We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised

[Northerner]

When I saw the photograph I could scarcely believe it was the same country. A picture of Brighton beach in 1976, featured in the Guardian a few weeks ago, appeared to show an alien race. Almost everyone was slim. I mentioned it on social media, then went on holiday. When I returned, I found that people were still debating it. The heated discussion prompted me to read more. How have we grown so far, so fast? To my astonishment, almost every explanation proposed in the thread turned out to be untrue.
Unfortunately, there is no consistent obesity data in the United Kingdom before 1988, at which point the incidence was already rising sharply. But in the United States, the figures go back further. They show that, by chance, the inflection point was more or less 1976. Suddenly, at around the time that the photograph was taken, people started becoming fatter – and the trend has continued ever since.

The obvious explanation, many on social media insisted, is that we’re eating more. Several pointed out, not without justice, that food was generally disgusting in the 1970s. It was also more expensive. There were fewer fast food outlets and the shops shut earlier, ensuring that if you missed your tea, you went hungry.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/15/age-of-obesity-shaming-overweight-people

 

[Amigo]

When I saw the photograph I could scarcely believe it was the same country. A picture of Brighton beach in 1976, featured in the Guardian a few weeks ago, appeared to show an alien race. Almost everyone was slim. I mentioned it on social media, then went on holiday. When I returned, I found that people were still debating it. The heated discussion prompted me to read more. How have we grown so far, so fast? To my astonishment, almost every explanation proposed in the thread turned out to be untrue.
Unfortunately, there is no consistent obesity data in the United Kingdom before 1988, at which point the incidence was already rising sharply. But in the United States, the figures go back further. They show that, by chance, the inflection point was more or less 1976. Suddenly, at around the time that the photograph was taken, people started becoming fatter – and the trend has continued ever since.

The obvious explanation, many on social media insisted, is that we’re eating more. Several pointed out, not without justice, that food was generally disgusting in the 1970s. It was also more expensive. There were fewer fast food outlets and the shops shut earlier, ensuring that if you missed your tea, you went hungry.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/15/age-of-obesity-shaming-overweight-people

And yet the article suggests we were eating more in 1976 calorie wise but exercise and manual labour sorted out the excesses. Many kids now are socialised on a diet of fast food/social media and inactivity and it’s taken its toll.

 

[Eddy Edson]

I was browsing the WHO data the other day (as you do).

http://www.who.int/gho/ncd/risk_factors/overweight/en/

In the UK, prevalence of BMI > 25 went from 40% in 1975 to 64% in 2016.

In the US: 41% => 68%

Oz: 42% => 65%

But then China: 10% => 32% !!
Indonesia: 6% => 28% !!
India: 5% => 20% !!

Even Japan: 15% => 27%

It really is a global epidemic. Overweight was always a rich-person's thing. As everybody gets richer and the global food industry delivers more of what our bods have been crafted by evolution to want, more cheaply and more conveniently ... it's a pretty straightforward outcome, I reckon.

Relying on behavioural solutions to stem this tsunami is not a strategy I would bet money on.

EDIT: Or to put it a different way, it's maybe problematic to call BMI < 25 "normal weight" when it's now a minority grouping in many countries and on the way to being a minority in many others, including China.

 

[Drummer]

In the early 1970s I had a 24 inch waist and wore leather or suede skirts which would just about make a good handbag - but I was rather muscular and considered overweight at 147lb - Twiggy was the ideal at that time I think - so all the dietary advice was low calorie low fat, lots of cereals and fruit of all kinds. The low calorie shut down my metabolism, I started to feel tired and dispirited. I had had several long bouts of tonsillitis and 'flu' needing a succession of antibiotics in my late teens and that seemed to change my resilience. I felt better when I reasoned my way to low carb, but that was the work of the Devil, according to my doctors and so I was always being given diet sheets with lower and lower calorie counts to aspire to. The reason for the obesity is that we are being told how to eat, and the advice was wrong and has been wrong for decades.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Many kids now are socialised on a diet of fast food/social media and inactivity and it’s taken its toll.

The food's different from when I was a child, sure. But the article comments on activity levels (and this I've heard before): "children’s physical activity is the same as it was 50 years ago". (If I remember correctly the suggestion was that there's some hard to change set point of activity for children: if you force them to do sport for an hour a day they'll end up doing less exercise while walking to and from school, and vice versa (if they're not doing sport, they'll play more while doing other things).)

Don't know about activity for adults (though the article does comment on obesity levels for adults who do jobs which involve more physical activity).

 

[mikeyB]

Food wasn’t disgusting in the 1970s. There wasn’t a McDonalds on every high street. Or Starbucks, where you can drink a coffee that contains more calories than the muffin that you eat with it. People never report their visits to Starbucks, when they tell you they eat only healthy food. Just for an experiment the other day I got my coffee machine to make me a simple Latte. Gave me a nice three point spike.

By the way, I walked to and from school and played football at every opportunity. I didn’t have to be forced. I was never once driven to school, junior or senior. If I had been, I’d never have started smoking. That’s what the top deck of buses were for.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Starbucks should be banned, or at least not allowed to use the word "coffee". Perhaps "Thin, burned, vaguely coffee-flavoured swill" would be acceptable.

Anyway, it would be zero surprise if self-reporting of calories is way inaccurate, particularly as calories became "a thing".

EDIT: Eg https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43112790

A third of people in the UK underestimate how many calories they are eating, according to an analysis of Office of National Statistics data.

It suggests British men eat more than 3,000 a day while claiming to eat 2,000. And women say they eat about 1,500 while consuming nearly 2,500.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...e-problem-with-dietary-intake-studies/254886/

But outside of a whole-body calorimeter or a controlled environment for metabolic studies, getting even reasonably accurate information about dietary intake is, to say the least, challenging. Indeed, we consider finding out what people eat the greatest intellectual challenge in the field of nutrition today. Why? We have no nice way of saying this. Whether consciously or unconsciously, most people cannot or do not give accurate information about what they eat. When it comes to dietary intake, pretty much everyone forgets or dissembles. This problem makes surveys of dietary intake exceedingly difficult to conduct and to interpret.

 

[Northerner]

Food wasn’t disgusting in the 1970s.

I agree, I could eat prodigious amounts in the '70s and I loved the school meals, cooked on the premises - usually meat and two veg and a stodgy pudding with custard. Fish and chips was the only fast food and you only had that on Fridays 🙂 I burned off the energy in the playground because I couldn't sit staring at my phone (it was in my house, attached to the wall). My experience growing up was that there were just one or two kids in each class who were what you would now call obese.

I think the point the article is making is that people are being berated for not having the willpower to take responsibility for controlling what they eat and making healthy choices, but their will power has been eroded by sophisticated marketing techniques and the 'healthy' choices consist of food largely adulterated with excess hidden sugars.

 

[SadhbhFiadh]

I would put in my opinion that the subject is too narrow, especially in light of stats Eddy Edson was digging up. My guess is those stats will mirror the economy of those countries. Obesity and wealth still go together, as it has through the centuries. IMO it reflects the materialism of a culture.
S.

 

[mikeyB]

Though the country with the highest rate of obesity - around 70% of adults and children - is Fiji, and that is not a hotbed of fast food, nor is it particularly materialistic or wealthy. That percentage makes it the norm.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Though the country with the highest rate of obesity - around 70% of adults and children - is Fiji, and that is not a hotbed of fast food, nor is it particularly materialistic or wealthy. That percentage makes it the norm.

Well, http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/7/10-010710/en/ says

Replacing traditional foods with imported, processed food has contributed to the high prevalence of obesity and related health problems in the Pacific islands. Jane Parry reports.​

 

[mikeyB]

Obesity in Fiji was common years before any recent change in diets. It’s a social phenomenon, a sign of wealth. Look at photos of Fijian kings in the past.

 

[SadhbhFiadh]

Having looked up a half dozen fijian kings, I now wonder how to define wealth? I always thought it was a significant amount of disposable income. But then I wonder how to find that across cultures. Hm.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Obesity in Fiji was common years before any recent change in diets. It’s a social phenomenon, a sign of wealth. Look at photos of Fijian kings in the past.

Sign of wealth: isn't that true of just about everywhere just about any time in human history? For most of that history, most people have been hungry most of the time, and being fat is a powerful display that you're one of the tiny elite for whom that isn't true.

To my mind, not being hungry most of the time is the single biggest difference between "now" and any other epoch. It's a huge step-change in real wealth when yr society transitions between reliance primarily just on whatever you can grow/hunt/gather locally, to having access to imported food & food processing. The evolved-for-hunger body jumps on processed foods, ravening.

See eg Okinawa, the Pacific islands, every little town in Africa with a KFC or local equivalent, same thing in China ...

 

[bamba]

I walked to school.

Post diagnosis I am walking to work to add some exercise to my regime.

 

[Eddy Edson]

I think this study adds powerful scientific support to my argument: https://www.medicaldaily.com/evolut...erful-thirst-fear-and-desire-socialize-399996

Motivation to eat is more powerful than anything else. In mice, but they're basically the same as humans except smaller, with tails and less inclined to sociopathy.

 

[mikeyB]

Mice, in common with other small rodents, have to eat most of the time, because their little bodies need loads of energy to keep warm. They don’t need a motivation to eat, that’s all they ever do apart from sex, when they stop for a fag.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Mice, in common with other small rodents, have to eat most of the time, because their little bodies need loads of energy to keep warm. They don’t need a motivation to eat, that’s all they ever do apart from sex, when they stop for a fag.

So not so different vs me, up to the age of ~25.

 

[SadhbhFiadh]

Sign of wealth: isn't that true of just about everywhere just about any time in human history? For most of that history, most people have been hungry most of the time, and being fat is a powerful display that you're one of the tiny elite for whom that isn't true.
...

Oh, yes, that's very good! I hadn't thought of that.

 

[Dave W]

The obesity epidemic was kick-started in 1980 with the publication of Ansel Keyes Seven Countries study, now recognised as flawed research. However the USDA used that research to issue in 1982 new dietary guidelines promoting low consumption of fats and increased consumption of high sugar carbohydrates. The result was rocketing obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
The UK followed the US in 1994 when it issued the Balance of Good Health advice which in 2007 morphed into the Eatwell Plate and more recently the Eathealthy Plate and obesity, and diabetes in the UK have followed the same growth curve as that across the pond.
Sedentary lifestyles may be part of the equation, but as has been often quoted "You can't outrun a bad diet"