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Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

cdc.gov

21–30 of 271 posts

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#21

Methinks that if 70% of you population is affected, something is effecting them. It's not just "low will power" even if that explanation makes 30% of people smug.

Abundantly available extremely cheap food?

Abundantly available extremely cheap food of poor nutritional value and addictive over consumption encouraging qualities forcefully positioned by the market at the expense of other options.

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#23

Methinks that if 70% of you population is affected, something is effecting them. It's not just "low will power" even if that explanation makes 30% of people smug.

Why can’t it be low willpower along with availability of instant cheap calorically rich unsatiating food? In the past even if you had low will power you didn’t have access to cheap 2000+ simple carb / sugar meals. Now we do.

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#24
post #17
post #8

This is directly related to the way American cities are designed. It’s a car centric culture where big houses are far away from each other. That means driving everywhere. That means long commutes. That means TV over communal activity. That means big grocery runs with shelf stable food. Then pile on hyper sweet drinks and nutritional misinformation campaigns, and of course Americans are going to be overweight. The wor…

It should be plausible to design a scientific study on how much a car centric culture is causing overweightness.

Why is it only now that obesity is reaching such epidemic proportions though? We've had a car-centric culture since Post WW2. Why haven't we seen this epidemic before?

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#25

Methinks that if 70% of you population is affected, something is effecting them. It's not just "low will power" even if that explanation makes 30% of people smug.

Abundantly available extremely cheap food?

Regular exposure to high doses of xenoestrogens like BPA[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#26
post #19
post #2

This might be a good YC "request for startups." Virta Health is one I've seen. And the Robert Johnson Wood Foundation is working on this cause: https://www.rwjf.org/en/our-focus-areas/topics/childhood-obe... -- Diet seems crucial. Obesity isn't really helped by exercise. ( https://www.vox.com/2018/1/3/16845438/exercise-weight-loss-m... ) "Significant weight loss was observed with any low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet.…

Also this article seems promising, if only I could read it without a paywall... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-fix-the-ob... (Side note: Is anyone working on "Amazon Prime for Web Paywalls" - e.g. $x/mo, and you get access to >90% of commonly hit web paywalls - see also https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ )

For specific articles you can make requests on r/scholar

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#27
post #8

This is directly related to the way American cities are designed. It’s a car centric culture where big houses are far away from each other. That means driving everywhere. That means long commutes. That means TV over communal activity. That means big grocery runs with shelf stable food. Then pile on hyper sweet drinks and nutritional misinformation campaigns, and of course Americans are going to be overweight. The wor…

The reason Americans eat that much sugar is not the "one won't hurt" mentality, but the fact that the government singled out fat as the only source of evil, and companies started adding sugar to everything because without fat everything tastes like cardboard.

I bet most of the sugar consumed is from things that no one would think contain as much sugar as they do (like--bread, meat, etc.), which is added to make it more palatable.

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#29

Methinks that if 70% of you population is affected, something is effecting them. It's not just "low will power" even if that explanation makes 30% of people smug.

Public policy, lack of education, overall culture and scale and dominance of food corporations. I'm not surprised with this data. The best example to understand this is to go to your nearest US convenience store.

Price of an Arizona Iced Tea 23oz can = $0.99

Price of the average bottle of water 16 oz = $1.50

Any poorly educated individual wouldn't understand the health implications of gulping 70g of liquid sugar when the only available data points to make food decisions are price and flavor.

Re: Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S

#30
If this is based on BMI, I couldn't care less. It's a terrible metric which is not fit for its purpose.

"Obesity is defined as body mass index (BMI) at or above the sex- and age-specific 95th percentile BMI (based on the variable BMXBMI) using cutoff points from the 2000 CDC growth charts for the United States: Methods and development. NCHS. Vital Health Stat 11(246). 2002. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_246.pdf. Excludes pregnant girls."

Almost everyone I know is "overweight" by this metric, which, as it turns out, means they are healthier (in terms of less likely to die from any-cause overall) than their thinner peers.

Show me the bell curve of longevity versus body-fat percentage, and what percentage of Americans are 1-sigma past the right side of the peak of that curve. Even body shape, for example, is a much better indicator of all-cause mortality than BMI. E.g. http://absi-calc.appspot.com/

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