What went wrong?

[SWAlexander]

If you follow the complete threat, you may find many components you can agree with.
At least I do.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1728136904028365161

 

[jaybee00]

A lot of pseudoscience nonsense in that thread.

 

[Mary]

Very interesting tweet thread @SWAlexander - I think in large part it's quite accurate unfortunately!

 

[JES]

Confusing thread. The people who count calories, have a keto diet or personal trainers are a small percentage of the population. They are not the ones who are overweight typically.

 

[lenora]

We're our own worst enemies in this case.

Fast food places are everywhere. While sports is good for a child, mother often stops at McDonald's (or the like) for dinner. This is not helping anyone.

Multiple vehicles in a family. Not too long ago (OK,I'm pushing 77 here) there was one car, and the head of the household drove it to work. The rest of the family walked. No, it wasn't a hardship, although some days were a bit much. Still, it kept us fit and physically challenged us and no, we didn't have Jane Fonda workouts, we didn't need them. Jack LaLane (?) appeared at some point and I did do his exercises for post-natal women.

It became a trend to join health clubs, have trainers and special diets.

I understand and wouldn't be comfortable if my child had to walk to school today. The world has changed and that's a rather sad thing to write, but i understand. I used to be a parent who waited up for my children.....my daughters fall asleep. My one son-in-law can't sleep if both children (one college student and the other a graduate) aren't home. We're a scared people and, sadly, even when my youngest was in kindergarten, we used to get notes about men doing strange things in their cars.

However, my child craved independence. I watched her walk down the street, then ran and watched until she entered the school door. Well, both of my children, that is. The oldest is now 52, so it shows you how many years ago the world changed.

I was a healthy cook and we didn't like fast food. Mealtimes were for as much enjoyment as possible.
School sports now interrupts everything including meals. Working mothers are the norm, sitting all day working on a computer, is the norm, everyone in a family has a car....the world changes. Somehow we have to adjust. But fast food should go! Yours, Lenora

 

[wabi-sabi]

Causes of the obesity epidemic are one off the most popular areas in nutritional research right now. Everybody's got a pet idea. Some historians even think the obesity epidemic started much earlier. See this article: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adults-1882-1986

Three of my favorite scientists in this area are Kevin Hall, Giles Yeo, and Tera Fazzino.

 

[wabi-sabi]

And the majority of people "fit as a fiddle" before 1970s? This is a man who's forgotten the history of infectious disease. Small pox, TB, cholera, typhoid, Oh my!

It's true that non-communicable diseases are much larger health threats now than in the past, but let's not forget how we got here.

Contagious Diseases in the United States from 1888 to the Present​

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4175560/

 

[hapl808]

I really think it's a modern obsession with the 'value' of portion sizes, and guilt-free anything.

All of our lowfat, nonfat, sugar free, stevia, diet, etc - with the assumed corollary that then you can eat an unlimited amount of it. Even keto has elements of this - oh, if it's keto you can eat until you're stuffed.

Portion sizes are out of control, particularly in America. It's not just fast food, but that fast food mindset of unlimited food. A 1983 McDonalds fries was a fraction of its 2023 size.

Meanwhile, most research shows that moderate calorie restriction tends to be healthier.

When I use to travel, the portion sizes in many other countries were a fraction of what you'd see in the USA.

 

[wabi-sabi]

It's not just fast food, but that fast food mindset of unlimited food.

It's culturally curious. I think part of it comes from trying to get value for money- lately I have been watching youtube videos of people going to Disney and listening to food reviews where the critique is not a great quantity for the money- and, mind you, they are discussing desserts, huge desserts. Some of them look like a Sundae mess a child would have made. Very few had an attractive presentation, but they were gigantic.

Paradoxically, I think overconsumption, like bulk buying, comes partly from food insecurity.

Here is a really fun quiz: https://www.idrlabs.com/food-choice/test.php

 

[Viala]

Multiple vehicles in a family. Not too long ago (OK,I'm pushing 77 here) there was one car, and the head of the household drove it to work. The rest of the family walked. No, it wasn't a hardship, although some days were a bit much. Still, it kept us fit and physically challenged us and no, we didn't have Jane Fonda workouts, we didn't need them. Jack LaLane (?) appeared at some point and I did do his exercises for post-natal women.

It became a trend to join health clubs, have trainers and special diets.

Maybe all we need is more walking. Not necessarily sports, just walking. Food doesn't have as much minerals as it had before, so excessive physical activity can contribute to losing even more electrolites. Walking seems the safest solution here. Michael Mosley had an interesting point of view on losing weight with introduction of intermittent fasting and only short bursts of high physical activity, something that our ancestors did. He lost weight thanks to his diet's autophagic properties and is healthier now. I agree with him that extensive physical activity is not the answer here, it is how we eat, what we eat and that we keep our juices flowing by walking a lot.

It is funny though that years back people didn't pay much attention to their diets and fitness and were much healthier than we are now, they also had much thicker hair, such beautiful hair. People now spend a lot of time focusing on eating healthy and exercise and still get sick. It shouldn't be that complicated. Our diets changed dramatically over the years, the biggest change I think was introducing pro-inflammatory omega 6 vegetable oils and fear campaign against saturated fats. How is that something that we ate for thousands of years would suddenly be harmful to our health and something that we never ate would be healthy, seems more like someone just wanted to earn money and then also benefit from our degrading health.

Meat is problematic now as well because it is also rich in omega 6 fats thanks to grain fodder. I had to change my diet a lot during last years and seeing now how everything influences our health, it is really difficult to maneuver to eat a healthy diet, even when preparing food at home. They just feed us unhealthy food and now want to go even further, to make us all vegan and stop eating meat, dairy and eggs. Which means that we would lose almost all sources of healthy saturated fats. High omega 6 plant oils would be all that is left. It's just hard not to see that it is a continuation of what they started years back when they began to scare people about saturated fats.

 

[wabi-sabi]

Here's one of the best recent conferences on obesity from the Royal Society.

https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2022/10/causes-obesity/

 

[Judee]

Most food that people are eating these days has been so modified and processed as to really be fake food in my opinion.

I think our bodies are so genetically complex that they really can tell something is not right with all that. It's just becomes a situation of "garbage in; garbage out."

 

[wabi-sabi]

processed

This is what Kevin Hall's research is about. It's changed some of my thinking on food. There's a nice summary here:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health...ultra-processed-foods-health-risk-weight-gain

 

[Rufous McKinney]

All I needed to do was drive out of the town I resided in up until recently, where health is important, to the next town down the highway.

Obesity abounds in the next town. And I feel for these children.

But they all could fight back. Our friend did. Her whole family were very overweight. She lost most of it, then wrote a book.

I lost 45 pounds. By simply deciding to eat less.

 

[L'engle]

Portion sizes are out of control, particularly in America. It's not just fast food, but that fast food mindset of unlimited food. A 1983 McDonalds fries was a fraction of its 2023 size.

I can confirm that portions of fries, mcnuggets etc here in Canada are meagre at best. Each combo comes with a gallon of sugary soft drink and the ice cream is pretty cheap so the calories add up here too.

The only time I went to the US I was overwhelmed by the huge portion sizes in a restaurant. To be fair, I also found the food in Britain to be very heavy, with lots of 'free chocolate bar... here, free crisps!'.

I think the fries here might have actually been a larger portion in 1983? Fortunately I never eat them so it isn't a hardship for me. The mcnuggets come in a tiny packet and still rattle around in it. Fortunately I don't eat those either.

 

[Wayne]

REVIEW

How to Eat​

Diet secrets from Michael Pollan (and your great-grandma)​

Houston Chronicle​

Houston Chronicle, January 23, 2010​

The most sensible diet plan ever? We think it’s the one that Michael Pollan outlined a few years ago: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” So we’re happy that in his little new book, Food Rules, Pollan offers more common-sense rules for eating: 64 of them, in fact, all thought-provoking and some laugh-out-loud funny.​

​

By “food” Pollan means real food, not creations of the food-industrial complex. Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize.​

​

Pollan points out that populations that eat like modern-day Americans — lots of highly processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains — suffer high rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. But populations that eat more traditional diets don’t. Our great-grandmas knew what they were doing.​

​

But in the last few decades, we seem to have lost that old cultural know-how — or maybe it’s just hard to remember it in our drive-thru world. We need rules.​

​

Like Rule No. 19: “If it’s a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.” Or Rule 36: “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.” Or Rule No. 20: “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”​

​

For most of us, “not too much” is especially hard. But if you follow Rule 52 — “Buy smaller glasses and plates” — your portions will seem larger. And Rules 58 (“Do all your eating at a table”) and 59 (“Try not to eat alone”) will help you slow down and enjoy your meals more.​

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Hard-core vegetarians complain about the “-ly” in the rule “mostly plants.” So be it: Pollan isn’t dogmatic. He urges us to eat less meat, and better-raised meat. But he doesn’t insist that we give it up entirely.​

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He ends his book with Rule 64: “Break the rules once in a while.” Decades of obsessing about nutrition — eating low-fat this and low-carb that, drinking sugar-free sodas and vitamin-enhanced water — haven’t made us thinner or healthier.​

​

It’s time we ate like our great-grandmas.​

 

[Murph]

Some of the points in that thread are very important. Mostly about diet.

1. Heavily processed food has a bad ratio of nutrients to energy, but also include a lot of seed oils. Seed oils seem to be fine until you oxidise them, at which point they are bad for your body and require antioxidants to mop up. Heated seed oils (i.e. anything made with heat ,rather than cold-pressed like virgin olive oil; and any seed oil used for frying) , are not 100% proven dangerous but the evidence is mounting enough that they are worth avoiding I reckon on balance of probability. Their introduction to the diet in the 20th century correlates with the obesity epidemic fairly neatly so they are worthy of suspicion.

2. I think sunlight is probably a helpful immune suppresser for most people (not good for those with pots, of course). People who dodge the sun die faster. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joim.12251

3. It's worth keeping an eye on plastics and hormones in the environment but I'm not freaking out about them and in any case, what can you do?

I do NOT share the author's worries about medications, vaccines, lack of exercise ( i reckon that's downstream of fatness) or deodorant.

 

[Murph]

The picture used for illustration is a fun little microcosm of the thread: it's provocative but not 100% accurate.

Check the number of fingers and toes on the people depicted and you'll realise those pictures are AI.

edit: and some of the people in the 1973 photo appear to be trans!

 

[Viala]

I think the solution here is to prepare healthy meals at home and avoid anything that is loaded with vegetable fat, sugar, salt and flavor additives. Other option is if governments would popularize healthy food and make it cheap and accessible just like it is in Japan. They are still one of the most healthy and lean nations in the world, but they have healthy food available practically on every corner including vending machines and it's quite cheap. I wish we had something like that in western countries. It would be nice to have healthy 'fast' food restaurant chains and healthy snacks available everywhere. No need to cook everything at home and it would save a lot of time.

 

[Judee]

Check the number of fingers and toes on the people depicted and you'll realise those pictures are AI.

You have good eyes.