Summary
A new Lancet study reveals nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, a sharp rise from just over half in 1990.
Obesity among adults doubled to over 40%, while rates among girls and women aged 15–24 nearly tripled to 29%.
The study highlights significant health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy, alongside projected medical costs of up to $9.1 trillion over the next decade.
Experts stress obesity’s complex causes—genetic, environmental, and social—and call for structural reforms like food subsidies, taxes on sugary drinks, and expanded treatment access.
Under-educated overweight people with guns. Everything’s gonna be alright.
I have noticed the general public is now very tolerant of sweet drinks. I know that is not the only problem. I was never allowed soda or coffee or sweet tea growing up, so don’t have much of a tolerance for them now. But when I try popular coffees (pumpkin spice this or vanilla chai that) or cocktails at most restaurants, I am surprised that people don’t send them back and ask for less sweetener.
As an infrequent treat, I can understand it. But if you are drinking that much sugar on a daily basis, it must seriously screw with your system. I am sure lots of people are drinking a huge amount of calories and don’t register how different that is from past generations.
I(M) am an actually healthy weight (I believe I’m almost exactly average for my height and build for a man in the 60s or 70s), but my brain has absolutely been hijacked by sugar, and I can tell. Even avoiding over sweetened stuff for months and months I will still get cravings and having something I know a European would find sickeningly sweet I find is very similar to how junkies describe a relapse.
Despite all of that, I refuse to give in. I enjoy the freedom having a relatively healthy body gives me. Makes finding a partner with a similar mindset and goals hard though. It’s worse than a Thanos snap, 3/4 of the population just gone.
I’m the opposite. I wad told sugar was poison, so I avoided it as a kid. But now as an adult I love getting a sugary pop or whatever. My sweet tooth has definitely come in late
Makes your breath smell bad. I noticed this as a teenager and never drank sodas since.
Not really surprising when all food is so processed and pumped full of all kinds of bullshit, from high fructose corn syrup to preservatives to you name it.
Fun anecdote - I moved to Europe from the states a year back, and lost almost 20 pounds in that time without explicitly doing anything different. Just from the better food quality, and walking more in daily life (walkable cities and good public transportation!)
It’s also now fully accepted to be fat or overweight. Online dating has become pretty weird to me. I’m a pretty athletic guy, so i’m looking for someone that is also a bit sporty and healthy.
Curvy on tinder has become just a blanket statement for not very skinny to wow, you look like walking must really suck. It’s a very small percentage that is super athletic, a small percentage that is just “normal” and the rest just fat. I’m not trying to shame people but reading shit like: i’m not skinny and i’ll never be is fucking sad to me. My dad is fat and his life is fucking garbage, and it’s getting worse the older he gets. I honestly forsee a shitty future for a lot of overweight people today.
Ugh, you just described my experience exactly. I’m mildly autistic and so online dating is my primary method since it’s easy for me to misinterpret or not understand the initial stages of the courting process. A lot of my interests are also very male dominated too. Therefore most of the women on dating apps that are interested in me either have kids (I don’t want any and even had a vasectomy) or are overweight since the more in shape women in the same spaces are “more desirable” and have everyone coming to them.
I’d say 90%+ of my partners have weighed more than me while being a lot shorter. Don’t know if I have ever had to worry about my hoodies being stolen since they can’t fit them.
P.S. I know that phrasing sounds problematic and is not how I view people or women as individuals. Game Theory does apply when it comes to dating though, and in the abstract that is one of the things that is going on.
Co-worker of mine visited Ethiopia for like 2-3 weeks. He said he actually ate more than he usually does while there and still lost 15lbs. Our food is a huge problem in the US. It’s better for business to keep us unhealthy.
The design of our cities and culture in north america definitely doesn’t help. Sit in your metal box and drive to the front door (or drive thru and don’t even leave the car), sit at a desk all day unless you’re in the trades, go home and sit down to consume netflix/youtube/games, order fast food delivered to your door.
Sure nobody is forcing people to live like this but parts of our society certainly feels like it is encouraged. People look at me funny and friends have questioned me if I park and walk into a business with a drive thru, even though I usually get faster service that way
How is walking more not something different?
Well, I meant as in, without actively changing anything, like going to the gym more or whatever. Just passive environmental changes.
I took it to mean that they didn’t go out of their way to walk more, it was simply the better option to get around and so they just did that instead of driving a car. After moving from a car-centric city to one with a metro I totally get it and I do go for walks just for fun.
It’s not just about whether or not you can do something but about how available that thing is. Going for a walk can suck real bad in North America, surprisingly. Things like shitty food being the cheaper option, in a country racing to get its working class to be as disproportionately impoverished as possible, can make it hard to justify getting better quality stuff, too.
Yea it sucks walking next to 6 lanes of high speed traffic and basically no noise restrictions on cars. Once I moved somewhere that I could walk to the grocery store down quiet, tree lined streets most of the way, it became my preferred way. The built environment influences how you travel a lot.
The problem with the car thing is that there is noise reduction on cars. It’s the tires that are making most of the noise you hear from regular cars so even electric vehicles will make more noise than you’d think. It’s always wild to me that my aftermarket muffler isn’t as huge a difference in disruption as you’d think(it’s also not a high-pitch, obnoxious one). Either way I still keep it quiet at night or near pedestrians, and where I live now I’m glad that I basically never need to drive.
I’m real happy to hear that you live somewhere much more compatible with being a human being!
Yes, but there is also little enforcement on extremely loud exhausts and excessive engine revving. People should not be subject to noises loud enough to require hearing protection on a regular basis. Some studies are also finding that car noises in general generate stress responses in humans and long term exposure inreases the chance of some health conditions.
You could also argue road speed and road design should factor in to a noise reduction plan at a city planning level. Cities could enforce lower speeds in certain areas to reduce noise. If the city insists on funneling cars in a certain area they could also be responsible to install sound barriers, maybe even a thin tree line to help buffer noise near residential or certain commerical areas.
Absolutely, though as someone who notices louder exhausts I gotta say that, as much as they stand out, they’re really quite rare. It’s the never-ending drone of tires on pavement, loud cooling fans, heavy diesel trucks, and whatever other clattering and clanging that make up the bulk of the noise. The main street where I live goes pedestrian in the summer and I remember just how much noise a late-ish model Honda Civic made as it drove across it slowly one day even though it’s engine was essentially silent. The contrast between the peaceful pedestrian street and this single, “very quiet” sedan was startling. I already had sorta known but that moment is really where I decided that there’s no such as thing as a “quiet” car.
Our school busses have gone electric, though, and city busses are rapidly being replaced with hybrids that are quiet when they sit or need to accelerate. Those have reduced a lot of noise, and that’s super nice, but again they’re not the bulk of the noise. Removing the worst offenders but keeping the “quiet” cars doesn’t actually help beyond making us feel like we did something. We gotta start making main, commercial streets pedestrian only year-round. We gotta start being aggressive about making public transit accessible. We gotta start building on a human scale.
And they bought different food too lol. You can buy clean vegetables, proteins and fresh non sugar bread in America. (Not that sliced sugar wonder bread shit). They just apparently chose the junk food (which is wildly available no question about that) when it was put in front of them.
When in a grocery with less of the junk (theres still junk in UK and EU Groceries), they chose better stuff.
Unless they want to make a claim that something like raw broccoli, raw grass fed beef, raw beans are substantially different in the eu. That wasn’t my experience, it’s just more prominent
Like, if you eat processed chips and cookies in America or the EU it’s still junk
Yeah but you’re missing the fact that their shitty junk food is still miles better than the shitty junk food here.
Look at something that is sold in both places and check the ingredients list. The one I’m Europe will have less ingredients and more real food in general, the American one will have a ton of chemicals and other shit
I acknowledged that. I’m highlighting that when presented with that option, the above commenter chose to eat American junk
Things like shitty food being the cheaper option, in a country racing to get its working class to be as disproportionately impoverished as possible, can make it hard to justify getting better quality stuff, too. Does help that the culture is also pretty bad around that stuff so maybe going to Europe was the moment they were finally taken out of the toxicity of their local community.
I had the opposite experience. I got fat while eating nothing but stone soup! We just put in some onions and celery for flavor, and potatoes for bulk. Add some bacon and a ham hock, and melt in cream cheese to thicken it.
To be fair, I don’t think many of us would recognize someone who is a BMI of 26 as “overweight.” It technically is, but you’ve probably seen people regularly that are “technically” overweight but would never realize it. You yourself might be (and, statistically, are likely to be) overweight according to BMI and not realize it.
The really staggering thing is obesity. From 1960 until about 1992, it was between 15-20%. By 2000 it was 30%. These days it’s getting close to 45%.
That’s the thing 40 years ago you would realize that they were overweight.
Actually 40 years ago a higher percentage of Americans were “overweight,” so it’s unlikely it would seem more obvious then vs now. The difference is that now many more people are obese, but being obese is fairly noticeable unlike being overweight.
The percentage of people who are in the just-above-normal category of “overweight” has remained very steady and within a narrow band over the years, i.e., it’s been consistently between roughly 31-34% for almost seven decades. It was 32.9% last year. That’s why in my comment I noted that the real concerning thing about the study isn’t really the amount of people who are overweight; it’s the amount of people who are obese and morbidly obese.
Well, 40 years ago it was easy to find really good blow anywhere.
Yeah right now I weigh 170, I’m in pretty good shape (would be in better shape if I didn’t injure my foot and could start running again). But for me 180 is overweight? Even if that’s just fat that means my muscles become less visible. Hell it feels like my thighs are bigger now after getting in shape that when I was 180. And I started to look really skinny when I got down to 165.
I’m sure people would keep calling me skinny at 180. What we need are easier ways to measure body fat percentage. Because it is true that holding onto lots of fat for a long time is what’s bad for you.
The easiest way to check on body fat percentage right now is just to take weekly pictures of yourself in your underwear. You can see the muscle vs fat pretty well.
Part of the problem with BMI is that since it’s squared it over-reports overweight in tall people and under-reports overweight in short people. I’m 189 cm or so and if I were to reach the bottom of the “healthy” weight I would look like a concentration camp victim. 😄
Yup. I was talking to a guy whose doctor told him that he needed to lose weight. He didn’t look big - he’s tall, but apparently his bmi was 30.
I’ve always had a scale and I’ve always used it. My weight now is less than my weight in hs. I was 130.
Someone with bmi 26 is absolutely overweight o.O
Yes, technically, they are. But it’s unlikely you would see someone with a bmi of 26 walk by you on the street and think “that guy is overweight.”
This guy has a BMI of 26. If he had clothes on, few people are going to assume he’s overweight, even though technically he is:
I’ve got about 10lbs on this guy. I’m obese. I know it. I’m ashamed of it. My body knows it and tries telling me every day I need to lose 30lbs.
This is the more important part, even if you don’t look unhealthy, if you are overweight there are health conditions that become more likely and it is likely poor lifestyle and diet is influencing it. Just because you don’t look unhealthy doesn’t mean you are perfectly healthy. Even people who are a healthy weight and exercise regularly could benefit from removing processed, oilly and sugary foods from their diets. People who eat amazingly healthy might not be getting as much exercise as they should. Our bodies require high quality nutrition and movement to stay in shape and most of us aren’t meeting those needs between lifestyle choices, work, finances, and education.
It’s never too late, I managed to lose 20lbs simply not going after seconds on my tasty pasta dinners. Took like 6 months but my stomach got used to it. Granted, this last week has been hella tempting to stress eat, but just seeing progress is enough to keep me going. Just get the ball rolling and be happy with really subtle losses. Like, impossible to notice day to day loses.
Where can I learn more about these tasty pasta dinners that you speak of? :-)
We’re talking about losing weight, not bulking up!
Yeah. I was actually fifteen pounds lighter this time last year. It’s been a rough year. I cut out all bread, pasta, cheese, and beer, and walked an average of 15 miles a week.
It’s really mostly about doing something sustainable. I tried keto once and lost 20lbs only to regain it immediately after. Portion control seems to be working better for me since I will still eat whatever I want during the day (helps that my diet is mostly normal food I cook and not processed)
If you or anyone else is actually interested in getting yoked, a great place to start is the fitness wiki. It does a good job of condensing everything down and lists various effective routines which will do a good job of getting you looking the way you want.
Fitness influencers specialize in baffling people with bullshit. The recipe to getting in good shape is really simple. Follow an established routine, adjust your diet (the does not have to be drastic, you only need subtle changes) and improve your sleep. You could lift 40 minutes two days per week, walk 30-60 minutes another two days per week and you’d look and feel like a new person in a year
Don’t worry congress is going to make Obese 50% body fat in response to the crisis…
I wonder how recent semaglutide (ozempic, wegovy, etc) will affect this. It’s just come into mainstream recently and it seems like it actually does have positive outcomes for weight loss and addiction. When availability increases and eventual price comes down with patent expiration in the next decade we might see a huge change in this data.
I see once again we’re going for the “just give me some magic pills” approach rather than actually changing the things that are making us fat. People want the wonders of medicine to save them from themselves.
Good for the shareholders I guess.
My understanding too is that these pills work alongside lifestyle changes. They make it a bit easier to make the lifestyle changes in part by helping control appetite. But if you don’t implement the lifestyle changes while taking them, you’ll just put the weight back on when you stop.
This comment is from a random guy on the internet familiar with some patient support programs that help people on these meds make those changes, so I would love corrected if I’m understanding this wrong.
People are trying to escape what others are doing to them.
By eating magic pills :D
Can confirm. 3/4 of my body is fat while the rest of it is skinny AF.
In 1990 half were overweight or obese? That’s the real news, I would have thought much lower.
Why is that the news? Using NHANES data for standardized numbers, in 1990 it was roughly 44% of Americans. That’s lower than 1980 (~47%), 1970 (~48%), and 1960 (~46%). Did you think Americans were unusually thin in 1990 or something?
The 1990s are actually when the numbers jump. By 2000, it’s 65%. 2010, it’s 68%. And in 2020 to the most recent yearly data (2023), its 74%.
People were thinner in the 1930s. We should figure out what their secret was and copy it.
Private prisons stock has increased, so it looks like its part of the plan.
They still give processed foods like crisps and cookies, but the calorie intake provided is too low to support an obese diet. And cholera spreading through overcrowded, for-profit prisons should also encourage rapid weight loss.
Do they get scones and blackcurrant squash?
No, unless Nestlé buys the genetics of the squash and scones and has exclusive selling rights to it
Oh, don’t worry. We are.
It’s called freedom, libtards. We want the freedom to order a gallon of soda with our king size fries without the government telling us how to eat or food producers how to make their food. And we certainly don’t want the government to work on our behalf to lower the cost of insulin. We want a free market to shop around for the best price.
Depressing, but having seen my Missouri friend eat in not surprised. I’m glad he’s taking ozempic now cause I swear the Midwestern diet it inherently an eating disorder. (Also thinking of a Texan friend who drinks coke like it’s water, oooof).
I’ve been seeing these commercials about losing weight. They briefly show a 💉 needle and state, “with the same active ingredient as ozampic”. It’s sort of messed up. It’s funny (dark humor), right?
Those commercials are about to stop interesting enough. They were only able to be on market due to the main drugs being in a shortage, which allows special pharmacies (compounders) to make knock off versions without going through the whole process the main drug did and bypassing patents.
The main drugs are now no longer in shortage, so in a few months, these compounders will not be allowed to sell those drugs.
I’m at least a quarter by myself hahahah…ha
So is Joe!
We don’t care about the fat fux
We? You and who else?
We live at a time of artificial plenty and everyone’s stressed. It literally doesn’t have to be a bad thing, either. We don’t judge people who take on prestigious corporate jobs that will by nature make them more stressed and worn down. They get money, 75% of us get to eat tasty food and treats.
