US Obesity Epidemic

Weird that poor people in the US are so fat - access to food clearly isn't an issue.

It's not mere availability of food. Obesity rates vary quite widely across OECD countries; the US is at 35%, France/Italy/Spain are at about 5-10%, Korea is below 4%.Overeating is a stress response for a lot of people, and overeating often occurs among people in high-stress situations. The US is a country that tolerates a very high level of poverty, inequality, and insecurity, and this results in high obesity rates in some sectors. Obesity isn't the same problem for people

> You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the USThe word "unhealthy" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. For instance, there's the Kitvian people, who have no food scarcity whatsoever and a diet that consists of 70% carbohydrates, which a lot of nutrition "science" tells us is bad, yet obesity is completely unknown to them.Or t

more than 1/3 of Americans are obese. the US is one of the fattest countries in the world. Does that mean Americans are poor people who can only afford empty calories? wake up. people just like to eat unhealthy stuff when given the chance?.

I wouldn't call it bugs - more cultural. Approx. 40% of Americans qualify as obese, compared to 28% of Canadians, 19% of Spanish, 15% of Swiss, etc.https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/I'm originally from the UK (now US), which doesn't score so well either (28%), but the differences are obvious - massive portion sizes in US from deli sandwiches, foot long subs, movi

Yes, but that’s an incomplete view on the obesity epidemic in the West, imo. It’s not just that there’s “more access to calories,” it’s that access to healthy foods is getting more difficult for a large portion of the population. People working multiple jobs don’t have time to cook a complete, nutritious meal. Also, due to our ever-increasing wealth inequality, it’s harder for people to afford healthy food. A whole chicken, a vegetable, and a starch will always cost more than getting something a

Here's why everyone is fat in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...It's not "aspartame". It's eating out twice as much as we did in early 70s [1], rise of fast food consumption, and huge portion sizes.[1] <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumpt

Isn't the real elephant in the room obesity? And a culture around lifestyle and low-quality food that actively promotes it?If you're sitting on your ass all day and then going out to drink a gallon of HFCS-infused coke (free refills) and a low-budget meal that could satisfy a starving family, of course you're gonna get to this point.My personal thought with the US is "why does everything have to be so big?"

It may or may not be fraudulent, but please keep in mind that certain US states have ~ 40% obesity rates. It sounds obvious to the non-obese that eating like there is no tomorrow is not conducive to a good life; and simple measures, like eating less and moving more, can dramatically improve quality of life. But to the obese, it might not be so obvious for a variety of reasons (and yes, there are also genetic and environmental and mental health problems contributing to obesity, but also not carin

Your premise is true, but drastically oversimplified. And your conclusion doesn't follow at all. It's clear that there's a huge public health problem with obesity that needs to be corrected. In order to correct it, we need to know why it's happening. Is something causing people to consume more calories than before? Is something causing them to use fewer calories? The "classic" answer is that people are lazy and gluttonous, but there's a distinct possibility tha