[RazvanS]

Obesity is caused by lack of access to quality food, being too scarce or too expensive. Sugar and fats are cheap, so most of the pre-made foods are just that. So increase the quality of the food available to the masses and do proper education regarding nutrition and healthy living, and the obesity rate will decrease.

Most of the obese people are like that not because they choose, but because they cannot do better.

[philliphaydon]

There is nothing wrong with fat.

People were cooking with lard for 1000s of years until the US decided fat is bad and people started substituting fat with sugar because when you remove fat, you remove flavour.

[Retric]

Don’t forget people also died much earlier for thousands of years.

There is a great deal wrong with very high fat diets, the issue is there’s also a lot wrong with very high carb diets.

[philliphaydon]

> Don’t forget people also died much earlier for thousands of years.

Funnily enough not from obesity or heart disease.

They died from violence, starvation, infections, plagues, travel, etc.

Fats were not a cause.

[Retric]

Do some actual research. People regularly got heart attacks throughout recorded history even if dying earlier from other things was common.

The history of coronary syndromes and sudden death, and apoplexy or stroke, goes back to antiquity and has been thoroughly treated by historians and experts from many disciplines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a heart attack with myocardial infarction was well known to cause death, but comprehension of it as a syndrome that one might survive was much delayed.

…

Part of the historical delay and confusion in recognizing heart attacks apparently lay in the Greek word, kardialgia, which could mean either abdominal or precordial pain. Biblical and Talmudic references abound, however, about chest pain of a life-threatening nature, and Hippocrates mentions sudden death related to an episode of chest distress (Leibowitz 1970).

Leibowitz points out that the great Italian anatomist Morgagni failed to tie it all together, but nevertheless clearly described in 1761 the late pathology found in survivors of myocardial infarction in his well-known dictum: “The force of the heart decreases so much more in proportion as the greater number of its parts becomes tendonous instead of being fleshy” (ibid., 4). http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/essay/history-of-heart-attack-...

[philliphaydon]

People have been dying for 1000s of years for things we are still dying from now. But heart disease was not a leading cause of death.

[Retric]

It was a leading cause of death for the same age range it’s a leading cause of death now.

Saying it was or wasn’t a leading cause of death overall is quite arbitrary, though it was at a minimum a common cause of death back then.

[shanebellone]

This is a ridiculous point. If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer.

[philliphaydon]

> If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer.

Not sure where the comment I’m replying to, and onwards, ever mentions cancer.

Lol

[anon291]

No they didn't. Death rates from now treatable diseases were higher in the past. But if you managed to escape those and not die in a tragic physical accident, you lived basically as long as anyone else.

[Retric]

Go back 1,000+ years and people did occasionally live to be say 70, the difference was they where also less likely to live to be 71. And at 71 they where less likely to live to be 72 etc.

Given a large enough population you would still see very very rare cases of extreme age but you are something like 1,000 times more likely to live to 115 today than you where back in 1,000 AD. Combined with a smaller population and it’s likely nobody live to 115 until quite recently.

[DeWilde]

In some cases yes, but hardly in all cases.

Anecdotally, I know people with the same wealth as me or even wealthier who eat copious amounts of sweets in all forms and are also obese. Some people just don't have control.

But yes, proper education regarding nutrition is something that is sorely needed as most people are unaware of the dangers of eating sugar rich and calorie rich foods in large amounts.