Obesity tops tobacco as biggest health threat

[General Zod]

As an aside, why does everyone rip on McDonalds? They are actually one of the best fast food options nutrition wise these days as even their flagship burger (the Big Mac) is relatively small by burger standards and is only 550 calories whereas flagship burgers at other restaurants can run into the 1500 calorie range.

I'm not going to argue the quality of McDonalds food but the whole "Super Size Me" thing hit them hard and they decided to take a very responsible route of removing all trans fats and cutting down their portion sizes and they deserve a lot of credit for that. Don't take my word for it, compare their menu to other fast food restaurants and it blows away pretty much everything except some of the better Taco Bell offerings.

McDonald's still uses the lowest possible grade of beef. I refuse to eat there anymore because their burgers actually make me feel exhausted by the time I've finished eating one.

[Oskuro]

*takes a look at the NAAFA wiki entry*

What the fuck?! Increase the quality of life of obese people? Fight discrimination in airlines? Have these idiots thought about trying to make obese people work to not be obese? That might actually increase their life expectancy!

And here I was thinking that this was just a joke:

[aieeegrunt]

So will we get the long, long overdue jihad against fatties that we have been succesfully prosecuting against smokers? I'd love it if fat people would start getting booted out of restaurants and movies and whatnot. Having some fatty overflowing the movie seat next to me or bulging out into the aisle of a restaurant or plane is at least as annoying as sitting next to a smoker to me. Yes I understand that I'm not actually at a health risk from "second hand blubber" or whatever, but it's still just as irritating, and there are other hazards like some fattie getting lodged in an aisle or exit during a fire or whatever. Or falling off a landing or balconey or down the escalator and crushing the innocent like a giant avalanche of flesh.

The other parallel is that fatties probably drain the health system at least as much as smokers do; sure they don't get lung cancer, but I don't think smokers get diabetes. So from a collective health of society level I'd say it's just as justified.

for the overwhelming majority of people, you are fat because you eat too much and you eat stuff that is bad for you. Period. Every time I've gotten tubby it's been my own damn fault, because I rack disiprin. I slim down when I stop chowing down, and the same is true for just about everybody else.

Let the jihad begin! Man the harpoons!

[Isolder74]

When I worked at McDonald's, we had a man come in every day, in the drive thru, almost on the dot at 10:30 when we changed over to lunch. The man drove a ugly orange Geo Metro.

The man ordered every day the following:
6 Big Macs
30 Hamburgers
40 Cheeseburgers
6 orders of large fries
6 Diet Cokes

The man was so heavy that his car leaned towards the driver's side. We had no way of knowing if he ate all that himself but even based on the drinks if that was for him and 6 friends the amount of food was INSANE! That also begs the question, how do they have the money for all this crap?

[Darth Wong]

That's a nice cookie-cutter answer to a standard argument which actually has nothing to do with my position. With conventional dieting, all outside factors remain unchanged: the availability, cheapness, etc. of shitty food. But if food costs much more, people eat less of it. Are you saying that food consumption is immune to economic factors?

Not immune to economic factors, but certainly in the US most people have enough money to afford as much food as they want, and you yourself have pointed out a correlation between lower economic classes and obesity. You'd have to tax foods pretty heavily to overcome this barrier.

Precisely, which is why I mentioned beforehand that I'm talking about a really heavy, downright punitive tax rate, like 200%. Also, while I don't buy the argument that food costs force poor people to eat cheap junk food, I think it makes sense that greatly increased junk food costs would tend to reduce their consumption of the product.

Besides, I actually agree with you, I just think that legislation to force companies to sell food that has better ingredients makes more sense as it has already proven effective in reducing things like trans fats.

Well, a tax on food with lousy ingredients would also tend to depress consumption, and as unlikely as it is, a junk food tax would be more likely to pass than a junk food ban, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

[Terralthra]

Your study shows nothing that people couldn't tell based on simple physics. If you go on a crash diet (lowering net energy in) your body responds by burning fat and you lose weight. When you go off the diet, you go back to whatever bullshit junk food you ate before, and surprise surprise, you gain the weight back. The height and angle from which you crash ("oooooh, an all-liquid diet!") make no difference on what happen after you stop.

This idea that a "diet" is something you go on to lose weight and then stop is the source of your problem. Successful long-term weight change is accomplished by, surprise surprise, long-term diet change. Even positing this "binge-eating hormone" (mentioned nowhere in the study you linked, and a cursory search indicates that the stomach naturally secretes it at all times, with plasma levels increasing before a meal and decreasing afterward), your hormones don't put food in your mouth, your hands do. Unless you are proposing some sort of fugue state, it's a matter of self-control.

If you want to lose weight, net energy in < net energy out. If you want to maintain weight, net energy in = net energy out. It's really that simple.

By that logic all you need to do to get teens to stop having sex is to tell them "All you have to do to stop having sex is not give into your natural urges!". Good luck making that a reality.

There's a fairly obvious fallacy here. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat at all, I'm saying that you should not necessarily eat when you feel hungry. By analogy, I wouldn't be saying that teens should stop having sex at all, only that they shouldn't go out and fuck anything that makes them pop a boner/oozer. Given that most people manage to not go dry-humping the blonde in the mall food court just because she's got a nice pair of ta-tas would seem to indicate that restraining baser urges is not as impossible as you seem to think.

[Phantasee]

When I worked at McDonald's, we had a man come in every day, in the drive thru, almost on the dot at 10:30 when we changed over to lunch. The man drove a ugly orange Geo Metro.

The man ordered every day the following:
6 Big Macs
30 Hamburgers
40 Cheeseburgers
6 orders of large fries
6 Diet Cokes

The man was so heavy that his car leaned towards the driver's side. We had no way of knowing if he ate all that himself but even based on the drinks if that was for him and 6 friends the amount of food was INSANE! That also begs the question, how do they have the money for all this crap?

What is it with these types of anecdotes and Diet Coke? Whether it's something with absurd numbers like this or the whole "double big mac with super sized fries and a diet coke" thing.

[The Kernel]

There's a fairly obvious fallacy here. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat at all, I'm saying that you should not necessarily eat when you feel hungry. By analogy, I wouldn't be saying that teens should stop having sex at all, only that they shouldn't go out and fuck anything that makes them pop a boner/oozer. Given that most people manage to not go dry-humping the blonde in the mall food court just because she's got a nice pair of ta-tas would seem to indicate that restraining baser urges is not as impossible as you seem to think.

The blonde in the food court with the nice ta-tas isn't for sale for $4.95 with a side of the redhead with the banging ass for an extra $2.50.

I think this analogy has run its course.

[Terralthra]

There's a fairly obvious fallacy here. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat at all, I'm saying that you should not necessarily eat when you feel hungry. By analogy, I wouldn't be saying that teens should stop having sex at all, only that they shouldn't go out and fuck anything that makes them pop a boner/oozer. Given that most people manage to not go dry-humping the blonde in the mall food court just because she's got a nice pair of ta-tas would seem to indicate that restraining baser urges is not as impossible as you seem to think.

The blonde in the food court with the nice ta-tas isn't for sale for $4.95 with a side of the redhead with the banging ass for an extra $2.50.

I think this analogy has run its course.

You're the one that made the shitty analogy to sex, with a side order of fallacy. People refrain from having sex as often as they'd like all the time. Get the fuck over it. Eat less.

[The Kernel]

You're the one that made the shitty analogy to sex, with a side order of fallacy. People refrain from having sex as often as they'd like all the time. Get the fuck over it. Eat less.

I show you a series of studies that show dieting is not an effective treatment for obesity and your response is that it is because it is theoretically possible to eat less indefinitely for the rest of your life? Clearly you and the medical professionals in this country plus the insurance companies have a difference of opinion.

Here's a clue moron: simply showing that reducing caloric intake leads to weight loss does not make your argument.

[Terralthra]

You're more or less arguing that not doing cocaine isn't an effective treatment for cocaine abuse. Yes, it is. The fact that people simply are unwilling to stop doing cocaine because they are more interested in a moment's passing pleasure than their hearts not exploding (a closer analogy than most fat people would like to admit), is not an effective counter-argument. Here's how this goes:

OP: "Obesity is a problem."
Darth Wong: "Fat people should eat less. We should encourage this economically by taxing cheap junk food." (the proliferation of which is closely correlated with the obesity epidemic)
You: "Wahhh, it's too hard to eat less, we should all have our stomachs clamped instead."
Darth Wong, me, and everyone else with an ounce of self-con-fucking-trol: "Iron bands stapled around your organs are not a good substitute for self-control."
You: "But studies show people aren't good at self-control, especially since they've been inculcated into a culture of crash-dieting followed by a return to fat-fueled binge eating. Clearly diets don't work!"
Me: "Yes, they do, you just have to actually continue managing your food intake after you reach your target weight."
You: "Teenagers! Sex! Studies!"

We're not buying it. Here, how about this: instead of linking a PDF of a bunch of abstracts, find me a study done on people who undertook a diet, reached their target weight, and continued to meter their food intake rationally (as opposed to people who diet, lose weight, then decide to stop dieting, like all of the studies mentioned in your PDF focus on), and still gain back all the weight. Then we can have a discussion about it. Until then, we're just going to go around in this circle of you claiming diets don't work, and people with self-control pointing out that they do, if you aren't a weak-willed person that can't decide not to eat McDonald's when they are trying not to be fat. Saying "but people don't have good self-control" is not an effective answer to "people need more self-control."

I also agree with Darth Wong in regards to high taxes on junky food, though I do maintain that with some attention paid to calorie counts, it is possible (albeit more difficult) to lose weight on donuts, pizza, and steak. By the same token, in the amount of steak, pizza, and donuts you'd be eating to lose weight, even a 200% excise tax wouldn't break the bank for most people, and if it did, that's a great reason to eat carrots and oatmeal.

[Lusankya]

One thing that people might be forgetting is that even if it is difficult to lose weight by changing your diet, making unhealthy foods less affordable and encouraging healthy food will make it less easy for people to gain weight in the first place.

[Edi]

One thing that people might be forgetting is that even if it is difficult to lose weight by changing your diet, making unhealthy foods less affordable and encouraging healthy food will make it less easy for people to gain weight in the first place.

Exactly. It's surprisingly easy to make good, tasty, filling, healthy food with some pretty basic ingredients. All you need to do is look up a few recipes. My cooking skills used to be of a caliber that boiling clean water in a clean kettle resulted in clouds of black smoke and a charred smell, but these days I can do quite a few good dishes. And they tend to cost less than buying preprocessed junk too.

One example, all you need is lettuce, an orange, some olives and a bit of sun dried tomato (artichokes optional, but recommended), chop those up, mix them, add a dash of olive oil and white balsamic vinegar. Add some dried crushed herbs and dried chili (there's a specific mix of Italian spices that's perfect for this, I just forget the name) and that's it. You can have a pretty big heap of that with e.g. steak, in place of the normal French fries or other heavy potato dish or whatever and it'll be a lot less calories and lot more vitamins etc. It'll also feel like a full meal, because there is a substantial amount of stuff for our stomach to digest.

So if you put a big tax on junk food and certain kinds of preprocessed crap while simultaneously promoting fresh ingredients, it would probably have an effect.

[PeZook]

One example, all you need is lettuce, an orange, some olives and a bit of sun dried tomato (artichokes optional, but recommended), chop those up, mix them, add a dash of olive oil and white balsamic vinegar. Add some dried crushed herbs and dried chili (there's a specific mix of Italian spices that's perfect for this, I just forget the name) and that's it. You can have a pretty big heap of that with e.g. steak, in place of the normal French fries or other heavy potato dish or whatever and it'll be a lot less calories and lot more vitamins etc. It'll also feel like a full meal, because there is a substantial amount of stuff for our stomach to digest.

Oh, man, I'm glad somebody finally wrote this: with a short analysis and quick substitution, you can cut your caloric intake by a significant margin while eating 'till you're full.

Me and my wife decided to preventively change our eating habits, and we simply cut out all sweets, chips and junk foods and replaced a side dish of rice, potatoes or fries that we used to eat with every dinner with an added heaping of salad. We replaced soda with diet soda and water, tea sugar with sweetener and/or green tea, cut out fruit juices altogether, cut out butter from sandwitches and cooking.

Net result? We are still nice and full after every meal, and keeping weight easily under control. Hell, there are times when our self-control fails (or we don't feel like cooking so we eat out) and we indulge in a bit of junk food (mmm, mom's holiday cake...), which only results in us not getting thinner for a bit, rather than getting fat.

Best thing? It's so un-demanding that we'll be able to keep it up indefinitely. Hell, it's far cheaper to buy an extra head of lettuce and two tomatoes than added fries or potatoes or rice (about an order of magnitude cheaper, in fact). You can also make varied salads with the same ingredients, so they don't get stale. Hell, we could go one further: currently, we eat a serving of chicken or beef with every dinner because it's easier logistically. With some more effort, we could have one or two days a week with no meat at all, we just don't feel like it.

It doesn't take much to cut out the worst parts of your diet, really. Just a bit of thought, observation and minimal effort (the vegetables are not that far from the potato chips in the supermarket, after all).

[His Divine Shadow]

This thread reminds me that after work today I have several engagements that'll keep me busy until 20:00 atleast, it sure is tempting to go buy a pizza instead of preparing food... I also have problems seeing how I can cut down on carbs, I make lots of pasta based food because it is easy to make in large quantities and then to freeze. So I can take it to work for lunch.

[PainRack]

We're not buying it. Here, how about this: instead of linking a PDF of a bunch of abstracts, find me a study done on people who undertook a diet, reached their target weight, and continued to meter their food intake rationally (as opposed to people who diet, lose weight, then decide to stop dieting, like all of the studies mentioned in your PDF focus on), and still gain back all the weight. Then we can have a discussion about it. Until then, we're just going to go around in this circle of you claiming diets don't work, and people with self-control pointing out that they do, if you aren't a weak-willed person that can't decide not to eat McDonald's when they are trying not to be fat. Saying "but people don't have good self-control" is not an effective answer to "people need more self-control."

That's misleading. The studies show that people are having difficulties sticking to diets and dieting plan, and this includes weight loss workshops. Using dieting as a tool alone simply isn't effective.
Note that the alternative isn't what Kernel is suggesting, but rather, the suggested solution here. Environmental and social manipulation while still offering health advice and plans to change. That's exactly what we did for smoking afterall.

I also agree with Darth Wong in regards to high taxes on junky food, though I do maintain that with some attention paid to calorie counts, it is possible (albeit more difficult) to lose weight on donuts, pizza, and steak. By the same token, in the amount of steak, pizza, and donuts you'd be eating to lose weight, even a 200% excise tax wouldn't break the bank for most people, and if it did, that's a great reason to eat carrots and oatmeal.

To be fair, I would rather target the tax on producers rather than consumers. It makes more intuitive sense to make economic changes, orientating retailers to sell more fresh and healthful foods than conditioning consumers to change their purchasing habits.

[PainRack]

It doesn't take much to cut out the worst parts of your diet, really. Just a bit of thought, observation and minimal effort (the vegetables are not that far from the potato chips in the supermarket, after all).

To be fair, there are economic barriers. The zipcode effect in the US is shown in that neighbourhood stores don't store fresh produce and veggies, so, poorer families unable to invest the time or the gasoline to drive to the supermarket purchase poorer quality food.

[PeZook]

To be fair, there are economic barriers. The zipcode effect in the US is shown in that neighbourhood stores don't store fresh produce and veggies, so, poorer families unable to invest the time or the gasoline to drive to the supermarket purchase poorer quality food.

Seriously? I've never seen a corner store without veggies here. Then again, our entire country can be comfortably fit inside Texas

[Oskuro]

Well, from what I read on a nutrition special on SciAm, junk food being dirt cheap is the reason why there's so much obesity in underdeveloped countries. Poor people eat junk food, thus they end up being poor and fat.

[wolveraptor]

Also, while I don't buy the argument that food costs force poor people to eat cheap junk food, I think it makes sense that greatly increased junk food costs would tend to reduce their consumption of the product.

Of course not. Hell, it should be self-evident that food you payed a frycook to prepare should cost more than food that you have to prepare. But has anyone actually made this claim? What I've read is that people in poorer neighborhoods tend not to have access to grocery stores - the closest thing they get are those 7/11-type joints, which rarely stock many healthy options. That, combined with inadequate healthcare, is said to be the greatest contributor to obesity among lower socioeconomic classes. So really, the problem is availability, not cost.

[Darth Wong]

Also, while I don't buy the argument that food costs force poor people to eat cheap junk food, I think it makes sense that greatly increased junk food costs would tend to reduce their consumption of the product.

Of course not. Hell, it should be self-evident that food you payed a frycook to prepare should cost more than food that you have to prepare. But has anyone actually made this claim? What I've read is that people in poorer neighborhoods tend not to have access to grocery stores - the closest thing they get are those 7/11-type joints, which rarely stock many healthy options. That, combined with inadequate healthcare, is said to be the greatest contributor to obesity among lower socioeconomic classes. So really, the problem is availability, not cost.

Availability is directly liked to the collective ignorance and stupidity of poor people. Small neighbourhood grocers in poor neighbourhoods stock garbage because that's what their customers tend to buy. In other neighbourhoods, you can walk into a tiny "hole in the wall" store and it will have fresh produce. Hell, in Chinatown in Toronto there are plenty of tiny cheap-ass stores which only sell fresh produce, and that area is well within walking distance of low-income neighbourhoods.

There's a "chicken and egg" effect here. Poor people buy crap because they're quite frankly too stupid and ignorant to know any better. Their local grocers primarily sell crap because that's what their customers are buying. People then make excuses for the idiots by saying that they can't find good food, as if they were even looking for it.

Besides, it's not that hard to shop for groceries outside a two block radius from your house, if you think it's important. The problem is that these people don't know what they need to know.

[PainRack]

Seriously? I've never seen a corner store without veggies here. Then again, our entire country can be comfortably fit inside Texas

The US is...... unique. Apparently, its actually cheaper to store and sell such junk food as compared to fresh. Makes sense, you don't need daily distribution networks, you don't need to throw away unsold produce and just keep it longer on the shelves.
Also, there's that whole subsidise corn syrup and meat going on, so retailers find it cheaper to add "value" by increasing sugar and fat content.

There's a "chicken and egg" effect here. Poor people buy crap because they're quite frankly too stupid and ignorant to know any better. Their local grocers primarily sell crap because that's what their customers are buying. People then make excuses for the idiots by saying that they can't find good food, as if they were even looking for it.

Besides, it's not that hard to shop for groceries outside a two block radius from your house, if you think it's important. The problem is that these people don't know what they need to know.

Hence, the need for environmental and social engineering to cause said grocers to actually sell healthful food.

[defanatic]

I agree with both sides of the argument, to some extent!

I don't believe that getting on a podium and telling people "Eat less, exercise more, get some self-control" would work on any large scale, whether or not it worked for particular individuals (for instance, my flatmate, who was 110, and now is 90 and relatively stable it seems, anecdotes hoorah!).

However, I do believe that the problem is self-control on most people's part. Maybe some sort of... I dunno. Propaganda sort of thing.

Why do I feel the need to post while tired?

[Simon_Jester]

We're not buying it. Here, how about this: instead of linking a PDF of a bunch of abstracts, find me a study done on people who undertook a diet, reached their target weight, and continued to meter their food intake rationally (as opposed to people who diet, lose weight, then decide to stop dieting, like all of the studies mentioned in your PDF focus on), and still gain back all the weight. Then we can have a discussion about it. Until then, we're just going to go around in this circle of you claiming diets don't work, and people with self-control pointing out that they do, if you aren't a weak-willed person that can't decide not to eat McDonald's when they are trying not to be fat. Saying "but people don't have good self-control" is not an effective answer to "people need more self-control."

Thing is, if a large fraction of all dieters turn out to be "weak-willed..." at what point does the argument stop being "fat people are weak-willed" and become "people are weak-willed?" Maybe losing weight you're accustomed to having on actually isn't easy.

That obviously doesn't mean no one can do it, but trying to make policy decisions on the expectation that people will do it is idiotic. Like eliminating rehab programs because if someone's got a cocaine addiction, they should just stop doing cocaine, and their problem will be solved. It's technically true: any person can quit using cocaine cold turkey and eventually their addiction will go away. It's physically possible. Good luck getting it to happen, though; most of the actual addicts will end up deciding they want their immediate short-term fix more than they want their long term goal of not being a crackhead.

And if you actually care not just about the goal of punishing crackheads for being crackheads, but about the public health consequence of having crackheads around, that's a problem. Relying on an ineffective way to make people who are addicted to self-destructive behavior stop doing it is stupid. Disdaining methods that they can use to bypass their own inability to make themselves stop (like clamping off part of their stomach) is similarly stupid.

Of course, you can still boast "quitting worked fine for me, get some willpower, crackhead/fattie" all you like, but at that point you're just gratifying yourself. You're not contributing anything to a policy discussion.
________

In this case, I think a tax on junk food would be a good idea, because it's a rare case where the government could actually make money from trying to stop people from doing something foolish, instead of having to spend money on it (as they do with rehab programs).

[Master of Ossus]

To be fair, there are economic barriers. The zipcode effect in the US is shown in that neighbourhood stores don't store fresh produce and veggies, so, poorer families unable to invest the time or the gasoline to drive to the supermarket purchase poorer quality food.

Thing is, if there were a hefty tax on junk food then even neighborhood stores would be encouraged to stock produce and vegetables, and poorer families would be more willing to drive to supermarkets as an alternative. There's a behavioral response on both sides of retail, and you're ignoring the effect it would have on suppliers.

That said, I don't know why a tax on junk food is more desirable than simply taxing obese people. With cigarettes it worked because there was a 1:1 relationship between tobacco and tobacco-related health problems. Here, I'm not convinced of that. Ordering salads is generally a good way to reduce calories, for example, but not when your salad consists of 85% Caesar dressing, by volume. Do you tax the dressing? That would be fine if people were preparing their foods on their own, but it's not really workable in restaurants. And what of foods, like cheese or avocados, that virtually everyone acknowledges are healthy when consumed in rational quantities but not when they constitute a substantial fraction of one's diet? I think the problem is that the morbidly obese aren't bearing the cost of their obesity. Health insurance in the US, largely for tax reasons, is very commonly provided by the employer to all of their employees, but this creates strange incentives in the area of obesity because employers don't tend to avoid hiring obese people, even though they have to pay higher health insurance costs for them. Thus, I think they could garnish peoples' pay for the difference in rates if they're obese. Further, when I go to an airport, they measure my bags to make sure they weigh less than whatever their limit is, and would charge me if they were too heavy. They never weigh ME along with my bags, to see how much I weigh, even though my weight presumably affects their costs almost as much as my bags do.