[jampekka]

Is this really a mystery? People eat more energy wise and move less.

As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food"). As to why we move less is less manual labor, more sedentary entertainment and increased use of vehicles.

The obesity discussion seems to somehow deliberately try to avoid the obvious.

[thucydides]

"Is this really a mystery?" They address your question on the first page. Please read a few sentences of the article, or hey, even the entire article, before trying to refute it.

A brief sample, though their whole argument is more complex:

"People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights effortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight. Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either."

[naming_the_user]

It's not clear to me that what they describe as being a "worse" diet is actually worse.

If I make a roast chicken dinner, not breast but full fat chicken, chuck some butter in the mashed potatoes, salt up the broccoli/carrots etc, it's still significantly lower in calories and higher in nutrients than lots of things people eat today.

It sounds to me that their "conventional wisdom" is more like, well, veganism or something. Milk, butter, cream, great.

Lard is a bit more marginal, sure. But I'd still rather eat lard than random seed oil deep fried whatever.

[Kirby64]

Just because folks had access to tons of fats and such doesn’t mean that this is causal to gaining weight. It has to do with how good everything tasted. The ability to have food that’s just delicious has never been easier. Not just access to spices and seasoning, but access to premade ingredients that enhance taste. That also doesn’t even account for access in terms of cost. It’s never been cheaper to get calorically dense food than the modern era.

Honestly, have you looked at a 100 year old cookbook? Most of the recipes are… crude in their implementation, to put it mildly.

[jampekka]

They consumed less calories. As to from what diet those come from doesn't matter that much.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

[thucydides]

Let's assume this graph is correct. Why did humans 100 years ago consume fewer calories? The body is a complex system with many homeostatic mechanisms. We stop eating when we're full (generally). What has adjusted that homeostatic thermostat upward? Why did obesity increase linearly for half a century and then suddenly increase exponentially starting in 1980? Why are wild animals and laboratory animals also more obese than 100 years ago?

[jdietrich]

>Why did humans 100 years ago consume fewer calories?

Because they couldn't afford to eat more. In 1900, the average American household spent 43% of their income on food.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...

[inglor_cz]

"Because they couldn't afford to eat more."

But people differ in their incomes. While there always were fat rich people, if food prices were the limiting factor, your average noble from the House of Lords of 1930 would be as fat as average people are today. And yet if you look at those black and white photos of important politicians, businesspeople etc., they were way less fat than an average contemporary student.

This is the Pacific War Council in the early 1940s. Do you believe that those people, decision makers whose decisions affected lives of millions, couldn't afford to eat ad libitum?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wood,_1st_Earl_of_Halif...

Today, they would weigh +15 kg each at least, and asking their doctors for tirzepatide.

[thucydides]

Guatemala (arbitrary choice) spent 35% of their income on food in 2016, but 66% were overweight or obese.

I don't know what's causing obesity, but it doesn't seem to be income, given everyone worldwide exploded into fatness around 1980.

And I'm not satisfied with flimsy hypotheses, such as a historically unprecedented worldwide diminution in human "willpower."

https://opendataforafrica.org/atlas/Guatemala/topics/Food-Se... https://data.worldobesity.org/country/guatemala-85/#data_tre...

[jampekka]

> As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food").

Animals, wild and lab, are probably affected by human food production.

[Izkata]

> Why did obesity increase linearly for half a century and then suddenly increase exponentially starting in 1980?

I do know one thing people used to jump on that coincides with this timing, but I don't know how likely it is to be a/the culprit - high-fructose corn syrup. It's the green line on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Sweetener_consumption,...

[cinntaile]

Why do you think none of the thousands of researchers within nutritional scientists have considered your explanation? That to me seems extremely unlikely.

[jampekka]

Many do and have a similar view. Maybe restating the obvious just doesn't make the news (or bring in grants)?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v03...

[hgomersall]

Nutritional science has come on a little in the last 21 years. Do you have anything more recent?

[amanaplanacanal]

"probably"

[jajko]

I am going to be brutally honest here - I see it as some form of personal 'character' weakness, very common these days, haven't lived for that long to judge previous generations so harshly.

To the gist - its supremely easier to be or move into position of weakness and victim, look for external blame, while staying very deep in comfort zone, aka fix my shit as long as I don't have to change anything in my life, I'll even throw a lot of money on it. Massive resistance to change that's not convenient nor pleasant at first sight. People throwing tons of money on diet fads, experiencing jojo effects, depressed about their self-image and feeling helpless, binging in anxiety attacks. Yet nobody taking gym ownership, personal trainer, throwing out all that chocolate and other junky food, amking any self-improvement plan that 5 year old can put together and sticking with it. And of course almost everybody moves much less, but gist of the issue is food, quantity and quality.

It doesn't have to be about junk food per se, same is with parents basically giving up on raising kids and leaving screens and ad companies to do the work. Then complaining how young suck and are horrible and have no respect etc. While they themselves are glued to phones every day, addicted to the core, half laughing about it while scrolling further. Telling them to put it down for a day, spend time with them and kids (if they are still little, not much point pushing teenagers suddenly against their well-trodden addictive habits).

Comfort zone is death of one's 'fighting' spirit, I mean in fighting-as-hard-as-possible-for-best-life-possible. No good stuff comes without some form of a fight, at least it didn't in my life. It just doesn't happen in that damned zone, not with social media showing folks what they could have been if they tried. I don't mean some artificial celebrities faking / pretending how everything is glorious, I mean your schoolmates or childhood friends who were not spectacular in any way, yet rewind 10-20 years and there is abyss in how their vs yours life looks like.

I've 'lost' quite a few close people to such envy exactly because I was nobody special in any way yet somehow made it way further than most, from environment which expected very little from me. One way would be 100% quiet about everything good in my life or fake complain about everything, thats how many successful or rich folks live. I refuse to go over the board with that just to keep such, at the end subpar relationships. Rather accept people change, and one of benefits of non-family relationships is that you can finish them and create better ones as you change if it feels like the opposite is a mistake. I am currently in the process of losing my best childhood friend in same way too, not the greatest experience but unfortunately at this point unavoidable one.

/end a bit off topic rant

[vintermann]

How can personal character weakness be a thing that varies by century? That doesn't make sense. If we have less willpower than our great-grandparents, whatever that means, it has a cause outside ourselves.

You can maybe blame individual differences in outcomes on personal character weakness, if you really want to, but when millions on millions of people fall to the same character weaknesses that very similar people didn't fall for before, then "personal" is exactly what it isn't.

[Kirby64]

It’s a combination of societal weakness/acceptance, marketing, and access to easier alternatives (eg, stuff that will make you fat) in my view. There’s not one thing that does it, but years and years of… conditioning that’s led us to this point.

[amanaplanacanal]

That's certainly one theory. Among many. Science is about designing experiments to show which theories are wrong, and which are correct.

[Kirby64]

Right, and science shows that in calorie controlled diets (where people have their diets carefully controlled), they have no issue with weight loss/gain/whatever.

This leads to the obvious conclusion it's peoples inability to manage how much they eat that leads to their obesity. What else could it be?

Granted, this isn't necessarily their own moral failing... but the environment they're put in does not set them up for success.

[amanaplanacanal]

Sure, it has to be environmental, since it has affected millions of people (and animals). The question is: which environmental change? Ultra palatable food? Ultra processed food? The demonization of fat and subsequent additional sugar? Plasticisors in the environment? Lithium in the water supply? Something else?

[BobaFloutist]

One person's problem can be a moral failing. Thousands of people are a systemic failing.

Unless you think they literally just don't make people like they used to, if you swapped the babies in the cradle of the current generation with previous generations, we'd be thinner and they'd be fatter.

So saying the problem is people is kind of meaningless.

[jampekka]

People do what's made easy and what makes them feel good. And what is advertised.

While it's rather obvious that obesity is caused by excess energy intake, it is not obvious how to change this. I'm getting weight (luckily not at an alarming speed) and I know exactly why I am and how I could stop it, but I don't. Knowledge that it's a "character flaw" doesn't change that.

I smoked for decades, knowing full well it's waste of health and money, and stopped only when smoking was made more difficult than not smoking (smoking bans, introduction of nicotine replacement products). I occasionally eat animal based products knowing they are destroying our environment, but eat them less now because of better plant based options.

Humans are not rational agents and our free will is at most limited.