How Ultra-Processed Food is Slowly Killing Us | ENDEVR Documentary

[Music] obesity is now the biggest health crisis in the world for the first time in history children are facing shorter lives than their parents we're eating poorly and we're getting fatter it's a huge burden on the health system what can we do hi i'm simon gulp and i'm a chef a bit of life for food eating eating eating and i have loved every moment of it but unfortunately i've become large so i'm now on a mission to find out why are we fat in this series i'll cut through the myths and uncover the facts about obesity and its effects i'll talk to leading experts to see what causes the ever-increasing epidemic and i've agreed to be a guinea pig using the latest cutting edge science i'll be poked and prodded wait and scan sounds freaky in here to see just how bad i am it actually says they're obese i'll get the latest nutritional advice and be put through the middle of intense exercise so i can make change and improve my health for good as the last time you get to see this fat body because now i'm going to be working on it all in a bid to find out why are we fat when i was a kid a fat person stuck out like a sore thumb there weren't fat kids at school and there were few overweight adults but like me new zealanders have gotten fatter and fatter and it has happened recently most of this weight has gone on progressively over the last 40 years and now it is a serious health issue it's predicted that obesity is going to become our biggest health problem and it's going to overtake smoking and smoking related diseases it's that big we're the third fattest nation amongst developed countries we're well up there and our rates are staggering one in three adults are obese half of all adult maoris are obese two-thirds of all pacific island adults are obese these are monumental figures it's not just kiwis who are suffering our neighbors across the tasman are following a very similar trend the rates of obesity and diabetes in australia are very high so two in three males are either overweight or obese and about one in two females if you take into account all of the costs including direct medical costs and indirect costs it's about 15 billion a year it's an international phenomenon there are now more fat people than skinny people in the world over the last 35 years obesity rates have more than doubled leading to a massive and rapid increase in heart disease kidney and liver problems high blood pressure and diabetes diabetes was a virtually non-existent disease in the 19th century even the united states the estimates of the percentage of the population that were diabetic was roughly you know one in ten thousand today it's one in 11. if you believe our centers for disease control diabetes prevalence in the united states has increased 900 percent in the past 50 years obesity rates have increased about 250 percent since the early 1960s in 1980 the diabetes epidemic started in earnest and it continues through today and it's all because of the change in our diet from real food to processed food low fat processed food high sugar processed food that's the nugget of truth of the last 40 years [Music] like the rest of society i wasn't always fat i was pretty lean for the first 30 years of my life but believe it or not a crazy life working as a chef and restaurant owner meant i didn't always eat healthy myself and i started to pack on the pounds i wasn't happy with that but a couple of years ago the real bombshell came i was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes that was a real wake-up call i realized for the first time my bad habits were potentially killing me and if i wanted to see my two-year-old daughter grow up with a dad still in her life then i needed to make a drastic change for most of us the word diabetes is just a word but what does it really mean i've come to san francisco to make kidney specialist linda frizzetto diabetes is your blood sugar is high and there's one type which is often genetic and that's type 1 diabetes where your pancreas is just not making enough insulin and so you are insulin deficient and therefore the treatment for that is we give you insulin a second type of diabetes is where the insulin is there but it's not your body cannot use the insulin very well and that's called insulin resistance and that's the kind of diabetes that we call type 2 diabetes i'm not alone type 2 diabetes rates have quadrupled and 450 million other people around the world suffer the same condition and it causes a huge range of medical problems damage to the eyes damage to the kidneys damage to the heart damage to the blood vessels like in the brain so that you get strokes damage to the blood vessels in the hands and feet so that you get this peripheral vascular disease depending on how bad your diabetes is and how long you've had it poorly controlled we think it cuts 10 to 15 years off your life i mean if you end up with a heart attack so that your heart is really weak if you end up with a stroke so that you're paralyzed on one side i mean you're not dead but you're really sick now i mean if you're going to be alive wouldn't you rather be healthy and alive until now i've never stopped and thought how damaging obesity was if left unchecked that can lead to many more problems we used to think that obesity led to diabetes and heart disease but the list grows longer it's a major cause of liver disease and liver failure the commonest cause of liver transplant now isn't alcoholism it's obesity it's associated with a whole range of different cancers it's associated with alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline and impairment as we get older heart disease strokes joint diseases those who are very obese are less likely to be employed are less likely to form relationships we'll have fewer friends will will earn less as adults there there are lots of social negative connotations to those who are very obese look at the garden look at the garden now that i've heard what diabetes will do if i don't make a change i'm ready to start my journey my daughter needs her dad to stick around for the future and he's got to do everything in his power to make sure he does they say that every journey begins with a single step simon hi so i'm stepping in to see dr william ferguson who's putting me on the path to a healthier future that's the plan anyway so i understand you've really put your body on the line for science here to uh to see if we can really get a better understanding of your diabetes and your your weight and things like that what i need you to do is fix me okay all right firstly william needs to work out my body mass index so along with my weight 92 my height 175 and my flattering abs i should know where i stand amongst the general population it says here your bmi is 31.00 and and it actually says they're obese but i think that's because you're just over 30 that's where the arbitrary definition of obesity is you're 31 your bmi what's normal normal is is really 25 something like that so we obviously need to get that down the next indignity to suffer is a blood test get some blood off you today i look terrified yes just relax we're just gonna see if we can pump up a vein this isn't the first time i've had blood taken but on previous visits to the doctor my veins were always how can i put this been a tad shy do you reckon they don't even have any luck on that arm oh we can have a lot of look okay okay yeah i wish i had those veins like this poked out yeah there you go i hate needles okay what we might do is get um our expert to come on in and just have a wee look because i don't oh this is a really great start i hate needles she can't see my veins something i am more willing to part with is a few cells for a genetic testing and after a few more attempts my veins reluctantly play ball we've had a couple of goes but uh we've got it and it's coming out and i don't want to look at it at all these fluids will head off to the lab to be analyzed so the experts will know just how bad my situation is thank you very much and i look forward to hearing the results okay great see you simon see you william thank you okay so i'm a beast but what does that really mean [Music] i've come to mexi university to find out more hey how you doing hi simon nice to meet you owen mugrage will get an accurate reading of just how much body fat i'm hauling around using this strange contraption the bod pod how does the bod pod work well in a really simple way a bit like when you get into a bath full of water the volume of water is displaced by the same volume as your body this is used the same principle uses air instead all right well why don't i hop into this futuristic machine and you send me into the future what do i need to do yep just go to the toilet get changed we'll give you a little heart and we're good to go all righty go for a pee every ounce is gonna count okay channel swim here i come here we go see you 20 30 see you soon okay just about to start are you ready i'm ready where's the throttle the reading only takes a few minutes but it's a strange experience it feels more like some kind of ancient meditation chamber than a piece of cutting-edge scientific kit um um sounds rigid here okay sam come on in the results are in have a seat oh there they go so the bug pod has um calculated your percentage body fat and the body part has said you're 40 percent fat 40.00 so it's also given uh in kilograms but if you look at this chart on the wall over here you can see that it's put you into that over 30 percent of the risky category now off the scale deepest sounds like i've got well clearly i've got a heap of work to do wow 40 percent that's a lot of butter the next bit of space age technology owen straps me to is the dexa or dual energy x-ray absorptometry a scanning device which shows where all this fat is hiding so here you can see the outline of your body everything in yellow is the fat around the around the muscles the red is the muscles and the blue is the skeleton not the prettiest picture in the world there's clearly quite a lot of fat looking at that yellow that's sitting in the sort of tummy region yeah that's where i'm really looks from to me that's where i'm counting on on my thighs yep so next time um we do the skin hopefully a lot less of the yellow and more of the red all right well i've got a bit of work to do and uh i'll see you in a few months hopefully uh less yellow that's right thanks very much simon thanks owen well i guess i've got to be brutally honest i'm absolutely gutted you know 40 percent of me is fat i mean i knew that i'm overweight but 40 of my body is fat that's nearly half of me is fat so yeah i'm absolutely stunned gutted i've got a hell of a lot of work to do to change this and yeah i'm pretty scared about that but i think i can do it and i'm on a mission to do it give it a go anyway why have i and so many others become obese and got diabetes in such a short space of time have people been eating the wrong foods or just too much what does science say in 1994 we learned about a hormone called leptin and leptin is made by your fat cells and goes to your brain and tells your brain you've had enough and you shouldn't eat so much and for 50 000 years leptin worked very well and then it stopped working about 30 40 years ago and the question was why we knew that it wasn't because we weren't making enough leptin we weren't leptin deficient if anything we were making too much leptin but the leptin wasn't getting to the brain that's called leptin resistance the reason for leptin resistance is the hormone insulin insulin blocks the signal from leptin getting to the brain to tell you you've had enough so then that fosters the next question okay if insulin is the bad guy in the story why is insulin now high why is insulin going up why do each of us release two to four times the amount of insulin today that we did say 40 years ago and that i can sum up in one word sugar robert lustig says we don't realize it but we are all eating too much sugar so how common is sugar i decide to check out the shelves at the supermarket nutrigang four health stars source of protein and fiber this would be pretty good first ingredient is cereals of wheat flour oat flour maize flour second ingredient sugar i'll tell you what i've had a few of these in my time wheat bix i love them but what's in here first ingredient whole grain wheat second ingredient sugar corn flakes pretty popular most people love them first ingredient corn second ingredient sugar third ingredient salt fourth ingredient barley malt extract which is sugar no matter what the product it seems sugar is in just about everything just looking at mayonnaise here per serve there's 3.2 grams of sugar 4.3 grams 5.3 grams 7.8 grams 13 grams of sugar 15.5 grams of sugar wow 48 grams of sugar so basically half of this bottle is sugar holy moly that is a lot of sugar we consume triple to quadruple the amount of sugar per day that our body can actually metabolize rationally we are overdosed of the 600 000 items in the grocery store 74 of them are spiked with added sugar added by the industry for its own purposes not for yours the fact is that the food industry knows that when they add it you buy more because they know that it's got an addictive quality to at least a percentage of the population the idea that sugar is addictive is very controversial in the nutrition world there's been this kind of idea that we we're just rational human beings that choose to eat various foods and some of us like sugar too much but to me my personal experience is that i was a sugar addict in fact if i go out and i have some sugar i want more and i want more and more and more and i develop tolerance and i feel these withdrawal symptoms i get craving for it i can't concentrate i get restless i get irritable to me it's a full-blown addiction some scientists say sugar's a food you can't be addicted to food because food's necessary for survival but is sugar a food can you name me an energy source that is completely vestigial to human animal and any other life on this planet and when consumed in excess causes damage to your cells to your organs to your body and shortens your lifespan yet we love it anyway the answer is oh yeah you can it's called alcohol alcohol is an energy source alcohol is calories but it's not nutrition well guess what sugar is an energy source sugar has calories but it's not nutrition sugar comes in many forms some refined and some natural in fact there are more than 50 names for the sugar in our food table sugar or sucrose consists of two molecules glucose and fructose glucose is the stuff in our blood that our body uses to power itself but too much fructose is increasingly seen as a problem we used to think that fructose was good because it sounds it sounds good it's commonly available in fruit but a whole bunch of experiments epidemiological studies clinical studies now show that fructose causes metabolic mayhem in the human body we have the innate capacity to metabolize fructose to a point once you get above that the liver becomes overwhelmed can't burn it faster than it's coming in and so the liver has an escape valve where it turns it into liver fat and then that liver fat has to be exported out as triglyceride which can cause heart disease or also contribute to obesity or maybe it won't be exported out and will stay in the liver and now you've got non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and you have the start of type 2 diabetes hypertension your insulin goes up that can drive cancer progression and we now know that insulin resistance at the liver is at least associated if not the cause of dementia as well [Music] sugar now dominates our diet it's in bread it's an orange juice it's in sauces and cereals how did so much sugar end up in our food the answer is complex in the 1960s heart disease was a major concern for adult men in the developed world british nutritionists like john utkan believe sugar was the cause but one prominent american scientist had a different theory one of the key things that happened at that time was the famous seven country studies by ansel keyes and ansel actually set out to show the fat in the diet that was his belief was the major cause of our problems particularly heart disease and the cholesterol epidemic that he saw in the united states with people having very high cholesterol atherosclerosis and so on in an extremely influential study keys presented data from six countries which showed a definite correlation between fat intake and heart disease he takes six countries and charts their heart disease rates versus their fat consumption it's almost a perfect linear the more fat they eat the more heart disease they have but when data from more countries became available the relationship between fat and heart disease is not so clear-cut it just tells you affluent countries have more heart disease than non-affluent countries western countries have more heart disease in non-western countries despite the inaccuracy of the data keys continued his campaign demonizing fat and his forceful personality drowned out competitors there was a battle between the british yudkin who was saying hey sugar it's pure white and deadly and ansel keys who said saturated fat and fat in the diet that's the problem he's one he starts convincing other people without ever having the evidence to support it suddenly dietary fats the problem if you take the fat out of foods because you're worried about heart disease then the question is what are you going to do to replace the mouth feel and replace the taste and the easiest cheapest way to do it is to use sugar syrup and now you've got something that's got almost the same amount of calories and you've replaced the fat with sugar sugar along with starch and fiber are carbohydrates in the 1960s carbohydrates were thought to be healthy because they have less than half the calories per gram as fat as the low fat mattress started to gain traction experts pushed a new message fat is out carbs are in by 1970 the american heart association is telling every american over the age of two old enough to walk off his mother's breast to eat a low-fat high-carb diet and by the 1980s the idea that carbohydrates were fattening has been transformed into the carbohydrate as heart-healthy diet food and even the american heart association is recommending in brochures that we replace fat rich snacks with sugared candies because sugar doesn't have fat in it in the early 1990s the us department of agriculture created the food permit at the very top was the food we were told to eat the least of fats oils and eventually even sugar and at the bottom the foods which we were told to eat the most of bread cereals rice and pasta it all seems like good advice right well not quite the usda pyramid that was developed around that time had at its base grain foods as as something that should be the basis of our diet the biggest part of our diet and it didn't really specify what sort of grain food or in what form because us nutritionists know they can be very different we now understand the terms of low gi versus high gi and many of the grain foods that they were recommending to people at that time were very high gi foods [Music] so what are high gi foods i've come to talk with professor jenny bran miller and her team at the university of sydney they run a lab that tests the gi of various foods gi or glycemic index is a measure of how quickly a food spikes our blood sugar foods containing different types of carbohydrates are prepared and fed to test subjects and what do you know subject o7 has just arrived hi how you doing hi well thanks simon so we'll just get your fasting blood glucose measure here so we'll start off just by giving my finger first part of the process is to extract a little blood and thankfully this time no veins are needed so just a little trick of the finger and we're just going to get a nice big drop of blood because we want one nice big drop of blood the blood sample is then tested for glucose and a baseline blood sugar reading is established from there i sit down with the other subjects for a yummy carbohydrate lunch in my case dry white bread bread with no butter no nothing on as um really not very interesting all the foods that we eat are made up of three main macronutrients carbohydrate fat and protein and some foods have got very high proportions of carbohydrates and that's what you've got around the table here and they make up the biggest proportion of calories in most people's diets carbohydrate foods the bergen bread is a low gi bread and if we gave you a low gi meal for breakfast lunch and dinner it would follow that blue curve if i gave you a normal wholemeal bread then it follows that red line and i think it's pretty clear that this blue one is what you want to see back in the lab the test subjects that were given the high glycemic foods are retested and as expected their blood glucose levels have risen the whole point of the experiment is to establish a glycemic index for each food the glycemic index is just a tool a measuring tape which sums up how much a carbohydrate in different foods is influencing blood glucose levels after we've eaten them so it's a scale the foods that are above 70 on this scale we call them high glycemic index foods on the other end of the scale we've got foods called low glycemic index foods and they are more slowly digested and absorbed looking at the glycemic index it's apparent that many of the foods with high gi the ones that dominate our diet today when you eat high gi foods all the time it means that there are constantly high levels of glucose in your blood in time this causes major damage to the body some cells in the body they just can't control the uptake of glucose into their cells those cells include the cells in the eye in the kidneys in the blood vessels the the lining of the blood vessels so you're setting the scene for blood clots and hardening of the arteries eventually those cells just start to die and if that happens to our beta cells the beta cells that produce insulin then our beta cell mass starts to contract and we're no longer capable of producing all the insulin we need to and when that happens we eventually get a diagnosis of diabetes over 400 million people including myself have diabetes more than 10 000 people die every day from diabetes and its related complications there's 50 years of bad nutritional advice part of the problem there was a real zealotry about trying to prove this hypothesis that animal fat was causing us to get sick with heart disease and we've seen enormous amount of resource go into that but the numbers have been frustratingly resistant to showing that that's the case although there's still a lot of controversy about whether fat especially saturated fat is good or bad for us the tide may be turning imagine the american heart association announcing that they made a mistake and the press release that says to the american public in the world by the way when we told you to eat low-fat high-carb diets for the past 50 years we were wrong we apologize if we killed some of you or some of your relatives or loved ones we apologize it was an honest mistake now we got it right now we're credible now you could trust us it's it's a no-win situation much of the food we eat today contains lots of different ingredients combined together in lots of different ways whether it's added sugar or added fat almost all of these foods have been altered in some way i want to know if ordinary people are aware of what they're buying when they're out shopping [Music] we're not even in the shop and you guys have fought badness i know come on what are we gonna get meet the virgos your typical suburban new zealand family i've come along on their usual weekly grocery shop in a bid to see what kind of food they're buying we want to ice big leaders okay keen to make a good first impression the virgos go a little overboard on the fruit and vegetables man when you can do a lot of onions got a bag of onions and a bag of onions then it's off to the meat section to grab some lamb chicken and steak some full fat milk and a couple of loaves of bread go for the multi grain is that where your not goes wrong we have a multi grain yeah or pretty standard stuff but it's what's coming up next where temptation starts okay here comes the naughty section the frozen ice cream section we're having boysenberry do we all agree boys and billy no so we've got a no and how many how many yeses have we got this one it's chocolates yeah how about we do jelly tips because we all like data [Music] if the boys are picking the ice cream then i'm picking the seasoning and wouldn't you know it the simon volk home cuisine range is on for your steak yes and what do you recommend either the kiwi or the italian or the moroccan is pretty good it'd be pretty good on those steaks you're going to cook on the barbie what the virgos don't know is that i'm actually looking at how much processed food they buy processed food makes up almost 80 percent of what's available in your average supermarket and when you get down to it many of these products contain at least one of only three core ingredients and none of them have any nutritional value basically the three commodities that food companies used in large amounts because they're very cheap to make this huge range of processed foods available to the public are basically refined starch from grains whether it be corn soy wheat barley oats rice sugar usually refined sugar either from cane sugar which is sucrose or high fructose corn syrup which they extract and make from excess corn that's grown particularly in the us and the third major commodity is cheap vegetable oils combining these high calorie low nutrient ingredients creates processed food but it's the ultra processed variety which dominates our modern diet ultra processed food is a specific level of processing where a lot has happened to the food and it's basically not at all recognizable to the food it was originally so for example you have cereals or biscuits chocolate and those kind of foods that's not something that grows in nature so a lot of processes have been applied to make that product processing food alters it in many ways heating gets rid of all the vitamin c in a product but also often a lot of additives are added so for example sugar fat and salt and refined oils they are added to these ultra-processed foods making them very energy dense and also not very nutritious meanwhile the virgos are continuing their shop and the boys are now making all the decisions that's what you like that's what they like moddies and they can go through liters of it really how much how much sauce do you catch up do you go through yeah they could easily do one of those in a week with a grocery shop thankfully almost done the virgos just need to decide which cereal to buy do we want wheat baked bites this week but it might not really matter as apparently they're all exactly the same in our study we found there's more than 200 or close to 300 different types of breakfast cereal but they're basically all variations of the same products so it's the same kind of grains and then lots of sugar and lots of syrups in those products and often they're also made by the same manufacturers so it looks like there's a lot of variety but basically it's all the same products back at virco hq we've separated the groceries into two camps and when you add it up the processed food makes up 60 of the total shop which is pretty typical [Music] but what's wrong with processed food after all it's cheap convenient and addictively tasty yeah i've come back to california to meet dr aaron blaisdell who has been testing the effects of processed food on rats i mean aaron i never thought i'd say this but yeah they actually look quite cute but they are oh and i've always thought rats ooh but like they're kind of cute so tell me what are you doing with these rats well i want to study obesity and then how that affects cognition so tell me how does it work with these guys what do you do well i get different rats they're all the same type of rat some of them are put on these kind of a relatively natural diet so this is a food pellet made from just grinding up fish meal and wheat and corn things like that and actually quite nutritious for a rat and then i have another group of rats that eats a very similar type of pellet but made of highly refined ingredients so what this allows us to do is compare a healthy diet to a processed diet and so what's the difference well the difference is that the ones on the healthy diet stay healthy lean and smart the ones on the processed food diet they get fat they get obese and they even started accumulating tumors very quickly and they started dying these two rats in here you're a slim healthy guys how big did the rat that got fat and died get well i could show you so you can see for yourself right here is a picture i took of the two side by side and you see that the fat one is is obese i mean bulging at the sides and the lean one looks like these girls when they get morbidly obese like that do they get diabetes they did it was crazy we didn't expect it we weren't measuring it from the blood but we noticed that the urine it was sweet so they were obviously pissing out sugar they were diabetic you've shown what the different diets do in rats how does it affect humans us on a day-to-day basis well there's not really much difference between a human and a rat in terms of our physiology the way a bad diet affects my rats is really the same way a bad diet affects us we're not just getting fat we're losing our mental functions our ability to pay attention our ability to work and we're starting to get tumors and cancers at a higher rate and dying younger than the implications for society are quite severe and we need to do something now to address that processed food makes up much of our modern diet and it is contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemic if this stuff is bad for rats then it's definitely bad for us okay i'm fat putting on weight is bad enough but where the fat is is also important the worst kind of fat is visceral fat that's the internal fat stored around vital organs and it's a key factor in obesity and diabetes i've come to the university of auckland faculty of medical and health sciences to see how much of my fat is visceral fat normally mri machines are reserved for cancer patients so i'm extremely fortunate to be allowed to use this one to scan for body fat but i'm really nervous not only do i hate small spaces but being bombarded with radiation doesn't fill me with confidence either ready okay see you later [Music] can you hear me okay that's great so there's just a short burst of noise for the first one the test is being overseen by rachel herron and professor jun lu breathe in breathe out stop breathing and a series of scans are performed providing detailed images of my insides although i'm not sure i want to hear the results okay are you ready for the result i don't know if i want to be how bad is it so you can see all the white bits are the fat and so is that normal or a normal amount of fat you can see swamps by white and all the black ones are all the white bits are the fat but you know between the space you have massive amount of fat slide after slide reveals a litany of organs and serious trouble it is unwelcome and upsetting news for me all i want to do is run home and curl up on the couch with some ice cream but i'm afraid that will just make things worse so turn it into numerical here's a result you can't even see anything it's just pitch black and but for you it's quite a lot and that's where you can see from your liver fat and this is the water peak and that's the fat peak and see it's already there so turn it into which is 10.84 percent it's huge and a normal person the highest tolerance you know fat can be in the pancreas at about seven percent and then you are reaching 10.84 and in the end 33.7 percent of fat in your liver that's phenomenal that means one third of your liver contains fat so it's compromising your liver function i'm a fat bastard i mean that is i mean yes i can see i'm fat but you look in here and 33.7 of my liver is fat yes it is really really bad but there is hope and metabolic disease like type 2 diabetes is one type of disease if you determine enough not to have it you can not to have it so i've actually got to get off my ass and do something about this to make some change that can get rid of my diabetes i mean i can live longer yes exactly i don't know whether i want to talk to you much more well maybe see me in three months [Laughter] i never want to see you again but i will come back in three months okay great without doubt the most shocking news of my life i mean to be told that 33 plus percent of my liver is fat oh you know i don't know how i'm gonna get through this but i've clearly got a lot of work and a lot of change to do i've got three months they're going to look at me again but you know do i want to have my foot cut off do i want to lose my kidney liver and ultimately die through from a heart attack that's the way i'm heading foreign you

Channel: ENDEVR

Views: 1,551,158

Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, processed foods, food documentary, processed food, ultra-processed foods, fast food documentary, documentary food, what is processed food, processed foods to avoid, processed foods are killing us, processed foods documentary, processed food documentary, processed foods grade 3, ulta-processed food, ultra-processed food documentary

Id: LQZ9BPSS1_I

Length: 44min 10sec (2650 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Vyrosatwork]

tldr: Nixon implemented corn subsidies that have never been removed.

[u/walterhartwellblack]

Not gonna watch the documentary but I’m definitely gonna comment on the title

[u/OliveTBeagle]

Environment: we’re exposed to delicious cheap calories all the time and we’re marketed them with extremely effective advertising, the best Madison Ave can produce.

[u/giro_di_dante]

A major factor that nobody wants to consider: a reliance on cars, more so than ever for many people.

Sugar, fat, beer, processed meat, bad fats, carbs, blah blah blah. People underestimate how much junk or bad-for-you-food people eat in countries that most everyone assumes to be healthy. The US isn’t the only place enjoying indulgent food or junk food, or the only place that eats excessive amounts of food.

A striking difference between the US and many other healthier places is how prevalent cars are for more people than ever. Like, driving the car 1 mile to the store kind of prevalent.

This contributes to complete inactivity. And this is one of the bigger differences between countries that struggle with societal weight and those that struggle less or don’t struggle at all.

Relying on a car takes you away from walking and biking and other opportunities of “accidental exercise” (like taking the stairs on the metro or whatever), which ultimately makes you fatter and lazier, which ultimately results in you avoiding all forms of physical activity. Which results in really poor health.

I’ve lived in about 6-8 places where I didn’t need a car — ever — and only 2 places where I did need a car.

In Italy or Hungary, for example, I ate crazy amounts of food everyday. Pasta, wine, prosciutto, salame, beer, risotto, pork fat, chocolate, gummies, sweets of all kinds. The only thing I never consume is soda. I had a hard time keeping my normal weight on because I walked literally everywhere. Often uphill. My apartments alone were 4-6 story walk ups.

Go to a time in LA when I drove everywhere — and went to the gym and watched what I ate — and I had a hard time keeping weight off. Like, I really had to work at it. “Don’t eat that slice of pizza. Don’t forget the gym today.” Etc. Living in Siena, I ate the whole damn pizza and never saw the inside of a gym. No problems because my over-fed ass had to walk 3 miles home.

Nothing can replace daily, regular, physical activity. Not even regular burst visits to the gym. Since I sold my car, I walk easily 4-5 miles a day and bike 5-20 miles every day. I still go to the gym. But it’s hard to replace that kind of regular movement by just going to the gym for a spin on the bike or lifting weights or whatever.

So people can point to sugar or corn syrup or certain types of fats and you know what? They’re surely right, to a degree.

But I don’t think that society’s automotive reliance gets enough blame. If you watch the average weight of the average American, it rises almost perfectly in line with the growth of auto reliance in the country. There’s a real boom around the 70s when cars started their ascent to outnumbering people and when everyone decided that living in a shitty suburb was the pinnacle of American achievement.

You’ll never outrun a bad diet. But you can at least keep one at bay if you move around a lot every single day. And here people are, in their suburbs, waddling into their car and driving themselves to the office, to the store, to the school, to the meeting, to the dinner, and back to their home. It’s like, come on mate, you’ve either been sitting sleeping for 22 hours in your day. Of course those tacos or that cheesecake are making you fat.

People need to move more.

[u/Tfoster100]

Big Corn Syrup

[u/barriekansai]

The cholesterol lie - that it was fat making us fat, leading us to a massive increase our processed carbohydrate intake, plus the engineering of food to be as addictive as possible.

[u/antihostile]

Sugar.

[u/CopenhagenSpitz]

The war against fats paid for by sugar lobbyists.

"Fat Free" = Extra Sugar

[u/SonOfKorhal]

Tl;dr - Sugar.