75% of Americans Too Fat or Dumb to Join Army

[Coito ergo sum]

I'm not fat, I'm big boned.

[Eddie]

I have slow metabolism.

[Clinton Huxley]

I am, of course, perfectly proportioned, for an overweight lieutenant- colonel

[Coito ergo sum]

I'm in great shape. Round is a shape.

[Clinton Huxley]

I'm in great shape. Round is a shape.

All that typing you do, I'd expect you to be thinner.

[Coito ergo sum]

My fingers are disproportionately muscular.

[JimC]

CES wrote:

The fact is obese people, rich, poor, middle class, whoever, are that way because they eat too much (most of them anyway, aside from medical issues). There really isn't another reason why people get fat. They eat more than their body needs to maintain its weight.

That is the proximate cause, but there are a raft of factors which come into play affecting whether a given person will eat too much. To the extent that it is possible, it is sensible for governments to identify the factors amenable to influence by public policy, and work to reduce the problem, which costs society an enormous amount...

[tattuchu]

Americans eat too much, eat non-nutritious food, and get little exercise. Most of the processed pre-packaged food people eat couldn't even properly be called food

[Warren Dew]

That is the proximate cause, but there are a raft of factors which come into play affecting whether a given person will eat too much. To the extent that it is possible, it is sensible for governments to identify the factors amenable to influence by public policy, and work to reduce the problem, which costs society an enormous amount...

Since it isn't possible for government to do it - as evidenced by the fact that obesity rates are going up rather than down - perhaps they should set things up so that private enterprise could do it. Having a competitive health care system where people chose and paid for their own providers would help a lot there.

[Warren Dew]

There's no point in saying "people are obese because they eat too much" because everyone fucking knows that already. It doesn't solve the problem.

It's not what you don't know that makes you fat - it's what you do know that isn't so.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Aside from everything else, I feel the physical benefit of avoiding processed foods (the only canned foods I buy are for my earthquake kit, and tomato sauce for Italian food). Eating fresh is pretty affordable, actually, and I can feel the difference in my energy levels throughout the day.

There is nothing wrong with processed foods. You are on the placebo effect thinking that the stuff you eat and process are somehow inherently superior.

You'll notice I said nothing about them being "superior". What I did was report my subjective sensations about my own body.

As far as your claim about "nothing wrong with processed foods", do some research about the pathology of food additives. You might wish to start first with the nitrates and nitrites present in processed meats. Perhaps you wish to look at the salt content of, say, canned vegetables, versus their unprocessed counterparts. Yes, salt is a food-processing chemical. You'll probably want to check out the differential rates of food-borne diseases between pre-packaged ground-beef and on-site fresh-ground beef.

It's a lot of work, and I'm going to bet that you'd rather spend your time hanging out in an Internet forum acting like you know jack-shit about complete strangers, probably because that gives you a better return on the emotional investment you clearly have in behaving as if you know that which you don't.

Bollocks.

Well, that told me.





























Oh, wait. It didn't.

[Coito ergo sum]

[Warren Dew]

So this guy got to be this shape just because of eating too much, eh?



Nothing to do with his repetitive use of the same two sites for insulin injection, resulting in insulin lipohypertrophy, eh?

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm1101527
http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/950/732.full

Fat accumulates where you have too much insulin. For the average fat person, that's all over their body.

[Coito ergo sum]

CES wrote:

The fact is obese people, rich, poor, middle class, whoever, are that way because they eat too much (most of them anyway, aside from medical issues). There really isn't another reason why people get fat. They eat more than their body needs to maintain its weight.

That is the proximate cause, but there are a raft of factors which come into play affecting whether a given person will eat too much. To the extent that it is possible, it is sensible for governments to identify the factors amenable to influence by public policy, and work to reduce the problem, which costs society an enormous amount...

I can agree with that in principle. But, the Devil is in the Details. When we start making people's weight and fitness a matter of public policy, we inevitably trod very near to some sensitive issues of personal privacy.

[Coito ergo sum]

I did qualify my statements with "aside from medical issues," which covers the diabetic issue you cited. That doesn't apply to the average fat person.

If it did apply to the average fat person, then it would have applied 30 and 50 years ago too. We were a much skinnier people too.

The statistical increase in obesity in the US is directly attributable to two factors: (1) the dramatic increase in food intake, calories/day, and (2) the dramatic decrease in calorie burning - activity, which correlates quite well with the invention of and increased viewing of the television and now the computer.

In short, we eat more than we did, and we exercise less. That equals weight gain.

Television Viewing and Long-Term Weight
Maintenance: Results from the National
Weight Control Registry http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/v ... atching%22

http://www.kff.org/entmedia/loader.cfm? ... geID=32022 - Have we experienced a change in human biology, such that we now have more insulin all over our bodies than we did 30 and 50 years ago?