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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Never underestimate the power of self-willed delusions.

My brother and I have to deal with our mother effectively killing herself by her lack of exercise. She developed a bloodclot from sitting still too much, and has refused to change her activity level, in addition to her near morbid-obesity. We have begged, pleaded, harassed, done meal prep, purchased equipment - nothing. Meal prep was a special kind of clusterfuck, as it merely resulted in her consuming the prepared meal shakes in addition to her normal food intake.

And yet, despite all this, she still claims she's more than capable of helping out outside with yard chores(she isn't). Commentary on her health and various drugs she's taking will have her brush it off, commenting on how many of her sisters were long-lived. Same with my advise that she needs better self-scheduling and to manage her food intake better(3 meals instead of 2).

All ignored.

The only time, the only time when she lost weight was when her and my father were on strict dietary regime due to his health(and hers).

That's what it takes - someone riding her near 24/7 with shame in order to actually eat properly.

That isn't to say that she hasn't tried to loose weight. Sugar-free snacks, drinks, meal shakes(as mentioned) - all of them treated like magic totems and talismans and potions that if she consumes this, she'll loose weight as if by magic while not altering her diet in the slightest.

I don't know if there's an official term for this. I like to think of it as 'Magic wand' thinking. That somewhere, somehow, something is out there that fixes everything - a magic wand, a golden ticket, that one thing that does it all without them having to expend one iota of effort, one dram of pain.

Mind, there's an aspect of culture, as well. I wonder how my mother would react if America was more like Asia in this regard - that, when getting fat, would have people actually tell her she's getting fucking fat - and, when reaching out to the wider culture as a whole to affirm her delusions, would instead be met with a cacophony of 'You're fat. Loose some fucking weight, fatty.'

Still. Her latest magic potion is ozempic. So, we'll see how that goes.

As for me, well, I've already learned my lesson long ago. And I get re-affirmation of the value of consistent exercise watching my friends barely a year or two older than I am - helping them with projects, seeing their stamina flag and suffering from minor ailments and injuries that I don't have to deal with - yeah, I'll stop exercising when I'm dead, thank you very much, and I intend for that to be a very, very long day off in the future.

(Also, don't think being educated doesn't mean you're immune to self-delusion. I have a friend of mine who's a lawyer, who doesn't believe in CICO dieting. He tends to bluescreen when I tell him how much I lost just by doing that alone.)

Now, as far as dieting goes - y'know what, I've ranted enough. Needless to say, 90% of the people who've I've seen try to diet start off on the entirely wrong foot to only have it crash and burn two weeks later.

I haven't gotten into the ozempic discussion so I don't know if other people have been talking about this, but isn't this going to make people consume 2000 calories of the same corn-syrup-on-soy-flakes diet they were already on?

I worry we're going to have a lot of malnourished people who maintain a BMI of 20 on nothing but Snickers bars and potato chips because their entire appetite regulation system is being overridden.

The idea that obese people eat nothing but junkfood is a strawman. Every single fat person I know tries to eat healthy. Every single one. And they are 95% successful at it too.

I've worked as a grocery store cashier (God help me) and see what foods people buy. I stand by it.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but I have a friend of mine who's already on ozempic specifically to loose weight.

Ironically enough, he's not obese - he just knows he eats alot and wants to stay at a healthy weight.

He literally cannot over-eat. As in, physically impossible. It makes him uncomfortable bordering on painful. Solid foods, atleast - does it affect liquids? I don't know.

So there's something there, atleast.

Sorry, I know this is being annoying, but you committed my least favorite spelling mistake. It should be lose, not loose. Loose is pronounced like moose.

I worry we're going to have a lot of malnourished people who maintain a BMI of 20 on nothing but Snickers bars and potato chips because their entire appetite regulation system is being overridden.

Then we throw some vitamins in the snickers bars and call it a day.

but isn't this going to make people consume 2000 calories of the same corn-syrup-on-soy-flakes diet they were already on?

That's not strictly worse than their current diet. Let's say they eat 8 Snickers bars for exactly 2000 calories:

  • 32 g of protein
  • 96 g of fat
  • 224 g of carbs
  • 8 g of fiber

They won't pack on any muscle with paltry 32g of protein, nor will this amount of fiber get them a better score on the Boston stool scale. But they will still lose weight and become much nimbler.

And if you switch them to (still delicious) Snickers Hi-Protein (8 bars for 1960 calories), the macros start to look solid:

  • 160 g of protein
  • 80 g of fat
  • 152 g of carbs
  • 48 g of fiber

This is not exactly the diet of champions, but if you feed someone these bars you can do some body recomposition work on them with resistance training.

their entire appetite regulation system is being overridden.

This is what I was trying to put my finger on. Thank you.

Ozempic etc don't reduce complexity in the system. We're already dealing with complex interactions between the human endocrine, neurological, and gastrointestinal systems and I think we're prematurely celebrating by myopically focusing on the success of appetite suppression. But how does that reverberate through the entire system? People eating fewer calories but also eating lower quality calories? Inconsistent eating timing? Maybe the secondary effects are benign (I'd like that!).

I would imagine the trade off is still worth it. Billions of East Asian peasants lived off almost nothing but rice for thousands of years. They weren’t at optimal health, but they managed.

That isn't to say that she hasn't tried to loose weight. Sugar-free snacks, drinks, meal shakes(as mentioned) - all of them treated like magic totems and talismans and potions that if she consumes this, she'll loose weight as if by magic while not altering her diet in the slightest.

To be fair, switching to sugar-free snacks and drinks is altering one's diet. Depending on your previous habits you can cut out a ton of calories just by switching from regular soda to a zero calorie soda.

But empirically people who switch to diet soda don't lose weight. There's something else going on there.

One would guess that those people are offsetting the change with something else. At my peak, my daily soda habit was something like 6-8 cans of Coke per day, which is 840-1120 calories. It's pretty much impossible to cut that out and not lose weight, as long as everything else stays constant.

"As long as everything else remains constant" is a hell of a loophole. You'd have to measure all of your excrement in a Calorimeter and all of your heat exchange with the environment to be certain that you're not driving a truck through it. That's untenable so we use (preferably tested) heuristics.

'Eat fewer calories' isn't a terrible heuristic, but 'eat foods that engender a stable energy level like complex carbs and vegetables and proteins' is a more nuanced and generally more useful heuristic.

I read it as adding sugar-free snacks and drinks on top her usual diet, rather than substituting for it.

Now that you point it out, I can see how it might be taken that way. If that's what OP meant, then fair enough - that isn't gonna help with weight loss.

Pretty much, yes. Sugar-free snacks don't help much when I clean out her car to find discarded taco bell takeout and ice cream wrappers.

Your 'Magic Wand Thinking' term is eerily familiar. I've internally termed it some variation of 'Tribal Brain' or 'Shaman Brain'. Just that acute sense that how the world must work is that there is Good Stuff and Bad Stuff. You either need to find the good stuff and it will all be better, or you need to excise the bad stuff and it will all be better. "The Dose Makes The Poison" makes no sense in this magic world. Good things are absolutely good and more is always good. Bad things are absolutely bad and the smallest dose will ruin everything.

But it's hard for me to be too harsh, even if it's despairing. Because whenever I read of one of those obscure African tribes that attribute all ills to witches or cargo cults in the Pacific it just feels like that's basement humanity. That's what we all instinctually revert to if we don't have constant social pressure from birth, or predisposition luck, to be otherwise.

I think there is also a gigantic intuition in the brain to go with whatever is the local social default. Human despise figuring thing out from first principles over and over again. Whatever others are having must be what's normal. Whatever others are having must be what you personally should want. Which makes sense in an amazonian, PNG, or savannah tribal context. But portion sizes have shifted to ridiculous extremes and now everyone is trapped is a default = poison context.

I see the same pattern regularly.

  • Not eating X will help.
  • Eating Y in addition to normal meals will help.
  • Eating organic food will help.
  • "This doesn't count."
  • "Actually the household chores I do are all the exercise I need."
  • "No I didn't gobble up half the contents of the fridge in the middle of the night, no idea why it's all gone.".
  • "I only eat 2000 calories a day and even just 800 twice a week, that's why I'm a skinny 350 pounds and my belly sags to the ground when I sit down."
  • the amount of calories in X doesn't count because 'it's good for you'.
  • dividing 4 by 2 is too much math. calories counts are whatever it says in bold. checking serving amounts is an unreasonable and absurd ask
  • "you can't expect me to just not socialize" when it's pointed that dieting and then a full meal at a restaurant twice a week is futile

I mean, you could sneakily inject her with ozempic, if you were unethical. It makes people not want to eat like hogs anymore.

Oh, she's taking it willingly. I didn't even suggest it or bring it up - she did that herself. I'm being just a little bitter when I call it a magical potion - I fully expect it to work.

It's just... one of those things that makes me grind my teeth a little. You'd rather pay 500 dollars a month for a weight-loss drug when you could just... organize your life better?

(To be clear, I don't know exactly how much she spent on her prescription - I'm going off by what a friend of mine pays for his prescription.)

Paying 500 dollars a month for a drug that stops you from feeling intense shame and also improves your health, energy, longevity etc. is supposed to not qualify under "organizing your life better"?

You'd rather pay 500 dollars a month for a weight-loss drug when you could just... organize your life better?

Imagine someone saying to a homeless person “you’d rather wait for the city to give you a tiny home in three years when you could just… organize your life better?” We fatties didn’t choose phantom hunger and akrasic mindsets. Obesity is as NP-hard a problem as chronic homelessness, and we probably share some neural miswiring with those unfortunate folks.

CICO works, indisputably, for anyone who can control their arms and legs against the will to consume.

I grew up obese, by the medical definition of the term. Lost over seventy pounds via CICO, and kept it off. So spare me the 'Oh, you've never been fat, you just don't know.'

I have been fat. Double-chin, no jaw-line, pear-shape. By all rights, I still am obese by strict BMI measurements, and believe you me, I'm constantly going over what would be needed to loose weight even further.

Please understand the PoV I'm coming from, because I've been there. When I say 'organize your life better', it's because I did exactly that, and I have difficulty putting myself in some sort of special, super-human category that can somehow overcome your phantom hunger, akrasic mindsets, and neural miswirings.

Sure, so maybe there's multiple reasons for why people get fat and your having been fat doesn't necessarily give you insight into the difficulties of every fat person?

Very well put. If it was as simple as "just stop eating, bro" then there would be almost nobody who is fat. Fat people aren't stupid - they know damn well that not eating will fix their problem, it's just really hard to accomplish that by sheer willpower. We know (because Grant_us_eyes told us) that his mom has tried many other things and run up against the limits of her willpower. So the choice here is "try this medicine as a tool to help" or "keep on going as things are", not between "try this medicine" and "lose weight without medicine". It's silly to complain that she's making use of a tool to help her in an area she struggles with.

It does seem to me a lot of people suffer quite a bit from hunger. Personally, for some odd reason it takes about 4-6x longer for me to actually be hungry than is the case for a normal person.

Also, there's considerable evidence that junk food messes with satiety and makes people permanently hungrier. Ozempic, maybe fasting/diet change resets this.

I suffer from cravings. I can start wanting food, and despite a running monologue in my car about how not hungry and already full I objectively feel, I find myself ordering food in a drive-through or finding food at my destination.

It’s phantom hunger, as pervasive and obsessive as the phantom pains of fibromyalgia sufferers or the painful sensations of a phantom limb.

Currently the science says this can be treated with GLP-1. I dutifully took Ritalin in my youth for ADHD on shakier science saying it would medicate away my distractibility, so I have absolutely no qualms about medicating away my phantom hunger. Except the cost.

A few people have had luck with switching to a meat heavy low carb diet, fwiw. https://youtube.com/watch?v=mHr51XqJtwE

this woman had a serious weight problem (up to 360 lbs), started doing carnivore diet and over 1.5 years dropped to ~220 with that an exercise.

My husband is having success with Ozempic, after many years of being varying levels of obese. For our first several years together, he was convinced that all diets were either "woo" (ineffective) or "starve yourself" (intolerable). Eventually he decided to try keeping track of his caloric intake and realized that he could lose weight if he kept his daily average to 3000 and exercised vigorously every day, though having a demanding desk job tended to interfere with the latter goal. Cutting the daily intake down below 2500 calories was apparently not feasible until Ozempic chemically altered his appetite.

I agree that there's a lot of magic wand thinking, but as I alluded to, I think this is aided by an absolutely abhorrent culture on the topic. You have the people trying to sell you something, so they're going to promise the moon. Then, when people give up, they turn to a different magic thinking (e.g., @jeroboem's "There's something else going on, IMO") and just imagine that it must be some magic chemical or something. Even when my wife agreed that we would track our calories and see how it went, she would repeatedly have times where her weekly windowed average weight wasn't visibly going down for like a single data point (maybe even two points) and would go off on "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE" with no real rational explanation of why it would suddenly stop working. Just some sort of unknown magic. Spoiler: it always kept working. After enough time and then seeing the summary data over a year or two, she said, "I knew, but I didn't know know." Now she "know knows". Before, there was always a gap, a gnawing hole, where magic could constantly sneak in and make her default to thinking that it's just too weird and complicated and that there's probably "something else going on".

Perhaps ozempic will actually be a magic wand for a lot of people. It seems genuinely useful for a lot of folks. I don't think I've seen any indication that ozempic magically causes people to exercise more, though, and exercise has significant bodily benefits beyond just caloric balance.

There clearly is something else going on. People didn't just suddenly lose willpower. Nor did they suddenly lose the knowledge that diet and exercise were important. More importantly, people 50 years didn't have to try to be skinny, they just were.

No one has a compelling theory, supported by evidence, for why the obesity epidemic happened. You might not agree with SlimeMoldTimeMold, but they do a good job of explaining why all the various folk theories are wrong. If you think the problem is simple, then I'd argue you just don't understand it.

Of course this doesn't mean an individual person can't use diet and exercise to lose weight. It just means that, when measured across the population, few will be able to.

To solve the obesity crisis we have to stop trying the same failed ideas from the 1990s that only made the problem worse.

The superpalable foods and people overeating is the best theory and the truth because it fits available evidence. It is also the main scientific theory.

Also fat people genuinely have less willpower to resist overeating because they have greater appetite.

It is EASIER to stay thin that to become thin after becoming obese. But it isnt impossible and there are other societal problems too due to a culture of less discipline.

So, outside of ozembic, the best intervention would have been to try to stop people from becoming fat in the first place, focusing more on ingraining the right habits to children and target the food culture.

The reality a lot of people go along with what is the default. The default changed for whatever reason (because people like eating tasty food with calories, and because people selling food like making more money over people consuming more food being a big reason, and such food became more available and cheaper), and then obesity increased and as it increased it became more acceptable and people mimicked each other.

Now, sure people don't like the results of being fat, but they do like eating in the way that makes them fat, and there is copying of each other. This conformism and copying others habits then leads to escalation of trends. If there is a rising trend to overeat, people increasingly overeat.

Discipline is not everything about it, because a facet of it is careless overeating due to the rise of hyperpalable food. At some point of making mistakes of judgement, it does require more discipline to get out of it. But the level of discipline in the initial stage would be less, and less so if the default food culture was less obesogenic with less high calorie hyperpalable foods around.

Fundamentally, there is a trend in general, not talking about motte specifically, of people talking about such issues who don't want to do something about it. Obviously you are going to have rising drug abuse, obesity, crime epidemic, or other problems (i.e. cultural far leftism, putting such groups on pedestal), if you promote that such issues are unsolvable mysteries, and exaggerate the difficulty and the harm of doing something about it. Same even with fertility issue. Modernity has come along with some problems which do have their difficulties, and also simultaneously there is an ideological trend which is part of the problem which exaggerates the difficulty of solving them, and is in fact against trying to do so.

The superpalable foods and people overeating is the best theory and the truth because it fits available evidence.

The problem I have with this is that foods in the U.S. seem no more superpalatable in 2024 than in 1990. Yet obesity has risen quite a bit. I also think words like superpalatable and hyperprocessed tend to become pretty mushy when we start to examine them.

Fundamentally, there is a trend in general, not talking about motte specifically, of people talking about such issues who don't want to do something about it. Same even with fertility issue. Modernity has come along with some problems which do have their difficulties, and also simultaneously there is an ideological trend which is part of the problem which exaggerates the difficulty of solving them, and is in fact against trying to do so.

I hope you don't put me in that bucket. It's true I think these problems are extremely difficult to solve. But rather than advocating surrender (as I feel Scott did on his homelessness article), I advocate stronger action. That said, it's important that we not merely just double down on solutions that we know don't work. For example, if we want to solve housing affordability (another of those intractable issues) we can't do it by using failed solutions like rent control. And if you want to solve obesity, then telling people to simply diet and exercise won't work. We tried it for 50 years. It failed miserably.

Above all, we should adopt epistemic humility and try a variety of solutions, ideally letting natural experiments play out at state and municipal levels.

U.S. seem no more superpalatable in 2024 than in 1990

This seems wrong, the difference between the average restaurant in Plano Texas from then to now is staggering, and not just in terms of quality, but variety of cuisine as well. This might be controversial, but I think the expected quality you would get from a high-end restaurant in 1990 is what you can expect from basically any restaurant today(controlling for location). Cooking knowledge seems to have really been spread through the information age, and a base line expectation of quality ingredients also spread through the country during this time window. Do you remember when people used to advertise that they used arabica coffee beans, before it just became the standard? Dominos pizza is a particular stark example, and that change happened in 2010, in part because they had fallen behind, because all the other pizza places had been upping their game for years. I think the idea that, because on the surface you could go to a Wendy's and get a burger and fries in 1990 and in 2024, the 'superpalatability' of the food has not changed, is wrong (Wendy's is another place that seriously improved and is constantly tweaking and improving, a few years ago they drastically improved their fries).

I will agree that it is not super cleanly defined, but in general I think the availability of good food has improved pretty significantly since the 90s.

Dominos pizza is a particular stark example, and that change happened in 2010, in part because they had fallen behind, because all the other pizza places had been upping their game for years.

Can you expand on that? I haven't been following trends in American style pizza, but the idea of "upping the game" on pizza seems absurd. The thing has been perfected decades ago. It's yeast dough, tomatoes, meat and cheese.

What could you even change to make it more calorie dense? More cheese? That's called pizza quattro formaggi and has been a classic since basically forever.

The idea behind 'superpalatable' is not necessarily that it is more unhealthy (calorie dense), but that it is more delicious, so you over eat more, or are more likely to want to eat it instead of something else(something healthier). 'Upping the game' here, means tastier sauces, better crust recipes, perfecting baking time/and delivery/heat retention, quality of cheese, cheese blends, herbs, spices. Making more palatable food does not require making it more calorie dense. Can you imagine a world where room-temperature school-cafeteria pizza is the best possible delivery pizza, and how that would effect the frequency with which you order pizza?

Although, you can almost always add calories, one of the headline changes of their 2010 recipe was an herb and garlic butter glaze on the crust.

There's also entirely new categories of commonly consumed foods. How many people in 1995 started their day with a coffee-like milkshake? Even those that don't, energy drinks have more calories than a cup of coffee, even with milk and sugar(and portion sizes were smaller back then, too).

On the other hand, every gas station has sugar-free energy drinks for sale as well. The white Monster is at least iconic enough that Boomerjak is always depicted with one.

The problem I have with this is that foods in the U.S. seem no more superpalatable in 2024 than in 1990. Yet obesity has risen quite a bit. I also think words like superpalatable and hyperprocessed tend to become pretty mushy when we start to examine them.

There's also limitless and ubiquitous digital entertainment. Reddit, X, TikTok, YouTube, PornHub, streaming services, video games, if you get tired of one thing you can switch to another. And just like that, your whole day is gone, and you've been mindlessly snacking on junk food the whole time. Yes, there were people that watched the TV the whole day in the 90's. And these people were morbidly obese, shaped like their armchairs.

No one has a compelling theory, supported by evidence, for why the obesity epidemic happened.

Food got cheaper, especially superpalatable food (count calories that can be bought by median wage).

People in the 1970s weren't skinny because food was too expensive.

The fattest countries in the world aren't the richest countries in the world, nor the countries where food is the cheapest. Look at this list, the fattest countries are Pacific islands (where the necessity of importing food makes it expensive) and Middle Eastern countries (which can be poor like Libya or rich like Qatar). Whatever's causing obesity, it isn't cheap calories.

I personally think that the global obesity epidemic has something to do with the fact that we replaced animal fats with an agricultural waste product that is evolutionarily novel.

Last time I checked Pacific islanders were eating ultra processed food and meager amount of fruits and vegetables, with high caloric intake. And food is still cheap enough there given incomes to easily eat yourself to death.

Is it wrong?

People in the 1970s weren't skinny because food was too expensive.

May depend on location. In Poland it WAS and obesity was far less widespread than nowadays.

Which countries you wanted to use as counterexamples here?

Whatever's causing obesity, it isn't cheap calories.

Cheap calories are at least prerequisite and part of the puzzle. Without that you will not get hordes of fat people

Is there any country where you could spend less than 20% of median income on tasty snacks providing more calories than you need, without obesity epidemic?

Is there any country where you could spend less than 20% of median income on tasty snacks providing more calories than you need, without obesity epidemic?

France and the high income East Asian countries have low obesity rates despite people being easily able to gorge themselves on food that is generally regarded as quite good by outside observers.

People didn't just suddenly lose willpower. Nor did they suddenly lose the knowledge that diet and exercise were important.

This is a bad strawman, and you should feel bad.

You might not agree with SlimeMoldTimeMold, but they do a good job of explaining why all the various folk theories are wrong.

SMTM acknowledges that calories have something to do with it. He just thinks there's some magic 'nonlinearity' somewhere in the middle. Fine, whatever. Give me a model. Tell me how we can design an experiment to confirm or falsify your belief. Imagine that we have enough resources to run a lab-controlled study with a double digit number of subjects for a year or two. What do you do?

You're asking me to explain the obesity epidemic. I can't.

But I can disprove standard medical advice. Honestly, I don't even need to because we are already running the experiment and the results are overwhelming.

But anyway, here's my experiment. We have a control group and an experimental group. The experimental group goes to a location once a week, for one hour, where they receive diet and exercise information provided by you. You can also do anything you want during that hour, including exercise. However, you may not recommend or mention any pharmaceutical intervention. To ensure compliance, each person is paid $50 per hour but people who drop out still count in the experimental group. After 8 weeks, the intervention ends.

Then we check back in 2 years to see how the BMI of the control group and experimental group has changed. I predict with a high degree of confidence that there is no significant difference.

You're asking me to explain the obesity epidemic.

No, I'm not. It would be simple enough for you to just propose an experiment to show that CICO doesn't work. You know, to demonstrate that "something else is going on". For example, you could propose an experiment where subjects are fed maintenance level calories, but gain weight. Or where they're fed deficit level calories, but maintain weight. You could show something specific about a weird nonlinearity that actually contributes to a claim that "something else must be going on". Anything. Literally anything at all that contributes to that. In any way whatsoever.

But I don't think you want to even try to demonstrate that "something else must be going on". You simply want to say that many people don't choose to do a thing, even given extremely mild informational content. That has never been contested, nor does it imply that "something else must be going on".

It would be simple enough for you to just propose an experiment to show that CICO doesn't work.

Who is saying that CICO doesn't work? No one is saying this.

What do you mean when you say, "There's something else going on"? What is the "something other than X"? Please speak plainly and directly about what you are meaning to say. Also, please take into account SMTM's writing on CICO in your description, as that appears to be related to one of the "folk theories" that you said were wrong, according to his explanation.

What do you mean when you say, "There's something else going on"?

Sure. Something in our natural environment is causing us to eat more food than we need, thus gaining weight. Throughout most of history (and even today in countries like Vietnam and Japan) people were able to effortlessly stay thin. They eat when they're hungry. Some days, they eat excess calories. Other days they have a deficit. But overall, there is an almost EXACT match between calories eaten and consumed. Being off by even 200 calories a day would lead to serious weight gain over time.

This is homeostatis. And, importantly, it does not require CONSCIOUS thought.

The mistake most people make is the assumption that thin people are thin because they continuously monitor their weight and exert willpower to maintain it. This is the same flawed mental model as the closeted gay who thinks that straight men want to bang other dudes but just resist it. No, straight men don't want to bang other dudes. Likewise, skinny people don't have to RESIST eating that second donut. They simply don't want to. Because they are full.

Something in our diet or environment has disrupted this homeostasis. This "something else" causes our bodies to send signals to eat more than we need. It might be sugar, it might be seed oils, it might be pesticides, it might be lithium. It could even be hyperpalatable foods. But it's causing people to continue to eat when they should feel full.

More comments

No one claims that consistent diet change is easy or that people are easily controlled.

Okay but the problem is that if it's not frictionless enough then it's not a good enough solution for the masses which means not a good enough solution overall for society.

No one has a compelling theory, supported by evidence, for why the obesity epidemic happened.

Massive increase in easily available food combined with a decrease in the amount of physical effort required to live seems like a perfectly sufficient explanation to explain the obesity epidemic.

My crackpot theory: In the beginning, there was scarcity to keep people thin. Rich people tended to fat if they weren't careful. Then food got fairly cheap, but lead and cigarettes (and sometimes amphetamines) kept people's weight down. Now food is still cheap but the lead and cigarettes are gone, so... boom.

That... actually makes a lot of sense. The insane growth in marijuana consumption can't have helped either.

It still doesn't really explain why Japanese women are skinny, given that they don't really smoke.

Comprehensive and massive fatshaming affecting the meme-gender in a conformist culture?

Everything I've ever heard about fatshaming in other times and places reinforces the idea that American fatshaming is ineffective because there's not nearly enough of it.

Smoking is very common in Japan, even among women. And even if you don't smoke, there's a lot of second hand smoke there.

But it's probably more to do with genetics, rice, and walking a lot there.

Could secondhand smoke deliver enough nicotine to meaningfully suppress appetite though?

(I agree that the smoking is probably small potatoes compared to the other factors you mentioned)

Notably, weights were rising that entire time even with lead and cigarettes. The thing is, that was a good thing for the first half of the 20th century because quite a few people were undernourished and underweight.

This is also why I find the simplest theory the best - food got cheap, people got rich, and the people that aren't rich get a bunch of money from the government to buy food. You don't need a complicated story, just a super-rich country that doesn't require much physical labor combined with the human inclination to eat a lot in times of plenty.

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