I would love to read a transcript of the bloggingheads discussions that you have, because I don't have the patience to watch the videos. Maybe you could post that instead of just a link?
In your diavlog, I was really pleased to hear you talk about one of the reasons for obesity that is rarely if ever mentioned. That being what you referred to as "hyperpalatability".
I'm probably anywhere between 50 and 100 pounds above where I should be depending on how one defines where I "should be." I've struggled with weight most of my life.
Yes, it's true that we Americans have become more sedentary and we eat larger portions, and everything you hear all the time. But, the fact that you never hear is that food just tastes SO much better than it used to.
If you look at recipes and descriptions of food that were common in the 1950's, with some exceptions for certain classics, the food looks downright awful. (I was born in 1969 so I don't know from personal experience, but I can see old cookbooks and advertisements.) With all of these jello molds with "floaters" in them, casseroles with ingredients that appear to be picked at random, side dishes that just repulse, and packaged foods that look like hockey pucks, it's no wonder that people didn't eat as much back then.
It's not like the food industry has been sitting on their hands just offering us the same old thing all the time. They're actively trying to make their products tastier and more palatable so that we'll buy them more. Is this evil? As reason magazine put it, it's no more evil than your grandmother trying to make her famous meatloaf more delicious.
We've seen the breathtaking advances in the information technology industry that have come down in the last twenty-five years. While the pace of innovation isn't quite that breakneck in the food industry, the last fifty years have certainly seen amazing progress in storage, transport, presentation, and just all around "yumminess" of food.
This hyperpalatability is something that clearly affects me. As comedian Gabriel Yglesias notes about his family, "We don't eat until we're full. We eat until we're tired." The simple fact is that food just tastes too damn good. It doesn't help that I live near San Francisco, an awesome foodie city if ever there was one.
I know all the tricks: eat less, exercise more, eat smaller portions, eat smaller things more often, don't eat too late, watch carbs, all that. Knowing these things has no effect. Information helps a little, and I'd welcome calorie count information since more information is better than less, but it won't lead to a revolutionary lifestyle change.
Maybe my libertarian attitude is not helping now either. Every time I diet, I feel unreasonably shackled by what I can and cannot eat, and soon the despair overtakes all of the non-trivial advantages of the weight loss. The resentment of the diet feels just like my resentment of the nanny-state (it is, after all, my own self-imposed nanny-state), and yet I'm fully aware that as a libertarian I have to take responsibility for my actions. The struggle continues.
A futurist whose name escapes me presently predicts that a pill will be developed in the next ten years or so that will enable us to eat whatever we want and have no unwanted body fat. I sincerely hope that he's right. It may just save my life.
[This comment starts out questioning a particular fact, but by the end I’ve somehow lurched into explicating Aristotelian moral philosophy, so please feel free to stop reading after the fourth paragraph.]
Megan says roughly halfway through this diavlog (sorry not to provide a link, but I forget the context, and hopefully I'm not misremembering) that there are more overweight people in Spain than in the U.S. I've never been to Spain, but all the Spaniards I know comment on how much Americans eat, how they see so many more heavy people, etc. -- yes, it is pretty annoying. That, and what I understand about a typical Spanish diet & eating habits, made me think this statement sounds funny.
According to the W.H.O.'s database [ http://www.who.int/whosis/en/ ], in 2003 (apparently the last year for which they have numbers?), 13.0% of adult male Spaniards (over 15 years old) were obese; 13.5% of Spanish women were obese. In 2004 in America, the percentages were 31.1% of adult men and 33.2% of adult women. These numbers were obviously drawn from different studies, so the sampling methods and precise definitions of obesity may have differed -- and of course 85 percent of statistical figures are not completely accurate -- but surely that alone cannot account for such a large disparity?
This was disappointing to learn, partially because it means I can't crow to my Spanish friends, but also because Megan, in addition to being an insightful & fair-minded person, usually seems on top of the facts. I suppose it's possible there are so many more slightly-overweight Spaniards than Americans (even though America has the higher obesity level) that Spain has the higher total number of overweight adults -- but that would be a lot of zaftig senoritas!
Megan, where did you get that figure? how can it possibly be correct?
Pulling back, I think Megan is understating the adverse health effects of being overweight. The causal link between poor diet and early onset of type II diabetes should be enough to establish this, and it seems hard to believe there's not also a causal link between high fat level and heart disease, no matter what a few new studies might say. Besides, I think if you'd ask people who are or were fat and who then tried diet & exercise, most would agree they felt healthier, more lively, more energetic, etc. while they were dieting. Some of that is psychosomatic, but not all.
Another question for Megan. It seems completely accurate to say that Americans are heavier now than in the past because we're wealthier and don't do as much hard labor. But Western Europe is similarly rich and has economic structures that make it hard to escape the same "sedentary lifestyle." They also have poor people in Western Europe (I assume). Why are Americans so much heavier? Doesn't most of the explanation have something to do with different food cultures? Corn syrup can't explain it all, right?
I agree completely Americans are too concerned with getting thinner & looking better, and I also agree that there are too many unreasonable goals floated by government bodies, the medical community, people at Aspen, etc. But why wouldn't it be a reasonable goal to try bringing he obesity level down to European, or at least British, levels? (If this ever happens it's more likely, in my opinion, to come through long-term cultural change than "liberal paternalist" legislation, but regardless whether it will ever happen, why isn't it a reasonable goal for a society? -- especially if we socialize healthcare.)
By the way, I myself am overweight, yet there is no history in my family of anything more than normal weight levels. There are a lot of diabetics in my family, however, and I have type II diabetes. From what I understand, I was going to have the disease at some point, though it's hard escaping the conclusion that, with a better diet, that time would have been decades from now. (I'm twenty-seven.) I've also been told there's a decent chance that if I lose enough weight, my blood sugar levels would improve (for the time being) to "prediabetic" or only-slightly-diabetic levels. Given that information, it's also hard not to believe I was partially responsible for the disease. My father, who is a doctor, says that most people are overweight simply because they eat too much.
Explaining why people do things or think things is always tricky. From the inside many of our beliefs seem justified by reason and evidence, but we are quick (too quick I think) to explain the beliefs of others as being influenced by culture, habit, prejudice, passion, self-interest, ignorance, luck. It seems that both sorts explanations are good. Similarly, we can explain most human action (in this case, eating too much, gaining weight) in many ways. Megan gave genetic, economic and cultural explanations for why so many Americans are heavy: I'm sure they are all good explanations, but they are also explanations only from the "outside," not explanations of actions as *actions* involving goals, deliberation, and choice. (Where I'm coming from is Aristotelianism / Thomism, but belief in human agency as irreplaceably necessary to describe humans is very common in modern philosophy, from Kant to, for instance, Inwagen.) To my way of thinking, actions are best described in ethical terms. Eating too much, like smoking too much and so on, are indeed vices in the sense that they do us harm; we can use the term vice univocally whether the vices in questions counter the classical virtues, or are defects in physical or intellectual wellbeing. So in the tradition of Aristotelian / teleological ethics, eating too much is not just bad for you, it is morally bad: saying the one thing is equivalent to saying the other. In fact, there used to be a name for this vice....
Anyhow, what I'm getting at is this. I don't for a moment dispute what Megan was saying about the link between poverty & obesity, or any other explanation of that kind. But obesity is also well-explained in ethical terms, as the result of poor choices -- poor choices influenced by downhome folkways, or marketing departments, or tastier food, or the Archer Daniels corporation, but not determined by them. (At least for most people. I'm sure there are some people who can't help being overweight simply through genetic traits, but I believe they are a small minority.) To put it another way, all these "deterministic" reasons can help explain why a particular person is overweight, but if I were asked to advise that person, the advice would be simple: he should try to go on a diet.
(Whether the above makes sense depends, in part, on whether there can be multiple causes for a thing, or whether each thing to be explained can or should only be explained by a single cause. The former position is intuitively obvious to me, but I gather some people think the latter, and who knows? -- maybe they have reasons.)
(By the way Megan, I’ve never commented before, but I’ve been reading your blog for a year or two and think you’re great.)
There is also a confusion in the dialog between social ideas of beauty and the medical profession's view of healthy weight. There's a point in the conversation where Megan tells a story of a woman she met at a party who suggested Megan could lose some weight by going to a spa. This is pretty absurd as Megan is border-line underweight by any medical definition. But, this confuses the issue. It's true that socially we have an unhealthy view of a woman's ideal weight. And, this likely does affect how women eat. However, no one in the medical profession would call Megan overweight and if her doctor suggested she lose weight then Megan should get a new doctor.
The other bit of confusion is over the idea that a BMI in the 30's is perfectly fine. The comments site Eric Oliver's work. But, they cite it incorrectly. Oliver says BMI is a bad measure of healthiness. He says we should instead look at what we eat (more veggies, smaller portions) and we should exercise more. If you eat correctly, exercise, and your BMI is STILL 35 then you are fine. I would wager that the vast, vast majority of people who have BMI's in the 30's do not eat properly or exercise. And, if they did they would be closer to a healthy weight. So no, BMI is not the perfect measure but I would wager it correlates to exercise and eating habits pretty closely.
Other commentors have already noted the strange error in Spanish obesity rates (could she have meant Mexico which is the only country I know of that's fatter than us?). Megan also failed to address the really strong correlation between weight gain and type II diabetes.
"The simple fact is that food just tastes too damn good. "
I hear you John.
I sometimes think I'm wired wrong. The fact that some things tast better doesn't seem to make others taste worse.
After listening to music on a good stereo, I couldn't stand to listen to it on a bad one. After driving a nice car, I hated driving my old Escort. But after eating at some very nice restaurants, the BK Stacker still tastes good.
I would love to read a transcript of the bloggingheads discussions that you have, because I don't have the patience to watch the videos. Maybe you could post that instead of just a link?
In your diavlog, I was really pleased to hear you talk about one of the reasons for obesity that is rarely if ever mentioned. That being what you referred to as "hyperpalatability".
I'm probably anywhere between 50 and 100 pounds above where I should be depending on how one defines where I "should be." I've struggled with weight most of my life.
Yes, it's true that we Americans have become more sedentary and we eat larger portions, and everything you hear all the time. But, the fact that you never hear is that food just tastes SO much better than it used to.
If you look at recipes and descriptions of food that were common in the 1950's, with some exceptions for certain classics, the food looks downright awful. (I was born in 1969 so I don't know from personal experience, but I can see old cookbooks and advertisements.) With all of these jello molds with "floaters" in them, casseroles with ingredients that appear to be picked at random, side dishes that just repulse, and packaged foods that look like hockey pucks, it's no wonder that people didn't eat as much back then.
It's not like the food industry has been sitting on their hands just offering us the same old thing all the time. They're actively trying to make their products tastier and more palatable so that we'll buy them more. Is this evil? As reason magazine put it, it's no more evil than your grandmother trying to make her famous meatloaf more delicious.
We've seen the breathtaking advances in the information technology industry that have come down in the last twenty-five years. While the pace of innovation isn't quite that breakneck in the food industry, the last fifty years have certainly seen amazing progress in storage, transport, presentation, and just all around "yumminess" of food.
This hyperpalatability is something that clearly affects me. As comedian Gabriel Yglesias notes about his family, "We don't eat until we're full. We eat until we're tired." The simple fact is that food just tastes too damn good. It doesn't help that I live near San Francisco, an awesome foodie city if ever there was one.
I know all the tricks: eat less, exercise more, eat smaller portions, eat smaller things more often, don't eat too late, watch carbs, all that. Knowing these things has no effect. Information helps a little, and I'd welcome calorie count information since more information is better than less, but it won't lead to a revolutionary lifestyle change.
Maybe my libertarian attitude is not helping now either. Every time I diet, I feel unreasonably shackled by what I can and cannot eat, and soon the despair overtakes all of the non-trivial advantages of the weight loss. The resentment of the diet feels just like my resentment of the nanny-state (it is, after all, my own self-imposed nanny-state), and yet I'm fully aware that as a libertarian I have to take responsibility for my actions. The struggle continues.
A futurist whose name escapes me presently predicts that a pill will be developed in the next ten years or so that will enable us to eat whatever we want and have no unwanted body fat. I sincerely hope that he's right. It may just save my life.
[This comment starts out questioning a particular fact, but by the end I’ve somehow lurched into explicating Aristotelian moral philosophy, so please feel free to stop reading after the fourth paragraph.]
Megan says roughly halfway through this diavlog (sorry not to provide a link, but I forget the context, and hopefully I'm not misremembering) that there are more overweight people in Spain than in the U.S. I've never been to Spain, but all the Spaniards I know comment on how much Americans eat, how they see so many more heavy people, etc. -- yes, it is pretty annoying. That, and what I understand about a typical Spanish diet & eating habits, made me think this statement sounds funny.
According to the W.H.O.'s database [ http://www.who.int/whosis/en/ ], in 2003 (apparently the last year for which they have numbers?), 13.0% of adult male Spaniards (over 15 years old) were obese; 13.5% of Spanish women were obese. In 2004 in America, the percentages were 31.1% of adult men and 33.2% of adult women. These numbers were obviously drawn from different studies, so the sampling methods and precise definitions of obesity may have differed -- and of course 85 percent of statistical figures are not completely accurate -- but surely that alone cannot account for such a large disparity?
This was disappointing to learn, partially because it means I can't crow to my Spanish friends, but also because Megan, in addition to being an insightful & fair-minded person, usually seems on top of the facts. I suppose it's possible there are so many more slightly-overweight Spaniards than Americans (even though America has the higher obesity level) that Spain has the higher total number of overweight adults -- but that would be a lot of zaftig senoritas!
Megan, where did you get that figure? how can it possibly be correct?
Pulling back, I think Megan is understating the adverse health effects of being overweight. The causal link between poor diet and early onset of type II diabetes should be enough to establish this, and it seems hard to believe there's not also a causal link between high fat level and heart disease, no matter what a few new studies might say. Besides, I think if you'd ask people who are or were fat and who then tried diet & exercise, most would agree they felt healthier, more lively, more energetic, etc. while they were dieting. Some of that is psychosomatic, but not all.
Another question for Megan. It seems completely accurate to say that Americans are heavier now than in the past because we're wealthier and don't do as much hard labor. But Western Europe is similarly rich and has economic structures that make it hard to escape the same "sedentary lifestyle." They also have poor people in Western Europe (I assume). Why are Americans so much heavier? Doesn't most of the explanation have something to do with different food cultures? Corn syrup can't explain it all, right?
I agree completely Americans are too concerned with getting thinner & looking better, and I also agree that there are too many unreasonable goals floated by government bodies, the medical community, people at Aspen, etc. But why wouldn't it be a reasonable goal to try bringing he obesity level down to European, or at least British, levels? (If this ever happens it's more likely, in my opinion, to come through long-term cultural change than "liberal paternalist" legislation, but regardless whether it will ever happen, why isn't it a reasonable goal for a society? -- especially if we socialize healthcare.)
By the way, I myself am overweight, yet there is no history in my family of anything more than normal weight levels. There are a lot of diabetics in my family, however, and I have type II diabetes. From what I understand, I was going to have the disease at some point, though it's hard escaping the conclusion that, with a better diet, that time would have been decades from now. (I'm twenty-seven.) I've also been told there's a decent chance that if I lose enough weight, my blood sugar levels would improve (for the time being) to "prediabetic" or only-slightly-diabetic levels. Given that information, it's also hard not to believe I was partially responsible for the disease. My father, who is a doctor, says that most people are overweight simply because they eat too much.
Explaining why people do things or think things is always tricky. From the inside many of our beliefs seem justified by reason and evidence, but we are quick (too quick I think) to explain the beliefs of others as being influenced by culture, habit, prejudice, passion, self-interest, ignorance, luck. It seems that both sorts explanations are good. Similarly, we can explain most human action (in this case, eating too much, gaining weight) in many ways. Megan gave genetic, economic and cultural explanations for why so many Americans are heavy: I'm sure they are all good explanations, but they are also explanations only from the "outside," not explanations of actions as *actions* involving goals, deliberation, and choice. (Where I'm coming from is Aristotelianism / Thomism, but belief in human agency as irreplaceably necessary to describe humans is very common in modern philosophy, from Kant to, for instance, Inwagen.) To my way of thinking, actions are best described in ethical terms. Eating too much, like smoking too much and so on, are indeed vices in the sense that they do us harm; we can use the term vice univocally whether the vices in questions counter the classical virtues, or are defects in physical or intellectual wellbeing. So in the tradition of Aristotelian / teleological ethics, eating too much is not just bad for you, it is morally bad: saying the one thing is equivalent to saying the other. In fact, there used to be a name for this vice....
Anyhow, what I'm getting at is this. I don't for a moment dispute what Megan was saying about the link between poverty & obesity, or any other explanation of that kind. But obesity is also well-explained in ethical terms, as the result of poor choices -- poor choices influenced by downhome folkways, or marketing departments, or tastier food, or the Archer Daniels corporation, but not determined by them. (At least for most people. I'm sure there are some people who can't help being overweight simply through genetic traits, but I believe they are a small minority.) To put it another way, all these "deterministic" reasons can help explain why a particular person is overweight, but if I were asked to advise that person, the advice would be simple: he should try to go on a diet.
(Whether the above makes sense depends, in part, on whether there can be multiple causes for a thing, or whether each thing to be explained can or should only be explained by a single cause. The former position is intuitively obvious to me, but I gather some people think the latter, and who knows? -- maybe they have reasons.)
(By the way Megan, I’ve never commented before, but I’ve been reading your blog for a year or two and think you’re great.)
If you want to look at a group that really has gone off the deep end when it comes to keeping fit, look at what they're doing in Japan: [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html?em ].
And of course there's this terrifying warning: [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlK62rjQWLk ].
There is also a confusion in the dialog between social ideas of beauty and the medical profession's view of healthy weight. There's a point in the conversation where Megan tells a story of a woman she met at a party who suggested Megan could lose some weight by going to a spa. This is pretty absurd as Megan is border-line underweight by any medical definition. But, this confuses the issue. It's true that socially we have an unhealthy view of a woman's ideal weight. And, this likely does affect how women eat. However, no one in the medical profession would call Megan overweight and if her doctor suggested she lose weight then Megan should get a new doctor.
The other bit of confusion is over the idea that a BMI in the 30's is perfectly fine. The comments site Eric Oliver's work. But, they cite it incorrectly. Oliver says BMI is a bad measure of healthiness. He says we should instead look at what we eat (more veggies, smaller portions) and we should exercise more. If you eat correctly, exercise, and your BMI is STILL 35 then you are fine. I would wager that the vast, vast majority of people who have BMI's in the 30's do not eat properly or exercise. And, if they did they would be closer to a healthy weight. So no, BMI is not the perfect measure but I would wager it correlates to exercise and eating habits pretty closely.
Other commentors have already noted the strange error in Spanish obesity rates (could she have meant Mexico which is the only country I know of that's fatter than us?). Megan also failed to address the really strong correlation between weight gain and type II diabetes.
"The simple fact is that food just tastes too damn good. "
I hear you John.
I sometimes think I'm wired wrong. The fact that some things tast better doesn't seem to make others taste worse.
After listening to music on a good stereo, I couldn't stand to listen to it on a bad one. After driving a nice car, I hated driving my old Escort. But after eating at some very nice restaurants, the BK Stacker still tastes good.