[wiether]

I'm genuinely curious about the changes you are talking about?

Keep in mind, thirty years ago, I was a kid. I thought that fast food was awesome. My parents would allow me a fast food meal at best once a month, and my "privileged" friends had a fast food meal a week.

Now, I'd rather starve than eat something coming from a fast food.

But around me, normies at eating at least once a day from a fast food.

We have at least ten big franchises in the country, and at every corner there's a kebab/tacos/weird place selling trash.

So, from my POV, I'd thought that, in general, people are eating much more fast food than thirty years ago.

[ajkjk]

In the interim America got obsessed with fitness and being out of shape much less obese became dramatically less popular in the middle / upper class.

Like now it's possible to go days in some cities without seeing a single obese person. It's still a big problem. Outside of the cities and in lower class areas, but... I think the changes are trickling down / propagating? That's been my impression at least.

Surprised by your take on fast food, by the way. When I complain about fast food like was ubiquitous in the 90s I think of McDonald's and other highly processed things. The type that are covered in salt and cheap oil and artifical smells and where the meat is like reconstituted garbage, where lunch is 1500 calories, where everyone gets a giant soda, where kids are enticed with cheap plastic crap.

But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all. I feel like most people eating at corner shops for half of their meals is pretty much ideal--if it's affordable to do so then it is a very sensible and economically positive division of labor. On the condition that the food be of decent quality, of course. Which sometimes it is. Perhaps not as much as it should be though, but people do have standards and will pick the better places.

[wiether]

Since you talked about "the west", I applied your comment to my situation also (France).

But it seems that some things were and are still different.

Related to fitness, sure, there's millions of people who "go to the gym" at least one a week and buy food supplements and protein powders...

But they'll happily eat fast foot several times a week.

And if we talk about ultra-processed food, it's even worse.

> But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all.

That's probably a big difference, because nobody here will dare say that those place serves actual food. Not because of the cultural aspect, but just because it's the case. They use the lowest quality in every ingredients, use lots of bad oils to cook, put tons of salt and other additives... And don't get me started on the hygiene side. People are perfectly aware of that and they'll even joke about it while eating their 50% fat kebab.

At least McDonald's have the hygiene on their side!

We don't have the same obesity epidemic, partly due to portion sizing and mobility, but almost half the population is overweight and figures are still going up.

https://www.obesitefrance.fr/lobesite-cest-quoi/les-chiffres...

[aeonfox]

The middle and upper class, city people, are just a fraction of the population. If there's been progress, it's not bearing out in the data. Though there appears to be a slight inflection point around the 2010, it seems the trend is still up. Though this data isn't recent enough to include the effects of semaglutide.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...