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I have been thinking about the issue of obesity. I posit there are two kinds of obesity, the first being force-feeding obesity, in which someone overeats huge quantities of food (>6000 calories/day or more), possibly due to some emotional disturbance, and is able to override, temporality, the body's set point. Losing weight is also the easiest for such individuals because all they have to do is not eat as much and their weight rapidly returns to normal, but without the constant starvation of dieting because they are still eating a normal amount of food (3000 calories) which is in line with calculators.
The second type of obesity, which is worse, is what I call 'shit genetics' obesity, which means a slow metabolism. The second groups has a much slower metabolism than the first and in order to not be obese has to eat surprisingly small quantities of food, and become obese eating only average quantities of food, maybe only 2500-3000 calories/day (lower than predicted by calculators for height, age, gender, activity level, etc.). These people are screwed and need these GLP-1 class of drugs or else they will feel starving all day. These ppl will become overweight or obese in almost any environment, short of famine. Both forms of obesity are made worse by modernity, like hyper-palatable foods, but the second group is even worse off.
As always, the question is: why not prior to the last ~50 years? Unless all the newly obese people of the last 50 years are the first type you mention, the lack of a significant number of obese people in past generations cries out for an explanation.
Bad genetics can explain the existence of a fixed proportion of the population being obese even in the 70s, 60s etc. As food became more palatable and due to sedentary lifestyles, more people in group one became obese, too. Even in the 80s and 70s a certain fraction of the population was obese , around 10-20%. Reading people's personal accounts on Hacker News and elsewhere lends credence to bad genetics, not willfully overeating, as an explanation for some obesity, such as men who consume far fewer calories than predicted by calculators but are still obese or way overweight (although as a caveat, people tend to underreport caloric intake). Metabolism varies greatly among individuals even controlling for factors like age, height, sex, lifestyles, etc. Like height, IQ, or any other trait that is normally distributed, it stands to reason there are individuals with the short end of that stick...
People forget how different modern food and entertainment are from the 70s. With no video games, 24x7 entertainment channels, YouTube, TikTok, other social media and porn you had to come up with other sorts of entertainment that at least stimulated you to leave your home ("go play with your friends and don't come back home until dinner", as genxers like to recall this). Less screen media consumption also meant less mindless snacking that doesn't satiate as well as mindful eating. Eating out and delivery were less common and featured far fewer cuisines, and both have portions that are too large, leading to overeating.
the issue is the food, but up to a point. some people have such lousy metabolisms ,and also due to age or other factors, they they need way fewer calories than predicted by calculators to not be overweight. instead of 2k/day for a medium-sized male, more like like 1300-1500. I dunno what percentage of the population is cursed like this, but given what I have read, it's probably not insignificant.
What's so cursed about that? Back when I was on a weight-loss diet I had some 1500 cal days. With bulky vegetable sides I didn't even feel hungry.
yeah but 1500 average daily, not just some days. also it also shows we cannot just blame overeating. Trying to get men over the age of 40s to adopt 1500-2000 calorie/day diets to stop obesity seems like a no-go.
That's what semaglutide does, doesn't it? External willpower for those who have spent too much time cultivating stronger hunger drives to curb them themselves.
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Anecdotal, and people are terrible at estimating their own consumption unless they're weighing everything they put in their mouth. The variation of metabolism is not completely insignificant, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. An extremely cursed person in the 99th percentile might have to consume about 400kcal/day less than average (assuming 160kcal stddev) which does not explain the obesity crisis. Your run-of-the-mill unlucky person complaining of a "slow metabolism" has to consume the equivalent of two fewer apples a day.
The main way in which obesity is genetic is behavioral. People with a satiation reflex that does not activate as quickly, whose hunger is stronger or self-regulation is weaker, who are inclined to sedentary activities and don't walk as much. But these factors of genetic variation often reflect poorly on the character the obese person in question, so they prefer to focus on a supposedly unbelievably efficient metabolism.
A new environment can expose genetic variation that was invisible before. Vulnerability to drug addiction is also genetic, but there were no fentanyl addicts in the 60s or 70s.
To explain the whole crisis requires more explanations. I think a lot of it can be explained by the undercounting of overweight/obese people decades ago. This is similar to autism and adhd, which saw a surge in incidence over the past few decades in part due to more people being diagnosed. Even Jack Dempsey in his later years appears obese. Would he have been counted in the 'official' stats? likely not. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Dempsey_elgrafico_1970.jpg/180px-Dempsey_elgrafico_1970.jpg
This guy was one of the greatest athletes in the world at his prime yet still got noticeably fat. it shows how hard solving this problem truly is when even people who we can assume to be careful about their health and in good physical shape still get fat.
that is true; ppl are bad at self-reporting. this agrees with other sources I read about with how the difference between a good vs bad metabolism is just a few hundred calories/day (assuming control for relevant factors), or about a candy bar, so bad metabolism is not a a valid excuse. The problem is, a small surplus over a long time period can add up to a lot of weight. Second, cutting back those extra 200 calories will incur some degree of metabolic adaptation, so the amount will need to be more than that.
I don't think undercounting can explain the prevalence in older media of fit people. Look at those old Victorian street scenes: everyone is good looking. The historical existence of this or that obese person shouldn't counter the overwhelming evidence that we've become a fat society.
Those Victorian street scenes are excluding a lot of ugliness already, though.
I don't think I'd want to paint (cameras were limited to exposure too long to capture someone walking down the street, so they had to be painted) the piles and streams of shit in the streets of a society [that hadn't yet implemented indoor plumbing and used horses for transport] if I didn't have to either, so naturally none of those scenes include it. If you have to put in effort to paint people you might as well make them decent-looking, so it's understandable there'd be, uh, fat erasure.
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"good looking" is not the same as not being overweight or obese according to precise BMI measurements. I recall when i was dieting (still am) than when I took some photos of myself i didn't look overweight, no stomach bulge , yet I was technically in the overweight category . i was still somewhat flabby in the mid section but it was covered well. But you're right society has gotten fatter, even with undercounting. Some of it can probably also be explained by demographics such as increased Hispanic population.
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Self-proclaimed calorie intake is generally unbelievable. People either lie quite deliberately, they are so confused that they might as well lie (1,000 calorie Starbucks coffees don’t count because they’re drinking, not food) or aren’t exactly measuring portions (eyeballs are much less precise than kitchen scales).
The idea of “slow metabolism” is evolutionarily improbable: consuming less energy, and thus less food is needed to do the same thing without any downsides would be a huge benefit for fitness. It is possible that they will make some compromises (e.g. perhaps less performance in normal times means survival in hunger). But there is a narrow window, because the famine disaster driving the adaptation can not occur too often (or everyone will have the same “slow metabolism” that will prove optimal), but not too rarely (or owners of “slow metabolism” are overtaken in good times). In addition, metabolism is very basic and crucial for life; as in reproduction, we should expect that the metabolism will be one of the most preserved parts of human biology and that there is limited functional variability. What we see in practice: with accurate calorie tracking and body composition estimates, BMR estimates are accurate within 10%.
That is like saying low IQs are improbable yet they exist .Why would it not be variable, like any other trait. There was an individual I read about who at 6'0 and 120 pounds his maintenance was 1900 calories/day, which he measured meticulously. This is astonishing given his very low body weight. By comparison, Ancel Keys' subjects had to diet to 1570/day to archive a similar weight loss, and some even lower than that (Keys was also meticulous about measuring calories). But it shows how variable it can be.
so is intelligence and physical strength, yet those also vary greatly among individuals even controlling for relevant factors. why do some guys who train bench 315 and other cannot do 225 despite equal training and other factors?
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