So what is making people from the USA so fat?
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Thank you for this.Dags90 said:
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Honestly, all it is simply to much sugar, corn and overall calories. While lifestyle has something to do with it, I honestly think it has to do with the fact that a vehicle that can go fast to go shopping is necessary. Where I live, I can walk and get a A&W burger and walk back while burning those calories, others aren't as lucky and essentially have to drive everywhere.
As a whole, the 81% shit seems to be extremely, extremely exaggerated. At that point you couldn't walk into a room in a grocery store without seeing 7 out of the 10 people as obese, and then one or two as chubby.
usa people have mac d for berakfast lunch and dinner and the they normaly eataxer size it so i wonder why 68% of Americans are massively obese.
Really, it's a combination of things.
First off, it's being poor in a climate where Taco Bell can sell fake food for 89 cents or less. Believe me, if you have rent due, and the salad is two bucks, but the bean and cheese burrito is less than a dollar? Screw healthy food, you need to sleep in a bed with a full belly.
Another reason is the car culture, but that is due to the fact that America is bloody HUGE. To my UK friends here, the whole of the UK, all of it, is as big as Kansas. I'm not kidding, look it up. Then, look at a map of the US, and find Kansas. There is a reason we rely on cars.
But, being huge has another effect, isolation, especially in the college years. Sometimes you are a thousand or more dollar plane ticket away from anyone who ever gave a crap about you. Why is that important? Because that is a major factor in depression, and what do depressed people do? Eat.
So, depressed poor people with nothing in biking distance that live on a falling dollar away from anyone who ever cared about them... this more or less equals fat people.
First off, it's being poor in a climate where Taco Bell can sell fake food for 89 cents or less. Believe me, if you have rent due, and the salad is two bucks, but the bean and cheese burrito is less than a dollar? Screw healthy food, you need to sleep in a bed with a full belly.
Another reason is the car culture, but that is due to the fact that America is bloody HUGE. To my UK friends here, the whole of the UK, all of it, is as big as Kansas. I'm not kidding, look it up. Then, look at a map of the US, and find Kansas. There is a reason we rely on cars.
But, being huge has another effect, isolation, especially in the college years. Sometimes you are a thousand or more dollar plane ticket away from anyone who ever gave a crap about you. Why is that important? Because that is a major factor in depression, and what do depressed people do? Eat.
So, depressed poor people with nothing in biking distance that live on a falling dollar away from anyone who ever cared about them... this more or less equals fat people.
Actually, ever since 2005 (or thereabouts) the population of Australia has more overweight and obese people than the US. It's not just America - it's almost every developed nation except the French and the Japanese. It tends to be worse in Australia, New Zealand, The United States, Mexico and Cananda.
There are actually many reasons:
1) Increased sedentary lifestyles - technology has made our lives easier, although many people don't realize it. Most of us have to do a fraction of the physical work our fathers and mothers had to do - whether in the workplace or in the home. Desk jobs, cars, wide-range public transport are all good things, but they also mean that we don't move around nearly as much
Also, in the past, community events, interactions, parties, hiking and travelling were much more popular because... well, frankly there wasn't that much to DO at home. Home was eating, sleeping and reading - but most of the population went outside for their fun and games. In the past, "go to your room and stay there" was a real punishment, since kids liked to play outside and would always resist being called back into their home at night. But now, with the internet, TV, music players, video games - you can have all the entertainment in the world at your fingertips in your house and you don't have to even get off the couch. Want to talk to your friend? Call them from the couch. Want to know what's going on outside? Turn on the TV. Want to feel an adrenaline rush? Watch an action film or play a game.
2) Food is cheaper and more widely available than ever before. Now, a lot of you are looking at your grocery bills and are puzzled by this statement, but that's because you're not taking into account inflation. Food, at least in the developed world, is available to almost anyone. Few people go hungry at night, unless they are in the most dire of situations (homeless, for example). Virtually no one dies of starvation in the developed world - not even the very poor.
But try telling that to our bodies - you see, we evolved on the Savannah plains, where food had to be caught or harvested and was hardly secure. Food had to be eaten there and then, because our ancestors didn't have farms when they evolved, they didn't have refrigerators. Sugary foods and fruit in particular had to be eaten RIGHT THEN AND NOW - your body wanted you to eat as much of it as possible, as soon as possible, because chances are it wouldn't be there tomorrow! The body was designed to cram a lot of food, go hungry for a while, then cram a lot of food. Not exactly healthy, but that's how our bodies worked, because that was the conditions our ancestors grew up in.
But we don't live on the Savannah anymore. Sugar and Fats are widely available. Yet, our bodies don't evolve nearly as quickly as our societies. Our bodies still compel us to cram sugars and fats because our bodies still perceive these foods to be rare, useful treats.
3) The type of food has changed. We get a lot more sugar and fat then we need to. Our bodies find these foods delicious because they are high in energy. Back in ye olden days, such food was rare. Sugar was found almost exclusively in fruit, and fruit wasn't exactly in abundance in Northern Africa, where humans are generally thought to have evolved. But now sugar is everywhere. It's in everything. Sugar taken moderately is nothing to fear - but US food companies knew that sugar made things tasty and that tasty things sold better, so they put it in their products. Sales are everything to companies.
4) We don't like to cook. Our lives are incomparably easier than our ancestors, but we don't think so. We're used to the technology that makes our lives a BREEZE compared to the life of a 13th century English Peasant. We take it for granted.
We have more free time but we also want to spend that time on entertainment. Cooking takes time. Even the simplest cooked meals can take up to an HOUR to cook! Hell, I had to go to work from 9 till 5, and I want to watch my TV and I don't want to spend an hour in front of a STOVE! So the thinking goes.
So, people in developed nations buy pre-packaged food. These foods aren't necessarily awful, but they often are high in fats and salts and sugars. They are high in these ingredients, first as a sales-tactic to increase sales because hey, people naturally like such foods, but also because high sugar levels actually preserve food. Bacteria does like sugar, but not too much sugar, and they really don't like salt.
Cooking foods is incomparably healthier and can be tastier, but requires a lot more effort, and we don't want to put that effort in. I know I can't be bothered cooking.
There are many more factors as well - advertising, body weight issues, poor parenting, the body's natural tendency towards homeostasis and the alterations of your appetite due to obesity - but it's actually not a simple topic.
As for why fat people find it so hard to lose weight - it's because once the body has reached a certain weight, it fights any attempt to reduce that weight. For someone who is obese, the body and the brain adjust to that overweight size as the normal baseline. It will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent you from losing that weight because on the Savannah plain, losing weight on purpose was suicidal foolishness! "What?!" your brain screams, "You want to LOSE weight!? What if there's a lion around the next corner? What if there's a drought tomorrow?" Never mind that most of us don't live on the Savannah, or in drought prone regions, and that the supermarket won't disappear tomorrow - our instinctive part of our brain doesn't know that. As far as our instincts go, we're still on the Savannah, fighting for food every single day. The body doesn't want to ever let weight go.
There are actually many reasons:
1) Increased sedentary lifestyles - technology has made our lives easier, although many people don't realize it. Most of us have to do a fraction of the physical work our fathers and mothers had to do - whether in the workplace or in the home. Desk jobs, cars, wide-range public transport are all good things, but they also mean that we don't move around nearly as much
Also, in the past, community events, interactions, parties, hiking and travelling were much more popular because... well, frankly there wasn't that much to DO at home. Home was eating, sleeping and reading - but most of the population went outside for their fun and games. In the past, "go to your room and stay there" was a real punishment, since kids liked to play outside and would always resist being called back into their home at night. But now, with the internet, TV, music players, video games - you can have all the entertainment in the world at your fingertips in your house and you don't have to even get off the couch. Want to talk to your friend? Call them from the couch. Want to know what's going on outside? Turn on the TV. Want to feel an adrenaline rush? Watch an action film or play a game.
2) Food is cheaper and more widely available than ever before. Now, a lot of you are looking at your grocery bills and are puzzled by this statement, but that's because you're not taking into account inflation. Food, at least in the developed world, is available to almost anyone. Few people go hungry at night, unless they are in the most dire of situations (homeless, for example). Virtually no one dies of starvation in the developed world - not even the very poor.
But try telling that to our bodies - you see, we evolved on the Savannah plains, where food had to be caught or harvested and was hardly secure. Food had to be eaten there and then, because our ancestors didn't have farms when they evolved, they didn't have refrigerators. Sugary foods and fruit in particular had to be eaten RIGHT THEN AND NOW - your body wanted you to eat as much of it as possible, as soon as possible, because chances are it wouldn't be there tomorrow! The body was designed to cram a lot of food, go hungry for a while, then cram a lot of food. Not exactly healthy, but that's how our bodies worked, because that was the conditions our ancestors grew up in.
But we don't live on the Savannah anymore. Sugar and Fats are widely available. Yet, our bodies don't evolve nearly as quickly as our societies. Our bodies still compel us to cram sugars and fats because our bodies still perceive these foods to be rare, useful treats.
3) The type of food has changed. We get a lot more sugar and fat then we need to. Our bodies find these foods delicious because they are high in energy. Back in ye olden days, such food was rare. Sugar was found almost exclusively in fruit, and fruit wasn't exactly in abundance in Northern Africa, where humans are generally thought to have evolved. But now sugar is everywhere. It's in everything. Sugar taken moderately is nothing to fear - but US food companies knew that sugar made things tasty and that tasty things sold better, so they put it in their products. Sales are everything to companies.
4) We don't like to cook. Our lives are incomparably easier than our ancestors, but we don't think so. We're used to the technology that makes our lives a BREEZE compared to the life of a 13th century English Peasant. We take it for granted.
We have more free time but we also want to spend that time on entertainment. Cooking takes time. Even the simplest cooked meals can take up to an HOUR to cook! Hell, I had to go to work from 9 till 5, and I want to watch my TV and I don't want to spend an hour in front of a STOVE! So the thinking goes.
So, people in developed nations buy pre-packaged food. These foods aren't necessarily awful, but they often are high in fats and salts and sugars. They are high in these ingredients, first as a sales-tactic to increase sales because hey, people naturally like such foods, but also because high sugar levels actually preserve food. Bacteria does like sugar, but not too much sugar, and they really don't like salt.
Cooking foods is incomparably healthier and can be tastier, but requires a lot more effort, and we don't want to put that effort in. I know I can't be bothered cooking.
There are many more factors as well - advertising, body weight issues, poor parenting, the body's natural tendency towards homeostasis and the alterations of your appetite due to obesity - but it's actually not a simple topic.
As for why fat people find it so hard to lose weight - it's because once the body has reached a certain weight, it fights any attempt to reduce that weight. For someone who is obese, the body and the brain adjust to that overweight size as the normal baseline. It will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent you from losing that weight because on the Savannah plain, losing weight on purpose was suicidal foolishness! "What?!" your brain screams, "You want to LOSE weight!? What if there's a lion around the next corner? What if there's a drought tomorrow?" Never mind that most of us don't live on the Savannah, or in drought prone regions, and that the supermarket won't disappear tomorrow - our instinctive part of our brain doesn't know that. As far as our instincts go, we're still on the Savannah, fighting for food every single day. The body doesn't want to ever let weight go.
Overeating, and you guys don't fucking do anything to beat the fatness. You just eat your ALREADY massive portions, and then sit down watching T.V or drive to a game of all American baseball to watch [[insert ridiculously patriotic name here]] face [[insert ridiculously patriotic name here]].
Seriously, it's not difficult to become trim, just look at your vast array of out of work actors. They're perfectly trim. So your and your kin, hit the gym... Tim. Ugh, I need some gin.
Seriously, it's not difficult to become trim, just look at your vast array of out of work actors. They're perfectly trim. So your and your kin, hit the gym... Tim. Ugh, I need some gin.
So much this. It's the one and only valid answer.TestECull said:
And the tragic thing is that dropping weight is so laughably easy, all that's needed is discipline. As of today I've been on a diet for exactly 3 months and lost around 35 kilos (and counting), and all I had to do to achieve it was staying away from soda, sweets and alcohol, exercising a little bit (some weights and maybe 100 push-ups a day) and reducing my daily calorie intake to about 600-800 in all. Believe me, it can be done without keeling over and dying - just make sure your body gets the raw essentials to keep functioning (vitamins, carbs, proteins, non-saturated fats).
Getting and/or staying healthy only requires a bit of discipline and, quite frankly, doing the math on what and how much you shovel down your gullet. Also, eat at regular mealtimes to regulate your body's insulin production (to prevent hunger attacks) and chew your food slowly.
This idea that our bodies are evolutionary frozen in the Savannah days of yore, again, isn't supported by the data. Europeans have had a clear selection for adult lactose tolerance specifically because of our domestication of ungulates. It's incorrect to view evolution as a rate, because it doesn't happen in a linear fashion at all. A single polymorphism could result in a few select people being the progenitors of the entire species (an admittedly extreme example), and there's no way to rate define that jump in fitness because it's infinite. It makes for poor analogies.Korolev said:
Now how about McDonalds by population?Samurai Silhouette said:It's really Simple.
The U.S. has one McDonalds per ~27,000 people. Japan: 1/35,000. Canada: 1/24,000.
Infographs made in order to skew information are nothing but pure propaganda.
I think the biggest problem is portion size.
If you don't like exercising to burn off energy, eat less instead so you're not stockpiling so much as fat. With all those JUMBO foods and drinks in the states, I'm not surprised most of them are obese and they have the highest percentage of morbidly obese people on the planet.
Also, cut the fat off of your meats, that stuff just becomes fat again when you digest it; and it's chewy and tasteless.
all in all, eat less and more healthily. I'm talking a Fist-sized burger and a handful of chips (fries) for dinner. With a mug of cola at most. Then slowly convert that portion into more healthy things such as salads, oven-baked foods, less greasy meats... etc.
If you don't like exercising to burn off energy, eat less instead so you're not stockpiling so much as fat. With all those JUMBO foods and drinks in the states, I'm not surprised most of them are obese and they have the highest percentage of morbidly obese people on the planet.
Also, cut the fat off of your meats, that stuff just becomes fat again when you digest it; and it's chewy and tasteless.
all in all, eat less and more healthily. I'm talking a Fist-sized burger and a handful of chips (fries) for dinner. With a mug of cola at most. Then slowly convert that portion into more healthy things such as salads, oven-baked foods, less greasy meats... etc.
The answer is that people's mouths are bigger than their arseholes.
Anyway what is so wrong with overeating? One day I will overcome the terribly affliction of my hyper metabolism and achieve my lifetime ambition to be a morbidly obese shut-in.
Anyway what is so wrong with overeating? One day I will overcome the terribly affliction of my hyper metabolism and achieve my lifetime ambition to be a morbidly obese shut-in.
- Cost of eating out vs cooking at home
- Ease of access to unhealthy and fast foods
- Size of portions
- Lazier/sedentary lifestyles
- Heavily processed food with chemicals, additives, preservatives and Heaven knows what else in.
- Ease of access to unhealthy and fast foods
- Size of portions
- Lazier/sedentary lifestyles
- Heavily processed food with chemicals, additives, preservatives and Heaven knows what else in.
Generally food in America contains higher levels of sodium and sugar than its European counterparts. ( http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/16/report-american-fast-food-contains-more-salt-than-rest-of-world )
We work more hours than you do ( http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364&page=1#.T5fD2dnrcrc ) This causes more stress, less time to work out, and less time to sleep. Thus creating an overall unhealthy lifestyle.
Our economy is in the toilet. (I trust I don't need to cite that) This means we have to work more (even though we already work too much) and causes many of us to buy quick meals such as fast food, microwave meals, etc. These processed meals are unhealthy to eat.
Now I can't speak for every American, but I for one am hoping this economy gets better before my metabolism starts to slow down. I currently eat fast food and microwave meals 5 days a week and get an average of 4 and a half hours of sleep a night.
We work more hours than you do ( http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364&page=1#.T5fD2dnrcrc ) This causes more stress, less time to work out, and less time to sleep. Thus creating an overall unhealthy lifestyle.
Our economy is in the toilet. (I trust I don't need to cite that) This means we have to work more (even though we already work too much) and causes many of us to buy quick meals such as fast food, microwave meals, etc. These processed meals are unhealthy to eat.
Now I can't speak for every American, but I for one am hoping this economy gets better before my metabolism starts to slow down. I currently eat fast food and microwave meals 5 days a week and get an average of 4 and a half hours of sleep a night.
Well, I can only speak for my brief experience in the states.
I ordered a pizza somewhere. It was covered in oil.
Any takeaway places I found were either very oily, or very sugary.
Some food I bought from supermarkets just tasted more oily, and cooked differently, to the stuff I had back home.
Its probably not how it is for a lot of America, but in my two weeks there on holiday - this is what I got. That and three massive Mickey Mouse pancakes for breakfast each morning.
I ordered a pizza somewhere. It was covered in oil.
Any takeaway places I found were either very oily, or very sugary.
Some food I bought from supermarkets just tasted more oily, and cooked differently, to the stuff I had back home.
Its probably not how it is for a lot of America, but in my two weeks there on holiday - this is what I got. That and three massive Mickey Mouse pancakes for breakfast each morning.
I like how your avatar is about eating food, too.Hazy992 said:
OT: And I'm pretty sure it's not exactly true, is it? I mean, all the American people I see on TV and such look pretty normal to me.
Unless you guys hire a CGI artist every time you need to air a news report.
I'm from Western Australia I've had a few friends that are "fat" mostly from eating to much or drinking Export (one of our local drinks here). probably some people in the USA go to Maccas (this is what us Aussies calls Mcdonalds) or other fast food places just my oppion, if u think i am wrong thats fine i dont care i wll not debate about my view the only response you will get from me mate is what ever you reacon i know i spelled it wrong cbf doing correnting