So what is making people from the USA so fat?

[Chairman Miaow]

I highly recommend you watch Jamie Oliver's food revolution. He's a British chef who basically fixed our school meals here and he went to the fattest town in the USA to try and show them what was wrong with their diet and try to eat healthily. One of the schools there served pizza for breakfast. A kid was shown a tomato and thought it was a potato. It's horribly depressing.

 

[SwagLordYoloson]

From my experience in the states it is due to your low wage which allows you to sell your convenience food for dirt cheap. 30c Tacos America.

 

[Danzaivar]

Your congress recently moved to have pizza classed as a vegetable so it could be served in schools as part of a healthy diet. I'd say it stems from that kind of attitude.

 

[Liham]

Shit food and no exercise.

 

[TheVioletBandit]

49% of Australians are overweight according to BMI, 16% are obese.
61% of Britons are overweight, 22% are obese.
59% of Canadians are overweight, 23% are obese.
66% of Americans are overweight, 34% are obese. [footnote]http://apps.who.int/bmi/index.jsp[/footnote]

America leads the world in mega-fatties, but most of the Anglosphere is pretty chunky. People don't say much about it because it's easier to point at the fattest kid in the class than to do admit that you too wear your shirt in the pool.

Sadly, no one will really care about these figures, because they want to bash Americans so badly.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

"70% of Canadians are chunky! We're Doomed, eh?"

This is the funniest thing I've read today.

As for this headline, I'm guessing you are American, since if you were British you'd be seeing nothing but articles saying '49% of British children are obese! Tally ho, what what, this is most unorthodox.'

I'm guessing that every country has headlines about it's fat people, it's just that Americans don't care about them. I've never actually really seen headlines about American obesity, I just know about it through popcultural osmosis. Americans are known to be fat, other countries aren't.

 

[loc978]

...I blame the food pyramid. Too many people follow the starches and then replace every other food group with meat/dairy...

Also, the poor factor. I could live on nothing but corn, wheat, beef and pork for under $100 per month if I was in dire financial straights. Thankfully I can afford fruits, vegetables, and good cuts of meat.
There's also what I like to call the "addiction to convenience". I know several people who refuse to spend more than 60 seconds putting together a meal, simply because they find it boring. Rather eat a $1 can of unheated chili than heat the chili and maybe chop up a salad on the side...

Also, to anyone quoting BMI... I've never met a bodybuilder who didn't qualify as obese on that scale. 10% body fat, rock hard and... obese?

 

[Dags90]

Also, to anyone quoting BMI... I've never met a bodybuilder who didn't qualify as obese on that scale. 10% body fat, rock hard and... obese?

Which is why it's poor as a tool for measuring individual people. For measuring large populations? It's pretty darn accurate because bodybuilders are pretty rare. Honestly, it probably paints a picture that's too forgiving because it also misses people who are "skinny fat". Especially considering that, as a group, older people are especially likely to have low muscle mass and misleadingly lower weight.

And they scrapped the original food pyramid ages ago. The new one is quite nifty.

 

[ElPatron]

This is really the crux of the issue. In order to have an 'optimal' diet, an American, on average, would spend nearly 8k a year more on food than if they had a moderately healthy diet (No fast food, etc) ((My own findings, nothing official))

When being healthy (Gym fees, increased utility bills, etc) is financially unsupportable, you tend to not be so healthy.

I call bull on that. Processed foods are popular with poor people because they are "apparently" cheap. Cooking food is ALWAYS cheaper unless you live in a very remote area. It's one of the best ways of saving money.

Gym bills? You have that gym inside your house, and that one outside your house. The temperature will certainly drop in Hell they day I get a gym membership because it's worthless with all the information available.

Your congress recently moved to have pizza classed as a vegetable so it could be served in schools as part of a healthy diet. I'd say it stems from that kind of attitude.

How nice, you don't know what happened.

Even here in Europe we had pizza once or twice every year. They passed a law that would ban pizza and they simply found a loophole.

 

[Substitute Troll]

I take it you've been to McDonalds and bought a coke before. Now go to Europe and buy a coke. Notice the difference in size. Your medium is our large.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

A sedentary lifestyle and way too much processed and fast food.

 

[DANEgerous]

idiocy and ignorance. We just can not get the news flash that calories and fat = flatting.
well I can i mean i am 6 feet tall and only... fuck 153 LBS!

Ima go eat some cheese cake. Or i could just stop making my own food and be force to go broke on good rather costly food or eat cheep horrible for me shit... nah ima make that cheesecake.

 

[SEXTON HALE]

I definitely dont think that its just one thing you can nail it down to.
Depending on the person its most likely a combination of inactivity,poor diet and lack of awareness.
I used to just down anything in sight but ive since learned that the negative effects of this can be countered with a fair amount of exercise.

 

[Vivi22]

Yet I never see the same thing for other parts of the world. There's no article saying, "75% of Australians are above-average in weight!" or "70% of Canadians are chunky! We're Doomed, eh?"

I can't speak for Australia, but I can say that the same sort of stories pop up all of the time about Canada.

So I'm really wondering here: what is it in American food or diet in general that makes Americans so freaking fat?

The simple answer is that they eat far too many carbohydrates, usually from processed foods. Everything is filled with sugar and wheat if you look at the labels, and these are responsible not only for people getting fatter, but for the increase in incidence of diabetes, heart disease, and a number of other ailments in the population.

It's made worse by the fact that modern wheat is absolutely nothing like what even our grandparents were eating fifty years ago. Modern wheat has a much greater impact on blood sugar levels, stimulates appetite, and is actually mildly addictive thanks to compounds called exorphins which act on the same parts of the brain opiates do. And what has the government spent the last several decades pushing? Diets low in fat with plenty of healthy whole grains.

A small part of it is also that the NIH switched, I want to say 10 years ago, maybe more, to measuring obesity based on BMI, and I believe they've moved the bar around a bit for what constitutes an obese BMI. It's a pretty useless measure for obesity to begin with, but they've also set the bar so low that some people could be perfectly healthy, muscular and lean with a great body fat percentage and still be classified overweight or obese.

What do you think Americans can do (person to person or powers that be) to fix the issue?

Simple, ignore all of the crap the USDA has been pushing for decades and cut out sugar and wheat products and shift to a low carb, high fat diet.

Mostly carbohydrates and vegetable fats. People have no idea how bad these are, regardless of how good it is in terms of general quality (as in whole wheat bread is better than plain white bread). If you follow the gov. guidelines on how much carbs you need a day, no wonder you get fat and get heart diseases.

I was skimming through the first page and saw your post. So nice to see someone else point the finger at the actual culprits.

 

[Sparrow]

I'm always sceptical of the statistics I see about fat people. Supposedly over half the people in my country are overweight, but my travels across England make me think that figure is just blown waaaay out of proportion. Maybe... a fifth? Most folks in Kent seem to be in pretty good shape.

 

[Yan007]

Side Note: What do you mean body-building? (just getting fit, or actually getting body-builder big?)

I picked up bodybuilding as my sport. I eat and live in order to achieve the best gains possible. I currently work in China by the way and getting good healthy food is almost impossible so I manage with a smaller variety of foods and I import some supplements.

I have 6 meals a day and work most of the time I'm awake. It IS time consuming, but if I were not bodybuilding and decided to go back to 3 square meals a day, it would be extremely easy and cheap to do so. I honestly think you overestimate the cost of eating healthy meals.

 

[Cavan]

I'm always sceptical of the statistics I see about fat people. Supposedly over half the people in my country are overweight, but my travels across England make me think that figure is just blown waaaay out of proportion. Maybe... a fifth? Most folks in Kent seem to be in pretty good shape.

It's partly because measuring anything via BMI is a sack full of shit.

Also the scale basically goes from healthy to overweight instantly and anybody over that line is then stabbed with this puerile label.

I'm no more against getting healthier than anybody else, but once people start trying to measure health in BMI you may aswell screw up the paper it's written on and have an enthusiastic office fight with the paper balls, you might even get some exercise and fun that way.

 

[ElPatron]

I think the biggest problem is portion size.

I don't know what kind of Europe you live in, but even our supposed "Mediterranean" diet isn't taken into account in restaurants.

We have huge portion sizes, too. And possibly even more salt than Mc Donald's fries. We are quick to blame fast food but our "slow food" is very unhealthy in restaurants. In Southern European countries we have a lot of hypertension.

If everyone ate decently at home, taking a proper diet into account, we would be less fat. Our unhealthy foods are disguised as slow food so they don't get as much flak as fast food.

It's a pretty useless measure for obesity to begin with, but they've also set the bar so low that some people could be perfectly healthy, muscular and lean with a great body fat percentage and still be classified overweight or obese.

Yeap. I know "slim" people who are a few kilograms heavier than me and shorter - but they have a little more muscular mass than me and therefore are considered overweight.

 

[somonels]

Lifestyle, laughable laws regarding to human health, much higher fat, sugar and salt content in common products.
Basically: sheepishness.

Yeap. I know "slim" people who are a few kilograms heavier than me and shorter - but they have a little more muscular mass than me and therefore are considered overweight.

The gross misuse of the BMI system has long been known, it has never been about measuring obesity, some wize guy just started using it as such.