Summary
A new Lancet study reveals nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, a sharp rise from just over half in 1990.
Obesity among adults doubled to over 40%, while rates among girls and women aged 15–24 nearly tripled to 29%.
The study highlights significant health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy, alongside projected medical costs of up to $9.1 trillion over the next decade.
Experts stress obesity’s complex causes—genetic, environmental, and social—and call for structural reforms like food subsidies, taxes on sugary drinks, and expanded treatment access.
Not really surprising when all food is so processed and pumped full of all kinds of bullshit, from high fructose corn syrup to preservatives to you name it.
Fun anecdote - I moved to Europe from the states a year back, and lost almost 20 pounds in that time without explicitly doing anything different. Just from the better food quality, and walking more in daily life (walkable cities and good public transportation!)
I took it to mean that they didn’t go out of their way to walk more, it was simply the better option to get around and so they just did that instead of driving a car. After moving from a car-centric city to one with a metro I totally get it and I do go for walks just for fun.
It’s not just about whether or not you can do something but about how available that thing is. Going for a walk can suck real bad in North America, surprisingly. Things like shitty food being the cheaper option, in a country racing to get its working class to be as disproportionately impoverished as possible, can make it hard to justify getting better quality stuff, too.
Yea it sucks walking next to 6 lanes of high speed traffic and basically no noise restrictions on cars. Once I moved somewhere that I could walk to the grocery store down quiet, tree lined streets most of the way, it became my preferred way. The built environment influences how you travel a lot.
And they bought different food too lol. You can buy clean vegetables, proteins and fresh non sugar bread in America. (Not that sliced sugar wonder bread shit). They just apparently chose the junk food (which is wildly available no question about that) when it was put in front of them.
When in a grocery with less of the junk (theres still junk in UK and EU Groceries), they chose better stuff.
Unless they want to make a claim that something like raw broccoli, raw grass fed beef, raw beans are substantially different in the eu. That wasn’t my experience, it’s just more prominent
Like, if you eat processed chips and cookies in America or the EU it’s still junk
Things like shitty food being the cheaper option, in a country racing to get its working class to be as disproportionately impoverished as possible, can make it hard to justify getting better quality stuff, too. Does help that the culture is also pretty bad around that stuff so maybe going to Europe was the moment they were finally taken out of the toxicity of their local community.
Yeah but you’re missing the fact that their shitty junk food is still miles better than the shitty junk food here.
Look at something that is sold in both places and check the ingredients list. The one I’m Europe will have less ingredients and more real food in general, the American one will have a ton of chemicals and other shit
It’s also now fully accepted to be fat or overweight. Online dating has become pretty weird to me. I’m a pretty athletic guy, so i’m looking for someone that is also a bit sporty and healthy.
Curvy on tinder has become just a blanket statement for not very skinny to wow, you look like walking must really suck. It’s a very small percentage that is super athletic, a small percentage that is just “normal” and the rest just fat. I’m not trying to shame people but reading shit like: i’m not skinny and i’ll never be is fucking sad to me. My dad is fat and his life is fucking garbage, and it’s getting worse the older he gets. I honestly forsee a shitty future for a lot of overweight people today.
Ugh, you just described my experience exactly. I’m mildly autistic and so online dating is my primary method since it’s easy for me to misinterpret or not understand the initial stages of the courting process. A lot of my interests are also very male dominated too. Therefore most of the women on dating apps that are interested in me either have kids (I don’t want any and even had a vasectomy) or are overweight since the more in shape women in the same spaces are “more desirable” and have everyone coming to them.
I’d say 90%+ of my partners have weighed more than me while being a lot shorter. Don’t know if I have ever had to worry about my hoodies being stolen since they can’t fit them.
P.S. I know that phrasing sounds problematic and is not how I view people or women as individuals. Game Theory does apply when it comes to dating though, and in the abstract that is one of the things that is going on.
The design of our cities and culture in north america definitely doesn’t help. Sit in your metal box and drive to the front door (or drive thru and don’t even leave the car), sit at a desk all day unless you’re in the trades, go home and sit down to consume netflix/youtube/games, order fast food delivered to your door.
Sure nobody is forcing people to live like this but parts of our society certainly feels like it is encouraged. People look at me funny and friends have questioned me if I park and walk into a business with a drive thru, even though I usually get faster service that way
The individuals make the collective, most Americans are making these choices everyday. There is not some boogeyman forcing Americans to live a certain way, they love their unhealthy sedentary lifestyle and will actively fight you to defend it, with guns.
The infrastructure that makes it impossible or dangerous to walk or ride a trolley into town to have dinner was built with lobbyist persuasion 50 years before I was born. Most of us cannot afford to buy into the narrow islands of places built for humans in north America.
Co-worker of mine visited Ethiopia for like 2-3 weeks. He said he actually ate more than he usually does while there and still lost 15lbs. Our food is a huge problem in the US. It’s better for business to keep us unhealthy.
Oh, I can totally believe it. Ethiopian food is so damn filling, while not being insanely calorie dense like a lot of what we’re used to in the US. Beans and veggies are filling but not calorie dense, so just adding more of those, even cheap canned ones to your diet can make it much easier to lose weight. I had a buddy that lost almost 30lbs in college literally just by replacing a meal with a can or two of green beans and hot sauce every day for a couple of months. He’s managed to keep it off too, as it helped him realize just how much more his hunger was sated by a couple 60cal cans of beans vs some huge 800 calorie meal from Taco Bell, which was his preferred junk food of choice at the time. Fun fact, it also works extremely well on overweight dogs, minus the hot sauce.
I understand the corn syrup and additives causing weight gain but can someone please explain to me how putting food in a blender would make it worse for you? Ultra processed - what does it even mean. Reshaping food doesn’t make it have more sugar/carbs and what not. Just the shit added to it does right?
For example, what makes ground beef not considered ultra processed? If someone puts other things into it, it can get worse for you, but is eating ground sirloin really any worse for you than non-ground sirloin, I can’t see how it could be.
Not an expert but I think ultra processed food has two main aspects, one is additives and preservatives. And the other is our body doesn’t need to process it as much to digest it. If you eta rice/bread your body has to break that carbohydrates into glucose which takes energy. Now if you directly take suger/glucose then eating the same calories would be a lot more plus calories since your body doesn’t need to work hard to process it. Furthermore it has more pure calories per same weight, so you end up consuming more to feel full compared to eating something not as calories dense.
“Body doesn’t work as hard to process it”, would this in theory mean that more tender foods would be less work to break down, so a crock pot would actually be a poor method to cook your food long term?
Not really surprising when all food is so processed and pumped full of all kinds of bullshit, from high fructose corn syrup to preservatives to you name it.
No. I refuse to blame those foods for people being fat.
I’m an amateur endurance cyclist, and during peak summer riding, I can eat junk food all day (literally from 5 am to midnight, multiple times an hour) and still end up in a calorie deficit.
It’s actually really hard to gain weight when you’re active, and those junk foods are very common with anyone who does endurance sports (or really any sport that requires high-calorie input over a sustained period). This is why sports nutrition products are basically pure sugar with some electrolytes sprinkled in there.
The problem is that people are eating junk food (jet fuel for our bodies) as if they were athletes. If you’re sitting on your ass all day and pounding back 4000 calories of junk food, yeah, you’re going to be fat.
Now, are those healthy foods? Absolutely not. But if you view food as fuel and nutrition, you can have a healthy relationship with “junk food”, too.
To be fair, I don’t think many of us would recognize someone who is a BMI of 26 as “overweight.” It technically is, but you’ve probably seen people regularly that are “technically” overweight but would never realize it. You yourself might be (and, statistically, are likely to be) overweight according to BMI and not realize it.
The really staggering thing is obesity. From 1960 until about 1992, it was between 15-20%. By 2000 it was 30%. These days it’s getting close to 45%.
That’s the thing 40 years ago you would realize that they were overweight.
Actually 40 years ago a higher percentage of Americans were “overweight,” so it’s unlikely it would seem more obvious then vs now. The difference is that now many more people are obese, but being obese is fairly noticeable unlike being overweight.
The percentage of people who are in the just-above-normal category of “overweight” has remained very steady and within a narrow band over the years, i.e., it’s been consistently between roughly 31-34% for almost seven decades. It was 32.9% last year. That’s why in my comment I noted that the real concerning thing about the study isn’t really the amount of people who are overweight; it’s the amount of people who are obese and morbidly obese.
Maybe…but two things:
If the number of obese people is lower, then what are the people who aren’t mildly overweight? They are healthy weight. So even if the percentage of mildly overweight people stay the same, the day to day comparison is with a bigger group of healthy weight people, so they probably were more recognizably overweight.
Secondly, with less really obese people you wouldn’t get desensitized to seeing fat all the time, which makes mildly overweight people seem more normal. Somebody with a BMI of 26 and about 15lbs overweight would have been more likely to be described as “plump” or “husky” back then. But when crowds are full of people that are 50+ lbs overweight, that 26 BMI seems downright healthy.
This is all speculation. I can’t remember how I perceived overweight vs obese people back in the 80’s.
Yeah right now I weigh 170, I’m in pretty good shape (would be in better shape if I didn’t injure my foot and could start running again). But for me 180 is overweight? Even if that’s just fat that means my muscles become less visible. Hell it feels like my thighs are bigger now after getting in shape that when I was 180. And I started to look really skinny when I got down to 165.
I’m sure people would keep calling me skinny at 180. What we need are easier ways to measure body fat percentage. Because it is true that holding onto lots of fat for a long time is what’s bad for you.
The easiest way to check on body fat percentage right now is just to take weekly pictures of yourself in your underwear. You can see the muscle vs fat pretty well.
Yes, technically, they are. But it’s unlikely you would see someone with a bmi of 26 walk by you on the street and think “that guy is overweight.”
This guy has a BMI of 26. If he had clothes on, few people are going to assume he’s overweight, even though technically he is:
I’ve got about 10lbs on this guy. I’m obese. I know it. I’m ashamed of it. My body knows it and tries telling me every day I need to lose 30lbs.
with men, the issue is that there is a lot built up internal fat around the inner organs BEFORE you even get to see fat thats visible from the outside. so yeah, i bet the guy is medically considered overweight even though he doesn’t look like peter griffin. this is why when women gain weight you can tell immediately and for men it takes a while. both is unhealthy though
As usual it is a matter of education and normalisation. I’m a rock climber and am surrounded by shredded people a lot of the time. I’m sitting at around 18-20% body fat which is high for the sport but I am considerably leaner than the guy in your photo.
I can absolutely tell that he is overweight (even with clothes) but that’s because I have invested a lot of time into learning about health and fitness and spend most of my time with people who have a ‘healthy’ BMI. If all you see are overweight and obese people every day then of course you will look at this guy and think he looks perfectly healthy (which he might well be but that’s another discussion).
I have noticed the general public is now very tolerant of sweet drinks. I know that is not the only problem. I was never allowed soda or coffee or sweet tea growing up, so don’t have much of a tolerance for them now. But when I try popular coffees (pumpkin spice this or vanilla chai that) or cocktails at most restaurants, I am surprised that people don’t send them back and ask for less sweetener.
As an infrequent treat, I can understand it. But if you are drinking that much sugar on a daily basis, it must seriously screw with your system. I am sure lots of people are drinking a huge amount of calories and don’t register how different that is from past generations.
I(M) am an actually healthy weight (I believe I’m almost exactly average for my height and build for a man in the 60s or 70s), but my brain has absolutely been hijacked by sugar, and I can tell. Even avoiding over sweetened stuff for months and months I will still get cravings and having something I know a European would find sickeningly sweet I find is very similar to how junkies describe a relapse.
Despite all of that, I refuse to give in. I enjoy the freedom having a relatively healthy body gives me. Makes finding a partner with a similar mindset and goals hard though. It’s worse than a Thanos snap, 3/4 of the population just gone.
Tell me about it. The discipline it takes to not consume something the general public has been consuming as the norm is a struggle sometimes, but tasting the flavors I otherwise wouldn’t notice from something not deathly sweetened is a plus. As well as better teeth. My parents also restricted sweet drinks to family trips and parties growing up, and I don’t think I can thank them enough.
I like the edge off my coffee but I just use stevia, which is fine if you don’t use a lot and get that tongue numbing sensation. Those novelty coffees are utterly disgustingly sweet, and its all sugar. I can’t imagine drinking them, but I guess if everything you eat and drink is sweet, you wouldn’t notice it.
Don’t worry congress is going to make Obese 50% body fat in response to the crisis…
When I bring my rice and veggy curry to lunch I become a spectacle for everyone. Because they are all either ordering fast food, not eating, or just eating junk and snack food. This is a huge problem, why am I spectacle for doing something so basic?
There are actually microaggressions from people to me just because I eat healthy.
People hate being reminded that the conveniences they enjoy are unhealthy/unethical/etc. All it takes is somebody else choosing differently to trigger defensiveness and denialism. Rather than making changes to their own life they choose to ridicule those who are making better decisions.
The reason people don’t like vegans is because they interject themselves into conversations that are only tangential to the topic.
Some previous coworkers I had were blown away by a pear that I brought as part of my lunch. A pear!!!
edit: duh, not pair
