Just saying "cheeseburgers" or "calories in, calories out" fails to explain why people eat more calories now than they did before. There is a vague, and I think very unhelpful, sense in society today that this is some sort of mass moral failing. In reality there are a few factors that could, alone or in combination, explain this change in average behavior. The most convincing to me: chemicals could be messing with our endocrine systems and making us hungrier or food scientists could be designing more appealing food that just overloads our desires to eat.
I lived in SE Asia for a while. Obesity is almost non-existent, though rapidly increasing for children.
I tried to figure out why. Was it lifestyle? More manual labor? No, even office workers weren't obese. Running was viewed as some weird western habit. Few people went to the gym. Most just went for walks for exercise.
Was it diet? Maybe. But plenty of local foods weren't exactly healthy. Mostly processed carbs. Lots of salt. Plenty of deep fried foods.
Then after eating like a local for a while I realized it. Portion size. I'd say the average meal is maybe half the portion size you'd get in the US. I'd go out to eat at a restaurant and think "I'm not that hungry", then order something anyways. But it was never a lot of food. Very common for people to have a soup dish for lunch - maybe a few strips of meat, an egg, a handful of noodles and ton of vegetables. Add it all up and it's not many calories.
It looked to me like people weren't obese because they ate less. But that was the societal norm. Sure people would gorge themselves at special events like weddings or fancy dinners out. But most of the time they were eating meals of maybe 400-500 calories each.
Or they have less exposure to obesogens and therefore don't want to eat as much, leading restaurants to offer smaller portion sizes. There's a correlation, but not necessarily a causation.
This is almost certainly the sum and totality of it. Edge cases? Sure. But it's pretty obvious that portion size has something to do with it, when a standard "American breakfast" rocks in at near a thousand calories (before adding juice and sides).
As an anecdotal experience, I have stopped eating any kind of commercial bread many years ago, despite the fact that I like bread.
The reason was that I could not become satiated when eating commercial bread, before eating huge quantities, which filled me up. It is much easier for me to not start eating something than to stop after beginning to eat, so I gave up completely on eating bread.
Nevertheless, I have started this year to make at home a bread every day when I wake up, which I eat at breakfast. Unlike commercial bread, this home-made bread satiates me completely without eating too much of it, and until late in the evening, when I usually have my 2nd daily meal.
This was unexpected and I am wondering about the cause. One possible reason is because this home-made bread is more protein-rich than commercial bread, because before baking I wash the dough for a few minutes, to remove a part of the starch.
There is also the possibility that it might matter that this is pure bread, made of flour and water without anything else added, unlike the commercial bread, which includes a huge list of additives. I believe that the additives may also have an influence because, as far as I remember, with the bread eaten when I was a child I did not have the same problem of lack of satiety like with the modern commercial bread.
I do not think that there is any psychological reason, because I was very surprised by this, as it was contrary to my expectations.
However you are right that it is chewier than commercial bread and I have also thought that this may be an additional explanation. I believe that the longer chewing time contributes to the satiation effect, but it cannot explain all of it, as I remain satiated for many hours, and I do not believe that the extra chewing can have a lasting effect.
In any case the fact that most modern food requires much less chewing than traditional food is indeed a likely contributory factor to the tendency of eating more at a meal than it was common for the previous generations.
Spend 2 days and write down everything you eat or drink in a spreadsheet with calorie count (including oil and condiments). Use a digital scale if possible for more accurate measurement. The answer will be glaringly obvious.
Most people don’t do this and spend their lives wondering why they can’t control their weight.
Some quick culprits: sodas and juices (huge amount of calories), excess oil in food cooking (oil has a ton of calories), side dishes and snacks (chips, French fries, crackers, etc.).
On the satiety level, if you eat out a lot or processed foods, most have little fiber and aren’t that satiating (e.g. you can eat a whole bag of chips or thing of crackers and want more). Either more fiber or protein.
Really the main solution is to limit eating out if you live in America. I eat out once a day maximum. Otherwise you’ll most likely hit a caloric surplus.
> Most people don’t do this and spend their lives wondering why they can’t control their weight.
My experience with obese and morbidly obese individuals in the northeast US suggests to me that the problem is more related to mental health & addiction than a lack of information & education.
Right, you'll see how many calories you eat. But you won't see why you eat that many calories. Plenty of people try very hard to count and limit calories, but stories of successful weight loss are still the minority of cases. Most people can't lose more than 10 or 15 pounds without starting to get really hungry. Similarly, most people can't intentionally gain more than 10 or 15 pounds without starting to feel that they are unable to eat more.
You can say the main solution is not eating out, or anything else, but the fact that losing weight is hard demonstrates the fact that no solution is easy.
The immense marketing around "healthy" vs "unhealthy" food has also contributed to it. Most people consider a glass of orange juice to be "healthy" and a can of Coca Cola to be "unhealthy" but a can of coke has 140 calories and the exact same size of orange juice is 150 - but most people drink a glass of orange juice which is often 16-20 ounces, getting you up near 300 calories.
Sure the orange juice is probably "healthier" per calorie, whatever that means, but you're still drinking a lot of calories.
In the UK average calorie intake has been dropping, but thats negatively correlated to kids being fat.
I would suggest that the big change is the amount of activity that an average kid does. which seems to be conducive to the calories in/vs out. the cause of this is complex. But a lot of it relates to stranger danger. Parents don't let their kids out after school unattended (for various reasons) which means they are inside not burning off as many calories.
The other thing to remember is that food is now cheap. Its perfectly possible to be in the bottom 20% of the UK income bracket and still have enough cash to eat more calories than you need. (This is a good thing. People starving in the UK is unforgivable.)
Also, it's not the activity that matters much as simply being further away from food while doing it. The amount of calories you burn running through a forest playing Robin Hood is minuscule; but since you're thousands of feet (miles even) from your fridge, you can't just continue to eat all the time.
Not just "stranger danger", but fewer people (in the US, and AIUI increasingly other parts of the developed world) live in a place where you can do anything without driving. As a result, not only are children barred from operating independently of their parents' time, but everyone is more sedentary, by nature of replacing active travel with automotive travel at every opportunity.
I suspect something we're eating more of now (seed oils, chemicals in processed foods, something else?) is causing us to store more fat that we otherwise would have. i.e. we seem to store all excess calories as fat, but maybe that's not actually what a healthy human body would do.
And some of these metastidies indicate our measure of calorie may be off. Lab rats fed controlled diets with measured activity have gotten fatter over the decades. Somehow those rats are extracting more energy from their food or becoming more efficient at producing the measured amount of activity.
The whole lab animals got fatter on controlled diets thing is based on a single study. It’s not a statistically significant trend for rats. It is for mice. I don’t have any particular gripes with the methodology but I am not totally convinced it’s well controlled
> fails to explain why people eat more calories now than they did before
Wouldn't this also intuitively be related to the fact that a calorie today is much, much "cheaper" (in terms of labor required to acquire the calorie for both the producer and the consumer) than a calorie was even 100 years ago due to advancements in agriculture and distribution?
To an extent, but we're 10x richer than we were in 1900; we do not eat 10x as many calories. And it's poor people who eat more calories now, not rich people.
> it's poor people who eat more calories now, not rich people
That's my point; if you look at a map of obesity rates in the US overlaid with a map of poverty, there's a very strong correlation.
The cheap access to calories today makes it easier to overconsume. In the past, the high cost of calories meant that only the wealthy could really ever become obese (outside of genetic factors).
The snide comment would be that obesity and unbearable debt are indicators of lack of control, and that poor people will have this more (because lack of control leads to being poor).
But even if absolutely true, how do you solve for that? Laws limiting what you can purchase/eat would simply be a non-starter.
I mean, if we were confident one particular food source contributes more to obesity than others, we have a solution that we know would work: tax it (and ideally dedicate revenues to some kind of universal food tax credit). People would consume less of it at the margin and then be less obese.
It would rankle some people, but so do taxes on alcohol and nicotine. My big concern is that I'm skeptical whether we can really identify those "bad" foods and that even if we could whether we could ensure the government would whitelist/blacklist the correct foods.
As far as lack of control goes, I'd be curious if fatter/poorer people would do worse on some kind of adult marshmallow test. Maybe see if you can get them to sit perfectly still for 20 minutes in exchange for a monetary reward. I don't have a strong sense that they'd do worse than skinnier/richer people.
That's the solution everyone wants "identify bad food and tax/ban it" - but when apple juice has as much or more calories than soda, what do you do? A per-calorie tax might work if you rebated it correctly, but the mechanics of that would be insane. Perhaps it could be tied to basic income - we will tax calories at ten cents per calorie, and give each person 2000 calories (200$) a day ...
That's interesting. A large side of fries at Macdonald's would be $50 (though I suppose everything else would also jump a lot in price). Definitely creates a strong incentive to consume less.
Implementation wise, it probably would be best to begin at something like half a cent per calorie and then ratchet it up until we hit some target number (or until we discover it doesn't actually influence behavior). Then at the end of the year people get a $4000 dollar tax credit.
There have been many studies looking at this phenomenon.
One hypothesis is that this is due to "food deserts" where the lack of access to fresh foods leads to over-reliance on processed foods for caloric needs.
It is no coincidence that there is also a strong correlation between food deserts (at a national and local level) with lower income. The solution probably isn't banning specific foods, but to solve the access problem and address socio-economic factors. Better health and nutrition education may also be key.
The food desert thing should be testable, no? Like identify one of the worst ones, and subsidize a normal grocery store for however many years necessary, and see what it has done?
> Just saying "cheeseburgers" or "calories in, calories out" fails to explain why people eat more calories now than they did before.
Junk foods at high-availability, low cost, offering low-to-zero satiety per-calorie, and habit-forming addictive potential. The answer is pretty much in your sentence. Add to the fact, eating well on a budget requires you to prepare food at home. Lots of pressures funnel people to obesity. In the before-times (if you want to set your clock well before the obesity epidemic), two-income households weren't a thing for the most part and manufactured junk foods were a novelty on the market. People kept more active even at leisure, with tv being the novel and singular screen-based entertainment device that not everyone could afford at outset.
Sure, I think that's a very plausible explanation. It also points to specific, testable policy changes. For example, a government could build a low cost (subsidized), healthy competitor to fast food. Alternatively, a government could implement a comprehensive "sin tax" scheme on "low quality" calories coupled with expanded food stamps (to ensure the poorest people can afford healthy alternatives). Governments could even go into food desserts and open health-focused grocery stores. We could see if low cost/low quality calories are the issue via a legislative experiment.
I've often thought that government-run "soup kitchens" providing basic nutritional food in small portions should be everywhere - no requirements to eat there, if Bill Gates and Buffet want to have lunch at the free soup kitchen who cares.
I like the Japanese school-lunch system. Kids develop a familiarity with real food, which stays with them into adulthood (and reduces the likelihood of obesity ever occurring), and parents don't have to worry about it.
It's also much easier to eat a very high amount of calories in relatively little volume, compared to any other time in history. It's very easy to eat thousands of calories in what would be a healthy volume of vegetables. Pack more calories and people will eat more calories before they actually feel full.
Would it change your perception if you look at overeating as a symptom rather than a cause?
A common enough symptom for untreated diabetes is eccessive thirst. Why should some ailments not cause lack of satiety or edcessive hunger.
Or even metabolic issues. Complex ones.
Imagine that the basis for the obesity pandemic may in fact lie in other, lack of proper digestive bacteria and yeast for example.
I feel that pointing at obesity as just lazyness is just not constructive.
I am not obese and have never suffered from it so this is not from a point of self defense.
Just a thought.
Regardless of the causes of the caloric intake, managing said intake is still the responsibility of said individual. Unless the chemicals involved block the ability to take dietary decisions, of course, but that's a different discussion.
From my point of view as an obese individual: It is the cheeseburgers. And the lack of excersize. And the long days working at a screen with few breaks.
Change is hard and bad habits are not easy to get rid of. Especially when you've spent a few decades getting used to them when you were young and unwise.
Going cold turkey on food would be unhealthy, so some kind of management is required.
I didn't grow fat because I have a slow metabolism (and I do), or because I'm addicted to a specific unhealthy type of food; I'm fat because I made a major switch in lifestyles (hard labour to desk job) without any changes to my diet, and because I kept prioritizing other things than my health for decades. After a while it became obvious that change is needed, but boy is it difficult to lose weight once you've had it for 20 years!
The solution is managing my diet. Sure, some variables may change (such as chemicals affecting my body), but I still need to keep consuming less calories than I burn in order to do something about the issue.
This nuance you're adding is not optional or dismissable. It's essential complexity to solving the problem.
Calorie in calorie out is not false. It's just not useful. Like saying to go to the moon you need to go up.
Calorie in is appetite. Calorie out is metabolism. The specifics of how these are affected, and the solutions to fixing them, are a lot more fruitful than reaffirming the second law of thermodynamics.
The paper talks about epigenetics and these chemicals, but isn't it possible the diet and lack of physical activity affected future generations as well? If not via epigenetics, perhaps via gut flora being passed down and spread?
They talk about lab animals with controlled diets and activity becoming fatter on average over the decades, and point to chemicals as the only possible culprit. I find that quite possible or even probable, but isn't it also possible the gut flora is evolving to be more efficient at processing modern food?
Fast food portions being larger, poorer eating habits passed on from generation to generation, the internet, the smartphone, presumably more stress and anxiety.
Are fast food portions actually larger? I remember getting super sized combos when I was a kid (maybe even in HS, I forget when they got rid of them) but they're gone now, and on the rare occasion I get fast food the portions seem reasonable.
I moved from New Zealand to the United States and one of my early culture shocks was the large portion sizes. I’d order food to go and it would easily be two meals.
I wondered if it was some sort of expectation that when you ordered food at a restaurant that there was always excess you could take home in a ‘doggy bag’ which seems to be fairly common in the US but not typical in my experience in NZ or Australia.
I’ve definitely become accustomed to it and I can now eat that full American sized serving :(
Funnily enough, most of the time the cheeseburgers are smaller here in the US than NZ!
"Free refills" also didn't become standard until some time in the 90s. In the 80s, a refill cost money and often the cups were smaller to begin with. You'd buy a pitcher (just like with beer) if you wanted a lot at a bit of a discount. You can see this on an ad on a pizza hut in the skater movie Gleaming the Cube, near the end of the film. Now the idea of buying a pitcher of soda makes no sense because everywhere has free refills, but almost none did in the 80s. In the early 90s some places did but it was often just during certain hours (lunch, say) as a draw. It spread from there until it became normal, fast-food joints started letting you fill (and re-fill) your own cup, et c.
The "cost to supersize" seems to me (but I have no proof, maybe I have more money now) to have gone down relative to the meal cost, so it's more and more of a "no brainer" upgrade.
Maybe if they were required to price it backwards, where the meal costs $x and you can get a ten percent discount if you order small, that would "trick" people into eating less.
I received one of those paper sleeves the last time I went through a drive through maybe 4 or 5 weeks ago, but that's not to say the sleeve itself didn't get larger.
What a low effort comment - as if burgers and cheese and big ole pieces of meat didn't exist before plastics? HN's comments are supposed to make the conversation more interesting and more engaging.
The burger itself is probably the healthiest part of it.
It’s the bun (full of corn syrup and carbs), a massive amount of sodium, the condiments (also corn syrup), a side of fries (mostly carbs), a soda (even more corn syrup). By the time you’ve finished a decently sized burger you’ve eaten enough sugar, sodium and carbs for the entire day.
A Big Mac and large fries at McDonalds comes to 1040 calories and 102 g of carbs (9 g of which are added sugars). That's 39% of the calories coming from carbs, which is generally considered to be a moderate level of carbs in the medical literature.
Get a double Quarter Pounder with cheese instead and its 1230 calories and 101 g of carbs (10 g of which are added sugars). That's 33% of calories from carbs, which is also in the moderate carb range.
As far as the burger itself goes, a doubler Quarter Pounder with cheese is 740 calories and 41 g of carb (10 g of which is added sugars). That's 22% of calories from carbs and would count as a low carb item in much of the medical literature.
Americans tend to go overboard. They hear that cutting back on carbs has been shown to have some benefits, and they think this means they have to cut back from the 50-60% calories from carbs diets they are on to 5-10%. That is very hard since it eliminates most breads, pastas, rice, potatoes, and deserts. It is costly and/or time consuming to maintain such a diet. Most who try will fail for those reasons.
In fact much of the benefits from reducing carbs will come with a more modest reduction to around 40%, which can be achieved without having to largely give up the aforementioned foods. It is much easier to stick with it when you can still eat at most restaurants, including most fast food places.
It's not necessarily the wheat itself, though residual glyphosate and other herbicides are a concern, it's more the industrial processing of it. Industrial baking is very different to traditional baking, and the proteins may be exposed to the immune system in very different ways as a result, i.e. different epitopes.
Fascinating. I was curious because I eat the three I mentioned kind of like rice (along with barley and oats).
I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something.
I certainly don’t think of it as a health food (nothing so heavily processed is), but is it actually harmful?
The science on gluten is ongoing and controversial, but the position I believe will ultimately be vindicated is that some people seem to derive no ill effects while many others develop a mild allergy to it, which can fly under the radar and lead to all sorts of chronic inflammation issues if the person keeps eating it. As a result, there's no 'standard safe dosage' of gluten, some people become violently ill if they encounter a trace, others (myself included) find a lot of seemingly unconnected annoyances clear up if they avoid it for a few weeks. Excess weight gain seems to be one of those, though in my case the major symptom was actually an excessively fast metabolism.
