The Obesity Crisis - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Provision of the two UN HDI indicators other than GNP.
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By jimjam
#14841145
The American diet sucks big time. It is designed to get people literally addicted to sugar and salt loaded "food" of little or no nutrition value. Their hunger is never satiated and they pretty much go through the entire day endlessly shoving potato chips, soda and crap from McDonald's and Burger King into their faces. While this practice does wonders for the bottom line of purveyors of shit food it ruins the lives of millions no less than opioids do, albeit in slow motion and under the radar. Is it rhetorical to ask, should our society subsidize the profits of the junk (addictive) food industry with degraded human lives, earlier deaths and increased burden to an already shitty health care system?
By Finfinder
#14841151
jimjam wrote:The American diet sucks big time. It is designed to get people literally addicted to sugar and salt loaded "food" of little or no nutrition value. Their hunger is never satiated and they pretty much go through their entire day endlessly shoving potato chips, soda and crap from McDonald's and Burger King into their faces. While this practice does wonders for the bottom line of purveyors of shit food it ruins the lives of millions no less than opioids, albeit in slow motion and under the radar. Is it rhetorical to ask, should our society subsidize the profits of the junk (addictive) food industry with degraded human lives, earlier deaths and increased burden to an already shitty health care system?


When I lived in Maine there was plenty of seafood and vegetables what happen did they outlaw them ? Would be sacrilegious to outlaw french fries in Maine. :D
#14841372
We used to be convinced that fat was making people fat and our anti-fat craze seems to have led to an increase in the consumption of carbs. At the same time obesity rates have gone through the roof. Now we are convinced the culprit is sugar, and the question is what will the unintended side effects be in the long term if we go after that? People and the food industry will obviously try and compensate. At least fat, sugar and salt are natural ingredients that humans have consumed for a long time, as opposed to artificial sweeteners, taste enhancers and all the other food innovations that require relatively little testing before they can be added to our food. As for salt, this is another contentious topic. Too little salt is quite likely bad for you and I read recently that the currently accepted recommendations for salt intake might actually be too low. Then we had the anti-egg craze which apparently turned out to be nonsense as well.

The main point is that targeting one ingredient or another is quite likely too simplistic even if it's true that they contribute to increased rates of obesity or other adverse outcomes. Our knowledge is probably too limited anyway to confidently make very specific recommendations. Moderation in all things is a long-established general principle that doesn't require any scientific input and holds for food as well. Of course, this doesn't mean that teaching people how to fix a tasty and balanced meal with fresh ingredients isn't worthwhile.

As for the obesity epidemic, as far as I know it's unclear what exactly is going on. People eating too much fast food or sugary foods and being sedentary might be a trigger that sets obesity in motion, but I don't think we have conclusive evidence for that.
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By One Degree
#14841437
The human body is a real life 'Star Trek replicator'. We need to concentrate on quantity much more than quality. Our bodies compensate for most imbalances. Blaming what we eat is just an excuse for our excess.
A sedentary lifestyle may trigger undesirable changes in our metabolism however.
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By Zagadka
#14841447
Reichstraten wrote:The kids should learn in schools what a healthy eating pattern is what isn't.
And they should get lessons in cooking.

I can't speak to now, but at least in the 90s those programs were mandatory (home economics and nutrition (itself a few lessons during PE time)).

They don't really work, though. Kids never retain the knowledge from them since they are boring.

It doesn't help that the food that IS provided during lunch is usually horribly unhealthy. Every effort to stick to healthy food from school sources is met with a Pizza Hut and McDonalds vendor and 18 Coke and candy machines. I remember running from one side of the campus to the other to get the pizza before it was gone (after that you had to settle for a microwave burrito or something), and coming out of PE every morning and buying PowerAde from the machine right outside the locker rooms.

And since we've curtailed PE a great deal (I drove by my old high school. The old PE blacktop, including the basketball and volleyball courts, had been replaced with "temporary" modular classrooms), kids aren't getting enough exercise to balance that out.
#14841448
Laziness of the life choices people make. Children are consuming more media and gaming than ever and sports and physical activities are declining. They need to get their kids and themselves off the couches and have physical activities and actually cook meals not heat up already made processed shit.
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By jimjam
#14842062
What I have been seeing more of lately is grotesquely obese people rolling around on motorized "wheel chairs". They literally can hardly even walk. I really feel bad for them. What kind of life can that be. I was at Burger King (my wife made me go :lol: ) the other day and in front of me was a seriously obese mother and her obese about 10 year old kid. They came away from the counter with three huge bags of shit burgers and fries. Huge bags. Many times I have seen the obese lifestyle passed from obese parents to obese kids. It is a way of life.

What is the solution to this epidemic? No single idea but I suggest the problem simply be recognized as a problem. Every day I hear about the opioid epidemic. Very very rarely if at all is any attention given to the obesity epidemic. I get the sense that it's ok to be obese to the point of being crippled in America. It seems to be a part of the American culture and, hence, not a problem. Let's get the damn thing out there into the minds of the public and recognize it as the serious problem it is.
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By Ter
#14842064
A Canadian woman friend was helping out at bingo evenings and she told me that one of the obese women fell down. She was on oxygen. She couldn't get up and several other obese people were trying to get her up but failed. The fallen woman could nor breathe properly lying down so it became a medical emergency, they had to call emergency services who came and managed to pull her up.

@jimjam
I understand that at Walmart supermarkets in the US they provide electric scooters to old and obese shoppers. I have not seen that anywhere in Europe but I started my exile several decades ago...
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By jimjam
#14844283
In 1980 10% of the US population suffered from obesity. In 2015 the figure was 27%.

There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children, according to research published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine. The prevalence of obesity has doubled in 73 countries since 1980, contributing to four million premature deaths, the study found. Unlike cancer or other illnesses, this is a disability you can’t see.
Last edited by jimjam on 17 Sep 2017 16:37, edited 1 time in total.
By mikema63
#14844284
End our current food subsidies. Subsidize raw ingredients. Tax raw sugar, additives, and extra processing of food over a certain amount.

Do that and you have gotten a strong start to dealing with the problem.
User avatar
By jimjam
#14844412
mikema63 wrote:End our current food subsidies. Subsidize raw ingredients. Tax raw sugar, additives, and extra processing of food over a certain amount.

Do that and you have gotten a strong start to dealing with the problem.

You are correct but it will not get done. The food industry/lobby will see to that. As I have said, a realistic first step to diminishing the problem is simply define and recognize the problem. Presently obesity is becoming the new normal. This will make the situation ever more difficult to combat. Also I suspect that it is politically correct to ignore the problem. We wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of obese people would we?

It doesn't help that America's role model In chief is, at 236 lbs. , just shy of being officially obese.
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By Stormsmith
#14844422
Ewwwww

I think part of the problem is that both parents work. When I was a kid, mom shooed us outside if we weren't doing homework. She started working when I was 9 or 10, and by that time it was the norm to be out doors. We always had properly cooked meals. And still do.
By mikema63
#14844445
And that certainly has nothing to do with the well known fact that poor nutrition is linked to both. :lol:
#14844478
There are two factors here.

The first is that childhood obesity appears to be declining.

This is obvious enough; when I was a child my parents gave me Kraft Mac&Cheese every single day for dinner. They didn't grow up in the kind of environment they found themselves in when raising children, and thus had no idea what they were doing. It was true for most of my peers. Now that my peers are having children, they do not feed their kids that garbage and start them early on whole oats, fresh fruits and vegetables, etc.

The other thing is that obesity is almost a code for poverty.

Obesity by state:

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Poverty by state:

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Though a few years old, it seems unlikely that the Feds are wrong in studying this:

NCBI wrote:How is poverty linked to obesity? It has been suggested that individuals who live in impoverished regions have poor access to fresh food. Poverty-dense areas are oftentimes called “food deserts,” implying diminished access to fresh food (7). However, 43% of households with incomes below the poverty line ($21,756) are food insecure (uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, sufficient food) (7). Accordingly, 14% of U.S. counties have more than 1 in 5 individuals use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The county-wide utility of the program, as expected, correlates with county-wide poverty rates (r = 0.81) (7). Thus, in many poverty-dense regions, people are in hunger and unable to access affordable healthy food, even when funds avail. The double-edged sword of hunger and poor availability of healthy food is, however, unlikely to be the only reason as to why obesity tracks with poverty.

There is evidence of the association between sedentariness, poor health, obesity, diabetes, other metabolic diseases, and premature death (8). Sedentary individuals move 2 h per day less than active individuals and expend less energy, and they are thereby prone to obesity, chronic metabolic disease, and cardiovascular death (9). More than half of county-to-county variance in obesity can be accounted for by variance in sedentariness (Fig. 1B). Overall, the poorest counties have the greatest sedentariness (Fig. 1C) and obesity.

Several reasons may explain why people living in poor counties are less active. One reason may be that violence tracks with poverty, thereby preventing people from being active out-of-doors. Similarly, parks and sports facilities are less available to people living in poor counties (5), and people who live in poverty-dense regions may be less able to afford gym membership, sports clothing, and/or exercise equipment. There are multiple individual and environmental reasons to explain why poverty-dense counties may be more sedentary and bear greater obesity burdens. What is unknown is whether reversing poverty would reverse sedentariness and obesity. It is an urgent matter to address—both rates of childhood obesity and poverty are concomitantly on the rise (1,2).

The link between obesity, inactivity, and poverty may be too costly to ignore because obesity-associated chronic disease already accounts for 70% of U.S. health costs. For instance, counties with greatest rates of poverty have greatest diabetes rates too (Fig. 1D). In 2009, 27% of people living in the U.S. with annual household outcomes below $25,000 were uninsured (no private or government health insurance). This cohort represents, 15,483,000 people, ∼5 million with obesity and ∼1 million with diabetes (10). With expanded health care provision in the U.S., the potential incremental health care costs of diabetes alone for these individuals approximates $9 billion/year, or $9,000 per new diabetes patient/year (11). There are, however, additional economic factors that may impact the cost-return equation, for instance, 1) potential savings associated with diabetes prevention, 2) the opportunity to develop and deliver high-quality and low-cost diabetes care to poverty-dense communities, 3) the health cost savings associated with the prevention of diabetes complications in patients with diabetes, and 4) the potential lost tax revenues associated with disability (12). Add these figures to the health care costs of other chronic obesity-associated diagnoses such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, sleep disorders, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and asthma and the projected health care costs of poverty increase.

Halting U.S. diabesity epidemic and curtailing its health cost may necessitate addressing poverty.


This is, after all, common sense. If you are a kid with parents that work a lot (or aren't there) and can't afford some kind of day care or after school activity, you're going to go right for pop tarts to eat after school because they're cheap and taste good.

If you're in a place where the closest thing to a grocery store is a 7/11 instead of a Whole Foods (to take the other extreme) you're going to be eating a bunch of pizza because it's $5 for an entire pizza at 7/11 where the only produce they have might be some eggs from a questionable source.

But, connected with the basic education—I think that's largely done and it's going to take a generation or two to even out. I still fucking love Kraft Mac & Cheese, and I should fucking hate something I ate so much of. I have to remind myself not to spend a dollar to have that mixed with tuna and some string cheese to make it gooey—and instead spend the extra money to get beans and lean chicken and some other things to cook in a crockpot to serve with some kind of veg during the day. Still not great, but certainly better than what I was raised on.

---

And then there's the other side to the coin. As mentioned, giant international corporations make a LOT of money from this junk. The fact that I still want to eat Mac & Cheese is a miracle of science. Food that you can eat but not get filled with is too. They need you to keep eating in order to up their profits. Even if you're eating carrots and hummus all the time, they're going to find a way to make it more addictive and more expensive to underline their profits.

Case in point, pay more for the pit removed from an avocado:

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It's a big enough part of the economy that we should legitimately fret about what they'd do if everyone did get more woke about what they were eating.

I know someone that works for the FDA and they are virtually not allowed to control food and drugs any more because to put a new regulation on something would mean getting rid of two regulations about some other amount of foodstuff. They've been looking for ways to get around this, but even really old laws are written in such a way that declassifying something that we used to think about milk 100 years ago could mean that milk isn't, "milk," any more than "white paint" is legally milk. So they're on their hands waiting for a new administration while the companies go to work...

...And the house already wins, capitalism must be overthrown and so on and so forth.
#14844491
Suntzu wrote:Stupid folks make poor decisions.

This applies to finances and nutrition.


Apparently also with supporting Trump, if the maps are any indication :p
User avatar
By jimjam
#14847957
But KFC’s expansion in Ghana comes as obesity and related health problems have been surging. Public health officials see fried chicken, french fries and pizza as spurring and intensifying a global obesity epidemic that has hit hard in Ghana — one of 73 countries where obesity has at least doubled since 1980. In that period, Ghana’s obesity rates have surged more than 650 percent, from less than 2 percent of the population to 13.6 percent, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington.

Research shows that people who eat more fast food are more likely to gain weight and become obese, and nutrition experts here express deep concern at the prospect of an increasingly heavy and diabetic population, without the medical resources to address a looming health crisis that some say could rival AIDS.
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