in being big and fat to start with.
It might also explain their sky high rates of diabetes.
@JGH – Maybe it’s Dim Sum that makes you fat?
“That prodnoses have attempted to make it meaningful and keep insisting that stout England rugby players are all about to keel over and die because they’re so obese demonstrates how useless it is at the level of the individual.”
Right, you find me 100 people at random, and measure their BMIs. I’ll lay a pound to a penny that all the ones with BMIs over 30 are lard buckets, not weightlifters or rugby players with more muscle than fat. Yes there are exceptions to the rule, people who are training for extreme sports and fitness. But for everyone else BMI is a pretty good guide to whether someone is a lard arse or not.
Put it this way, if someone put a gun to your head and said ‘There’s a person with a BMI of 30 behind this door, that we picked off the streets of a random Uk town. Using your knowledge of UK society are they a) a lard arse or b) a professional rugby player/exteme fitness fanatic? If you’re wrong we’ll shoot you.’ Which are you going to choose to give yourself the maximum chance of surviving?
Except, historically they weren’t fat (q.v. Paul Gauguin et al), their massive rates of obesity are a relatively recent phenomena. Even going back to photographs of the 1960’s they weren’t obese. Rates only began to sky rocket in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Being a bit porky has its advantages if you’re going on a long sea voyage in a canoe.
I assume the Polynesian taste for long pig was down to a lack of space for farming rather than Moriori being especially delicious (more research is needed).
So is the Pacific Ocean a food desert? Lots of lovely fish, but idk if a squad of blokes in a tiny wooden hull would’ve been able to catch more calories than they were expending in their epic ocean voyages?
In which case you don’t want skinny rowers, mebbe? Idk. Hard to imagine the slaves who pulled Greek and Roman galleys were fat, but the Med is a pond. The Pacific is an entire world. So yes, Polynesian people look the way they do due to natural selection (and spam).
Air conditioning. Has the same effect of reducing energy consumption in temperature regulation.
But this is the whole point. BMI is a statistical measure and what you’ve just done is invented…the Bell Curve.
It’s like stereotypes. While there is some measure of truth in them (because they exist to provide generalised information about a group), their application to individual members of the group varies.
Having a BMI of greater than 30 GENERALLY means you’re a fat bastard, but not always, because some group members (0+) maybe be shorter than average AND more muscular than average.
Again, a generality. A statistical measure which tells us information about a group / population, but DOESN’T ALWAYS apply to all individuals.
Or, my theory may well be complete bollocks, pace JG’s information. Dunno.
The important thing is being able to produce plausible bullshit, or ChatGPT will steal my job.
Tim is right about aircon, you can easily sweat yourself into being a skinny bastard in southern latitudes.
I am not sure how we get to the Star Trek: The Next Generation high tech California liberal utopian future of sexy people in bum-hugging spandex from here, because we are lazy humans we prefer to use our technology to become the sedentary blobbos from WALL-E.
Ah. So what you’re really saying is use of technology to raise or lower the ambient temperature, so both air conditioning AND central heating both cause obesity?
Really?
I mean, I’ve lived in Penang, Malaysia for a few years and the use of air conditioning was both widespread and (in some cases extreme), certainly I’ve been to restaurants when it’s 30C outside and a rather parky 16C inside.
Still don’t see many hippo-like locals wandering around GeorgeTown mall, for the most part the orcas were American and British tourists.
I think the CH theory doesn’t explain this:
– distro of obesity across UK men broadly similar across incomes.
– distro across UK women skews towards the low income, with middle and upper earners much less fat.
Unless someone knows better.
Two fattest countries in the EU (until 2020) are the only two with NHS system. That’s a theory I do like.
Have dropped 30lbs since moving to the sticks some 17yrs or so ago. Physically active – retired from desk-based environment; no central heating; healthy diet; restaurants, clubs and bars in short supply… Not exactly rocket science.
America got efficient central heating before Britain.
And, being proud of the fact that they finally mastered it, the British decided to heat all indoors to 85 degrees… for comfort’s sake. I remember walking into Harrod’s on a rainy, chilly afternoon and having to remove both coat and sweater within two minutes to keep from sweating out my shirt. The wogs, of course, were all marching around buttoned up in down filled coats and knit caps.
It was one of the first indications that I really had landed on a different planet.
Jim:
Errrm… No.. Calories in v/s calories out is a simple Truth. Get less in than you burn, you will lose weight. Matter of chemistry and all that.
Both the “in” and “out” sides of the equation have multiple factors, some physical/genetic, some environmental/social that determine which way the net result goes.
We may not even know all the factors, but the basic equation is true. Physics demands it.
a) define “carbohydrate”. The way you’re using the term here is like our Host describing every ore as “rock”. Got to be a “bit” more specific than that…
b) a protein-rich meal leaves you full for longer compared to “carbohydrates”.
Yes, of course. I’d even say “No Shit, Sherlock” there… Primary digestion of proteins takes place in the stomach, “carbohydrates” go right through to the intestine once they have liquified enough.
Proteins hang around longer in the organ that signals “fullness”, thus create that feeling longer. Basic anatomy and physiology.
c) If you want to stay full, proteins isn’t the way to go anyway. You’ll want indigestible and insoluble “carbohydrates” in the stomach. Like cellulose.
Which does get measured in a caloric test, but does not add to the effective calorie yield after digestion.
Which goes to show that caloric yield is a dangerous beast and should be approached with caution.
And… Stuff..
I have to go shopping, and I’ve yet to receive a grant to make the effort and cop the headache to re-debunk all that stuff using actual science.
Well, yes, we know what you mean:
“The way you’re using the term here is like our Host describing every ore as “rock”.”
Except I always use it in the manner that rock is distinct from ore. As in, there’s rocks made of some combination of 92 elements, there’s ores made from some combination of 02 elements but rock is different from ore in the sense that ore is economically viable to extract one or more of the 92 and rock ain’t.
Deep ocean is a food desert compared to coastal waters so Polynesians wouldn’t have been supplementing food supplies much during trips, same true for Europeans and transatlantic trips etc.
The Med as stated is pretty much a pond in comparison which is why marine trade and trading civilisation flourished there.
Thomas Sowell has an interesting talk on how the lack of navigable rivers and natural ports shaped African development vs European, geography is important.
The trouble with doing The Science that way is the number of things that also correlate with the same time. Food becoming a rounding error in most household budgets, near universal use of cars for trivial trips to name but 2.
Jgh, I tend to lose weight in HK despite a massive increase in calorie intake, but I suspect it is because I am less sedentary there.
@ Tim
The inventor of BMI made it Weight/(height^2.5) because he reckoned that tall people are not, in general, correspondingly broad. Some lazy twit decided that h^2.5 was too much like hard work – he/she had to work out sqrt(h) – so recast the formula as W/h^2. A succession of lazy and/or ignorant idiots have copied the twit.
Whatever “expert” explained to you that weight corresponds to area not volume was taking the mickey.
I agree that BMI (the original and true version not the NHS idiocy) makes better sense applied to populations than individuals.
my weight goes up when I don’t cycle for a couple of weeks. Goes down again when I get back to it.”
This is why cycling will never solve Tim’s weight problem. That’s actually the wrong way round from what it should be. Exercise more, the person should increase weight. Increased muscle mass but mostly the body building up a reserve in anticipation of further exercise. One’s appetite should increase to facilitate that
Tim’s problem is eating too much. He’s not going to solve that by exercising, is he?
“ Errrm… No.. Calories in v/s calories out is a simple Truth.”
The problem isn’t that it’s not true but that most people underestimate both sides of the equation and you have to put a lot of work in to burn calories when exercising.
An Apple Watch if set up correctly is very good at measuring active calories, those calories you burn above and beyond what you burn when just living and I make sure mine is set up correctly.
Thursday’s morning hike was 7.5 miles over rough hilly terrain with an elevation gain of just over 1,000’ in just under 2.5 hours for 795 active calories.
Today was 4.6 miles, on tracks with an elevation of 300’ in 1 hr 20mins for 475 calories.
30 mins on my cross trainer which leaves me breathing heavily at the end, but not working too hard is 200 to 220 cals.
There’s about 130 calories in a bag of Walkers crisps, over 400 in a large brownie and over 600 in a bottle of red wine.
Watch people who go to a gym or start walking a bit more to lose weight and they won’t be burning anywhere near the calories they think they are and then they’ll reward themselves with a treat and wonder why they aren’t losing weight. Someone will probably tell them some crap about losing fat and building muscle and that muscle is denser than fat and they’ll continue to convince themselves that eventually they’ll lose weight until they give up the exercise in despair but continue with the treats.
BniC – geography is important
Yarp. See: East Anglia.
And pour one out for our paleolithic homies of Doggerland.
Heh. No, not quite. Muscle mass rapidly plateaus. You have to do more more exercise to increase it again. If I go swimming I do gain more upper body muscle mass. Cycling, no, my thighs do not get ever larger. I can cycle 50km in a couple of hours and a bit and doing that again doesn’t increase my thigh size to Will Carling levels. It might well keep that leg muscle mass, burn calories, but not increase again. I’d need to up the amount I cycled to gain more muscle mass given the level I’m at.
Polynesia was drastically low on fat. Fish isn’t very fatty, nor most birds. And almost no mammals were available.
So the Polynesians with thrifty fat genes survived preferentially. That means their descendants both love fatty food and turn it into weight very quickly.
You can lose weight easily without exercise. I know enough people who have done exactly that to stop it being simply anecdote. But it’s hard work cutting back that hard. Most people actually don’t want to lose weight that badly.
The wrapping up of “overweight” and “obese” is hugely misleading. Slightly “overweight” people have better health outcomes than skinny ones.
They do NOT have the health issues of lard buckets, and should not be counted with them
Pendant alert: “Hard to imagine the slaves who pulled Greek and Roman galleys were fat” Greek and Roman galleys weren’t pulled by slaves. They had paid oarsmen who joined in the fight during boarding actions. /Pendant alert
Quite, Tim. You cannot control your weight with exercise. But you will habituate to eat more
“Calories in/calories out” is always going to control body weight.
But sugars flooding in screw up the insulin response, which is what tells you “omigawd eat eat eat!”.
Dropping the sugars – the carbs, in shorthand – leaves your insulin levels low and very moderated – no spikes. Insulin spikes because of carb gorging fool your body into wanting more food. “Low Carb” doesn’t change the value of calories – it simply allows your body to quash food cravings. You eat all you want – but you want much less.
I was almost 220. Now, 166. Yay keto!
Tim: “Muscle mass rapidly plateaus.”
Yes it does – the body adapts.
Cycling is not a good way to increase muscle mass anyway. No long slow distance thing is (which is anything you can describe as happening over a couple of hours).
High intensity works better – lifting, pushing a sled, etc. The body adapts, but then you can increase the weight quite easily (as opposed to cycling further, which takes more time).
A slender friend of mine swears by not eating anything after 7pm.
Discussion of calories in vs calories out fails to take into account an important factor: that one of the ways calories get out is straight through you into the toilet.
If you try to regulate body weight by reducing calories in, you will almost certainly fail. Some people fail quickly, while others take longer, but the vast majority of people fail. This is why there are so many products to help with weight loss – because they work for a short period, so cannot be banned as ineffective, but fail over a longer timespan, leaving a huge market for more products.
@ bis
You may not be able to control your weight with exercise but I can (and have done so whenever I felt it necessary for the last 60+ years).