US drops to second…
…in the list of the world’s fattest developed nations.
Quick—without reading the article, what are the others?
I would not have had a clue. I’m not even sure what I would have guessed—maybe Samoa (or is that considered a “developed” nation)? But if so, I would have guessed wrong.
The new #1 nation is actually Mexico, which come to think of it should not have been a surprise to me. I’ve eaten enough Mexican food to understand exactly and precisely how that could happen.
But what really, really surprises me are the other fattest countries. Number three is—get ready for it—Syria. Syria??? With Venezuela and Libya tied for fourth? Excuse me but—what??
The “what” is possibly explained in this rather mysterious statement:
“The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese…
It’s true that things like pasta and sweets are less expensive than meat and vegetables and fruit, but this still seems rather odd. We’re obviously not talking about starvation here, but about less-than-optimal nourishment.
Further down in the article the mystery about Samoa is solved. I was right, pretty much:
The world’s fattest nation overall is Nauru, a South Pacific island where a staggering 71.1 percent of its 10,000 inhabitants are obese.
The U.N. report does not include data for American Samoa, which has been tabbed in the past as the world’s fattest. According to a 2010 World Health Organization report, nearly all of that Pacific island’s inhabitants (95 percent) are considered overweight.
You can see the entire list at the article.
The first comment after the piece is pretty funny, too. It goes like this:
We will reclaim the title! Twinkies are back so it won’t be long.
Basically countries with a lot of tyrants fatten up the sheep and get rid of the warriors, so you tend to get a lot of energy that isn’t being used effectively in a physical sense.
In some ways, gluttony is a sign of decadence. In other ways, decadence is a sign of gluttony.
The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese…
this is just complete and utter b*llsh*t. This is a victim-centric libtard fantasy peddled by fat people who will do anything but take personal responsibility for what they repeatedly shove in their mouths.
We’re #2! We’re #2!
Sorry foodies, being fat is overwhelmingly genetic. West africa is plenty porky (Nigeria in particular). Ditto for many Slavic and Southern Germanic areas. The propensity to add fat is the key to the really obese so that dieting has less effect than on the naturally lean.
THis is true of other so called diet related health issues as well. My wife always complains that I can eat all the fatty foods I want and my cholesterol is low. I tell her a thousand years of central european genes have to be worth something.
Genetics are not as stable as people think from popular science. It is actually more dynamically activated.
Dirty jobs guy: Germanic & Slavic people ARE NOT PLENTY PORKY. People who overeat are PORKY.
Genes don t make you fat, overeating & not burning calories makes a person fat !
Photos from concentration camp victims have NO FAT People in them !
MollyNH Says:
July 10th, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Dirty jobs guy: Germanic & Slavic people ARE NOT PLENTY PORKY. People who overeat are PORKY.
Genes don t make you fat, overeating & not burning calories makes a person fat !
Photos from concentration camp victims have NO FAT People in them !”
Look at the crowds cheering the returning servicemen from WWII.
Look at 8 mm home movies taken of holiday and family celebrations from the 60’s and 70’s. Your aunts and uncles look like movie stars compared to young adult and middle aged people today.
Look at your “camcorder” videos from the 80’s and 90’s. That one “fat” uncle out of the 20 was really just portly, a 5’9″ tall, 56 year old guy with a 42″ waist.
Too bad jpegs can’t be uploaded into the comment boxes. We could all do with a dose of healthy shock (or reality) therapy.
The “no fat people in concentration camps” line always puzzles me. MollyNH, are you endorsing the “weight loss techniques” used in those camps? If so, I’m afraid I can’t go along with you. Apart from the cruelty of the procedure, those camps had a very high mortality rate, so many fatter people almost certainly died from the “treatment” long before they got thin. Accounts of life in concentration camps also stress that many inmates compulsively ate anything that seemed even vaguely like food — including rotten meat that would be sure to make them sick and things like wood and shoe leather that whose digestion would consume more energy than they could ever possibly provide. In other words, their hunger was so great that it wouldn’t let them refrain from eating — even when there was nothing to eat.
The real question, it seems to me, is whether there’s some sort of program that can reliably produce weight loss in the obese *without* cruelty or damage to health. The fact that people can be rounded up and starved doesn’t suggest much to me in terms of public policy.
MollyNH, I always thought the same things. I eat less and exercise more, I lose weight.
Regarding Mexico…I don’t know about Mexico proper, but living in south Texas, I would agree with that list for both the recent and not so recent arrivals –
Maybe it’s cultural – Mexican American families have big family gatherings regularly. Very regularly. And food and beer are in great supply. I frequent many such gatherings, as some are family. It’s definitely not malnutrition causing the expanding belt lines around here. Not that there aren’t plenty of other fat nationalities to go around. Just an observation.
I’m doing all I can to help drop us to #385 but those pounds just keep hanging on.
Fat comes from corn, aka maize.
Either directly or via hogs.
It’s not for nothing that the fattest on the planet live in hog heaven.
It’s an ancient Aztec revenge — tied into the cocoa bean.
=====
This is in studied contrast to the famous Nordic-Semitic diet: Lox on Bagels.
Watch the poppy seeds — you’ll get nailed on the opiates.
>>The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese…
>this is just complete and utter b*llsh*t.
This is a well-established phenomenon. See Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat, chapter 1, for many examples of coincident poverty and obesity. Some of the most striking observations along these lines were made by Benjamin Caballero of Johns Hopkins who in a 2005 NEJM article related his experience of seeing malnourished children with fat mothers in a clinic in Brazil.
If we believe that obesity is caused by overeating, then we would also have to believe that, as Taubes writes, “mothers are willing to starve their children so that they themselves can overeat. This goes against everything we know about maternal behavior.”
As for the worldwide obesity pandemic, it’s not just for humans any more. This is a fascinating (if not frightening) glimpse of the actual scope of the pandemic:
Klimentidis YC, Beasley TM, Lin HY, Murati G, Glass GE, Guyton M, Newton W, Jorgensen M, Heymsfield SB, Kemnitz J, Fairbanks L, Allison DB.
“Canaries in the coal mine: a cross-species analysis of the plurality of obesity epidemics.”
Proc Biol Sci. 2011 Jun 7;278(1712):1626-32. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1890. Epub 2010 Nov 24.
Abstract
A dramatic rise in obesity has occurred among humans within the last several decades. Little is known about whether similar increases in obesity have occurred in animals inhabiting human-influenced environments. We examined samples collectively consisting of over 20 000 animals from 24 populations (12 divided separately into males and females) of animals representing eight species living with or around humans in industrialized societies. In all populations, the estimated coefficient for the trend of body weight over time was positive (i.e. increasing). The probability of all trends being in the same direction by chance is 1.2 é— 10(-7). Surprisingly, we find that over the past several decades, average mid-life body weights have risen among primates and rodents living in research colonies, as well as among feral rodents and domestic dogs and cats. The consistency of these findings among animals living in varying environments, suggests the intriguing possibility that the aetiology of increasing body weight may involve several as-of-yet unidentified and/or poorly understood factors (e.g. viral pathogens, epigenetic factors). This finding may eventually enhance the discovery and fuller elucidation of other factors that have contributed to the recent rise in obesity rates.
PMID: 21106594
I agree with you DNW.
When Neo posted the You Tube tribute of the Anderson Sisters, there wasn’t a fat person in any one of the videos/photos. The average man/woman, dancing for entertainment (not at the gym exercising). We are knee deep in “science” and “studies” but what is plain and obvious is ignored.
I am naturally prone to being chubby. If I ate what I wanted and in the quantities I could eat it, I could put on 50+ pounds in 1 month. DAILY I deny myself things I want to eat and instead eat foods I enjoy, but are good for me (natural, fresh foods, olive oil, butter, 1/2 & 1/2 in my coffee, cocktail or wine…no sugar substitutes,etc). Add in my moderate exercise and I am a normal weight, size 6. When I say it requires daily discipline and denial, I do not exaggerate.
Have to disagree with you Jen.
Go to a Walmart. Look around. Pay attention to what food items are in the cart. I believe that one of the unintended consequences of welfare is an overweight “poor people”. If these people had to actually pay for what they are eating and in those quantities, they’d be in debt up to their eyeballs. It’s only because so much in their household is being subsidized that they can “afford” to be gluttons. Sorry it is indeed the sin of gluttony. Again DNW is right…look at the past…no such problems and a very healthy looking people.
SharonW,
I think it also has to do with irreguar mealtimes. Previously, people ate what mom put on the table at specific times. Now, family life is more irregular and people don’t develop in internal sense of when they have had enough. It’s so easy to go to the fridge and pull out something whenever you feel a hunger pang. There are also so many microwavables, to say nothing of snack foods.
SharonW Says:
July 10th, 2013 at 5:13 pm
“Have to disagree with you Jen.
Go to a Walmart. Look around. Pay attention to what food items are in the cart. I believe that one of the unintended consequences of welfare is an overweight “poor people”. If these people had to actually pay for what they are eating and in those quantities, they’d be in debt up to their eyeballs. It’s only because so much in their household is being subsidized that they can “afford” to be gluttons. Sorry it is indeed the sin of gluttony. Again DNW is right…look at the past…no such problems and a very healthy looking people.”
There was a time not too long ago when public health officials were speculating that overweight and heart disease was largely a cultural artifact, a disease of “affluence”.
Some may remember speculations that a supposedly traditional and economically necessitated early 20th century “negro American” staples diet centered on beans and greens with only very modest amounts of animal flesh should offer a comparative advantage in cardiovascular well-being.
While I cannot testify to what African American working class families were eating in 1929, nor whether after controlling for other inputs their cardiovascular health was in fact superior to the average 1975 suburbanite’s, I can offer personal testimony as to the grocery buying habits of people – based to some extent on class and intelligence.
Getting a part-time job in a supermarket as a kid, and working a register for a year or more exposes you to human grocery buying patterns in volume and in detail. And among the most obviously unintelligent customers of whatever race, and those I encountered were almost exclusively white suburbanites, the pattern was virtually the same: outlandish amounts of cookies, and pastries, and candies and soda pop. Pop Tarts, sugared cereals, Wonder Bread, plastic blister packed lunchmeats, hot dogs, chocolate milk, Twinkies, chips of all kinds … half of their carts would be garbage, and half of the remaining would be non food items.
Maybe, just maybe, some oranges or apples; but probably not.
For some reason I still remember one clearly semi-retarded woman with a couple of sons who were probably slightly more intelligent than she was. Watching her place their purchases on the register belt was almost heartbreaking … and I’m not a particularly sensitive sort. I could tell that the kid, probably 14, and say, 2-3 years younger than myself, was painfully aware something was really amiss. But what could he at that age do other than stand there silently despairing for his mother? I don’t know how they actually survived eating the almost exclusively junk food she bought. I think the kids would throw a can of corn in the basket now and then.
Other than those types, we’re doing this to ourselves with no real excuse.
When I go into a produce store and have a friendly cashier jokingly ask me if the kin-folk and I just came down off of Lookout Mountain, because I’m picking up mustard and collards (developed a taste for them in Houston barbecue joints), you know we have a pretty generalized problem.
SharonW Says:
July 10th, 2013 at 5:07 pm
I agree with you DNW.
When Neo posted the You Tube tribute of the Anderson Sisters, there wasn’t a fat person in any one of the videos/photos. The average man/woman, dancing for entertainment (not at the gym exercising). We are knee deep in “science” and “studies” but what is plain and obvious is ignored.
I am naturally prone to being chubby. If I ate what I wanted and in the quantities I could eat it, I could put on 50+ pounds in 1 month. DAILY I deny myself things I want to eat and instead eat foods I enjoy, but are good for me (natural, fresh foods, olive oil, butter, 1/2 & 1/2 in my coffee, cocktail or wine…no sugar substitutes,etc). Add in my moderate exercise and I am a normal weight, size 6. When I say it requires daily discipline and denial, I do not exaggerate.”
I think you’re right. Anyone over 40 has to be able to remember when Americans simply were not this fat. Where’s the mystery?
You either get in an exercise and restraint habit or you don’t. The reasons for not doing so, may vary with your sociocultural baggage. I’ve begun seeing speculation that assortative selection is drawing big and fat people together, reproductively amplifying whatever genetic component there is present. But I don’t have a particular opinion on that.
I will wildly speculate that a cultural movement that rebelled against “unattainable” and “stereotypical” standards of beauty, and the social emergence of the soft pleasure seeking male which values tactile stimulation over an appreciation of ideal female form and virtue, may have something minor to do with sanctioning corpulence. But enough of speculation about the possible cultural effects of pairing up Elena Dunham type females with Paul Krugman type males as social icons and exemplars.
I’m Popeye the sailor man.
I’m Popeye the sailor man.
I yam what I yam
And that’s all what I yam.
I’m Popeye the sailor man.
IMO nature has a greater footprint on what we are, as individuals, than nurture. I’m lean, my wife is lean, our kids are lean, our grandchildren are lean, and our extended families are lean with a few exceptions. We all eat what and how much we please (most of us do exercise).
The list is interesting, but does not tell us much about individuals and their families. So while diet is a component, I think heritage plays a large part in determining obesity.
Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?
The issue can also be addressed in the long term via the primary school curriculum.
The free market is tits on a bull wrt this issue. There’s no money to be made targeting kids with aggressive, focus-group-tested advertising for carrots and broccoli.
Couple of things: My father was supposedly the fastest end in whatever conference UConn was in in the late thirties/early forties. 6’1 1/2″ and 185. Today, he’d be “overweight”. I was 6’2″, 205 getting out of Infantry OCS. Underfed, overworked, could run all day and whip tigers on weekends. I’d be “overweight”.
So part of this is the ratcheting down of “overweight” and “obese”, probably to gin up another looming catastrophe to justify even more government intrusion.
I know. Paranoid. Well, that might have been a justified reaction maybe two years ago.
Also, read an article years ago saying that Polynesians tend to be big and bulky because that build was less likely to be subject to cold on extended ocean voyages. IOW, the skinny ones died on the way from Samoa to Hawaii. The central Pacific is not always hot.
And some southwestern Indians are said–think I heard Pima–to have a thrifty gene which means they would manufacture and store fat under conditions we would not consider overeating. that kind of genetic background would be likely in Mexiican poor and those in this country from Mexico.
That said, Walmart customers average a good deal more portly than those in the upscale deli.
The people in the fifties, sixties and seventies were not as fat. What did people do then that they don’t do now? Surely not exercise. I remember being told not to do too much exercise because it caused “enlarged heart.” I was told not to build muscles by lifting weights because once you quit the muscle would all go to fat. Back in the day people did not do as much sitting at desks – that much is true. The one thing that most adults did back in the day was…….smoke cigarettes. Yeah, they’re bad for you. But they did seem to kill your appetite or speed up your metabolism.
I married a smoker. Never a bit of a problem with weight until she quit smoking at age 55. She really didn’t eat much more after she quit smoking but she slowly gained weight until one day she decided to do something about it. She went on a diet of 1200 calories per day. And did not lose. It wasn’t until she got down to 900 calories a day that the weight came off. But after about two months she hit a plateau. She wasn’t losing anymore. Her metabolism had down regulated to preserve the fat. The problem was solved by eating 1500 calories per day for two weeks and then going back to 900 with every third or fourth meal at 12-1300 calories. Pulsing the calories fooled her metabolic regulator and she continued to lose down to the weight she was at when she quit smoking. She now eats very lightly – seldom over 1200 – 1500 calories per day, but has to go back to the old diet levels every so often. As we age (she’s 79 now) our bodies seem to want to hold onto a little extra weight, and of course, we slow down physically.
I’m not recommending that people take up smoking again, but I think it might be an avenue of research to try to understand why most smokers didn’t have weight problems. Does nicotine increase metabolism or decrease appetite? It would be interesting to know if anyone has thought about this.
I see two issues here-
1) We are genetically not all the same. Duh.
2) Lots of victim-blaming. It’s your fault you’re fat; FLOTUS excells at that. Or, as a transference, you are what you eat, but it is not your fault; it’s the Big Corporate Agribusiness/McDonalds fault, since they feed you.
JJ: smoking reduces appetite.
Fat content isn’t really an issue. It’s all the other things people add on to it that is an issue.
Biologically speaking, fat is pure energy refined from the liver and other purification systems, without a hint of toxins found in food. The body can make use of such energy much better than it can make use of energy directly from food digested.
Which is why satoh, or enlightenment, was often sought in a cave, alone, fasting. While the ancients never quite figured out why that was so, burning only fat tended to clear the mind.
However, modern civilization has made it so that not only do people get more fat, they also do everything in their power not to make use of it. Instead, they force the body to metabolize things quickly through exercise, glycogen conversion, and then proceeds to eat more and convert more.
The fat is converted into energy which is then converted back to fat when it isn’t used and then the liver and kidneys start shutting down as a result of this 10-20 year “program” people have. Weight goes down. Weight goes up. Body systems shut down eventually due to lack of maintenance.
Pro boxers have this regimen where they starve and dehydrate themselves to make the weigh in. All the while they have to keep their body in shape. Very stressful. These individuals are top athletes in their own realm, yet they can’t “lose the weight” easily either without extreme methods.
Regular members of society will eventually have to figure out just what exactly is good or bad for them, without some “authority” telling them right from left.
The fact that artificial sugars and preservatives like HFCS is replacing sugar, also contributes. Although to what degree it is harder to say.
When human beings wreck their own metabolism, it takes more effort to keep it balanced. More effort also means more stress and more health disfunctions.
Perhaps it was always naturally easier for humans to metabolize sugar and other such things. Those who perhaps are genetically inclined towards largeness, may activate such attributes if they eat certain foods for years on end, but those are just individuals. If one seeks a cultural trend, look for a cultural commonality.
Look at all the medical and technological advances in the food industry between 1950s America and 2000 America. Then compare 1950s America to 2000 Japan and look at the differences.
“Does nicotine increase metabolism or decrease appetite?”
Nicotine being a stimulant, is much like caffeine. It increases the body’s systems and cpu rate of cycling, turns off the hunger instinct.
The problem with cigs wasn’t really the nicotine but the smoke and other junk in the lungs.
While it’s possible to overdose on stimulants like caffeine and red bull, normally that doesn’t kill a person. The bad judgments while high does.
I suspect that recreational and/or prescription drugs play a role in the weight management strategies of many of those in upscale neighborhoods.
As for the concentration camp diet that I keep hearing so much about on neoneocon, it doesn’t work as a long term plan. Nearly all those who survive go on to become morbidly obese, at least from surveys I’ve seen. Having survived starvation, it’s as if their bodies continue to be burdened by a post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes them to scavenge and store every calorie, only giving them up grudgingly, so as to never experience the agony of starvation again.
Pingback:LIVE AT FIVE: 07.11.13 : The Other McCain
If populations in general are trending toward fatter, wouldn’t that be a correlation to improvements in the global food supplies and more sedantary lifestyles? USA eating habits, food, and lifestyles are different than they were in the 40s and 50s, and must be a large contributor. Television, computers, and cars are common, leisure time and free time are at all time highs. Globally, even poorer countries have access to a lot more conveniences than they once did -less walking, more driving, better public transportation, and less working hours.
I see a lot of intersting things here about metabolic rates and eating habits, and while they would seem to have some effect, they would seem to be less of a factor for global populations than than the simplest explanations. If you have any kids, you know they spend their time on the internet (like we do) and playing video games. That’s not unique to the USA – my kids play video games with kids all over the world. Everybody has a computer. You don’t even need to go out to buy things — you can have things delivered to your door with a few keystrokes. None of these conveniences or this much leisure time has ever been available to earlier generations in the US or elsewhere. Seems like these things have to be considered.
JJ, you’re on to something. When people say, “Look at the pictures of people in 19__,” I have to laugh. Recently LIFE or TIME uploaded photos of a high school campus of the ’60s and ’70s. So many comments about “They weren’t fat” and yet when I compared it to teenagers in my town, I saw they weren’t FIT. In fact, some of the miniskirt-wearing girls that were supposedly “thin” had tell-tale signs of wearing support undergarments aka tummytuckers. Some of the boys had old-man belly because their chests weren’t developed.
Besides smoking, previous generations had other aids to being thin: higher levels of drinking and no modern dental care. Although we all hear about the “empty calories” of drinking, we rarely hear that drinking also discourages appetite and (for people in whom alcohol causes microscopic bleeding and swelling in the stomach lining) a feeling of being full.
The deterioration (and loss) of teeth made it harder to eat solid food and less pleasant to eat in general. Several of my relatives had false teeth that were painful, and many more had sparse or worn-down teeth that didn’t work as well. If you ever had a tender spot in your mouth, you can appreciate what a chore it is to eat when you have to use only one part of your mouth.
Another “country” the UN leaves off its list like Nauru (presumably because it is not “developed”, which fits the agenda of the Left), is “Palestine”. I have read how the “Palestinians” would top any list for average national weight. Of course, letting knowledge of this get out would surely hurt the narrative of “Palestinians as concentration campers”.
I wonder if future historians will call this the Golden Age presided over by US technology. And then speak of how the US, wrought with guilt over such things, created a totalitarian evil unknown to the entire history of humanity, and made sure people slimmed down to the right proportions, for fat was a sin in the eyes of the many. 800 calories a day sound about right for a humanity that is over taxing Gaia’s resources. The 4000 calorie a day diets should only be reserved for those born to a special caste.
What’s up to all, because I am genuinely keen of reading this weblog’s post to be updated daily.
It contains pleasant material.