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Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

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Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference can be explained in large part by urban design: many US shoppers need a car to drive to the supermarket and only go there once a week or less. In Europe you live much closer to a supermarket, so you go more often and get more fresh food and less frozen or canned. Some Americans are surprised to learn that many supermarkets inside cities do not even provide parking, everyone walks or bikes there. People…

That makes no sense. If the average American can drive to the supermarket, they're even more likely to go more often than if they had to walk.

Eh, this is just not proven true by observing what people do though.

When I lived in Europe for a couple months, my first time there I grocery shopped like an American - filled up an entire cart with a week or two worth of groceries and then everyone stared at me when I checked out.

It's absolutely true that Europeans who live in walkable cities go to the market to pick up groceries a few times a week. Americans simply do not, with very few exceptions.

The grocery store density is much higher though. There were at least 2 grocery stores within a 5 minute walk from anywhere I've stayed in a city core in Europe. At least a dozen within 15 minutes.

It's simply a difference in culture. There are plenty of places in the US where you could drive to half a dozen grocery stores within 15 minutes but people simply don't do so. The store sizes reflect this cultural difference too. The average grocery store in the US seems to be 4-6x larger than those in Europe.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#902
post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. If the average American can drive to the supermarket, they're even more likely to go more often than if they had to walk.

Eh, this is just not proven true by observing what people do though. When I lived in Europe for a couple months, my first time there I grocery shopped like an American - filled up an entire cart with a week or two worth of groceries and then everyone stared at me when I checked out. It's absolutely true that Europeans who live in walkable cities go to the market to pick up groceries a few times a week. Americans simp…

[shrug]

Your mileage varies, I guess. I used to live with easy walking distance of an upscale supermarket, but yet I did most of my shopping by driving to a different one farther away. Buying groceries with a car is simply more convenient.

Even after I moved out of that neighborhood, it wasn't unusual for me to stop at the grocery store every afternoon on my drive home.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality doesn’t care about whether it’s generalizable or not, it only cares about the truth. And the truth is that your suburbs are killing you.

Reality also doesn't care about an answer if it is impractical for a huge number of people. There are a variety of different answers to the problem and you pick the ones that are applicable to you and work from there Telling someone who can't afford to move to the city that they just need to move the city to solve their health problem is a waste of time for you and them.

The answer applicable to individuals is to leave the suburbs and move to a city.

The answer applicable to the government is to build better cities.

The answer is never stay in the suburbs but take drugs the rest of your life and spend the end of your life miserably unhealthy. You’re free to do that if you want to, you just can’t pretend it’s healthy.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#904
post #761

Isn't it funny/shocking how efficiently the US free market creates both the problems and their "solutions" in a neverending self-escalating game of subjecting the consumers to their will (here: food vs pharma)?

Ozempic is not a product of US though

You're right and AFAIK it wasn't primarily developed for weight-loss either. Still, there's something not quite right with the way this band-aid would be required at non-trivial scale in the first place. I guess there really is a level of commerce that is too excessive.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#905
post #899
post #877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Share to share any of it?

Always a fair request. I don't know it well enough or have time at the moment, but afaik it's the medical consensus: Obesity is a disease, (mostly) not a result of behavior. Eating less and/or more activity doesn't cure people; iirc bodies adjust to retain the same amount of fat, etc. under the new conditions.

I don't know where you get your science man but I'm about 100% sure what you just said is completely false. Not even remotely controversial just flat out wrong.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality also doesn't care about an answer if it is impractical for a huge number of people. There are a variety of different answers to the problem and you pick the ones that are applicable to you and work from there Telling someone who can't afford to move to the city that they just need to move the city to solve their health problem is a waste of time for you and them.

The answer applicable to individuals is to leave the suburbs and move to a city. The answer applicable to the government is to build better cities. The answer is never stay in the suburbs but take drugs the rest of your life and spend the end of your life miserably unhealthy. You’re free to do that if you want to, you just can’t pretend it’s healthy.

Ya, if you look at the propaganda being thrown around today '15 minute cities' are a communist trap meant to imprison you... don't expect change in the US.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More subtle as in still not a healthy diet with exercise?

Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake. Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle. Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a s…

Meanwhile, tracking consumption involves error bars that span a factor of 2. Go figure out how many calories are in an avocado. Is that per gram figure amortized for the weight of the pit, or is this just for the flesh?

Counting calories precisely was invented by the processed food industry.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#908
post #12
post #6

>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024. I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff. It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them…

For artificial problems, artificial solutions. I think the state of food in the US is really bad, and one cannot compare such products to the superior EU food quality standards and eating habits (and city designs) which render the incentives really perverse

Food is wayyyy better in America than Europe, are you kidding? Why do you think we're so fat?

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#909

There is a mix of culture and food at play here. Most people, left to their own devices, without cultural pressure, are lazy, unproductive, and slovenly. We can see that with food: as soon as the shaming of people for being fat weakened, as it happened primarily in the US and then in the Western world at large, people started to indulge without guardrails. We can see that with clothing and appearance: people started…

Bullshit. We built a world that constantly exploits human limits, then act surprised when people hit them. No one has infinite willpower.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i considered it, but the gym was a much better option. for everyone who says "i've tried etc doesnt work" all i would say is, possibly if you dont have the time due to kids etc. Otherwise, get to it!

You can't out excercise a bad diet. You can hit the weights for 2 hours straight every day and eat those calories back with a single bad dietary choice (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).

Diet is important, but if you think that a handful of peanuts is leading to your issues I'd first task writing down _everything_ you touch to eat.

IMO, especially when one has snacks fully stocked, it's easy to 'forget' that you ate something.

One big breakthrough for me was reading Arnold S. "encyclopedia of body building". There's a lot of physiological tips and also very practical advice.

I'm sure you can get it from anywhere, but for me this was a big change. Sizing the reps, the workouts, the weights helped a lot in trying to make progress. Additionally endomorphic bodies need different excercise and I was doing too much ineffective cardio for months with few results.

Weights changed my results within a few weeks.

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