Blaming an entire epidemic on epigenomes seems like a bit of a stretch. I wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Sothern did a bit of hedging in the epilogue of her paper. If, however, this theory is correct, it could lead to quite an epithet for her.

Kids aren't allowed outside anymore because that's where the molesters will steal them away and put penises in their cavities. It's all based on fear, and it's making kids sedentary, and sedentary kids make sedentary adults.

Meanwhile, you have manufacturers of junk food spending many billions of dollars advertising their product to kids. Their goal most of the time is to pit kids against their parents. You need this product regardless of what your parents say. Hell, they're even sneaking their ads into cash-strapped schools.

These are two of many factors. And, I don't see anything changing anytime soon. So, I down a bunch of beers and go "LA LA LA."

CitizenTed: The critical change is the new sedentary lifestyle. I was a kid in the 60's and 70's and none of us sat around the house all damn day. We were outside running, riding our bikes, play ball games, having snowball fights and building forts. As we became teens we started stealing things and running away, hiking into the woods to smoke weed and walking the streets like a bunch of hoodlums.

Ever since the expansion of TV, video games and the Internet, the yoot just sit around all the time. Fat, lazy farkers. Has little to with diet. My mother stuffed us silly and we enjoyed lots of late nights at White Castle. And we weren't fat.

Exercise. It's the difference.

This and junk food. Real food and an active lifestyle don't make you fat.

BTW, TFA was complete bullsh(t. She's an 'expert'?Yeah.

Mr. Coffee Nerves: Portion sizes have gone insane in just the last 20-30 years. I'm only a child of the 80's and I remember when a "large" McDonald's soda was 16 ounces. Now a large is at least a QUART and, more likely, 44 ounces.

And there were sidewalks and proper playgrounds. No drive-throughs, no remote controls, and very few 2 car families.

Born in '56 and don't need the BSFA to try to pull the onion off my belt.

Kids THESE days are lard asses.

There were very few obese kids when I was a child because the doctor would sit the parents down and say "hold on there" and have a serious talk.
Plus the taunting would put them off their feed.

3 paragraphs into this and it reeks of pure bs

/obesity is caused by larva of flies lodged in the otitus media before the 2nd and after the third Tuesday of the first month of a child's life.
//i can make sh*t up too

Automobile-dependency and the suburban way of life.

-Kids used to walk to school, today they're driven by their parents.
-People live in subdivisions that have no sidewalks and no local amenities.
-You have to walk 20-30 minutes just to get to the closest convenience store in many of these neighbourhoods.
-Almost all transportation is done by car, and very little of it is done by walking/cycling anymore.
-Comparing the obesity statistics of dense urban cities (such as New York) to those of sprawling suburban cities (such as Atlanta) indicates a strong correlation between suburban car-dependent settlement patterns and obesity rates. It makes sense.. if you live in a walkable neighbourhood, right off the bat you'll get more daily exercise than somebody who gets in their car to pick up two litres of milk.

Cars and suburbs aren't the only factor, obviously, but it's a critical piece of the puzzle that often goes unnoticed.
Also, i'm not trying to trash my suburban friends here, the suburbs have many lovely qualities, but they also have many horrible flaws/drawbacks that we must be honest about.

CitizenTed SmartestFunniest 2012-01-15 12:08:16 AM


The critical change is the new sedentary lifestyle. I was a kid in the 60's and 70's and none of us sat around the house all damn day. We were outside running, riding our bikes, play ball games, having snowball fights and building forts. As we became teens we started stealing things and running away, hiking into the woods to smoke weed and walking the streets like a bunch of hoodlums.

Ever since the expansion of TV, video games and the Internet, the yoot just sit around all the time. Fat, lazy farkers. Has little to with diet. My mother stuffed us silly and we enjoyed lots of late nights at White Castle. And we weren't fat.

Exercise. It's the difference

You were kids in the 60s and 70s but PARENTS in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. TV and games didnt force my generation to sit inside all day, your generation of poor parenting ALLOWED them to sit inside all day while feeding them pizza and soda. Poor parenting all around from you guys, hang your head in shame

TommyymmoT: Think of the ubiquitous Coca-Cola.
For the longest time. they were sold in the classic 6.5oz bottles.
Then, it went up to 8oz bottles, then, along came the 12oz can.
Now, it's up to 20oz bottles, and they are all considered (by the consumer) to be a single serving.

Obesity is not hard to fathom when people are out there drinking the equivalent of what used to be 3 bottles, every time they have one.

So much this. I tried an experiment about sodas on myself. I used to be what I called an "average" soda drinker; one or two 12oz cans a day, depending if I had fast food or not. I was in the Army at the time, so I had a good daily workout involving lots of running. For one month, I drank nothing BUT soda at meals (except for breakfast, which I had orange juice instead of my usual iced tea). I went up two belt loop sizes in that time. I didn't own a scale, so I don't know the weight gain. The next month, I had absolutely no sugary drinks, save for one iced sweet tea at a restaurant that got my order wrong. I ended up having to poke a new hole in my belt!

/have probably had 5 sodas in the past two years.

Benevolent Misanthrope: CitizenTed: The critical change is the new sedentary lifestyle. I was a kid in the 60's and 70's and none of us sat around the house all damn day. We were outside running, riding our bikes, play ball games, having snowball fights and building forts. As we became teens we started stealing things and running away, hiking into the woods to smoke weed and walking the streets like a bunch of hoodlums.

Ever since the expansion of TV, video games and the Internet, the yoot just sit around all the time. Fat, lazy farkers. Has little to with diet. My mother stuffed us silly and we enjoyed lots of late nights at White Castle. And we weren't fat.

Exercise. It's the difference.

Well - it's part of the difference. We also stopped eating protein and fat, and started eating lots of high-GI carbs (Protip: whole wheat bread has a higher GI than sugar), along with becoming sedentary even as children and shunning sports and strength exercise for low intensity cardio when we do exercise (which, as a population, is rarely). As a result, we develop Metabolic Syndrome, which becomes insulin resistance and eventually diabetes. It's only been since the 50s that people thought "eating fat makes you fat". Before that, it was generally known that starches and sweets made you fat.Andd since we started blaming fat for our troubles, diabetes and obesity have skyrocketed.

Take a look at the movie "Fat Head" sometime. Interesting stuff on the nutrition science of the '50s through the '80s.

Fathead was right about Saturated fat. But anybody with a background in physiology and nutrition will tell you that Taubes is an idiot of the greatest degree and GI is flawed and irrelevant. Not many people stuff themselves with carbs and ONLY carbs in a fasted state. Research shows that mixed meals, you know how real people eat, that have a mixture of fat, carbs, and protein greatly blunts insulin response. Hell, eating straight protein will give you almost as high of a GI response as eating straight carbs.

Bathia_Mapes: AbbeySomeone: This and junk food. Real food and an active lifestyle don't make you fat.

QFT

We didn't even have any type of fast food in the area I grew up in until my early teens, and that was a local chain. Even then eating out anywhere was a rare treat in my childhood household. On average, 3-4 times in a year. During the summer months my sister and I left the house after breakfast and pretty much had free range to go where we wanted, with the admonition from our grandma to behave ourselves and be home in time for dinner. We rode bikes, played tether ball, badminton, croquet, freeze tag, hide & seek, red rover, etc. with the other kids in the neighborhood. Sometimes we'd take a sack lunch with us, other times we go home and have lunch or one of the other mothers in the neighborhood would fix sandwiches for the ones playing with her children.

I was born in 1952 and there were no video games, computers, etc. Locally we got two TV stations and during the weekdays the only things on were game shows and soap operas. On Saturdays, once the morning cartoons were over, there was nothing much to watch unless you were interested in golf or bowling.

And Grandma had the best time of her week once the wrasslers took over for an hour or so Saturday afternoon.

Bathia_Mapes: In my teens and young adult years, you could buy Pepsi in 16-oz glass bottles. However, it was sweetened with sugar, not HFCS.

The last few years I was living in Lake Arrowhead, California, the lake level had dropped down so low, it became necessary to moor the private docks fifty yards away from where they had been moored since the lake was first filled. That's also when people got their first chance to see all the junk they had been throwing off their docks and boats for seventy years.

You never saw so many glass soda pop bottles in your life. Some of the bottles were so old that the names on them had come off and no one had any idea what they had been. And a lot of them had been much larger than 16 ounces. I kept a couple of vintage bottles that must held about a gallon of soda pop apiece.

Cataclaw: Automobile-dependency and the suburban way of life.

-Kids used to walk to school, today they're driven by their parents.
-People live in subdivisions that have no sidewalks and no local amenities.
-You have to walk 20-30 minutes just to get to the closest convenience store in many of these neighbourhoods.
-Almost all transportation is done by car, and very little of it is done by walking/cycling anymore.
-Comparing the obesity statistics of dense urban cities (such as New York) to those of sprawling suburban cities (such as Atlanta) indicates a strong correlation between suburban car-dependent settlement patterns and obesity rates. It makes sense.. if you live in a walkable neighbourhood, right off the bat you'll get more daily exercise than somebody who gets in their car to pick up two litres of milk.

Cars and suburbs aren't the only factor, obviously, but it's a critical piece of the puzzle that often goes unnoticed.
Also, i'm not trying to trash my suburban friends here, the suburbs have many lovely qualities, but they also have many horrible flaws/drawbacks that we must be honest about.

Hells yes. The kids who got driven to school when I was a kid were either supreme pussies or had some really good reason they had to be driven. Even when we had to be bussed to middle school because it was further away, as soon as the weather was nice, we took advantage of the freedom to ride our bikes. And my mom wasn't going to be my taxi service. If you wanted to go to a friend's place or the mall, you walked or rode your bike.

But that worked for where we lived. The suburbs now are cut off by major roadways that, even if they have sidewalks, run down an intimidating, boring corridor of fences or sound barrier walls, with crossings across the roadway only every half mile. Kids are bussed halfway across the city because by the time one is built to serve a new area, the local population has gotten too old to use it. Consequently, their friends live several city bus transfers away. And their parents are too freaked out about predators (who would most likely be someone known to the child, and not some stranger on the way) to let them go on their own.

Coelacanth: Bathia_Mapes: In my teens and young adult years

How you doing?

Mitch Mitchell: Coelacanth: Bathia_Mapes: In my teens and young adult years

How you doing?

Growing old these days sucks. But thanks.

Bathia_Mapes: TommyymmoT: Think of the ubiquitous Coca-Cola.
For the longest time. they were sold in the classic 6.5oz bottles.
Then, it went up to 8oz bottles, then, along came the 12oz can.
Now, it's up to 20oz bottles, and they are all considered (by the consumer) to be a single serving.

Obesity is not hard to fathom when people are out there drinking the equivalent of what used to be 3 bottles, every time they have one.

In my teens and young adult years, you could buy Pepsi in 16-oz glass bottles. However, it was sweetened with sugar, not HFCS.

We have to be careful to not think that HFCS is some magically extra-fattening sugar. It's not. We'd get just as fat on cane sugar. HFCS has made us fatter because it's cheaper and so has been put in more things and allowed portion sizes to be bigger.

Also, the marketing and culture of "soda" as a suitable beverage with every damned thing. Juice is a hardly better alternative as it often contains just as much sugar. Gingerbread lattes are even worse. Easy liquid calories, all.

I blame Cornell.

Wasn't there more guns and Jesus then?

Bathia_Mapes: AbbeySomeone: This and junk food. Real food and an active lifestyle don't make you fat.

QFT

We didn't even have any type of fast food in the area I grew up in until my early teens, and that was a local chain. Even then eating out anywhere was a rare treat in my childhood household. On average, 3-4 times in a year. During the summer months my sister and I left the house after breakfast and pretty much had free range to go where we wanted, with the admonition from our grandma to behave ourselves and be home in time for dinner. We rode bikes, played tether ball, badminton, croquet, freeze tag, hide & seek, red rover, etc. with the other kids in the neighborhood. Sometimes we'd take a sack lunch with us, other times we go home and have lunch or one of the other mothers in the neighborhood would fix sandwiches for the ones playing with her children.

I was born in 1952 and there were no video games, computers, etc. Locally we got two TV stations and during the weekdays the only things on were game shows and soap operas. On Saturdays, once the morning cartoons were over, there was nothing much to watch unless you were interested in golf or bowling.

Born in '55 so I shared the same type of childhood. Walk where you wanted to go, not much on TV, play outside until it became too dark to see what you were doing. There were, probably, only 2 overweight kids in my class elementary/high school classes. The funny thing was, we were born in an era where cleaning your plate was almost mandatory (Starving children in China. Sin to waste food.)

There weren't too many overweight adults from that era either. The one big change I saw in eating habits was with the inclusion of the microwave in the kitchen. Instead of having that pear for a snack, people began heating up the fried chicken dinner because, now, it took only 2 minutes rather than 45.

Walking and riding bicycles is not what it's cracked up to be.

I don't own a car. I walk/ride everywhere. It sucks. It sucks so bad. I waste so much time doing things that used to be quick and easy. I used to go shopping, drive to the store in 10 minutes, buy everything I needed at one store, drive home. I can't do that anymore. I used to live in Suburbia in the US. Now I live in a very walkable, very bicycle friendly city in Europe.

My hour long trip to the store in the US is a three-four hour shopping marathon here. Yes - there are several stores within a mile distance of my apartment....but there are many *tiny* stores. Poorly stocked, tiny stores. They don't carry 'everything' you need. Going to Target or Walmart in the US is now replaced with going to four or five stores. I need to go to two different grocery stores to get what the food I want. Then I need to go to a pharmacy and a book store (to get office supplies).

And everything I purchase, I need to carry with me. Each store I visit after the first, I'm carrying everything. Yesterday, a grocery store had Pepsi on sale. In the US - buying two 24-packs of Pepsi wasn't even something you'd think about. Here - that becomes a logistics nightmare. 'Okay, we can go to the other stores first, then swing back here, then we can buy two six packs and carry them a mile back home!'

It's incredibly inefficient.

Maybe this extra hassle helps keep the obesity rate lower. But it's a horribly inefficient way to do so. Give me my pickup truck and super-walmart and mega fitness center; I could go shopping and spend TWO HOURS at the gym and still save time over shopping here. Same with commuting to work on my bicycle.

I'm sure the obesity rate in poverty-stricken villages in Africa is pretty low. That doesn't mean we should emulate them. If you want to be 'not obese' eat less and move more. Don't advocate for, literally, the world to change around your lazy habits so that you are forced to do the things you could do voluntarily now.

You are missing what I think is an important factor: smaller families.

Families had more kids back in the day, which = more people to play with in your family (as well as too many people in the house, time to get outside!) more people in the neighborhood to play with. Heck, we used to be able to field 6-on-6 football or baseball easy in my neighborhood. 4 families with kids would be 16 kids.

Where I live now that would be completely impossible, 4 families = 6 kids.

I know my kids have no problem getting up and playing outside, if there are other kids to play with. Glad the new folks across the street have 3.

The First Four Black Sabbath Albums: Kids aren't allowed outside anymore because that's where the molesters will steal them away and put penises in their cavities. It's all based on fear, and it's making kids sedentary, and sedentary kids make sedentary adults.

Molesters cause obesity? That theory is only just slightly lower on the plausibility ranking than the one in the article, coming in at 3,467th. Which is right below aliens.

I'd say video games and computerized "social networking" are #1 and #2.

Jisaw: TommyymmoT: Think of the ubiquitous Coca-Cola.
For the longest time. they were sold in the classic 6.5oz bottles.
Then, it went up to 8oz bottles, then, along came the 12oz can.
Now, it's up to 20oz bottles, and they are all considered (by the consumer) to be a single serving.

Obesity is not hard to fathom when people are out there drinking the equivalent of what used to be 3 bottles, every time they have one.

So much this. I tried an experiment about sodas on myself. I used to be what I called an "average" soda drinker; one or two 12oz cans a day, depending if I had fast food or not. I was in the Army at the time, so I had a good daily workout involving lots of running. For one month, I drank nothing BUT soda at meals (except for breakfast, which I had orange juice instead of my usual iced tea). I went up two belt loop sizes in that time. I didn't own a scale, so I don't know the weight gain. The next month, I had absolutely no sugary drinks, save for one iced sweet tea at a restaurant that got my order wrong. I ended up having to poke a new hole in my belt!

/have probably had 5 sodas in the past two years.

Total anecdata, but I know one woman with three kids and a happy family life who was, until a couple years ago, shaped like a refrigerator on its side. The woman was nice and all, but she huffed and puffed like a steam engine every time she as much as got out of her chairs. Huge woman, I would say, based on comparing her to obesity horror documentaries, she was well over 500 pounds, probably 600, given how very tall she was. Huge.

Over the course of around half a decade, she shrank into a maybe 200 pound woman, who, while still fat, looked significantly thinner.

What was her secret? She stopped drinking soda.

This generation had grown up during the depression, a time where little was available. Then the war and the subsequent boom where they could now have what they never did.

This nonsense that it was the "evil 50's " seems to assign some kind of design to it. That's the way it was. But it didn't 'lay the groundwork" for today's obesity issues. We just are afraid to say what needs to be said...."go be fat somewhere else!"

I blame emo music. It's the only viable and valid explanation.

CitizenTed: The critical change is the new sedentary lifestyle. I was a kid in the 60's and 70's and none of us sat around the house all damn day. We were outside running, riding our bikes, play ball games, having snowball fights and building forts. As we became teens we started stealing things and running away, hiking into the woods to smoke weed and walking the streets like a bunch of hoodlums.

Ever since the expansion of TV, video games and the Internet, the yoot just sit around all the time. Fat, lazy farkers. Has little to with diet. My mother stuffed us silly and we enjoyed lots of late nights at White Castle. And we weren't fat.

Exercise. It's the difference.

This. Thread over.

Teen social networking in 1970 - "Hey, Let me go see what my friends are doing today!"....Goes out side walks to friends house.

Teen social networking in 2010 - "Hey, Let me go see what my friends are doing today!".....Sits at computer, or pulls out iphone without getting off couch.

/my theory is better

Watch Sugar the Bitter truth on YouTube.

Benevolent Misanthrope: Well - it's part of the difference. We also stopped eating protein and fat, and started eating lots of high-GI carbs (Protip: whole wheat bread has a higher GI than sugar)
...
Take a look at the movie "Fat Head" sometime. Interesting stuff on the nutrition science of the '50s through the '80s.

That movie is awful, and full of erroneous facts. Starting with the whole wheat bread has a high GI index.

Whole Wheat Bread: 68 (new window)
Table Sugar: 84 (new window)

It's just calories anyway. He comes up with a rough estimate of his metabolism, and then goes on a low-calorie diet where he burns more calories than he eats. And he loses weight. What a surprise. He then goes on to claim he lost more weight than predicted by simply doing calorie math, but his estimated metabolism makes that all very fuzzy. It's like driving with the radio on and then claiming that the radio reduced your gas mileage because you're using more gas than the EPA average would suggest. Without a proper control, the claim is just meaningless.

The article sounds like crap to me. When I was growing up my brothers and I were only home for lunch and dinner. The rest of the day was spent running around outside with the neighborhood kids. Parents back then had it easier since they didn't have to watch their children 24/7 to protect them from the diddlers. Now if a kid wants to go to the park, you have to go with them and there's no way you have the time or energy to be there all day. 30 minutes to 1 hour and then its time to put Bobby back in front of the tv so you can get some housework done. So sure they're going to put on more weight and be less fit.

How about some marshmallow rice squares? Those are swell!

The portions people in America (and Canada) eat for one farking meal could feed me for an entire day, and not even in a way that leaves me hungry that night.

/skinny

Fark_Guy_Rob:

It sounds like you're trying to adapt a suburban living big-box pattern to an urban city form. It just doesn't work.

I have a grocery store 2 minutes away by foot and I only go there, no need for other stores. I shop every other day and it works out great. All the services are right next to each other on the same street. The store fronts are in the following order, literally: gym, pharmacy, bank, restaurant, groceries, electronics, clothing, coffee shop. So within a 50 meter walk, I can basically access everything I need most often in just seconds.

So either your urban neighbourhood is just poorly designed (which is possible), or, (no disrespect intended) you're doing it wrong.

If you want to blame television sitcom moms... sure. It is interesting to note that obesity increased in TV moms as well.

1950s: June Cleaver
1990s: Roseanne Barr

TV dad's aren't immune either...

1950s: Ward Cleaver
1990s: The King of Queens

Basically, my point is that I don't have a point.
I got nothing.
Welcome to FARK.

NEWSFLASH!

Scientists uncover real cause of obesity epidemic!

A radical new theory says fatties get fat because they make the choice to eat too much and not exercise.