bigbottom
Footballguy
What is your thought, Joe, on why we have gone off the rails in the last 50+ years as far as obesity? You are an active participant in this thread so I assume you have some thoughts, would love to hear them.Thanks. But I'd hope we could have a real discussion with real people here as I think the value of the forum is hearing what others think.
If we wanted to hear what AI thinks, we could just ask AI.
Thanks @Joe Schmo
I see lots of the same stuff and things like AI suggests but I truly don't know the answers.
The thing I keep coming back to is the fact not that long ago (50 or so years) we seemed to be in a much better place. And people still lived in cities and suburbs and in rural areas.
Sure, life was different in many ways, but it's not like we're comparing 2025 to 1825.
My GB @tommyGunZ mentioned more food insecurity in the 60's. I'd never thought of that and maybe that has a factor. I don't know.
Gianmarco wrote earlier:
"The fact that only 15% of the population (number just a guesstimate, not for accuracy), for example, can succeed in losing weight with diet and exercise is irrelevant to whether or not you can. If you're able to, either through discipline or help from family or whatever, achieve your health goals without medicine, then the idea that others need it is likely going to be foreign to you. In that aspect, I would simply say "consider yourselves lucky".
"Your doctor, however, is coming at it knowing that 85% of his/her patients will need pharmacologic help to achieve those goals. It's not to say that diet and exercise alone won't be recommended and not to say that they shouldn't be willing to work with a patient that wants to avoid medicine, but at the end of the day, that's going to help most of their patients and where they will likely end up. And, it's very difficult to determine based on a visit where each person will fall. So yeah, trial it for 3 months and let's recheck is why that's recommended."
I'm interested in why today only the guesstimated 15% of people should consider themselves lucky, when 50 years ago, it seems like that number of "lucky" people was massively bigger. That just seems odd. And something worth trying to figure out how we get back to there.
Just as importantly as the why though is the how we get back to a level of health and obesity that we had in previous years. Short of moving to Japan.
In discussing the 15% lucky group, I think you may be conflating the ability to lose weight through diet and exercise with the percentage of population that were never obese to begin with. 50 years ago, the percentage of people who were obese but ultimately able to lose the weight through personal decisions re diet and exercise may very well have been at or below 15%. I have no idea.