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More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

diabetes.co.uk

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Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#111

Post by symlinkk »

shinycode wrote: post #86
symlinkk wrote: post #12

Isn’t it strange how the only way to eat healthy food in America is to cook it yourself? Every fast food restaurant is unhealthy. Most sit down restaurants are unhealthy. I can pay someone to change my oil, I can pay someone to cut my grass, but for some reason cooking healthy food, the most essential service, is difficult to find. Why has our economy failed us in this sector specifically?

Because processed food yields the most profit. It’s cheap and quick to cook. It’s the economy of profit, with 8h of work and the same food budget you cook more and make more profit ...

Maybe there is space in the economy for a fast food restaurant that is slightly more expensive but also slightly healthier. Food for thought.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#112

Post by spaetzleesser »

29athrowaway wrote: post #34

In the US there are many highly processed foods with little fiber and added sugar. Nutrition fact labels can be very misleading. e.g.: showing nutrition facts per certain some arbitrary amount of weight, or having multiple servings per container, which is misleading if it's an individual serving container. e.g.: Oreo serving size is 2 cookies. Who opens a pack of oreos only to eat 2 of them? nobody. Many occupations…

“Servings” must be the biggest fraud in nutrition ever. The companies can basically make up whatever they want to make their foods look better. It’s unbelievable that this nonsense can be done.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#113

Post by war1025 »

A thing I wondered over the weekend:

Is there a correlation between frequency of bowel movements and BMI?

I read a book about pigs a couple years ago. It mentioned that once of the main differences between breeds of pigs that are high fat and those that are more lean is intestine length.

Basically, the longer food is in your guts, the more energy gets extracted from it.

My hypothesis would be that for an obese person, the length of time between food entering the body and food exiting the body is greater than in a person of a healthy weight.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#115

Post by viraptor »

kbenson wrote: post #63
tasty_freeze wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time BMI is mentioned someone has to come up with an example of a body builder or fit athlete who has a high BMI. Yes, everyone realizes this already, and nobody who is in that position is going to be mislead into thinking they are obese. Sure, it would be great if everyone could do a caliper test or a water displacement test, but that isn't ever going to happen, and BMI is a trivial and good enough place to st…

> Yes, everyone realizes this already, and nobody who is in that position is going to be mislead into thinking they are obese. No, but someone who works out the numbers and realizes that the BMI doesn't match them well, or their circumstances well, realizes it calls the study and what it represents into question. Using controversial metrics because they are easily available is counter-productive in the long run, beca…

The measurements don't have to be precise to show a trend, relation, or infer a number of valid results. If someone calls the study into question based on using imperfect methods, rather than using those methods incorrectly... That's their opinion, but it's not useful.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#116

Post by Smaug123 »

newen wrote: post #22
yters wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of the BMI is the more I workout to stay in the healthy range, the more difficult it is to stay in the healthy range. Best bet is to sit around not eating anything to be 'healthy' according to BMI.

True, I started weightlifting for three months and my BMI went into overweight territory. I had an athletic build both before and after. Probably good for a lot of people but weightlifting really puts it into question. It's not like weightlifting is something only few men can do; most men can weightlift. Then they end up having healthy body fat levels, but end up with BMI in the overweight category. If something as s…

The question is not whether most men can weightlift, but whether most men do weightlift. They don't.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#117

Post by kbenson »

ThePadawan wrote: post #50
kbenson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many people does having both muscle and fat push them from the overweight category to the obese category? At 5'-9" the overweight category starts a little over 169 lbs and the obese category starts just above 203 lbs. Given that as a teenager I was well into the overweight category with a six-pack and very little fat from an active lifestyle and playing a lot of basketball multiple times a week, I could easil…

The level of fitness you describe would put you in the top 2% of people I have ever met. I think that margin of error is acceptable compared to the ease of use of the BMI.

I did not feel overly fit. I was definitely not as fit as the people that played a sport competitively. I hung out with friends, ate (a lot of) fast food, and didn't do much outside of school. I did have a "weight training" class a few times a week, where we ran a mile and then I played basketball the whole time. A total of about five hours of exercise a week, and not being sedentary, definitely not an outlier for many teenagers. Yet still considered overweight?

The problem is that the BMI probably matches fairly well to a specific slice of the population. Maybe males 25-40. It likely loses accuracy of meaning the farther in age either direction you go, as well as the more different you are from the optimal subgroup. This is only barely noted in most cases (it's alluded to here in this article that Asian people might see problems at different BMI numbers). What about women vs men? What about the young and elderly? As a metric, BMI is poorly understood by the public, and this poor understanding is targeted and capitalized on by different studies. All it does is cloud our view of what's really going on.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#118

Post by konjin »

dwaltrip wrote: post #104
konjin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would showing added lead in baby formula help? Kind of shocked how in the US an issue that is obviously a health issue is treated as a personal failing. If you want sugar in your food you're free to add some after the fact, or buy it from a non-food store. Warning people that all the food they have access to is poison is not a solution to anything.

> Warning people that all the food they have access to is poison is not a solution to anything. It sounds like you are suggesting all food in American grocery stores is equally bad when it comes to sugar. Perhaps I misunderstood you, as that is obviously absurd. While I do wish there were more healthy options, I can assure you that the mainstream grocery stores (Ralph's, Safeway, etc) contain many products with low o…

>What is your alternative proposal?

Ban over the counter sale of processed food, the same way heroin stopped being sold as Mr. Jims Magical Cure All.

It's not like banning additives that have proven detrimental to health is a radical new idea. We have killed hundreds of industries that killed people before, most of them in much smaller numbers than the food industrial complex.

>Empowering people to make better decisions is actually one of the best things we can do.

Looking at the state of the US, it really isn't. Taking advice from Americans on food is like taking bathing advice from Catholics in 900AD.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#119

Post by mpol »

meowzero wrote: post #72

This isn't surprising. We're conditioned to eat great tasting food and lots of it. Most American cities have a car-oriented culture, along with sedentary lifestyles; therefore, not much walking or NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis). It seems over the years, Americans are burning less calories, but consuming more. I usually cook at home now, thanks to the Pandemic. Looking at all the recipes I found online, I…

> I realized how much high-calorie ingredients you have to add to make the food taste delicious.

Is that not a trap? Most professional cooks who want to stand out use lots of salt and sugar, sometimes up to a point that I find it disgusting. I can imagine if you are used to that much salt and sugar, you need it again to taste anything. But believe me, you can unlearn it and start to taste the food itself, instead of the added salt and sugar.

I learned the rule that a cook that uses lots of salt and sugar is a bad cook.

Re: More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

#120

Post by sieabahlpark »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #47
andygcook wrote: post #11

BMI isn't a reliable indicator to gauge obesity. For example, Tom Brady at 6' 4" and 225 lbs is considered overweight, which is obviously not the case. That being said, as an American, it really did shock me how fit the majority of people were in Italy when I visited there for the first time last year. This New England Journal of Medicine chart really does a good job of showing that America has gotten heavier over th…

Every time BMI is mentioned someone has to come up with an example of a body builder or fit athlete who has a high BMI. Yes, everyone realizes this already, and nobody who is in that position is going to be mislead into thinking they are obese. Sure, it would be great if everyone could do a caliper test or a water displacement test, but that isn't ever going to happen, and BMI is a trivial and good enough place to st…

> Yes, everyone realizes this already, and nobody who is in that position is going to be mislead into thinking they are obese.

Not everyone would know by now if people didn't repeat it. Just because you know something don't expect all 7 billion other potential people to automatically know.

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