If you think I haven’t, then show me I’m wrong. Prove that doctors are no longer talking about obesity.
I don’t recall mentioning wokeness. You’ve posted wokeness half a dozen times or so. I showed you how to Google how doctors shouldn’t call patients obese. Apparently you were only able to see one article from Australia.
In the peak woke thread? Yes I did mention it.
If you have evidence otherwise, you can post it. Nobody is stopping you.
While also being afraid to talk about why they are fat. Several industries make a lot of money out of fat people, and it’s in their interests to ensure that they all remain fat. Doctors are roped into this process and are punished if they speak out against it.
Americans are obsessed with “dieting” precisely because doctors and other self-proclaimed experts are handing out appalling advice that sends people mad.
That is a mis-characterization. People don’t like to be called fat. I don’t know anybody that is afraid to talk about why being fat occurs. Is it any coincidence that all diet fads come out of the US (keto, Atkins, paleo, south beach)? Why else if not to lose weight?
How exactly? Certainly not by telling you that you’re overweight.
No they’re obsessed with dieting because America has high rates of obesity and is an image conscious culture, hence why people don’t like being called fat. That’s nothing new.
If people knew why they were fat, they wouldn’t be fat. There are no upsides to being fat, multiple downsides, and it takes quite a bit of concerted effort to remain enormous. You have to eat in an extremely specific way, and the USDA, AHA, ADA, and various other health establishments encourage fat people to eat in precisely the manner which will keep them fat.
None of these are “fad diets” - all of them are based on the idea that if you stop eating the shit that the USDA tells you to eat, you’ll be fine. Although all of them incorporate too many unnecessary rules, they typically do that because dieters like rules. If something is too simple, people ignore it.
Telling people they’re overweight is usually a precursor to prescribing them pills. Any doctor who gives them advice that will work will be excoriated, or at best ignored. Two examples in the UK are Dr Aseem Malhotra and Dr David Unwin. Both of them have spoken out loudly about how to treat obesity, including documented successes, and they’ve been completely sidelined by the establishment.
Then they should stop being fat. Why is that so problematic, do you think? Could it be that they’ve tried all the advice, and found that it doesn’t work? The only defence left to them is denial.
That is very ignorant. Most people know why they are fat and have difficulties with self control and slower metabolisms. Once you are overweight it can be difficult to get back to a normal weight.
Again completely ignorant of different body types. Nobody is arguing there are upsides here.
Some people have a harder time losing weight than others. I have a family member that dieted for years while exercising every day. The only thing that eventually worked was lap band surgery. But trust me they knew why they were fat. And they were not making an effort to stay fat.
No keto/low carb/atkins are all pretty simple and very effective.
Diet pills were heavily prescribed in the 1980s which is how we got ephedrine, meth etc. The emphasis has shifted to diet and exercise first other types of intervention like medication and surgery last.
Because of the amount of sugar and processed foods in the American diet. Many of the poorest neighborhoods do not have access to healthy food and obesity is higher among low income. It is expensive to eat well in the US.
Have you thought about why you believe this is true?
If what you are doing is not working, then it should be abundantly obvious that you’re doing it wrong. “Dieting” does not work for anybody, and there is absolutely no theoretical reason why it ought to.
A lot of people’s salaries depend upon fat people continuing to believe that fat people need to either (a) diet or (b) accept that they’ll be fat forever. Different lies, same nice result for the person handing out the advice.
Have you missed a comma here?
A minute ago they were fad diets. Now they’re simple and effective?
Since it became widely understood that obesity is a symptom of metabolic syndrome, a whole new lot of lucrative possibilities have appeared. Metformin is being touted as a cure-all for fat people, and a new one (I forget the name) is in phase 3 trials.
Fine. Then all they have to do is stop eating like that. So why don’t they? My claim is that they’re being actively pressured to eat in this manner by (a) nudges away from healthy food and (b) nudges towards the crap products.
“It’s expensive to eat well” is a poor argument in a country with sky-high costs for healthcare. And in any case, it really isn’t. I did a survey at one point asking if people in our weight-loss group had noticed any change in their food outlay. A few people said their costs had gone up slightly, but most said it was about the same, principally because they were eating less packaged crap (which is a lot more expensive than it appears).
When’s the last time you’ve been to inner city US? Tell me how many grocery stores there are. Access to healthy food is the first step to eating heathy.
Have you considered that you may not understand every person’s individual circumstances?
What is your explanation? Wokeness is making people fat because everyone’s afraid of fat shaming?
Obesity in America existed before any was talking about woke or fat shaming.
Diets become popular because they’re effective. Atkins, low carb and keto are all variations of the same thing.
And I’m going to assert that you are ignoring the correlation between obesity and income and are completely oblivious to lack of access to healthy food in the US.
Were any of these people living in the US in an urban environment? Do you know where people living in the inner city get their food? The dollar store.
When I lived in the US I got my food at local all organic grocery stores. I guarantee low income people could not afford to avoid processed foods high in sugar/corn syrup if they tried.
It doesn’t matter what your “circumstances” are. Nature doesn’t care what your circumstances are. If you’re fat, and you don’t want to be fat, then you do whatever is required to stop being fat.
In this case, you pull up the website of the supermarket of your choice, order some healthy food, and wait for it to be delivered to your door. I really don’t see how this represents an insurmountable barrier. It can actually be cheaper to buy from a megastore than from a local supermarket.
Those groceries stores don’t exist in “deprived” areas for a really simple reason: nobody wants to buy their products.
Wokeness and fat-shaming (or lack of it) is a huge part of the problem. Fat people should be told clearly and unequivocally that it is unhealthy, a burden on society, and easily fixable. Nobody should be making excuses for it, or telling people that it’s normal, or pretending that you can still be beautiful if you’re grossly obese.
True enough. So the question is, why is the medical establishment and the left wing firmly against this family of eating patterns (I don’t like the word “diet”)? It used to be almost a rite of passage for every medical student and health-supplement journalist to write a screed about the terribleness of low-carb diets.
Of course they can. Have you tried costing it out?
You don’t need to buy everything from Whole Foods. Industrial meat and veg might not be the best you can get, but it’s better than sacks of processed shit made from corn and soy. You can make your own bacon, for example, using low-end pork belly, for less than the cost of frozen beefburgers or spam. You can make nice homemade yoghurt for about the same price as the “low fat” garbage on supermarket shelves. You can grow salad veg in windowboxes.
You (and they) believe that it’s impossible because somebody has told you that it’s so, or (more bizarrely) that people who make their own food at home and grow their own vegetables are right-wing lunatics.
It’s all bullshit. The aim here is to keep people buying the expensive processed crap by ensuring that they never even think about doing anything different.
Because processed foods are cheaper. Not that people don’t want to buy they don’t have the income to buy and likely can’t afford to order from a grocery further away.
The easier it is to lose weight, the more people will lose weight. And vice versa the harder it is the more people will be overweight. Acting like it’s all just people being lazy isn’t really helpful. You have to address both personal responsibility and access.
Every time they go to the doctor their weight is checked and they are told whether or not they are a healthy BMI. Every time they walk out the door they are praised or degraded for their image. The US is an image obsessed culture. We are not walking around pretending fat people are beautiful everywhere. If you believe that then you need to spend more time in the real world and less on the internet.
I never said impossible just more difficult depending where you live. Michelle Obama was the one pushing for healthier school lunches and the white house garden. So I would hardly think growing your own vegetables is anything to do with right wing. I grew my own vegetables in the US. Although you should consider having a garden is out of reach for many in the US.
Yes food companies want to make money and processed foods are cheaper. Therefore those with lower income have a greater incentive to eat unhealthy since they are motivated by price, available time, more than quality.
This simply isn’t true. You think it’s true because it’s a message that’s been blasted out from every media channel at full volume. I can run through a complete costing if you like. Packaged junk food is comparable in price to, or in many cases more expensive than, proper food. How could it possibly be otherwise? They have to cover the cost of manufacture. The food industry depends absolutely upon everyone believing that their fake food is both better and cheaper than the real thing.
I’m not arguing that it’s “laziness” as such, although certainly intellectual laziness is part of it. Far more important is the messaging telling fat people that it’s hard-to-impossible to lose weight (it isn’t), the stupid “healthy eating” advice that makes it hard to lose weight (deliberately so, IMO), and the media blather about “fat acceptance” designed to keep people fat (and miserable).
The message is crucial here.
And what use is that? My argument here is that doctors should be walking fat people through the process of eating healthy food. They do not and cannot do this, partly because they don’t know how, and partly because if they did, they’d be slapped down.
Unfortunately, a lot of people absorb everything that they think and believe from the internet. It matters not one jot what I read or what you read: the issue here is what fat people read.
And how did that work out? US school meals are worse than they ever were. They are utter trash. They barely better than pet food. My point is that this is not merely a mistake or an oversight. It’s deliberate. If even the first lady can’t get such a simple thing fixed, it cannot possibly be anything else.
I’d change that to unhealthy.
The larger societal question is if we cannot feed ourselves in a healthy manner and must rely on unhealthy food to feed everyone, is it a food supply side problem or an urban overpopulation side problem?
People in cities eat shit food because food is grown and processed elsewhere, right?
You continue to miss the point of supply chain and access. Heavily processed foods are cheaper precisely because they can be more widely distributed with a longer shelf life.
You made a pretty amusing assertion that someone living in a poor neighborhood could just order online from the grocery store. Ignoring the fact that it may be too far and too expensive to do that.
This is not propaganda. There are studies to show access is one of the driving factors of obesity. There is a correlation with poverty and obesity.
So you can take the whole body of evidence that demonstrates lack of access to healthy food, lack of access to recreational activities etc, ignore it and continue to assert its wokeness. That’s just not reality. Doctors will not get slapped down for telling you how to eat it. They do it all the time.
A growing body of research suggests that healthful foods are scarce and unhealthful foods are ubiquitous in low-income and African American neighborhoods. Studies show that supermarkets have the widest variety and lowest prices of high-quality healthful foods; their presence or absence in a given area can be taken as a measure of the relative availability of healthful food.13–15
“You’ve got to go out in the suburbs now to get some decent food. … By the time you get to that store and get some fresh fruits and vegetables, you’re going to pass about 30 fast food joints and about 100 liquor stores.”[18]
Frozen pizzas are no more complicated or expensive to store and distribute than canned peas or frozen beef. In any case, even if we accept that this is true for some smallish fraction of the US population, it isn’t true in other countries, or anyone living above subsistence poverty. The UK is well-served by large supermarkets, yet the rate of obesity is approaching the US. Whatever explanatory power the “access” issue might have, it’s only a small part of the equation.
Junk food is cheaper than you would expect (but more expensive than healthy alternatives) because it is subsidized, and because dietary guidelines steer people away from healthy food. Have you read the USDA guidelines?
If you want to give me a budget and a delivery zip code, I’ll give you an eating plan using stuff from a local supermarket.
If this is true, a solution presents itself: the government could subsidize food delivery to anyone on a federal low-income assistance programme. This would cost next-to-nothing. But since it hasn’t been done - despite the massive push over the last couple of years to get everyone’s life tied to online suppliers - then, clearly, it’s not an important issue.
I’m saying “wokeness” is the basis of these claims, and not evidence. The core of wokeness is taking some outrageous untruth, inflating it into a big, wibbly narrative complete with “research” that proves the lie to be true, and then blasting it out nonstop from every media channel. These irony is that it’s always the Left - those who say they care about social justice - who seize onto these messages and amplify them, when their intent is to ensure inequity and profit for large corporations and “the rich”. The messages are, of course, carefully constructed to appeal to such people so that they will broadcast them onwards.
Doctors do indeed tell people how to eat. I’m sure your friend you mentioned back there was following doctors orders to the letter. Which is why it didn’t work.
They are giving out advice that is designed to fail. I can demonstrate this really easily: most people who find out that the advice is BS, and start eating in a healthy manner (and thereupon start losing weight) experience crushing guilt at “going against doctor’s orders”. I would say a third to a half of people who discover they’ve been lied to their entire lives have this experience. I can recall one woman for whom this was so overwhelming that she went back to her carb-loaded, low-fat diet, even though she knew she’d get fatter.
Let’s say you’re right, and that the average American inner-city dweller has less access to food than the average Indian in Mumbai. Have you thought about asking why? How is it that the most economically-successful country on the planet is supposedly run by businessmen who can’t spot an opportunity when they see it?
… because those are the things that people demand. Recall the school dinners. Kids have been raised from their earliest years to consume nothing but manufactured shit. Don’t tell me this is hard to fix: the US budgets about $15K per year per child, and somebody, somewhere, has decided that it’s not worth spending more than $1K of that teaching them how to eat. This is not a mistake or an oversight.
I’ve presented evidence of access being a major issue in the United States of which there are many more studies. You have provided no evidence that doctors get slapped down for telling you how to eat or that wokeness is the driver of obesity.
Proposing this solution is naive in the context of US politics. Your proposal would be immediately labeled as socialism, a handout contributing to the laziness of the poor. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and drive into the suburbs everyday after work to get proper nutrition.
You haven’t provided any evidence of any other driver, just conjecture.
Again no evidence.
Because woke. If the economics were there, then grocery stores would be all over the poor neighborhoods. They are not.
The nature of US politics has become so toxic that social programs are nearly impossible to implement.
Of course there are many more studies. The research is carefully curated to ensure that you believe that this is true. Everything else is denied publication. The aim here is to ensure the public conclude - as you have - that nothing can be done.
The narrative goes something like this:
- You have to eat X, Y and Z in order to be healthy (untrue in itself).
- X Y and Z are not available in poor communities (even though they are - I notice you didn’t accept my challenge).
- Ergo, poor communities cannot be healthy. QED and ka-ching!
Just one high-profile example.
It is impossible for me to prove that dietary studies that show unmitigated success are either unpublished or unfunded. Because they aren’t being published or funded. Obesity is very easy to treat, and billions of dollars are invested on ensuring that nobody knows that.
Again, this is merely something you have been told. The US spent trillions of dollars on “COVID mitigation”. Money found for school meals, or for food-transport subsidy, would be chump change in comparison. There are are all kinds of ways it could be done - for example, the gov’t could offer tax breaks to supermarkets offering low-cost transport to certain neighbourhoods. Americans seem to like tax break for the rich.
The evidence is that your friend failed. If you go to the doctor and ask for diet advice, you will get the same crappy advice. If you genuinely want evidence, try it; but I really don’t think you do.
Right. So the economics isn’t there. Why is that? Think about it.
That’s utter nonsense. School is itself a social programme. Nobody is out there with placards demanding to defund the schools.
Somebody has decided:
a) Only $2 of a child’s daily budget, rather than say $4, should be spent on teaching them how to eat.
b) When they are taught how to eat, they’re taught how to eat the worst possible food.
(b) is entirely compliant with USDA guidelines. Go and read them if you want “evidence”.
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Well … yes and no. Obese people are unhealthy in a specific way that requires a specific treatment protocol. No physician who values his license will offer that treatment protocol. There are private clinics that do it.
It’s a confluence of interests that results in the deliberate sabotage of certain kinds of food supply, and the promotion of other kinds.
Really, no. They eat shit food because they’re told to. They’re programmed as five-year-olds to eat shit food, and that’s been happening for at least three generations, so the hundredth-monkey effect kicks in. Parents feed their kids shit food as toddlers because they don’t know any better.
As I said earlier, people actually feel guilt if they start eating a healthy diet because they run up against a cognitive roadblock that they didn’t even realise had been put there.
A good piece on the reason why processed foods are cheaper, and how subsidies have minimal impact.
According to supermarket expert Phil Lempert, the actual cost of the food ingredients in processed foods like Twinkies hovers somewhere south of 15 percent, which means that subsidies account for something like a penny — maybe a penny and a half — of those 99-cent Twinkies. And the carrots? A 10 percent subsidy of the value of the crop would be about 3 cents a pound.
So, if we redirect our subsidies away from commodities and toward fruits and vegetables, the Twinkies would cost a penny or two more and the carrots a few pennies less — assuming those subsidies get passed on to consumers and not simply absorbed along the food chain.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/im-a-fan-of-michael-pollan-but-on-one-food-policy-argument-hes-wrong/2017/12/04/c71881ca-d6cd-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html
The definition of “food” is quite important. To me products like Twinkies are no longer on the list of what I consider food.
Ingredients:
Bleached Enriched Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate (Iron), Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid]
Sugar
Corn Syrup
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Animal and Vegetable Shortening (Tallow, Hydrogenated Tallow, Cottonseed Oil, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60, Soy Lecithin)
Eggs
Water
Dextrose
Contains 2% or Less: Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Sulfate, Agar, Disodium Phosphate, Locust Bean Gum, Modified Corn Starch, Corn Syrup Solids, Soy Lecithin, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Corn Starch, Monocalcium Phosphate, Whey, Glycerin, Salt, Cellulose Gum, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Sorbic Acid and Potassium Sorbate (to Retain Freshness), Xanthan Gum, Barley Malt Extract, Corn Grits, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Enzymes, Yellow 5, Red 40.
Apart from the eggs and the water, it consists of highly problematic ingredients.
It’s basically a concoction by some big profit-seeking enterprise that is not in the least interested in the well-being or health of consumers.
How many other products like this fill the supermarket shelves these days?
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