Why are we so fat?

ARX

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122761866#Comment_122761866

It's perhaps not so much a matter of accepting that we have issues due to our past as a matter of moving on from them. The famine isn't making anyone eat fast food in 2024.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122761981#Comment_122761981

OK - but for some reason, the original linked calculator is telling me that Arnold's BRI of 2.6 is "out of the healthy zone". Also, the figure of 15.1% bodyfat for a pro bodybuilder taking a large quantity of anabolic steroids is dubious.

mrslancaster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122761994#Comment_122761994

Exactly, yummy and plenty more 😬. It's a bit disgusting tbh when I stop to think about it. This thread has really highlighted the obsession we have about food, eg have anything delivered, food carts and trucks everywhere. Every second retail outlet is some type of food shop, tv shows about food on constantly. We are surrounded by so much food and bombarded by food adverts.

techman1

Apologists. People now say they have slow metabolism, eating disorders etc, but look at photos from 60 years ago when people were thin. Differences are as above. Seriously, when did you last see a man out on a Saturday pushing a manual lawn mower?

Exactly the sedentary lifestyle is the biggest factor ,50 years ago our diet wasn't great, alot of fried food, meat . Potatoes. The 70s was all processed food much more than today, angel delight and powdered mash that you mixed in with water and lots of tinned food. Also the argument about alcohol consumption is wrong since we are consuming less alcohol now than in the year 2000 when our alcohol consumption peaked

The biggest change is that we are no longer doing physical jobs, children are driven to school and no longer walk or cycle. Smart phone addiction has reduced people's physical activities. Also the working from home phenomenon has exacerbated the above and made people more lazy as they are no longer required to get up and physically travel to work

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762075#Comment_122762075

Yeah, I didn't spot those discrepancies until you highlighted the issue and I compared the short form calculator results from the 1st one I shared, to the more complete results from the original, albeit 2nd link I shared.

I do think the expanded results of the 2nd link address the issues that are apparent with the 1st though?

The_Macho_Man

The famine talk is absurd: so because there was a famine in Ireland 180 years later an obesity crisis develops and never in the interim? Absolute rubbish.

bladespin

Our brains are wired to choose the easiest, it's far easier to sit on the couch watching Netflix and eating crisps than to exercise, that's the fight, it has very little to do with processed foods, advertising, peer pressure, cheap beer etc etc it's willpower, that's how it's always been just in recent years it's become a lot easier to do less and eat more.

almostover

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762100#Comment_122762100

In fairness, for most of us, getting up and physically travelling to work involves walking 5m from the front door of the house to the car, driving for 30mins+, and walking maybe 100m from the car park to the office to sit on our fat behinds for 8+ hours. A sedentary lifestyle is unhelpful but diet has to be the primary root cause.

I was babysat by my grandparents in the early and mid 90s. I distinctly remember that dinner every day consisted of potatoes, veg and meat. Fish on a Friday with peas and spuds. Porridge for breakfast with a boiled egg and maybe homemade wholewheat bread with some leftover meat for supper. Not a huge amount of variety but there was no processed foods. Sweet foods were typically home baked, apple tart, stewed rhubarb etc. That generation hadn't half the education on a healthy diet as we do now but their diets weren't all that bad, mainly out of necessity. Go back to the 40s and 50s and people were thin because they were half starved most of the time. People are taller now too then then due to generational calorie intake. It's almost all about food.

The sedentary lifestyles will mess us all up too eventually. Mobility issues in later life will be the result there.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122761866#Comment_122761866

I'm sorry but you're talking absolute balderdash trying to prove we have fatties now because of an event nearly 2 centuries ago.

Why did it take until the late 20th/early 21st cent? Where were all the post famine trauma fat people hiding until then?

ARX

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762352#Comment_122762352

America.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122761866#Comment_122761866

I have heard of inter-generational trauma, certain events influencing our culture etc (the latter is surely a thing) e.g. absentee landlords under colonisation leaving us with an obsession with owning land and property, the famine causing us to stockpile food... but I dunno whether it's true, especially this far ahead in time. Would it not therefore be the case in Eastern Europe where people were starved much more recently and the state owned everything?

Our issues with unhealthy eating are similar to those of Britain.

GSBellew

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122759014#Comment_122759014

Public transport isn't going to make you all that less fat than sitting in a car, you are still sitting and being driven, the only difference may be a short walk either end.

John_Rambo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762473#Comment_122762473

City dwellers are becoming fitter and slimmer than their rural counterparts, largely due to a reliance on public transport, walking, and cycling. Those short walks, and sometimes a panicked run to catch a bus or train, make a significant difference. I recently attended a Halloween event at an urban school, where I noticed only three overweight children in the entire school. In contrast, my wife’s brother’s rural school of a similar size is facing a serious obesity problem among students and it's down to every child being driven to and from school, door to door.

GSBellew

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762510#Comment_122762510

Not sure that is the full story, in the end it goes back to the amount consumed, eat less and you will weigh less with the same amount of physical activity.

Brussels Sprout

I agree with the sentiment of many posters that individual adults are ultimately responsible for the food that they eat.

However, I also think that the companies involved in the production, marketing and selling of processed foods bear a large responsibility as well and quite frankly they are getting away with extremely dubious behaviour.

Things like:

• Using knowledge of human physiology to designing processed food to be as addictive as possible which leads to overconsumption while being offering little to no nutritional benefit
• Spending colossal amounts of money lobbying governments in order to mitigate against legislation that would reduce their profits
• Creating and funding scientific bodies whose sole purpose is to muddy the waters when it comes to nutritional science
• Misleading advertising implying that some brands of processed foods are healthy (low fat, low sugar etc). A lot of this is targeting at parents of young children
• Advertising of processed food targeted directly at children, played for example during the afternoon on cartoon channels
• The design of packaging of processed food aimed at children using bright colours, cartoon characters, tie-ins with popular children's movies etc
• The placing of sweets, crisps, chocolates in locations designed to maximise impulse purchases - for example, adjacent to supermarket checkouts or in baskets placed at children's heads' heights that are used to form the queuing space in petrol stations.

If anyone is interested in reading more about this topic I highly recommend the excellent book, Ultra-Processed People by Dr. Chris Van Tulleken.

I think in decades to come we will look back at this era in the same way that we now think of the 1970s with tobacco. The science was already clear then that the product was catastrophic for health but public policy had not yet caught up.

Juran

Over the summer, we had our teenage nephews over from France, we sent them to a weeks summer camp, where they stayed there in a hostel type setting. We gave them.spending money as we were informed by the camp that a tuck shop would be open for an hour in the evening during evening indoor games. When they came home after the week, we asked them.if they had enough money. They both said they spend some of the money on the pool table, but didnt buy anything from the shop as they were full from dinner every evening.

When I see them or their friends in France, I have never seen them munching on sweets, chocs or crips ... apart from nutella at breakfast.

I've noticed it many times, and said it on other forums on boards, when I see kids walking home from school in France (where we have a holiday house and spend time there) and German, Switzerland Holland & Sweden (where work quiet a bit), I never see them.with sweets or crisps in their hands. In Ireland, every second kid in my area has crisps, sweets, choc bars, sugar drinks in their hand walking home. In London,every second kid has a bag of chips on their way home..

When we were at school in the 80's, the only time we had a treat like choc bar was on the annual school tour or the rare sports match when the bus would stop at a fancy shop.

freshpopcorn

A bit like people who smoke and drink to excess.

You know it's bad for you but you don't really care.

jackboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762794#Comment_122762794

I see here during the summer loads of mothers bringing their children to the local petrol station for ice cream late in the evenings. The mothers generally eat more ice cream than their children. As far as I can see the mothers are using the children as an excuse to stuff their own faces.

I think a lot of parents use their children as an excuse to load up on junk themselves and fill the house with junk.

ARX

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762596#Comment_122762596

"Using knowledge of human physiology to designing processed food to be as addictive as possible which leads to overconsumption while being offering little to no nutritional benefit"

Or as Pringles put it, "once you pop, you can't stop". Like seriously people, it's right there in plain view. They are telling you that they have designed them to keep you eating till you get to the bottom of the can.

GSBellew

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122761522#Comment_122761522

Of course it is way below average if the average Irish person is overweight then the average waist measurement of an Irish person will be larger than it should be.

It is plainly visible shopping for clothes, it can be quite difficult to get 30" waist jeans etc, 20 years ago it was no problem at all, that just says to me that more people are fatter than 20 years ago.

walshb

Abundance of choice, choice, choice!

Acosta

God damn tasty IPA

French Toast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122760756#Comment_122760756

It’s just weather alright. Shite weather.

walshb

The awfully bleak and bland and dead weather plays a huge part in people’s lives and choices. We’re in a country where the lack of clear consistent sunshine leads us to be more on edge and moody. Boredom kicks in, we’re indoors a lot more, and this is when picking and eating happens. If Ireland had a lot more sunny sunshine days, guaranteed we’d be a lot healthier, slimmer and happier.

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762839#Comment_122762839

As it happens van Tullen uses that exact example in his book. He talks to some food scientist about how the flavourings in the Pringle send a signal to your brain to expect a big meal, likely requiring lots of digestion. Instead a pathetic little mushy crisp arrives into the stomach. The net result is that you need to eat lots of them to feel in any way full.

That's one of the hall marks of processed food. Soft, quickly eaten and easily digestible. The upshot is it takes more of them before the gut tells the brain that you're full - by which you've taken in way more calories than you would with natural food.

Thelonious Monk

you always see teenagers here going around drinking cans of monster and eating 3 in 1s while walking down the road. as a previous poster said, you just don't see this in spain etc.

i always see the inner city kids in the chippers near me in their school uniforms at 5 or 6pm getting what i assume is their dinner. these habits are hard to break from.

Mannesmann

Porridge, potatoes and veg fill you up a lot more that burgers and chips leading to a lot of extra calories nowadays. This and the Famine. (The thin people died then, many anyway while the fatter and more inclined to eat more survived leading to this bias in our population)

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762794#Comment_122762794

The thing I noticed when I visited home a couple years ago was the amount of nutella served with some stuff, it made my teeth itch.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122763019#Comment_122763019

A lot of nonsense was made of the dangers of MSG in the past. I think this is the worse aspect of it, making absolute junk of food taste good.

Mrs OBumble

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122762473#Comment_122762473

I walk 2.5km each day I go to te office, between home to bus stop other bus stop to office, and return.