[Opinion] A reason for Americas weight problem ... perhaps more than one.

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

1. Portions. If in parts of Europe, or even at some higher end restaurants, you may notice the portions are a little smaller. There are various reasons for this, eg paying for better quality of food, and the concern for the consumers health. If youre healthier you might come back for more. There is a saying I heard:
Breakfast like a King, Lunch like a Prince, Dinner like a Pauper. Why? Dinner usually comes before bedtime, Breakfast before the work begins. Sleep burns fewer calories.

2. What we eat. With rising food prices and the American general diet, we eat on the regular processed crap food. We look for the cheaper foods which usually come in cans. Despite frozen vegetablkes which are a little more expensive, still less than raw whole foods. Corn, flour, salt, sugar and dairy attribute to most health problems.

3. Lack of exercise. Exercise without a proper diet may become failure. Diet (proper) without exercise is doomed to fail. We should exercie every day, perhaps at most one day a week off for recovery. If every day, go easy on the number of sets. Alternate, anaerobic one day, cardio the next.

 

[Xenophon]

1. Portions. If in parts of Europe, or even at some higher end restaurants, you may notice the portions are a little smaller. There are various reasons for this, eg paying for better quality of food, and the concern for the consumers health. If youre healthier you might come back for more. There is a saying I heard:
Breakfast like a King, Lunch like a Prince, Dinner like a Pauper. Why? Dinner usually comes before bedtime, Breakfast before the work begins. Sleep burns fewer calories.

2. What we eat. With rising food prices and the American general diet, we eat on the regular processed crap food. We look for the cheaper foods which usually come in cans. Despite frozen vegetablkes which are a little more expensive, still less than raw whole foods. Corn, flour, salt, sugar and dairy attribute to most health problems.

3. Lack of exercise. Exercise without a proper diet may become failure. Diet (proper) without exercise is doomed to fail. We should exercie every day, perhaps at most one day a week off for recovery. If every day, go easy on the number of sets. Alternate, anaerobic one day, cardio the next.

I'm not sure food prices are the culprit. My sister has been a doctor for decades. Her favorite gripe is fat patients who say, "Can't you just give me a pill?" Yanks are taste junkies. Salty, sweet, and fatty tend to nudge out green leafy and meh. Ditto for Carob-carmel-French-cheesecake-and-butterscotch mocha vs. Cuppa Joe Black.

Exercise? Lazy is one factor. The other is our crumbling culture. Not so many years ago while taking a walk I (and my little friend GP) had a nearly nasty run-in with a local troop o' urban pongoids. The police? Their first question was why I went outside after dark. (Around 7:00 pm on a December's eve.) With the duck and cover mindset being actively encouraged, yeah. Urbanites don't get much exercise.

 

[pixel_fortune]

There's so much sugar (syrups, etc) in everything, even food that's supposed to be savoury. I lived in Virginia for a little while and I started feeling really sick, like... well like you would if you ate dessert for every meal, which is basically what I was doing.

The bread tastes like cake. I tried going to a health food store, and it was no better - the bread there was just sweetened with honey and agave syrup instead of HFCS.

And I know I came across like such a diva, "I'm too delicate for your supermarket breads, your American food is making me sick, I need to go to the farmers market for artisanal sourdough". But I didn't need it to be artisanal, it's just the only place that didn't sweeten their bread.

So you can say Americans are taste junkies, but at the same time, it's a huge effort to just get normal staples that haven't been turned into dessert, at least where I was living

 

[Xenophon]

There's so much sugar (syrups, etc) in everything, even food that's supposed to be savoury. I lived in Virginia for a little while and I started feeling really sick, like... well like you would if you ate dessert for every meal, which is basically what I was doing.

The bread tastes like cake. I tried going to a health food store, and it was no better - the bread there was just sweetened with honey and agave syrup instead of HFCS.

And I know I came across like such a diva, "I'm too delicate for your supermarket breads, your American food is making me sick, I need to go to the farmers market for artisanal sourdough". But I didn't need it to be artisanal, it's just the only place that didn't sweeten their bread.

So you can say Americans are taste junkies, but at the same time, it's a huge effort to just get normal staples that haven't been turned into dessert, at least where I was living

Yes, there is that side to it. Sugar surreptitiously slipped into one's food. (Ditto salt and fat.) I guess Maggie Thatcher's "TINA" (There In No Alternative) now goes double for food. Time to go listen to Soundgarden (they of "Black Hole Sun" fame) and nurse grim wishes.

 

[KjEno186]

Evolution:

Meat, animal fat, and salt were a part of our diet for millions of years giving rise to the hunter-gatherer "lifestyle". We got our big brains from this stage of evolution because animal-based food is nutritionally dense.

Cultivated grains were a part of our civilized diet for tens of thousands of years as part of the agricultural revolution. There was a noted decrease in health and stature among populations that transitioned from hunter-gatherer & pastoral systems into farming grains.

Industrial scale cheap starches brought on mass malnutrition as white flour and polished rice became cheap export products for the colonial powers. Weston Price called them "the displacing foods of modern commerce" as he traveled around the world and looked at pockets of native populations existing in a state of transition between traditional and industrial foods in the early 20th century.

Industrial scale agriculture brought on new products like seed oils and margarine which were heavily promoted during WW2 as a substitute for traditional fats. They were never proven safe for human consumption, but they do make a nice profit.

Fruit sugar, aka fructose, was only available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eating fruit in season, and refined sugar (fructose-glucose) was still relatively expensive well into the 20th century. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was developed and became the go-to source of sweetening practically every manufactured food-like product. It also made soda (Coke, Pepsi, etc.) reliably cheap enough to become the only beverage consumed by a vast portion of the human population. Around 1970, John Yudkin's Pure, White, and Deadly laid the blame for chronic health problems on sugar, but the US Government decided that people should eat like vegans instead.

Now, tell me WHY do people STILL blame animal products for the obesity epidemic?

 

[Xenophon]

Evolution:

Meat, animal fat, and salt were a part of our diet for millions of years giving rise to the hunter-gatherer "lifestyle". We got our big brains from this stage of evolution because animal-based food is nutritionally dense.

Cultivated grains were a part of our civilized diet for tens of thousands of years as part of the agricultural revolution. There was a noted decrease in health and stature among populations that transitioned from hunter-gatherer & pastoral systems into farming grains.

Industrial scale cheap starches brought on mass malnutrition as white flour and polished rice became cheap export products for the colonial powers. Weston Price called them "the displacing foods of modern commerce" as he traveled around the world and looked at pockets of native populations existing in a state of transition between traditional and industrial foods in the early 20th century.

Industrial scale agriculture brought on new products like seed oils and margarine which were heavily promoted during WW2 as a substitute for traditional fats. They were never proven safe for human consumption, but they do make a nice profit.

Fruit sugar, aka fructose, was only available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eating fruit in season, and refined sugar (fructose-glucose) was still relatively expensive well into the 20th century. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was developed and became the go-to source of sweetening practically every manufactured food-like product. It also made soda (Coke, Pepsi, etc.) reliably cheap enough to become the only beverage consumed by a vast portion of the human population. Around 1970, John Yudkin's Pure, White, and Deadly laid the blame for chronic health problems on sugar, but the US Government decided that people should eat like vegans instead.

Now, tell me WHY do people STILL blame animal products for the obesity epidemic?

To be exact, I blame sugar mostly. But gobbling a lot of meat fat, cheese, and sitting on one's ass is also part of the problem. Lots of folks eat like farm laborers oughta, but live like Mandarins. There. Happy? Now go get undo that double-hitch sheepshank knot you got yer shorts twisted
into. That's gotta be more aggravating than a monkey's fist jammed up yer sphincter.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Serious question .. what about cannibals vs vegans?

 

[pixel_fortune]

Serious question .. what about cannibals vs vegans?

What's the question? What about them like how?

Post automatically merged: Feb 20, 2024

If you just mean vs like "who would win in a fight", vegans.

Cannibalism is super unhealthy, that's how you get kuru / mad cow disease

Same for vegans vs carnivores. It's possible, but a bit tricky, to build a supremely healthy and balanced vegan diet. It's not possible to build a supremely healthy carnivore diet

The carnivore diet can produce temporary health improvements because it's an elimination diet (you probably have an intolerance to some random fruit or vegetable and you've cut that out of your diet so you feel better. You've also cut FODMAPs (a class of complex carbohydrates) out, which people with IBS don't tolerate. But over time, you'll end up with a bunch of nutritional deficiencies

Vegans end up with nutritional deficiencies if they eat stupidly, but all diets cause nutritional deficiencies if you do them in a stupid way.

Carnivore and fruitarian diets are the only ones where it's impossible to avoid nutritional deficiencies.

 

[Xenophon]

What's the question? What about them like how?

Post automatically merged: Feb 20, 2024

If you just mean vs like "who would win in a fight", vegans.

Cannibalism is super unhealthy, that's how you get kuru / mad cow disease

Same for vegans vs carnivores. It's possible, but a bit tricky, to build a supremely healthy and balanced vegan diet. It's not possible to build a supremely healthy carnivore diet

The carnivore diet can produce temporary health improvements because it's an elimination diet (you probably have an intolerance to some random fruit or vegetable and you've cut that out of your diet so you feel better. You've also cut FODMAPs (a class of complex carbohydrates) out, which people with IBS don't tolerate. But over time, you'll end up with a bunch of nutritional deficiencies

Vegans end up with nutritional deficiencies if they eat stupidly, but all diets cause nutritional deficiencies if you do them in a stupid way.

Carnivore and fruitarian diets are the only ones where it's impossible to avoid nutritional deficiencies.

I've read that Rom'e legions, eating mostly dried fruit, bread and wine, had better endurance than the sausage 'n porridge, gimme more beer Cherusker, Marcomanni, and what not barbarians. On the other hand, I'm betting that a cannibal would beat a vegan simply because the one is inured to killing, the other makes nonviolence a matter of principle. Still, there have been sanguinary vegans like Savitri Devi who favored four-footed friends over two. So, I guess there's nothing to do but a controlled experiment. Some reality TV show that really should be called "Survivor," eh wot?

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Yeah, I meant in terms of diet. Youd think being a carnivore would not be necessarily unhealthier than an herbivore.
As for Survivor, Id pay per view that.

 

[Xenophon]

Yeah, I meant in terms of diet. Youd think being a carnivore would not be necessarily unhealthier than an herbivore.
As for Survivor, Id pay per view that.

Depends on the meat? ("You are whom you eat.")
In any case, I've never met a carnivore. Even the biggest meat gorger (me, a few years back( is better described as an omnivore. We eat a bit of everything.

 

[pixel_fortune]

Yeah, I meant in terms of diet. Youd think being a carnivore would not be necessarily unhealthier than an herbivore.
As for Survivor, Id pay per view that.

Nah cause you can get protein from plants but you can't get fibre or (many) vitamins from meat.

The only way to manage it is to eat a lot of organ meat, which do contain some of those vitamins. If you just eat muscles (steaks), you're gonna be sickly long term. Inuits ate whole animals, including the stomach contents of herbivores.

(20 year olds can get away with eating instant noodles for every meal and sleeping for 4 hours a night, so i'd want to be comparing forty year olds on each diet)

 

[Lemongrass00]

Instant gratification culture is huge for Americans, it feels better short term to not exercise and to order McDonald’s 3x a day so that’s what ends up happening.

 

[Xenophon]

Instant gratification culture is huge for Americans, it feels better short term to not exercise and to order McDonald’s 3x a day so that’s what ends up happening.

McD's 3x a day? What about the other meals? 3 eats in 24 hours leaves some awful long stretches between episodes of gratification.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Serious question .. what about cannibals vs vegans?

My money's on the cannibals...

Post automatically merged: Feb 20, 2024

Seriously though, investigations into the gut biome suggest that having a well balanced internal ecology is important to having a well balanced external ecology. One example; you know that old story that if you stay awake for 72 hours, you die? (You don't die, you just wish you could) It turns out that as you stay awake for longer, it takes a toll on your gut biome, and that has a direct line to your overall health.

Post automatically merged: Feb 20, 2024

Sorry - missed my actual point; a wide range of different foods can help promote a healthy internal ecosystem. If you stop eating (say) dairy, then the bugs in your gut that digest dairy will starve and die off, making it more difficult to go back to dairy later.

 

[Xingtian]

I think sugar and processed foods (which often have sugar in them even if it seems completely unnecessary) are a big part of it. The corn industry is powerful and you'll see corn syrup, corn starch, etc. in all kinds of things. I've got a kid with some rare food senstitivities and most affordable food is loaded with horrible stuff so like Pixel I've had to pay ridiculous amounts for artisanal this and that even if I'm just looking for something as simple as "blueberries that haven't been sprayed with corn starch for some inscrutable reason". I was fortunate not to grow up with soda pop constantly in the house but a lot of Americans did and I see people going through crazy diets and workouts but they somehow can't imagine giving up a coke or two every day, so they don't get too far.

 

[pixel_fortune]

Sorry - missed my actual point; a wide range of different foods can help promote a healthy internal ecosystem. If you stop eating (say) dairy, then the bugs in your gut that digest dairy will starve and die off, making it more difficult to go back to dairy later.

Yes!

Jordan Peterson's evidence for the carnivore diet included that, after eating nothing but meat for a year or whatever, he ate an apple and it made him really sick. That doesn't mean what you think it means, Jordan!

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Yes!

Jordan Peterson's evidence for the carnivore diet included that, after eating nothing but meat for a year or whatever, he ate an apple and it made him really sick. That doesn't mean what you think it means, Jordan!

I didn't realise there was yet another reason to categorise Peterson as a waste of everyone's time.

I am very lucky. My wife is a fantastic cook and we eat all kinds of delicious things, leaning towards, but not exclusively, vegetables.

Also, I discovered that in the '90's, they isolated the substance that made Brussels sprouts bitter, and bred it out - so sprouts are no longer the horrid bitter things I remember from my youth

 

[stratamaster78]

I didn't realise there was yet another reason to categorise Peterson as a waste of everyone's time.

I am very lucky. My wife is a fantastic cook and we eat all kinds of delicious things, leaning towards, but not exclusively, vegetables.

Also, I discovered that in the '90's, they isolated the substance that made Brussels sprouts bitter, and bred it out - so sprouts are no longer the horrid bitter things I remember from my youth

In the 80’s my Mom covered up the Bitter in Brussels Sprouts with Salt and Butter and I loved them.

I’m sure they weren’t healthy though…lol

 

[Robert Ramsay]

In the 70's, my mother just boiled the **** out of them