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Only 5% of the American population get the recommended minimum of 150 minutes of exercise a week.
It's not just humans this happens to. If you confine swine to pens and feed them slop, they get bigger and bigger, right??
This is the "simple" story they keep selling but if it is so simple why can't we change it? Because it isn't really simple. Did you know that the more exercise you do the body adjusts to it? So if people 30 years ago took 10K steps a day, the body adjusted and turned off things to keep energy needs stable. There is an entire book written by an evolutionary biologist... based on the science that he did that showed hunter gathers in Africa who walk all day long have the same TDEE as office workers in New York. His science shows that the body constrains energy.
In the 70s no one went to the gym. Now there is a gym on every corner and most workplaces. I don't buy that only 5 % of us get the exercise we should. Every town and city has bike lanes and sidewalks. Wasn't that way in the 70s.
Until we stop bemoaning these myths and seriously examine the issue things won't change.
I feel like in my area i see less fat people. I think education and income have something to do with staying in shape. People with less income and less education are more likely to be less motivated.
Partly true, I suspect. Some of us have less knowledge about healthy cooking and nutrition. How did our parents feed us?
My parents allowed us way too much sugar (candy and soda) and junk food (chips and pretzels). Just ask my dentist. But I've educated myself on whole foods, healthy cooking and developed a regular exercise program.
Partly true, I suspect. Some of us have less knowledge about healthy cooking and nutrition. How did our parents feed us?
My parents allowed us way too much sugar (candy and soda) and junk food (chips and pretzels). Just ask my dentist. But I've educated myself on whole foods, healthy cooking and developed a regular exercise program.
We can do better than our upbringing.
Right I'm not saying only wealthy people eat healthy...but if someone is truly low income and scraping to get by they are likely not out exercising or making an effort to eat healthy. Especially if there are kids in the mix which there usually are.
Its hard for me to grasp how some folks don't know what is/isn't healthy...
Hey folks, if the government's best interest was to keep people healthy by pushing for a real healthy diet. There wouldn't be all the big pharma, health orgs, and expensive treatment options. The hospitals would be less occupied. People 40-50 years ago drank sodas, ate burgers, had chocolate bars too and wasn't obese back then. But they didn't have high fructose corn syrup, no GMO foods back then. These processed foods contributed to destroying people's health.
Fifty years ago, we didn't drink sodas and eat chocolate bars (or other snacks) every hour nor eat burgers every day.
Without a doubt, the food supply has changed, but our eating habits have also changed. We didn't eat as much and we didn't eat as frequently. The frequency of eating itself has snowballing metabolic consequences. In many cases, the metabolism of children has been permanently ruined before they even reach their teen hears simply because they've been fed too many times in a day all their lives.
Early human societies generally ate once a day (we know that because the most primitive societies still do)...that's what our metabolism is set for. It appears that by ancient times, cultures were able to set that to twice a day, which lasted through the 1700s when we began to move to three times a day (that was a result of industrialization).
These days, we have many people consuming calories every waking hour. A large percentage of people don't go more than two hours between calorie consumption. The effect of that on human metabolism is severe.
Last edited by Ralph_Kirk; 11-17-2023 at 08:40 AM..
This is the "simple" story they keep selling but if it is so simple why can't we change it? Because it isn't really simple. Did you know that the more exercise you do the body adjusts to it? So if people 30 years ago took 10K steps a day, the body adjusted and turned off things to keep energy needs stable. There is an entire book written by an evolutionary biologist... based on the science that he did that showed hunter gathers in Africa who walk all day long have the same TDEE as office workers in New York. His science shows that the body constrains energy.
In the 70s no one went to the gym. Now there is a gym on every corner and most workplaces. I don't buy that only 5 % of us get the exercise we should. Every town and city has bike lanes and sidewalks. Wasn't that way in the 70s.
Until we stop bemoaning these myths and seriously examine the issue things won't change.
Exercise--that is to say, the concept of moving just to burn calories--has only a minor effect on managing weight. It doesn't compare with reducing calories, and it flattens out in effect just as reducing calories eventually does.
There are certainly other benefits to exercise, and those are not to be ignored. But weight loss isn't the major benefit.
This whole discussion of how our eating habits have changed to manufactured foods (OK. Everyone else calls them "processed") sort of dovetails into the shrinking population discussion.
Because of our success as a civilization, we have lost the ability to fend for ourselves. We no longer farm, work hard, grow our own vegetables, hunt for our own meat and make our own tools. So we have become sedentary and over-fed.
It is my belief that this was always going to happen. Success will cause population decline, and, because survival skills are now gone, population decline will become more severe than most people can imagine.
This is the "simple" story they keep selling but if it is so simple why can't we change it? Because it isn't really simple. Did you know that the more exercise you do the body adjusts to it? So if people 30 years ago took 10K steps a day, the body adjusted and turned off things to keep energy needs stable. There is an entire book written by an evolutionary biologist... based on the science that he did that showed hunter gathers in Africa who walk all day long have the same TDEE as office workers in New York. His science shows that the body constrains energy.
In the 70s no one went to the gym. Now there is a gym on every corner and most workplaces. I don't buy that only 5 % of us get the exercise we should. Every town and city has bike lanes and sidewalks. Wasn't that way in the 70s.
Until we stop bemoaning these myths and seriously examine the issue things won't change.
"Fraid I disagree. Not myths. Ten mega-food companies make 90% of canned/frozen/bagged grocery items. They employ scientists to design enticing foods filled with sugar, fat, and salt. Items we're genetically programmed to lust after. Can any of us stop after one potato chip??
Who does 100% home cooking these days from whole foods? How often is dinner a frozen, microwaved pizza? How many fast food restaurants can you name? More than a dozen?
As far as exercise, we've become a nation of screen heads. Games, streamed movies, texts, social media.
Who do you personally know who gets the minimum 150 minutes of weekly exercise??
I see very few kids on bikes these days. That's a big change from when I was a kid--we lived on our bikes after school.
And why doesn't it change, you ask??
That's the multi-billion dollar question, isn't it?
Profit. Pure and simple.
The food and pharma industries are happily making their profits. Their army of lobbyists kind of own our politicians through donations and influence (and, in return, getting govt. subsidies.
I'd be happy to hear your solution on how to change this....
Lord, people, stop acting like 40-50 years ago was ye olden times like back in the Great Depression.
40 years ago was 1983. Just two years later, that kid would be doing the "truffle Shuffle" in Goonies, OK? I was four years old and was eating processed food like crazy. My husband is 20 years older than me, and was in the period of his adulthood where he was eating tons of pizza and drinking soda all the time and starting to put on weight then. He did get good results from changing his diet, but only to a point. He will never be svelte. But he talks about his childhood in the 1960s where his mother didn't know how to cook so she served "TV Dinners" every night. He's not the only Boomer I know who had that kind of diet then.
Our activity levels have indeed shifted. There are other factors though and all I've been saying is that when you have a ton of variables, you should not just ignore them and say, "It is this, and only ever this - diet and exercise full stop."
Stress hormones high over time can cause difficulty in losing weight. The body believes that it is in crisis mode. We have not been talking about hormonal shifts due to anything from birth control pills in women's urine winding up in the water supply to the effect of plastics and microplastics on us. A couple of generations between the initiation of the industrial revolution and the 1970s when they started to regulate the use of lead, were SEVERELY lead poisoned.
And then there's the cultural/psychological/societal stuff. You had a generation that were affected by the Great Depression passing on certain ethics to their kids who treated their kids a certain way, but the strategies that made sense in scarcity became harmful in abundance. How many people here had parents who raged at them if they didn't "clean their plate?" I have met SO MANY Americans who will freak out if a person does not eat enough at their table, does not finish a heap of food on their plate, wastes a single bite. I've literally had overweight people give me crap for not stuffing myself past the point of comfort.
They were trained in this. It's what came from their parents and their parents' parents. And it can be very hard to break that programming.
All I'm saying is that even to the extent that it IS a matter of food or exercise, it's STILL complicated. A person who struggles to take off excess weight must have access and means to obtain healthy food and the time and know-how to prepare it, they must have the time to exercise and a safe place to do so (I've lived in neighborhoods where walking or biking was not safe, and I couldn't afford a gym membership.) They may still struggle and if they do, it could be a matter of psychology, environment, genetics, endocrinology, gut biome, etc. Do they have the means to see a bunch of specialists and find out what it is? Maybe. Maybe not.
In America at least, very wealthy people are rarely overweight let alone obese.
In my best Marie Antoinette impression, "let them eat keto. Let them get Pelotons." A lot of industries are happy to make bank on the hardships of the poor.
Also, the starvation and emaciation of the Great Depression isn't really something to point to as aspirational. The United States Government instituted a lot of agricultural programs because young men were too malnourished to qualify to enlist and fight in the World Wars. It was a noted problem.
What I really would like to see, would be a study on whether obesity might have a compounding generational component. So if you have a generation of people whose diet is a certain way, does it cause chemical signals that effect their gametes prior to conception of offspring, or signals to fetal development, which could then effect the way that the child's body processes nutrients, which then effects their eggs and sperm or fetuses when they reproduce... Etc.
Like aside from what exactly people are eating today versus decades ago, or what physical activity we are doing, could it be that we pass on shifts in how our bodies function from one generation to the next? There has been interesting research of the effects of a stressed mother on a developing fetus, and what about people waiting to have kids now until older ages in adulthood?
It's. All. Connected.
But to a more direct and personal level, I think that sometimes individuals don't so much care if other people are fat or not, they just really want to have a class of folks that it is socially acceptable for them to bully. The petty meanness is the point more than anything else for some people and I just don't have time for that noise.
But to a more direct and personal level, I think that sometimes individuals don't so much care if other people are fat or not, they just really want to have a class of folks that it is socially acceptable for them to bully. The petty meanness is the point more than anything else for some people and I just don't have time for that noise.
Oh gosh, personally, I don't want to bully anyone--fat, skinny, or otherwise.
I feel a heart full of compassion for anyone who is suffering from the ills that obesity can cause (you know the laundry list of diabetes, heart issues, joint pain, and etc). And the psychological ills that can plague one who feels out of control and helpless to effect change...
I wish we were a nation of robustly healthy folks who are enjoying life to the fullest!
If only I could wave a magic wand of positive changes and see it happen, I'd be the happiest gal in the world. Suffering is not my bag.
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