As someone who has experienced so many different sides of this, you have zero clue the degree to which your appetite and ability to suppress it is hormonal until you get hormonally compromised (and then fix it, in my case, happily)
Blaming individuals for a public health crisis affecting 40% of the population is absolutely silly. There are a lot of individuals like me, who overeat behaviorally, but that doesn't explain the scale of the issue. maybe 8-10% of the population has some sort of eating disorder, the other 30% are just regular people eating an american diet.
I think this is easy to say as a healthy eater (I am one too, always have been). However, unlearning a lifetime of bad habits is hard. But yeah, it's costing nations billions that could be better spent.
It's not just habits. It changes the composition of your gut microbiome, hormones, etc. All of that can make changing your diet much harder than one might think.
Those are easier in many ways as you don't need heroin or alcohol to survive and can avoid it completely
If it's hard or not is more of a philosopical question about how much free will we have as people. Statistically they're all hard and not over-eating is the hardest.
Culturally and individually we do a lot of things that probably make the food one even harder
If you drink too much, the common answer is that you need to stop drinking. If you eat too much, we are very reluctant to talk about how you need to eat less. We prefer to talk about how it's someone else's fault and how powerless we are to do anything about it, including comforting lies about how eating less wouldn't work anyway, or how being overweight isn't bad really.
And it becomes even harder when you mix any of those two criteria, let alone more. Then factor in your environment. It is way easier to eat healthily in Italy than in the US. (Maybe that is what you meant with Food desert.)
I disagree on the “if you’re poor”. I find eating healthy cheaper.
You can prepare healthy meals from basic and cheap foodstuffs like vegetables, whole grains and legumes, eggs, low cost meat cuts etc. You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each.
Buying prepared unhealthy foods is what is expensive.
We don’t teach children accountability. We teach adults the opposite.
Body acceptance movements («it’s sexy to be obese»), a social safety net built around supporting the people taking the least responsibility for their lives (like drug addicts), and a culture celebrating incompetence and throwing merit out the window in the name of DEI.
Is it really a surprise a large percentage of the population is obese, stupid and unwilling to change? It’s simply a fundamentally bad incentive structure on a western societal level.
Except this entire narrative is thrown off by the fact that obesity has been a problem before any of that and is a problem in countries without any of that. Even places like Korea where you are literally shamed constantly by friends and family for being even remotely overweight has obesity growing all while having basically the exact opposite culture of what you are complaining about.
Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.
Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.
South Korea's obesity threshold is much lower than western Europe and the US. There you're considered obese at 25 kg/m2 or above. In Europe and the US it's 30 kg/m2.
I didn't mean to say the cases I listed are exclusively the only ones, but I still maintain they are a major part of it.
Japan teaches accountability and taking personal responsibility -- it's a country where its capital city can get away with barely any places to dispose of your trash and not be littered. DEI is barely a thing, if at all. And it definitely does not celebrate mediocrity.
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As someone who has experienced so many different sides of this, you have zero clue the degree to which your appetite and ability to suppress it is hormonal until you get hormonally compromised (and then fix it, in my case, happily)
Blaming individuals for a public health crisis affecting 40% of the population is absolutely silly. There are a lot of individuals like me, who overeat behaviorally, but that doesn't explain the scale of the issue. maybe 8-10% of the population has some sort of eating disorder, the other 30% are just regular people eating an american diet.
40% in a specific country
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I think this is easy to say as a healthy eater (I am one too, always have been). However, unlearning a lifetime of bad habits is hard. But yeah, it's costing nations billions that could be better spent.
It's not just habits. It changes the composition of your gut microbiome, hormones, etc. All of that can make changing your diet much harder than one might think.
If it’s not too hard why are people not doing it?
Because not doing it is even easier.
1 reply →
It's really not hard to not drink. It's really not hard to not do heroin. It's really not hard to...
Those are easier in many ways as you don't need heroin or alcohol to survive and can avoid it completely
If it's hard or not is more of a philosopical question about how much free will we have as people. Statistically they're all hard and not over-eating is the hardest.
Culturally and individually we do a lot of things that probably make the food one even harder
If you drink too much, the common answer is that you need to stop drinking. If you eat too much, we are very reluctant to talk about how you need to eat less. We prefer to talk about how it's someone else's fault and how powerless we are to do anything about it, including comforting lies about how eating less wouldn't work anyway, or how being overweight isn't bad really.
It can be very hard to eat a healthy diet if you're poor or if you live in a food desert, or you have a dietary restriction, or some allergies...
And it becomes even harder when you mix any of those two criteria, let alone more. Then factor in your environment. It is way easier to eat healthily in Italy than in the US. (Maybe that is what you meant with Food desert.)
2 replies →
I disagree on the “if you’re poor”. I find eating healthy cheaper.
You can prepare healthy meals from basic and cheap foodstuffs like vegetables, whole grains and legumes, eggs, low cost meat cuts etc. You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each.
Buying prepared unhealthy foods is what is expensive.
2 replies →
Ignorant comment.
i feel like close to half the adult population having an eating disorder has to be chocked up to a bug in the human brain at some point.
we evolved to eat caloric foods, in case of a famine that will never happen in the modern world.
I think we are too soft on people and we let dirtbags get away with way too much in the US but saying "its not that hard" is a cop out.
we get it you're a macho conservative. nobody cares.
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We don’t teach children accountability. We teach adults the opposite.
Body acceptance movements («it’s sexy to be obese»), a social safety net built around supporting the people taking the least responsibility for their lives (like drug addicts), and a culture celebrating incompetence and throwing merit out the window in the name of DEI.
Is it really a surprise a large percentage of the population is obese, stupid and unwilling to change? It’s simply a fundamentally bad incentive structure on a western societal level.
Except this entire narrative is thrown off by the fact that obesity has been a problem before any of that and is a problem in countries without any of that. Even places like Korea where you are literally shamed constantly by friends and family for being even remotely overweight has obesity growing all while having basically the exact opposite culture of what you are complaining about.
Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.
Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.
South Korea's obesity threshold is much lower than western Europe and the US. There you're considered obese at 25 kg/m2 or above. In Europe and the US it's 30 kg/m2.
There's also factors like this: https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/08/17/SC54HFSN7JAU...
I didn't mean to say the cases I listed are exclusively the only ones, but I still maintain they are a major part of it.
Japan teaches accountability and taking personal responsibility -- it's a country where its capital city can get away with barely any places to dispose of your trash and not be littered. DEI is barely a thing, if at all. And it definitely does not celebrate mediocrity.