Its not cardiovasuclar, but the top 2 causes of death in the US are tied to obesity, which takes zero time to reduce. You just have to not eat, which is actually time positive.
Most humans are just incredibly bad at impulse control.
To be fair, our diets and lifestyles changed drastically in the 20th century.
When we're bombarded with advertisements of highly caloric, processed, sugary foods engineered to flood our taste buds and trigger dopamine, we can't be surprised that people get addicted to it. Combine that with forms of entertainment, transportation, and a work culture that keep us sedentary, and it's no wonder many people struggle with being physically healthy.
I would suggest that in the next 5 years or so if ozempic and others don't turn out to be cancer causing or have more than awful side effects that we'll see a large drop in obesity, as obesity isn't an easy thing to change. Likely other competitors will come along and use a similar mechanism and Novo won't be able to charge $1000 a month for it any longer allowing 80-85% of those who are overweight to give it a shot.
I think it will be very interesting to see how it plays out and has a lot of positive potential.
I don't think it is very sustainable to have 50% of the population on a biologic medication to help self control, but hopefully it will help individuals and societies change norms.
To frame the discussion as one of either/or alternatives is self-defeating, a more productive framing is what are the various strategies we can employ to reduce obesity?
There are plenty which are unrelated to self-control or personal discipline. One is a sugar tax (not a huge fan personally but it exists).
One I do like is to regulate the advertising and labeling of food. Frankly I'd like to know how many calories I'm eating or being persuaded to eat, pretty much all the time. This is a work in progress with the FDA gradually expanding the types of restaurants that are required to disclose caloric and nutrition info about their food. Frankly I'd like to see it required in advertisements too, if you're advertising a pizza, the advertisement should disclose that there are 2,000 calories in that pizza, many people actually are not aware.
Not that I ever thought they were serving health food at the Cheesecake Factory, but I recently learned that their peanut butter cheesecake is 1650 calories per slice! Almost a full day's calories in one slice of cake! Nearly everyone I've talked to about it knew it was a gut buster but no one guessed that high.
Those cheesecakes are only for special occasions now and it's because C.F. is required to disclose calories, I'd be fatter if not for this simple government intervention. Nothing to do with self control. Apologies to C.F. but with the nation's obesity rate cresting 50% I consider this a wholly reasonable imposition on their free speech rights or whatever.
> Those cheesecakes are only for special occasions now and it's because C.F. is required to disclose calories, I'd be fatter if not for this simple government intervention. Nothing to do with self control
How is eating a cake from a store "nothing to do with self control". It's not like you were buying vegetables and turns out big sugar made the vegetables be worse for you. You not knowing if the cake was 800 calories or 1.6k calories makes it no less about self control. Even to avoid eating it at 1.6k, it's still all just self control.
No, it's much easier to pass on dessert when you know it's 1600 calories as opposed to if you think it's much less. In essence the disclosure of how bad that particular item really is reduces the amount of willpower required to avoid it. If this wasn't true, all these restaurants wouldn't have kept the calorie counts of these dishes secret until the government forced them to share that info.
I mean this is common sense, the more clearly you understand the negatives of an action, the more likely you are to avoid it. And we have plenty of evidence that this works to alter people's behavior through looking at the effects of e.g. cigarette labeling.
Like up until the 1950s we actually didn't have good evidence that cigarettes were bad for you, and doctors actually got on TV and endorsed specific brands, so a lot of people weren't sure. Eventually the studies were produced and doctors started recommending against smoking and smoking started to decline. It didn't decline because people became Badass Willpower Monks, it declined because they were given access to more and better information.
"Less self control needed" which is your argument in this follow-up comment is very different from "Nothing to do with self control" in your original comment.
Why every time obesity is brought up it's always because the environment is bad, food is bad, lifestyle is unavoidable instead of just being a personal responsibility?
There was a relatively recent study that found that BMR has actually been dropping over the last 30 years. The difference in men was large enough (7% iirc) that it would explain most of the obesity epidemic.
Why it's dropping is still a n mystery though.
Nevertheless, the solution is still the same: eat less.
I would like to see replications, as it could just be bad data:
"It is also possible that the long-term reduction in BMR represents methodological artefacts. In the early years, measurements of BMR were often made using mouthpieces to collect respiratory gases, and recently such devices have been shown to elevate BMR by around 6%. A second possibility is that early measurements paid less attention to controlling ambient temperature to ensure individuals were at thermoneutral temperatures."
Thanks for the link to this very strong and now open study.
The authors suggest that the decreased consumption of saturated fats over the last 30+ years is likely to contribute to the reduction in basal metabolic rate and gains in weight. The mouse model component of the study provides some support.
I'm not an expert on the literature, but I do know Bmr isn't a fixed number. It is a function of activity, muscle mass, and other factors.
It seems that a largely sedentary lifestyle free from exertion matches both.
It would be insightful to see the sensitivity analysis for BMR with respect to strength, activity, muscle mass, ect.
I know there is a body of data about environmental hormones and BMR, ect, but my understanding is that the impact is barely measurable with large sample sizes. I expect that it can't hold a candle to activity. In my personal experience, my BMR can easily modulate by 1000 calories based on body composition and behavior. That is a huge impact.
> Nevertheless, the solution is still the same: eat less.
Or make life harder! Quit the elevator. Quit the automatic transmission (and car). Quit the online shopping.
Making some progress with self-checkouts and pointless lineups at airports.
Less jokingly (hard to outrun a bad diet) but more pedanticly: drinking less (alcohol and calorific beverages) might be a better start than eating less.
It would be interesting to correlate these results with data about reduced testosteron levels and sperm counts/fertility, especially whether one of these leads the other or whether both go down at the same time.
clearly there is no "just" to it as a level of effort on the part of those who are overweight. It is not an easy road and something like 95% of the people fail at it, so I guess it depends on what your meaning of "just" is.
People here complain a lot about social media and the tuning for engagement which makes people addicted to their phones etc..
Well compared to the food industry industry that's nothing. Incidentally they learned their trade from the tobacco industry who invested heavily in the junk food industry in the 60s. [1]
All to say, much of modern food (and the advertising around it) is designed to get people hooked on junk food from a very early age. So saying just eat less is a simplistic solution that requires people to act against a conditioning that has been aggressively imprinted on them from a very early age.
Of course. I was responding to the time spent (out of ones day), opposed to calendar days of not eating.
That said, people can make pretty rapid weight loss without eating. skip eating 1 day a week and that is 30 lbs a year for an average obese man. skip 2 days/week and that is 60 lbs/year.
> people can make pretty rapid weight loss without eating
Your suggestion is not sustainable. A staggering 90+% of people regain all weight loss a year after their diet ends. Seriously, who is not going to eat for two days per week? Your mental health would be a wreck. Can you do it? I cannot.
90% of people regain weight because they go back to eating like they have a death wish.
I think conflating between mental health and eating is at the heart of the obesity epidemic. Nobody will die if they skip a few meals. They will suffer some moderate discomfort depending on how much they fixate on it.
I can go a week without eating and a few days is trivial. The longest a human has gone without food is 381 days and they lost 275 lbs
Please do not assume your experience is universal. You simply cannot know how it feels for other people to be hungry, it might be a completely different feeling than what you get.
This. Exactly. It took many, many years as an adult to realise that I was blessed with incredible genes that allowed me to reduce calorie intake without many negative consequences (insane hunger cravings, etc.). My point: I didn't do anything to "earn" this -- it was granted to me by birth. It gave me extra empathy for people who don't have it, who are trying to control their weight. It is a brutal battle. I always have so much respect for people who stuggle with weight gain, but beat the demons and lose weight long term. They really are someone special!
A lot of people assume humans are mechanistic, unfeeling CICO convertors and exclude psychological and physiological realities of losing weight. I've grown used to it. It took several tries for me to drop 50lbs and most of it was psychological and good habit formation. it took about 3 years to complete that journey.
I think the point is rather to communicate that there is no trick to around cico.
Instead, they are reinforcing that the path is clear, and the the barriers Are entirely psychological. Effort to build habits, effort to exert self control, effort to find solutions when you stumble.
If people are looking and waiting for a strategy that makes weight loss easier than inaction, they are bound for disappointment.
Some rare people find a passion that makes the process of getting healthy and fit more fun and easy than getting fatter, but that is exceedingly rare.
Most humans are just incredibly bad at impulse control.