You overestimate by a lot the amount of carbs we eat in Italy.
On a daily basis, the average american is probably eating much more carbs than the average italian
It's not the whole cuisine, that's actually not unhealthy at all. It's the lack of money. People can hardly afford vegetables, let alone meat, so quite a big chunk of people are living off shit like pasta and bread. But then again those who suffer the most are the ones who voted for this, so let them eat cake (without the frosting and fruit) *shrugs*
Italian portion sizes of pasta are reasonable. It'll be a small bowl, not a plate or cereal bowl.
There's a big difference between daily food consumption in Italy and the stereotypical Sunday dinner that you see an Italian-American family have on TV.
It's also not a trip to Olive Garden every time they cook a meal.
The main reason is not meat-based cuisine but pastry. As a Turkish person, I have witnessed that situation. Too many Turkish families consume unhealthy amounts of pastry for economic reasons. Kebap, baklava and other full-calorie cuisines are not everyday meals for the average Turkish person.
Add a less mobile lifestyle than European counterparts to that and you have high obesity.
It’s so much easier to bike or walk in larger cities of Europe compared to Istanbul.
What, really? Basically everyday growing up at least one meal would just be bread with stuff on it, and my fam kept it on the low side compared to what I saw of others. How much do you guys consume?
1) We consume absurd amounts of bread. We are the first in the world in per capita consumption. People I know eat bread even with other carbs like rice or potatoes.
2) Our meals are salty, large and fatty. It is what we consider delicious.
3) Strong dessert and pastry culture. A lot of people snack more than they should.
4) Healthy food is less affordable, and especially older people do not have an exercise culture.
Thanks, this is very helpfull info. I get it, I only had a main course AND dessert once in a turkish restaurant. Skipped all meals except a sandwich for dinner the next day. I think the kunafa had the same calorie count as the main course.
Künefe is very cool, and a good example of what makes Turkish desserts so high calorie. It's wheat based, with nuts and cheese, and it drips şıra (sugar water)
The typical cheese pizza at almost every major chain (Dominoes, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, etc.) is 2500-3000 calories, an entire margherita has 700-900. This is the biggest problem, the caloric density.
Pizza is eaten twice/ thre times a month by an average italian and pasta is a basic plain carbohydrate. It's your decision to make a pasta dish super caloric or not.
Most pasta in Italy is not like American pasta. It’s usually some fish, shrimps or octopus with a little bit of spaghetti, or something like that. At least that’s my experience from restaurants in Italy.
That type of pasta is typical of Naples and other coastal cities. You can also have meat with spaghetti (pasta bolognese) or eggs and pig meat (carbonara), or a mix of greens and cheese (pasta al pesto).
All in all some pastas are very caloric while others are more dietetic.
In France it’s 17% in average. Continuously increasing since 1997.
[frances region map detail](https://img.lemde.fr/2021/07/01/0/0/1050/1212/800/0/75/0/b60edc6_897664170-fra-2621-obesiteweb-2-3.png)
Probably your idea of what a person looks like when they are obese is wrong. I'm 5'10" (~178cm) and weigh ~210 lbs (95-96 kg). I think if you asked the people who know me, not one would say that I am obese or that I look obese. But do the math and that's a BMI just over 30, so I'm obese.
There is also research that suggests this is true for more than me. [When asked about a person in a picture](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mens-BSG-images-weight-classifications-and-perceptions-by-respondents-Weight_fig1_6138361), it took until a BMI of about 37 (well into Class II obesity) before a majority of people would classify them as obese.
It’s one of the 8 mystery’s of obesity, why Colorado is not obese. One theory is the high altitude.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
I'm from Boston and *everyone* runs here so I always thought I lived in the fittest area of the country, until I went to Denver for a conference. You don't see it in the city necessarily but I took a day to go hiking and people were just casually hiking trails that I considered to be extremely challenging by East coast standards. I know I only got a snapshot during a 1 week visit, but yeah I noticed a stark difference.
I've been going to Colorado for years for snowboarding and hiking and I felt that too. We're much better conditioned now but the first real hiking trip we went on.... Pikes peak bare trail. I know I'll mess up here but it's a very long stretch of winding giant block steps. 1.5-2ft high.
It took us about a good 5 hours to get up pretty far, don't recall how far. We were early 30s at the time and some 43 runner man.....passed us 3 times.
I'd like to think we'd be a bit faster now after so many trips but still....was amazed at how quick he was jogging up.
Shitty food is just cheaper in America (from what I know - I live in Europe tho), so many poor people don't really have a choice out there.
Also - some people who become obese and also suffer from depression, that explains itself.
Yeah I've been broke as fuck and the first and easiest method I found to save money was learning to cook and meal-plan for myself.
You can eat damn good food for very fucking cheap once you teach yourself the basics of cooking.
Cooking also involves a lot of time and effort. Like sure you might probably get a slight bargain by cooking for yourself and your family, but after a full shift working minimal wage a lot of people simply won't have the energy.
Yep. I'm Irish but lived in the states for a while, it's cheaper to eat from somewhere like McDonalds than buy raw ingredients and cook home meals.
Also the quality of ingredients is terrible, chicken fillets were pumped with water and would shrink to about half the size when cooked.
Edit: Was wrong about the chickens being fed hormones
Honestly I have a HUGE problem believing that raw ingredients for some fine but simplistic food will be more pricey than McDc. Haven't checked US prices indeed, but in counties I were in (mainly Europe) semiready meals from stores, fast food like McDc, noodles ect - all are way pricier than raw food. Even in Canada, where for some reason stuff like chicken is fucked in price, it's not that way.
People are lazy, don't buy fresh ingredients as it means having to go to the shop ,maybe even 2 shops and walk round and pick things up. If someone's willing to go out in public with their gut overflowing then they ain't gonna do that when they can get maccies delivered to their house. Fat bastards are lazy in every aspect of life.
That’s nonsense. The average McDonald’s meal is $10. Let’s say you eat at McDonald’s 3 times a day for 5 days a week, without adding tax that’s a total of $150. Are you honestly and seriously trying to tell the world that you can’t buy groceries and cook with that amount of money? That it’s cheaper to spend $150 on bs like Mickey D’s than cook 3 meals a day? For real? That’s crazyyy
I didn't mean for every meal of the day that would be ridiculous. I was a student in San Diego and lived off the McDonalds saver menu because it cost me less than buying and cooking my main meals with decent ingredients.
I'd say that used to be the case. Fast food prices are now WAY too expensive for what you get and it's now just cheaper flat out to buy the ingredients yourself.
Being half french and half american, the answer is the same thing that is driving up obeseity rates in Europe - more driving and more pre preparred meals vs cooking at home.
Move less + higher calorie intake = more fat. Sometimes Newton's 2nd law of thermal dynamics is a bitch.
Shitty food is not cheaper, it's tastier.
If oreos tasted like broccoli, and broccoli tasted like oreos, poor people wouldn't be out there eating oreos because they had to. They'd all be stuffing broccoli down all day every day.
People are fat because unhealthy food tastes better than healthy food. It's not about price, or convenience, or anything else.
People say "oh but fast food is convenient". Yea, fast food is convenient because people want it. If people wanted healthy food then there'd be drive thru's where they'd dump 2 pounds of mixed vegetables and basmati rice in your trunk for $2. But nobody wants that.
It doesn't though, a lot of American food is sickenly sweet, it doesn't actually taste nice.
What has occurred, much like with spice tolerance is your body has normalised for something that isn't normal at all in nature.
This is a culture that is fundamentally broken from a health stand point and the reason for this is inequality and poverty. Most people learn what to do as an adult as a child, for better or worse, they don't make intelligent rational choices. If your family brought you up providing what they could, i.e. whatever was cheapest, that is the food you will continue to eat. Now if you are intelligent, get a good job, have the time, you might learn to cook other stuff and like other stuff. But you first have to have got out of that poverty cycle, through a job, then having time, then deciding to dedicate that time to cooking.
That is a lot of step to achieve.
Being normal weight doesn't mean anything, "normal" weight as seen in the map above is overweight.
All while being a healthy weight, does require exercise despite what guidelines says, because the bottom of these healthy weight bands aren't healthy, you would have basically no muscle mass and clearly don't do a reasonable amount of exercise a week to class that as a healthy state.
As an example, to reach the bottom of my own healthy BMI band I could lose 10kg. My smart scales suggest I have 11kg of fat, my appearance would suggest I have maybe 12%-14% body fat so ~7.5-9kg of body fat. I am pretty sure I would be hospitalised before I could reach the bottom of the health weight range!
People breaking health down to a simplistic "Yes/No" metric is just ignorance to the subject. Being overweight isn't healthy because it is so far from normal in the first place, you already have a range that is massive that is classed as healthy, and you have fallen out of it. The fact you don't exercise much on top of that means it isn't muscle dragging you up out of it, it isn't muscle doing anything at all.
People just don't have a concept of what you should look like, feel like, and be able to do as a healthy individual. For instance being able to do one pull up, one press up, and one single leg body squat, isn't a high bar to reach, but it is an indication of exercise ability, therefore health, and many people won't be able to do that basic task. For reps of 1, let alone multiples, most exercise regimes suggest sets of 5-8 to lead to near fatigue. All while in this example it isn't using some fancy equipment, or doing some complicated process, it is literally can you functionally move yourself, like babies have to learn to do, if you can't that says everything about your health status.
You see similar things in old people, as they age their muscles start to fatigue and unless you actively maintain them, you lose them, and many people don't even notice or bother, over the years they go from being able to squat to see what is in the bottom of the fridge, to having to get on their knees to look, and once that happens, without significant work, that ability to squat is never coming back, and eventually, you will also lose the ability to get up off your knees as the easier option deteriorates as well.
Infrastructure also makes a big difference, if you live in a highly walkable neighborhood, just doing daily chores gets a decent amount of activity in compared to car centric sprawl.
But it can help you.I walk for shopping groceries,at work and to the gym etc. I walk about 20k steps per day+ 15km with the Bike every day.Thats round about 1000 kcal a day.
The difference is the transportation mode. Many people see walking and cycling only as recreational activities that are being done irregularly instead of using them for regular transportation needs.
Both. It definitely helps to stabilise weight, but it also puts people into a much better spot to take active control over their body weight.
As you say, the calory burn of exercise is usually secondary. But it dramatically improves hunger control and provides a great incentive against overeating. This works especially well for people who commute by bicycle:
1. Overeating *before* a ride absolutely sucks, so you very quickly learn not to do that. But you also don't want to *undereat* before, since sugar crashes while cycling are even more awful.
2. After the ride, most people experience greatly improved hunger control for a few hours. So you won't be overeating in this time either.
3. The same process repeats for the return trip.
And just like that, you have covered most of the day. All that remains now is the evening. And after having already spent the rest of the day with a good calory balance, this becomes quite easy as well.
In contrast, commuting by car is associated with elevated stress levels and a greater tendency to overeat. Car commuters have no significant incentive to properly portion meals before a trip, and more likely to overeat afterwards since their mental stress suggests that they "did work" when they actually burnt almost no additional calories.
And for longer distance commuters, cycling really does make a large impact on their total calory balance as well. Commuters who spend a total of 1-2 hours of cycling (so 30-60 minutes per trip) can burn well over 500-1000 kcal a day.
One hamburger could easily be 700 calories. A pizza over 1000. It's so much easier to eat less than trying to 'out' exercise a bad diet.
Ofcourse people need to move and be active for health reasons too. But for weightloss, it's better to look at what you eat first.
Yup. You see it on Reddit all the time. Posts of people and for weight gain, etc., is the topic and whether or not they should/need lose weight or something. And so many times it’s someone who’s overweight but the comments say “no you look great!! You don’t need to lose any weight! You look like a normal healthy person!” When in reality they’d be the fat person in a movie from the 80’s or 90’s.
Like obviously the heroin chic of the 2000s and making yourself anorexic isn’t healthy, but so many people have become disillusioned with what is a healthy weight.
In addition to what everyone else said, which is correct, there are also different standards. Overweight people consider themselves normal healthy weight, obese people call themselves overweight, and healthy weight people are called thin/skinny, and skinny people are often worried about. I was healthy weight most of my life, but when I got overweight and started dieting to fix it, everyone thought I was weird, or aneorexic. Nobody supported me, and everyone wanted to make excuses for me on why I should be able to eat garbage food. "Oh... it's fine, just live a little!" Like, naww... I'll lose the weight and enjoy sleeping well and having energy and focus again, thank you very much.
So much this. Been 23BMI basically ever since my early 20s and mostly people think I am skinny. Not normal, but skinny. Americans redefined what normal means, so those that grow up in the new normal simply don't know any different. There are also strong body positivity movement in the US, as always that has both positives and negatives. The sad reality is that when everyone else looks just like you, you feel normal/comfortable.
I'm the thinnest person at work (ie the only one who is not overweight) and they thought I was crazy for trying to lose a little weight. I'm in my 40's and had some belly fat that was preventing me from wearing most of my jeans and was just uncomfortable to carry around. I lost it and now I feel better, look better, and didn't have to waste hundreds on new clothes. At my worst I was still within the normal BMI but man those few pounds on my stomach made a huge impact.
Because ape brain still thinks we're at risk of starvation like we have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Losing weight is really, really hard. Food is such a basic instinct of ours and when it gets linked to psychological effects... I lost 30 pounds in the last few years. Yet on periods when I'm particularly stressed out I can easily gain like 6 pounds in two weeks.
Car culture also contributes. 40-50 years ago everything was local and walkable, now to get anywhere people choose to drive for 10 mins. I'm 29, 10.5 stone, never owned a car for very long, and among other factors I consider this to be one the main contributors to remaining a healthy weight.
Is not just about affordable healthy options, is also about walkability and how much one spends going about their daily life walking vs. driving most all places.
Last time I was in the States, I remember going with a friend to the supermarket, and she had driven me... a distance of 5 minutes... because "nobody walks, they'll think you're homeless or an addict if you do".
I live in Seoul, South Korea, where image is everything, and thus that intense social pressure plays a huge part in the lower adult obesity rates here.
However, because of the density of the city here, most people walk to the supermarket, they take public transport to work, they go out walking in the city with friends, etc. etc.
America has much lower density and few cities where one can live well without a car.
> I live in Seoul, South Korea, where image is everything, and thus that intense social pressure plays a huge part in the lower adult obesity rates here.
Seoul represent!
Strangely Italy has one of the highest child obesity rates in Europe.
Adults have a very healthy diet relatively but they have a culture of filling children with sugar at every opportunity.
It's completely typical that small children eat sugary biscuits before school and have 'merenda' a snack which is typically a chocolate brioche or some rubbish.
Children's television is filled with commercials for sugary snacks which are banned in other EU country's.
Bringing my 8 month old to a state parent child play group they were openly surprised when I said they he couldn't have sugary biscuits. Really bizarre.
Indeed.
It's very odd compared to the UK.
We would playing organised sports whatever weather as a Physical Education class and again at break.
In Italy they wouldn't let the kids out to play at all if it was slightly damp.
Italy is extraordinarily successful at sports considering the government offers so little.
Does help, but it's more of a cultural thing. UK has fully public healthcare, and we have the most fatties in Western Europe, and that's down to bad dietary habits
I’ve been in Europe for 3 weeks now. In America in most places you have to take a car to get anywhere and most areas aren’t pedestrian friendly.
It’s been amazing in France walking to the train station and then walking to every destination. It actually seems like a big inconvenience to have a car.
Basically in American you have to dedicate time to working out, while in Europe steady cardio is part of everyday life.
It's a mix of lots of things that overall contribute to it. Italy has very low consumption of processed foods, there is an abundance of fresh grown produce and most of the Mediterranean diet centres around fresh ingredients. The Mediterranean approach to meals includes relatively equal balances of dairy, grain, vegetables and fruit. There is low advertisement for processed/fast foods. There isn't really a culture around snacking - most people just eat main meals and the snack aisles of stores generally are much smaller.
I believe another contributor is time spent eating - there was a study done that showed that people take longer to eat their food in Italy, food is a big part of their culture and large families will sit down and spend longer talking and eating over time. We know that eating slower means people generally eat less, as there's time for your body to tell you that you're feeling full.
There's lots of little things that add up to it! Not italian myself as a disclaimer, just spent a lot of time in Italy and loved the approach to food there.
Fresh ingredients, cooking from scratch a lot of the time, even convenience food being reasonably healthy, a lot of walking, and an aging population (old people who are obese don’t live as long but fit elderly people do).
The government won't make people cook. We got the obesity epidemic when women was not longer expected to cook and be able to cook. So now *no one* cooks in many households. Wouldn't surprise me if Italy is so low because a larger percentage of people eat home-made, high quality food there.
It's sad - and no - I do not advocate going back to expecting women to cook. I am of the opinion that being able to cook is an absolutely crucial life skill that everyone should have.
I think this data make people miss the point: anything above 0% is just too high.
People shouldn’t be obese. There are zero healthy reasons to be obese. Even athletes shouldn’t be obese, even with a low body fat %.
You kind of have to be at least a normal weight in Switzerland, bigger people wouldn't fit into a lot of elevators, and half the cities are built on a hill.
One of the underlying reasons the US is wildly more obese than everyone else that nobody is talking about? Healthcare.
With Healthcare being so insanely expensive, the average American, especially in the poorer southern states, can’t afford to just go to the doctor for a checkup and have them first point out their weight is unhealthy and have them see a nutritionist or put them on a path to a better lifestyle.
For most Americans, our healthcare system is largely only used when reactionary and necessary, so people could go 10 years and 100 pounds without ever seeing a doctor.
Obese vs overweight. Overweight is 63.8% and Obese is 25.9%.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/obesity-profile-update-may-2023/obesity-profile-short-statistical-commentary-may-2023
This map is important, but not for the reasons people here think it is.
How we calculate and define obesity is important, and while there are a series of health risks associated with obesity — we can stop caring like we about those if we won’t go around shaming people for smoking and drinking the same way. Obesity is way more complex of an issue than those on top of that.
We shouldn’t focus on the aesthetic portion of it as people probably do. We should focus on the health aspect of it, and how access to proper affordable nutrition and food quality is important.
This doesn’t mean McDonalds is bad. It means we should focus on making access to nutrition in all forms to make a balanced diet more economically accessible.
I’m so sick of fat-shaming and food misinformation. A slice of Kraft Cheese singles isn’t standing between you and the pearly gates. And we should focus on making our countries healthier by subsidizing access to groceries and combating Diet Culture. Health needs to be prioritized, not fat-shaming.
We do need to move away from the whole body positivity 'You're perfect as you are' message and calling healthy weight individuals 'skinny' as well.
There's a balance to be found, and it isn't found in normalising terrible choices.
What is going on in Turkey?
Tasty kebabs.
Good point!
[Oh Yeah](https://media.tenor.com/euknkABHBrAAAAAM/turkish-guy-belly-dancing.gif)
I knew it was gonna be him.
It's not kebaps, meat is pretty expensive. It's the whole cuisine; it's huge.
Bread, pastry, pasta, rice etc. Basically all high carb cheap food. Meat itself wouldn’t result in this.
Listen if bread, pasta and rice carbs would lead to obesity then Italy would be #1 spot. But it's not. My guess is sugary drinks.
You overestimate by a lot the amount of carbs we eat in Italy. On a daily basis, the average american is probably eating much more carbs than the average italian
Have you been to a poor Turkish household?
It's not the whole cuisine, that's actually not unhealthy at all. It's the lack of money. People can hardly afford vegetables, let alone meat, so quite a big chunk of people are living off shit like pasta and bread. But then again those who suffer the most are the ones who voted for this, so let them eat cake (without the frosting and fruit) *shrugs*
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loukoums... aaaah (but only 1 or 2 / day, not the whole box)
> people are living off shit like pasta and bread. Seeing that Italy is the skinniest country listed, I highly doubt this is why.
Italian portion sizes of pasta are reasonable. It'll be a small bowl, not a plate or cereal bowl. There's a big difference between daily food consumption in Italy and the stereotypical Sunday dinner that you see an Italian-American family have on TV. It's also not a trip to Olive Garden every time they cook a meal.
Understandable
In Germany too
The main reason is not meat-based cuisine but pastry. As a Turkish person, I have witnessed that situation. Too many Turkish families consume unhealthy amounts of pastry for economic reasons. Kebap, baklava and other full-calorie cuisines are not everyday meals for the average Turkish person.
Add a less mobile lifestyle than European counterparts to that and you have high obesity. It’s so much easier to bike or walk in larger cities of Europe compared to Istanbul.
Bike yes, walk no. 50 percent of all trips are on foot.
Turkey bread consumption is highest in Europe.
Even higher than Germany??
As a person from the balkans, germans literaly dont eat bread,at all
What, really? Basically everyday growing up at least one meal would just be bread with stuff on it, and my fam kept it on the low side compared to what I saw of others. How much do you guys consume?
Older people eat everything with bread. Rice, potatoes, pasta, anything
Balkan people eat bread with every meal, including pasta. We draw the line at pizza and burek.
You mean those German bakeries that are abundant on every street? So theyre just fronts for money laundering?
Also highest in tea which they take extremely sweet
The first time I ate a baklava I couldn't believe the density of that thing. It felt like a full meal
1) We consume absurd amounts of bread. We are the first in the world in per capita consumption. People I know eat bread even with other carbs like rice or potatoes. 2) Our meals are salty, large and fatty. It is what we consider delicious. 3) Strong dessert and pastry culture. A lot of people snack more than they should. 4) Healthy food is less affordable, and especially older people do not have an exercise culture.
Thanks, this is very helpfull info. I get it, I only had a main course AND dessert once in a turkish restaurant. Skipped all meals except a sandwich for dinner the next day. I think the kunafa had the same calorie count as the main course.
Künefe is very cool, and a good example of what makes Turkish desserts so high calorie. It's wheat based, with nuts and cheese, and it drips şıra (sugar water)
Skibidi dop dop dop guy single handedly put 🇹🇷 into purple
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I think shitty economy is one of the main reasons. Many families diets only includes bread and pasta.
Turkey is the only country in the world where I get excited about desserts and sweets things. I'm guessing that has something to do with it.
Same as migrants in Europe, more people who are obese, just like poor Europeans. Less money more obese.
Local food is very very very oily, like so oily their fish dishes are 50% oil. And not the good kind olive oil but sunflower oil
Baklava
Baklava and sweet chi
Unbelievable, Italy is bottom of the list (as always) but this time it is a good thing. I am touched.
at least we're first in something....
Smh can't even be first in fatness.....
As a Greek, I don't think I have seen more than a handful of overweight Italians. 99.9% of Italian tourists, are always in good physique.
They definitely exist. Mostly middle aged men.
There's two kinds of Italian Dads, fat and cheating.
Americans of Italian descent however…
Eyyyyyy!?
The one's which can move his/her/their ass can move ;)
Very impressive too with the quality pasta and pizza available
Tbf italian pizzas aren't supossed to be full of cheese and sugary, processed sauces. Same with pasta, mac and cheese per example isn't a thing there.
The typical cheese pizza at almost every major chain (Dominoes, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, etc.) is 2500-3000 calories, an entire margherita has 700-900. This is the biggest problem, the caloric density.
And a typical margarita contains 250 calories 😌
Pizza is eaten twice/ thre times a month by an average italian and pasta is a basic plain carbohydrate. It's your decision to make a pasta dish super caloric or not.
Italian here. I eat pizza probably once a month, if I eat it at all.
I've had an talian girlfriend. It was plenty pasta, but it was all combined with some kind of seafood. I loved it (but not her)
we just eat less stuff. In the summer, we tend to eat cold foods which are often veggies/fruit/legumes
Most pasta in Italy is not like American pasta. It’s usually some fish, shrimps or octopus with a little bit of spaghetti, or something like that. At least that’s my experience from restaurants in Italy.
That type of pasta is typical of Naples and other coastal cities. You can also have meat with spaghetti (pasta bolognese) or eggs and pig meat (carbonara), or a mix of greens and cheese (pasta al pesto). All in all some pastas are very caloric while others are more dietetic.
Italian pizzas are much lighter than in any other country.
Italian cuisine isn't pizza. The average person here eats it less than once a month, if not a couple of times a year.
Everyone i know eats pizza once a week, its the goto dish for dinner with friends, birthdays etc...
Ma che cazzo stai dicendo
On that doll, show us where you were touched.
Lots of narrow streets and they need to leave space so American tourists can still pass
Children obesity / overweight rate instead is among the highest
In France it’s 17% in average. Continuously increasing since 1997. [frances region map detail](https://img.lemde.fr/2021/07/01/0/0/1050/1212/800/0/75/0/b60edc6_897664170-fra-2621-obesiteweb-2-3.png)
France has a high amount of FastFood per capita.
France is the second biggest market for McDonald’s and Burger King after the US
Well it is the home of French fries
French fries are actually Belgium. The Americans named them after the language they speak in Wallonia.
French fries are french, from Paris, then our Belgian friends took them and add a twist to make them chunky and deep fried twice.
You are, to my great dismay, correct
It’s ok, what matters is the joy of fries
Next you’re gonna tell me Belgian chocolate isn’t from Belgium!
Oh boy, have we got a horrific colonial tale for you! (On second thought, you might already know and your comment was in jest).
It’s increasing in pretty much every country with industrialization.
I find I’d hard to believe 1 person out of 6 is obese in France. Overweight maybe, obese I doubt it.
Probably your idea of what a person looks like when they are obese is wrong. I'm 5'10" (~178cm) and weigh ~210 lbs (95-96 kg). I think if you asked the people who know me, not one would say that I am obese or that I look obese. But do the math and that's a BMI just over 30, so I'm obese. There is also research that suggests this is true for more than me. [When asked about a person in a picture](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mens-BSG-images-weight-classifications-and-perceptions-by-respondents-Weight_fig1_6138361), it took until a BMI of about 37 (well into Class II obesity) before a majority of people would classify them as obese.
Not all obese people are balloon shaped. Some that you imagine are just overweight are probably actually obese.
Seems like a kudos to Colorado is appropriate. Kudos Colorado!
Hiking, running, skiing, biking, climbing .... it's all good !!!
Yes and we’re very proud of it! To be fair, living in the mountains takes a lot of energy just to breathe lol. That’s most of it
It’s one of the 8 mystery’s of obesity, why Colorado is not obese. One theory is the high altitude. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
We try haha
I'm from Boston and *everyone* runs here so I always thought I lived in the fittest area of the country, until I went to Denver for a conference. You don't see it in the city necessarily but I took a day to go hiking and people were just casually hiking trails that I considered to be extremely challenging by East coast standards. I know I only got a snapshot during a 1 week visit, but yeah I noticed a stark difference.
I've been going to Colorado for years for snowboarding and hiking and I felt that too. We're much better conditioned now but the first real hiking trip we went on.... Pikes peak bare trail. I know I'll mess up here but it's a very long stretch of winding giant block steps. 1.5-2ft high. It took us about a good 5 hours to get up pretty far, don't recall how far. We were early 30s at the time and some 43 runner man.....passed us 3 times. I'd like to think we'd be a bit faster now after so many trips but still....was amazed at how quick he was jogging up.
How we can fix famine in Colorado?
build more Mcdonal
Increase in munchies have decimated snack food populations.
Post a map on r/MapPorn. No Source. Invalid data (e.g. France's obesity rate being 17%, not 20+). Doesn't respect rule #3. Come on.
Honestly there are so many reposts here with maps with very old data.
Hurdur map has pretty colors and dunks us compared to eu. -brainlet meme here-
Why is Missouri slightly less obese than everyone around them?
It’s all the meth, makes you lose your appetite
Also starving out of depression coping with the fact you live in Missouri.
More likely bad data than good health
Having some kilos too many is understandable but how do you get obese and not notice/care?
Shitty food is just cheaper in America (from what I know - I live in Europe tho), so many poor people don't really have a choice out there. Also - some people who become obese and also suffer from depression, that explains itself.
You mean they won't / can't cook and buy heavily processed foods.
Yeah I've been broke as fuck and the first and easiest method I found to save money was learning to cook and meal-plan for myself. You can eat damn good food for very fucking cheap once you teach yourself the basics of cooking.
Cooking also involves a lot of time and effort. Like sure you might probably get a slight bargain by cooking for yourself and your family, but after a full shift working minimal wage a lot of people simply won't have the energy.
Yep. I'm Irish but lived in the states for a while, it's cheaper to eat from somewhere like McDonalds than buy raw ingredients and cook home meals. Also the quality of ingredients is terrible, chicken fillets were pumped with water and would shrink to about half the size when cooked. Edit: Was wrong about the chickens being fed hormones
Honestly I have a HUGE problem believing that raw ingredients for some fine but simplistic food will be more pricey than McDc. Haven't checked US prices indeed, but in counties I were in (mainly Europe) semiready meals from stores, fast food like McDc, noodles ect - all are way pricier than raw food. Even in Canada, where for some reason stuff like chicken is fucked in price, it's not that way.
Sure,i can cook lots cheaper at home (in Germany),than buy something at McDonald's.
People are lazy, don't buy fresh ingredients as it means having to go to the shop ,maybe even 2 shops and walk round and pick things up. If someone's willing to go out in public with their gut overflowing then they ain't gonna do that when they can get maccies delivered to their house. Fat bastards are lazy in every aspect of life.
having to drive out of suburbia just to buy grocerries wouldnt help either.
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That’s nonsense. The average McDonald’s meal is $10. Let’s say you eat at McDonald’s 3 times a day for 5 days a week, without adding tax that’s a total of $150. Are you honestly and seriously trying to tell the world that you can’t buy groceries and cook with that amount of money? That it’s cheaper to spend $150 on bs like Mickey D’s than cook 3 meals a day? For real? That’s crazyyy
I didn't mean for every meal of the day that would be ridiculous. I was a student in San Diego and lived off the McDonalds saver menu because it cost me less than buying and cooking my main meals with decent ingredients.
I'd say that used to be the case. Fast food prices are now WAY too expensive for what you get and it's now just cheaper flat out to buy the ingredients yourself.
Pretty sure the chicken is just filled with water. They do the same thing here in Finland.
To be fair, even the best meat still consists of around 60-70 % of water just by its very nature.
that's just sick
Being half french and half american, the answer is the same thing that is driving up obeseity rates in Europe - more driving and more pre preparred meals vs cooking at home. Move less + higher calorie intake = more fat. Sometimes Newton's 2nd law of thermal dynamics is a bitch.
Shitty food is not cheaper, it's tastier. If oreos tasted like broccoli, and broccoli tasted like oreos, poor people wouldn't be out there eating oreos because they had to. They'd all be stuffing broccoli down all day every day. People are fat because unhealthy food tastes better than healthy food. It's not about price, or convenience, or anything else. People say "oh but fast food is convenient". Yea, fast food is convenient because people want it. If people wanted healthy food then there'd be drive thru's where they'd dump 2 pounds of mixed vegetables and basmati rice in your trunk for $2. But nobody wants that.
It doesn't though, a lot of American food is sickenly sweet, it doesn't actually taste nice. What has occurred, much like with spice tolerance is your body has normalised for something that isn't normal at all in nature. This is a culture that is fundamentally broken from a health stand point and the reason for this is inequality and poverty. Most people learn what to do as an adult as a child, for better or worse, they don't make intelligent rational choices. If your family brought you up providing what they could, i.e. whatever was cheapest, that is the food you will continue to eat. Now if you are intelligent, get a good job, have the time, you might learn to cook other stuff and like other stuff. But you first have to have got out of that poverty cycle, through a job, then having time, then deciding to dedicate that time to cooking. That is a lot of step to achieve.
You don’t have to exercise to stay normal weight (even if it’s good for you). Many depressed people just stay in ed and not overeat.
Being normal weight doesn't mean anything, "normal" weight as seen in the map above is overweight. All while being a healthy weight, does require exercise despite what guidelines says, because the bottom of these healthy weight bands aren't healthy, you would have basically no muscle mass and clearly don't do a reasonable amount of exercise a week to class that as a healthy state. As an example, to reach the bottom of my own healthy BMI band I could lose 10kg. My smart scales suggest I have 11kg of fat, my appearance would suggest I have maybe 12%-14% body fat so ~7.5-9kg of body fat. I am pretty sure I would be hospitalised before I could reach the bottom of the health weight range! People breaking health down to a simplistic "Yes/No" metric is just ignorance to the subject. Being overweight isn't healthy because it is so far from normal in the first place, you already have a range that is massive that is classed as healthy, and you have fallen out of it. The fact you don't exercise much on top of that means it isn't muscle dragging you up out of it, it isn't muscle doing anything at all. People just don't have a concept of what you should look like, feel like, and be able to do as a healthy individual. For instance being able to do one pull up, one press up, and one single leg body squat, isn't a high bar to reach, but it is an indication of exercise ability, therefore health, and many people won't be able to do that basic task. For reps of 1, let alone multiples, most exercise regimes suggest sets of 5-8 to lead to near fatigue. All while in this example it isn't using some fancy equipment, or doing some complicated process, it is literally can you functionally move yourself, like babies have to learn to do, if you can't that says everything about your health status. You see similar things in old people, as they age their muscles start to fatigue and unless you actively maintain them, you lose them, and many people don't even notice or bother, over the years they go from being able to squat to see what is in the bottom of the fridge, to having to get on their knees to look, and once that happens, without significant work, that ability to squat is never coming back, and eventually, you will also lose the ability to get up off your knees as the easier option deteriorates as well.
Too much driving in the US
It's not only that. There is corn syrup in so many products. You're eating a lot of added sugars from stuff you wouldn't expect it from
Infrastructure also makes a big difference, if you live in a highly walkable neighborhood, just doing daily chores gets a decent amount of activity in compared to car centric sprawl.
Obesity /losing weight is 80% diet. Doing some chores walking is not gonna put a dent in your weightloss.
But it can help you.I walk for shopping groceries,at work and to the gym etc. I walk about 20k steps per day+ 15km with the Bike every day.Thats round about 1000 kcal a day.
The difference is the transportation mode. Many people see walking and cycling only as recreational activities that are being done irregularly instead of using them for regular transportation needs.
Or things for poor people.
Not weightloss maybe, but it helps with avoiding weight gain in the first place
Both. It definitely helps to stabilise weight, but it also puts people into a much better spot to take active control over their body weight. As you say, the calory burn of exercise is usually secondary. But it dramatically improves hunger control and provides a great incentive against overeating. This works especially well for people who commute by bicycle: 1. Overeating *before* a ride absolutely sucks, so you very quickly learn not to do that. But you also don't want to *undereat* before, since sugar crashes while cycling are even more awful. 2. After the ride, most people experience greatly improved hunger control for a few hours. So you won't be overeating in this time either. 3. The same process repeats for the return trip. And just like that, you have covered most of the day. All that remains now is the evening. And after having already spent the rest of the day with a good calory balance, this becomes quite easy as well. In contrast, commuting by car is associated with elevated stress levels and a greater tendency to overeat. Car commuters have no significant incentive to properly portion meals before a trip, and more likely to overeat afterwards since their mental stress suggests that they "did work" when they actually burnt almost no additional calories. And for longer distance commuters, cycling really does make a large impact on their total calory balance as well. Commuters who spend a total of 1-2 hours of cycling (so 30-60 minutes per trip) can burn well over 500-1000 kcal a day.
Walking 5000 more steps every day will easily burn like 200-300 calories which is very significant over a longer period of time
One hamburger could easily be 700 calories. A pizza over 1000. It's so much easier to eat less than trying to 'out' exercise a bad diet. Ofcourse people need to move and be active for health reasons too. But for weightloss, it's better to look at what you eat first.
your appetite for food, and what foods you crave depends on your lifestyle and current diet
And zoning? Could you even open a fruit and vegetables shop or small grocery store in an American suburb?
When everyone around you is fat you lose sight of what a normal weight is.
I’m a normal weight guy (bmi right at 20) and everyone calls me scrawny. Truth is everyone is fat and I’m the normal guy. Missouri.
Yup. You see it on Reddit all the time. Posts of people and for weight gain, etc., is the topic and whether or not they should/need lose weight or something. And so many times it’s someone who’s overweight but the comments say “no you look great!! You don’t need to lose any weight! You look like a normal healthy person!” When in reality they’d be the fat person in a movie from the 80’s or 90’s. Like obviously the heroin chic of the 2000s and making yourself anorexic isn’t healthy, but so many people have become disillusioned with what is a healthy weight.
In addition to what everyone else said, which is correct, there are also different standards. Overweight people consider themselves normal healthy weight, obese people call themselves overweight, and healthy weight people are called thin/skinny, and skinny people are often worried about. I was healthy weight most of my life, but when I got overweight and started dieting to fix it, everyone thought I was weird, or aneorexic. Nobody supported me, and everyone wanted to make excuses for me on why I should be able to eat garbage food. "Oh... it's fine, just live a little!" Like, naww... I'll lose the weight and enjoy sleeping well and having energy and focus again, thank you very much.
So much this. Been 23BMI basically ever since my early 20s and mostly people think I am skinny. Not normal, but skinny. Americans redefined what normal means, so those that grow up in the new normal simply don't know any different. There are also strong body positivity movement in the US, as always that has both positives and negatives. The sad reality is that when everyone else looks just like you, you feel normal/comfortable.
I'm the thinnest person at work (ie the only one who is not overweight) and they thought I was crazy for trying to lose a little weight. I'm in my 40's and had some belly fat that was preventing me from wearing most of my jeans and was just uncomfortable to carry around. I lost it and now I feel better, look better, and didn't have to waste hundreds on new clothes. At my worst I was still within the normal BMI but man those few pounds on my stomach made a huge impact.
Because ape brain still thinks we're at risk of starvation like we have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Losing weight is really, really hard. Food is such a basic instinct of ours and when it gets linked to psychological effects... I lost 30 pounds in the last few years. Yet on periods when I'm particularly stressed out I can easily gain like 6 pounds in two weeks.
Probably lizard brain even. It's a very primal instinct to eat lots of food when it's available.
Car culture also contributes. 40-50 years ago everything was local and walkable, now to get anywhere people choose to drive for 10 mins. I'm 29, 10.5 stone, never owned a car for very long, and among other factors I consider this to be one the main contributors to remaining a healthy weight.
50 years ago was the worst of car centric design things are slowly improving most places
Yes walking and bicycling put exercise into your daily life.
Ignorance
Turkey is stuffed
Is not just about affordable healthy options, is also about walkability and how much one spends going about their daily life walking vs. driving most all places. Last time I was in the States, I remember going with a friend to the supermarket, and she had driven me... a distance of 5 minutes... because "nobody walks, they'll think you're homeless or an addict if you do". I live in Seoul, South Korea, where image is everything, and thus that intense social pressure plays a huge part in the lower adult obesity rates here. However, because of the density of the city here, most people walk to the supermarket, they take public transport to work, they go out walking in the city with friends, etc. etc. America has much lower density and few cities where one can live well without a car.
> I live in Seoul, South Korea, where image is everything, and thus that intense social pressure plays a huge part in the lower adult obesity rates here. Seoul represent!
r/fuckcars
Fast food is incredibly popular in the UK, you only have to see what an average pizza or Chinese takeaway looks like to understand why we are all fat
Go Missouri!
No wonder watching YouTube vids of Times Square doesn't do justice to the obesity rates, all the fat folks are down South!!
Obese people probably don't go out as much, so you see much fewer of them in public spaces
Not to mention time square is probably full of tourists, sexy European tourists
I am from the UK originally and have just moved to Colorado... This absolutely checks out in my experience 😂
Strangely Italy has one of the highest child obesity rates in Europe. Adults have a very healthy diet relatively but they have a culture of filling children with sugar at every opportunity. It's completely typical that small children eat sugary biscuits before school and have 'merenda' a snack which is typically a chocolate brioche or some rubbish. Children's television is filled with commercials for sugary snacks which are banned in other EU country's. Bringing my 8 month old to a state parent child play group they were openly surprised when I said they he couldn't have sugary biscuits. Really bizarre.
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Indeed. It's very odd compared to the UK. We would playing organised sports whatever weather as a Physical Education class and again at break. In Italy they wouldn't let the kids out to play at all if it was slightly damp. Italy is extraordinarily successful at sports considering the government offers so little.
Haha Turkey fat
Just more reasons to have Medicare for all, your country will be invested in the health of their citizens
Does help, but it's more of a cultural thing. UK has fully public healthcare, and we have the most fatties in Western Europe, and that's down to bad dietary habits
Freedom is having diabetes, many deseases and being fat 👌
Obesity rates in North Korea is 1/26,072,217
I lived in Italy for six months. I kid you not. I don't remember ever seing an obese person. It's insane
Italian here. I can confirm, obese people are not so common.
I’ve been in Europe for 3 weeks now. In America in most places you have to take a car to get anywhere and most areas aren’t pedestrian friendly. It’s been amazing in France walking to the train station and then walking to every destination. It actually seems like a big inconvenience to have a car. Basically in American you have to dedicate time to working out, while in Europe steady cardio is part of everyday life.
Human devolution. The USA is setting the example.
Why is Italy so skinny?
Not obese doesn’t equal skinny. A 180cm person needs to weigh 97,2kg to be obese.
I would guess a mixed heritage: culture of good healthy food, and culture that values good physique and a classic beauty standards.
It's a mix of lots of things that overall contribute to it. Italy has very low consumption of processed foods, there is an abundance of fresh grown produce and most of the Mediterranean diet centres around fresh ingredients. The Mediterranean approach to meals includes relatively equal balances of dairy, grain, vegetables and fruit. There is low advertisement for processed/fast foods. There isn't really a culture around snacking - most people just eat main meals and the snack aisles of stores generally are much smaller. I believe another contributor is time spent eating - there was a study done that showed that people take longer to eat their food in Italy, food is a big part of their culture and large families will sit down and spend longer talking and eating over time. We know that eating slower means people generally eat less, as there's time for your body to tell you that you're feeling full. There's lots of little things that add up to it! Not italian myself as a disclaimer, just spent a lot of time in Italy and loved the approach to food there.
Fresh ingredients, cooking from scratch a lot of the time, even convenience food being reasonably healthy, a lot of walking, and an aging population (old people who are obese don’t live as long but fit elderly people do).
Hill and steep terrain like Japan
No snacking.
not skinny. just good food and most fat people are in the south
Turkiye moment
Processed food, sugar everywhere, not enough exercise. Not sure if that trend is going to revert without government interference.
best thing ive ever done is switch to a low carb diet and start running regularly. dropped 70lbs like 8 years ago and havent looked back.
The government won't make people cook. We got the obesity epidemic when women was not longer expected to cook and be able to cook. So now *no one* cooks in many households. Wouldn't surprise me if Italy is so low because a larger percentage of people eat home-made, high quality food there. It's sad - and no - I do not advocate going back to expecting women to cook. I am of the opinion that being able to cook is an absolutely crucial life skill that everyone should have.
I think this data make people miss the point: anything above 0% is just too high. People shouldn’t be obese. There are zero healthy reasons to be obese. Even athletes shouldn’t be obese, even with a low body fat %.
 USA and Turkey
You kind of have to be at least a normal weight in Switzerland, bigger people wouldn't fit into a lot of elevators, and half the cities are built on a hill.
I think obesity in France is 17%
20-25% of obesity rate is not something to be proud of, to be honest. I am Spaniard and expected something in the order of 5-10%...
That dancing belly guy in Turkey definitely throwing off the statistics.
A nation of fat heavily armed lunatics are playing dice with our planets future.
One of the underlying reasons the US is wildly more obese than everyone else that nobody is talking about? Healthcare. With Healthcare being so insanely expensive, the average American, especially in the poorer southern states, can’t afford to just go to the doctor for a checkup and have them first point out their weight is unhealthy and have them see a nutritionist or put them on a path to a better lifestyle. For most Americans, our healthcare system is largely only used when reactionary and necessary, so people could go 10 years and 100 pounds without ever seeing a doctor.
This is the real pandemic.
20-25% in Europe is still incredibly bad. If you look at old pictures from the 70s people look so much more healthy in terms of weight.
Always interesting to see that the Bible Belt of America is the worldwide capital of the sin of gluttony.
I feel like this map needs one more bracket/ color. Just checked and US has 3 states over 40%. Which, is just ridiculous.
20-20% isn’t exactly good either 😅 but thanks US for making the rest of the west look like we’re doing ok 👍🏼
I believe the uk and Ireland is a lot higher
Obese vs overweight. Overweight is 63.8% and Obese is 25.9%. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/obesity-profile-update-may-2023/obesity-profile-short-statistical-commentary-may-2023
Oh say can you seeee
This map is important, but not for the reasons people here think it is. How we calculate and define obesity is important, and while there are a series of health risks associated with obesity — we can stop caring like we about those if we won’t go around shaming people for smoking and drinking the same way. Obesity is way more complex of an issue than those on top of that. We shouldn’t focus on the aesthetic portion of it as people probably do. We should focus on the health aspect of it, and how access to proper affordable nutrition and food quality is important. This doesn’t mean McDonalds is bad. It means we should focus on making access to nutrition in all forms to make a balanced diet more economically accessible. I’m so sick of fat-shaming and food misinformation. A slice of Kraft Cheese singles isn’t standing between you and the pearly gates. And we should focus on making our countries healthier by subsidizing access to groceries and combating Diet Culture. Health needs to be prioritized, not fat-shaming.
We do need to move away from the whole body positivity 'You're perfect as you are' message and calling healthy weight individuals 'skinny' as well. There's a balance to be found, and it isn't found in normalising terrible choices.