Study: people who eat and exercise the same as people 20 years ago are fatter

"I have no particular expertise in this area, but I've been making the "we don't know why people are fat" argument to whoever will listen for a while. Doctors (socially, not at an appointment FWIW), academics… I'm actually quite surprised how often they've been thinking along the same lines and/or they are convinced by the general idea."

May I present my broad theory ?

Americans, across a very broad swatch of behaviors, haven't broken away from the social norms and habits of living on a farm.

You (my fellow American) drive a big truck, eat "3 squares" a day, serve HUGE portions, don't specifically exercise and generally overequip and overfuel our entire lifestyle because we can't remember we're not on the farm anymore.

My father grew up on a farm, my wifes grandparents both grew up on a farm, and everyone in their lineage going back ... forever ... were living rural, agrarian, peasant lives. So depending on who you are in the United States, you are perhaps 1-2 generations removed from a radically different lifestyle.

It's going to take more than one generation to become well-practiced at being urban, and a pseudo-rural suburban environment coupled with a TV shouting "YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH TRUCK!@" is not helping ...

I watched a documentary called "Fed Up" that addressed this. I haven't verified the accuracy of the documentary, but here was the explanation it gave, which is consistent with your first sentence.

"Fat" was declared the enemy, so highly processed food providers started removing fat. The food tasted bad. So they added in sugar. So now people were eating much more sugar, but still craving fat, and seeking it from other sources. So it became a double whammy.

At the same time, as many products (such as dairy) were being made low-fat, the highly processed food industry needed something to do with all that fat, so it launched the "cheese glorious cheese" campaign, where highly processed cheese (with lots of added salt) was now added to almost every conceivable thing, at low cost (because it was left over from the milk). Cheese went into pizza toppings (extra cheese!), pizza crusts, processed mac n cheese, all kinds of approximations of previous foods. So now, Americans, instead of eating fat where it naturally exists, were instead eating lots of low fat processed food products with sugar to replace the fat, and then eating the fat in other products, with lots of added salt.

The other thing the documentary asserted (well, a physician in the documentary asserted) is that the popular believe that "a calorie is a calorie regardless of source" is incorrect in terms of how the body processes calories from different food sources. A calorie of sugar can lead to weight gain in a way that a calorie from other sources doesn't. Again, this is just what was in the documentary "fed up", I don't know much more about it than that.

Rather than focusing too much on the difference between Europe and the US, I think it might be useful to realize the difference between "big, corporate food" and an almost completely orthogonal supply system. Orange juice and a juiced orange may have almost nothing to do with each other, at this point (depending on the source, of course).

The reason I say this is that I think it would be foolish to count on the atlantic or a national border as safety, instead, think of something that has conquered the US food market (among other markets) and will absolutely expand and conquer new territory when possible.

> Travel agents in 1980 did less physical work than ER nurses do in 2015 whether measured in micro-tasks, macro-tasks, steps per day or anything else.

My point is that that is an assumption, if we choose to believe 1% of the last 30 years of technological innovation in convenience is real then the environments are a better explanation than changes to their inhabitants.

A travel agent in 1980 may walk to work, clean the house without a vacuum, scrub the floor, lift and lug all sorts of heavy devices, reference books, carry and hang laundry, etc... Anyone today has higher odds of having to drive to work, having a roomba and easy surfaces at home, carrying a tablet or just a phone, having no steps in their living area and an elevator at work, not cooking at all by 1980's standards, having a private washing machine, being afraid to walk after dusk...

Then for the 40 hours they actually spend at work, there are various equipment and practices to no longer lift patients frequently in the ER, etc. Many nurses are spending a lot of time reading things, comparing numbers, following (manual?) push carts and entering pill data. A few ER nurses may be doing more exercise now, but the average could look shockingly low to a travel agent from 1980.

I would expect the articles premise if I ran the study. That makes me more suspicious of the outcome; we find what we expect to find when a study can't be perfectly controlled. Swapping the 1980s and 2010s environments is a perfect example of poor control.

Here you go: https://books.google.com/books?id=XPJdM9POXGAC&pg=PA366&lpg=...

> They will consume the protein in their muscles and organs rather than surrender the fat in their adipose tissue. [...] They lost 60 percent of their body fat before they died of starvation, but still had five times as much body fat as lean mice that were allowed to eat as much as they desired.

Some people don't want to kill animals that don't want to be killed. You may have different ethics but that doesn't imply anything bad about vegetarians.