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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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The fat activists have been pretty successful. The fact that "fat shaming" is regarded as something that shouldn't be done is really quite remarkable.

Good for them! We shouldn't be fat shaming people. The problem with fat activists is that they are celebrating unhealthy behavior or even denying that its unhealthy at all.

And I suppose from an aesthetic perspective it's awful as well, much like the deliberately ugly statues, public art, and brutalist buildings we are now forced to endure.

The problem with shaming is it ignores the role biology plays too. Long-term results for most dieters are abysmal. Trying to lose weight long-term means having to make restrictions that are possibly infeasible. Some people who have bad genes are quite literally unable to stop eating, or have really slow metabolisms, or bad balance of ghrelin vs. leptin, etc. These people are screwed

I am increasingly adopting this belief. Willpower didn't just collapse, nor did activity levels. There is something in our food or environment that is making people having a higher set point. In the 1970s or in modern-day Taiwan most people don't struggle to maintain a healthy weight. But in the modern day U.S. most people will be overweight because it is very difficult to maintain a weight lower than one's set point. Not impossible, of course. Just not worth it for many people.

On the other hand, semaglutide and other weight loss drugs will fix this for wealthy people within in the next decade, so I expect being to fat to become even more of a low class signifier than it is already.

weight loss drugs are the future. i see no other way out unless we get better fat substitutes. most of the calories come from fat

Physical activity did collapse, though. Combine high caloric intake with very low physical activity and voila, everyone is fat.

Can't find the citation, but I believe that's not actually true, at least for U.S. adults since the 1970s?

Iterestingly, the average BMI of Japanese people doesn't show (Top left graph is men, top right is women) any sort of change in direction or strength of a trend during the 1970's, but does paint a steady increase in BMI of men of all age groups, and quite a complicated picture for women.

If I'm reading these graphs correctly, Japanese men have been getting fatter since the early 1960s while Japanese women have generally not. Interesting dichotomy. Potentially there is more social pressure for Japanese women to be skinny? Certainly, in Japan, the standards for feminine beauty are far above what they are in North America.

Nevertheless, Japan does not have an obesity problem. With only 4.3% obesity in 2016, it is in fact the LEAST obese of any developed country in the world, and less obese than almost all the poor starving countries as well.

So even though Japanese BMI has apparently been increasing since about 1960, it's not having nearly the effect it is on other countries. I wonder what their corn product consumption looks like?

And yet the obesity rate was much lower in living memory, and people who follow the procedure of ‘just shoving fewer groceries down their maw’ lose weight. Yes, that entails being hungry sometimes and passing on dessert most of the time and probably learning to drink water. But pushing people to actually do those things is a plausible justification for fat shaming.

Yes, that entails being hungry sometimes and passing on dessert most of the time and probably learning to drink water.

Isn't this what a diet is. yet the stats are pretty miserable. ppl lose weight and then regain it

Don't you know people with healthy diets? I have relatives who eat muesli and yoghurt in the morning, a salad with some prosciutto berries for lunch, some potato chips (that is to say fairly traditional ones with just potato and salt) and cheese in front of the television, then beef, rice and vegetables for dinner. Or maybe salmon or lamb instead of beef.

They're not fat and never have been. It's not dieting so much as having a healthy diet. If we started people on that sort of diet rather than American style plastic food, there'd be no problem. These people have no attraction to McDonalds or whatever, they look upon it with disgust.

I know lots of people who maintain a healthy weight. I know many fewer people who were once obese but then slimmed down and maintained a healthy weight by dieting. It's far from clear from the data that "trying to diet" or "telling people to diet" is an effective intervention once they are already obese. It seems like something intrinsic to metabolism and appetite regulation is irreversibly broken at that point, and the only permanent solutions are gastric surgery and (now, hopefully) semaglutide and its analogues.

not so much healthy but rather eat little. I know someone who would often go something like 9 hours without eating anything. Dinner + small amount of food in morning...that's it. Stayed thin forever. No snacking, But steak for dinner and pastry in morning, so not particularly healthy anyway. Plus daily exercise.

People have been trying to figure this out for a century. Think of all the federal and state dollars spent on raising awareness about health, school lunches, etc. As an HBD and libertarian leaning person, I am inclined to believe this is infective. A bunch of factors come into play: Something as basic or fundamental as food is still largely a mystery. I think the solution will have to come from the private sector to provide better drugs to combat obesity and better substitutes for food, like low calorie food that better mimics high calorie food.

How can it be a mystery? It's like Scott's example of the Russian periodic table with room-temperature superconductors and antigravity. There are some healthy diets in the world. There's the upper middle-class pious diet with home-cooking, multigrain bread, fruit, fish and so on. There's the Japanese diet with fish and rice - there's zero problem with obesity in Japan. The Mediterrenean diet isn't bad either. Only as countries westernize, only as McDonalds and Coca Cola expand into new markets does obesity emerge.

The most obese countries are Pacific Islanders, which is genetics-related, followed by oil-rich Arab countries who are ultra-Westernized and then the US.

According to wikipedia, Ethiopia has a higher proportion of obese people than Japan! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate

I'm confident that if the US government shifted its vast agricultural subsidies program towards pumping out sushi rather than corn and beef, there would be quick improvement. I agree that raising awareness does nothing, what's needed is serious movement on the ground. Dissolve Coca-Cola, retrain fast food cooks to produce sushi, ban HFCS and things will turn around quickly.

n=1, but I pretty much only eat pizza and other take-out food, and have for the majority of my life (I'm in my 30s now). I'm not fat and haven't been since I was a kid. It's not my metabolism or genetics, either - I quickly gain pounds if I let myself indulge snacks too much for a few weeks. In that eventuality, I just eat slightly less for a few weeks and go back down. I know the CICO observation is trite at this point, but it's true. It's trivially true. You simply won't get fat if you just don't eat excessively.

I suspect the sort of disdainful attitude you're describing/exhibiting (e.g., "plastic food") is just class signaling and virtue signaling, frankly. Pizza and burgers, for example, are just wheat, tomatoes, cheese, and meat. But combine them into the form of pizza or burgers and all the sudden it evokes an image of a lower class person who's perhaps not that bright, not that health-conscious, doesn't really understand nutrition, doesn't really want to put in the effort to be "healthy" (unlike you, dear observer, of course), and probably also has Coors Light instead of craft beer in his fridge.

I'm not against pizza or burgers in principle. If you make them from good ingredients than that's fine. I was more thinking of the aisles in the grocery store full of plasticky sweets. There'll be a row of soft drink next to a row of chips with flavors unknown to nature. Stuff like gummy bears.

Furthermore, it is true that poor, lower-class people are fatter than rich people, generally speaking. In this case, my classism and disdain is based upon fact. I won't say that the diet I describe above is ideal - these are also people who buy and unironically eat kale and non-alchoholic kombucha which is just repulsive. Nevertheless, it is possible to buy high-quality ingredients that taste good and don't cause significant obesity. Sugary Starbucks drinks aren't healthy either, despite being middle-class as opposed to lower class.

I know CICO is fundamentally correct, and I've conquered my fat demons, but they did exist. If you can eat crappy food every meal without consequence you really are fortunate in some ways. I won't claim it's anything complicated or impossible to overcome but there really do exist people who if not diligently rounded in will balloon out.

Do you know where to buy actual muesli or toasted oat-based cereal any more? All my local stores stopped carrying the last one they had, and now the only marginally edible cereals are that horrible raisin bran stuff packed with as much sweetener as kids' Sugar Puffs.

I guess it fell victim to the successive wave of fads against carbs and grains

I guess it fell victim to the successive wave of fads against carbs and grains

Or it just was getting outcompeted for shelf space by the chocolate frosted sugar bombs.

Because they don’t stick with it.

That's because sustained willpower is hard. For a diet to work long term, it requires a more fundamental behavioral change than just toughing it out.

Do you think that the root cause of increased obesity today vs in 1970 is primarily due to people in 1970 being more persistent in sticking to a diet where they are hungry sometimes? If so, do you think that's due to a general decline in willingness to stick with unpleasant things in general between the 1970s and now, or something specific to dietary habits (e.g. "feeling slightly hungry" was a feeling with ~neutral valence in 1970, but is a feeling with negative valence now)?

It's food getting cheaper, more palatable and shelf-stable, plus the normalization of snacking (aka eating while doing other things).

  • Cheetos were invented in 1948

  • Sugar-frosted flakes were created in 1952

  • The first flavored potato chips were created in 1954

  • Trix was created in 1954

  • Domino's was founded in 1960

  • Taco Bell was founded in 1962

  • Froot Loops were created in 1963

  • Cap'n Crunch was created in 1963

  • Commercial production of corn syrup began in 1964, allowing for cheaper sweet food

  • Lucky Charms were created in 1964

  • Pringles were invented in 1968.

  • Cheese Doritos were created in 1972

  • Honey Nut Cheerios were created in 1979

It's a wonder people weren't getting fat in the 70's with all this sweet and savory junk, I guess with just PBS, CBS, NBC and ABC on TV they had more active pastimes.

Also, as mentioned above, smoking and leaded gasoline probably also played a significant role.

I think the root causes are multiple, but that an increasing unwillingness to stick with things that require putting in the work to achieve results is a major factor. I would also point to soda becoming cheaper to the point of being a replacement for water, and less home cooking alongside skyrocketing portion sizes, in addition to less tolerance for healthy but not especially tasty food.

I'm pretty sure they main relevant difference is the lack of smoking.

Also the reduction in environmental lead.

That's an interesting hypothesis. I imagine, if it were true, we would see a smaller increase in the obesity rate in people who are or were in professions that require a strong work ethic and significant grit, and a larger increase in the obesity rate of those who don't.

Specifically, I would expect, in that case, to see warehouse workers getting fatter faster than doctors (despite a similar level of physical activity being required in each job), since I would expect that doctors have not experienced significant slippage in willingness to put in work (if anything, my impression is that medicine has gotten more competitive). My impression is also that the Marines requires considerably more perseverance and grit than the Air Force, so I would expect former marines to be getting fatter more slowly than former members of the air force.

I have not yet looked at those data points, but do you think that those are a reasonable set of concrete observations that you would expect to see if the laziness hypothesis is the primary contributing factor?

Sure, that seems reasonable, although we should probably note that doctors are also, by and large, older than warehouse workers, and less likely to be kept in shape by their jobs, so you’d need more datapoints than just a few to average out confounder like that.

IIRC the working class(which has no great barrier to entry) has much higher obesity rates than the professional class(which filters out people too lazy/dumb/undisciplined to earn a college degree).

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