Overweight and healthy is a big fat lie, obesity study finds

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/overweight-and-healthy-is-a-big-fat-lie-obesity-study-finds-pqc3bzjz7

by elorant • 5 years ago

199 194 5 years ago

thetimes.co.uk

mk81• 5 years ago

Didn't need a study to know this

naringas• 5 years ago

and no amount of studies will get this into the heads of those who need to accept it

callamdelaney• 5 years ago

Indeed, this is stating the obvious. If you are an active fat person, you are still a fat person - which is the important point.

xibalba2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, we do. There is a movement dubbed HAES which purports "health at any size".

SamoyedFurFluff• 5 years ago

Please correct me but I always thought HAES meant “you can choose healthy choices no matter your size”, presumably because past a certain point fat people might be like ‘fuck it no point in trying to be better’.

mumblemumble• 5 years ago

I wonder if the two can't be reconciled. It's probably ideal, from a health perspective, to avoid developing things like metabolic in the first place. But has it been demonstrated that, once you're already there, living the kind of aggressively orthorexic lifestyle it takes to get down to an ostensibly healthy weight does more good than harm?

Even without that, though, I'm sympathetic to HAES because it seems quite likely that, even if absolutely nothing else, focusing on body weight rather than lifestyle factors ultimately does more to discourage than encourage making healthier choices.

nvr2192• 5 years ago

I do like the focus on health rather than weight though, I think that's valuable.

bzb6• 5 years ago

There are many stupid movements. Do you think you’ll change the opinions of anybody with a study? Especially when the solution is losing weight

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

The loons that say "healthy at any size" beg to differ unfortunately. It's just a coping mechanism.

kevbin• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP4IyBal1xg

sasij• 5 years ago

I'd like to agree, but when this was a major magazine front page this month, I don't think I can.https://i.imgur.com/0kQQMcS.png

I personally know too many people who believe this shit. You can't say anything about it though or you're called scum and toxic. That too is healthy to them.

jmercouris• 5 years ago

Is anyone possibly surprised by this?

cosmodisk• 5 years ago

Probably not,but more often than not, there's a bizzare trend to normalise it. Fat becomes plus size, Obese becomes big bones and etc. I've gone bananas with my weight and to be honest it's pretty scary how normalised it is. Nobody really tells you that you are fat and it's time to drop some.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

No there is a movement to increase tolerance so fat people aren't treated like pariahs which is perfectly legitimate pursuit. What is the societal value of acting like a fat person is less valuable than you are? Like it or not it is pretty normal in the USA and a lot of western countries and people need to learn to be tolerant rather than feeling superior because they're at a healthier weight. It can hurt a person as much as racism, ageism, or any number of other improper and unfounded isms.

aaomidi9• 5 years ago

Nobody really tells you that you are fat and it's time to drop some.

Literally everyone does. I don't know what world you live in. If you're obese its the ONLY thing you hear your doctor say. This has caused hundreds of missed diagnosis for serious issues because it's just "lose some weight".

Thanks. I'm trying. It's not working. And now you've missed an issue that's going to end up being life threatening for me.

chrisseaton7• 5 years ago

The Army Sergeant Major of the British Army is 'overweight', for example. The idea that he's unhealthy is an absolute joke. He's done an interview about this.

switchbak• 5 years ago

The BMI is radically oversimplified. I don't think any professional is surprised that well built athletic people fall outside the target audience for that metric.

It really is just a ratio of weight to height, after all. Of course that's going to have its limitations.

neartheplain• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, yes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

When I went to see "Body worlds", and saw the comparison between an obese person and a non-obese person, you can tell immediately how unhealthy being obese is.

deeviant• 5 years ago

Anybody have an actual link to the study? The article is pay-walled.

chronial2• 5 years ago

Here's a non-paywalled article https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases... and it has a link to the study: https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

5555624• 5 years ago

You can bypass the Times paywall by adding a '/' to the end of the url

perardi5• 5 years ago

Does anyone have a link to the actual study? Whatever study they’re referencing is behind the story’s paywall.

I ask because newspaper summaries of nutrition and exercise research studies are, to put it generously, utter horseshit.

hntrader4• 5 years ago

I prefer to refer to it as metabolic syndrome rather than obesity (even though they're not strictly identical) just to reinforce the point that it's going to likely lead to early mortality if left untreated.

o_p• 5 years ago

Thats incorrect because theres no problem with their metabolism at all, you are eating too much and your body stores it as fat, working as intended.

graeme7• 5 years ago

Metabolic syndrome is the medical name of a disease. It doesn’t mean “slow metabolism”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome

cuddlybacon2• 5 years ago

That's actually not working as intended. There is a part of the brain that is supposed to monitor body fat percentage and suppress hunger and encourage physical activity in order to get body fat to lower again.

This book[0] goes through how the metabolic system works, how it is supposed to self regulate, and how it can miss-regulate. It also talks about what it is about our food since the late 1970's that has changed to cause this to happen more frequently.

[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ove...

EDIT: I want to add a bit. This book goes through how the metabolic system of humans is supposed to work, and it can get technical at times. It also goes over the specific traits that certain foods have that can be problematic, which gives enough info to make a self-improved diet. It backs up everything it can with specific citations of scientific experiments.

NikolaeVarius5• 5 years ago

Its obesity. Caused by eating too much and probably minimal to no physical activity

dathinab6• 5 years ago

Caused by eating too much and probably minimal to no physical activity

Very often actually it's unrelated to eating to much and doing no physical activity (at least wrt. most obese people I ended up knowing, context: Germany/Berlin).

Most obese people I ended up knowing did had a rather controlled diet and did more sport/physical activity then your average person.

So why where they obese? Some combination of:

- They had problems with their metabolism, potential had to take medicament too.

- In their childhood they ended up getting fat due to a varity of aspects and even with strict diet and sport had a hard time of losing their weight (once you where fat enough for long enough time your body gets used to it and as such is much much more prone to add fat to your body when you eat etc.)

- there are other reasons too for other people but not people I did know close enough.

Either-way I don't know about the US but in Germany/Berlin "minimal to no physical activity" is not often the case and neither is missing discipline or laziness.

For many obese people telling them to just do more sport and eat proper is like telling a depressed person to just stand up in the morning and go out or a person with social anxiety to just leave the house. I.e. impolite, discriminatory, mean and far of reality.

dgudkov2• 5 years ago

Caused by eating too much and probably minimal to no physical activity.

Eating too much is probably true. Healthy natural food though doesn't make you want to eat often or too much. People eat too much because they eat highly processed food with lots of sugar, salt, and artificial flavoring. Unfortunately, eating good food in North America is not possible without making a special effort. Learning how to cook is part of this effort.

strken2• 5 years ago

Anyone got a link to the specific study in question? The author has 775 publications on researchgate and I haven't a clue which one this article is referring to.

chronial2• 5 years ago

I think it's this one: https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

graeme7• 5 years ago

I got curious about this once and looked up the life expectancy of sumo wrestlers. It anyone is “fit but fat” it would be them.

They have very high bmi’s, ~35. But they’re just barely obese by body fat, about 26%. Result is a life expectancy of 60-65, more than ten years shorter than the Japanese male.

“ The negative health effects of the sumo lifestyle can become apparent later in life. Sumo wrestlers have a life expectancy between 60 and 65, more than 10 years shorter than the average Japanese male, as the diet and sport take a toll on the wrestler's body. Many develop type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure, and they are prone to heart attacks due to the enormous amount of body mass and fat that they accumulate. The excessive intake of alcohol can lead to liver problems and the stress on their joints due to their excess weight can cause arthritis. Recently, the standards of weight gain are becoming less strict, in an effort to improve the overall health of the wrestlers.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo

Source on bmi: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10195655/

Note: wiki’s own quote is not well sourced, but there were some paper noting short lifespan. This is the main one cited, but it is in japanese. If anyone wants to track down the actual life expectancy, let me know.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjh1946/50/3/50_3_730/_...

This one in English discusses bmi as a risk factor for sumo but doesn’t give an age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3761530/#!po=50...

mrfusion2• 5 years ago

I’m confused how they have 26% body fat. That’s not all that much. Are you saying they are mostly muscle?

nvr2192• 5 years ago

Yep.

bagacrap5• 5 years ago

yeah it's surprising. But keep in mind they weigh at least twice a normal man, so they have about 4x the total fat of a healthy adult male (12% being close to what I consider ideal).

bazooka_penguin• 5 years ago

It's still overweight. For men the mid to high 10s is considered healthy.

mrfusion2• 5 years ago

As a corralary has anyone researched the longevity of bodybuilders?

You’d think entering old age with a large surplus of muscle could be beneficial.

graeme7• 5 years ago

At the same time I looked into life expectancy of olympic athletes. Iirc it was higher across the board, but powerlifters had a lower boost compared to runners.

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/at...

Edit: Fixed typo thanks. Also note that bodybuilders on steroids may not fall into the same group. One report found higher mortality below 50 this group.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

Powerlifters or weightlifters might be better because they don't cut to <5% body fat and steroid use is less common.

reader_mode• 5 years ago

Having your cardiovascular and endocrine system taxed by steroids is going to be shit for longevity.

I think from what I've seen in media restricting calories seems beneficial to longevity so bulking and packing muscle mass probably "burns you out" even without steroids.

Having said that I'd rather trade 10 years of the tail end of my life for being jacked and rested in my prime years (testosterone does wonders for energy and recovery), especially compared to being a fat slob.

m4632• 5 years ago

I thought the olympics would not entertain any sort of event with bodybuilders because they were extremely unhealthy.

(this is different than weightlifting)

perardi5• 5 years ago

I don’t think professional athletes are a good population sample to map onto the general population. Athletes are highly incentivized to burn bright and flare out.

Take NFL players. Yes, an obviously aggressive sport that lends itself to short careers…but even then, the average stint is 3.3 years. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/240102/average-player-ca...) You will do anything, no matter how deleterious, to keep yourself in the game, damn the consequences. And by anything, I mean a steady diet of uppers, downers, and steroids.

graeme7• 5 years ago

I replied to another comment to say that olympic athletes actually live longer than average.

NFl players aren’t a great example. That much traumatic brain injury is seriously harmful to health. Among olympic athletes, those in contact sports did less well.

You do have a point as sumo is grueling and involves contact, but you wouldn’t expect hard playing to take off that much life expectancy all on its own. Sumo wrestlers surely lose some from adiposity.

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/at...

chongli• 5 years ago

NFL players have another major issue that greatly shortens lifespans: CTE [1]. I wonder how much sumo wrestlers are affected by it. I could imagine it also being a problem due to the powerful impacts from their heavy bodies slamming against each other.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-traum...

jhowell• 5 years ago

If I recall correctly the same is not true for professional cyclists [1], a sport with a rich doping history. They seem to live longer than the general population. I believe this is related to the impact on the body versus steroids.

1. https://www.cyclingweekly.com/fitness/cyclists-live-longer-a...

jimbob45• 5 years ago

Yeah, for anyone who doesn’t know, everyone in the NFL is on HGH. Their tests are inadequate and they didn’t even test for it whatsoever until 2010.

Even better, if you know you’re going to be injured, you can just take PEDs and laugh right on through your suspension since you weren’t going to be playing anyway (see: Edelman, Branch, others).

kikokikokiko2• 5 years ago

I'm a sumo fan, and when you think about the daily routine these guys endure it's really amazing that even then it can't overcome their diet. They wake up at 5am, train for 5 hours in the morning, perform the domestic chores that the stable needs them to do, then come back in the afternoon for more 4 hours of training. E-VE-RY day. Other than some rare off season oportunities only the top wrestlers can get, that is it. And they still become diabetic and develop heart disease. There's no escape, other than having amazing genetics, if you eat like a pig, you die like one.

xnx• 5 years ago

I've also heard it phrased as: You'll never outrun your fork.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

Of course BMI doesn't work for body builders. However only like 1% of the population work out enough to have muscle mass vs fat mass to actually make BMI "worthless" as so many people say. BMI is an "ok" way of determining if you're obese or not with 95-99% of the population. (at least in the USA). Lots of people just don't want to admit they're fat.

dogma1138• 5 years ago

BMI works for body builders too, if you carrying 50kg> extra the body doesn’t care as much if it’s fat or muscle your heart still needs to support that body mass.

BMI for people with very high body mass and low fat percentage can be adjusted slightly usually within 10-15% but if you are morbidly obese it’s going to be a problem either way.

Going down from 96kg to 78kg while gaining some body fat from 9-10% to 12-13% reduced my RHR by about 10-15bpm.

And that initial mass gain was just with a decade of exercise not the gain and shred cycles that body builders are going through not to mention the extra “vitamins” they tend take...

cavisne2• 5 years ago

A good example of why BMI is actually a good indicator. Its a bit of a meme that when you weightlift BMI is inaccurate, but all excess body mass is somewhat unhealthy. Even most people who lift weights are too fat.

thesz3• 5 years ago

These weightlifters below all-inclusive weight category are pretty much not too fat. Look at deadlift records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zxXQhSvGKY

Upwards 140 kg, there are fat people, but even Konstantinov (below 140kg)is not fat.

Take look at him doing 55 pullups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boLl8rGhJvE

The "most people who lift weights is fat" myth comes from watching too much competition in open-ended weight category (which, for weightlifting, starts at 109kg, I believe).

dnhz• 5 years ago

Sort of riffing on this subject, since rikishi are nearly all Asian: Asians are more vulnerable to diabetes than people of other ethnicities. Health authorities have recommended screening Asians with a BMI above 23 for diabetes. BMI, of course, is purely a function of weight and height.

limiting screening at BMI ≥25 kg/m2 would miss 36% of Asian Americans with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. In the same study, Araneta et al. (39) found that screening Asian Americans at a BMI cut point of ≥23.5 kg/m2 identified approximately 80% of those with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. Among Japanese Americans, lowering the BMI screening cut point to ≥22.8 kg/m2 achieved 80% sensitivity.

https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/38/1/150

https://aadi.joslin.org/en/am-i-at-risk/asian-bmi-calculator

senectus1• 5 years ago

my scales say i'm in the healthy rang for BMI, but unhealthy for fat and too much muscle mass...

i can tell you i have a desk job and do NOT have too much muscle :-P

tzs• 5 years ago

How the fat is distributed is more important than how much there is. In sumo wrestlers almost all their excess fat is subcutaneous fat rather than visceral fat.

Subcutaneous fat is much less harmful than visceral fat.

There was a fair bit about this and sumo wrestlers on the excellent Nova episode "The Truth About Fat" last year [1]. Fat is much more complicated than most people realize, as is long term weight loss. It looks like the episode is available for free streaming [2] until the end of the month. It's worth it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/video/the-truth-about-fat-xnqm4i/

[2] PBS shows go in and out of free streaming. They can usually be streamed for free for about a month after they first air, then most of them become restricted to people who donate to their local PBS station. The restricted ones do pop back to free streaming for a while now and then, and certain episodes become free for years.

m4632• 5 years ago

I remember someone telling me that as soon as sumo wrestlers stop wrestling, they immediately get diabetes.

david_allison3• 5 years ago

Source:

Joint association of physical activity and body mass index with cardiovascular risk: a nationwide population-based cross-sectional study

https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaa151

bagacrap5• 5 years ago

right off the bat I'm suspicious of the methodology, since it seems that active obese people are more likely to develop high cholesterol than less active obese people (doesn't pass the sniff test).

More importantly, I don't think the "active" category is sufficiently discerning, ie it's a pretty low bar to exercise 150 minutes in a week. I know several hardcore endurance athletes who are likely overweight if not obese, who exercise obsessively and achieve those weekly exercise figures every day. If anyone was "fat but fit" it would be them, but this study doesn't measure that kind of person.

twelvechairs• 5 years ago

This should be the top link not a paywalled times article.

The chart below is pretty clear as to their findings if anyone wants the summary.

https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/225496940/zwaa151...

geofft3• 5 years ago

Here's a (non-paywalled) press release from the journal: https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases...

The researchers investigated the associations between each BMI and activity group and the three risk factors. At all BMI levels, any activity (whether it met the WHO minimum or not) was linked with a lower likelihood of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol compared to no exercise at all. Dr. Lucia said: “This tells us that everyone, irrespective of their body weight, should be physically active to safeguard their health.”
However, overweight and obese participants were at greater cardiovascular risk than their peers with normal weight, irrespective of activity levels. As an example, compared to inactive normal weight individuals, active obese people were approximately twice as likely to have high cholesterol, four times more likely to have diabetes, and five times more likely to have high blood pressure. Dr. Lucia said: “Exercise does not seem to compensate for the negative effects of excess weight. This finding was also observed overall in both men and women when they were analysed separately.”
He concluded: “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles.”

I don't totally follow the establishment of causation here - in particular, it would seem to me like the arrow of causation is likely to go from diabetes to inability to lose weight, instead of vice versa? That is, equally active people with diabetes probably weigh more than people without, and the underlying cause is not their weight, it's their diabetes. So the conclusion in the press release that they should lose weight to get rid of their diabetes doesn't obviously make sense to me.

dathinab6• 5 years ago

I find it problematic how they turn overweight != healthy into chubby != healthy. Sure we all know (I think) that over- (or worse under-wight) is not health. But a obsession with forcefully trying to gain a specific wight can easily be much less health then being slightly overweight.

NikolaeVarius5• 5 years ago

I fail to see how in any world underweight is worse unless its a baby.

This is coping, losing weight to a target healthy weight is always good,

chrisseaton7• 5 years ago

For many healthy people, losing weight to reach a government ideal of 'healthy' means dropping useful muscle mass. Which is not good.

fullstop• 5 years ago

I was denied life insurance once because I was underweight. Maybe, statistically, it's true.

I have since gained weight and now have life insurance.

perardi5• 5 years ago

Wow, no, stunningly wrong.

Being underweight is highly correlated with poor health outcomes in seniors. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16886095/) Obesity is obviously bad there, but being underweight is just as dangerous.

geomark2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if the thresholds for being "overweight" and "underweight" have changed over time? I mean, with so many people getting heavier and heavier has the standard crept up so that "underweight" isn't even skinny anymore?

kikokikokiko2• 5 years ago

In fact being slightly underweight is one of the only sure ways to increase your life expectancy. Restrictive calories diet.

tw043• 5 years ago

You don't really need to be obsessed though, you just need to be willing to commit to an appropriate caloric intake. You might need to look at boxes for a while to see how many calories are in your favorite foods, and you might even need to cut some of them out, but after a month or two you just kind of know what you can and can't eat, no unhealthy obsession required.

readme3• 5 years ago

Calories, although the simplicity of the thermodynamics analogy seems simple are not the only factor at play here.

The basic reason is that your body can increase or decreased its energy expenditure drastically in response to increased or decrease consumption of calories.

I'm reading The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung right now and he presents a very strong argument that the cause of obesity is insulin resistance.

In the book he cites both overfeeding studies where subjects were fed very large numbers of calories but did not gain weight, as well underfeeding studies where subjects ate only 500 calories a day but didn't lose weight.

After reading this I'm pretty damn convinced that the diet problems facing us are: highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and sugar substitutes, and alcohol (I haven't come across this in his work, but if you look at the stuff by Dr. Lustig you'll see sugar and alcohol are incredibly similar metabolically)

Think about this: for most of human history we did not count calories and yet we were not obese.

It's the highly processed western diet of breads, cakes, cereals, soda, etc that are the culprit.

coldtea2• 5 years ago

Sure we all know (I think) that over- (or worse under-wight) is not health.

Anorexic is not healthy. Underweight within reason is. In fact the best way we currently know to live more is to eat much less...

https://gizmodo.com/how-living-near-the-starvation-point-can...

cuddlybacon2• 5 years ago

I think there are a few parts that are more problematic:

* Most layman diet advice is awful. There is scientifically backed advice. I think most people could understand it. It seems to not be common knowledge.

* A lot of people "backseat drive" other people's diets. Since most people carry awful advice, this is extremely unhelpful in practice.

* Some people have a crab bucket mentality towards others losing weight, and almost go out of their way to sabotage.

aaomidi9• 5 years ago

Honestly this is more of a systemic failure than an individual failure.

It's extremely hard to eat and live healthy. It's getting harder every day. Why are low sugar alternatives to basic snacks (e.g. Keto friendly) like 3-10x more expensive?

Why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it? Why don't we have cheap and healthy fast food that seems to be common in so many other countries?

We could solve this problem if we actually subsidized and demanded better food standards. If we helped people make the right choices. But hey, we decided that fat is the enemy and everyone should have hundreds of grams of carbs per day.

When I lived in Iran it was so much easier to maintain a proper weight. After moving to the US it's become extremely difficult. I'm still the same person. But what's available to me has changed immensely.

atom_arranger2• 5 years ago

Sometimes the amount of sugar is also completely unnecessary.

Heinz sells ketchup without added sugar and it tastes almost exactly the same as normal, or even slightly better, half the calories though.

aaomidi9• 5 years ago

Yep. And also usually more expensive. I can't understand, I'm paying more for less.

I didn't belive this before but we need a sugar tax. We also need to have strict dietary guidelines on how much sugar is acceptable per gram of food.

projektfu4• 5 years ago

It is sweetened with sucralose. Presumably they wouldn't have been able to market a sugar-free version without sugar substitutes.

thinkingemote• 5 years ago

I've found sauces tend to be more vinegary, at least low fat salad sauces. Salt should also be looked out for too.

alacombe2• 5 years ago

Why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it?

Taste, mainly, because all the fat has been removed.

JMTQp8lwXL2• 5 years ago

Sugar substitutes like Monk Fruit Extract aren't as widely produced. (There are other sugar substitutes, but among all of them, Monk Fruit is king: it tastes most like sugar and it is the least likely to cause digestive issues). If they were more popular, perhaps efficiency at scale would drive down prices. Also, carbs tend to be more shelf-stable than proteins and fats (though, beef sticks and nuts are solid exceptions to this generalization). But a long shelf life can help decrease the cost-- which is the case with staple grains like wheat and rice.

bagacrap5• 5 years ago

meh, I think this rant is a little dated. The FDA recently started requiring an "added sugars" line item on nutrition labels, which is a step in the right direction. In my city there's now a tax on sugary drinks. People have never had more options for what to eat and drink, however we (Americans) don't live in a nanny state, thankfully, and some people will make choices that you consider unwise.

To your last point, I live in the US and have a healthy diet and lifestyle and waistline. So don't be so quick to blame your environment.

aaomidi9• 5 years ago

Good for you.

itake• 5 years ago

I live in the US and I have a healthy diet and lifestyle but I definitely spend 3-10 times more than most of my friends that don’t on food and exercising

cripblip• 5 years ago

I used to drink Dr Pepper 10 instead of regular, it was almost identical, how existing full sugar soda is considered normal blows my mind . Would you drink a cup of coffee with 10+ sugars? Alas it is very difficult to find now.

xwdv• 5 years ago

It’s not hard to eat healthy at all. People are just nutritionally illiterate, and that makes it difficult for them to build proper meals.

The typical person has no idea how big a meal should be to obtain the right quantities of nutrients, because they’ve never bothered to weigh their food. They also have no idea what their daily macro nutrient goals should be.

spfzero• 5 years ago

Its not all on the people though, there are many forces bent on keeping people nutritionally illiterate. Low fat, cholesterol, its all been found to be, at the most charitable, completely wrong. When I grew up, my Mom made sure we ate “healthy” cereal for breakfast instead of eggs. She wasn’t illiterate, she was following the “literacy” of the day.

joshuamcginnis• 5 years ago

One reason for this is that corn subsidies have created an excess supply of corn-based food derivatives (e.g. corn syrup) for years, driving down costs and creating an incentive to use cheap corn-based ingredients across the entire food supply.

JMTQp8lwXL2• 5 years ago

Farming subsidies were originally created in the aftermath of the Great Depression. While they have their place, we probably over-subsidize today. Given the choices of widespread obesity or widespread starvation, I'd choose the former.

xiphias22• 5 years ago

It seems like you made a choice that lowers your life standard. If you want lots of money while living healthy, move to Switzerland. But of course there are many other options.

projektfu4• 5 years ago

I'm imagining the Swiss watching in horror as a caravan of thousands of obese American refugees arrives at their frontier...

geofft3• 5 years ago

I mean, if they're gay, moving to the US from Iran probably did not lower their life expectancy.

But more generally - we can't ask everyone in the US to move out of the country, can we? So it seems worth figuring out how to get the US to be healthier.

(And in any case, the linked study happened in Spain.)

cavisne2• 5 years ago

Lots of deli meat + wrap or 2 slices of bread + lots of lettuce.

A cheap, portable meal/snack that removes the need for fast food or "Keto snacks". Enough protein and fibre to fill you up.

Eating low calorie is not expensive, it's just not very exciting.

Until recently you could also get something like this at mcdonalds (grilled chicken burger or wrap).

Added sugar is not good, but fat free products are a great choice for dieters who want more variety. You get the same volume of food with a similar taste for much less calories.

smelter• 5 years ago

Back in the day when we were running around the Savannah foraging, fat and grease would have evolved taste buds to prefer these inputs since they are such concentrated energy sources.

Fast food takes advantage of this, and it would not be too much of an issue if not for preservatives (find a French fry under your car seat from 5 years ago and it looks the same as it did the day you bought it - we should want to eat things that will rot within a week of room temperature).

I sop up all the grease of my homemade dishes ( "Food what nearly all people eat, to me it is harmful and dangerous. Sometimes I visualize that chefs in the world are all in conspiracy against me …" Nikola Tesla thought chefs were conspiring against him [1]) because I refuse to let anything to go to waste, and I welcome all the energy I can get (fuel for the tractor). I also do not clean dishes after every meal (blender included) because I want to see what nature can throw at me tomorrow. So far so good, although my stool once smelt like sulfur after cooking with boiled/stored creek water - duckduckgo tells me giardiasis, waterborne pathogen, which my gut promptly destroyed after one digestive cycle (well rehearsed and diversified, daily probiotic reinforcements).

At this point I have an iron stomach, and I was inspired by quite the lean healthy "homeless" girl I met who was eating out of dumpsters. I refused to partake in the dripping salad offering she presented me, but I could understand that because of this lifestyle - she would be far less of a liability to the healthcare system. Meanwhile, the "housed" people are stuffing themselves with their Precious TV Dinners (Tom Green, Stealing Harvard), sanitizing every surface they can think of, and finding it acceptable and even preferable to sit in their favorite chair with their "free" time to fawn over streaming media that depicts other people living their lives.

We want to blame it on the food, but the propaganda on phones and public wall-mounted screens is orchestrated by those who themselves are fearful of the world around them. The ones that follow suite are going to acquire a gut, high blood pressure (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers), and dulled senses.

[1] https://garylite.com/2019/08/21/everything-is-the-light-an-i...

dorkwood• 5 years ago

I don't really buy the argument that sugar content is to blame. I buy cheap food, I live in the US, I don't eat "healthy" and never have -- and yet I'm thin. People like to hand-wave this away by telling me I must have a high metabolism, but I've never found that to be a convincing explanation.

I think a more probable reason for the obesity epidemic is the rise of food as a self-soothing device. To me, the best indicator of whether you're likely to have a weight problem isn't your activity level or the sugar content of your groceries, it's whether you turn to food as a way to relax.

sedgjh23• 5 years ago

Yep, I look at food as an escape and my BMI is 44.1

dgudkov2• 5 years ago

Why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it?

I suspect that added sugar increases sales.

zihotki• 5 years ago

Another possible answer is that it's just cheaper to fill snacks with sugar than anything else while keeping them tasting good. Plus sometimes in snacks sugar plays a big role in forming the structure and it's hard to find a proper replacement for it.

ogre_codes2• 5 years ago

The conclusion of the actual study doesn't exactly align with the title here. The title gives the impression being active is pointless which isn't true.

“Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles.”

For a lot of people, increasing activity is something they can manage even when weight loss is a struggle. Obviously being skinny and active is the ideal, but being heavy and active is vastly better than being heavy and sedentary.

graeme7• 5 years ago

Check out this slide. Shows a big step change in health at every increase in weight level, regardless of activity: https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/225496940/zwaa151...

The title seems accurate. If you’re overweight and active, you’re less healthy than normal weight and sedentary, on average. Most people would find this surprising.

The title doesn’t mention activity, so I would not say it gives the impression that “being active is pointless”.

ZephyrBlu4• 5 years ago

Most people would find this surprising

Really? I don't understand how people would come to the conclusion of fat + active > normal + sedentary unless they're willfully ignorant.

ogre_codes2• 5 years ago

The title doesn't mention activity, but the actual study does. That's my point here.

I would not say it gives the impression that “being active is pointless”.

If the only way to be healthy is to be skinny, what is the point of being active at all?

Being healthy is a sliding scale, not an on/ off toggle. Being active and overweight is significantly better than being sedentary and overweight. Being skinny is an even bigger jump.

thick• 5 years ago

There are very few overweight people past the age of 80. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you a bridge. Agenda pushers and idiots who parrot for free what others are selling them are responsible for the “body shaming” nonsense.

Cut back on the ice cream and hit the rack. Your body will thank you, even if your politically minded “friends” don’t.

notacoward• 5 years ago

There are very few overweight people past the age of 80.

How much of that selection is due to voluntary lifestyle choices, how much is due to genetics or other involuntary factors? The answer has a pretty big influence on how appropriate it is to look down your nose at others for not fitting your ideal.

RA_Fisher• 5 years ago

One counter example can be diabetes. Healthy insulin usage often causes weight gain, and withholding it the opposite. It’s a human growth hormone. So it’s entirely possible that one could mistake a thin person suffering from diabulemia for being healthy, and an “overweight” diabetic as unhealthy.

outime• 5 years ago

I don’t think anybody really believed such thing except a loud minority, mainly thanks to social networks and journalists wanting to gain eyeballs with provocative headlines so people get mad at absurd stuff and come back for more.

The formula worked and keeps working very well.

terrycody• 5 years ago

Sry guys, please anyone telling me how to bypass the paywall? Or any link to a full version of this article?

explodingman• 5 years ago

Non-paywalled link to summary of article: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/overweight-and-healthy-is...

In the study, the bottom group by activity contains 63% of the population, while the bottom group by obesity contains only 18% of the population. So shifting from bottom to middle by obesity is a bigger move than shifting from bottom to middle by activity level. Not sure the author is comparing apples with apples here.

In reality, we need to be aware of what lifestyle changes we can sustainably make given our particular circumstances, whatever the whole-population results might look like. To quote the author, “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles".

sradman• 5 years ago

The press release [1] for the paper Joint association of physical activity and body mass index with cardiovascular risk: a nationwide population-based cross-sectional study [2]:

We retrieved information from medical examinations on the prevalence of diabetes (medicated or glycaemia > 125 mg/dL), hypercholesterolaemia (medicated or total blood cholesterol ≥ 240 mg/dL), and hypertension (medicated or systolic/diastolic blood pressure ≥ 140/90 mmHg).
Data from 527 662 participants [32% female; age (mean ± SD): 42.3 ± 9.4 years; BMI: 26.2 ± 4.3 kg/m2] were analysed. About 42%, 41%, and 18% of the participants had normal weight, overweight, or obesity, respectively; 63.5%, 12.3%, and 24.2% were inactive, insufficiently active, and regularly active; and 30%, 15%, and 3% had hypercholesterolaemia, hypertension, and diabetes. Being either regularly or insufficiently active conferred protection compared to inactivity against all the studied risk factors within each BMI category, which was evident in a PA dose-response manner for diabetes and hypertension (Figure 1). However, regular/insufficient PA did not compensate for the negative effects of overweight/obesity, as individuals with overweight/obesity were at greater CVD risk than their peers with normal weight, irrespective of PA levels.

The headline is inappropriate and I'm not convinced the study is as useful as it could be. Though large, the study only demonstrates that being overweight or obese is linked to high cholesterol, diabetes, and high blood pressure; all risks for cardio vascular disease (CVD). I'd prefer more direct measures of CVD like the Ankle-Brachial Index (ABI). Regardless, the data has to explain the U-Shaped BMI mortality curve [4] and it does not. There are also well established mortality tables [5] for blood pressure based on age and gender; 140/90 is not reflective of risk.

[1] https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases...

[2] https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankle–brachial_pressure_index

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#Mortality

[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067369...

refracture• 5 years ago

And it always has to come down to either fat shaming or fat acceptance.. It's like we can't have an honest dialogue about abusive relationships with food (be it using food as a coping mechanism for other things going on in their lives or straight up addiction), or the fact people are never taught nutrition, instead just 'winging' it. You can't do that in the US. There's so much food you can buy and eat for cheap that will leave you starving despite being at a caloric surplus.

boatsie• 5 years ago

The numbers for obesity in the US and even the world are shocking, and it feels like we are doing almost nothing. Even if you believe we aren’t doing enough to combat COVID, we seem to be doing much less to battle the obesity epidemic.

DC1350• 5 years ago

To those who say BMI is misleading, consider that athletes of average height weigh around 150-160lbs when they have a lot of muscle and very low body fat. If an average man didn’t work out at all (no muscle) and had low body fat, he would probably weigh around 130lbs. A 5’10” 180lbs man that lifts weights regularly could easily lose 30lbs of fat, so the typical 180lb sedentary office worker is actually enormous. The idea that BMI doesnt count is almost always just a coping strategy.

Overweight and healthy is a big fat lie, obesity study finds

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