"That's why Americans are so fat."

[John]

I talk to a lot of international college athletes -- track and field and swimming, mainly -- and many of them talk about how they gained weight when they first came here because of the high levels of sugar and fat and crap in so much of what we eat, as well as the portion sizes.

I do notice in my college town, and maybe it's happening elsewhere, that since the start of lockdown a lot of fast-food spots and convenience stores are closing much earlier, like around 10, even on a Friday night. In theory, this might help the obesity situation since nobody is eating anything good for them late at night.

 

[clintrichardson]

I would favor any explanation that looks at American food over that of exercise habits. Exercise obviously matters some, but your weight is much more about the calories you take in than the ones you do or don't burn off.

 

[Songbird]

Americans are to food as geese are to foie gras.

 

[Liut]

I always liked the corn syrup theory that its omnipresence was a conscious decision made in the 70s to appease all of our corn producers. The obesity epidemic is an unintended consequence. Several interesting articles about it.

Blame Nixon for the obesity epidemic

The deadly legacy of America's fields of gold
Thank you for sharing the links. Welcome aboard.

 

[MisterCreosote]

I would favor any explanation that looks at American food over that of exercise habits. Exercise obviously matters some, but your weight is much more about the calories you take in than the ones you do or don't burn off.

I run marathons, and my problem is that I have a hard time adjusting my calorie intake after the race. I was eating upwards of 5,000 calories a day because I was burning that many a day, if not more. When I'm not burning like that, I always end up with 10-15 extra pounds before long.

I've never weighed more than 200 pounds, but I was dealt a shirt hand genetically. So I have to stay away from mainly salt and sugar, which is tough to do unless you make everything from scratch, which I try to do.

But, as long as I can maintain marathon shape, I feel like my salt intake is less important.

 

[MTM]

I talk to a lot of international college athletes -- track and field and swimming, mainly -- and many of them talk about how they gained weight when they first came here because of the high levels of sugar and fat and crap in so much of what we eat, as well as the portion sizes.

I'll second this. We used to host international high school exchange students and they were all amazed by the portion sizes and the availability of soda with large cups and free refills.

 

[WriteThinking]

I talk to a lot of international college athletes -- track and field and swimming, mainly -- and many of them talk about how they gained weight when they first came here because of the high levels of sugar and fat and crap in so much of what we eat, as well as the portion sizes.

I do notice in my college town, and maybe it's happening elsewhere, that since the start of lockdown a lot of fast-food spots and convenience stores are closing much earlier, like around 10, even on a Friday night. In theory, this might help the obesity situation since nobody is eating anything good for them late at night.

The portion sizes really are a legitimate contributing issue, and the tendency toward large, and larger, ones, is pretty much unique to the U.S.

If/when Americans travel through Europe and order food from restaurants there, they are often surprised, and usually a little dismayed, too, at the small plates/portions that are standard there.

 

[goalmouth]

I got nutrition religion years ago, when I was quoted in a men's health book on sports and got a free copy. I'm 40 pounds lighter than when I graduated college, and the most exercise I get is jumping to a conclusion or flying off the handle. It helps that I'm an ectomorph. The craving to eat is deeply rooted in our DNA, from when we were hunter-gatherers and ate as much as we could as soon as we could, not knowing when we would get more.

It's a tough habit to kick.

 

[Songbird]

Growing up was a race to thirds at the dinner table.

 

[Jssst21]

My grandfather never intentionally exercised more than mowing the lawn and ran about 6' 170 or so his whole life. His whole generation did if you look at the average photo from the 40s to the 60s when going to the gym or running a marathon were unheard of. It's the food, not the exercise in my opinion (though exercise helps a ton in other ways).

 

[The Big Ragu]

I always liked the corn syrup theory that its omnipresence was a conscious decision made in the 70s to appease all of our corn producers. The obesity epidemic is an unintended consequence. Several interesting articles about it.

Blame Nixon for the obesity epidemic

The deadly legacy of America's fields of gold

It's a processed food thing. Which goes way beyond corn syrup, even though high-fructose corn syrup runs through a lot of processed foods, for the reason you are pointing out. If it hadn't been corn syrup as the added sugar ingredient in many of the processed foods that Americans started making a staple of their diets, it would have been refined sugars extracted from other sources, such as cane or beets. Added refined sugar has become a plague, because it goes hand in hand in with processed foods that make up 70 percent of what the typical American is eating today.

Michael Pollan has written and lectured extensively about this, a lot of his stuff is from the mid 2000s, but the trends he was talking about have just taken off since then, and so much of what he says is just plain old common sense. But people have a penchant for complicating things, creating messes, and then complicating them even more in an attempt to provide a solution to the self-created mess. The term he uses is "nutritionism," where we are trying to engineer food and how to eat, even though our understanding is pretty primative. Everyone is looking for some magical key to eating, and the idea that we can engineer diets rather than just eating naturally the way people did for millions of years, is what has led to our screwing ourselves up.

Pollan's mantra / advice for people is: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." When he says "eat food," it's not as simplistic as it sounds, because he makes a distinction between the "edible foodlike substances" that fill up stores now, and what he would classify as "real food": vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and to a lesser extent, fish and meat, according to him.

In one of his books, he had some common-sense guidelines. These were some of them:

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. Even there, though, he warns that your grandmother might recognize a loaf of bread in a supermarket today, but what she wouldn't understand are why it isn't just composed of flour, yeast, water and salt. So along those lines. ...
2. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

 

[Driftwood]

I watched a guy in a press box a couple of Saturdays ago eat five - yes 5 - Chick-fil-A sandwiches.