We have a major problem with framing of the problem.

"Obesity" looks too innocuous. "Metabolic disease" or "metabolic syndrome" would probably feel scarier to people, and would be more exact. The thing that people suffer from is a syndrome of several serious conditions of which obesity is just the "observable by naked eye" component:

* high blood pressure

* high blood lipids

* insulin resistance

* fatty liver.

Metabolic syndrome is the new lung cancer. Promoted by overconsumption of sugar, but the corporations that make money on it are fighting tooth and nail, constantly muddying the waters etc.

When you tell people they have metabolic syndrome they think they have something wrong with their metabolism that is out of their control.

And of course, control over body weight does vary, for a variety of reasons, but the message shouldn't be that it is not controllable.

"Their major risk factor for getting this sick was obesity.”

“These were otherwise healthy, hard-working people,”

Healthy and obese cannot exist in the same sentence.

Also what does "hard working" have anything to do it? As if their hard work will offset some karmic debt that they own to their employers?

"...found that 77% of nearly 17,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were overweight (29%) or obese (48%)."

It says "otherwise healthy"

It's a weasel word.

"Aside from that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"

Aren't nearly 77% of americans generally overweight or obese?

Not quite, but close.

https://www.healthline.com/health/obesity-facts

In the United States, 36.5 percentTrusted Source of adults are obese. Another 32.5 percent of American adults are overweight.

> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 42.5% (2017-2018)

> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

And we need bigger pipes for bigger poops!

Why has it become shameful to simply say indulging yourself with calories is a personal choice that has consequences?

It boggles my mind we need “science” to tell us this stuff that is frankly just common sense that has been beaten down by pop culture.

As a European, the (default) food options I see in the US make it very difficult to eat what I would call a healthy meal. You really have to make an extraordinary effort, which I don't experience back home and therefore I can't be surprised to see it translates in these obesity statistics. To place that all on personal agency seems not very productive to me, back home there are efforts made that make easy and default options meet a minimum level of healthiness. I don't see why Americans can't do the same, and why you would want to count on billions of individual choices if you can solve with a (health) program. This kind of thinking made us into programmers, right?

I see variations of this idea a lot but I find it hard to agree with them. Right now (in California) I can buy a week's worth of low calorie healthy groceries (including a variety of leafy greens) from Walmart for around 30 bucks. I'm fancy so for me it's around 45 via instacart (sub+tip). That's not too bad for most Americans. Even if it is for some, rice, beans, and milk alongside a wide variety of filling vegetables can be bought for gallons/pounds on the dollar. The problem isn't access to healthy meal options, it's that most Americans with a choice would rather just eat food they enjoy more. Personally I never saw the issue since private healthcare means the added health burdens get priced in.

This assumes you cook own lunch and dinner. Before covid, I would had lunch next office just like everybody else. And how easy it is to find healthy balanced option there makes big difference.

Plus, American version of everything contains more sugar - notably bread, sauces, cola, cereals, everything. Bread is the thing that makes massive difference. Aaaand milk is invariably low fat, which makes it less satiating.

When I heart Americans talk about healthy food, they often end up citing food that can't work long term. Or that just seem designed to be tastles and punish you. You can't have the same beans your only protein source long term.

Rice+beans easily amount to food that makes you both fat and hungry. Vegetables add vitamins and fibre, but absent some other fat and protein source you are bound to feel hungry.

Beans were just one example to emphasize the cost point, though given the rates of obesity in south east asia I'd point out that even if they can make you fat that it's more a matter of not eating too much than the items actually being unhealthy. Speaking to cost again though, at a latino market I can get pork for a bit over $2 a pound for example and chicken is only a few cents more where I am. Beans are by no means the only way to get cheap protein and fats. And if I get tired of rice I can go go to an asian market and get fresh noodles to keep in the fridge for not much more than rice.

I'll give you that lunch is more of a struggle if you're short on time and don't want to meal prep but you could still just buy a value menu taco or burger from a fast food joint and be fine (the ultra calorie monster items are not in the value menu). Sure, it'll come with transfats and some of the other non-christian food ingredients but one Breakfast Jack, Value Cheeseburger, Potato Taco, etc. per day aren't going to be what makes you fat. Which winds back around to my point that the issue isn't really one of access for most Americans, it's one of preference and excess.

The starch in bread is processed by the body as sugars. A gram or 2 of sugar in a slice isn't changing much of anything.

I am lactose intolerant and so don't drink raw milk, but I don't have any problem buying full fat milk products. I guess restaurants might not serve full fat stuff, but stores pretty universally stock the range.

The lactose in raw and pasteurized milk is the same?

The difference in sugar content between American and European break itms way bigger then you assume. It is also super noticeable by taste.

I live in the US and shop for lower sugar breads, so I'm actually pretty well aware of how much sugar is in US breads.

Do European breads have negative sugar in them?

This is different country to country, but in places where I've lived, 'breads' don't have added sugar at all. In France that kind of bread would be called a brioche, in the Netherlands suikerbrood (sugerbread). Generally it's thought of as a pastry, not bread.

I'm not convinced added sugar in bread means a whole lot nutritionally. Like any starchy food, it's effectively largely sugar (glucose) anyway. And the added sugar is only a few grams per serving, so if you take the viewpoint that the fructose component is what makes sucrose/HFCS especially harmful, it's not nearly equivalent to downing a glass of juice or soda.

> not nearly equivalent to downing a glass of juice or soda.

Whose sugary content is also bigger. It is that thing I noticed - I eate roughly the same in different counties and put sand effort into food. And sometimes I was gaining weight and other times loosing it. It was not me that was changing.

All of that adds up and the form od sugar do matters too.

I think you're assuming too much based on the stereotype of Americans being sugar fiends. Fruit juice typically doesn't have added sugar. Soda brands are comparably sugary between locations.

It's true that sugar is added to things that typically wouldn't contain them elsewhere, e.g. bread and pasta sauce, but I'd argue not in amounts that are nutritionally meaningful.

The issue we have is over-consumption.

It has also become shameful to honestly tell people that they failed at a task. Instead, you praise them for trying...

We're treating adults more and more like kids.

If you call them a failure they internalise their failure as a feature of their character. If you praise them they will be more likely to engage in improving their performance.

Why is being harsh seen as being more adult? It's just harmful and creates many social barriers and ill will.

You can lose a game and not be a "loser". You can fail and not be a failure.

We used to teach that, not tell everyone they did good for participating

Somehow we've lost the distinction between the outcome and the person.

Everyone today ties their persona and personal identity around what they do, what they purchase and what their opinion is.

In some developer circles, merely opening an issue or criticizing a feature is now considered rude, because someone worked on it very hard and they might get offended at pointing the bug or lacking design. This problem is getting more and more widespread.

Some people see disagreeing with any of their mundane opinions as assault on their character.

With the advent of social media, blocking people for having different opinions, institutionalizing “safe” “spaces” in academia, so that freedom from “offense” or “insult” is seen as more virtuous than having freedom of opinions and ideas, it’s no surprising that people expect to be awarded for merely participating, or they fall in existential depressions.

Fully agree. If I tell someone that they failed a test, they can either bounce back and work on their skills to pass the re-test, or they can internalize it and stop trying.

In my opinion, the 2nd choice is a very common mental disease, in the sense that I see no benefits but lots of drawbacks from generalizing a failure in one part of your life into a character attribute. So most likely, such a trait would have been evolutionary selected against.

In short, people who internalize failure are evolutionary less fit.

Obesity is much more complex than your comment implies.

It is completely unsurprising that there are people who think like you.

One of the factors in fattening of the UK and the USA is that many people forgot how to cook. The intergenerational transmission of this skill somehow diminished over the last decades. In contrast, in the poorest part of the world, pretty much everyone cooks at home, it would be unaffordable to live on processed foods only.

But oh God, so many Westerners are absolutely clueless in the kitchen. I am not sure whether this is caused by not having enough time, by successful advertising from processed food producers or from a cultural stigma that cooking is somehow backward and a kind of self-oppression. But cooking is dying out, for the first time in human history.

It was the mission of the Hairy Bikers. They wanted people to start cooking at home again. All their recipes were high fat and high calorie. Eventually they did a weight loss show because they got so big.

When my friends talk about "knowing how to cook" they are talking about making rich, luxurious foods with lots of butter, oil, eggs, and meat. It's probably worse than a hamburger from McDonald's.

It's also linked to enjoying fatty and sugary foods. I'm overweight, and it's not because of a traumatic experience. It's because I enjoy eating pizza and burgers, and I'm too lazy to shop for and cook healthy food.

According to the most recent CDC data, 42% of Americans are classified as clinically obese. Are we to believe nearly half the country is suffering from severe psychological trauma?

I blame the intersection of capitalism and food, the normalization and expansion of horrific fast food choices solely because it is profitable and advertising is cheap.

Yeah, this is a fishy correlation. While I believe that some people may soothe their bad feelings with food, we don't observe any sort of obesity epidemics in the cohorts of survivors of serious crises (Yugoslav civil wars etc.)

Mental health is down, and obesity is up. It doesn't follow that they are related, but it seems they could be.

Because your description of obesity has very little to do with what's actually happening. It's just more of the pernicious "sickness is due to evil, health is due to righteousness" nonsense that pervades certain demographics.