As a nation, we're getting steadily heavier - WHY?

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  • AlabasterVerve
    AlabasterVerve Posts: 3,171 Member
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    There's research being done right now that shows one of the biggest indicators of childhood obesity is the diet of the mother while she was pregnant. It seems that it can "turn on" the fat gene (or some such) and even though these children are born a normal weight they just get fatter in an environment with abundant food.

    Not that I expect anyone to care. It's much more satisfying to believe there's no biological and environment reasons for the obesity epidemic and that it's "their own fault" for being bad, lazy people instead of something driving people to overeat. Everyone seems to absolutely revel in this idea that being fat is a well deserved punishment for a lack of character and thinness is a reward for a good, virtuous character. Truly bizarre.

    "They get fatter in an environment with abundant food". That would suggest they would not get fat if they did not overeat.
    Of course?

    So ... how would that not be their fault (or in the case of children, their parents fault)? The environment is not making anyone overeat. People choose to overeat.
    People eat when they're hungry. That's normal, not a character flaw.
  • sourberry
    sourberry Posts: 22
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    Fake food and laziness.
  • cindergirl73
    cindergirl73 Posts: 51
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    High fructose corn syrup! It's in EVERYTHINGGGG!

    AGREED!
  • belgerian
    belgerian Posts: 1,059 Member
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    Fast Food, Uneducated I never really realized how much I was really eating till I started to pay attention and getting off my *kitten* and moving instead of sitting in front of a computer typing stuff (OOPS) Time to move.
  • Leiki
    Leiki Posts: 526 Member
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    We are getting taller due to better nutrition being available.

    The baby boomers make up a larger percentage of the population than that age group has in the past, and face it, older people are usually either heavier or way way way thinner than younger people due to health issues.
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.

    ETA: and yeah, the OP did ask about weight gain since the 90's (went back to make sure I read it correctly)
  • tmauck4472
    tmauck4472 Posts: 1,785 Member
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    Because fast food is on every corner and we have no self control, because boxed foods are easier and less time consuming than makeing healthy food. Because we work our jobs till late in the day and our family's are starving by the time we get home so we reach for fast and easy over time and healthy. Or because we are lazy and don't care. Take your pick.
  • AlabasterVerve
    AlabasterVerve Posts: 3,171 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...

    Depends how you define "bad diet". You can have an unhealthy diet and still be slim. If you mean just calories, then yes, there will come a point where there are not enough hours in the day to exercise off what it's possible to eat. But when people were more active, they had less time to eat and they needed more calories.
  • DMZ_1
    DMZ_1 Posts: 2,889 Member
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    1. Portion Sizes
    2. Types of foods consumed
    3. Less physical activity
  • Silverkittycat
    Silverkittycat Posts: 1,997 Member
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    Money.... and the last well (tobacco money) is drying up and it's time to dig a new well.

    The definition of obesity changed overnight.. it was intentional.
  • waldo56
    waldo56 Posts: 1,861 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...

    That is good advice for fat people looking to be not fat.

    But you can very much out exercise a bad diet once you are in shape. To maintain peak performance, adequately fueling your exercise becomes important, which can mean eating a lot more than you would intuitively eat, even if your intuitive eating would be classified as a bad diet.
  • AlabasterVerve
    AlabasterVerve Posts: 3,171 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...

    Depends how you define "bad diet". You can have an unhealthy diet and still be slim. If you mean just calories, then yes, there will come a point where there are not enough hours in the day to exercise off what it's possible to eat. But when people were more active, they had less time to eat and they needed more calories.
    You think the single mother working two jobs is obese because she has too much leisure time? Or doesn't get enough exercise when she's on her feet for 16 hours a day? What about the overweight and obese triathletes?

    There are so many people who just don't fit into your theory, you need to account for them as well.
  • jkk424
    jkk424 Posts: 4 Member
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    Silverkitty beat me to it. Money. our nation is becoming poorer and bad food is cheaper than healthy. If you had a $10 to spend on food and had two kids- would you spend it on a few produce items or 10 boxes of mac n cheese. yep.
  • vickycollo
    vickycollo Posts: 16 Member
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    Well, having spent the first 26 years of my life in the U.S.A. and the last 17 years in the U.K., my opinion is that it's portion sizes, processing, and food marketing, and we are now beginning to see similar trends in the U.K.

    When I first moved to the U.K., there were less fat people than there are now. Over the years I've noticed that there are alot more fast food outlets than there were 17 years ago, portion sizes are becoming bigger and there's alot more junk food advertising. Basically, U.K. food habits have become more americanized. I'm not blaming the U.S.A., because frankly it pisses me off when people in this country blame the U.S.A. for whatever they think is wrong with the world, but I have to admit that I believe there is some correlation.

    I never really thought about it until the last time I went back to the U.S.A. to visit my mom, and I was watching TV one evening and there was an advert for some prepackaged chicken (I think it might have been Tyson). Anyway, this woman was feeding her toddler this chicken and said she liked it because it had "minimal processing." I remember thinking, "Minimal processing? Just go buy a chicken and cook it!"

    Just my 2p.
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...

    Depends how you define "bad diet". You can have an unhealthy diet and still be slim. If you mean just calories, then yes, there will come a point where there are not enough hours in the day to exercise off what it's possible to eat. But when people were more active, they had less time to eat and they needed more calories.
    You think the single mother working two jobs is obese because she has too much leisure time? Or doesn't get enough exercise when she's on her feet for 16 hours a day? What about the overweight and obese triathletes?

    There are so many people who just don't fit into your theory, you need to account for them as well.

    ??? Individual outliers would not change the fact that we as a nation have gotten fatter because we have become more sedentary.
  • AlabasterVerve
    AlabasterVerve Posts: 3,171 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...

    That is good advice for fat people looking to be not fat.

    But you can very much out exercise a bad diet once you are in shape. To maintain peak performance, adequately fueling your exercise becomes important, which can mean eating a lot more than you would intuitively eat, even if your intuitive eating would be classified as a bad diet.
    I absolutely agree with that. I've always struggled to maintain my weight and exercise was the only way I could keep the weight off. Don't studies show that people who lose weight and keep it off exercise on average 1 1/2 hours a day as well?
  • Silverkittycat
    Silverkittycat Posts: 1,997 Member
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    ‘How Did The Fight Against Fat Reach This Point?’

    "How did the fight against fat reach this point?" asks a hard-hitting Seattle Times article by reporter Susan Kelleher this week. The answer, as we've been detailing for some time, is that there is an ongoing campaign to make obesity a "disease" — an effort driven by the pharmaceutical industry, which will profit from increased public fears of fat by selling weight-loss pills.

    As Kelleher states in her must-read report that echoes concerns we've highlighted time and again, "Some of the world's most prominent obesity experts, with backing from the drug industry and medical societies, defined obesity as a stand-alone 'disease' that caused premature death and needed to be treated with drugs." One way for the pharmaceutical industry to fill its own prescriptions for profit was to push for a redefinition of who's too plump. That's just what happened when a government panel, populated by researchers with ties to the weight-loss industry, changed the government's standard of "overweight" from a Body Mass Index of more than 27 down to 25. That decision cast more than 35 million Americans into the fat camp overnight, without those individuals gaining so much as an ounce. Kelleher notes:

    It started more than a decade ago as drug companies and their scientific consultants increasingly promoted using a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 as the trigger point for when someone should be treated for obesity, including being prescribed weight-loss drugs … In May 1995, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked 24 experts to write guidelines for diagnosing and treating obesity. The expert panel officially defined obesity as a BMI of 30 or higher, and overweight as a BMI above 25 and below 30. The panel, which included the pharmacologist who created the phen-fen combo, was criticized for its ties to the drug and weight-loss industries.

    Why are these guidelines, which carry the government's imprimatur, so important? Kelleher explains:

    Industry-sponsored obesity experts continued to support treatment guidelines for obesity that included prescribing drugs. Guidelines are essentially detailed steps for doctors in diagnosing and treating an ailment, including recommended drugs to prescribe. The doctors who write guidelines are a powerful force in health care because their opinions become the blueprints that drug companies and medical societies use to teach doctors in the trenches how to prescribe newly approved drugs. Many of the doctors who supported Redux, including [George] Bray of Louisiana State University and others, worked on the obesity guidelines for the NIH and the World Health Organization.

    The case of Redux, half of the "fen-phen" appetite-suppressant combination that was banned after its deadly side effects were uncovered, is a perfect example of how dubious obesity statistics are used to promote profitable pills. Kelleher notes that during the FDA hearings on the drug, one company:

    … presented data showing an obesity pandemic and said desperate measures were required to stop it from prematurely killing 300,000 Americans a year. That controversial figure came from weight-loss experts and researchers who used epidemiological data from decades-old health studies to build the case that excess body fat was a crisis more urgent than even AIDS …

    One of the leading obesity experts supporting Redux and the effort to classify obesity as a disease was Dr. George Bray, a physician and medical researcher at Louisiana State University. A consultant for numerous drug companies for more than three decades, Bray holds patents for such things as low-fat potato chips, a cream to reduce fat thighs, and treatment for metabolic disorders. Also at the hearing was a newly formed group, the American Obesity Association, which built a case for treating obesity as a chronic disease. Funded largely by drug companies, including two involved with Redux, the association was headed by Dr. Richard Atkinson, an internist who advocated gastric bypass for severe obesity and who later founded a company to test for what he believed might be an "obesity virus." At the hearing, the association positioned itself as a patient-advocacy organization, though it offered no patients to testify for the drug … Judith Stern, vice president of the American Obesity Association and a nutritionist at the University of California, Davis, was disappointed the panel members had not voted to approve Redux. Stern told reporters, "If they recommend 'no,' these doctors ought to be shot."
  • waldo56
    waldo56 Posts: 1,861 Member
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    What about the overweight and obese triathletes?

    There are very, very, very few of these people.

    If most fat people started seriously training to be competitive triathletes and totally ignored their diet, they'd stay fat for a while, but once they started to accumulate significant fitness, that situaiton would change fast. Its hard to stay fat when you're burning 2000+ calories per workout.
  • waldo56
    waldo56 Posts: 1,861 Member
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    The OP asked why we were getting heavier since the 90's.
    NO she did not. She just backed up her argument one piece of data from the 90's . Do you think that the reason we got fatter in the 90's and the 00' is somehow different than why we got fatter in the 80's?

    Nope. I think it's always been the increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
    You can't out exercise a bad diet...

    That is good advice for fat people looking to be not fat.

    But you can very much out exercise a bad diet once you are in shape. To maintain peak performance, adequately fueling your exercise becomes important, which can mean eating a lot more than you would intuitively eat, even if your intuitive eating would be classified as a bad diet.
    I absolutely agree with that. I've always struggled to maintain my weight and exercise was the only way I could keep the weight off. Don't studies show that people who lose weight and keep it off exercise on average 1 1/2 hours a day as well?

    Yep. Heavy daily exercise is the key to long term weight loss maintenence.

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