Why is Belgium so Skinny?
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I am a Belgian! We are not skinny, half of us is overweight, but we are not aware of it! At least that is what the newspapers are saying this week, but rescue is on the way!
I guess we are getting bigger as we are slowly adopting the SAD diet. The SBD is a bread meal in the morning and the evening, and 1 hot meal at lunch, normally boiled potatoes, veggies, a piece of meat or fish, and coffeeshop, water or beer as staple drinks. Fries once a week, and pasta once a week. Salad in stead of a hot meal when it is warm outside. That is how me and my husband, and mist of our friends were brought up. It is true that you do not see a lot of obese people, but half of the people I know become overweight in their late twenties, early thirties. In my case, yes, my activity level dropped as my family grew. I used to cycle everywhere, now I take the car....0 -
O, and may I add, at a BMI of 26, my environment considers me to be quite overweight, and I am being advised by relatives to slim down! I am also calling out my overweight brother myself, so perhaps we have less social tolerance for overweight people. Every woman I know starts going on an off diets from their mid twenties, thus never becoming too big. There is more tolerance for a man's beer belly than for an overweight woman.0
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Edit: not coffeeshop, coffee as a drink. coffeeshop has an entirely different meaning in Dutch....0
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Maybe it's the sprouts that do it.0
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Edit: not coffeeshop, coffee as a drink. coffeeshop has an entirely different meaning in Dutch....
Lol, I used to own a coffeeshop, one where we actually served coffee, I always need to explain that when I tell someone.
And yes for me it was also lack of activity that got me here. I started a really sedentary job 9 years ago, 15 km from where I live. Couldn't do that on my previous bike. Weight just kept creeping up in the past years. Now I do have good bike again and started using it to commute to work.
I turn two corners and I have one long bike road right to the front door of my office, love it!0 -
christinev297 wrote: »What I'm kinda getting out of this is Belgium et al focuses more on Calories Out than Calories In... If a lot of the population bikes everywhere this would explain why their obesity rates aren't as high as those of us who drive everywhere. This is obviously a very simplistic view....
jg can you explain what you mean by 3000g... 3000g of what? Does 3000g equal 3000 calories??
I am using data from the WHO which has classified national diets in "clusters" based on national consumption of foodstuffs. So it's not analysis of individual diets but more like a GDP score for food rather than money.
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For happiness ratings I might use the HDI index. Belgium does nominally outrank Saudi Arabia. The Netherlands does even better, and they are in the same diet cluster as Belguim.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDI_index0 -
Obesity is a puzzle that is being investigated at many levels. There are rat studies, twin studies, longitudinal studies, and so on. I am looking at international data, following where my nose leads, to come up with more questions.0
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christinev297 wrote: »Hehe @Machka9 I don't think I've encountered a chicken parmy yet, that wasn't hanging off the side of the plate! :bigsmile:
Yeah, me neither. The last town we lived had 30 different parma flavours, and a contest where participants were supposed to eat one each day for a month.
I didn't even start the contest ... I just couldn't. Too much food!!!
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Obesity is a puzzle that is being investigated at many levels. There are rat studies, twin studies, longitudinal studies, and so on. I am looking at international data, following where my nose leads, to come up with more questions.
LOL, your very premise is incorrect, just because a country has a "low" rate obesity, that does not equal a country being skinny. In fact if you actually tried to dig a tad deeper, ~45% of the country is classified as overweight which seems to indicate it is not a skinny country. But that would involve actually thinking and doing a little more research0 -
Frick. I know I posted this already. Here is my source. And I am talking grams because that is the unit of measure in the data.
http://www.who.int/nutrition/landscape_analysis/nlis_gem_food/en/0 -
looking at the GEMs data the difference between G10 countries and G11 in terms of consumption is easily located
16 160 Water 14.5, 925.0
research? lol, critical thinking? lol0 -
Comparing this data to the obesity map yielded surprises. A country with the highest consumption also has a very low obesity rate. Why?
Why is obesity in Saudi Arabia so high when their food consumption is relatively low?
What other characteristics make these countries stand out? Daily physical activity is one, though that is anecdotal. Living in a fairly stable, healthy, educated community is another.
The U.S. obesity epidemic is uneven. Looking at a U.S. county obesity map makes this clear. Places like New England and California do not have the same obesity problem. What distinguishes the fat states/counties from the skinny ones? Poverty is one.
I just don't think we can blame obesity on the poor though, as if they are too ignorant or incapable of putting a reasonable diet together.
You may laugh but I have seen comments where the relatively prosperous lament that the poor can't access the wealth of food at a Whole Foods for instance.0 -
So can someone explain why WHO is using grams or what they mean by using grams?Frick. I know I posted this already. Here is my source. And I am talking grams because that is the unit of measure in the data.
http://www.who.int/nutrition/landscape_analysis/nlis_gem_food/en/
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Another advantage that a happy, stable community has is time. Leisure to fine tune their diets, time to plan, time to cook.0
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As someone who has lived in the US and EU among other places, the differences are pretty stark in ways many have mentioned here on this thread.
People in the climate-wise cooler part of EU are very active, drive less, bike more, hike_run_bike_walk_swim during the weekends etc.
Of course all this will add up over a lifetime of an active lifestyle over a sedentary one.
The benefits are numerous and obvious.
You keep harping on the "happiness" of the Arabic people and their "low" food consumption vs. their obesity...
Have you been there? The sizzling weather prevents you, most of the time, from any physical activity whatsoever unless you want to end up as a greasy stain on the asphalt.
Of course CICO applies there too. Why would it not?
Plus their wealth affords them to eat with all the excess of the EU/USA population without adding any exercise.
All these are generalizations, as we are speaking about entire nations/people after all.0 -
@andrikosDE , I'm not meaning to characterize all arabic people. I am speaking specifically about Saudi Arabia, as the nutritional/obesity data is in stark contrast to Belgium. It begs the question, why? The WHO dietary cluster map says that Saudi Arabia does not eat the same as the US.
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The WHO Cluster diet map.
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I've been analysing cluster diet data published by the WHO, comparing against a world obesity map, and I'm finding unusual results. Belgium and the Netherlands do not have an obesity problem (less than 10% of the population), even though they consume almost 3,000 grams a day; higher than North America's diet of just over 2,000.
Not only that, they're carb-high! How does one explain this? My working theory is that this is a happy country, with possibly a more active population. Do they walk to work?
This does seem to fly in the face of the CICO model, and the theory that weight loss starts in the kitchen.
Puzzling.
I reckon they are just more active, I think thats the only explanation?
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Frick. I know I posted this already. Here is my source. And I am talking grams because that is the unit of measure in the data.
http://www.who.int/nutrition/landscape_analysis/nlis_gem_food/en/
So Belgium eats 3000 grams of food per day.
When you subtract water from their intake you get 2060 grams of calorie containing substance.
When you subtract water from the US intake you get 2067 grams of calorie containing substance.
Grams of food doesn't mean calories are equal. You'd have to find the average calories per gram for each type of food listed (citrus fruits, dairy products, fish, etc.) and do the math.0 -
zyxst, the WHO is collecting this information from consumption of foodstuffs. It would be a practical measure.
No, not really. You'd have to look at how much of each individual food is consumed and determine the total number of Calories consumed. I closed the link, but I seem to recall that there were just a bunch of not-very-specific categories of food called out and the average number of grams per category. As such, no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from that data - there's simply not enough "real" data.
edit: ninja'd by usmcmp0 -
andrikosDE wrote: »People in the climate-wise cooler part of EU are very active, drive less, bike more, hike_run_bike_walk_swim during the weekends etc.
Of course all this will add up over a lifetime of an active lifestyle over a sedentary one.
The benefits are numerous and obvious.
Yes--these kinds of comparisons show the folly of that recent study that claimed activity didn't matter.
Activity is much more than intentional exercise.
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Ok, I don't know anything about this study, those food clusters, units of measurements or definitions. But it seems like some people like to draw inferences from aggregate (population) statistics of consumption regarding current lifestyles and link that to observed obesity rates. This can be misleading for that one reason that we have no idea of the distribution of obesity over population categories such as age, income class, education, gender, ethnic background.
For example, obesity is commonly linked to poverty, which is also associated with lack of education. The share of very poor and uneducated people in NL/BE may be much smaller than in the US, because NL/BE has a much smaller income gap than US. Hence, comparing US with NL/BE is more a comparison of rich peoples' with poor peoples' obesity rates. And the causes of obesity rates in poor communities is a universal issue which have little to do with "lifestyle choices" or may not even be that country-specific.
One thing about NL: the Dutch are also the tallest people in the World. And I think the cross-country height difference is most pronounced among the female population. It is unfair to compare calorie intake between 5'10'' Dutch women and 5'5'' US women. Especially since the obesity rate among US women are higher than for men.
My point being, aggregate data leaves too much room for speculation. You pose questions like there aren't any answers. I think the problem is that there are too many answers, but we don't know which ones are relevant.0 -
54 % of Dutch males were overweight and 10 % were obese in 2010. For Dutch women, overweight and obese rates were 44 % and 13 per respectively.
irishtimes.com/news/health/ireland-set-to-be-most-obese-country-in-europe-who-says-1.22017310 -
@doktorglass I don't think that aggregate data leads to answers, but it does pose new questions. For instance, The North American/Russian cluster diets are pretty well the same, yet the US has a higher obesity rate. I'm pretty sure the reason is that the US represents more than one demographic profile. And I agree the most obvious split is poverty/income inequity. The obesity map by county very closely matches the income inequity map.
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So Belgians drink more water and eat more carbs by proportion than Americans.0
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