That county-level obesity rate map of the US looks nearly identical to a county-level map of average household income. This search for a complex chemical cause is farcical in the face of the obvious: poor people eat cheap food. Cheap food contains high amounts of carbohydrates, containing well beyond the caloric needs a normal person should be eating in a day, while not being nearly as satiating as a more healthy option. So more gets eaten.
Half his arguments are bad. Like the argument against the correlation between BMI and altitude level? “Here’s a study that was poorly done. Because it was poorly done, it cannot be caused from lower oxygen levels.”
I've seen this brought up time and time again on fitness forums. I strongly contest the assertion that cheap food is unhealthy food. Beans, rice, veggies, unprocessed protein can be bought in bulk for very cheap and are massively more healthy to eat for every meal than a dollar burger. This is anecdotal, sure, but I'm only arguing against what you consider obvious.
Beans rice veggies and protein can be cheap - but you need the skills, tools, a kitchen, a fridge, a freezer, and a couple free hours a day to travel to the store, shop, prep, cook and clean. If you live in poverty and need to rely on "cheap food", you probably don't have access to these things. People working 2 full time jobs in a food desert without a regularly stocked kitchen cannot do what you suggest.
Sure but there are plenty of obese people living in “McMansion Hell” suburbs who can clearly afford vegetables. When visiting my parents in such a wealthy-ish suburb, the difference from similarly wealthy parts of NYC is very obvious (hey also you can’t walk anywhere in the suburb, weird…)
That's another aspect to it for sure. Those who chose to eat crap suffer the same fate as those who can't afford the alternative. Either way, eat poison = face health consequences.
You make America sound like a 3rd world country without a fridge or freezer. If you don't have a fridge or freezer you have such big problems going on, you'll probably not be obese because you can't even afford food and you'll be rationing like crazy.
It's less about the fridge than about the stove. Or rather, the time to spend in front of it.
Healthy, inexpensive meals can take a lot of time to prepare. You could spend an hour making beans and rice, or you can take something labeled "Healthy!" out of the freezer and nuke it for two minutes.
A lot of the poorest people don't have time or energy for that. Even people with more money often think of themselves as time-starved. It would be better for their health and well-being to get around that, but it's hard to compete with the messages of fast food marketing. That marketing is often deliberately misleading with false "healthy" claims, and the food itself is incredibly easy to eat. They are fine-tuned to appeal to people, in part by packing in a ton of calories and excluding anything else that would dilute the flavors.
Combined with a ton of mixed messages and extraordinary amounts of wishful thinking, even people who should know better often don't put it into practice. And a lot of people genuinely don't have the time or energy to know better.
I said nothing about America as a whole, you made that part up.
But for the millions living below the poverty line, having a place to safely store your groceries or a place to prepare/cook them is not at all guaranteed.
> you'll probably not be obese because you can't even afford food and you'll be rationing like crazy.
This is not how human physiology works at all. Mainly because our bodies won't let us get to that level of starvation voluntarily. We do have cheap shitty food for sale that can bail us out in times of hunger. This perpetuates a cycle of obesity.
As someone that fasts for fun and has been 50+ lbs overweight before, I assure you that's not how it works. You buy cheap shit if you feel like shit. But if you're broke, which I have also been, not eating actually feels better than eating processed garbage. People buying cheap junk are on a feel like shit spiral, but money is not the problem. It would cost less to eat less and feel better, but for now they want to feel poorly.
I buy gas and energy drinks every day almost. I see them. They are not 'poor'. If they ARE living paycheck to paycheck though, it's because they buy food at 7/11.
Cheap food is high in sugar and refined carbs but also lots and lots of seed oil (most likely rancid) along with additives etc. We have the sugar/carb hypothesis of obesity. We have the seed oil hypothesis. We have various claims of additives causing metabolic problems. Por que no los tres? These aren't mutually exclusive, and they're all correlated with shitty industrial foods.
> things like “diet and exercise” are non-explanations
what?
CICO, period. You can’t beat thermodynamics. You can certainly separately explain why CI has gone up and/or CO has gone down, but the energy has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.
Unfortunately you're not arguing for what you think you're arguing for. Food is not metabolized via combustion. However there is a way to measure the energy the human body gets from food and that's to measure the amount of ATP generated by the metabolism of a single molecule of the constituent parts of that food. And it turns out this doesn't track calories very closely at all. I'm fact, fat produces nearly 2x the ATP we would expect, except in the absence of oxaloacetic acid, in which case it produces a mere 16% of the expected value, implying that utilizing OOA for things like glycogen production can force your body to burn loads of fat for the same metabolic output, completely invalidating CICO.
And that doesn't even begin to account for how much mass we eat which is utilized structurally or excreted without being exhausted. CICO works for thermodynamics, not dieting.
Yep. Coming from someone who has lost a lot of weight and got into the best shape of my life using CICO, there is no other explanation. Of course food quality matters a lot because you won’t feel as hungry. I’d argue even exercise makes you less hungry as a whole. Of course there are probably chemicals in our environment that are making us fatter, but it's definitely not a silver bullet, maybe responsible for 10-20lbs of excess fat if even that.
The lithium hypothesis doesn't really much scrutiny. I mean they include Canada, but exclude Norway because it's not a warm arid climate? Also how do they explain obesity in New Zealand (a country that they conveniently forgot when talking about high obesity countries), which had a single refinery which closed 2 years ago.
Also if proximity to oil production would be a reason, maybe don't treat a place like Australia as a single entity. The oil producing places are largely (with the exception of Gipps basin) quite far away from where people live. If that is still close enough, than all of Europe should be affected by e.g. Norwegian oil production.
What are the qualifications of the author?
Much of this content is contrary to content I'm familiar with written by those with Phds in nutrition science
Sigh, why do his qualifications matter… You should be asking if his argument is sound and backed by evidence instead. People with PhDs have been wrong many times in the past.
IMO the top 2% know their stuff 10x better than someone at even the top 10% level.
So imagine if you lined up 100 people with a PhD in nutrition. To the average person they seem like they know their stuff. But imo, the bottom ones are druggies, weirdos, and frauds. The middle are what you'd expect. The top 2 stand out clearly.
Not to be a downer but this is not the first time there are rather unqualified opinions from this blog presented as factual/scientific writing. The starting point is a theory looking for evidence. This is the wrong way around.
Exactly.
Two things:
1. The vast majority of people do not need to worry about nuances of nutrition. Most Americans (90%+) don't even meet physical activity guidelines, for which there is extremely strong evidence of far more significant benefits.
2. OP responded to another comment of mine that they actively go against what Phd nutritionists say. This was never a post about facts/science.
Lithium and fluoride: two deadly chemical by-products that were rehabilitated a few decades ago, so they could be force-fed to the general population. Yum!
I am skeptical that it is physically possible for water to be retained in a child's mouth long enough to make a difference. Might the 25% also have something to do with introduction of enhanced dental care, and encouraging frequent brushing of teeth with fluoridated toothpaste? You know, the stuff that leaves a significant residue, and is not completely wet and slippery?
I'm also skeptical whether you realize that "fluorinated water" is rather impossible. Fluorine is a gas, and a highly reactive one. It will explode (oxidize) if you mix it with water, you know. So, for your 25% factoid, [citation needed].
