Obesity in America

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  • stines72
    stines72 Posts: 853 Member
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    Well the half I could read was interesting.
  • GauchoMark
    GauchoMark Posts: 1,804 Member
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    I posted a link once I saw it cut off.
  • pastryari
    pastryari Posts: 8,646 Member
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    I'm sure this thread will go just as well as all the other American obesity threads.
  • stines72
    stines72 Posts: 853 Member
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    "At the rate America is going" that bit was pretty scary.
  • vicrandom
    vicrandom Posts: 80 Member
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    How do they measure that? Obesity - fat tissue - is not actually murderous. Presumably they are measuring the mortality rate from diseases that tend to be correlated with obesity, but as always, correlation does not equal causation.
    /petpeeve
  • TylerJ76
    TylerJ76 Posts: 4,375 Member
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    Americans are fat.

    This isn't news...
  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,371 Member
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    How do they measure that? Obesity - fat tissue - is not actually murderous. Presumably they are measuring the mortality rate from diseases that tend to be correlated with obesity, but as always, correlation does not equal causation.
    /petpeeve

    Agreed!

    Main thing really is that nothing's going to change any time soon. Nobody wants the government to intervene, but why would the food industry change anything as long as they're making money? I think it's a bit easy to tell people to work out to lose weight, when a lot of people really have no idea about how many calories are in the typical restaurant menu, or when restaurants (fast food included) have just a handful of healthy meals on their menu (if it all). I mean it was obvious to us that we had to lose weight, but how many of us really knew how many calories we were eating every day?

    Oh and for what it's worth, at least at Mc Donald's they have low fat dressing. But they're always taking the blame, when Wendy's and Burger King don't even have a low fat option at all.

    Funny thing is I did gain 40lbs or something when I moved to the US, but it's because of the lack of public transportation and having to take the car everywhere. Before I just relied on bus and subway and had to walk quite a bit to get to the stations.
  • jontay81
    jontay81 Posts: 39 Member
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    This is inaccurate.

    Americans average ~2700 calories per day intake. The 3800 is aggregate food supply. About 1100 of that is lost to spoilage and waste.

    www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf


    One of the major reasons the obesity rate jumped is that the government changed the measurement in 1998, causing millions of Americans to become obese overnight.

    http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/


    These were the first two things to jump out at me as being incorrect. Make sure to check sources on the rest of them before believing blindly.


    Edit: Also there's the whole correlation =/= causation issue at hand.
  • MelanieSkittle
    MelanieSkittle Posts: 43 Member
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    How do they measure that? Obesity - fat tissue - is not actually murderous. Presumably they are measuring the mortality rate from diseases that tend to be correlated with obesity, but as always, correlation does not equal causation.
    /petpeeve

    Originally what scientists noticed was a correlation between obesity and disease, so they decided to study it in-depth (over the last few decades, so lots of research has been done) and have found that obesity does in fact cause a lot of disease. This is accepted fact in the medical community, and the questions being explored now are *how* obesity leads to specific diseases. The above image isn't quite accurate on a lot of things, but the concept of obesity being bad for our health is spot on.

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