Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More than 73% of American adults are overweight or obese

diabetes.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 217 posts

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

#91

Post by tokamak-teapot »

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…

It should be an easy metric, yes. I think it does help some people realise they are in poor physical health.

The problem with it is that it’s so commonly responded to with ‘muscle means it isn’t right’.

I used to be fairly fit and fairly strong and a bit too much towards the ‘obese’ category. I remember semi-believing it was muscle pushing me up the scale that far.

I’m now right in the middle of the ‘healthy weight’ category and I’d like to go back and convince my younger self that it’s time to fix the food intake and that muscle isn’t what’s pushing the weight up.

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

#92

Post by syshum »

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…

BMI is a poor indicator of Individuals Health

BMI is a good metric for POPULATION level studies, infact it was designed explicit for that purpose

So me calculating my individual BMI then making health judgments solely on that number is stupid.

However A person calculating the BMI of all persons in a Population then using those numbers to judge to overall condition of the population is valid

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

#93

Post by torstenvl »

BMI has no scientific validity and never did. Huge numbers of people are "overweight" by BMI standards, which is why even the armed forces don't use it (the Marine Corps height/weight standards allow for heavier individuals at each height, which is pretty telling since were the most physically demanding branch and geared toward being light naval infantry).

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

#94

Post by OminousWeapons »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #54
lemonspat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it is very destructive and unhelpful in the long run. If the United States ever moves to a public-funded healthcare regime, it will also be more expensive and destructive to care for from a government budget perspective.

False! Unhealthy people are great for saving money. Health care costs are disproportionately skewed towards end of life care. People who are unhealthy die younger and more quickly. Edit: Here you go. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748...

Obesity is strongly correlated with chronic healthcare issues (stroke, coronary artery disease, cardiac issues, diabetes, cancer, etc) and poor health outcomes overall. This has partially been directly linked back to signaling from adipose tissue. Being fat is unhealthy; this has been known for awhile; full stop. We can absolutely expect an aging, obese population to contribute to increased healthcare costs.

Additionally, while end of life care for the elderly is one significant contributor to health care costs, managing patients with multiple chronic healthcare conditions actually is the single largest cause of healthcare spend. If we want to be blunt, your assumptions are wrong: Fat people typically don't die suddenly while young, they die slowly after battling chronic disease, and they rack up costs while doing so.

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

#95

Post by spaetzleesser »

Just watch some home movies or look at pictures from the 60s or 70s and see how skinny most people were back then. It’s pretty amazing how the country got fat in such a short time. Having lived only on the coasts I noticed that Americans are a little chubbier than what I was used from Germany but the extent of the crisis became only clear when I did a cross country trip. Going to a Walmart in Indiana or Oklahoma you basically see only very fat or morbidly obese people. Even children are huge.

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

#96

Post by konjin »

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 healthy food is not subsidized.

A raw Big Mac costs on the order of a dollar. If you tried to just match that with raw healthy ingredients you'd be looking at five to ten times that.

And that's before we get into the labor costs of cooking.

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

#97

Post by claydavisss »

torstenvl wrote: post #93

BMI has no scientific validity and never did. Huge numbers of people are "overweight" by BMI standards, which is why even the armed forces don't use it (the Marine Corps height/weight standards allow for heavier individuals at each height, which is pretty telling since were the most physically demanding branch and geared toward being light naval infantry).

The armed forces are allowing the overweight to enlist because they can't find healthy recruits in the numbers they demand.

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

#98

Post by titanomachy »

ransom1538 wrote: post #81
titanomachy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> running for an hour burns far fewer calories than in half a muffin As a guy who runs pretty hard and weighs over 200 lbs, I burn nearly 1000 calories in an hour of running (~11km distance). I've tried a few different models to estimate this and they all more or less agree. A lightweight person jogging at low intensity for an hour, maybe .

A Burger King Whopper with cheese, for example, has 710 calories. You would need to run 10km. Running and exercise is worthless. Don't eat the Whopper. Cancel the gym membership. Workouts cause calorie cravings - and most Americans will just eat processed garbage [ or unless you are super healthy - then you drink the "Mocha Mojo" from jamba juice 680 calories ].

> running and exercise is worthless

A bold claim indeed.

Not everyone who exercises is trying to lose weight.

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

#99

Post by inglor_cz »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #33
vkou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 it's incredibly inefficient for a chef to cook a meal for a family, because people want their food to arrive warm, thus preventing factory-food-production, because delivery is expensive,…

Fat and salt are both critical for your health.

SOME fats are indeed essential for our health, but not every fat out there is.

Highly processed shit like trans-fats seems to be pretty destructive.

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

#100

Post by hombre_fatal »

martindbp wrote: post #31

I still remember driving through some small town in Arizona 10 years ago, and I couldn't find a single non-obese person there. Not just overweight, full on obese. Parents, kids, everyone. It was the one of the most bizarre experiences I've had, as a visitor. Cities are not that bad though, but I'm sure many rural parts are close to 100%.

We stopped for burgers in a Texas McDonalds in a tiny town off the beaten path.

Every single person inside was obese. It was actually embarrassing trying to squeeze by people on my way to find the end of the line, and we decided to just have one person order the food instead of all three of us contributing to the awkwardness of the human body version of bumper cars. I'd never seen anything like it in my life.

Living in Austin, I would wonder where exactly this 73% of the population lived. But after that rest stop in McDonalds, it was obvious that they simply live everywhere between the urban centers.

Our society is failing its people tremendously and on so many levels.

Post reply on HN