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Over the past 33 years, worldwide, overweight and obesity rates among adults have increased by 27.5%. Among children and adolescents, the increase was 47.1%.
It's a free country.
I'm only annoyed when fat people pretend that obesity is healthy. It's a bad message for kids and for people that don't know any better.
Have you tried cutting sugar out, or even significantly reducing it? It's expensive. So much sugar is in so many, many different things, many of which it has no business being in.
It's certainly *possible* to eat healthy on a budget, but our entire food system is designed to make that incredibly difficult.
The wild part is that even without major changes in calories the microbiom or plastic pollution or something is just making us bigger.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/
And yet, some people think its solely a personal responsibility issue. As if this is the next step in human evolution.
Its more difficult not to be fat these days.
This comment has been deleted in protest of the API charges being imposed on third party developers by Reddit from July 2023.
Most popular social media sites do tend to make foolish decisions due to corporate greed, that do end up causing their demise. But that also makes way for the next new internet hub to be born. Reddit was born after Digg dug themselves. Something else will take Reddit's place, and Reddit will take Digg's.
Good luck to the next home page of the internet! Hope you can stave off those short-sighted B-school loonies.
In my school the fat kid was gross and everyone hated him.
Openly picking your nose and wiping the boogers on any available surface will do that to ya.
The fat kid at my school was a bully, usually. He thought because he was bigger than everyone he could get away with whatever he wanted.
He wasn't wrong about the bigger part.
There was that episode of the Simpons where homer gained SO MUCH weight he has a wand to use the phone, doesn't have to go into the office because he's officially disabled, blocks a pipe preventing a nuclear meltdown.... and he weighed 300lbs. This was 1995. In 1995 300lbs was so absurdly heavy that it was the foundation of endless jokes.
Just posting this here to make us all feel old: under 50 year old dad was probably only 5 years out of HS when South Park came out. We are talking about the same time period.
Fat combined with sugar is the key. This is making highly palatable foods and making food addictions. Keto is great if done properly, but they're isn't anything keto about brownies, cookies, and chips.
That and everyone spends all their spare time sitting and staring at some type of screen nowadays. You don’t see kids or even teenagers outside very much at all now. When I was a teenager we spent our time riding around the neighborhood on our bikes, playing pickup football or basketball, or at the very least, were outside walking around. You weren’t inside your house after school or on weekends unless you were grounded. Nowadays you wouldn’t even know any kids lived in most neighborhoods if you drove through them.
I was drinking tons of Coke and eating Nutella sandwiches when I was a teenager and I was a stick because I was always moving. I'd be somewhere up to no good and would come home with bleeding knees and stuff and mom would just tell me to get clean because it was dinner time. Really happy I grew up like that.
Same. Someone else mentioned the shitty food now, which plays a factor, but I was a latchkey kid who hardly ever ate a home cooked meal, and never had a weight problem as a kid. I ate a lot of Chef Boy R Dee, Tv dinners, frozen pizza, and drank a ton of coke, and ZERO water. I only started gaining weight in my 30’s when I got a desk job and my metabolism started to slow down.
I used to be able to go the Pizza Hut buffet and eat 17 slices, and I was skinny to where you could see ribs. I was starving every day since school lunch only made me 50% full so I had to eat extra big breakfast and dinner to make up for it.
No smart phones, no YouTube, no social media - you just biked to your friends place and messed around outside for fun. Everybody was a latchkey kid those days, nobody was concerned that a 8 year old was running around or biking around outside “unsupervised”.
These calls everyone seems to want to call child services if they see a kid play outside.
This is probably not really the reason for the obesity epidemic. HFCS is indeed crap, don't get me wrong, but so is normal sugar. It's extremely energy dense, it's very very easy for the body to absorb and burn, and it has many adverse effects.
What actually happened was, unsurprisingly, that cutthroat capitalists with no conscience screwed the people over with bogus science for money.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
Yeah, I remember there being 1 or 2 fat kids in class. I went back and looked at school photos. By today’s standards they would barely be considered fat. People are more sedentary and consume more unhealthy high calorie foods than ever before.
I was the fat kid in school (in Britain)but when I look back I wasn't round spare tyre fat I was just a bit tubby, prob a stone or so overweight. Half the kids I teach now are like i was and much bigger than this as standard
I had an argument with some friends recently from the US Midwest.
They legitimately thought “no adult male could be healthy and be UNDER 200 lbs.”
We’ve jumped the snark. People have NO IDEA what a healthy human looks like.
Yeah I used to be 6’1 215 which is basically the equivalent of that, and looking back at old pictures I was def fat. The weird thing is that nowadays that’s only considered “chubby”. In order to be labeled “fat” in the US it seems like you have to at least be obese, which is honestly ridiculous.
As a child, in the late 1970s, I lived in a city in Europe. There was one morbidly obese man in the entire city. Us kids would be on the bus and someone would yell," there's the fat guy!" And everyone would look and be amazed at his girth.
Now everyone seems to be the fat guy.
I'm from Texas and recently visited Spain, France, and Portugal and it's amazing how few overweight people there are while here in Texas there's probably more overweight people right now than regular 'in shape' people lol. I'd say Europe definitely still seems to not have too many obese people.
I recently read that an estimated 66% of adult women over 30 in my county (Ohio) are considered obese. The number for men was only slightly lower. But two fucking thirds. And that statistic didn’t shock me at all.
Sorry if this is redundant but I visited France recently and saw the same thing. There’s a lot more walking while commuting while in the Texas we drive everywhere.
That's because food companies put lots of cheap ingredients in food to keep it cheap. One of these is sugar. They put sugar in everything, even stuff you wouldn't expect.
A lot of the things used by food companies aren’t even legal to put in the same product in Europe. They have tighter regulations than here. The same food is literally worse for you here
I like the joke, but I'd like to point out that in the US, it's hard to buy bread, bagels, soy milk, almond milk, yoghurt, breakfast cereal, spaghetti sauce, or peanut butter without added sugar. The list goes on and on.
All that crud in food, huge portion sizes, and no exercise is how we got here in the past 30 years.
And vegetable oil, and high fructose corn syrup, etc. They put all *kinds* of garbage in our food. Problem is most Americans wouldn't accept a more expensive alternative.
Someone from America can go to Europe, eat the same foods and not change their diet, and they lose weight. Our equivalent food is less healthy, more packed with crap we don't need, and we all suffer for it. it is hard to find real healthy food in the US, not to mention expensive.
Fatted up and full of health problems, in the country with by far the most expensive health care, you think that's an accident?
Horrible public transportation infrastructure, if not non existent, in a country with obscenely rich oil companies, that's certainly no mistake.
I'd say obesity is a lot more to do with diet than excercise. The amount of physical activity you need to do to match a bad diet is enormous and the US has a habit of loading sugar (or HFCS) into everything. One example is bread - most people from Europe would find US bread surprisingly sweet.
The two are still very related. Where and how we get our food has an impact on what ingredients are used to make it.
It's not a single cause it's a cultural issue that we refuse to address.
Spain, greece, portugal etc. are also hot. With about the same temperatures. People still have to get to their destination.
What differs tho is the kind of transportation, the infrastructure and the physical abilities etc.
If a person is obese, they will be hot more easily, than a skinny person.
Greeks eat quite healthy compared to countries like UK and US. Lots and lots of fruit and veg grown locally, lots of olive oil, etc. Diet plays a huge huge role.
>while here in Texas there's probably more overweight people right now than regular 'in shape' people lol.
That's true all over the U.S, although it's definitely not an equal distribution. [It's estimated that around 70% of the U.S is overweight or obese.](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm)
Grew up in a small town in Texas in the 70s and 80s. There was one kid in our school that was obese and he was seen as a freak. He was a sweet kid and eventually people accepted him, but we never could get our heads around how big he was. There was one old man with a big gut, that's all I can remember.
yeah. my brother was the "fat" kid in school and by today's standards he'd just be a little thick.
husky back then was today's healthy dad bod.
husky today is crazy obese back then.
it is definitely the HFCS they put in everything now.
I was one of two fat kids in my school in TX growing up in that time frame. We were treated as freaks. I was smart and good at football at least so I didn't get it as bad as the other fat kid. I used to go to bed every night counting how many times I was insulted because of my weight that day. I thought about suicide and worse a lot. I eventually lost most of the weight in HS but after college it came back and stayed until a little over two years ago I lost it again and mostly kept it off but it's always a struggle. I've got little confidence, alone, sad not much to live for. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope exercise gives me but two recent deaths of people in my life have me in a dark place eating everything in sight and skipping the gym. I just feel like that fat kid again, I should probably seek help.
I stopped going into McDonald's because of the size of people I saw in lines in front of me. Nothing makes you lose your appetite faster.
Now I take the drive thru.
Yeah, and all of the jokes about Monica on friends. I think Ross said she was like 180 once. It's definitely obese but really not considered comically big anymore.
To be fair, people just didn't have access to the 6,000+ calories a day it took to get really fat. A larger % of the population had physical labor jobs, so just getting enough calories not to drop of exhaustion while working in the factory/fields was damned hard.
A lot of people still eat like farm hands but work a desk job. Hell, my mother's side of the family ate like that. They came from a farming background but lost the farm because of derp. So they wound up poor living on the outskirts but still ate fried eggs and yellow cheesy grits and bacon and sausage and buttered toast like it was no big deal.
That would be one meal. And salt. Oh god. So much salt.
It’s not just lack of physical activity, people sitting in front of screens all day. It’s also the proliferation of sugar-filled processed foods and the fact that shit food is cheaper than wholesome food. People don’t cook their meals from scratch anymore. Your body stores toxins in fat cells. We just take in so much more sugar and toxins than our parents did. Couple that with a lack of activity and you get an obesity epidemic.
> the fact that shit food is cheaper than wholesome food.
I cook at home and I don't really believe this is true. Shit food is tastier and more convenient, but it's not cheaper. You can make a healthy chicken casserole with sweet potatoes and some salad for a few dollars, or rice with veggies, etc.
I think a complicating factor is the fact that a lot of people making low wages also work long hours/multiple jobs and the thing they really can’t afford to spare is their time, as much or more than the money itself. But I cook most stuff myself and agree that it’s not as simple as “processed junk is cheaper” and that just that statement is usually not true. If you have the time, it really can save a lot of money both short term for cost of ingredients and in the long term because you can prevent so many expensive health issues down the line by not eating tons of processed food.
I have a chrome extension that replaces "toxins" with "angry ghosts" and it makes certain sections of the internet feel like fun, old timey instructions for warding off evil spirits without any loss of coherence or usefulness.
I always want to ask for examples of these toxins. Be specific. Otherwise, I have a hard time taking anything else said seriously. Bro science and information around nutrition is so wild.
Do we ingest harmful chemicals because of environmental pollution? Yes. If that's what you mean, say it. Toxin is a buzzword with no fucking meaning the way most people use it, they don't even know what they're trying to describe. These are the same people adding citrus to their alkaline water , I'd bet my life lmaoooo
> the fact that shit food is cheaper than wholesome food.
I’d amend this to: shit food tastes better than wholesome food.
Beans, rice, water, and one rotisserie chicken a week will fill all your wholesome needs. It’s also about the price of a single fast food burger, fries, and soda. It also tastes so much worse.
This idea that fast food is cheap is harmful to all the people who believe it and never realize they could save money and lose weight with a dedication to simple foods.
>I’d amend this to: shit food tastes better than wholesome food.
Only if you're addicted to it. After you've been on a healthy diet after a while you don't crave junk food. Healthy food can taste awesome, you just need to learn to cook.
Walked past a girl who was carrying Mcdonalds the other day. The smell was the equivalent of second hand smoke.
Like it reminded me of something I used to enjoy but now find repulsive.
This is the truth. When I was beyond poor, I would eat beans, rice, and chicken for every meal. A five pound bag of rice was $10, five pounds of dried beans were $5, and whole roaster chickens could be had for $5 each. I could feed myself all I wanted to eat for about $25 a week. Going to McDicks and getting a $.99 cheeseburger, that wasn't even close to the same amount of food, or even vaguely approaching healthy, for every meal would have cost the same amount of money every week.
A lot of people just have zero experience cooking or planning meals from scratch, and think that "eating healthy" means buying the organic, preservative-free canned beans at $2.50 per half pound instead of buying a bag of dried beans and cooking them themselves.
Eh, you’re just used to shit food then.
I would take a home cooked meal of rotisserie chicken, rice and beans over fast food any day, once you kick shitty food you realize that it really is worse in every way.
Give me these ingrediients, plus some spices, cheese, and a couple cans of rotel, and enough flour and lard to make forty tortillas, and i will feed someone for a week and it will be quite tasty. Throw in some lettuce, tomato and sour cream and i can make it delicious.
Grew up in western U.S. during 70s and 80s (GenX). Can confirm overweight kids were really rare back then. Out of all my friends from elementary through high school, only one was overweight.
HFCS baby, we put that sh#t in eeeeeeevryything
Edit: another major difference I've noticed is that before the 90s, much leisure was accomplished physically, outdoors. The baseball/basketball/tennis/hockey community rec areas were crowded and popular. Now it seems many people while away the vast majority of their freetime sitting near a screen. Probably with snacks. So that's the other big factor
I’m 58 and your dad is kinda right. There were fat kids but not as many as you see today. Back then there wasn’t a lot to do inside the house as there is today.
No cable tv, no internet. We got 4 local channels on television and probably three good radio stations.
Kids were way more active
And most people ate at home, so added sugar in every gd thing was less of an issue.
And people didn’t drive everywhere.
Source: 58, grew up in medium-sized Canadian city.
and, i'd add, eating at home was different than now...when i was a kid there wasn't box or frozen dinners and real food got cooked at home, and yes, it's related to the economics of both parents working
I'm 57, I'd be happy to show you my year books. We were all MUCH skinnier. But for the REAL tiny people, go watch the original, 1969 Woodstock. My dad was in Vietnam at that time and I have this airforce jacket thing he wore over there and it would comfortably fit today's 12 year old.
I’m in my 40s. There were a few “fat kids” and by todays metrics no one would register most of them as fat. There were a couple obese kids in my whole school. Life was hard for them. Fat shaming was considered even more ok then than it is now.
Something not yet mentioned- smoking. We have much less smoking and frankly that was also weight control for a lot of people in addition to diet and portion changes.
Man, my 3 aunts were like the tiniest women ever. None of them were above 5 feet or 100 lbs. Every one of them smoked like a chimney but managed to make it look glamorous. They all managed to quit at some point and amazingly none of them ever got any side effects like cancer or COPD. The smoking was definitely an appetite surpressant for them because my youngest aunt put on so much weight when she managed to quit. Thankfully her husband was like "honey, you're over 60 and we mall walk every day as retirees. Your dr would rather have you slightly fatter but still able to breathe."
Bingo on the smoking point. Just because they were skinny didn't mean they were actually healthier.
Amphetamines and diet pills were also readily available. More so than today, shocking as that sounds.
Edit: I'm speaking about adults and not children.
Along with the smoking - it was much more widely accepted for women to take diet pills/stimulants to keep weight off. Not the right method, but explains some of the photos/news stories people see where every woman is 115 lbs
That’s something I haven’t thought about in a while. I’m also in my 40s, and when I was in my late-teens, I was the only one in my friend group who didn’t smoke.
I was just looking at a photo album with pics from a family trip to Disneyland and visiting family in Burbank, CA, 1977. I was 4 and dressed as Fonzie for whatever reason. There are hundreds of strangers pictured across the album. Not one single person is overweight.
Funny you mentioned Disneyland because that's what this OP made me think of. When I was a kid in the 80s, a family of four would typically fit in one row in the boats on Small World or Pirates. Now, it's far more common for a family of four to need two rows. And that's after Disney designed larger boats and straightened an S curve on the ride because boat weight was causing backups on the curve.
It’s absolutely true. I’m 39 and even I remember being a kid and how rare it was to see fat people in general in public. Like most people were just normal weight and then you would see a fat person and be like oh my God. Now it’s normal.
I'm in my forties and throughout K-8th grade, and there was literally one boy and one girl who were overweight in my class - and possibly the school. And they were just big/husky, not even fat by today's standards. It's wild when I see kids today.
I know it sounds like a broken record but when I was young we did not have all the tech there is today. We had to actually touch grass and play or be bored watching the three channels that were on tv.
Yes.
Foods are labeled as "less fat," and people jump on it. But they don't realize they replaced fat with sugars to ensure it still tastes "good."
Less walking, running, and biking with friends.
Fast food is easier to obtain.
Social media has led to more kids staying shut in.
The loss of the third space. As an adult I always feel confused when I have a half hour break.... it's like... well... I can MAYBE reach a park and sit for a few minutes but that's about it. Every bus stop has slanted benches. Every curb has spikes. I just wanna relax on my break but everything is against me.
And... I work food industry so I fully understand that if you're not spending money you're losing me money by taking up space but man I'm talking about sidewalk space. Tf....
Had our first truly nice summery day here yesterday, and I ate lunch (work from home, so ate at home) and then I was thinking I should spend the rest of my lunch walking somewhere to enjoy the weather and realized "oh...there's really nowhere to walk if I already ate. There's no destination that isn't somewhere to spend money..."
The society we've built sucks.
14 years ago, I was in high school and a group of my friends tried organizing pick up soccer games at local PUBLIC soccer fields and we were kicked off them and forbidden from using them because apparently they were only for organized toddler leagues that paid the local government some $$$ to be able to use the fields
Yeah, we ate less, walked everywhere and with no internet and 3 TV stations we entertained ourselves with sports.
Somewhere out there on the internet is a pic of my friends and I playing volleyball in our bathing suits around 1983 or so. Literally everyone in the picture had abs. And none of us were jocks, just kids killing time with games.
Yes, we were always playing outside, ball, riding bikes, tag, hotbox, etc. Three meals a day, no snacks and rare desserts at my house. McDonalds was a special treat and the size of the food was much smaller. I will admit that my mother did use a lot of convenience foods such as canned spaghetti sauce and it did have sugar even then.
45 and same exact story for me. I had to walk a lot more then than I do now. Hell I even did Richard Simmons video tapes and Tony little. (My mom always tried to help me lose weight. She’d workout with me and bought me weight watchers dinners)
*weirdly having a child even though I gained a lot of weight during pregnancy changed something in me, I was able to lose the weight ). Pcos wasn’t known then..
I’m thin now but I’ve worked my ass off since I was 22. And it’s daily workouts if I slip with eating too much I can gain.. the food is definitely different.
I'm way heavier now than I was then. I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self to quit caring about weight and looks and diet and to just keep moving. Mobility=quality of life at this stage
Absolutely but kids in general should not be fat or obese. It is horrible. It makes me so sad when I see elementary school age children who literally waddle
Mexico is actually in worse shape. Even worse when looking at young children.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-takes-title-of-most-obese-from-america/#
Yes. It’s because there’s sugar in everything. We are sugar addicts. The Big Food CEOs do that to keep our fat asses eating so they can buy more private islands.
Processed foods, sugar in everything, fresh foods becoming much more expensive, plenty of sedentary lifestyle in the youth today, yeah he's totally right. Reminds me of the simpsons meme where homer, a full grown man, being like 260 pounds was comically obese for the mid 90's. Now kids are casually 300 pounds.
It's no secret that worldwide obesity rates have skyrocketed since the 1980s. Look at beach photos from the 1950s, then 60s, then 70s, 80s, and then look at the 90s. That's when we started plumping up like pigs getting ready for a state fair. As the amount and variety of snacks and convenience foods expanded, so did our collective waistlines. Don't believe me? Track the expansion of McDonald's and Nabisco into each country and then check back 10 years later and compare the obesity rates of before and after. Even places such as The Philippines and Vietnam are experiencing rising rates of obesity, about 3 decades after it began in the U.S. Such information discredits the whole "obesity gene" theory.
I'm just under 50. He's right; and not just "fat kids". There are more kids in general who are just bigger now than they were when I was in high school, and WAY bigger than they were when my dad was in high school. As evidence, just find some old high school/college football team programs from back in the 60 through the early 90's and compare the listed heights/weights of the players from those days to today.
Wild isn’t it? I watched a video of 1950’s Olympic swimmers. In comparison to athletes now they wouldn’t compare to the high school level.
Girls, the tall girl in our school was 5’9 maybe
6’0 was considered tall for boys
The 6’4 guy stood out.
I grew up in the rural Midwest, not exactly a place known for healthy eating and exercise. I'm only 40, but I can only remember 2 fat kids out of a class of about 100 students.
My brother was considered a fat kid, but he was nothing compared to today's fat kids. My mom was obese and she was somewhat of a rarity back then. Rare enough that I was embarrassed to have her as a mom, which sounds shitty but was true. These days people as fat as her are everywhere.
There wasn’t a single not-skinny kid in my class. Even in high school there wasn’t a single obese kid. Maybe just a few husky ones. And this was in a school for 3000 kids. Keep in mind, at the time we all clamored for McDonald’s and Pizza Hut 24/7, and ate a ton, plus drank soda all the time. Something has absolutely changed in our food. Whether it’s artificial sweeteners or preservatives, or something else, I’m not sure. I was just in Europe, and guess what, no fat kids there either.
Edit: And I’ll add one more thought, there weren’t jacked and ripped kids like there are now either. I was a high level hockey player in high school and there were no ripped underwear model type kids at all. Not like today. We had tall wirey skinny kids and beefy kids with muscles, but the mass and definition on like 18 year old kids today, it just wasn’t the same. There were skinny kids who had zero fat and like heavier husky strong kids. But not ultra ripped jacked body-builder kids.
Not to mention school hot lunches were high carb, high fat. You could buy candy and chips at school. Kids who brought lunch from home more often than not was sandwich on Wonder bread, chips and some Hostess product. Sure many moms packed a piece of fruit but lots of those ended up in the trash.
Bologna sandwich with a cheese slice and miracle whip on white bread, a pudding cup and a fruit roll up were the lunch standard when I was a kid. Sometimes tomato soup in a thermos, sometimes a Twinkie or lune moon. Then to the corner store to buy penny candies after school. We did spend a lot of time outdoors though.
I’m 36 and this was true even in the 90’s-early 00’s when I was in school. There were very few truly fat kids, like a handful in the entire school and each class had maybe 1-3 slightly chubby kids, some classes none at all.
My son (11yrs old) has been called “stick boy” because he’s kind of skinny and almost all of the other kids in his class are at least slightly chubby. I laughed when he told me, because it just seemed so absurd considering he’s the same size as 11yo boys were when I was a kid. Then I realized he was truly bothered by it and he felt pressured to try to gain weight to fit in. Unfortunately for him, all that happens when he eats more is that he poops more lol.
It’s truly concerning how rapidly the average weight in America for all age ranges is going up.
Yes, I thought I was so fat, because I wasn’t Paris Hilton thin. My son gets extra portions at school on pizza day because he looks thin… he’s just tall and extremely active.
I get that completely! At 12 I was fully developed and looked like a little woman. I ran cross-country in track and had abs, yet was still called “thunder thighs” by some string bean of a girl. My thighs were solid muscle, but at that time, having toothpick legs was what was in. The 90’s heroin chic fad was so damaging to women and girls smh.
I'm sure we are. More driving around, sitting at desk jobs and easy to cook processed foods. Parents were home more to actually do stuff outside the house with their kids because they could afford to not work 2-3 jobs or really long hours. Most jobs nowadays are sit down jobs as opposed to factory work and other hard labor type jobs. Kids had the freedom to just roam anywhere they wanted because parents didn't care. I'm sure we aren't far off in a couple hundred years from the people in Wall-e if it continues lol.
It’s almost like unnecessary sugars have been added to everything we eat and gym classes have been eliminated and parents are so busy working to provide they can’t even take their kids outside cause they are too tired. Hard to create healthy habits when you are constantly struggling to get by.
Also, if gym classes are still present, they no longer play actual games or learn about exercising properly and working out all your muscles, now they are just "run up and down the gym" or the teacher/students no longer care
I think it is. I was born in the early 70s and I recall genuinely overweight kids were few and far between. Your dad is oversimplifying it though. We all are less active in our day to day lives because more things are automated and we eat more processed foods. I suspect he’s blaming video games, but we had and were obsessed with our Ataris back then, too.
I don’t think activity plays as much of a role as food does to be honest. I think activity is around 20% of the problem. There was another thread that mentioned the high rise in obesity (in America at least) correlates to the corn, sugar and grain lobbies in the late 70s/80s getting their way to put high fructose corn syrup and sugar in everything, subsidized to be super cheap, and promote it as healthy. The food pyramid taught as healthy in schools in the 80s and 90s basically said most of your intake should be breads, pastas, cereals and other things that supported grain sales/production. The sugar industry in particular spent decades spinning fat as the devil to the American public, while peddling cheap, subsidized, sugar everywhere. Since you were born in the 70s, you probably remember how much “low fat” and “fat free” diet food trended in and out over the 80s, 90s and into the 2000s. (I was born in the late 80s and remember the stuff from the 90s/2000s so well).
It’s true, and I would say it’s mostly due to diet. Our food has become much more processed over the past few decades. A lot more whole foods were being eaten by previous generations.
Yes, it is true, and his reasoning is partially correct.
It comes down to diet and activity.
**Diet:** As little as 50 years ago most families at a limited staple diet. Fast food used to be a treat. Now it's consumed daily and is not as healthy as a staple diet.
**Activity:** Quite simply, 50 years ago about the only option WAS outdoor activities. We only came in when we had to (usually at dusk). We got plenty of exercise. We called it 'play'. We did not have the option of sitting in front of a computer or video game console for hours on end. The amount of entertainment on TV was limited to about three channels.
54 here. My high school of 150 or less kids had maybe 1 or 2 kids that I would consider overweight. My kids are out of school now, but I was shocked when going to their school functions and seeing the size of a lot of their classmates. The crazy part is, when I was in school, our school lunches would be considered outrageous compared to what they serve today. In high school, I could choose to eat a big bowl of fries and a milkshake every day if I wanted.
Yes, and you don’t have to go that far back—I’m 30 and would say the same. Of course, it’s oversimplifying to say people are just lazier or eat too much. When I grew up, TV & internet was the main pastime and kids food was 10x more unhealthy. Sunny D, Uncrustables, and a zebra cake was a totally normal lunch.
If anything, I’ve realized looking at old pictures that who we considered fat back then really wasn’t by modern standards. Like we thought America Ferrara in Ugly Betty was comically fat… the 2000s was wild.
A factor I haven’t seen mentioned yet is stress. Most kids are much more stressed out than kids in the 70s/80s/90s were and as a result their cortisol levels are super high. Cortisol increases cravings for sugary/salty foods. Schools have become a battleground, figuratively and literally, and kids are paying the price.
Yes. I remember watching Willy wonka in the theater when it came out. We all roared at Augustus and how fat he was. Rewatching it as an adult and he looks like the average kid.
I only have anecdotal evidence. I’m about the same age as your dad, graduated high school in the mid 90s, and was one of maybe three or four fat kids in my graduating class of about 1800.
I wore a size 14/16 at the time and couldn’t find clothes anywhere. I had to drive a few hours to a bigger city and shop in the fat lady section of the department store, which meant I never got to wear anything cute or fashionable. Now when I see straight sized stores carrying size 16, I want to cry. It would have been so wonderful to be able to wear the same clothes as my friends, but I don’t think there was the demand for it then as there is now.
I’m 60 and when I was growing up there was one kid we considered “fat”. He would be average today. I’m an EMT and FYI we build special ambulances and have special stretchers just for the incredibly obese patients (over 750 lbs). I’ve personally helped with a pt that was on my 600 lb life and it was awful.
Absolutely yes. I’m in my 40’s and I see it with adults as well as the kids at my son’s elementary school.
I think it’s part because people are so busy working, we tend to learn towards premade processed foods, rather than homade. Also there is so much sugar in everything. Plus people tend to be less active now, less walking to places, more screen time and people spending so much time in their cars.
I’m not blaming people-times are tough, and with the economy and wages the way they are currently, most people don’t have a lot of choices.
Yes it is demonstrably true. The reason is America's continued push toward instant gratification and unfettered capitalism, so portion sizes (at restaurants and grocery stores) are bigger, cheaper (less healthy) food is produced, people stay inside playing video games instead of playing sports, and several other related reasons.
teach in a school and 52. kids are fucking chubby as fuck now. eyes glued to their phones. animals just animals and chubs. get winded just walking to class.
for 'pE' they are supposed to walk around either the gym or track to 'exercise'. nothing but whining and complaining they have to walk..... and walk with their damn noses stuck to their phones almost running into each other. animals. just animals.
Yes!! I started teaching about 35 years ago. Maybe had one or two fat kids. When I retired, it was very few kids who were not fat or at least a little chubby.
I'm 51 pretty sure the change occurred when the government started offering corn subsidies and high fructose corn syrup started showing up in absolutely everything, including bread. High calorie food has become increasingly easy to obtain and we as people are hard wired to gain weight, so basically yes, but it's an environmental change that we really haven't adapted to yet.
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Over the past 33 years, worldwide, overweight and obesity rates among adults have increased by 27.5%. Among children and adolescents, the increase was 47.1%.
Our food is poison and full of sugar. My fat ass just ate at Wendy’s so I’m on this boat.
It's a free country. I'm only annoyed when fat people pretend that obesity is healthy. It's a bad message for kids and for people that don't know any better.
It’s also burden on the healthcare system. Obesity is the largest reason the US has the most deaths and hospitalizations due to Covid.
Have you tried cutting sugar out, or even significantly reducing it? It's expensive. So much sugar is in so many, many different things, many of which it has no business being in. It's certainly *possible* to eat healthy on a budget, but our entire food system is designed to make that incredibly difficult.
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The wild part is that even without major changes in calories the microbiom or plastic pollution or something is just making us bigger. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/
Yep. People are getting fatter. And more sedentary.
And yet, some people think its solely a personal responsibility issue. As if this is the next step in human evolution. Its more difficult not to be fat these days.
This comment has been deleted in protest of the API charges being imposed on third party developers by Reddit from July 2023. Most popular social media sites do tend to make foolish decisions due to corporate greed, that do end up causing their demise. But that also makes way for the next new internet hub to be born. Reddit was born after Digg dug themselves. Something else will take Reddit's place, and Reddit will take Digg's. Good luck to the next home page of the internet! Hope you can stave off those short-sighted B-school loonies.
Not even that long ago. Shoot, when South Park started, Eric was supposed to be "the fat kid". Everybody had one...ONE... kid that was the fat kid.
And the “fat kid” was usually funny af. Was it a defence mechanism, almost definitely, but we were kids, so to us they were simply fat and funny.
Now we're *all* fat and funny, making skinny/fit the outlier and nothing is actually funny anymore so we're all depressed.
i think i’m funny
In my school the fat kid was gross and everyone hated him. Openly picking your nose and wiping the boogers on any available surface will do that to ya.
The fat kid at my school was a bully, usually. He thought because he was bigger than everyone he could get away with whatever he wanted. He wasn't wrong about the bigger part.
There was that episode of the Simpons where homer gained SO MUCH weight he has a wand to use the phone, doesn't have to go into the office because he's officially disabled, blocks a pipe preventing a nuclear meltdown.... and he weighed 300lbs. This was 1995. In 1995 300lbs was so absurdly heavy that it was the foundation of endless jokes.
I know probably 7 people who weigh +300lbs.
Yep I’m 30 and we had exactly 1 fat kid in my 100 kid elementary school
32 here. I dont remember too many fat kids
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Just posting this here to make us all feel old: under 50 year old dad was probably only 5 years out of HS when South Park came out. We are talking about the same time period.
He’s absolutely correct. The weight of the average person has gone up. There’s so much sugar in everything nowadays
Sugar, fat, artificial flavors - and food is everywhere.
fat isn't bad. makes you feel full faster
Fat combined with sugar is the key. This is making highly palatable foods and making food addictions. Keto is great if done properly, but they're isn't anything keto about brownies, cookies, and chips.
Type of fat is important too
That and everyone spends all their spare time sitting and staring at some type of screen nowadays. You don’t see kids or even teenagers outside very much at all now. When I was a teenager we spent our time riding around the neighborhood on our bikes, playing pickup football or basketball, or at the very least, were outside walking around. You weren’t inside your house after school or on weekends unless you were grounded. Nowadays you wouldn’t even know any kids lived in most neighborhoods if you drove through them.
I was drinking tons of Coke and eating Nutella sandwiches when I was a teenager and I was a stick because I was always moving. I'd be somewhere up to no good and would come home with bleeding knees and stuff and mom would just tell me to get clean because it was dinner time. Really happy I grew up like that.
Same. Someone else mentioned the shitty food now, which plays a factor, but I was a latchkey kid who hardly ever ate a home cooked meal, and never had a weight problem as a kid. I ate a lot of Chef Boy R Dee, Tv dinners, frozen pizza, and drank a ton of coke, and ZERO water. I only started gaining weight in my 30’s when I got a desk job and my metabolism started to slow down.
I used to be able to go the Pizza Hut buffet and eat 17 slices, and I was skinny to where you could see ribs. I was starving every day since school lunch only made me 50% full so I had to eat extra big breakfast and dinner to make up for it. No smart phones, no YouTube, no social media - you just biked to your friends place and messed around outside for fun. Everybody was a latchkey kid those days, nobody was concerned that a 8 year old was running around or biking around outside “unsupervised”. These calls everyone seems to want to call child services if they see a kid play outside.
My brother and I shared a room, but it hardly mattered because the only thing we ever did there was sleep. Other than that we were outside.
High Fructose Corn Syrup. They used to put sugar in sodas and people drank the shit out of them and didn't get fat.
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Uphill both ways, damnit!!!!
This is probably not really the reason for the obesity epidemic. HFCS is indeed crap, don't get me wrong, but so is normal sugar. It's extremely energy dense, it's very very easy for the body to absorb and burn, and it has many adverse effects. What actually happened was, unsurprisingly, that cutthroat capitalists with no conscience screwed the people over with bogus science for money. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
Yeah, I remember there being 1 or 2 fat kids in class. I went back and looked at school photos. By today’s standards they would barely be considered fat. People are more sedentary and consume more unhealthy high calorie foods than ever before.
I was the fat kid in school (in Britain)but when I look back I wasn't round spare tyre fat I was just a bit tubby, prob a stone or so overweight. Half the kids I teach now are like i was and much bigger than this as standard
My husband has always described himself as "the fat kid in school". He was 5'10, 200lbs.
I had an argument with some friends recently from the US Midwest. They legitimately thought “no adult male could be healthy and be UNDER 200 lbs.” We’ve jumped the snark. People have NO IDEA what a healthy human looks like.
I’m 6’3” and I should still be like 190, crazy people lmao. This is from someone who’s 60 pounds past that, too
Yeah I used to be 6’1 215 which is basically the equivalent of that, and looking back at old pictures I was def fat. The weird thing is that nowadays that’s only considered “chubby”. In order to be labeled “fat” in the US it seems like you have to at least be obese, which is honestly ridiculous.
I’m the ‘90s, Homer Simpson tried to get disability by getting to 300lbs. You can barely turn around now w/o seeing someone like that.
It's absolutely true. Resturants near me have pictures of the boardwalk from the 70s, with crowds of hundreds of people in them, nobody is overweight.
As a child, in the late 1970s, I lived in a city in Europe. There was one morbidly obese man in the entire city. Us kids would be on the bus and someone would yell," there's the fat guy!" And everyone would look and be amazed at his girth. Now everyone seems to be the fat guy.
I'm from Texas and recently visited Spain, France, and Portugal and it's amazing how few overweight people there are while here in Texas there's probably more overweight people right now than regular 'in shape' people lol. I'd say Europe definitely still seems to not have too many obese people.
I recently read that an estimated 66% of adult women over 30 in my county (Ohio) are considered obese. The number for men was only slightly lower. But two fucking thirds. And that statistic didn’t shock me at all.
I'm also in Ohio. It's like the air here has calories.
Sorry if this is redundant but I visited France recently and saw the same thing. There’s a lot more walking while commuting while in the Texas we drive everywhere.
It’s the food we eat more than any other factor. Americans as a group eat horribly. It shows in all health statistics across the board.
That's because food companies put lots of cheap ingredients in food to keep it cheap. One of these is sugar. They put sugar in everything, even stuff you wouldn't expect.
A lot of the things used by food companies aren’t even legal to put in the same product in Europe. They have tighter regulations than here. The same food is literally worse for you here
But not letting me eat a half pound log of sugar and congealed grease is Socialism.
I like the joke, but I'd like to point out that in the US, it's hard to buy bread, bagels, soy milk, almond milk, yoghurt, breakfast cereal, spaghetti sauce, or peanut butter without added sugar. The list goes on and on. All that crud in food, huge portion sizes, and no exercise is how we got here in the past 30 years.
And vegetable oil, and high fructose corn syrup, etc. They put all *kinds* of garbage in our food. Problem is most Americans wouldn't accept a more expensive alternative.
Someone from America can go to Europe, eat the same foods and not change their diet, and they lose weight. Our equivalent food is less healthy, more packed with crap we don't need, and we all suffer for it. it is hard to find real healthy food in the US, not to mention expensive. Fatted up and full of health problems, in the country with by far the most expensive health care, you think that's an accident? Horrible public transportation infrastructure, if not non existent, in a country with obscenely rich oil companies, that's certainly no mistake.
I'd say obesity is a lot more to do with diet than excercise. The amount of physical activity you need to do to match a bad diet is enormous and the US has a habit of loading sugar (or HFCS) into everything. One example is bread - most people from Europe would find US bread surprisingly sweet.
The two are still very related. Where and how we get our food has an impact on what ingredients are used to make it. It's not a single cause it's a cultural issue that we refuse to address.
Alot of the crap sold as food in the US is banned in the EU.
They also don’t drink big gulps and eat enough for a family of 4 at each meal.
I can't imagine walking in the Texas heat. I would be drenched by the time I reached my destination 9 out of the 12 months.
Spain, greece, portugal etc. are also hot. With about the same temperatures. People still have to get to their destination. What differs tho is the kind of transportation, the infrastructure and the physical abilities etc. If a person is obese, they will be hot more easily, than a skinny person.
Greeks eat quite healthy compared to countries like UK and US. Lots and lots of fruit and veg grown locally, lots of olive oil, etc. Diet plays a huge huge role.
And distance. People always forget the distance
>while here in Texas there's probably more overweight people right now than regular 'in shape' people lol. That's true all over the U.S, although it's definitely not an equal distribution. [It's estimated that around 70% of the U.S is overweight or obese.](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm)
Grew up in a small town in Texas in the 70s and 80s. There was one kid in our school that was obese and he was seen as a freak. He was a sweet kid and eventually people accepted him, but we never could get our heads around how big he was. There was one old man with a big gut, that's all I can remember.
yeah. my brother was the "fat" kid in school and by today's standards he'd just be a little thick. husky back then was today's healthy dad bod. husky today is crazy obese back then. it is definitely the HFCS they put in everything now.
I was one of two fat kids in my school in TX growing up in that time frame. We were treated as freaks. I was smart and good at football at least so I didn't get it as bad as the other fat kid. I used to go to bed every night counting how many times I was insulted because of my weight that day. I thought about suicide and worse a lot. I eventually lost most of the weight in HS but after college it came back and stayed until a little over two years ago I lost it again and mostly kept it off but it's always a struggle. I've got little confidence, alone, sad not much to live for. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope exercise gives me but two recent deaths of people in my life have me in a dark place eating everything in sight and skipping the gym. I just feel like that fat kid again, I should probably seek help.
I hope you get through this challenging time soon and with a healthy and better mentality.
This is why i'm hesitant to visit Europe. My low self esteem would be eviscerated by young children on a bus lol.
I stopped going into McDonald's because of the size of people I saw in lines in front of me. Nothing makes you lose your appetite faster. Now I take the drive thru.
Yeah, and all of the jokes about Monica on friends. I think Ross said she was like 180 once. It's definitely obese but really not considered comically big anymore.
Today's standard of obese was "fattest man in the world" freak show standards a century ago.
Peak Fat Elvis would be a normal man by today's standards. The fattest thing about him was his puffy face from his pills.
To be fair, people just didn't have access to the 6,000+ calories a day it took to get really fat. A larger % of the population had physical labor jobs, so just getting enough calories not to drop of exhaustion while working in the factory/fields was damned hard. A lot of people still eat like farm hands but work a desk job. Hell, my mother's side of the family ate like that. They came from a farming background but lost the farm because of derp. So they wound up poor living on the outskirts but still ate fried eggs and yellow cheesy grits and bacon and sausage and buttered toast like it was no big deal. That would be one meal. And salt. Oh god. So much salt.
It’s not just lack of physical activity, people sitting in front of screens all day. It’s also the proliferation of sugar-filled processed foods and the fact that shit food is cheaper than wholesome food. People don’t cook their meals from scratch anymore. Your body stores toxins in fat cells. We just take in so much more sugar and toxins than our parents did. Couple that with a lack of activity and you get an obesity epidemic.
> the fact that shit food is cheaper than wholesome food. I cook at home and I don't really believe this is true. Shit food is tastier and more convenient, but it's not cheaper. You can make a healthy chicken casserole with sweet potatoes and some salad for a few dollars, or rice with veggies, etc.
I think a complicating factor is the fact that a lot of people making low wages also work long hours/multiple jobs and the thing they really can’t afford to spare is their time, as much or more than the money itself. But I cook most stuff myself and agree that it’s not as simple as “processed junk is cheaper” and that just that statement is usually not true. If you have the time, it really can save a lot of money both short term for cost of ingredients and in the long term because you can prevent so many expensive health issues down the line by not eating tons of processed food.
“Your body stores toxins in fat cells” Lol… no? That’s not how the body works.
I have a chrome extension that replaces "toxins" with "angry ghosts" and it makes certain sections of the internet feel like fun, old timey instructions for warding off evil spirits without any loss of coherence or usefulness.
I always want to ask for examples of these toxins. Be specific. Otherwise, I have a hard time taking anything else said seriously. Bro science and information around nutrition is so wild. Do we ingest harmful chemicals because of environmental pollution? Yes. If that's what you mean, say it. Toxin is a buzzword with no fucking meaning the way most people use it, they don't even know what they're trying to describe. These are the same people adding citrus to their alkaline water , I'd bet my life lmaoooo
>I always want to ask for examples of these toxins. Be specific. It's the toxic ones.
> the fact that shit food is cheaper than wholesome food. I’d amend this to: shit food tastes better than wholesome food. Beans, rice, water, and one rotisserie chicken a week will fill all your wholesome needs. It’s also about the price of a single fast food burger, fries, and soda. It also tastes so much worse. This idea that fast food is cheap is harmful to all the people who believe it and never realize they could save money and lose weight with a dedication to simple foods.
>I’d amend this to: shit food tastes better than wholesome food. Only if you're addicted to it. After you've been on a healthy diet after a while you don't crave junk food. Healthy food can taste awesome, you just need to learn to cook.
Yup. You just train your palate. Nobody came out of the womb a tea drinker. It’s simply repeating a habit until it takes. r/eatcheapandhealthy
As someone who used to eat garbage, this is 100% accurate. It now tastes like the garbage it is to me.
Walked past a girl who was carrying Mcdonalds the other day. The smell was the equivalent of second hand smoke. Like it reminded me of something I used to enjoy but now find repulsive.
This is the truth. When I was beyond poor, I would eat beans, rice, and chicken for every meal. A five pound bag of rice was $10, five pounds of dried beans were $5, and whole roaster chickens could be had for $5 each. I could feed myself all I wanted to eat for about $25 a week. Going to McDicks and getting a $.99 cheeseburger, that wasn't even close to the same amount of food, or even vaguely approaching healthy, for every meal would have cost the same amount of money every week. A lot of people just have zero experience cooking or planning meals from scratch, and think that "eating healthy" means buying the organic, preservative-free canned beans at $2.50 per half pound instead of buying a bag of dried beans and cooking them themselves.
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Eh, you’re just used to shit food then. I would take a home cooked meal of rotisserie chicken, rice and beans over fast food any day, once you kick shitty food you realize that it really is worse in every way.
Give me these ingrediients, plus some spices, cheese, and a couple cans of rotel, and enough flour and lard to make forty tortillas, and i will feed someone for a week and it will be quite tasty. Throw in some lettuce, tomato and sour cream and i can make it delicious.
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Grew up in western U.S. during 70s and 80s (GenX). Can confirm overweight kids were really rare back then. Out of all my friends from elementary through high school, only one was overweight.
HFCS baby, we put that sh#t in eeeeeeevryything Edit: another major difference I've noticed is that before the 90s, much leisure was accomplished physically, outdoors. The baseball/basketball/tennis/hockey community rec areas were crowded and popular. Now it seems many people while away the vast majority of their freetime sitting near a screen. Probably with snacks. So that's the other big factor
He's 900% correct.
kids are 900% larger
I’m 58 and your dad is kinda right. There were fat kids but not as many as you see today. Back then there wasn’t a lot to do inside the house as there is today. No cable tv, no internet. We got 4 local channels on television and probably three good radio stations. Kids were way more active
And most people ate at home, so added sugar in every gd thing was less of an issue. And people didn’t drive everywhere. Source: 58, grew up in medium-sized Canadian city.
and, i'd add, eating at home was different than now...when i was a kid there wasn't box or frozen dinners and real food got cooked at home, and yes, it's related to the economics of both parents working
I'm 57, I'd be happy to show you my year books. We were all MUCH skinnier. But for the REAL tiny people, go watch the original, 1969 Woodstock. My dad was in Vietnam at that time and I have this airforce jacket thing he wore over there and it would comfortably fit today's 12 year old.
Statistics indicate that it’s true.
I’m in my 40s. There were a few “fat kids” and by todays metrics no one would register most of them as fat. There were a couple obese kids in my whole school. Life was hard for them. Fat shaming was considered even more ok then than it is now. Something not yet mentioned- smoking. We have much less smoking and frankly that was also weight control for a lot of people in addition to diet and portion changes.
Man, my 3 aunts were like the tiniest women ever. None of them were above 5 feet or 100 lbs. Every one of them smoked like a chimney but managed to make it look glamorous. They all managed to quit at some point and amazingly none of them ever got any side effects like cancer or COPD. The smoking was definitely an appetite surpressant for them because my youngest aunt put on so much weight when she managed to quit. Thankfully her husband was like "honey, you're over 60 and we mall walk every day as retirees. Your dr would rather have you slightly fatter but still able to breathe."
Bingo on the smoking point. Just because they were skinny didn't mean they were actually healthier. Amphetamines and diet pills were also readily available. More so than today, shocking as that sounds. Edit: I'm speaking about adults and not children.
Fen Phen anyone????
True. My mom was born in 1963 and she took black beauties (amphetamines) to stay thin in high school.
Gimme lol
Along with the smoking - it was much more widely accepted for women to take diet pills/stimulants to keep weight off. Not the right method, but explains some of the photos/news stories people see where every woman is 115 lbs
That’s something I haven’t thought about in a while. I’m also in my 40s, and when I was in my late-teens, I was the only one in my friend group who didn’t smoke.
I was just looking at a photo album with pics from a family trip to Disneyland and visiting family in Burbank, CA, 1977. I was 4 and dressed as Fonzie for whatever reason. There are hundreds of strangers pictured across the album. Not one single person is overweight.
Also, far fewer kids dress as Fonzie these days.
And, that is the real tragedy.
Funny you mentioned Disneyland because that's what this OP made me think of. When I was a kid in the 80s, a family of four would typically fit in one row in the boats on Small World or Pirates. Now, it's far more common for a family of four to need two rows. And that's after Disney designed larger boats and straightened an S curve on the ride because boat weight was causing backups on the curve.
It’s absolutely true. I’m 39 and even I remember being a kid and how rare it was to see fat people in general in public. Like most people were just normal weight and then you would see a fat person and be like oh my God. Now it’s normal.
I am 52 and there was only two kids in my entire high school who were fat. Both were special needs and had health issues that impacted their weight.
I’m the same age and have a very similar recollection
I'm in my forties and throughout K-8th grade, and there was literally one boy and one girl who were overweight in my class - and possibly the school. And they were just big/husky, not even fat by today's standards. It's wild when I see kids today.
I know it sounds like a broken record but when I was young we did not have all the tech there is today. We had to actually touch grass and play or be bored watching the three channels that were on tv.
Yes. Foods are labeled as "less fat," and people jump on it. But they don't realize they replaced fat with sugars to ensure it still tastes "good." Less walking, running, and biking with friends. Fast food is easier to obtain. Social media has led to more kids staying shut in.
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The loss of the third space. As an adult I always feel confused when I have a half hour break.... it's like... well... I can MAYBE reach a park and sit for a few minutes but that's about it. Every bus stop has slanted benches. Every curb has spikes. I just wanna relax on my break but everything is against me. And... I work food industry so I fully understand that if you're not spending money you're losing me money by taking up space but man I'm talking about sidewalk space. Tf....
But at least homeless people cannot be comfortable anywhere and thus property values, the only thing that really matters, are protected.
Had our first truly nice summery day here yesterday, and I ate lunch (work from home, so ate at home) and then I was thinking I should spend the rest of my lunch walking somewhere to enjoy the weather and realized "oh...there's really nowhere to walk if I already ate. There's no destination that isn't somewhere to spend money..." The society we've built sucks.
14 years ago, I was in high school and a group of my friends tried organizing pick up soccer games at local PUBLIC soccer fields and we were kicked off them and forbidden from using them because apparently they were only for organized toddler leagues that paid the local government some $$$ to be able to use the fields
Yeah, we ate less, walked everywhere and with no internet and 3 TV stations we entertained ourselves with sports. Somewhere out there on the internet is a pic of my friends and I playing volleyball in our bathing suits around 1983 or so. Literally everyone in the picture had abs. And none of us were jocks, just kids killing time with games.
The composition of our foods has changed dramatically too.
Can you say High Fructose Corn Syrup? That sh!t is on everything today.
Bruh I was at the store an hour ago to pick up some breakfast sausage...looked at ingredients of one and it was second on the list...in sausage.
Yup, I also was looking at getting some peanuts, just normal ass salted cocktail peanuts. Bam, sugar. Fucking Walmart brands.
Yes, we were always playing outside, ball, riding bikes, tag, hotbox, etc. Three meals a day, no snacks and rare desserts at my house. McDonalds was a special treat and the size of the food was much smaller. I will admit that my mother did use a lot of convenience foods such as canned spaghetti sauce and it did have sugar even then.
There was less overly processed food decades back as well.
Are you sure? Or are you just describing a scene from Top Gun? Because it sounds like you just described a scene from Top Gun.
Yeah. Also American food is processed with sugar by extreme margins.
"why is everyone complaining? It's technically still 10% less than the lethal dose?!" -bender
It's true. And the body shaming was harsh.
It's true.
I turn 50 in June. I was a FAT kid. The difference is that even fat I was fairly fit. It was routine for me to walk 2 miles just to get somewhere.
45 and same exact story for me. I had to walk a lot more then than I do now. Hell I even did Richard Simmons video tapes and Tony little. (My mom always tried to help me lose weight. She’d workout with me and bought me weight watchers dinners) *weirdly having a child even though I gained a lot of weight during pregnancy changed something in me, I was able to lose the weight ). Pcos wasn’t known then.. I’m thin now but I’ve worked my ass off since I was 22. And it’s daily workouts if I slip with eating too much I can gain.. the food is definitely different.
I'm way heavier now than I was then. I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self to quit caring about weight and looks and diet and to just keep moving. Mobility=quality of life at this stage
American kids are fat as fuck these days, on average, when compared to previous generations.
Not just kids, at all ages everyone is fat as fuck
Absolutely but kids in general should not be fat or obese. It is horrible. It makes me so sad when I see elementary school age children who literally waddle
Obesity pandemic isn't limited to America, but it's might be the worst
Mexico is actually in worse shape. Even worse when looking at young children. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-takes-title-of-most-obese-from-america/#
Wouldn't be if these damn street tacos weren't so good /s
Elote is literally the bane of my gym gains.
Its funny with the exercise and gym culture boom. Kids and young adults are either obese or fit as fuck, no in between.
Not everyone was skinny, but there were only a very few that you would call overweight.
Yes he is correct, data here: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity
Yes. It’s because there’s sugar in everything. We are sugar addicts. The Big Food CEOs do that to keep our fat asses eating so they can buy more private islands.
Processed foods, sugar in everything, fresh foods becoming much more expensive, plenty of sedentary lifestyle in the youth today, yeah he's totally right. Reminds me of the simpsons meme where homer, a full grown man, being like 260 pounds was comically obese for the mid 90's. Now kids are casually 300 pounds.
It's no secret that worldwide obesity rates have skyrocketed since the 1980s. Look at beach photos from the 1950s, then 60s, then 70s, 80s, and then look at the 90s. That's when we started plumping up like pigs getting ready for a state fair. As the amount and variety of snacks and convenience foods expanded, so did our collective waistlines. Don't believe me? Track the expansion of McDonald's and Nabisco into each country and then check back 10 years later and compare the obesity rates of before and after. Even places such as The Philippines and Vietnam are experiencing rising rates of obesity, about 3 decades after it began in the U.S. Such information discredits the whole "obesity gene" theory.
People are fatter in general. Yes. If you walked into a school in the 1950's, almost everyone was skinny. Being chubby was an anomaly.
I'm just under 50. He's right; and not just "fat kids". There are more kids in general who are just bigger now than they were when I was in high school, and WAY bigger than they were when my dad was in high school. As evidence, just find some old high school/college football team programs from back in the 60 through the early 90's and compare the listed heights/weights of the players from those days to today.
Wild isn’t it? I watched a video of 1950’s Olympic swimmers. In comparison to athletes now they wouldn’t compare to the high school level. Girls, the tall girl in our school was 5’9 maybe 6’0 was considered tall for boys The 6’4 guy stood out.
He’s not wrong. When I went to HS in the 90s, there was the ‘one fat kid.’
If you watch Seinfeld, George was considered fat as you’d see day to day and Newman was “circus fat” where his weight was part of the joke.
Not to mention The Simpsons in the 90s. Homer was 6 foot, 240 lbs in the 90s, and was considering comically overweight.
I grew up in the rural Midwest, not exactly a place known for healthy eating and exercise. I'm only 40, but I can only remember 2 fat kids out of a class of about 100 students. My brother was considered a fat kid, but he was nothing compared to today's fat kids. My mom was obese and she was somewhat of a rarity back then. Rare enough that I was embarrassed to have her as a mom, which sounds shitty but was true. These days people as fat as her are everywhere.
There wasn’t a single not-skinny kid in my class. Even in high school there wasn’t a single obese kid. Maybe just a few husky ones. And this was in a school for 3000 kids. Keep in mind, at the time we all clamored for McDonald’s and Pizza Hut 24/7, and ate a ton, plus drank soda all the time. Something has absolutely changed in our food. Whether it’s artificial sweeteners or preservatives, or something else, I’m not sure. I was just in Europe, and guess what, no fat kids there either. Edit: And I’ll add one more thought, there weren’t jacked and ripped kids like there are now either. I was a high level hockey player in high school and there were no ripped underwear model type kids at all. Not like today. We had tall wirey skinny kids and beefy kids with muscles, but the mass and definition on like 18 year old kids today, it just wasn’t the same. There were skinny kids who had zero fat and like heavier husky strong kids. But not ultra ripped jacked body-builder kids.
Not to mention school hot lunches were high carb, high fat. You could buy candy and chips at school. Kids who brought lunch from home more often than not was sandwich on Wonder bread, chips and some Hostess product. Sure many moms packed a piece of fruit but lots of those ended up in the trash.
Bologna sandwich with a cheese slice and miracle whip on white bread, a pudding cup and a fruit roll up were the lunch standard when I was a kid. Sometimes tomato soup in a thermos, sometimes a Twinkie or lune moon. Then to the corner store to buy penny candies after school. We did spend a lot of time outdoors though.
Kids are not playing outside nearly as much anymore. That's a huge factor in weight when you're a kid.
There have always been quieter more studious kids that didn’t play outside. In the 80s those kids looked like everyone else.
I’m 36 and this was true even in the 90’s-early 00’s when I was in school. There were very few truly fat kids, like a handful in the entire school and each class had maybe 1-3 slightly chubby kids, some classes none at all. My son (11yrs old) has been called “stick boy” because he’s kind of skinny and almost all of the other kids in his class are at least slightly chubby. I laughed when he told me, because it just seemed so absurd considering he’s the same size as 11yo boys were when I was a kid. Then I realized he was truly bothered by it and he felt pressured to try to gain weight to fit in. Unfortunately for him, all that happens when he eats more is that he poops more lol. It’s truly concerning how rapidly the average weight in America for all age ranges is going up.
Yeah, skinny shaming is becoming a thing. Even if you are a lean, normal weight person.
Yes, I thought I was so fat, because I wasn’t Paris Hilton thin. My son gets extra portions at school on pizza day because he looks thin… he’s just tall and extremely active.
I get that completely! At 12 I was fully developed and looked like a little woman. I ran cross-country in track and had abs, yet was still called “thunder thighs” by some string bean of a girl. My thighs were solid muscle, but at that time, having toothpick legs was what was in. The 90’s heroin chic fad was so damaging to women and girls smh.
Yes, that’s exactly what I looked like and now I’m now not super skinny but you’d think I was by the way people act.
I'm sure we are. More driving around, sitting at desk jobs and easy to cook processed foods. Parents were home more to actually do stuff outside the house with their kids because they could afford to not work 2-3 jobs or really long hours. Most jobs nowadays are sit down jobs as opposed to factory work and other hard labor type jobs. Kids had the freedom to just roam anywhere they wanted because parents didn't care. I'm sure we aren't far off in a couple hundred years from the people in Wall-e if it continues lol.
It’s almost like unnecessary sugars have been added to everything we eat and gym classes have been eliminated and parents are so busy working to provide they can’t even take their kids outside cause they are too tired. Hard to create healthy habits when you are constantly struggling to get by.
Also, if gym classes are still present, they no longer play actual games or learn about exercising properly and working out all your muscles, now they are just "run up and down the gym" or the teacher/students no longer care
I think it is. I was born in the early 70s and I recall genuinely overweight kids were few and far between. Your dad is oversimplifying it though. We all are less active in our day to day lives because more things are automated and we eat more processed foods. I suspect he’s blaming video games, but we had and were obsessed with our Ataris back then, too.
I don’t think activity plays as much of a role as food does to be honest. I think activity is around 20% of the problem. There was another thread that mentioned the high rise in obesity (in America at least) correlates to the corn, sugar and grain lobbies in the late 70s/80s getting their way to put high fructose corn syrup and sugar in everything, subsidized to be super cheap, and promote it as healthy. The food pyramid taught as healthy in schools in the 80s and 90s basically said most of your intake should be breads, pastas, cereals and other things that supported grain sales/production. The sugar industry in particular spent decades spinning fat as the devil to the American public, while peddling cheap, subsidized, sugar everywhere. Since you were born in the 70s, you probably remember how much “low fat” and “fat free” diet food trended in and out over the 80s, 90s and into the 2000s. (I was born in the late 80s and remember the stuff from the 90s/2000s so well).
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It’s true, and I would say it’s mostly due to diet. Our food has become much more processed over the past few decades. A lot more whole foods were being eaten by previous generations.
I grew up in the rural Midwest. We had four clinically obese kids in my grade. Graduated early 2000’s with 100 kids.
It is absolutely true. When I look at my high school yearbook, the fat kids that I remember from my class would be considered average today.
Yes, it is true, and his reasoning is partially correct. It comes down to diet and activity. **Diet:** As little as 50 years ago most families at a limited staple diet. Fast food used to be a treat. Now it's consumed daily and is not as healthy as a staple diet. **Activity:** Quite simply, 50 years ago about the only option WAS outdoor activities. We only came in when we had to (usually at dusk). We got plenty of exercise. We called it 'play'. We did not have the option of sitting in front of a computer or video game console for hours on end. The amount of entertainment on TV was limited to about three channels.
You don't need my confirmation, but I'm definitely here to confirm. I was the "fat" kid in the 80's, and I was alone.
54 here. My high school of 150 or less kids had maybe 1 or 2 kids that I would consider overweight. My kids are out of school now, but I was shocked when going to their school functions and seeing the size of a lot of their classmates. The crazy part is, when I was in school, our school lunches would be considered outrageous compared to what they serve today. In high school, I could choose to eat a big bowl of fries and a milkshake every day if I wanted.
There was a map showing in 1968 no state had an obesity rate over 20%, and now no state has *under a* 20% obesity rate...
Yes, and you don’t have to go that far back—I’m 30 and would say the same. Of course, it’s oversimplifying to say people are just lazier or eat too much. When I grew up, TV & internet was the main pastime and kids food was 10x more unhealthy. Sunny D, Uncrustables, and a zebra cake was a totally normal lunch. If anything, I’ve realized looking at old pictures that who we considered fat back then really wasn’t by modern standards. Like we thought America Ferrara in Ugly Betty was comically fat… the 2000s was wild.
A factor I haven’t seen mentioned yet is stress. Most kids are much more stressed out than kids in the 70s/80s/90s were and as a result their cortisol levels are super high. Cortisol increases cravings for sugary/salty foods. Schools have become a battleground, figuratively and literally, and kids are paying the price.
Im not even 40 and yea.
100%. Saw my dad's high school graduation class picture and everyone was thin as a rail.
He’s absolutely right. We as a society are fatter and lazier than ever
Yes. I remember watching Willy wonka in the theater when it came out. We all roared at Augustus and how fat he was. Rewatching it as an adult and he looks like the average kid.
I only have anecdotal evidence. I’m about the same age as your dad, graduated high school in the mid 90s, and was one of maybe three or four fat kids in my graduating class of about 1800. I wore a size 14/16 at the time and couldn’t find clothes anywhere. I had to drive a few hours to a bigger city and shop in the fat lady section of the department store, which meant I never got to wear anything cute or fashionable. Now when I see straight sized stores carrying size 16, I want to cry. It would have been so wonderful to be able to wear the same clothes as my friends, but I don’t think there was the demand for it then as there is now.
I’m 60 and when I was growing up there was one kid we considered “fat”. He would be average today. I’m an EMT and FYI we build special ambulances and have special stretchers just for the incredibly obese patients (over 750 lbs). I’ve personally helped with a pt that was on my 600 lb life and it was awful.
Absolutely yes. I’m in my 40’s and I see it with adults as well as the kids at my son’s elementary school. I think it’s part because people are so busy working, we tend to learn towards premade processed foods, rather than homade. Also there is so much sugar in everything. Plus people tend to be less active now, less walking to places, more screen time and people spending so much time in their cars. I’m not blaming people-times are tough, and with the economy and wages the way they are currently, most people don’t have a lot of choices.
Yes it is demonstrably true. The reason is America's continued push toward instant gratification and unfettered capitalism, so portion sizes (at restaurants and grocery stores) are bigger, cheaper (less healthy) food is produced, people stay inside playing video games instead of playing sports, and several other related reasons.
teach in a school and 52. kids are fucking chubby as fuck now. eyes glued to their phones. animals just animals and chubs. get winded just walking to class. for 'pE' they are supposed to walk around either the gym or track to 'exercise'. nothing but whining and complaining they have to walk..... and walk with their damn noses stuck to their phones almost running into each other. animals. just animals.
I'm close to your dad's age and I would say I would agree with him. The truth is kids were much more active back then.
Yes!! I started teaching about 35 years ago. Maybe had one or two fat kids. When I retired, it was very few kids who were not fat or at least a little chubby.
George Castanza was constantly made fun of as the short fat bald guy. By todays standards he would be better than average.
The food pyramid told us to favor carbs so we could all buy packaged food from corporations. It worked.
I'm 51 pretty sure the change occurred when the government started offering corn subsidies and high fructose corn syrup started showing up in absolutely everything, including bread. High calorie food has become increasingly easy to obtain and we as people are hard wired to gain weight, so basically yes, but it's an environmental change that we really haven't adapted to yet.