How Did the ‘90s Make America Fat?

High fructose corn syrup.

^this

Thread Closed.

Ruby Romaine (Tracey Ullman's makeup artist character) had a theory that disco music made people gay starting in the 1970s. Rock Hudson used to chase women around the makeup trailer until he discovered Studio 54 and went gay.

I blame those g.d. scooters fat people use in the grocery stores

"Low fat" products. Fat was never the problem. Sugar (HFCS) was.

R4 Dontcha just love going to the store at 11am on a Wednesday and seeing old people and fat people fight over the carts? They won't even let them charge for an hour in between trips. Then, when the battery dies in the butter aisle, they start shouting for help or just call 911 to say they're trapped and starving to death.

It's especially prominent on the 1st-12th of every month. That's when government checks come in, and old people go shopping the most.

The advent of low to no fat diets, with no heed to sugar content or carb content. The old USDA food pyramid, carb heavy.

What r1 said but Americans also became lazy, entitled and spoiled at the same time.

Low Fat craze. Nothing but sugar.

It looks like obesity started to really grow fast starting in the late 70s. I blame portion sizes. Portions are just massive compared to 40 or 50 years ago.

I walk daily. I almost never see children or teenagers playing outside. My parents’ generation and my generation spent hours outside every day. I can’t imagine what they’re doing other than being on some kind of technology inside. Pretty sad.

R11, even when I saw growing up in the 90s, kids were outside all the time. It feels like there was a drastic reduction by the late 00s--no doubt due to the explosion of the iphone.

He’s a hottie.

A huge shift to eating more processed food. Now "bars" and "smoothies" both full of sugar and starches and artificial ingredients are popular food groups.

People used to eat 3 meals a day without a lot of snacking. Then the changes to the food pyramid really promoted starch (w/o scientific basis, was the 7th Day Adventists and Nixon running for reelection that shaped that health disaster) and promoting of the idea to eat 6+ times per day > obesity and diabetes and NAFLD rates soaring worldwide, including in kids.

Take out the seed oils and the sugar and eat whole foods and plenty of protein and it is much easier to maintain a lower weight. Also, rise in people on psych meds, weight gain is a common side effect.

I do think the biggest changes are in factory farming and the suburbanization of America. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US have very high obesity rates and they are also very suburban. In fact, New Zealand and Australia's obsesity rates rose FASTER than America's did since 1980. America's obseity rates were already comparatively high so the started off higher.

They’re all dying of covid now though.

R1 and R2 are a great example of how misleading discussions about the weight explosion have been. "Thread closed" Go fuck yourself.

America turned everyone with anxiety into eaters. It became wildly inappropriate to drink and drive or smoke cigarettes during this period. Cigarettes are the big one they never talk about.

Secondly would be the rise of big data. American food companies figured out how to study making foods more hyperpalatable. That's why generic food sucks. Doritos and cheetos are made to have the optimal pressure needed to crunch, as figured out by endless internal studies

Meanwhile yogurt makers entered an arms race where they kept competing by adding more and more sugar to their products and many single serve yogurts now have as much sugar as a snickers bar.

Cereals were tested by adding more and more sugar until kids said it was too sweet to eat. Takes a lot of sugar to hit that.

The low fat craze mentioned above is definitely a contributor though. Replacing fat with sugar definitely fucked up how people view food and added large amounts of sugar to the american diet that's nearly impossible to get off of.

Also back in the 70s and 80s women started entering the workforce in larger numbers. They didn’t have time to cook nutritious meals all the time for their families. They were exhausted by the time they got home and maybe they ate out or picked up takeout food.

[quote] It looks like obesity started to really grow fast starting in the late 70s.

Grains and HFCS (a grain byproduct)

Regarding kids again, I’m a teacher and I see what students bring for snacks and lunches every day. For every child who has a healthy snack/lunch, probably at least 4 don’t.

R17, it was HFCS mostly. Really. You don't know shit.

I straddled the 80s and 90s as a kid, and I feel like in the mid 90s there was an effort to "super size" and "king size" junk food and sodas.

Interestingly, not long ago, I read this article that attempted to answer the same question OP asked.

A lot more entertainment options kept the kids indoors longer in the early 80s. Video games, cable TV to name a few. Also think of all the child abductions and sex offenders out there. It’s even worse today because parents are hyper vigilant about sexual predators. They don’t want their kids playing outside unsupervised (free range kids).

"I watched a documentary about events taking place from the ‘60s to late ‘80s, and it’s remarkable how thin the people were. Not one single fat person."

Watching one documentary is hardly a good way to make generalizations about an entire population. Obesity had been trending up for decades, people didn't just magically get fat in the 90s

Sitting in front of a Computer or tv all day and junk food.

I blame women's lib!

The comedian Totie Fields' entire schtick was based on her being fat.

Today you can go to the grocery store and see six women fatter than Totie.

[quote]People used to eat 3 meals a day without a lot of snacking.

I wonder what the side effect of constant eating is on metabolism? Do digestive systems need rest breaks like other body parts?

Definitely super size and dollar menus, extra large portions at restaurants, more disposable income so people had more money to eat out.

I remember being a young teen and went to the movies with my friend and his sister and some of her friends who were old enough to drive. After the movies, after we all had already had popcorn and soda, they stopped at McDonald’s on the way home. I was confused because we had dinner at their house before we went to the movies, and then snacks at the movies. It was a totally foreign concept to me to have McDonalds as a late night snack.

The McDonalds near me is busiest when school lets out. So many kids go there for an after school snack it’s no wonder they are all so fat.

A lot more of us have office jobs now. Maybe that's part of it. Also, we have the internet, video games, and a shitload more TV than they did back then.

When even rich people had nothing more than three channels, rabbit ears, and a stack of Perry Como records, you can bet your sweet bippy they got out of the house to amuse themselves!

R29, my understanding is that eating something SMALL every three hours, and NOT also having huge meals is a key to sustaining a healthy metabolism.

People aren’t as fat in New York City, where people have to walk to get somewhere. Just saying.

It's actually the opposite, R32. Eating constantly means your body never has the opportunity to burn stored fat. Your digestive system needs long breaks between meals. Constant snacking is part of why we're so fat.

I stayed with a friend’s relatives in Louisiana at some point in the 90’s when we were on a road trip together. My friend warned me before we got there not to “stare” because the whole family was fat and ate a lot.

It was a married couple with three pre-teen aged kids. They were all very overweight. The mother was obese.

My friend and I were both “normal” weight.

The night we arrived she was making dinner. It was pasta with Alfredo sauce. She used store-bought jars of sauce that she said she tweaked by adding her own butter. The pasta was over cooked and the whole dish had the consistency of rice pudding. A “salad” was also served but it was actually orange jello cubes and marshmallows in some sort of sweet white goop. And Italian breadsticks, which were oily and had cheese on top (pre-made frozen of course). To drink? Coke, of course.

Then we had dessert. Fresh strawberries dipped in Cool Whip. But all three kids “hated fruit” so they got ice cream with their cool whip instead. The dad cracked open a case of Coors Lite and they cranked up the tv.

The next morning a lavish breakfast was made. Probably two dozen eggs with tons of cheese and sausage patties served like sandwiches between biscuits. They were the size of tour head. And bacon on the side. Oh, and syrup to dip the sandwiches in. The mom kept apologizing for “being out of grits.” And the kids had sugar cereal (also, in addition to the sandwich things). And tons of orange juice. Weak coffee was loaded with cream and sugar.

Breakfast hadn’t even been consumed an hour again and they were already making lunch: homemade submarine sandwiches. Layers of processed lunch meat and cheese with generous spoonfuls of mayonnaise and oils and Italian spices. Giant white flour bread. But no lettuce or onions or tomatoes because “the kids don’t like it.” Giant bags of potato chips and cheetoes, and more Coke! It was barely even noon at this point.

When we hit the road again the mom gave a bag of cookies. I assumed homemade or semi-homemade. Nope. When I opened the brown bag she’d handed us there were two bags of Keebler chocolate chip cookies still in their original packaging inside.

I never said a word and ate what I could. I will say the family was nice and the kids well behaved and they seemed happy.

But my god!!!

Someone blamed the 7th Day Adventists? Smh

Most say eating small snacks throughout the day is good for metabolism

R37 I believe that theory has been debunked.

Starbucks and the like haven't helped with their latte's, etc. Sugar overload.

Large corporations put R&D into engineering how to make food so pleasurable to our monkey brains that it would become addictive and consumers would buy and buy it. This ran parallel with the “low fat” craze and even Atkins, which sent people with disposable income into a yo-yo diet spiral. At the same time, because the scientifically-crafted food became an experience of (empty) pleasure, more and more people turned to it as they became alienated in their personal lives (“bowling alone”) or stressed out from economic strife (junk food is easy to obtain and a comparatively cheap pleasure after another shitty day at a poorly-paid job).

I don’t blame “lack of willpower” at all; humans as a group are relatively constant in terms of basic needs and desires over time. The food now is just lethally geared to filling emotional (and learned hunger) needs.

I cook all the time and recently all recipes, no matter what it is, calls for sugar.

You're exposed to far more advertising than people in the early 90s, No cellphones, no social media, no advertising at movies, no targeted ads online--ad blockers worked. If you turned off the TV and radio, the only source of messaging was print media, billboards and other signage.

Food Network demonstrates the shift in appetites. In the beginning, it was instructional with call-in shows and cooking demonstrations. Now it's about how many charred burgers and fries you can scarf at one time.

With the demise of public education and newspaper consumption as a regular habit, America got fatter and dumber but more appearance obsessed.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

[quote] High fructose corn syrup.

That didn’t start in the 90s, idiot.

OP watches a documentary and thinks she knows what everyone looked like. lol. People were fat as fuck in the 80s.

[quote] You're exposed to far more advertising than people in the early 90s, No cellphones, no social media, no advertising at movies, no targeted ads online--ad blockers worked. If you turned off the TV and radio, the only source of messaging was print media, billboards and other signage.

Those all became common place in the 2000s, not the 90s.

Limitless drink machines and upsized value meals

[quote] Large corporations put R&D

WTF is R&D? Stop typing fat.

[quote] People aren’t as fat in New York City

In New York City, obesity is epidemic. More than half of adult New Yorkers have overweight (34%) or obesity (22%).

There have always been chunky and chubby people (my people!). In fact, I think the 1920s-50s were unusually slender because of the Depression and war years, which gave people who grew up then complexes about being heavier (resulting in the rise of things like Weight Watchers in the 60s and beyond). What’s new now is the commonality of obesity. But frankly, those people’s bodies are doing the job their genes are geared to do to keep carrying on in all the generations before.

High-fructose corn syrup started in the 70s.

i think a lot of people just don't know how to cook healthy meals, or cook at all. Who wants to come home after a stressful day at work and cook? It's so easy to just order take out.

The obesity rate began skyrocketing in the 1980s. Probably when they declared ketchup a vegetable in 1980/81.

If you need an audiobook to listen to while on the treadmill, listen to [italic]The Hacking of the American Mind[/italic] by Dr. Robert Lustig. Lots of material in that book answer the question.

[QUOTE] Probably when they declared ketchup a vegetable in 1980/81.

That sounds like Ronald Reagan’s doing.

So Reagan made us fat.

I'm not sure exactly what happened OP, but I am sure we should stop allowing so much crap in our foods and environment. That's really where the problem stems from. Exercise all you want, but burning a lousy few hundred calories isn't going to make or break you with this modern diet. One latte destroys it.

Trust me, not all people ate these amazingly healthy meals back in the day. My grandparents were quite disgusting and the whole family was skinny. They loved fatty meats, big meals, and sweet desserts. Vegetables were in cans half the time. What changed is the ingredients. Soybeans, sugars, trans fats, etc. Plastic leaking synthetic estrogen into everything we consume. There's a lot of illnesses on the rise too (autoimmune diseases, cancers, etc.), that do damage to the body's functioning -- medicine alone can cause weight gain (birth control, antidepressants, etc.)

It's obviously more complex than a simple answer though, since many habits have been altered, but don't let people trick you into thinking everyone was eating all natural healthy foods from a garden, but they were processed and packaged differently than now.

[QUOTE] OP watches a documentary and thinks she knows what everyone looked like. lol. People were fat as fuck in the 80s.

I’m sure there were chubby people back then, but nothing like the guy in OP’s pic. He looks like he’d fall over if you took that shopping cart from him. We didn’t start seeing millions of morbidly obese people like that til the 90s onward.

I think constant snacking and this "eat 6 small meals a day" BS didn't help. Not that those are the only reasons, but the human body was not designed to receive food every 2-3 hours. We're supposed to allow our digestive systems to rest, and engage in brief "fasting" periods every day to allow our blood sugar levels to re-set and burn stored fat..

R58 I agree. My mother said in the 80s, there were maybe 3 "fat" kids in school. Fat as in maybe a size 8. Kind of like the movie Carrie, with the one "fat girl" who is just kinda chubbers. Most of the girls were wearing size 0-4; then showering in their jeans to make them even tighter. Something definitely happened in the 90s to move things along.

R58 both my parents were very large people. Even back in the 70s and 80s. But they had to take medicine for their bipolar disorder. I think the lithium had something to do with it. But their diet wasn’t very good either. My mom was a horrible cook and loved sweets and eating out.

R59 I agree with that as well. Unless you're a work out nut or athlete. I've always been thin and I eat once a day a majority of the time. I'm just not hungry and it makes me too sluggish. About 15 yrs ago I joined a gym over a gain of about 10lbs. I wanted to get ahead of it and get some definition going. The trainer was an absolute lunatic about pushing the eating thing. I ended up gaining another 5lbs (still I was thin, but I'm weird about any weight gain). As soon as I went back to eating once, dropped 20lbs in a month.

I've never understood the eating all day trend. I know there's some people like that, but wasn't for me. They now have genetic testing, where you can find out the idea diet for your body (there's 4 types). I highly recommend spending the $100 to find out.

Sigh...

To the fool at r45:

High Fructose Corn Syrup was developed in the 1970’s but didn’t begin to be widely used in processed foods until the mid-1980’s. In answer to the OP’s question, by the 1990’s, use of HFCS was in full swing (because it was much less costly than real sugar, and because there were profitable government subsidies to grow corn) which had a huge and deleterious impact on American health during those years…. Ie. THE 1990’S.

What was considered a fat teenager in 1951.

[quote] Large corporations put R&D into engineering how to make food so pleasurable to our monkey brains

^^This. Snack foods are scientifically engineered to be addictive. They stimulate the same dopamine receptors that crack cocaine does. That perfect salty crunch of Doritos, the double hit of creamy sugar and fat when you bite into a piece of cheesecake or a pint of Haagen-dasz or a kid eating a bowl of crunchy CocoaPuffs breakfast cereal. That fizzy artificially-sweet buzz you get from a Red Bull or a Diet coke. It’s the texture (‘mouth feel’) as much as the taste/sugar/caffeine that hooks you.

I also read once about how a lot of junk food is not made as tasty as it could be, just at the right level to make people keep eating it (ie "do I like this? hmmm, what flavour IS this?" etc) and that by the end of the packet they may think they like it and so will buy another.

I feel that's definitely happened with something like Arnott's biscuits here in Australia. They absolutely used to be nicer. But of course, then you would fill up and only eat a few at a time. Now they taste kinda like nothing, but you keep eating, trying to get that flavour.

R35, you remember that much excruciating detail about a few meals you ate in the1990s; right down to the brand of cookies and strength of the coffee? Interesting.

[quote]That perfect salty crunch of Doritos, the double hit of creamy sugar and fat when you bite into a piece of cheesecake or a pint of Haagen-dasz or a kid eating a bowl of crunchy CocoaPuffs breakfast cereal.

In other words, just as any good cook does.

What people should be asking themselves is: why eat that crap in the first place?

You can't blame manufacturers for making their stuff as "tasty" as possible.

A good cook’s good food is more satiating than Doritos—junk food is designed to hike you up and then crash you, so you go looking for more. The same is not true of my mothers roast chicken and scalloped potatoes.

On YouTube there are videos of walking the streets of Paris. The Parisians are so thin. Is it from walking everywhere, diet, both?

We replaced socializing and God with food

R70 Then learn to cook.

And don't eat Doritos.

[quote]junk food is designed to hike you up and then crash you,

In what way exactly?

I don’t appreciate the direction this thread is taking,

Born in the late 70s. I remember in the 80s seeing a really fat person was kind of a novelty. Rare. Chunk from the Goonies was a fat kid back then but now he would be normal

Hate to say it, but cigarette smoking was drastically decreasing beginning in the 1990’s. California was the first state to ban smoking form public places in 1995. However, smoking was often an unconscious meal replacement for many people. By not smoking and not eating, calories were substantially reduced… and it was something to do that occupied the hands and mind vs. snacking.

To the poster at r71, the French are still big smokers. This might be a factor in their thinness.

Meant “by smoking and not eating”

R72 yep.

R73 This is a pretty good overview -

Totie too? R28

America has a culture problem. Junk food, guns, shabby clothes, messy homes and yards, spending more than they can afford, willfully uneducated, etc. Whatever standards this country used to have are at ground level. Unhealthy eating is part of a bigger issue, and I don’t think there’s an easy way out.

Buffets

People are looking for complicated or trendy answers - "too many carbs!" "HFCS!" - when the primary answer is portion size. 20 oz. of Coke sweetened with sugar instead of HFCS is still bad for you. Grains, bread and potatoes have been essentials in the Western diet for centuries. Look at the meals of our ancestors - they're almost entirely carbohydrate and fat; the typical home-cooked meal of 1960 had lots of carbs, too.

The problem is portion size. 50 years ago, 8-oz bottles of soda were being replaced by 12-oz cans. That size remained standard through the '70s and '80s. Then, suddenly, 16-oz and 20-oz bottles were ubiquitous, and fast-food places and movies theaters had enormous cups that put even these to shame.

Look at a standard-sized dinner plate. You could barely fit one typical modern restaurant course on it. Restaurants now use much larger plates of the size that used to be called chargers, that is, plates meant to go under the dishes you actually ate from. Even this extra-large plates are served slopping over with food.

One reason for all this is that food is cheap in America, and even more so if you're a restaurant chain buying at super-low negotiated prices. But it's cheap for individuals, too. Food takes up only a small part of the average American household budget. We can afford to stuff ourselves, so we do. Restaurants can afford to offer huge portions to please and attract customers, so they do.

The smoking thing is spot-on as well. Nicotine suppresses the appetite; the act of smoking keeps our hands and mouths busy; cigarettes make any food you try to eat while smoking taste awful. So ... you eat less. This is really obvious to anyone who has ever been a smoker, but you'll never hear it from official sources. The public health nazis have worked too hard to demonize smoking and smokers ever to admit that there might actually be at least some ancillary benefits from the otherwise unhealthy habit.

R81, what period are you comparing modern standards to? I ask because the first step in figuring out how to make things better is to understand what has changed since that time and how it might have contributed to the cultural decline.

GMOS and HFCS.

We're not supposed to say this.

The lawsuits against food manufacturers are coming.

R83, look at what a mcdonalds standard meal used to look like in the 50s. It basically looked like a modern-day happy meal! How things have changed...like you said, it's so simple but people want to develop all these other answers.

[QUOTE] Born in the late 70s. I remember in the 80s seeing a really fat person was kind of a novelty. Rare. Chunk from the Goonies was a fat kid back then but now he would be normal

Spot on. Chunk was a fattie yet he’s downright fit compared to these kids today.

R33. You need to visit the Bronx and East New York more often. NYC is full of poor people of which many, many are obese.

"New York City, New York, is tackling obesity and tobacco use throughout the community of 8.4 million residents. More than half (57%) of the adults in New York City are overweight or obese, and 27.3% of adults reported no regular physical activity in the past 30 days. Further, approximately 39% of New York City Public School children in kindergarten through eighth grade are overweight or obese, compared to 35.5% of children aged 6-11 nationally."

Everyone eats far, far too much and often and people are disgustingly inactive due to car culture. There’s also widespread and baffling ignorance regarding caloric input and output and how to actually lose weight. Add in the reduction of tobacco consumption, high fructose corn syrup, the fat acceptance movements in western countries and here we are.

People also use food as entertainment, as a facet of their so called personalities, and as a weird emotional crutch. I am so sick of endless food photos, articles, new fad diets, discussions!! It’s so vulgar, gross and boring!!

My fondest dream is a true meal replacement pill to eliminate all food buying/cooking/cleaning/excreting nonsense! What a waste of time, effort and resources it all is, shameful really the energy expended on it all, just flushed down the bog in the end. Surely there are better things to do?

This woman wrote a very good book called Gut: The Inside Story. It’s very good! I think it also says in the book that snacking is bad and we should space our meals apart by five hours or so.

Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner

I notice that I don’t see kids of today out playing pick-up baseball, football, maybe some basketball, etc. (BITD my friends and I would run full court games back to back, maybe 5 hours straight. Also, as a kid I would hustle for money by cutting grass, shoveling snow, etc. I have never had a kid in twenty years of home owning offer to cut my grass or when I lived in the city, sweep my walk. They stay at home playing video games, watching videos, smoking weed, and eating terrible junk food.

[quote]A lot more entertainment options kept the kids indoors longer in the early 80s. Video games, cable TV to name a few. Also think of all the child abductions and sex offenders out there. It’s even worse today because parents are hyper vigilant about sexual predators. They don’t want their kids playing outside unsupervised (free range kids).

I was a child in this time period and I can tell you that the Adam Walsh kidnapping/murder changed everything. That was a HUGE story and scared the living shit out of parents all over America, I remember it very well. After that happened, parents became paranoid and unsupervised kids roaming around in public was greatly curtailed. Kids of my generation were the first to spend more time indoors than outdoors.

Don’t forget to smoke these all day R91!

I could never smoke American Spirits, they made me nauseous and gave me a headache. My favorites were these, the best cig ever....

R28 Totie Fields is the new "petite"!

R95 smoke whatever you like. All I’m saying is smoking sure keeps the weight off. When I quit smoking I gained over 70 pounds! Do I feel healthier? A little. But I sure do miss smoking!

There are tons of kids lifting weights and playing basketball at gyms today

I don't think it's about food additives or diet coke or anything like that. It's portions and also culture. Elastic waist clothing (because you don't realize you're gaining the weight), lack of shame about being heavy, all that stuff. I'm sure quitting smoking plays into it. I read once that people tend to be friends with same size people. So if you are around a bunch of skinny people, you would be embarrassed to gain weight. If heavy people hang out with heavy people, it seems normal.

Portion sizes have definitely increased, especially of sugary soda.

I remember in the 1970s, a "large" soda cup at McDonalds was about the size of a "small" today. You can now down 400 or 500 calories easily in one of those x-large drink cups.

Drink refills and endless soda machines are standard

Like what someone mentioned above, women entering the workplace has had a huge impact on our eating habits. It's not just on thing though, it's a combination of a lot of things mentioned in this thread.

I grew up in the 90s and my mom was very much of the "you need to stay inside" type because the well-publicized child abductions of the era made her anxious. So I don't blame kids for not being active enough - if they're not allowed to be or if they have no place to run around, then it's irrational to expect them to do backflips in their living room to compensate.

Keto and Intermittent fasting.

And being vain. Yes.

I don’t want to be fat.

I think of regular soda as liquid candy. I’m trying to quit drinking Coke. As a youngster I would have two cokes a day or more. Then I was off it for a while. I was drinking Diet Coke and that’s bad and it’s own way. 10 years ago I started drinking Coke again. I was drinking a can a day. Now I’m down to about one can a week. Pretty soon I’m going to be Coke free for good!

I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s. We played outside constantly.

Either organized sports (baseball in summer) or just with other kids in the area. We used to jump rope waiting on the bus!

After school, we all had chores from feeding the horses, cleaning stalls or working in the garden/hauling and splitting firewood. We were allowed a happy meal maybe once a week. Maybe.

Today, people will eat three meals at a burger joint every day and snack on junk in between meals sitting in front of a TV.

There are children who are talker and a lot fatter than I am. I mean kids under 12.

I think there are numerous factors that contribute to obesity, most of them already mentioned. It's gotten so bad that chairs, beds and hospital furniture is gigantic! I go to the doctor for a check-up and the chairs look like they belong to the jolly green giant.

This woman has a lot to answer for. Her infomercials were on the air constantly in the '90s. Her message, repeated over and over again: "Fat makes you fat!" So instead she encouraged people to eat lots of carbs, which are what really make you fat. (Dr. Atkins had already made that point 20 years earlier.) And America on the whole was on a low-fat craze. Low-fat products flooded supermarkets, substituting sugar and carbs for the missing fat. Stop the insanity, indeed.

I grew up in the 80s and early 90s. Back then there were two McDonalds, one Burger King and one Dennys within about a 10-mile radius from my hometown. Today, that same 10-mile radius has more fast food places and more chain restaurants in the style of Chilis and Applebees than I can count offhand. The explosion of fast food chains and various restaurant chains is crazy. You only had a small fraction of those places years ago., and the portions were smaller.

Hfcs, computers, video games, sedentary lifestyle.

It will be a combination of everything mentioned here, but the high-carb/low-fat/constant eating thing is most convincing to me.

I've recently started intermittent fasting and have been watching a lot of YouTube talks on the negative effects of frequent insulin spikes and positive effects of not eating for longer stretches. My sister always has a diet soda in her hand, doesn't eat regular meals, snacks all day on carbs. Her total caloric intake is probably lower than that of thin people's, yet she's obese.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended a low-fat, high-carb (grain) diet. So they basically recommended that we greatly reduce our consumption of protein-rich, nutrient-dense, incredibly satiating red meat (which humans have been eating for millennia) and replace them with grains which are what we feed cattle to fatten them up and stuff into geese to make foie gras (literally fatty liver).

The guidelines also encouraged that fat be stripped out of dairy products (despite the fat being the thing that makes them palatable and satiating), which meant that sugar was added to these things to make them tasty.

Food producers eagerly embraced these new guidelines for 2 reasons, both based on finance rather than health: firstly, if you fill food with sugar (a preservative), it has a much greater shelf-life (which is one reason why bread is weirdly sweet in the US) and secondly, food manufacturers are well aware that removing satiating fat from food and replacing it with dopamine-inducing sugar completely destroys the body’s ability to regulate its body weight. Essentially removing fat and adding sugar means people can eat huge quantities without feeling full.

The Dietary Guidelines were issued in 1980. It took a few years for them to filter down to the general population, and to be adopted in the rest of the Western world, but by 1990 Americans (followed swiftly by Brits, Australians, etc.) were eating far less fat and far more grains and sugar. At the same time, diabetes rates began to soar, and it became a wonderful time to decide on a career as a bariatric surgeon.

A fat child is a victim of child abuse.

The world eats carbs and plenty of them. The US eats massive portions of everything.

"They basically recommended that we greatly reduce our consumption of protein-rich, nutrient-dense, incredibly satiating red meat (which humans have been eating for millennia) and replace them with grains which are what we feed cattle"

Except, r111, that that "protein-rich, nutrient-dense, incredibly satiating red meat" in the 80s and 90s was no longer what humans had been eating for millennia, but rather a package of pesticides, antibiotics and artificial growth hormones eating which certainly changed your biome, triggered reactions like allergies, and did more harm than good.

If you can afford it in terms of time and money, you need to organic in the US and cook for yourself. Sad but true.

We didn’t get fat because of grains or non organic food. Asian people eat rice or some kind of noodles for breakfast lunch and dinner, and some countries use pesticides and food additives by the truckload and their citizens aren’t fat.

America is fat because of cheap, fatty, and unhealthy food that’s devoid of nutrition and available at every corner, massive portion sizes that can feed entire villages, driving everywhere instead of walking and no or very little exercise, too much meat, fat, and sugar in our diets and not enough fresh fruits and vegetables, the anti smoking campaign 40 years ago that made people quit cigarettes and replace them with unhealthy food, and no preventative care or education is offered by the government or health insurances for overweight or obese people.

Even your doctor won’t tell you that your ass is fat because that would be politically incorrect (body positivity), and there’s a billion dollar market for statins, blood pressure lowering medications, antacids, diabetes drugs, and no incentive for any educational or preventative measures.

Datalounge is fond of this "there wasn't a single fat person in this old footage" meme, but you can find plenty of fat people in movies and documentary footage going back to the 1950s at least. There are far fewer, but the simple-minded rote repetition of "there were no fat people back then" is untrue.

It's just an excuse for old people to reminisce about how things were better back in the day. Truth doesn't really enter into it, I guess.

R115, you are absolutely right that the US (and all those other countries which follow it is eating “unhealthy food that’s devoid of nutrition”, but it isn’t fat that is the problem. It’s that the foods are laced with sugar which keeps us hungry, cooked in vegetable oils which played no part in human nutrition until 100 years ago and which our body can’t deal with, and the food isn’t satiating.

Satiety should be at the heart of healthy eating. You are absolutely right that there are places which eat a lot of rice/pasta/potatoes, but those places have also traditionally also eaten huge amounts of fish, shellfish and meat as much as possible. And these places would traditionally never have dreamt of stripping out the fat from foods. A country like France, for example, is famed for bread, but the bread is not the centre of a meal. French cookery is heavy on butter, cream, meat and fish, and they finish off a traditional meal with full-fat cheese, which sends a satiety signal to the brain. Until recently, this diet served France well, and it still has far lower rates of obesity and heart disease than the Us or uk for example. They are catching up though, as they adopt more of our dietary habits.

Blaming consumers for greed is very tempting. It’s the easy answer. But the fact is that consumers try hard to look after their health. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans instructed Americans to avoid full-fat dairy, so sugary low-fat versions became the norm. So schools won’t serve plain full- fat milk, but kids can have the low-fat chocolate version!

The Guidelines told Americans to avoid red meat, so pork consumption has decreased by around 30% and beef consumption by around 40% in the US since 1980. At the same time obesity rates have skyrocketed.

The dietary advice has been ruinous for at least the past 40 years, and more and more people are realising that. I think food companies are realising that the game is up too. Unfortunately, instead of committing to selling us fresh, unprocessed foods which our bodies understand, they are pivoting to a new marketing strategy: plant-based foods. Instead of selling us more meat and vegetables and encouraging us to cook them as we wish, they are aggressively promoting faux-meat, which offers them greater room for profit than normal human foods.

[QUOTE] Datalounge is fond of this "there wasn't a single fat person in this old footage" meme, but you can find plenty of fat people in movies and documentary footage going back to the 1950s at least.

No you can’t.

Get yourselves learned up about HFCS and brush up on your Spanish at the same time.

Okay, so fat is bad for you. But don’t demonize the obese.

Saturated fat is bad

My neighbor in the 80s was never without a veritable vat of soda in her jug-sized Big Gulp mug.

SLN SKIT 90'S or sometime in that frame , their weight loss skit. EAT LESS , MOVE MOVE. EAT LESS MOVE MORE...

You need the right raw ingredients in your diet to make new cells. The most important being the right types of fats to make cell walls, the phospholipid bilayers that are key to everything. Without a good supply of long and medium chain fatty acids to do this your body will attempt to build new cells with crap fats that don’t hold a charge well. All cell walls essentially act like a capacitor in holding charge. If you don’t consume the right foods with the right raw ingredients to manage building new cells, you are fucking yourself health-wise. Lower cellular voltage leads to inflammation and the onset of diseases which sets the stage for chronic conditions.

Want to know why the obese are succumbing to COVID at higher rates? Their bodies have massive inflammation. The cells that their bodies are building don’t hold voltage well, dropped voltage leads to inflammation which stresses the immune system constantly. An overtaxed immune system dealing with chronic inflammation gets hit with the demands of fighting off COVID and it just doesn’t have the energy and capacity to do so. Their immune systems are already overloaded in having to deal with the constant inflammation throughout the body. COVID flips the breaker and it all starts to shut down.

By correlation, if you get a bad, extensive sunburn and you contract COVID, you are at serious risk. You could be really fit and muscular, but a sunburn is extremely demanding on the immune system and the energy required by your body to fuel the immune system to deal,with the consequences of a sunburn and added to that a COVID infection — and you are in trouble. There’s a lot of inflammation under the surface that the immune system is dealing with from damaged skin cells (remember, skin is the body’s largest organ). An overburdened immune system will crash in trying to also take on COVID.

HFCS is acidic. The body’s normal, healthy pH is between 7.35 and 7.45. Consumption of sugar in any form pushes the pH down. What is pH? It’s potential hydrogen, or the number of electrons available to “do work”. Essentially it’s the measure of voltage in a liquid. When pH drops, voltage drops. When your pH/voltage is in the healthy range (7.35 - 7.45 pH / -20 to -25 millivolts), your body is inhospitable to pathogens. The moment that drops and is sustained for any period of time, it’s the equivalent of ringing the dinner bell for every virus, bacteria, or fungus to start eating on/off of you. Once they do, the cascade of disease begins. As an example, the detritus (basically the excrement of strep bacteria eating off of the cells in your throat creates a reaction in your joints which causes inflammation and soreness, and it also affects your heart muscles,as well. Restore the pH/voltage to ‘healthy” and strep can’t survive in the body. The viruses for heroes and chicken pox, those viruses lie dormant in our spinal column, waiting for the voltage in our system to drop (because of stress, diet, the natural aging process) and then they spring to action and our immune system has to be marshaled like a fire department to deal with the outbreak they cause.

Sugar lowers pH which makes our bodies more acidic and that lowers voltage. Consuming lots of sugar and foods that are highly acidic stresses the body and pushes it below the “healthy range”. Consumption of more alkaline foods help keep the body balance and in that range or above it to where certain diseases don’t have a foothold.

The recipe to make a Fat Whore is Aspartame, high fructose corn syrup, and sitting in front of the TV and computer most of the day and night.

The high-carb/low-fat craze was a huge turning point for me. And I mean YUGE!!

The virus for “herpes” not “heroes”.

It would be nice if we could edit our posts here like we can on Facebook to catch stupid typos and punctuation errors.

I did my best. I know there are some misplaced commas in there. Be gentle with me. I was only trying to help and inform. The damn keyboard on mobile devices is a curse when trying to communicate. I should have proofread before hitting “post” and for that I am guilty.

Aspartame does not make you fat. That is a myth. I started losing weight in college when I started drinking diet coke. I drank a LOT of it. But I also ate almost nothing. Borderline anorexic, but happy to be thin.

I have said this on DL before, but my daughter should be fat. I'm a bad momma. My son is skinny but he's the vegetarian and doesn't eat enough. Daughter is a beautiful rail, she is 13. I tell her to be careful of drinking all that (non diet) Coke, that it could catch up with her. She also drinks whole milk once or twice a day (chocolate milk, made with the powdered mix). She does enjoy chips (but then I take them and chow down and now I am pudgy), burgers, fries, junk-o-rama. Exactly what one shouldn't eat. I tell her to be careful. She and her two buddies planned a picnic a couple days ago, and I was the chauffer. One of the buddies has been large for years, and still is. The other buddy gained some weight but also gained enormous boobs. I don't know how my daughter didn't gain weight, I do everything wrong.

I used to drink about a half liter of soda per day in my teens and 20s

Portion size is out of control. Just look at McDonald’s. 50 years ago, you got a small burger or cheeseburger, a little paper bag of fries and an 8 ounce drink. Today it’s a Big Mac or quarter pounder, or a double quarter pounder, giant serving of fries, and at least a 16 ounce drink. And that's before you supersize it.

Multiply that by the proliferation of fast food outlets, add in supermarket and convenience stores filled with junk food giant bags of chips and cookies, 2-liter soda bottles, Starbucks type sugary fatty giant coffee drinks, ice creams, etc. and it’s no wonder so many people are giant sized too.

Don’t forget factory farming. Try to find a tomato that tastes like a tomato in the supermarket. A ripe pear. A peach that isn’t mealy. It’s all picked when it’s still unripe and engineered to have thick skin so it won’t bruise. When fresh food is tasteless, we add too much salt or sugar or we end up eating more in an effort to feel satiated.

The French have weekly farmer’s markets in every tiny town but now they also have supermarchés with plastic wrapped vegetables on the outskirts of larger towns.

It’s cultural change and energy mathematics. People are eating more calories per day as portion size, meal frequency, use of high calorie ingredients, and snacking increase. Food is taking an increasing central role in social culture, and despite the countless avenues out there to learn about nutritional content of food, many people choose not to apply the information. On the expenditure size, people are increasingly less active for a variety of reasons outlined in this thread. It’s as simple as that. A couple hundred calories shift on both sides of the equation creates a surplus of fat reserves which builds over time.

I tracked a five mile walk today. Usually walking equates to around 100 calories per mile and that’s generous. That five mile walk wouldn’t cover most blended drinks at a coffee chain. You can only make up for so much overeating by exercise. There’s not enough hours in the day.

The great thing is, when you eat real, unprocessed foods with a healthy balance of fat, carbs, and protein, you don't have the sugar swings and cravings that happen with processed food. It takes about a month to really break the cravings to the bad shit, but once you do that, you find yourself eating plates of normal, balanced food and then being happy to stop.

I've been reforming my eating and exercise habits this summer after gaining 40 lbs eating junk during the worst of the COVID lockdowns. I've taken off 20 pounds in 2 1/2 months--halfway there. Weight loss isn't complicated, but it does require patience and dedication. No pill or fad diet will do it.

I am amazed at the people I know who claim they are trying to lose weight and be healthier yet still drink sugary drinks.

[quote] The damn keyboard on mobile devices is a curse when trying to communicate.

The eldergays don't understand this. They're still using flip phones from the 2000s and of course aren't using the internet on them or texting.

Also Americans eat stuff they think is healthy, but is not. Eating a salad full of carbs, white creamy dressings, and bacon is unhealthy. Just because you call it a salad doesn’t mean it’s good for you

r134, 20lbs. in 2 1/2 months is amazing. You should be proud of yourself.

Thanks, R138. The first month was tough, but once my palate adjusted to the shift and I got used to cooking for myself, it hasn't been too bad. I've cut out white sugar, wheat, and processed foods of any kind. I'm also drinking tons of water (and only water) and hitting the gym 3-5 times a week depending on my schedule. The fact that the weight has come off like it has tells me that the crap they're selling us as food and drink really is the main culprit.

R137, something foreigners note when they come to America is that almost everything tastes way sweeter than it did in their home country. Even stuff like bread. Hell, even American chocolate is often way more sugary than the chocolate of other countries. Even Canadian Kit Kat tastes much better and less sweet than the American kind.

In the late 80’s they decided to give fat cow Roseanne a sitcom, coincidence? I think not.

I thought Roseanne was SO fucking fat back then. I look at reruns now and I think she looks normal.

High fructose corn syrup and hormones in everything. I don't know what percentage of Americans eat out but there's also the massive portions.

Years back I read an interview with Elena Bereshnaya from the early 0s. She's a Russian pairs skater/gold medalist. She describes moving to New Jersey from Russia to train with her partner and freaking out because no matter what she ate she gained weight and she wasn't exactly eating like a horse. As a pairs skater she was tiny and probably underweight, so adding in her training regimen we're probably talking only 5-6 additional pounds but she was losing her mind over it. I can't recall how she solved it - only bought from farmers markets or what.

Russians are ALL drama queens (and whores) though.

DLers of the world - do you think the food in America is the most toxic of the western countries in terms of animal steroids, additives, and chemicals compared to say the UK?

It used to be very common for people to have a few drinks before dinner, and that will cut down on your appetite so you don't eat as much. It was also fairly common to have a drink or two if you went out to lunch. Then America turned into Prisspot Nation and that was frowned upon.

And yes, smoking helped too. I used to smoke and I never ate breakfast because I wasn't hungry in the morning, and I didn't usually eat lunch until the middle of the afternoon.

Europe banned GMOs.

R146, doesn't drinking alcohol increase hunger?

R145, 100%. The UK post-Brexit is turning into America and they will not get wonderful chlorinated chicken.

It’s much harder to overeat meat than it is to overeat candy.

[quote]She's a Russian pairs skater/gold medalist. She describes moving to New Jersey from Russia to train with her partner and freaking out because no matter what she ate she gained weight and she wasn't exactly eating like a horse.

This is such bullshit.

I lived in Italy for years. It is one of the slimmest countries in Europe (after Denmark and Switzerland).

Now back in the states I eat the way I did over there: salads, vegetables, pasta, good cheese, fresh fish etc.

My weight is exactly as it has always been.

I don't understand all the talk here about high fructose corn syrup and Doritos and fast food. Why do you eat that shit? And you're surprised it makes you gain weight?

That’s because in Italy they don’t serve giant Maggiano’s-sized portions at every restaurant.

Of all the responses to this "holy fuck everyone is so fat" conversation, which is one of the main conversations we've been having as a culture for a couple of decades now, is the R150-style "wow why do they even eat all those Doritos?!?" response is among the least helpful. Fat people know Doritos make them fat. The reasons they eat Doritos are complex and the real answer probably has something to do with why alcoholics drink alcohol and drug addicts shoot up drugs. Way upthread someone posted that we stopped socializing and going to church and that's why we're fat and I think that actually has a decent amount to do with it. Along with, of course, all the other complex reasons (HFCS, nutritional advice, portion size, junk food palatability etc .).

We're fat because a)it's easy as shit to be fat in this time and place and our genes literally encourage chowing down whenever possible and b)we're fucking lonely and life sucks/feels hopeless for a lot of people.

I collect dinerware from the 20s/30s/40s. The plate and cup sizes look like children's toys they're that small. The mugs hold easily hold less than 1 standard cup/250ml liquid. The "hot chocolate mug" (that's it's actual name) barely holds a half cup of liquid.

growing up in the late 70's and 80's i was the only fat kid around. It was miserable. My parents fed my siblings and i the same thing, so i really don't know why i was so fat. My older sister was rail thin. We rode bikes, swam, played outside all day. Maybe some people are just naturally fatter? My father was a fat child too, but he lost all his weight and took amphetamines.

Nutrient deficient foods are fabricated to taste great.

You eat more because.

1. You haven't consumed enough nutrients your body needs.

2. The foods are fabricated to taste great.

3. See 1

Covid loves 600 pounders

[quote]We're fat because a)it's easy as shit to be fat in this time and place and our genes literally encourage chowing down whenever possible and b)we're fucking lonely and life sucks/feels hopeless for a lot of people.

Oh boo hoo.

Stop eating crap and start walking.

[quote] But they had to take medicine for their bipolar disorder. I think the lithium had something to do with it.

Lithium messes with your thyroid, so you’re probably on to something - although people can eat shit when they’re manic or depressed. When you’re depressed you don’t move as much.

[quote] Ruby Romaine (Tracey Ullman's makeup artist character) had a theory that disco music made people gay starting in the 1970s. Rock Hudson used to chase women around the makeup trailer until he discovered Studio 54 and went gay.

Ruby’s family was fat as a house. Ruby’s space in their trailer was wherever was left over after they sat down.

R30, my friend told me that every day before he drove home from work he stopped at one fast food place or another (all drive-through) and got a sundae or some other snack to eat in the car. Granted, the highways in big cities are hard to face, but it had never occurred to me to do such a thing. I kind of envied him his chutzpah, but he was pretty overweight then and is probably enormous now.

R154, there are body types and I think research bears out hat endomorphs are prone to weight. I have that from my grandmother's side of the family and as they aged they all put on considerable weight, whereas my grandfather's side ate just as much and stayed almost scarily thin. They were tall ectomorphs. The genetic lottery is unfair.

I wonder if mindless and continual snacking isn't a big factor.

When did cup holders become standard in cars? When did snacking during a drive take off? Just drive, jesus christ.

When did movie theater concessions expand the menu and add hot dogs and nachos?

Snacking all the time wasn't a thing. You ate however many meals your family ate and then maybe you ate an apple (sounds quaint). Pringles for when company came over.

Play dates and sports for kids involve snacks. Didn't always. After a game you went for a slice of pizza.

Watching TV doesn't have to involve eating.

Single-serve food packaging, the popularity of bookbags that can hold snacks for people who aren't students.

And of course, not burning calories running around all day outside. People who walk a lot are still in good shape.

R89 I wonder how many calories manna in the wildnerness had when it was sent down in Biblical times? It was supposedy a miracle, in that it could taste like anything your heart desired, including a 3-course meal. Willie Wonka tried to sort of steal part of that idea, but he never worked out all the kinks, what with Violet becoming a Violet blueberry.

Food companies aren't "committing to selling us fresh, unprocessed foods which our bodies understand" because there's no money in it, r117.

Meat and dairy produced without mounds of chemicals are (rightly) expensive, and fresh produce is expensive both to transport and store. Neither are big food companies eager to produce and distribute, nor are supermarkets eager to keep expensive fresh, perishable products in stores. It's not "efficient", and therefore not profitable.

Plus, let's be frank, most US consumers don't want to be bothered (or don't have time to be) preparing (expensive) fresh food for themselves and their families.

The four horseman of the apocalypse: 1) HFCS, 2) aspartame, 3) hydrogenated oils, 4) palm oil.

I worked in advertising and saw many a confidential graph in briefings from the biggest fast food and soft drink companies correlating rising use each of these, individually and together, with rising obesity. The other factors like stupid low fat diets and portion size increases were accelerators but these four were the core.

It's not about sympathy R156 - or lack of it. Everybody knows "stop eating crap" and "exercise more" is the solution - everybody has known that for a long, long time. So again, if you just want to rip on fat people have at it but the conversation about the reasons behind the rise in obesity and possible solutions to it is a lot more complex and interesting than "fuck those lazy fat fucks" or "fat is beautiful, admit my 300lb ass is desirable or you're a bigot."

People with doctorates in food science are employed by big companies to make foods 1) addictive 3) shelf-stable. Hence the use of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, etc. Making foods addictive and shelf-stable maximizes profits. Of course, the massive advertising budgets of the big companies entice people even more.

Also, portion sizes are huge, jobs are sedentary yet exhausting, and most families require two parents working those jobs to make ends meet. There is no time, money, or motivation to cook nutritious meals, and the kids sure don't want to eat them. Those kids are placated with sugary or salty snacks and wiith sedentary activities like video games.

It's a perfect storm of factors, and you have to work really hard to fight against them and maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle for you and your family. A lot of people simply can't.

1) addictive 2) shelf stable. I originally had tasty in there as a third factor, but that just circles back to addictive.

R154 that's the same reason I stay unconvinced it's as simple as eating too many chips (or "calories in/ calories out). My one sibling was always chubbier than the rest of us and had the same exact diet. Not only that, she excercised 3x as much. She still does and is overweight. Obviously, when she now occasionally misbehaves with food habits, she pays, but she pays extra compared to the rest of us.

I'm thin. Always was. Never had a BMI above 23. I rarely get out and walk around (disabled) and eat out way too much. I should be 100lbs or more overweight. I'm not though. I actually think doctors don't believe me about how bad I'm doing because I look thin and even toned.

My grandparents were all the same way. Ate the worst diets ever. The only few things that I can attribute this to, is 1) genetics 2) smoking 3) I don't eat huge portions and usually only pig out once a day. However, that once a day is a big meal of garbage foods, along with calorie heavy drinks.

I'm always asked what my secret is but it's all luck. I feel for people that struggle like my sibling.

I'm also surprised how overlooked medication is. More than 37 million Americans take antidepressants. Over half the women take birth control. 1 in 6 Americans take an antipsychotic med. Antihistamines contribute as well. 66% of Americans take a prescribed drug.

Another thing left out, that was gaining attention, is gut health in general. Haven't heard much lately about it unfortunately. On top of that, chronic diseases are increasing, creating a revolving door of issues -- IBS, autoimmune, cancers, etc.

I just really don't think it's that simple to pin down. Are people mentally struggling, taking meds, overeating, and not getting out? Or is the way we eat causing that domino effect? Are there environmental factors that could be changing our health (mentally/ physically), or is this a product of social ills, like too much tech dependence, too much stress, too little money?

No matter what, we've been failed by putting money before health.

[quote]Are people mentally struggling, taking meds, overeating, and not getting out? Or is the way we eat causing that domino effect? Are there environmental factors that could be changing our health (mentally/ physically), or is this a product of social ills, like too much tech dependence, too much stress, too little money?

The answer to all of these questions is yes.

When I instituted an insanity-level strict diet regime the most shocking result was the improvement in my mental health. Feeling physically a lot better and fitter I expected but I don't think I've felt as mentally and emotionally "fit" in my entire life, including childhood. That eating regime did more for me than any anti-depressant or related drug Ive ever ever been prescribed. I did not take a single xanax the entire time. (something I didn't even realize, because I never took many in the first place, until a few months in when i came across the full pill bottle and it hit me).

Can you elaborate on the strict diet regimen?

my friend gained 60 lbs taking latuda for bipolar. She weighed 120, now 180.

R112 Food is the only drug children can get their hands on.

Sure R171. Caveats:

1. I know it makes me look insane. For whatever reason i can only do things 100% or not at all.

2. I am not making any wider claims about this specific diet. Sample size of 1.

So basically, I survived for months on raw organic fruits and vegetables with some legumes, whole grains, seeds and seafood thrown in. No dairy or meat. A single day would look like: giant bowl of fruit and veg, all raw and organic. There would always be at least 2 servings of cruciferous veg in there and 2 servings of berries but I varied it as much as possible. It takes a surprisingly long time to eat a huge amount or raw fruit/veg and being able to munch through all that over a few hours like some kind of bovine helped with that unconscious habit of cramming things into my face and being sort of calmed by the repetitive motion alone.

The only liquids I drank were water or organic green tea. Kept a large glass beside me at all times, sipped all day.

Along with the giant bowl of produce I would have: 2x vegan omega 3 (algae based, they aren't contaminated or oxidized like can be a problem with fish oils), 1 tbsp. fresh ground flax seed, 1 tbsp hemp seeds, 1 tbsp sesame seeds. A lot of the good shit in produce is fat soluble so I had this, the very small amount of fats I consumed, at the same time.

For dinner I would have black lentils or black beans and whole grains (farro, oars, barley etc.) in a 3:1 ratio. Seasoning would be a little miso paste and a small amount of salt. More fruit and veg with dinner, usually a starchy veg like sweet potato, squash or potato and a serving of edamame or tofu. Dinner always involved onions, garlic and mushrooms as well (I was following the GBOMBS - greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, seeds method).

I cannot emphasize the sheer volume of vegetables I consumed enough.

Twice a week I ate seafood - either a can of (skin on, bones included) sockeye salmon or a small serving of oysters or mussels for the zinc and B12.

I supplemented with B12, D3 and the aforementioned Omega 3 caps.

This diet wasn't good tasting. It was tedious. I basically don't like the way raw vegetables taste. Even cooked they're not great. Not without butter, which I wasn't consuming. This was a very low fat, high carb (although zero refined carbs), extremely high fruit and veg diet. I was a chimpanzee for half a year. Like I said it wasn't enjoyable in terms of the pleasure of eating. I missed junk the entire time. What I learned:

1. This kind of regime and succeeding at it is 99% a mind game with yourself. I accepted and even came to borderline enjoy the deprivation. I think I get the anorexic mindset a little more after doing this. There's a weird satisfaction that comes with this high level of self-control.

2. Physically and mentally/emotionally I have never felt better. I've never even felt close to being that healthy. Even as fit teenager (who nonetheless ate junk a lot). No drug has ever come close to doing what that diet did. If someone else described the change/difference to me I probably wouldn't believe them without experiencing it myself. The word "profound" would not be out of place. At times I almost felt like I was glowing with health. All the minor complaints that seemed to creep up on me when i turned 40 (achiness, slight joint stiffness, random weird complaints that never seemed to merit a doctors visit) basically disappeared.

I'm planning to do it again, 8 months this time, because I miss the feeling and know I'm capable of it now. Not eating cake and chips sucks because I like cake and chips but the feeling I got from eating a shitload of raw fucking brussels sprouts every day - which incidentally taste like bitter shit - was 100% worth eating a shitload of raw brussels sprouts every day.

[quote]fresh produce is expensive both to transport and store. Neither are big food companies eager to produce and distribute, nor are supermarkets eager to keep expensive fresquote]h, perishable products in stores. It's not "efficient", and therefore not profitable.

What on earth are you babbling about.?

I don't know where you live but I see supermarkets full of fresh produce.

Expensive? I spend about $350 per month on food and eat well.

A Big Mac meal is 6 dollars. I can prepare an entire dinner for that price.

[quote]I can prepare an entire dinner for that price.

Agreed. And have extra to take to work the day after!

R176 Yes!

The issue isn’t that fruit, veg and meat are expensive for food companies: it’s that they cannot be stored almost indefinitely the way highly processed stuff can be. The more processed foods are (stripped of fat and fibre) and the more sugary they are, the longer they can stay on the shelf. This makes the profit margin on these things absolutely enormous because there is very little waste before sale. A lettuce has to be harvested and sold in a week or two, whereas a packet of low-fat protein bars will last for decades without rotting. If you are a food company, it’s not hard to understand that your profits will be higher if you persuade people that the protein bars are just as healthy as the lettuce.

Healthy food is not complicated: meat, fish, vegetables and full-fat dairy. - As close as possible to the type of stuff our ancestors evolved to eat. The problem is that there is profit to be made in complicating matters, and making people distrust their natural instincts. So people are told fat is bad, and meat is evil. In essence, commerce thrives on making us hungry. And there is no better way of doing that than alienating us from the most nutrient-dense and filling foods and brainwashing us into thinking that we are being virtuous when we consume sugary, low-fat foods, which do not leave us feeling full, and which, because of the sugary content, actually leave us craving more.

[quote]So people are told fat is bad, and meat is evil. In essence, commerce thrives on making us hungry. And there is no better way of doing that than alienating us from the most nutrient-dense and filling foods and brainwashing us into thinking that we are being virtuous when we consume sugary, low-fat foods, which do not leave us feeling full, and which, because of the sugary content, actually leave us craving more.

People know more about how to eat well now than ever before.

At the check-out line at my supermarket there is magazine after magazine specialized in eating well. There's one dedicated specifically to the Mediterranean diet. Another about Keto etc.

You tube, the internet are FULL of info about how to eat well. How to cook etc..

Info about ingredients and so on.

It is EASIER to eat well now in the US than it was 30 years ago.

I meant to write: " People can know more about how to eat well now than ever before."

Yep, r179, there are loads of magazines out there, all containing contradictory information, and all motivated more by making a profit than by making you healthy. It’s just another branch of the diet industry, really.

I’m British, so I can’t comment as an expert on the US, but here in the UK, people cook far less than their parents or grandparents. People have lost the basic skills to prepare a meal, so they buy processed ready meals, which contain all sort of weird additives. And because they are unsure, they buy meals which say “low fat” (which we have all been brought up to believe is a good thing),or “heart smart”, or “weight watchers”. And all of these labels are essentially meaningless.

Maybe I should write my own cookbook or magazine, but it would be rather short: eat food your great-grandparents would recognise as food. Eat food which doesn’t require a list of ingredients which are mainly added fillers and chemicals. Don’t trust corporations to cook the food which you use to fuel your body. Eat food which has not had fat removed or sugar added. Eat unprocessed food until you are full and then stop.

[quote]The issue isn’t that fruit, veg and meat are expensive for food companies: it’s that they cannot be stored almost indefinitely the way highly processed stuff can be.

So what?

Any good supermarket out there is stocked to the gills with fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and fish.

Are you writing from Cuba? Russia circa 1985?

[quote]Maybe I should write my own cookbook or magazine, but it would be rather short: eat food your great-grandparents would recognise as food. Eat food which doesn’t require a list of ingredients which are mainly added fillers and chemicals. Don’t trust corporations to cook the food which you use to fuel your body. Eat food which has not had fat removed or sugar added. Eat unprocessed food until you are full and then stop.

Michael Pollan among many others have made a fortune in the US writing about all this

Do live in a cave?

^ Do you live in a cave?

American culture....Americans love to live in extremes, low fat, high fat, low carb, etc. Its all or nothing, for everything. Americans have such hard time with balance and accepting that there are gray areas in life. All that meat eating until the 80s had people dropping dead from heart disease and the low fat high carb diet was the result.

Americans also work so much that they don't even have time to prepare their own food, another extreme. In the late 80s and 90s the American corporate culture became glamourous. Movies and TV made people , especially women, feel like they were in the stone age if they stood over a stove every night.

In America, it seems most men, even gay ones, cannot cook. I don't understand this at all. With youtube, there is absolutely no excuse.

Not being able to afford ingredients, not having learned how to make simple meals, the easy availability of a variety of good-tasting, cheap (and seemingly healthy) restaurant options, and being tired after long work days and commutes might be a reason, R186.

But as someone who has cooked their entire adult life, I also don't get it. My obese housewife sister has a huge, well-appointed kitchen, and her family ate out or got takeout most nights. Mashed potatoes were made from instant flakes. While in town once, I made lunch for everyone in her kitchen and she said just watching me made her exhausted. Another time our whole family stayed in a vacation rental together and she threw a fit when she realized we planned to cook and eat together. She fumed that eating out was part of vacation. Her daughter is now also obese.

[quote] Food companies aren't "committing to selling us fresh, unprocessed foods which our bodies understand" because there's no money in it, [R117].

The hell there isn't for what they charge for it.

welp as much as you bitches complain about the fat 90s food, it also resulted in most young men having larger penis sizes, a lot of them have huge dicks. white boys have ass now too

I don’t wanna cook. Not my interest or skill bro

But it made his pubes fall out too!!

Most New Yorkers don't cook.

Then how do they eat, R192? They eat out multiple times a day?

R187, I guess most people who don't cook have no idea how much they can save by cooking themselves. I cook my meals for the week on Sunday. I eat out once a week, sometimes twice. But I can't imagine not being able to cook a simple meal.

R123 You were way off. "Eat Less, Move More" was a MadTV skit from 2008.

"This is starting to sound like some sort of scam you do to an old person."

I don’t cook. I eat out or pick up prepared foods

That's nice if you can afford it.

NYers do that r196. I don't know anyone who really cooks.

R155, maybe Covid was "engineered" to dispose the fatties from the healthcare system?

"Mission akomplish"

In my 20s a friend who cooked in the army taught me a few basic skills. Jesus, people, it's not that hard to do. Sautéing is a basic skill that will launch you into the world of cooking. Just this one skill alone will open doors for you. If you say you can't or won't cook for yourself, you're a fucking moron. Cooking for yourself also leaves you less dependent on fast food and store bought processed food. And, it really can take less time than calling on Uber Eats or visiting a drive-thru window.

[quote]If you say you can't or won't cook for yourself, you're a fucking moron.

I just don't want to. I have a Whole Foods and tons of restaurants right outside my front door. I just don't want to cook when I have all of that.

I understand not wanting to cook if you have the money and you live in an urban area. But just straight up not knowing how to cook is dumb.

Not even some scrambled eggs, R202? Some burgers and hot dogs on the grill?

I don't eat eggs or red meat.

Simple. HFCS, the explosion of Cable TV, the internet, the beginnings of cell phones - The birth of Amazon. and online shopping couple that with the death grip the sugar industry has on the FDA.

Now I've started to read the title as How Did the 90s Make America Fart...

You can’t outrun a bad diet.

[quote] Movies and TV made people , especially women, feel like they were in the stone age if they stood over a stove every night.

They were selling a lie to turn women into a slave class while jacking up the cost of everything to effectively steal all this newfound income.

Bravo R209

It was as big of a lie as the other big lie of the era: that “free love“ meant “consequence-free love.“

[quote]"Low fat" products. Fat was never the problem. Sugar (HFCS) was.

Snackwell's were huge in the 90s because they were "fat free" and loaded with sugar. That was always the trick. Companies could get away with saying something was fat free because sugar doesn't become fat until it's in your body.

R202, you're an ass. Learn some basic skills in your voided life. I'll bet you can't add without a calculator.

r213 my life is just fine. I've never cared to cook, lots of people haven't. Save your bitter venom for shit that really matters.

I will say that I don't "cook cook," I prepare food (heat it up) and stuff like that. I can make a mean grilled cheese sandwich, but I've gotten too lazy to even do that lately. But I can warm up veggie burgers or pizza or soup.

I have actually cooked some dishes, but I'm not that into it.

You'd make a great wife to some poor dumb straight bastard, R215.

R214, Save your ignorance for when the power goes out and you have a grill and you've got ground meat in the freezer that needs to be cooked. Oh yeah, you have neither. Oh yeah, Mickie D's will still be open.

Hi R216! I am married to a poor dumb straight bastard! He's pretty good to me. He didn't care about the cooking because I was so freaking skinny when we met in the late '90's!

They're always skinny in the beginning, aren't they?

R213, Tween Shitbag.

[quote]Save your ignorance for when the power goes out and you have a grill and you've got ground meat in the freezer that needs to be cooked. Oh yeah, you have neither. Oh yeah, Mickie D's will still be open.

Well, the power last went out in NYC nearly 20 years ago and hasn't since, and places were still open. It was really cool to see all the bars and restaurants lit by candlelight, the whole city had a big blackout party that night.

1. High Fructose Corn Syrup!

2. Increased portion sizes

Yeah R221, and it was quiet that you could hear all of the rats and roaches chewing and shitting.

And growth hormones in the nation’s livestock.

This thread is hilarious. Just watch "My 600 Pound Life", and you can see that "not eating enough good meat", "aspartame and artificial sweeteners", "eating too many grains", and "fat free products" are not the reason why people get fat.

All of them eat pounds of meat for each meal, drink regular soda, almost no grains or legumes, and definitely no fruits and vegetables. Add to that horse sized portions of everything they ingest, the constant trickle of fast food, zero exercise, and you get obese or morbidly obese people.

I hate when people quote the "French", because they do not drink a bottle of wine with 2 baguettes and an entire pot of Coq au Vin a day. They actually eat lots and lots of fruits and vegetables and keep their portion sizes small when eating calorie dense foods. When I travel to Europe, I see a lot more fat people than I used to see in the past. Why? Because American fast food places are popping up more and more, and there's a Starbucks at every corner. They're eating more crappy and fatty foods, more meat, more sugar, and they have the waistline to prove it.

Many fat people like to come up with reasons why they're fat and blame it on additives in food. There is no secret here, stop eating highly processed and calorie dense food, cook at home, go to a quality restaurant when eating out, avoid fast food or allow yourself to eat it very rarely, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, exercise, and practice portion control. That's it.

A word of warning to those who can’t or don’t want to cook and eat all meals out or heat prepared food for all meals: this is not sustainable. If you keep eating like that you will most likely end up with diabetes and/or high blood pressure, which will lead to worsening heart disease and kidney disease.

The FDA recommends 2500 mgs of sodium per day if you are healthy and under 40 years old, or 1500 mgs of sodium per day if you are over 40 and for all African Americans, including children because they are prone to high blood pressure. A restaurant meal can easily include close to 1200 mgs of sodium. A healthy diet includes around 100 grams of carbohydrates per day. If you become diabetic you will have to lower that to about 20 grams a day.

To give you some perspective, I just ate half of a 2 oz (snack size) bag of Hal’s sour cream and onion potato chips. If I had eaten the whole bag, believe me, easy enough to do, it would have been 500 mgs of sodium, or 1/3 the daily limit, and 32 grams of carbs, again 1/3 the daily limit. The total calories aren’t too bad - 300 for the whole bag but it’s basically poison to eat that much sodium and carbs from a little bag of chips.

I don’t cook and don’t want to. I don’t eat scrambled eggs or red meat

R217, the power goes out somewhere all the time, and it still doesn’t motivate people to cook at home

[quote]A word of warning to those who can’t or don’t want to cook and eat all meals out or heat prepared food for all meals: this is not sustainable. If you keep eating like that you will most likely end up with diabetes and/or high blood pressure, which will lead to worsening heart disease and kidney disease.

It depends on where you eat out. If you're doing fast food or those Flyover pig food restaurants like Chili's then yes, you're correct. There are, however, healthy dining out options.

I don't eat chips or pretzels or any other shit that comes in a bag. Gross.

I like Sweetgreens. Healthy. Not cheap, but healthy.

You might want to take a look at the nutritional info on Sweetgreen r231. Most menu options are calorie/carb/fat bombs.

Holy crap. I never want to cook again after reading the chicken washing thread. And I'm a vegetarian!

There are so many informed pisters on this thread, it's actually a comfort of sorts to read not everyone is in tbe dark. It still surprises me that some still villify saturated fat, and meat however. No, they are not what caused all the heart problems. The vegetable oil trend began much earlier than the 80s. Once these fats replaced all good saturated fats, inflammation, as well as other factors put some bodies into heart disease.

Aside from hormones making humans fat, and causing several organs to grow larger, and pesticides destroying good gut biomes, people forget that antibiotics will not only fuck with your biome, but that they're given as a "supplement" to be mixed in with animal feed in commercial feedlot production to cause the animals to gain weight. Americans not only take more antibiotics, but they're also eating animals loaded with them. Result is more fat, and more destruction of a healthy gut biome.

About two years ago, I was playing tennis with a friend trained as a chemist. The courts we played on were within two blocks of a plant which produced artificial flavourings. We got to talking about the odd scents emitted some days, some were bad, some were quite pleasant. He began to explain to me how they're really almost the exact sort of chemistry involved with fragrance. He petsonally thought they were as bad for us. He found it ironic how so many have turned on fragrances and synthetic perfumes due to health concerns, yet the majority are mainlining them by eating them. Very few give particular concern to artificial flavours, even when health conscious. Many of these involve petrochemicals, and substances considered the opposite of health promoting. Increasingly, I now read "contains natural and artificial flavours". More needless crap to confuse our systems.

^1,000 apologies for all the typos

R234, meat itself is not the problem, but even if you're eating a grass-fed steak, portion size is a contributing factor in health issues. Everything in moderation is fine.

"eat less" isn't the entire story when foods we eat are nutrient deficient causing you to consume more and are saturated with tastes we crave, fats, sweets and salty.

...........

"Not one single fat person."

There were fat people. Considerably fewer, but there were definitely fat people.

I grew up in a small farm where we raised our own livestock for slaughter.

I was used to eating fresh, corn fed, free range chicken, pork and beef. Feeding and caring for them also kept my weight down.

Once I got into college in the late 80s, I quit eating meat. I didn't make a conscious decision to become a vegetarian, it was the taste of store bought meat was "not right". It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't know what fresh meat *should* taste like.

I will occasionally eat chicken and bacon now. (Maybe once a month) Every 8 months or so I'll cook up some burgers but I haven't eaten steak in years. The taste of beef is so synthetic now, it's repulsive.

Maybe it's just me in my old age, but stuff seems to taste more synthetic now. To me, at least.

Most People Don’t walk at all. Even 10 minutes a day. Also they eat a lot of fast food

Supersize me!

R241, it's true. And our suburbs make that the default. Stroads are everything and everywhere.

Yes, we are totally car-dependent outside of NYC and a very few other cities. Most Americans don't walk much. And fast food/take-out is everywhere.

If you're old enough to remember, think about how many fast food/take-out places there were 30 years ago vs. now.

R244, it's pathetic. Canada, our neighbor to the north, is car dependent but is investing in public transit much more than we are. It's shameful. It looks like we will continue to subsidize the suburban, car-driven lifestyle for the forseeable future. Big mistake!