As a nation, we're getting steadily heavier - WHY?
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It seems like many people have changed their standards to suit themselves. I've told a few people that I've joined MFP and what my goals are and they're shocked. They think I'm already skinny and they know I'm already an active runner and I have lots of energy compared to others. However, I see a steady pound increase here and there and I could definitely use more muscle.
Even here, I see lots of people like a 5'3" woman with a goal of 150 lbs. That's chubby. It might be a drastic improvement but it's still chubby.
I've also noticed how little people know about food. Lots of people have already mentioned all the "diet foods" available. They're awful!!! I personally didn't know how to eat fresh fruit until I was out on my own. Growing up, I thought canned fruit was healthy. I also had my own personal struggles with diet food and it took me forever to figure out how bad they are.
My favorite answer.
Totally agree. When I see people who are shooting for weights that would have gotten me in trouble with my ob/gyn, when I was 9 months pregnant, AND I'M 5' 8", that's just a whole new world of societal acceptance, having nothing to do with health. And way too many people claim it's all muscle - no it's not.
Wow. People are trying to get healthier and set smaller goals so 100 lbs doesn't feel so insurmountable and then we get people like this who criticize our goals. Splendid.
Also, for the people that are ripping on 150 being overweight:
Believe it or not, she’s 11 pounds HEAVIER (142 pounds) in the picture on the right (May 2011) compared to the picture on the left (131 pounds, October 2010).
***** Taken from Nerd Fitness @ http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2011/07/21/meet-staci-your-new-powerlifting-super-hero/ ****0 -
A lot of valid points in the thread. The most contributing factor is portion control. You can be lazy all you want, stressed, eat overly-processed foods but at the end of the day, if you didn't portion your meals, you will gain weight.0
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I think it's the combination of laziness, a sedentary work environment (majority), the extreme lack of food education, and the pervasiveness of food companies in selling us crap for cheap while good healthy food is more lucky to break the bank.0
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I think another reason we've become fatter is simply that it's become acceptable to be fat. It's acceptable to not be fit. Everyone gets to join the team, even the fat kid that won't practice. Fat children used to be a really rare thing. And fat adults were not very common either. People who were 10 - 20 lbs overweight were considered fat.0
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I have noticed, since I started eating better, that we are bombarded with temptation everyday. The tv commercials are relentless pushing bad food at us. Restaurants are full of bad things. We seem to be getting away from personal responsibility and blaming these outside forces. I have also noticed that when I try have a serious discussion about weight that I am labeled as insensitive. We need to start treating this problem seriously and stop allowing people to hide from their responsibility for themselves.0
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I think there's a few factors. Laziness being at the top, combined with poor eating habbits and heavily processed EVERYTHING. Have you taken a trip around the grocery store and really looked at the shelves.... In my local supermarket, there are more aisles and shelves for cookies, snack cakes, chips, and soda's, than there are produce and fresh meats. We are a society of convenience. People have this misconception that cooking a wholesome, fresh meal takes too long, when the reality is, one of those stoffers family meals takes on average 60 minutes in the oven, You can make fresh grilled chicken breasts and veggies in far less time.The average American has gained about one pound each year since the mid-1990s. The average American man weighed 194.7 pounds in 2006, up from 181 pounds in 1994. The average American woman weighed up 165 pounds, up from 154. Two thirds of us are overweight or obese. ~ Face The Facts USA
Curious why people think this is. I can think of many, many reasons. I feel, as a nation, we have just gotten lazier and lazier and technology underlies a lot of it. Add that to poor diets (which is also stems in part from technological dependance = laziness and just lack of caring) and to a greater societal acceptance and bam!
What do you think?0 -
7. Food is less nutritious than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. It takes two apples today to match the nutrition of one apple from the 1940s. The calories are the same, but your body is going to be screaming for the nutrients, causing you to eat more. The reasons for this are several, one being that the ground is being stripped of its nutrients and the second being that GMO food is often less nutritious than organic.
I would love to know your sources on this. It sounds so sciencey and at the same time, it sounds completely made up.
Edit to add: Otherwise I thought you made a lot of good points, although I'm not sure about the gluten genes either. That's also something I'd like to see more info on, but I can probably find that myself.0 -
I don't think it's laziness. A study I read recently compared energy expenditure of native cultures to current civilizations and found little to no difference. (I'm going to try and go find the link to post here.)
I think it's processed franken-food and liquid calories. We need to eat real food, that comes from or lives off of the earth, with as few steps as possible coming in between it's natural state and putting it in our mouths.
ETA: The summary is at http://www.sciencecodex.com/huntergatherers_westerners_use_same_amount_of_energy_contrary_to_theory-95568 with the original linked to at the bottom at the Public Library of Science.0 -
Various reasons:
1. Technology has taken over work that used to require muscle power, thus people are not burning off the calories that they eat.
2. Children are wrapped up in technology and no longer play outside.
3. Crime prevents many people from taking part in activities outside and parents are fearful for the safety of their children outside, so they keep their children inside if they can't be outside to watch them.
4. The food industry has been using many things to sale their products. Two of the major things used is sugar and fat. This makes their products taste better and people will eat more and buy more.
5. Food is made salty in order to get people to eat more and, in restaurants, salt causes you to drink more. Bars often serve salty food to boost their sales of alcohol.
6. The food industry has been supersizing meals and people will buy them. People buy them because they believe that they are getting more bang for their buck. Unfortunately, they don't realize that this kind of eating is costing them healthwise.
7. Food is less nutritious than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. It takes two apples today to match the nutrition of one apple from the 1940s. The calories are the same, but your body is going to be screaming for the nutrients, causing you to eat more. The reasons for this are several, one being that the ground is being stripped of its nutrients and the second being that GMO food is often less nutritious than organic.
8. Animals are being raised in feedlots and confined barns. This means the animal is not moving around and will have more fat than animals that are raised in open pastures. This fat is passed off in the food we eat. In the 1960s, chicken used to be about 13%-17% fat. Now they are around 25% fat.
9. Hormones that are given to animals to make them grow bigger and faster are passed down through the food chain and being eaten by humans. Thus, those hormones are affecting the growth patterns of humans.
10. Wheat has been hybridized to the point that the gluten content is very high. This is because when wheat is bred, the total number of gluten genes will be from the combination of both wheat forms used to hybridize the wheat. In order words, if wheat A has 12 gluten genes and wheat B has 5 gluten genes, then the new form of wheat will have 17 gluten genes. Why is this important? Because gluten has detrimental effects on the pancreas and insulin levels. It causes the body to store fat more readily, especially around the waist. Fat around the waist places the person at high risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Think of all the foods you eat that is made from flour and you will understand why this is affecting the weight of Americans.
11. Hidden sugar, high fructose corn syrup, flour, and other elements in our food. Sugar is a poison to the body. It affects just about every system in the body, but mostly the pancreas, liver, and nervous systems. If sugar is a poison, then high fructose corn syrup is the devil itself. HFCS is not metabolized the same way sugar is metabolized. The body is not satiated when HFCS is used, thus leaving the person hungry. HFCS is deposited as fat on the body. This means that the person has ingested 150-200 calories of HFCS and they are still hungry. That's 150-200 calories that are empty calories.
12. People are ignorant about what the food industry is thrusting upon us as food. Many 'foods' that people eat are actually food-like materials concocted in a laboratory. Like that yogurt that comes in the tube: It is all chemicals without one ingredient that even resembles real food.
13. People are so busy running here and there that they don't have time to cook. So these people pull out the latest convenience food that is loaded with either sugar or fat, or maybe both, to make them taste good and think that they are eating healthy. Additionally, labeling is deceptive. Something that is marketed as 'fat free' may not be any better for a person that the original that has fat in it. With all the running around that people do, they may be eating out more often. I look at some of my friends' journals and some eat out or use package foods all the time. They may not cook a single meal! Maybe they cook for Thanksgiving.
14. Deceptive packaging doesn't help. If you buy a package of chips, it may say that it contains 2.5 servings. Are you going to eat just under half the bag in order to get that 1 serving or the whole bag, since they taste so good?
In general, it is not about laziness or over-eating. There are a myriad of reasons why people are getting fatter and the food industry doesn't help with their deceptive advertising and making foods taste good so that they can sell more and more of the product. It used to be that even a simple-minded person could eat healthy. Now you almost need a PhD in order to understand the various reasons why people are obese and how to avoid becoming so yourself.
Yep, this just about covers all bases!0 -
Too much food that is readily available ;3.0
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Ignorance.
Apathy.
Most people don't know what 500 calories looks like. Even people GOOD at eyeballing a plate for calories can be fooled. We Americans have our big plates and our big restaurant portions and it's "normal" because everywhere you go, you are overfed. Restaurants, cook-outs, work potlucks, and people will pressure you to eat more if you're trying to diet. Eating with people is accepting people, somehow. It's a social event, and it's "weird" if you don't eat much. And eating an actually normal amount definitely looks like not eating much when you're at a restaurant with friends where everyone else is eating an entree that's actually enough food for a 300 pound line backer.
Also, since it's become so normal to eat so much more than a healthy amount, most people don't CARE. If all of your friends are obese and you're in a relationship, a lot of people lack the motivation to get healthy. Why bother? No one else is doing it. This is partly because they don't really understand the health risks involved with being overweight for a long period of time. And partly just because it's too hard for some to imagine a different lifestyle.
We've made being this way easy. Think about it. If you're at a luncheon, it's rude to say to a chubby person "you're going to eat ALL that?" but no one thinks twice before saying to the normal weight or thin person "is that ALL you're going to eat??" All the pressure is on normal eaters to eat more.
DEFINITELY- people, esp. coworkers and others who I'm not close with, constantly put the pressure on to eat more... because if I'm smaller than them and am STILL trying to lose weight, what does that say about them? The peer pressure element is huge for people I know.0 -
Poor nutritional choices
Intake surplus to energy requirements
Sedentary Lifestyles
The most egregious is the genetic predisposition to obesity which hovers around 70%.
Add water and stir.....0 -
In the late 90s, the BMI limit for a healthy weight was lowered from 27 to 25, causing millions to become overweight overnight. So that "chubby" 5'3 150lb woman would have been considered normal in 1997. And studies have shown that people with slightly overweight BMIs live longer, so....0
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I think it has a lot to do with culture. Here in the US, high calorie/high fat foods are more readily available and at a cheap price. I think that is a reflection of values.0
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A lot of valid points in the thread. The most contributing factor is portion control. You can be lazy all you want, stressed, eat overly-processed foods but at the end of the day, if you didn't portion your meals, you will gain weight.
Agreed -- how many of us grew up with this "Clean your plate, there are starving kids all over the world".... and as portions got larger, well guess what happened when we still cleaned our plate. What is scarier isn't the adults, its the kids! Take a look around, there are so many overweight kids! I attribute this to:
* More moms were home, cooking balanced meals for their kids -- also -- did you dare go into the kitchen when it wasn't meal time? NEVER
* Playing with friends meant biking or walking to the park, or basketball courts. Even in harsh winters - mom always kicked us outside!
* The only good TV for Kids was Saturday morning. And you had to wake up at 7am , cuz if you slept until 10, you'd miss them all!
* Video games, for those who had them, got old after a few weeks - there were only 3 games and 5 different levels. It was much more fun to play the REAL thing -- remember the problems Dungeons and Dragons caused? My mom was convinced they were nothing but a source of evil.
* Eating out was limited to take=n= bake Pizza on Friday nights, , , cuz Mom's were home cooking for their families!
People worked just as hard, if not harder "back in the day", but usually only one spouse worked, while the other concentrated on the well being of everyone. Money made was spent very carefully. you bought a NEW car when you wer in your 40 's if you were lucky. You lived in the same house for 50 years, things were paid for, you enjoyed people's company, not their things, and the list goes on. But I do agree a large part of us are "waking" up... I just hope we pass that onto our kids!
I know I am guilty of many of those faults -- and on my way to correting them!0 -
It's a shift in culture. It's not simple it's complex and it comprises of the many factors that have already been stated. It's ideals and standards changing. It's convenience. It's technology. It's not just one factor. But scientifically it all comes down to taking in more calories than you expend.
I think setting realistic goals is good, it gives you a more positive outlook on the situation which in turn gives you the motivation to reach those goals. I think it's important though to push yourself to some degree in order to give results that positively reinforce your effort.
Also, saying a certain weight is invariably overweight is just wrong. Beyond it varying based on height, muscle is much more dense than fat which obviously means that a thinner person with more muscle definition could weigh more than someone bigger than them at the same height.0 -
The most egregious is the genetic predisposition to obesity which hovers around 70%.
I don't think 70% of us have a "predisposition to obesity." Otherwise we would, as a culture, have always been fat. It's a recent trend, this "growing" of modern man.0 -
I know that I had no clue how many calories a lunch at Taco Bell had...I mean I would eat a burrito, a taco and a giant nachos and I had no clue that I had just consumed almost half my daily allowance in calories. People don't care to get educated...they don't really see the point.
I had a friend that was totally against getting "healthy". She said that she was going to die any way and so she was going to eat whatever she wanted. Thankfully she has come around and she is now paying more attention to what she eats and what she feeds her children.0 -
well for one thing when I went to Russia they eat 1/6 less on their portions then we do. America eats super sized meals, like you mentioned laziness where it used to be kids played outside and got exercise now days the watch tv, play video games or go on the computer.
some want a quick fix to weight loss and don't want to make the effort to work at it. there are no quick fixes.0 -
The most egregious is the genetic predisposition to obesity which hovers around 70%.
Ridiculous. Genetics change over thousands to millions of years in populations. Not in a couple generations. Genetics is used too often as an excuse. If it was a serious problem with 70% of the population, we would have seen similar rates of obesity 50 years ago.0 -
*Size of plates for restaurants are bigger than in the past so calories are out of control - most are carb based or even fried
*Release of corn syrup into majority of food products
*Less time / more work - people in the past had more time for recreation (we work to live now)
*Fast food is not nutritional - mostly carbs - even hamburgers had pink slime (they went bankrupt thank goodness)
*Soda is now the dominant drink of the time - insane sizes released to the public
*Breads are refined and not whole grains - almost everyone is eating the white stuff
*Genetic modification of foods and hormones are running rampant in the USA (look up monsanto)
*Cooking was the way of the past - mom's didn't buy pre-prepared with all sort of chemicals to keep food fresh - now we do
*Communities had places for kids to play - emphasis is play
*Kids are having gym class removed because it's more important to be tested and spend time reading/writing/math - the federal regulations are causing kids to learn that exercise is just not important (future obesity epidemic)
*Kids in schools are eating poorly - food programs feed things like burgers, pizza, cheese sticks - lack of healthy veggies or fruits that are appealing - sometimes they give whole fruits but can't can't easily peel them so they bypass them
*Increased access to cookies/chips - high calorie items
*The real food (healthy, raw, nutritional) of the past is now so expensive that families can't always afford them
Those are just some of the reasons.0 -
7. Food is less nutritious than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. It takes two apples today to match the nutrition of one apple from the 1940s. The calories are the same, but your body is going to be screaming for the nutrients, causing you to eat more. The reasons for this are several, one being that the ground is being stripped of its nutrients and the second being that GMO food is often less nutritious than organic.
I would love to know your sources on this. It sounds so sciencey and at the same time, it sounds completely made up.
Edit to add: Otherwise I thought you made a lot of good points, although I'm not sure about the gluten genes either. That's also something I'd like to see more info on, but I can probably find that myself.
Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food
As for the gluten genes, cosult the book Wheatbelly0 -
*sigh*
We're not actually "lazy" as Americans. In fact, our average caloric burn is consistent with high-energy output cultures. By and large, we don't eat actual food any more, though. There's no capital gain and it's hard to market straight up meat and veggies. Corporate giants need profit margin - and that comes in marketing campaigns and tacking on packaging costs. it behooves a capitalist culture to create "food products" because there can be a corresponding "fix" product via pharmaceuticals, diet industry, insurance costs...
More than anything, we've convenience-fooded ourselves into obesity and poor health.0 -
We've been brainwashed that fat and protein are evil, and carbs are king. We've had corn and wheat and other "healthy" grains shoved down our throats like cattle being fed out for slaughter, and taught to fear lard. Once I got off the pasta, potato, and bread "diet", I lost 100# and my heart is as healthy as a 20 year old athlete.0
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Way more 'Convenience" to "make life easier" here in America.....
while i love the concept ...it DID make me adopt habits that steadily got me used to having things done the easier way.
Back home in India..we had to do everything with very few gadgets....food cooked from scratch..and i mean...grinding the ginger/garlic paste on a grinding stone.. my gramma's village had a grinding stone for wheat ( you should have seen those womens' toned arms!!)...i had to walk a long time to catch the local bus to school....we walked everywhere, until my dad got a motorbike ( which is as common as a car is here ) and even that was used only for sunday church and when he went to work...
i was SO healthy and slim and had such a tight body just until 6 years ago when i 'got off the boat' to the US....i guess i was so blown away with how cool everything was in the kitchen and being able to drive everywhere...lol...i started to love it a bit too much i know.
The US has such inventive geniuses.... but yes.. too much of a good thing is not so good :grumble: 0 -
I don't think we are necessarily lazier as a nation, I think over booked. We are constantly running around carting ourselves, children, etc.. to functions, events, etc... It's easier and more convenient to hit the fast food drive through or make a frozen meal. All of which is unhealthy, full of calories, sodium and the such. Eating unconsciously on the go.
Additionally economic reasons generally require both parents in a family to work. (I do and I'm not saying women should stay home, I wouldn't want to) But let's face it, when I was a child mom stayed home and there was a hot, homemade, healthy meal on the table at night. We rarely ate out, and fast food was a treat!
I think if families made a effort to have more meals together, of fresh homemade food it would help.0 -
Kids no longer walk to school, they ride the bus. The bus likely picks them up at the end of their driveway and I've actually seen Moms driving their kids to the end of the drive way to wait for the school bus.
Kids no longer walk to the playground or an empty field for a pickup game of baseball any and all times they please. Instead Mom chauffeurs them to organized sports at appointed times 3 times a week.
Kids no longer eat meals cooked by mom on a daily basis. McDonald's is a common occurrence, as is Hamburger Helper.
Kids no longer play outside after school and all summer long. They don't play tag, kick the can or red rover. Instead they stay indoors and play video games.
It's been that way for about 20 years, maybe more. Enough time for those to grow up into adults and have kids of their own to perpetuate the cycle.0 -
man, can we get nutrition class incorporated into elementary schools for every year and find a way to get parents educated on what they should be eating and feeding to their kids? nutrition education and habit changes needs to be a priority, the obesity problem is probably only going to get worse unless we do this! we should be spending stimulus money on this type of stuff, every problem has a foundation0
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I think we are getting fat because we are lazy. It's so easy to go to taco bell...0
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LolObviously it is carbs that has caused all this, as they are the only thing that makes you fat0
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