Summary
A new Lancet study reveals nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, a sharp rise from just over half in 1990.
Obesity among adults doubled to over 40%, while rates among girls and women aged 15–24 nearly tripled to 29%.
The study highlights significant health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy, alongside projected medical costs of up to $9.1 trillion over the next decade.
Experts stress obesity’s complex causes—genetic, environmental, and social—and call for structural reforms like food subsidies, taxes on sugary drinks, and expanded treatment access.
i love personal anecdotes where someone makes sure to call everyone but them stupid and fat. eating proper meals takes time and money, which a great many people do not have, and large portions of the population do not have even live in areas with fresh food. ever heard of a food desert?
also the BMI system is based entirely on white Irish men of a specific height who lived like a hundred years ago.
also also, being ‘fat’ does not always mean you’re unhealthy, and being ‘skinny’ does not always make you healthy.
Every time I visit Germany, I eat and drink a ton. I’ll lose about 5 lbs that week just from the higher quality food and walking convenience.
5 lbs is literally just a hydration and glycogen difference. You tend to have about 5 lbs of glycogen of which each pound is holding 2 lbs of water so 5 lbs is within normal fluctuations. Carb and fat profile of diet and a lack of gluconeogenesis can have you eat the same amount of calories while “losing” weight. Additionally, the amount of salt that you retain from your food can have a significant difference. If you’re going from a high salt diet to a low one, you could expect to lose water weight.
Where do you normally eat?
That’s interesting. Germans certainly aren’t known for their healthy food when you look at the prevalence of cured meats and things like currywurst.
contrary to conventional wisdom, quality of food isn’t really considered a primary instigator of the obesity epidemic. rather, environmental factors such as poverty, failures in education/access to diet information, and car-centric urbanization are proven to be much bigger factors in the ongoing health crisis.
in other words, america could be totally healthy eating the exact same food if we built society around people living healthy lives, but that is far from the primary goal for a country living under capital.
I slightly disagree.
If I suddenly started eating 15000 kcal of mostly sugar and fat each day, it would have a detrimental impact on my health. Regardless of my education or income.
So to me it seems like the effect is in reverse. If we changed society to make it easier for people to make healthier choices, then the general health would improve. But the actual improvement would come from calorie intake, food quality and activity levels.
But I absolutely agree that having limited access to healthy food, and living in a area where walking could be unsafe makes it incredibly hard to be healthy.
that’s the difference between primary and secondary causes, individual cases and epidemics.
while you may be able to imagine an instance where food quality is a primary factor in an individual’s wellbeing doesn’t challenge the empirical evidence that overall the epidemic affecting massive swaths of people is borne primarily out of a context of low income, low education and urbanization.
Well, the smugness is impressive. I’ll have to give you that.
You specifically said: “in other words, america could be totally healthy eating the exact same food if we built society around people living healthy lives, but that is far from the primary goal for a country living under capital.”
I just disagree with this statement. I don’t think we could eat the exact same diet in a different society and expect food-related health issues to significantly improve.
So where on the list of causes would you place calorie intake, food quality and inactivity? Secondary? Tertiary? Completely unrelated?
me: in other words, america could be totally healthy eating the exact same food
you: I don’t think we could eat the exact same diet
notice the key difference in language. makes 100% of the difference. i choose my words with care.
So, I’m I to assume that you wanted to say that calories are more important than food quality?
Sure. I agree with that.
Regarding your careful choice of words. If you wanted to make a convoluted post in order to smugly debate some random person on the internet, then you have done an excellent job and I congratulate you sir.
If you are trying to actually communicate clearly then you have some improvements to make.
At least the Germans have time to take care of themselves, but quite a bit of the food is processed too.
My family survived a famine, 80% of them died in the Holodomor.
I’ve got literal famine resistance genes.
I now live in the United States with access to delivery food and extra cheese pepperoni pizza.
Checkmate natural selection 👉😎👉
So your only diet options are… starvation? Hehe
The shitty US labor laws (piss poor working conditions) are one of many problems associated with obesity.
Probably the real reason why McDonald T-rump got voted for again.
genuinely curious wtf you mean with this lol. like i’m not following at all.
🤔
Social/environmental - life is fucking terrible and I have to take anxiety meds to survive it without panicking and breaking down. My last meds made me hungry CONSTANTLY. Sadly, I didn’t know it was the meds until about 3 months ago. New med calms the anxiety and doesn’t make me starving all the time.
I am not built for modern society.
I am not built for modern society.
No one is. Modern society wasn’t even built for you. We are just means to an end under capital.
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Sometimes they are tho.
Under-educated overweight people with guns. Everything’s gonna be alright.
In 1990 half were overweight or obese? That’s the real news, I would have thought much lower.
Why is that the news? Using NHANES data for standardized numbers, in 1990 it was roughly 44% of Americans. That’s lower than 1980 (~47%), 1970 (~48%), and 1960 (~46%). Did you think Americans were unusually thin in 1990 or something?
The 1990s are actually when the numbers jump. By 2000, it’s 65%. 2010, it’s 68%. And in 2020 to the most recent yearly data (2023), its 74%.
People were thinner in the 1930s. We should figure out what their secret was and copy it.
Oh, don’t worry. We are.
Private prisons stock has increased, so it looks like its part of the plan.
They still give processed foods like crisps and cookies, but the calorie intake provided is too low to support an obese diet. And cholera spreading through overcrowded, for-profit prisons should also encourage rapid weight loss.
Do they get scones and blackcurrant squash?
No, unless Nestlé buys the genetics of the squash and scones and has exclusive selling rights to it
I have noticed the general public is now very tolerant of sweet drinks. I know that is not the only problem. I was never allowed soda or coffee or sweet tea growing up, so don’t have much of a tolerance for them now. But when I try popular coffees (pumpkin spice this or vanilla chai that) or cocktails at most restaurants, I am surprised that people don’t send them back and ask for less sweetener.
As an infrequent treat, I can understand it. But if you are drinking that much sugar on a daily basis, it must seriously screw with your system. I am sure lots of people are drinking a huge amount of calories and don’t register how different that is from past generations.
I like the edge off my coffee but I just use stevia, which is fine if you don’t use a lot and get that tongue numbing sensation. Those novelty coffees are utterly disgustingly sweet, and its all sugar. I can’t imagine drinking them, but I guess if everything you eat and drink is sweet, you wouldn’t notice it.
I’m the opposite. I wad told sugar was poison, so I avoided it as a kid. But now as an adult I love getting a sugary pop or whatever. My sweet tooth has definitely come in late
Makes your breath smell bad. I noticed this as a teenager and never drank sodas since.
I(M) am an actually healthy weight (I believe I’m almost exactly average for my height and build for a man in the 60s or 70s), but my brain has absolutely been hijacked by sugar, and I can tell. Even avoiding over sweetened stuff for months and months I will still get cravings and having something I know a European would find sickeningly sweet I find is very similar to how junkies describe a relapse.
Despite all of that, I refuse to give in. I enjoy the freedom having a relatively healthy body gives me. Makes finding a partner with a similar mindset and goals hard though. It’s worse than a Thanos snap, 3/4 of the population just gone.
Tell me about it. The discipline it takes to not consume something the general public has been consuming as the norm is a struggle sometimes, but tasting the flavors I otherwise wouldn’t notice from something not deathly sweetened is a plus. As well as better teeth. My parents also restricted sweet drinks to family trips and parties growing up, and I don’t think I can thank them enough.
I’ve been seeing these commercials about losing weight. They briefly show a 💉 needle and state, “with the same active ingredient as ozampic”. It’s sort of messed up. It’s funny (dark humor), right?
Those commercials are about to stop interesting enough. They were only able to be on market due to the main drugs being in a shortage, which allows special pharmacies (compounders) to make knock off versions without going through the whole process the main drug did and bypassing patents.
The main drugs are now no longer in shortage, so in a few months, these compounders will not be allowed to sell those drugs.
[Tinfoil hat time]Crazy how much money is involved.
It’s sad on how much food is “wasted” because people eat way more than they need. But now you can eat like a pig and just get a shot to lose weight. As long as it’s not some bad big pharma vaccine and i can still eat as many nuggies as i want, fantastic.
I lost a bunch of weight a couple years ago. The secret was counting calories. Eating out at lunch was usually twice as many calories as I was allowed. Everywhere I went it was this way. Personally, the portion sizes didn’t look huge.
GLP-1s work by making unhealthy food feel more sickening, causing people to eat and drink less
Don’t worry congress is going to make Obese 50% body fat in response to the crisis…
To be fair, I don’t think many of us would recognize someone who is a BMI of 26 as “overweight.” It technically is, but you’ve probably seen people regularly that are “technically” overweight but would never realize it. You yourself might be (and, statistically, are likely to be) overweight according to BMI and not realize it.
The really staggering thing is obesity. From 1960 until about 1992, it was between 15-20%. By 2000 it was 30%. These days it’s getting close to 45%.
Yeah right now I weigh 170, I’m in pretty good shape (would be in better shape if I didn’t injure my foot and could start running again). But for me 180 is overweight? Even if that’s just fat that means my muscles become less visible. Hell it feels like my thighs are bigger now after getting in shape that when I was 180. And I started to look really skinny when I got down to 165.
I’m sure people would keep calling me skinny at 180. What we need are easier ways to measure body fat percentage. Because it is true that holding onto lots of fat for a long time is what’s bad for you.
The easiest way to check on body fat percentage right now is just to take weekly pictures of yourself in your underwear. You can see the muscle vs fat pretty well.
Part of the problem with BMI is that since it’s squared it over-reports overweight in tall people and under-reports overweight in short people. I’m 189 cm or so and if I were to reach the bottom of the “healthy” weight I would look like a concentration camp victim. 😄
Someone with bmi 26 is absolutely overweight o.O
Yes, technically, they are. But it’s unlikely you would see someone with a bmi of 26 walk by you on the street and think “that guy is overweight.”
This guy has a BMI of 26. If he had clothes on, few people are going to assume he’s overweight, even though technically he is:
i hate being wrong on the internet :D
point taken!I’ve got about 10lbs on this guy. I’m obese. I know it. I’m ashamed of it. My body knows it and tries telling me every day I need to lose 30lbs.
This is the more important part, even if you don’t look unhealthy, if you are overweight there are health conditions that become more likely and it is likely poor lifestyle and diet is influencing it. Just because you don’t look unhealthy doesn’t mean you are perfectly healthy. Even people who are a healthy weight and exercise regularly could benefit from removing processed, oilly and sugary foods from their diets. People who eat amazingly healthy might not be getting as much exercise as they should. Our bodies require high quality nutrition and movement to stay in shape and most of us aren’t meeting those needs between lifestyle choices, work, finances, and education.
It’s never too late, I managed to lose 20lbs simply not going after seconds on my tasty pasta dinners. Took like 6 months but my stomach got used to it. Granted, this last week has been hella tempting to stress eat, but just seeing progress is enough to keep me going. Just get the ball rolling and be happy with really subtle losses. Like, impossible to notice day to day loses.
Yeah. I was actually fifteen pounds lighter this time last year. It’s been a rough year. I cut out all bread, pasta, cheese, and beer, and walked an average of 15 miles a week.
It’s really mostly about doing something sustainable. I tried keto once and lost 20lbs only to regain it immediately after. Portion control seems to be working better for me since I will still eat whatever I want during the day (helps that my diet is mostly normal food I cook and not processed)
Where can I learn more about these tasty pasta dinners that you speak of? :-)
We’re talking about losing weight, not bulking up!
If you or anyone else is actually interested in getting yoked, a great place to start is the fitness wiki. It does a good job of condensing everything down and lists various effective routines which will do a good job of getting you looking the way you want.
Fitness influencers specialize in baffling people with bullshit. The recipe to getting in good shape is really simple. Follow an established routine, adjust your diet (the does not have to be drastic, you only need subtle changes) and improve your sleep. You could lift 40 minutes two days per week, walk 30-60 minutes another two days per week and you’d look and feel like a new person in a year
with men, the issue is that there is a lot built up internal fat around the inner organs BEFORE you even get to see fat thats visible from the outside. so yeah, i bet the guy is medically considered overweight even though he doesn’t look like peter griffin. this is why when women gain weight you can tell immediately and for men it takes a while. both is unhealthy though
As usual it is a matter of education and normalisation. I’m a rock climber and am surrounded by shredded people a lot of the time. I’m sitting at around 18-20% body fat which is high for the sport but I am considerably leaner than the guy in your photo.
I can absolutely tell that he is overweight (even with clothes) but that’s because I have invested a lot of time into learning about health and fitness and spend most of my time with people who have a ‘healthy’ BMI. If all you see are overweight and obese people every day then of course you will look at this guy and think he looks perfectly healthy (which he might well be but that’s another discussion).
Yup. I was talking to a guy whose doctor told him that he needed to lose weight. He didn’t look big - he’s tall, but apparently his bmi was 30.
I’ve always had a scale and I’ve always used it. My weight now is less than my weight in hs. I was 130.
That’s the thing 40 years ago you would realize that they were overweight.
Well, 40 years ago it was easy to find really good blow anywhere.
Actually 40 years ago a higher percentage of Americans were “overweight,” so it’s unlikely it would seem more obvious then vs now. The difference is that now many more people are obese, but being obese is fairly noticeable unlike being overweight.
The percentage of people who are in the just-above-normal category of “overweight” has remained very steady and within a narrow band over the years, i.e., it’s been consistently between roughly 31-34% for almost seven decades. It was 32.9% last year. That’s why in my comment I noted that the real concerning thing about the study isn’t really the amount of people who are overweight; it’s the amount of people who are obese and morbidly obese.
Maybe…but two things:
If the number of obese people is lower, then what are the people who aren’t mildly overweight? They are healthy weight. So even if the percentage of mildly overweight people stay the same, the day to day comparison is with a bigger group of healthy weight people, so they probably were more recognizably overweight.
Secondly, with less really obese people you wouldn’t get desensitized to seeing fat all the time, which makes mildly overweight people seem more normal. Somebody with a BMI of 26 and about 15lbs overweight would have been more likely to be described as “plump” or “husky” back then. But when crowds are full of people that are 50+ lbs overweight, that 26 BMI seems downright healthy.
This is all speculation. I can’t remember how I perceived overweight vs obese people back in the 80’s.
Well, you may be right. I’m not going to try to divine cultural sentiment from 40 years ago or whatever. I just think the study collapsing a relatively stable category (people who are “overweight”) with people who are obese and morbidly obese kind of hides the news. Sure, it makes for a splashier headline “75%!!” But the increase in obesity and morbid obesity is actually more dramatic when the “overweight” category is taken out of the focus.
Can confirm. 3/4 of my body is fat while the rest of it is skinny AF.
congrats, you’re the pinnacle of western society
