Economic impact of overweight and obesity to surpass $4 trillion in 10 years

ddsb1111 wrote: »

@rileysowner

I appreciate your feedback. What do you say when carnivore doesn’t work for the masses? What if they’re like me, most of their calories are from carbs, protein, and fat, in that order? I’m healthy (now), but would you tell me what I’m doing is going to cause health problems in the future? If not, why not?

More importantly, are you allowing a healthy balanced variety of food to be embraced by the masses? Or are you demonizing foods that could prevent a healthy balance of food?

This post isn’t about excuses or promoting a certain diet, because that’s impossible, so what balanced approach do you have?

I said I eat Ketovore. I didn't say everyone should. I said they should avoid most processed food and start cooking meals from whole ingredients. Don't put words into my mouth.

ddsb1111 wrote: »

@AnnPT77 Your lunches were an eye opener for me, I had no idea it was like that then. With all that fresh produce!

(snip)

I'm not saying school lunches were like that everywhere. I have no idea. I grew up in a rural poverty area: Not the wealthiest school system, by far. Maybe somewhere they had nice meats and fresh veg/fruit? (Things like public school lunches tend to be more regulated and standardized now, at least within a given state, seems like.)

I feel like sometimes some people think there was some kind of idyllic food nirvana "there" "back then" (wherever and whenever "there" "back then" was). I don't think that's true, like maybe ever (at least for working class people)?

My parents were unusually old for my age. I was born when my mom was 43 and my dad was 38, so they were born in the nineteen-teens. I was an only child, and they'd only married recently, not when young. My dad's family were subsistence farmers before the depression (1920s) and perhaps a bit beyond. This was in the US, in Michigan.

For them, there was no school lunch, even when they moved on from the K-8 local school to the high school in town. My dad talked about taking lunch to school, and reaching a point some Winters where all they had to carry for lunch was cooked dried beans. They usually got one orange each (9 kids in the family) in their Christmas stocking and that was a big, exotic treat. In summer, yes, there would've been fresh produce, and they canned and dried lots. (No electricity. Ice house, maybe "ice box" in the house, cooled by ice blocks. Heat and cooking with wood they cut.) Winter variety of food, not so much. Other than the white flour and sugar, I supposed most of the food they did have was reasonably healthy by current standards, just not balanced.

They hunted squirrels and rabbits and such, plus fished, to supplement the meat they could raise and spare. (Mostly, the small number of cows were mainly for milk, the chickens and ducks mainly for eggs, maybe a pig or few each year for meat, and the other animals got eaten when they stopped producing milk/eggs.) Meat had to be smoked or canned to preserve. They sold some farm produce to buy flour and sugar and such, plus other needful things they couldn't produce. The kids worked out for other farms; my dad was picking cucumbers for other farmers at age 5 when he was still to short to do lots of other kinds of work. What he earned went to the family finances, too.

All of that was pretty common, perfectly normal. No, I don't think it was "I walked 20 miles to school uphill both ways". I think it was truth.

Sometimes the nutrition would've been good, sometimes not that wonderful. They burned a astounding number of calories with all the work, I'm sure. No food nirvana then, either. Obesity not common, though not zero. I remember reading in the "doctor book" they used that a suggested treatment for being obese was rolling around on your stomach.

Every place and era tends to have its nutritional challenges for non-rich people, and maybe some different ones for rich people (the over-sufficiency issue similar to what we have today). Seems that a common modern developed-world challenge is a surfeit of easily available calories, large-scale food waste, lives so physical-effort limited that we don't burn many calories or stay active through daily life, and lots of foods available that push our buttons but lack nutrition . . . that's the current challenge for those of us lucky enough not to be literally starving or structurally malnourished because suitable food is literally unavailable (as is a common case in some parts of the world).

Rumor has it that in some recent cases where there've been attempts to serve kids high-nutrition school lunches, they won't eat them. For sure, someone in my friend-feed here a while back had a job at an outfit that included a food pantry distribution. She said that when they provided dried peas/beans as part of a distribution, you could go outside after and find many of the bags of those in the trash, because people either didn't know how to deal with them, or didn't like them or something like that.

I'm not really sure how to think about the current developed-world situation in a larger historical and global context. A lot of history (and localities), the challenge was calorie or nutritional insufficiency imposed by outside circumstances. Now, it seems like - for those of us lucky (?) enough - it's self-selected excess.

Maybe it's a Walt Kelly/Pogo "We have met the enemy and he is us" situation.

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

MargaretYakoda wrote: »

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

A big impact could come from changing the menus of public school lunches and offering nutrition classes.

I taught in public and private schools in NYC for a while - I remember the huge difference in what was offered for lunch.

This was a part of my wake up call. Such a disparity in the quality of food.

The board of ed still has their menus online - they offer pizza, chicken nuggets, mozzarella sticks, fries. There are also salad offerings but these are paired with tubs of high sugar, hi cal dressings and as a compliment to the mains above.

When I taught in a very high end private high school (tuition >$50k per year) the cafeteria was like 4 star dining. They did not offer anything they did not deem “healthy”. Lunches were salmon, chicken breast, lean proteins , all shades of vegetables. No soda or fruit juice allowed. No added sugar, no fried foods.. no vending machines.

Is it economic? A tale of 2 cities?

We spend a fortune on public schools and the quickest way to make a change would be to change what’s offered in public school lunches. It’s just as easy to promote the cafeteria as a place of learning for the public schools as it is in the $$$ private schools.

Years ago when my kid was in elementary school we were on the free lunch program.
Which meant we were also entitled to the free breakfast program.

The teachers pestered me constantly about making sure my kid was on time for the free breakfast, and I politely but firmly refused. I saw two things happening there.
1) The breakfasts were disgusting. Sunny Delight (which is not orange juice!) Pop Tarts, and donuts. Not even milk and cereal. Forget about a healthy bowl of oatmeal!
And the kids only had about 15 minutes total to wolf it down.
A lifetime of bad habits, brought to you by the American Public School System.
2) Unlike the lunches, everyone was able to see who got the free breakfast. Marking those kids as an obvious underclass. Which absolutely did skew the perception of others. Especially other parents. Which, in a small town, has an impact beyond just the school system.

In second grade my kid - completely on their own - decided to become a vegetarian. Keep in mind we were still on the free lunch program.
Our school at the time was unified. Three buildings on one campus. The same staff providing all breakfasts and lunches for Head Start through High School.
And I informed the cafeteria staff that my kid would need vegetarian meals. I had a lot of discussions with them about this. And was assured that my kid would be provided a proper lunch.

But my kid was coming home very hungry every day.

Turns out the cafeteria staff was refusing to accommodate the vegetarian kid. Like, just flat refusing. My kid would be served milk and a slice of bread. Just that. Every day. For months

I was livid. But I was nice to their faces. I tried to reason with them. I asked if there were other vegetarian students and was told only at the high school. “There are no vegetarian students in the elementary school”
I pointed out that there was at least one…. That went over pretty badly. 🤣
I asked why they were able to feed the vegetarian high school kids but not provide for the vegetarian grade school students and I even offered to provide veggie burger patties for them to feed my kid on days when they had hamburgers. The cafeteria people just flat refused to provide the legally mandated meals my kid was entitled to.

I resorted to packing my kid a cold lunch, even though it was another strain on our budget.

Fast forward a couple years and the local soda bottling plant donated a scoreboard to the high school. Which caused a bit of an uproar because, despite what I just described, we’re a relatively prosperous area and there’s a lot of people who are the sort who try to limit their kid’s exposure to advertising, and their sugar consumption, etc. Typical Hippie Crunchy Granola middle class stuff.

Because it was the soda bottling plant that donated the sign, some parents had a lot of questions. And many learned for the first time that there are soda machines at the high school. Which the cafeteria people were not concerned with because “the biggest seller is water!” (I pointed out that there’s free water in the filtered fountain 30 feet away but… )
Anyway. At this extremely energized school board meeting the head cafeteria staff said “I don’t care. If we got Mars Bars for free, we would serve them to these kids every day!”

I thought that was one heckuva admission….

Anyway. That’s a lot of words for “We have a lot of work to do to get the US on to a healthy path”

I'm not sure where you live, but in the school districts I work in, they only accommodate medically required diets, not dietary preferences. We are up front with parents about this and they have to go to the doctor and get a medical statement that their child requires a specific diet for an allergy or whatever medical condition. Outside of that, parents have to send a lynch in with the child if they don't want them to eat a certain food. And yes, I've had to tell vegetarian parents this. Unfortunately, it's just not plausible to accommodate all dietary preferences in a school system.

1) They told me that they would accommodate a vegetarian diet
And then they just fed my kid a single slice of bread and a carton of milk.
2) They were feeding the vegetarian high school students.

MargaretYakoda wrote: »

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

MargaretYakoda wrote: »

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

A big impact could come from changing the menus of public school lunches and offering nutrition classes.

I taught in public and private schools in NYC for a while - I remember the huge difference in what was offered for lunch.

This was a part of my wake up call. Such a disparity in the quality of food.

The board of ed still has their menus online - they offer pizza, chicken nuggets, mozzarella sticks, fries. There are also salad offerings but these are paired with tubs of high sugar, hi cal dressings and as a compliment to the mains above.

When I taught in a very high end private high school (tuition >$50k per year) the cafeteria was like 4 star dining. They did not offer anything they did not deem “healthy”. Lunches were salmon, chicken breast, lean proteins , all shades of vegetables. No soda or fruit juice allowed. No added sugar, no fried foods.. no vending machines.

Is it economic? A tale of 2 cities?

We spend a fortune on public schools and the quickest way to make a change would be to change what’s offered in public school lunches. It’s just as easy to promote the cafeteria as a place of learning for the public schools as it is in the $$$ private schools.

Years ago when my kid was in elementary school we were on the free lunch program.
Which meant we were also entitled to the free breakfast program.

The teachers pestered me constantly about making sure my kid was on time for the free breakfast, and I politely but firmly refused. I saw two things happening there.
1) The breakfasts were disgusting. Sunny Delight (which is not orange juice!) Pop Tarts, and donuts. Not even milk and cereal. Forget about a healthy bowl of oatmeal!
And the kids only had about 15 minutes total to wolf it down.
A lifetime of bad habits, brought to you by the American Public School System.
2) Unlike the lunches, everyone was able to see who got the free breakfast. Marking those kids as an obvious underclass. Which absolutely did skew the perception of others. Especially other parents. Which, in a small town, has an impact beyond just the school system.

In second grade my kid - completely on their own - decided to become a vegetarian. Keep in mind we were still on the free lunch program.
Our school at the time was unified. Three buildings on one campus. The same staff providing all breakfasts and lunches for Head Start through High School.
And I informed the cafeteria staff that my kid would need vegetarian meals. I had a lot of discussions with them about this. And was assured that my kid would be provided a proper lunch.

But my kid was coming home very hungry every day.

Turns out the cafeteria staff was refusing to accommodate the vegetarian kid. Like, just flat refusing. My kid would be served milk and a slice of bread. Just that. Every day. For months

I was livid. But I was nice to their faces. I tried to reason with them. I asked if there were other vegetarian students and was told only at the high school. “There are no vegetarian students in the elementary school”
I pointed out that there was at least one…. That went over pretty badly. 🤣
I asked why they were able to feed the vegetarian high school kids but not provide for the vegetarian grade school students and I even offered to provide veggie burger patties for them to feed my kid on days when they had hamburgers. The cafeteria people just flat refused to provide the legally mandated meals my kid was entitled to.

I resorted to packing my kid a cold lunch, even though it was another strain on our budget.

Fast forward a couple years and the local soda bottling plant donated a scoreboard to the high school. Which caused a bit of an uproar because, despite what I just described, we’re a relatively prosperous area and there’s a lot of people who are the sort who try to limit their kid’s exposure to advertising, and their sugar consumption, etc. Typical Hippie Crunchy Granola middle class stuff.

Because it was the soda bottling plant that donated the sign, some parents had a lot of questions. And many learned for the first time that there are soda machines at the high school. Which the cafeteria people were not concerned with because “the biggest seller is water!” (I pointed out that there’s free water in the filtered fountain 30 feet away but… )
Anyway. At this extremely energized school board meeting the head cafeteria staff said “I don’t care. If we got Mars Bars for free, we would serve them to these kids every day!”

I thought that was one heckuva admission….

Anyway. That’s a lot of words for “We have a lot of work to do to get the US on to a healthy path”

I'm not sure where you live, but in the school districts I work in, they only accommodate medically required diets, not dietary preferences. We are up front with parents about this and they have to go to the doctor and get a medical statement that their child requires a specific diet for an allergy or whatever medical condition. Outside of that, parents have to send a lynch in with the child if they don't want them to eat a certain food. And yes, I've had to tell vegetarian parents this. Unfortunately, it's just not plausible to accommodate all dietary preferences in a school system.

1) They told me that they would accommodate a vegetarian diet
And then they just fed my kid a single slice of bread and a carton of milk.
2) They were feeding the vegetarian high school students.

Generally free meals are not offered in high school. High schoolers have to pay. Does the high school offer free meals where you are at? Just curious. Things always work a bit differently in different locations. And I agree that they should never have told you they could accommodate a vegetarian diet given that they were unable to do so.

ddsb1111 wrote: »

@AnnPT77 You really painted a picture for us here. I knew I was spoiled but now I feel especially so. Your last sentence sums it up for me, “We have met the enemy and he is us". It doesn’t have to be this way, but we’ve created an uphill battle, that’s for sure. There’s gotta be something we can do to start caring and taking this more seriously. Seems like that will only happen when it hurts.

Part of the problem here is that in some sense, over-eating high-energy, non-filling foods and sitting still "feels good" . . . in the moment. The negative consequences creep on, almost imperceptibly slowly, and they're distant from the root cause.

Both of those things - IMO - have clearly been wired into humans by millennia of natural selection. We evolved during mostly higher risk of famine when gorging ourselves with high energy food had some usefulness, and when our "danger - fix it!" circuits were attuned to immediate risks and immediate consequences like predators, quick-acting poisons, physical injuries, perceived enemies. We have "fight or flight" hormones, not "failure of long-term planning" hormones.

Occasionally, when I've commented on threads here that certain hyperpalatable foods don't - IMO - even taste good (too simple, no nuance, etc.), I've gotten push back that I'm yucking other people's yum. That's debatable: I don't see why my liking or disliking foods ought to have any effect on other people's enjoyment of things they like.

That - the fact that people feel personally criticized when others have different preferences in things that clearly are about personal taste, not morality or worth as a human, let alone objective facts - is part of something I mentioned upthread, the human tendency to create norms and want to fit in. That's how we create societies, cultures.

I'm not saying that being a contrarian on food preferences is some noble thing, because it's not. But I do think it would behoove people to give a thought to whether the foods they routinely eat truly taste good and satisfying . . . or only push the evolutionary buttons that make us reach for sugars, starches, and fats. Bolstering that sugar-starch-fat inclination is IMO where food marketing comes in: All the happy pretty people eat at McDonald's (or whatever, wherever), according to the ads. We want to be part of the happy pretty people, to fit in, to be cool and popular.

I'm way oversimplifying here, doing so for clarity and effect, and I'm sure I've insulted a bunch of people along the way.

In the US, my perception is that tobacco consumption took major nosedives when two things happened: Taxes made it expensive (some impact), and smokers were socially ostracized when smoking was incrementally banned from public/shared spaces (bigger impact, as unscientifically measured by when I saw numbers of people around me quit, or cut waaaay back). Mere warnings, even dire warnings, had quite limited impact.

I'm not saying we should ostracize people who eat cookies, are inactive, or who are overweight. That's dumb. I'm saying it may be useful to recognize humans' wired-in mechanisms that underpin the "obesity crisis". Appealing to rationality has a poor track record in influencing people at the population level.

When it comes to the "immediate acute consequences" human hardwiring, that's also a factor behind other societal-level issues. One example is disinclination to save for retirement (for those for whom it's arguably financially viable). Another is estate planning (that one's amped up by a human disinclination to think about unpleasant things). Immediate rewards and dangers affect our decisions much more strongly than gradual, long-term ones. There's quite a lot of research around this, such as in criminology and criminal justice. I admit I don't follow that research closely, but from what I've read, the slow wheels of the US justice system tend to increase crime commission and recidivism, as one example. We don't expect our dog to understand and respond well when we scold them 10 hours after they do something we don't like; humans' memory and reaction time may be longer, but there are limits.

There's some interesting work in behavioral economics and related social sciences about the impact of nudging and defaulting as tools to deal with problems like these: Finding ways to make relatively small changes that (statistically) tip people's behavior in a positive direction without strictly constraining their choices. (The "Concepts" section of the Wikipedia article on behavioral economics, here outlines some of the underlying ideas in a generic (not health/weight specific) way, if you're unfamiliar with these ideas and interested. The article on nudge theory has some applied examples.) While this is limited-evidence stuff still, I think it's interesting in contexts like our current "debate".

Yes, techniques based on those concepts are manipulative. I've long argued that we can't avoid influencing behavior via public policy, so we might as well try to understand how those influences operate and try to use them for good instead of just doing seemingly-good stuff and seeing what happens. (I made the same argument to managers who reported to me in the work context, that they unavoidably influence people who report to them so they should do so consciously and with positive intentions, rather than just "acting naturally" and letting the chips fall where they may.)

Ugh. Another flippin' essay. Enough rant for now.

"foods" engineered to be hyperpalatable is the foundation of ultra processed foods which typically are a combination of carbohydrates, sugar, fat and salt which triggers the brains reward system which interferes with the body's ability to regulate appetite and satiety which encourages excessive eating, this isn't rocket science, it's a well documented fact and has been for decades. Ann touched on our evolutionary adaptive abilities that helped us survive that are now turning out to be our nemesis, isn't that special.