Sugar is much less of a problem if you are also being very active on a daily basis. For example, your work contains physical component or maybe you are walking a lot.
So while the graph is showing dropping amount of sugar consumption, it is not taking account for also falling healthy limit of sugar consumption, ie. the fact that we should be eating even less overall given falling activity levels.
And this is especially true for kids whose activity levels fallen dramatically since smartphones.
I can tell that the same amount of sugar has much less effect on me since I lost weight and started running a lot every day. And I know this because I put on a continuous glucose monitor from time to time and can observe sugar spikes from foods to debug my diet.
You can learn a lot wearing CGM like the fact that my local Starbucks was serving me lactose-free milk regardless of what I ordered. You can tell lactose-free milk on a CGM because of a huge glucose spike. The reason? "Lactose free" is misleading. In reality they don't remove lactose. Lactose-free milk is obtained by adding to milk an enzyme that converts lactose to glucose and galactose which can be easily absorbed by the body and cause blood glucose spikes.
Your comment has helped me immensely... I have some degree of lactose sensitivity (can eat cheese and ice cream but cant drink milk), and when I have optimistically tried lactose free milk in the past it has upset my stomach just the same as the normal milk would. What you mentioned about the production of lactose free milk is something I had wondered, how could they actually remove the lactose. anyways thanks for you comment I will go down a research rabbit hole of galactose
How is it misleading? it's simply showing that people aren't eating more sugar. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you want to add that to an article about how "100 pounds of sugar a year with half the activity because people people are playing xbox too much" that's fine - this could be a part of that conversation.
Nothing wrong with the bigger conversations... but also nothing wrong with data points like this for the sake of data points.
> Lactose free" is misleading. In reality they don't remove lactose. Lactose-free milk is obtained by adding to milk an enzyme that converts lactose to glucose and galactose
Thereby leaving the milk lactose free... Lactase, the enzyme in question, is produced by those who are not lactose intolerant and results in the same quantity of sugar though perhaps without so much "spike".
Like, seriously how? The graph is about sugar. It doesn't have obese or similar words in it.
If there is a graph of "U.S. citizen's smartphone usage trend from 2010-2021", are you going to say it's misleading a bit because it doesn't take sugar into account...?
It is misleading people because people see the graph and compare it to the graph of rising obesity levels and infer (incorrectly) that if sugar is falling and obesity is rising then it is not sugar that is responsible for obesity.
The truth is that obesity is more complex problem but sugar definitely one of the important drivers.
One way obesity is a complex problem is that in most people it is delayed by decades. Our bodies can take a lot of punishment for a long time before they become disregulated enough to start gaining weight.
He posted, then deleted, a response saying he's not diabetic, but isn't healthy either. I guess he wears a CGM because he falsely believes transient blood glucose spikes ultimately cause T2D.
This graph does not go back far enough. Processed foods really took off during WWI, and then again in WWII. Using 1970 as a base line feels like skipping over the biggest jumps in those trends. My guess is that sugar consumption rose during those same periods.
The amount per year doesn't tell me much, but when converted to per day it's crazy high: 120*453.6/365 = 149 grams. That's 600 calories from sugar per day.
The data in the chart is sweetener "availability" and not really consumption, though it can be assumed that if less is available per capita, then less is consumed as well (per capita). But, this data doesn't explains the increase in obesity since 1970. this might be because of data being an average. Stats like p90 sugar consumption might show a better correlation with obesity rates and hence may be more meaningful than per capita sweetener availability.
Added sugar is not necessarily problematic, but consumption of anti-thyroid substances like high amounts of PUFA (especially seed oils), chlorine, bromine, fluoride (in absence of iodine) can make it so, by way of increasing energy supply which is not properly consumed. Industrial pollutants like PFAS and hexane byproducts also play a role.
There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive" -- it's good for you! It's an obscenely easily digestible source of energy, whose products are used very easily by the cells. In the case of fructose, its consumption is relatively more insulin-friendly than the glucose-heavy starches. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.
Seriously "addictive" sugary foods are psychologically problematic usually for other reasons. Pure cane sugar is not very addictive when consumed alone. Try it.
I think this is an example of proportionality bias. There's a cognitive bias that big effects (obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc) must have big and complex causes.
In reality, sugar is just straight-up bad in anything resembling the quantities we eat it, and we should not. It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density. Therefore it makes sense to seek out. In our synthetic world, we can make as much as we want and eat it whenever we want.
The reward system exhibits unconstrained positive feedback.
As a counter-example there are tons of things that 'feel good' but are destructive, like opioids and cigarettes. Things that are addictive aren't de facto good for you. In fact they're usually very bad for you because they overload your reward feedback network.
> There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive"
Sugar on its own isn't addictive and isn't a necessary nor sufficient ingredient for hyperpalatability. Foods can be hyperpalatable without sugar, and in fact most (~70%) hyperpalatable foods have their hyperpalatability driven by fat and sodium:
> The availability of HPF in the US food sysltem has expanded substantially over the past 30 years. The current US food supply is highly saturated with HPF, which our findings indicate comprised almost 70 % of available foods as of 2018. The growing availability of HPF over time, particularly HPF high in fat and Na, may have resulted from the reformulation of existing food products in the food system to be hyper-palatable. Thus, expanding HPF availability may be one key contributor to the obesogenic food environment in the US. Given potential consequences for population health, policy-level action is needed to address the presence of HPF in the food system. Policy may focus on limiting the nutrient thresholds allowed in foods to be below HPF thresholds (e.g. foods should contain <25 % kcal from fat and <0·30 % g from Na).
Agreed entirely. Even more glycemic foods than sugar (which is only half glucose), are not a metabolic problem. I started eating pasta, white bread, and white rice and have been able to lose weight. People on this very forum will tell me that what I do is impossible, but I'm done taking the advice of bots and people who aren't fit. I am downright skinny now. Go ahead and downvote my post, after all HN is an echo chamber full of IYIs and shills, is it not?
The title says consumption but the graphic says availability. Does availability have a different meaning in this context? Or is this just the amounts of various forms of sweeteners available to a consumer
My guess is that it has something to do with the government tariffs on sugar imports. As Americans, we all pay way more for our sugar than the rest of the world does. The sugar industry spends a bunch of money lobbying congress to keep it that way. Someone ought to start a lobby group for the sugar consumers of America, those of us who like cookies, cakes and ice cream, in order to reduce the tariffs and bring down the prices.
Maybe that is just the American baseline? Plenty of people enjoy cakes, cookies, doughnuts, brownies, etc that will be made with real sugar either at bakeries or at home. 60pounds/year is ~2.6oz/day (74g/day) which sounds pretty achievable given a once or twice a week snacking habit.
Alternate title: the graph that broke HN's brain. You'll notice that 1) sugar consumption peaked around Y2K and declined after 2) the decline was driven by a decline in consumption of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (the most vilified sugar) specifically, and 3) the average American now consumes about as much added sugar as the average American did in 1970--yet their waistlines are not remotely comparable.
Technically the graph is of per capita added sugar availability and isn't adjusted for loss (due to spoilage, plate waste, etc.), but it meshes with NHANES survey data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9434277/
>In conclusion, over the 18 year time span, from 2001 to 2018, added sugars intake declined significantly among younger adults (19–50 years) in the U.S., regardless of race and ethnicity (i.e., similar for Black and White individuals), income level, physical activity level or body weight status, and declines were mainly due to reductions in added sugars intake from sweetened beverages (primarily soft drinks and fruit drinks). These trends coincide with the evolving emphasis in the DGA on reducing added sugars intake and the increasing focus on population-level interventions aimed at reducing intakes.
> Alternate title: the graph that broke HN's brain.
It breaks my brain, but on the "Holy hell, that's a TON of extra calories for the entire population to be consuming."
That graph shows almost 30 pounds of sugar consumption differential between 1970 and 2000. That's roughly 15 pounds of bodyweight per year every year in calories. That's a HUGE amount of body fat packed on that has to be explicitly removed.
In addition, even in 2020, there's a difference of somewhere between 5 to 10 pounds of sugar consumption relative to 1970 which is roughly 2.5-5 lbs of extra body fat every year. That's 4-8% more calories consumed by the population every year. That's a LOT.
If there is no corresponding decrease in caloric consumption in some other category (remember: there was a big anti-fat push which switched everything to turbo amounts of sugar) then it's no wonder there is an obesity problem in the US.
Side note: my favorite anecdata on this is iced tea in Austin, TX. In the early 1990s, the default iced tea serving was a 32oz glass of unsweetend iced tea. When I came back in the late 2010s, the default is now a 16oz glass of sweet tea which is actually a hyper dose of sugar. Think of the gigantic amount of extra calories that people eating out are now consuming.
Every time there is some discussion about weight here, somebody will come with the whole "there is no good or bad food, calories in/out is the only thing that matters" argument. And while technically correct it's also overly symplistic. The whole point about "bad" (processed) foods is that they make it very easy to take in a lot of calories without feeling sated.
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
Fascinating. Japan's caloric intake per capita has declined since the peak in the early 90s. No wonder everybody here is so lean. I'm always shocked when I step off the plane in Germany or the US at how fat everybody is.
The point is the added calories aren't coming from sugar, contrary to what everyone here thinks. And even if sugar did somehow magically make you fat regardless of calories, sugar consumption has actually gone down, yet the obesity and diabetes epidemics have only gotten worse.
Per the data, caloric supply dropped after/during the great recession (2007-2008) to the levels of about 10-20 years prior. Did obesity drop during this period, too?
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
Calories absorbed vs calories expended is physics, but it doesn't explain why people are storing more calories over time.
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
Calories are equivalent to joules. Diesel fuel has lots of calories, but you probably won't get fat drinking it. (The human body can't process diesel fuel.)
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
Note that some artificial sweeteners produce an insulin response like sugar - which leads to calories converted to fat.
Also, I wonder about fiber and other carbohydrates. Fiber moderates carbohydrates of all types and prevents glucose spikes (and crashes). and other processed carbs/starches can be very similar to simple sugars - breads, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereals, etc.
Did a ctrl+f on this page to see if anyone had mentioned fiber. Absence of fiber is probably the key characteristic of "ultra" processed food. Foods with fiber are lower in calories, take longer to eat, increase satiety, and moderate glucose response. People are looking all over for scapegoats ("plastics!"), but fiber barely gets any attention.
> the average American now consumes about as much added sugar as the average American did in 1970--yet their waistlines are not remotely comparable.
But people don't become obese overnight. People ate much more sugar in 2000-2010, and those people, if not dead now, are still contributing to the obese rate today.
Also this graph shows people are still eating more sugar in 2021 than in 1970. Just not as much as in 2000.
No one says sugar is the only reason causing obesity. But this graph doesn't debunk the correlation between sugar and obsesity either.
One possibility: we have been collecting learning to use our feet less throughout life.
"In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011)."
It's probably multifactoral. For example, here's a recent provocative paper from a highly respected researcher (John Speakman) arguing metabolic rates have actually slowed since then: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10445668/
The obvious answer is more calories. The obvious answer for why more calories is pretty obvious to non-Americans - your portion sizes are crazy, albeit everyone else in the world is catching up. Even if you buy a "healthy" meal in a quick service restaurant or as a pre-packaged retail product, the smallest portion size is still likely to be grossly excessive.
The obvious answer for why portion sizes are increasing is that food keeps getting cheaper, in particular relative to other costs in the food service industry. The traditional formula for restaurant pricing is 1/3 ingredients, 1/3 labour and 1/3 overheads; if your food costs have decreased over time but your rent and labour costs continue to increase, it's natural to increase portion sizes to maintain the appearance of value-for-money. The same would apply (to a moderately lesser extent) to convenience foods sold at retail. This has a quite drastic anchoring effect - when you normalise excessively large portions, reasonable portions seem meagre.
I think a major factor is that today people eat a lot of food designed by engineers to maximize sales. Designs that makes people overeat probably increases sales so they optimize for that.
So we should expect people to continue to get fatter as we get better at engineering food.
Note that I don't think that engineered food is inherently bad, just that today most food are engineered to be unhealthy because that is better for sales.
Sugar's effect to 1970s waistlines would be determined by preceding decades. Insulin tolerance and other MBS things develop slowly over a person's life.
Pure sugar may have peaked, but total calorie intake is still much higher than it was in 1970. Pew[1] has it 23% higher, which corresponds reasonably well to the rate at which weights have been increasing[2] over the past few decades (i.e., at about 3-4%/decade). The data is reasonably consistent with weight increasing ~linearly with calorie intake.
This is soooo funny, I scroll through all the comments and everyone tells that it's so obvious that calories or sugar are responsible for the fat population. Not a single one mentions that maybe fat makes people fat... No one seems to be interested that the share of fat in the food increased in the recent decades. Why not? Because it's not fat that makes you fat, it's the sugar! Hilarious.
I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
The straw-graping replies to this thread are pretty funny. It's somehow still all sugar's fault, because it just is, with at least one repost of Dr. Lustig's viral Sugar, The Bitter Truth lecture from 12 years ago (when people ironically ate more sugar and weren't as fat or obese as they are today), and a neurotic low-carber who wears a CGM despite not being diabetic (and not knowing that dietary fat intake is actually a stronger risk factor for T2D than sugar).
>I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
IMO the graph is misleading a bit.
Sugar is much less of a problem if you are also being very active on a daily basis. For example, your work contains physical component or maybe you are walking a lot.
So while the graph is showing dropping amount of sugar consumption, it is not taking account for also falling healthy limit of sugar consumption, ie. the fact that we should be eating even less overall given falling activity levels.
And this is especially true for kids whose activity levels fallen dramatically since smartphones.
I can tell that the same amount of sugar has much less effect on me since I lost weight and started running a lot every day. And I know this because I put on a continuous glucose monitor from time to time and can observe sugar spikes from foods to debug my diet.
You can learn a lot wearing CGM like the fact that my local Starbucks was serving me lactose-free milk regardless of what I ordered. You can tell lactose-free milk on a CGM because of a huge glucose spike. The reason? "Lactose free" is misleading. In reality they don't remove lactose. Lactose-free milk is obtained by adding to milk an enzyme that converts lactose to glucose and galactose which can be easily absorbed by the body and cause blood glucose spikes.
Your comment has helped me immensely... I have some degree of lactose sensitivity (can eat cheese and ice cream but cant drink milk), and when I have optimistically tried lactose free milk in the past it has upset my stomach just the same as the normal milk would. What you mentioned about the production of lactose free milk is something I had wondered, how could they actually remove the lactose. anyways thanks for you comment I will go down a research rabbit hole of galactose
Why don’t you start by reading the ingredients on what you’re drinking… it’s milk + lactase (the enzyme in question)
4 replies →
How is it misleading? it's simply showing that people aren't eating more sugar. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you want to add that to an article about how "100 pounds of sugar a year with half the activity because people people are playing xbox too much" that's fine - this could be a part of that conversation.
Nothing wrong with the bigger conversations... but also nothing wrong with data points like this for the sake of data points.
> Lactose free" is misleading. In reality they don't remove lactose. Lactose-free milk is obtained by adding to milk an enzyme that converts lactose to glucose and galactose
Thereby leaving the milk lactose free... Lactase, the enzyme in question, is produced by those who are not lactose intolerant and results in the same quantity of sugar though perhaps without so much "spike".
The misleading part is that people don't expect milk to be a sugary drink.
1 reply →
It would also be a lot more useful if it included all carbohydrates, particularly categorized by glycemic index.
> IMO the graph is misleading a bit.
...how?
Like, seriously how? The graph is about sugar. It doesn't have obese or similar words in it.
If there is a graph of "U.S. citizen's smartphone usage trend from 2010-2021", are you going to say it's misleading a bit because it doesn't take sugar into account...?
It is misleading people because people see the graph and compare it to the graph of rising obesity levels and infer (incorrectly) that if sugar is falling and obesity is rising then it is not sugar that is responsible for obesity.
The truth is that obesity is more complex problem but sugar definitely one of the important drivers.
One way obesity is a complex problem is that in most people it is delayed by decades. Our bodies can take a lot of punishment for a long time before they become disregulated enough to start gaining weight.
3 replies →
[dead]
> You can learn a lot wearing CGM
Are you diabetic?
He posted, then deleted, a response saying he's not diabetic, but isn't healthy either. I guess he wears a CGM because he falsely believes transient blood glucose spikes ultimately cause T2D.
This graph does not go back far enough. Processed foods really took off during WWI, and then again in WWII. Using 1970 as a base line feels like skipping over the biggest jumps in those trends. My guess is that sugar consumption rose during those same periods.
The amount per year doesn't tell me much, but when converted to per day it's crazy high: 120*453.6/365 = 149 grams. That's 600 calories from sugar per day.
PS. A graph showing the total amount of daily calories from carbs, not just sugar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-caloric-supply-deri...
For reference, the recommended maximum amount by the American Heart Association is 37.5 g for men and 25 g for women.
Here is the page from which the chart is from https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
The data in the chart is sweetener "availability" and not really consumption, though it can be assumed that if less is available per capita, then less is consumed as well (per capita). But, this data doesn't explains the increase in obesity since 1970. this might be because of data being an average. Stats like p90 sugar consumption might show a better correlation with obesity rates and hence may be more meaningful than per capita sweetener availability.
Added sugar is not necessarily problematic, but consumption of anti-thyroid substances like high amounts of PUFA (especially seed oils), chlorine, bromine, fluoride (in absence of iodine) can make it so, by way of increasing energy supply which is not properly consumed. Industrial pollutants like PFAS and hexane byproducts also play a role.
There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive" -- it's good for you! It's an obscenely easily digestible source of energy, whose products are used very easily by the cells. In the case of fructose, its consumption is relatively more insulin-friendly than the glucose-heavy starches. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.
Seriously "addictive" sugary foods are psychologically problematic usually for other reasons. Pure cane sugar is not very addictive when consumed alone. Try it.
I think this is an example of proportionality bias. There's a cognitive bias that big effects (obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc) must have big and complex causes.
In reality, sugar is just straight-up bad in anything resembling the quantities we eat it, and we should not. It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density. Therefore it makes sense to seek out. In our synthetic world, we can make as much as we want and eat it whenever we want.
The reward system exhibits unconstrained positive feedback.
As a counter-example there are tons of things that 'feel good' but are destructive, like opioids and cigarettes. Things that are addictive aren't de facto good for you. In fact they're usually very bad for you because they overload your reward feedback network.
> It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density
Fat has 2.25x times the energy per gram that sugar does.
1 reply →
Counterpoint: Try munching on some pure cane sugar. Observe that it is not very addictive at all.
5 replies →
> There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive"
Sugar on its own isn't addictive and isn't a necessary nor sufficient ingredient for hyperpalatability. Foods can be hyperpalatable without sugar, and in fact most (~70%) hyperpalatable foods have their hyperpalatability driven by fat and sodium:
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9672140/
> The availability of HPF in the US food sysltem has expanded substantially over the past 30 years. The current US food supply is highly saturated with HPF, which our findings indicate comprised almost 70 % of available foods as of 2018. The growing availability of HPF over time, particularly HPF high in fat and Na, may have resulted from the reformulation of existing food products in the food system to be hyper-palatable. Thus, expanding HPF availability may be one key contributor to the obesogenic food environment in the US. Given potential consequences for population health, policy-level action is needed to address the presence of HPF in the food system. Policy may focus on limiting the nutrient thresholds allowed in foods to be below HPF thresholds (e.g. foods should contain <25 % kcal from fat and <0·30 % g from Na).
Yes, this is what I put forward at the end.
Agreed entirely. Even more glycemic foods than sugar (which is only half glucose), are not a metabolic problem. I started eating pasta, white bread, and white rice and have been able to lose weight. People on this very forum will tell me that what I do is impossible, but I'm done taking the advice of bots and people who aren't fit. I am downright skinny now. Go ahead and downvote my post, after all HN is an echo chamber full of IYIs and shills, is it not?
My dad a farmer from Croatia always said; corn is what you feed livestock before you drive them to market.
The title says consumption but the graphic says availability. Does availability have a different meaning in this context? Or is this just the amounts of various forms of sweeteners available to a consumer
I'd like to see trends since like 1950.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
is there a strong support for the refined cane sugar trend line at 60 pounds per person? :)
looks like a decade+ long decline trend abruptly stopped there and miraculously stayed flat for 20+ years
My guess is that it has something to do with the government tariffs on sugar imports. As Americans, we all pay way more for our sugar than the rest of the world does. The sugar industry spends a bunch of money lobbying congress to keep it that way. Someone ought to start a lobby group for the sugar consumers of America, those of us who like cookies, cakes and ice cream, in order to reduce the tariffs and bring down the prices.
I suspect the revolution in .cu had something to do with the tariffs as well...
Maybe that is just the American baseline? Plenty of people enjoy cakes, cookies, doughnuts, brownies, etc that will be made with real sugar either at bakeries or at home. 60pounds/year is ~2.6oz/day (74g/day) which sounds pretty achievable given a once or twice a week snacking habit.
I'm guessing tariffs and subsidies. At some point, maintaining the ability to grow corn became seen as a matter of national security.
I'm surprised this peaked at 2000 rather than earlier
This is making me want to "refine" my portfolio
Alternate title: the graph that broke HN's brain. You'll notice that 1) sugar consumption peaked around Y2K and declined after 2) the decline was driven by a decline in consumption of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (the most vilified sugar) specifically, and 3) the average American now consumes about as much added sugar as the average American did in 1970--yet their waistlines are not remotely comparable.
Technically the graph is of per capita added sugar availability and isn't adjusted for loss (due to spoilage, plate waste, etc.), but it meshes with NHANES survey data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9434277/
>In conclusion, over the 18 year time span, from 2001 to 2018, added sugars intake declined significantly among younger adults (19–50 years) in the U.S., regardless of race and ethnicity (i.e., similar for Black and White individuals), income level, physical activity level or body weight status, and declines were mainly due to reductions in added sugars intake from sweetened beverages (primarily soft drinks and fruit drinks). These trends coincide with the evolving emphasis in the DGA on reducing added sugars intake and the increasing focus on population-level interventions aimed at reducing intakes.
> Alternate title: the graph that broke HN's brain.
It breaks my brain, but on the "Holy hell, that's a TON of extra calories for the entire population to be consuming."
That graph shows almost 30 pounds of sugar consumption differential between 1970 and 2000. That's roughly 15 pounds of bodyweight per year every year in calories. That's a HUGE amount of body fat packed on that has to be explicitly removed.
In addition, even in 2020, there's a difference of somewhere between 5 to 10 pounds of sugar consumption relative to 1970 which is roughly 2.5-5 lbs of extra body fat every year. That's 4-8% more calories consumed by the population every year. That's a LOT.
If there is no corresponding decrease in caloric consumption in some other category (remember: there was a big anti-fat push which switched everything to turbo amounts of sugar) then it's no wonder there is an obesity problem in the US.
Side note: my favorite anecdata on this is iced tea in Austin, TX. In the early 1990s, the default iced tea serving was a 32oz glass of unsweetend iced tea. When I came back in the late 2010s, the default is now a 16oz glass of sweet tea which is actually a hyper dose of sugar. Think of the gigantic amount of extra calories that people eating out are now consuming.
> That's roughly 15 pounds of bodyweight per year
It's an extra 4,300 calories per month. Or 145 calories per day. Or about 35 minutes worth of light walking.
It's calories. It's always been calories https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
Every time there is some discussion about weight here, somebody will come with the whole "there is no good or bad food, calories in/out is the only thing that matters" argument. And while technically correct it's also overly symplistic. The whole point about "bad" (processed) foods is that they make it very easy to take in a lot of calories without feeling sated.
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
17 replies →
Fascinating. Japan's caloric intake per capita has declined since the peak in the early 90s. No wonder everybody here is so lean. I'm always shocked when I step off the plane in Germany or the US at how fat everybody is.
18 replies →
The point is the added calories aren't coming from sugar, contrary to what everyone here thinks. And even if sugar did somehow magically make you fat regardless of calories, sugar consumption has actually gone down, yet the obesity and diabetes epidemics have only gotten worse.
6 replies →
Per the data, caloric supply dropped after/during the great recession (2007-2008) to the levels of about 10-20 years prior. Did obesity drop during this period, too?
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
1 reply →
Calories absorbed vs calories expended is physics, but it doesn't explain why people are storing more calories over time.
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8G8tLsl_A4
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Calories are equivalent to joules. Diesel fuel has lots of calories, but you probably won't get fat drinking it. (The human body can't process diesel fuel.)
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
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It’s also smoking
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-total-daily-smo...
Note that some artificial sweeteners produce an insulin response like sugar - which leads to calories converted to fat.
Also, I wonder about fiber and other carbohydrates. Fiber moderates carbohydrates of all types and prevents glucose spikes (and crashes). and other processed carbs/starches can be very similar to simple sugars - breads, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereals, etc.
Did a ctrl+f on this page to see if anyone had mentioned fiber. Absence of fiber is probably the key characteristic of "ultra" processed food. Foods with fiber are lower in calories, take longer to eat, increase satiety, and moderate glucose response. People are looking all over for scapegoats ("plastics!"), but fiber barely gets any attention.
Which artificial sweeteners?
5 replies →
Is this trend vastly affected by the rise of artificial sweeteners like aspartame?
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> the average American now consumes about as much added sugar as the average American did in 1970--yet their waistlines are not remotely comparable.
But people don't become obese overnight. People ate much more sugar in 2000-2010, and those people, if not dead now, are still contributing to the obese rate today.
Also this graph shows people are still eating more sugar in 2021 than in 1970. Just not as much as in 2000.
No one says sugar is the only reason causing obesity. But this graph doesn't debunk the correlation between sugar and obsesity either.
Plus in the 70s I can imagine life was far more physical than today.
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So have any research on why the waistlines today are not remotely comparable to 1970?
One possibility: we have been collecting learning to use our feet less throughout life.
"In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011). In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011). In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972). In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011)."
[Source](http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...)
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It's probably multifactoral. For example, here's a recent provocative paper from a highly respected researcher (John Speakman) arguing metabolic rates have actually slowed since then: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10445668/
But two decades of "fat doesn't make you fat" probably didn't help, and neither did the continued trend of increasing empty calories from cheap vegetable oils, especially soybean oil: https://thedietwars.com/why-are-americans-getting-fatter-a-f...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/59529/indicators_goa...
>Added fats and oils provide more calories per day for the average American than any other food group
EDIT: I think most Americans would be shocked to discover that their "favorite" food group is added fat/oil.
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The obvious answer is more calories. The obvious answer for why more calories is pretty obvious to non-Americans - your portion sizes are crazy, albeit everyone else in the world is catching up. Even if you buy a "healthy" meal in a quick service restaurant or as a pre-packaged retail product, the smallest portion size is still likely to be grossly excessive.
The obvious answer for why portion sizes are increasing is that food keeps getting cheaper, in particular relative to other costs in the food service industry. The traditional formula for restaurant pricing is 1/3 ingredients, 1/3 labour and 1/3 overheads; if your food costs have decreased over time but your rent and labour costs continue to increase, it's natural to increase portion sizes to maintain the appearance of value-for-money. The same would apply (to a moderately lesser extent) to convenience foods sold at retail. This has a quite drastic anchoring effect - when you normalise excessively large portions, reasonable portions seem meagre.
I think a major factor is that today people eat a lot of food designed by engineers to maximize sales. Designs that makes people overeat probably increases sales so they optimize for that.
So we should expect people to continue to get fatter as we get better at engineering food.
Note that I don't think that engineered food is inherently bad, just that today most food are engineered to be unhealthy because that is better for sales.
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Sugar's effect to 1970s waistlines would be determined by preceding decades. Insulin tolerance and other MBS things develop slowly over a person's life.
In spite of sugar, a lot of people went hungry.
You can note that average male height in the US continued increasing up until the late 1980s.
That points to a general caloric deficit up until roughly 1990--which is roughly where we claim the "obesity epidemic" kicks off.
Also, a graph of sugar doesn't include caloric fillers like "soy protein" which now seems to be in everything.
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That part is pretty clear. People are eating more calories than they did in 1970. The more difficult question is: why are they doing that?
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They don't smoke nearly as much as in the 70s though.
Pure sugar may have peaked, but total calorie intake is still much higher than it was in 1970. Pew[1] has it 23% higher, which corresponds reasonably well to the rate at which weights have been increasing[2] over the past few decades (i.e., at about 3-4%/decade). The data is reasonably consistent with weight increasing ~linearly with calorie intake.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328241/americans-average-weight...
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This is soooo funny, I scroll through all the comments and everyone tells that it's so obvious that calories or sugar are responsible for the fat population. Not a single one mentions that maybe fat makes people fat... No one seems to be interested that the share of fat in the food increased in the recent decades. Why not? Because it's not fat that makes you fat, it's the sugar! Hilarious.
I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
The straw-graping replies to this thread are pretty funny. It's somehow still all sugar's fault, because it just is, with at least one repost of Dr. Lustig's viral Sugar, The Bitter Truth lecture from 12 years ago (when people ironically ate more sugar and weren't as fat or obese as they are today), and a neurotic low-carber who wears a CGM despite not being diabetic (and not knowing that dietary fat intake is actually a stronger risk factor for T2D than sugar).
>I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094902