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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.

Really?

It is not even per person. It is not compared with total callories change. Not compared with say sugar production.

If you look at the chart Trends in Daily Calories from Major Food Groups on this article, you'll see that vegetable oil consumption per capita has almost tripled since the 1960s. There are dozens of other sources online saying the same thing. Literally nobody is arguing that vegetable oil consumption has fallen. The only debate is whether the gigantic increase in vegetable oil consumption has anything to do with the gigantic increase in obesity that happened at the exact same time.

Meanwhile both sugar and grain consumption has actually been falling since the late 90s.

tl;dr: no indicator that calories from vegetable oils are special

Rates of chronic conditions like heart disease, asthma, cancer, and diabetes have grown 700% since 1935. Today, 6 in 10 Americans have a chronic disease.

Has Americans started to live longer by any chance since then? Or are better diagnosed?

With very quick look at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy - it seems that people now live longer and this person failed to even mention it!

In fact they start from "where our healthy life expectancy is actually decreasing year over year" - while from 1935 it massively increased!

Exercise graph is starting in 1998, how much change is from 1935?

Mixing stats starting in 1935, 1998 and just few years ago is a massive malpractice. You do not get to compare last 2 years of life expectancy and 97 of another. You need to take the same timeframe for both!

Also, curiously "total eaten calories" remains missing. From trend in plant vs animal foods: it is increasing. What may be enough to explain direct cause of people getting fatter, via simple CICO again.

(I have not even got to checking sources: I suspect that this exercise trend may entirely measure that people are more likely to lie about exercising and be unrelated to actual exercise being done)