> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication.
GLP-1 drugs are popular in Germany, too. Not quite to the level of some other countries but a quick search shows about 1 in 12 individuals in Germany.
Note that the US number quoted above was for households not individuals, so the numbers of households in Germany with at least one member on a GLP-1 is higher. This isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, despite attempts to turn this into another America-bad comment thread.
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.
GLP-1 drugs don’t make people stop eating processed food. They reduce food intake and cravings. It’s still up to the user to make healthy choices about what to eat.
Also it’s been about a decade since I visited family friends in Germany but there was plenty of processed food to be had when I was there, too.
>I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US.
I had the same question and did some back of the envelope math. The data I have seen says the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories, and 3600 daily calories total. That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%.
But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining), safe to say those 16% of Americans are eating 20-30% less... 20-30% times 16% = 3-5% decrease in spend.
So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet.
> The data I have seen says the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories, and 3600 daily calories total. That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%.
You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost. Unfortunately the big problem with ultra processed food is that calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods. Cutting out the cheapest items is going to reduce spending less.
> calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods
I hear this a lot but I really don't see good evidence for it. And people keep peddling stereotypes about "fast food" consumption after QSRs saw much larger price increases than grocery stores. For that matter, the UPFs are where I see people most commonly reach for overpriced name brands over the generics.
> jjk166: You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost
Give the guy some credit... No, clearly CGMthrowaway is not assuming that at all, it's purposly left out. The first sentence mentions "back of the envelope math" and makes it clear it's a rough order-of-magnitude estimate. Also it's in response to a statement about "wondering how you could get such a high impact overall". Also, also, the last sentence is "So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet."
It's perfectly fine for people to do rough estimates to understand a situation, especially in informal discussions. It not a dissertation for a Ph.D. or formal position paper.
I got some similar responses on my post above. HN discussion quality is really suffering recently. Wondering how many LLMs are involved here at this point.
The decrease in spend was at the household level, not aggregate, so it’s a 5% decrease across 16% of households, or a bit less than 1% overall.
The overall weight loss seems to be because the spending decreases most heavily in calorie dense foods like savory snacks; yogurt and fresh fruit spending goes up a bit.
> the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories
This can't possibly be true. A caloric surplus of 500cal/day adds a pound of weight per week. That'd mean in a decade of life the _average_ American would add an additional 260 pounds. In 4 decades Americans would add half a ton to their waistline, on average.
That'd mean at then end of their life the average American would die weighing over 2 tons
In excess or a normal body's caloric need, not in excess of what you need to maintain your current weight. The latter would lead to infinite growth.
Once you're 140kg, a sedentary lifestyle requires you to take something like 800 more calories as the same person with the same lifestyle at 70kg, to each maintain your weight.
So excess eating of 500 calories over what a normal bodyweight (say 70kg) needs to maintain, leads to fat people (say 110kg) who at some point stop gaining weight and stay at that fat level (of say 110kg).
Assuming a steady surplus of 500, and considering that a kg of human fat is roughly 8000kcal, it will take two weeks to gain a kilo. But a larger person consumes more to simply stay alive so the curve flattens out once a certain mass is reached.
Excess means above what your metabolism consumes. If I'm 200 pounds and my metabolism consumes 3200 calories per day, eating 3200 calories per day isn't 500 calories in excess. Same as if I'm 600 pounds and 4000 calorie metabolism. It isn't excess unless its excess.
The question is how you calculate or define excess. For one, excess calories aren't 100% stored as fat. We're not that efficient.
Additionally the fatter you are the more calories you use at rest. So there's a point where if you consistently eat too much you'll stop gaining weight.
The biggest source of error here will be the calories in the garbage bin though. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is stored in the waste disposal, not the waist disposal.
> That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%
I doubt that $ spend on the top end of caloric intake scales linearly with # of calories because of high caloric density foods.
If I spend $500 a month on groceries, lets say I need $400 to keep me alive and hygienic and the last $100 are going to be the candy and sodas that make me fat. So to give an example, reducing the caloric intake by 50% could be achieved by reducing spend by only 5% if there's very caloric foods making me fat.
> But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining)
I would not assume this. Most people remain on GLP-1 agonists after they reach their goal weight, as without it cravings return and weight starts coming back on. I would guess a substantial fraction of people on the drugs are on a maintenance dose
These calorie numbers don't make much sense to me. The typical recommendation for how much a man should eat is 2000-2800 Cal/day, and for the average woman that is 1600-2200 Cal/day, depending on age and exercise levels [0]. So if it were true that the average American ate 3600 Cal/day, they would be eating 800-2000 excess Cal, not 400-700.
Even if we assumed that average food cost/Cal is a meaningful concept, the reduction would be much higher.
You're right I seem to be referencing bad data, and the excess is probably more like 10-50 cals/day.
Whatever the figures are, what's interesting to me is the growing secular impact on an entire sector of the economy (the most stable and inelastic sector). If eating right means spending 5% less, extrapolating that across the entire sector, not just for the 16% using GLPs today, could be catastrophic
I suspect ultimately though supply will meet demand and prices may even rise for the food people are still eating
There is no direct correlation between dollars and calories though. I could spend 10 dollars on 400 calories of strawberries or 10 dollars on 4000 calories worth of cheetos. So theres no way to do that kind of math on this, really
As you gain weight, your base metabolic rate also increases. Having fat means you inherently burn more calories, even if you don’t exercise any more.
Take one person, say they eat 2000 calories to maintain bodyweight. If they start eating 2500 calories a day, they won’t gain 1lb of fat a week forever. As they gain fat, their body naturally burns more calories due to the increased body weight, and eventually a stable weight (higher than their original weight) will be reached.
So yeah if you’re eating 500 calories above your metabolic weight, you’ll theoretically gain weight forever. But in this case your metabolic rate is rising over time, so you would be eating more and more calories per day.
Fat does not raise your metabolism by a lot (relatively), and tiny changes in diet lead to massive swings in the equilibrium implied by basal metabolic rate formulas. In fact, some formulas do not include weight due to body fat. If you think about it, that fact touches on the idea that your natural weight is being maintained by another body system, one related to GLP-1.
By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.
The potential for overeating chronically has not been possible for most people, in most societies, throughout most of human history. Our current caloric abundance being available to literally everyone in Western society is something unique to the past century.
If you eat 1% fewer calories than you burn every day you will die. You will also die if you eat 1% more calories than you burn every day. Is it possible, really, to suggest that the availability of calories was 100% of the daily requirement of our ancestors, and not 99%, or 101%? That is a level of accident that exceeds belief.
It is incredible to think this precise balance could be maintained by anything other than a closed loop of biological control. How would the wheat on a medieval farm know how much to grow each season? If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died... unless they had a mechanism for satiation.
How do you think our microbial ancestors maintained internal salinity, through the limited availability of salt in the ancient ocean?
You will also die if you eat precisely the amount of calories you burn every day.
There exists something called a "feedback loop", something common in biology. You would probably find it interesting, you should look it up.
Basically, it means that if you try to chronically eat, say, 1% more calories than are burned, your body will try to burn more calories to compensate.
I'm not sure I grasp the rest of your comment, could you try again to explain? The wheat farm your ancestors worked did not provide the excess of cheap calories available to the present day American.
That is the intended conclusion of my post, that body fat is obviously regulated biologically, and suggestions that changes in obesity rates are due to the increased availability of food (implying that it was regulated by some sort of precise cycle of starvation in the past) or individual choices (implying that most people are measuring portions and keeping a running tally) are in conflict with that.
In reality there were times of excess and times of shortages far more often in past times. In times where there were plenty of items that didn't last you over consumed. By late winter you were getting lean.
>If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died...
You do realize that starvation was a massive killer in the past. Everyone didn't die, but the young, the old, and the weak sure did.
It ends up being the opposite. Rather than the body having a satiation response, it controls the metabolism.
If you've ever fasted, you've experienced this. You just don't have the energy to do much other than sit around when you are hungry.
Ancient societies realized this, it's why they'd give out calorie dense meals to their farm labor. For a serf in England, harvest time was often met with a very calorie dense meal. For roman soldiers, they had a diet of meats and cheeses.
I'd also point out that you don't need to have exactly 100% daily calorie intake. You can go a week with just 99% and catch up with 101% the next week just fine.
It's not necessarily about BMR - if you maintain a similar activity level as you gain weight, you consume more active calories as well, in almost every activity, particularly the most common ones such as walking.
This hits on something that seems to get lost in most of these "obese people are lazy fat slobs" circle jerks. A typical American gains 1 or 2 pounds per year as they age. This is not a candy problem, or a binge eating problem, this is way more subtle than that.
Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake.
Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle.
Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a small excess the effects that would lead you to regulate are much more... subtle.
Meanwhile, tracking consumption involves error bars that span a factor of 2. Go figure out how many calories are in an avocado. Is that per gram figure amortized for the weight of the pit, or is this just for the flesh?
Counting calories precisely was invented by the processed food industry.
Judging from the downvotes my observation got, you're not the only person who skipped math class. I couldn't say it any better than the comment below this one that already replied to you. 10 calories a day, expressed in candy, is two M&Ms.
> Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication.
Indeed, I do not announce it even to many people in my own circle of friends and family. Plenty of people (as you can clearly see just in this discussion) see the issue as one of morality and the get very judgy. If you use medication to help yourself become healthier, you have cheated.
Sometimes I wonder how much comes down to religion. After all, isn't gluttony one of the deadly sins?
To be honest I don't even have a single fat friend, and I'm not picking my friends on looks. I couldn't imagine anywhere close to 1/6 taking this medication.
I don't think you've eliminated the likely hypothesis that overly processed food and GLP-1 use are significantly more prevalent in America. I don't think anyone would argue that these things don't exist at all in other countries, but we can still talk about degrees.
And yet Europeans in this discussion are going out of their way to play the America Fat game without acknowledging how much fatter Europeans are than Asians.
That is certainly true. But now I feel like we need to talk about beer in America. Because as much as I love a real German beer, the variety and quality of beers we have to choose from in America is pretty astonishing. At least it seems that way in my bubble (and it certainly helps that I live in an area of the PNW that has a high per-capita number of breweries).
Yes, I still enjoy weissbier sometimes but currently mass-produced German beers can't hold a candle to all the incredible US craft breweries that popped up during the last two decades (Monkish, Other Half, Evil Twin, etc.)
For artificial problems, artificial solutions. I think the state of food in the US is really bad, and one cannot compare such products to the superior EU food quality standards and eating habits (and city designs) which render the incentives really perverse
These drugs are expensive and, at least in France, they're discussing offering them. I think this is the main reason explaining the difference in prevalence between the US and the EU.
Despite access to "superior food quality", weight issues are absolutely a problem in the EU, too. Maybe it's not at the same point as in the US, but 51% of the population of the EU (outside Ireland and Germany for some reason) are "overweight or obese" [0].
My country (Poland) is an unfortunate leader in childhood obesity (and close to the top in terms of obesity in general), but it's very easy to see why: people live very different lives than they did just 20 years ago.
There are valid counterarguments to the overweight values, a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body.
I agree, that has to do with "malbouffe" and other lifestyle choices. As for offering them that is a nice thing, but I am curious about the mechanics (mutuelles) and such of the medicine.
> a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body
This is a tired argument. Most people who have BMI in the obese range do not have one of oft-cited exceptions that make BMI an imperfect measure.
Everyone knows BMI is imperfect at this point, but the number of people who have BMI in the obesity range yet have healthy body composition is very small.
> Everyone knows BMI is imperfect at this point, ...
Indeed.
BMI is the best thing that people can readily calculate with easily available equipment (a tape measure and scales either at home, gym, pharmacy, etc) plus some relatively basic maths or sticking the numbers into a website.
Measuring body fat using calipers is better but hugely error prone. Similar for waist/height ratios. Body fat scales can be wildly inaccurate.
BVI is far superior but very few people have access to the equipment needed to measure that.
So we're kind of stuck with BMI as the best "simple" measure.
Let it be noted that I have said overweight and not obese, if you are in the obese category you are 100% unhealthy (even the bodybuilders who inject stereoirs in this category are unhealthy).
It doesn’t change the argument. Most people who have BMI in the overweight range do not have healthy weights.
I say this as someone who did enough weightlifting to be in the overweight BMI range with a low percent of body fat (no steroids involved). Trust me when I say it’s a lot of work to get there. It’s not a category that includes a lot of people or invalidates the measure.
Thank you, this is what I constantly say. For population statistics, BMI is nigh perfect, since it's much easier to gather than more accurate data points, and the number of exceptions are super small.
I know very fit people that still fall well in the BMI 20-25 range. Most around 23. You have to be very focused on natural bodybuilding for years if you want to become an outlier on BMI.
Or some combination with being super short or super tall. But this again affects a tiny minority.
It's important to note that overweight and obesity are not the same thing. Most people are overweight, and from what I've seen of modern studies, the health risk of being overweight is almost negligible.
But being obese is a higher BMI than overweight, and the bar is actually quite low. Lower than most people think. A lot of people think they're overweight, but they're not, they're obese.
> Most people are overweight, and from what I've seen of modern studies, the health risk of being overweight is almost negligible.
Health risks of being overweight are very well researched and are significant (cancer risk, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular health). If you meant the mortality, then it is also worse for overweight people when confounding for smoking and reverse causality.
> There are valid counterarguments to the overweight values, a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body
But the BMI takes into account the mass, not the size. Usually women have less lean muscle mass than men, which would mean that for a given size and weight, they'd have more fat, without influencing the BMI. I also think there's quite some leeway. My BMI is "normal" at 24, and I have a fair bit of belly fat.
Very athletic people also don't fit in the BMI tables, a dude like Schwarzenegger is probably well in the overweight category if not above because of all that lean muscle, but is also probably healthier than average. These people are extreme outliers, though. I don't think they're anywhere near 1% of the population, so you can't really argue they skew the numbers.
> As for offering them that is a nice thing, but I am curious about the mechanics (mutuelles) and such of the medicine.
It's apparently paid by the social security, but doctors are only to prescribe this when other means of controlling the weight have failed, such as adjusting nutrition.
"a dude like Schwarzenegger is probably well in the overweight category"
For illustration, Arnold was 107 kg at 1m88 at his prime, giving him a BMI of 30.3, which is clinically obese. But yeah, LOL at all these people with 130 cm waists going 'BMI is useless'.
BMI still isn't great for fat people. An active fat person is going to have a significant amount of muscle compared to a sedentary fat person at the same body weight - just doing things carrying around that weight will build muscle. Some health markers, this won't matter for - your heart doesn't like pumping blood to a 300lb body, whether that's at 50% BF or 8% - but for a lot it does. Lipids, insulin resistance, etc. are going to be quite different in someone at 40% BF vs. 20% BF at similar weights with similar genetics.
Unfortunately it's not so easy to get a good BF%. BIA scales are probably what most people have access to, either at home or at their local gym, or calipers, but both are very inaccurate at getting totals and at best can help you understand trend directions. There are places to get cheap DEXAs in a lot of cities these days, but not everywhere, and $30 each time you go is still expensive for some people.
BF% and FFMI are both a lot more useful for everyone than BMI.
I lived in Germany and Indonesia. It’s easier for me now back in the US than ever to eat healthy.
I can buy pre-chopped Cole slaw, diced peppers / onions, etc. Whole Foods is best in class (Alnatura doesn’t come close)
While to me, the layman, it seems health regulation in general in Europe is more conservative about what can be put on the body / be consumed, I think it’s mostly Americans don’t want to eat healthy. And the portion sizes here are insane (just look at the evolution dinner plate. 1960s plates at an antique sale only pass for salad plates)
There's a massive amount of junk food and ultra-processed food in grocery stores, even though (rough estimate) 50% of floorspace is "raw" food. (Fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish.)
Processed food tends to have more sugar (high fructose corn syrup) than other countries. The same brand in the US vs another country will have more sugar.
Cultural momentum: Everywhere you go there's unhealthy food.
---
Speaking from personal experience, junk food is just plan addictive and satisfying. It's not like alcohol or other drugs where you can just abstain; you gotta eat and we all get hungry.
I think there is argument to be made that the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia. I think maybe by living abroad you have adapted by default to a path (shaped by the environment) to eat more healthy.
In the US I heard there is now parity in terms of quality products, but maybe culture takes some time to adapt to such environments.
I agree that when it comes to portion size and whole foods, Europe makes it easy to follow by example. FWIW, I ate healthy in the US before because I rock climbed and needed to maintain a very lean mass. If I wanted to cut weight in Indonesia, it was easy: just eat their portion size, and I'd come in below maintenance.
What I've seen consistently amongst the non-healthy eating Americans is that they argue:
1. Dieting requires them to be hard on themselves and they're focusing on self-love, which they struggle with
2. They deserve a daily treat. They look forward to it, it brings meaning, etc
3. The taste of their food is super important to them, such that they can't imagine repetitively eating (meal-prep) or eating cleanly (no added sugar, monitoring sodium)
Here's some advice on all 3, and I don't even ask you to buy my supplements :)
1. Practicing a healthy diet is self-love
2. A daily treat is not what breaks your diet. Have _a piece_ of chocolate, sweets or snacks now and then. If you (still) lack the self-control to not eat the whole package, help yourself out by repackaging in daily-compatible portions. Meaning is not gained by consuming anyway.
3. Taste preferences are in big parts a matter of habit. Also prepping doesn't necessitate you eat the same thing for a week. You can freeze a lot of things for longer and thaw them in a mixed manner.
Imo the issue is that people seem to lack a combination of knowledge, time to prep or motivation. Lack of knowledge could be solved with information campaigns, lack of time/motivation is a consequence of people having to spend so much of their time doing a dayjob just to get by, embedded in a culture that puts no value on thriving humans.
> 3. The taste of their food is super important to them, such that they can't imagine repetitively eating (meal-prep) or eating cleanly (no added sugar, monitoring sodium)
They're saying this without irony? Or by "important" do they mean "the way I like it"?
In North America there are a lot of "food deserts" especially in poorer neighbourhoods. "Healthy" foods become a class marker. Distribution of higher quality food is through more upscale grocery stores.
Same goes for walkability in neighbourhoods. To live in a place that has transit accessibility, green grocer and bakery you can walk to -- that's not possible for the vast majority of North Americans because it exists only in urban areas that have gentrified beyond the reach of most people.
When I moved to Toronto in the mid-90s it was possible for a middle-income earner to rent or live in a home adjacent to some of the corridors in the city that offer this (e.g. Roncesvalles/High-Park, Spadina/Chinatown, College&Clinton, etc) and you could see a higher diversity of people living near the stores and in the neighbourhoods off them. As a person in my early 20s making not very much money, I could make it work. That is now no longer possible, the city has become a wealthy fortress. I imagine the same for parts of Brooklyn&NYC, Chicago, SF, Vancouver etc.
The food deserts thing gets tired. It's a social media trope at this point. I lived in poorer neighborhoods growing up, and those who wanted to eat healthy made it happen. It just took more work, which is the point. Corner stores that stocked fresh fruits and veggies would just have them rot on the shelves due to no one purchasing them. It's consumer preference.
Almost nowhere in the US walks to go to the grocery store. Exceedingly small portions of major cities. Where I live in Chicago is quite walkable, but the vast majority of my neighbors load up the car for the vast majority of their shopping trips. There are pockets of course, but they are rare.
My neighborhood also happens to be much more fit than the national average - obesity is somewhat rare to see. The correlation is with wealth. Why there is such a correlation is much more interesting, and it likely is not as simple as people want to believe.
Same goes for the poor inner ring suburbs where I lived in my 20's in a different state. Very high rates of obesity. In the rich outer suburbs obesity levels were visibly less.
It's far cheaper to meal prep and make your own food from base ingredients. It doesn't need to be fancy. When I grew up poor (working class) this is how we made it work. By buying staples in bulk and buying other items opportunistically on sale. We didn't even own a car for most of that time - and the nearest grocery store was at least 3 miles away. It simply wasn't an option to exist off of junk food since it was too expensive.
Eating junk is easier and more convenient. It feels good in the immediate moment and is low-effort. It's the default, and the environment around you encourages it. Add in lack of any peer pressure and it being normalized by those around you and I believe that explains nearly everything. Lack of walkability certainly hurts, but it's not a primary driver anywhere I've lived.
> the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia
My theory is that in US compared to Europe, you are going to need the path of least resistance more often. If you are working two part-time jobs with variable hours and schedules to make ends meet, then you are going to reach for the easy & fast food options. Whereas if you have the stability of 40 hour work weeks, regular schedule and social safety nets - regardless of the total income - then you have the time and mental energy to eat healthier.
Another data point for here. Not from the USA, I find the ingredients pretty good and we cook a lot at home, and we avoid anything super packaged, so yes, you could claim Americans don’t have a culture of eating appropriately
Tons of Americans want to eat healthy but don't have the energy/time/access. It's easy to cook healthy for yourself if you're single, have a good work/life balance, and have a grocery store nearby. There are a lot of Americans who eat fast food on the go because it's their only option (or they haven't been educated on how to get healthy food quickly). Others have lives where job and family responsibilities sap so much energy that by dinner time ordering a pizza is pretty tempting.
If you start looking around at the world you will likely start to notice an inverse correlation between those with “little free time due to working three jobs” and the amount of junk they feed their families.
Turns out that if you care enough and have the work ethic to grind out that sort of living to better your family, you also tend to care what kind of foods they eat.
There are of course seasons in everyone’s lives - but this observation has held generally true no matter the demographic or geographic location I’ve lived around.
I was obese - there is no intended judgement here for folks who struggle with it. I did for the better part of my adult life. The social tropes are simply unhelpful.
Consumer preference is a scapegoat. You can also make nicotine-free cigarettes, and people have tried, but they just don't sell. Of course consumers prefer the stuff that feels better. They have to.
The abundance of "fat free" and "low fat" products. A huge increase of "protein heavy" and "low calory/sugar" products.
All these tell that people do have a preference towards buying healthy stuff, given the choice. It's not their fault that they have been misled by the media/scientists in some of those cases.
Goodluck getting a healthy salad delivered outside of a major metropolitan area. In my city of a quarter million (not huge, not small) the options are pretty much limited to two or three places that only offer high caloric salads
Yes, and the reason is that few people want them.
There isn't a cabal conspiracy to forgo the profits from offering healthy options. They just dont sell.
This is no joke. I picked up a 3 pound package of garden variety 80/20 ground beef last week and it was over $20. Maybe I just don't buy it often enough to notice, but that seems far higher than even a few months ago. I would have expected to buy a modest cut of steak for that price.
First, pre-cut isn't that much more expensive. Second, cutting is an accessibility thing now? A kitchen knife and 5 minute YouTube video should have anyone being to chop/dice without much trouble. And once they learn they will only get faster/better at it allowing them to use whole veggies adding more variety.
Yes, it's a boon esp. for old people who live alone, have mobility or sight issues, and don't trust themselves to hold a knife. It's also a convenience thing, but as you said, the general population can cut things just fine and won't suffer much without it; which isn't the case for this growing demographic.
Whole Foods fresh vegetables prices are comparable to elsewhere, same with some dairy. However, everything else carries a premium and for budget minded people you need to avoid it.
The pre-chopped coleslaw mix is like 3 bucks for a huge bag. 1 pound of pre-sliced frozen peppers I think is $2. Some of it depends on where you’re shopping, I’m sure this stuff would be 50-100% more at Whole Foods the next town over.
My issue with organic stores in Germany is that they offer the exact same stuff you can get in a regular supermarket, just smaller, less flavorful and more expensive. My pet theory is that a lot of people here just don't really enjoy food, so when they have kids or simply some extra disposable income, their idea of "eating better" would be to have the same bland plate of spaghetti, just with organic pasta and organic sauce.
Organic tends to have more variability in quality. So sometimes you get really good stuff, sometimes you get really bad stuff. I’ve read that pesticides penetrate a quarter inch into most foods so there’s no way to wash them off. Given that, I try not to buy non-organic food to keep my son from getting a lot of pesticide exposure.
Whole Foods isn’t the only store providing vegetables or pre-cut vegetables.
Even my local Walmart has pre-cut vegetables.
It’s not an affordability issue either. It’s cheaper to buy the same number of calories from vegetables, fruits, and legumes than meat right now. Meat prices are unusually high and it doesn’t seem to be slowing consumption.
My consumption of beef is way down because of the cost. I'm almost exclusively buying poultry and pork now for meat. Occasionally I'll get something like a top round or flank cut if it's on sale.
Well, corn and potatoes are indeed vegetables, so there's that. And I think the only person who ever said ketchup was a vegetable with a straight face was Ronald Reagan 40 or 45 years ago.
"Eat your vegetables. They're good for you." shouldn't mean dipping your fries in ketchup. But that is what happens if you call corn and potatoes as vegetables.
Cause and effect is backward. The locations indicate where people are buying it. And cheap doesn't really add up either because if somebody wants the cheapest possible calories they would be buying rice, flour/pasta, potato...
I don't know why the problem is shied away from. It is because people are addicted to fast food and to their sedentary lifestyles. It's not the price or availability of good food, not the first order effect anyway.
You'll never be able to force "whole foods" sellers into unprofitable places and if you did by some miracle, you'll never be able to force people to buy it no matter how much money you gave them. Vegetables and grains and basics could be free and many obese food addicts will go buy a burger from a drive thru.
Cooking good food takes time. I can slap some pre-made burgers in a pan, throw some buns in a toaster and have a "meal" in 10 minutes. I can stop by fast food on the way and have the same meal (at only slightly more cost) in 5 minutes.
I typically spend more than an hour in the kitchen cooking every day, and then there is half an hour clean up after my family is done eating. I eat much better and healthier food, but it takes time. (If I'm having noodles I'm making them from scratch myself - I could save some time buy less of things like that and the cost wouldn't be much different if any - but even then the whole meal takes time).
I grew up in a poor neighborhood. Busy doing what, exactly?
This comment is so out of touch it must be a joke right? At least I hope so.
Far more time was spent in front of the TV than any other activity by far by my peers and their families. Moving to a more middle class area opened my eyes in how many other options people had to do with their time, and how much time and effort was spent maintaining their lifestyles.
Well, uh, working. The less you make per hour of work means the more hours you need to maintain a normal standard of living. Obviously there's variance in standards of living, but wealthier people don't typically work two or three jobs. Poor people do, I've met people who do. The reality is that at 12 dollars an hour, 40 hours is just not gonna cut it.
And it's a little more complicated than even just that. Another reality is that, at 12 bucks an hour, nobody is going to be giving you a steady 40 hours. You need extra shifts for buffers, and your shifts will be shorter.
Sure, working 50 hours a week across 7 days isn't technically more than 50 across 5 days. But it does certainly drain your will to live a lot more, from what I've seen.
Poor obese people aren't working so much they don't have time to cook.
And using numbers to support that idea doesn't work, it actually goes against you. A small (much smaller than most obese people will eat in one sitting) fast food meal costs about an hour of minimum wage! Buying stable calories in cereals where the time to buy and cook them can be amortized into many more servings can be amortized is actually cheaper and also takes less time.
In the US, obesity rates rise as income drops, but it continues to rise beyond the point at which income drops below a full time federal minimum wage income.
It's over-eating and under-exercising. I know this is hard for certain ideologies to accept because it means obesity is not inflicted upon victims against their will and beyond their control. If you really need to minimize their agency and responsibility for their choices you can call it addiction to food and addiction to sedentary lifestyle if it helps.
Fast food almost always takes longer than that unless you can literally drive through while driving home from work.
Also, you're comparing making noodles from scratch to a typical meal. I can do an asian style chicken/veggie/rice meal in < 30 minutes and have the kitchen mostly cleaned by the time the rice is done.
i said on the way for fast food. Since those places are eherywhere it is likely you can find one on the way when you were going and so the time cost to go is zero.
i agree you canecook faster than I normally do - a lot of meals benefit from simmering while the flavors blend.
Or you slap the burgers in a pan and serve it with some broccoli, and sliced fresh red peppers or other other quick healthy sides and have a balanced meal. The bun, fries and soda are the unhealthy part of a burger, anyways (assuming it's good quality meat).
This does not address what I wrote though because it is not what I was arguing against.
I agree part of the reason people buy junk food and fast food rather than "whole food" is because the real or perceived effort required to turn it into something they will eat. Or they don't know how to make things that can compete on taste and satisfy their food addiction like those fast foods. It's not because they are time-poor either. They are just addicted to this sedentary "lazy" lifestyle. 30 minute drive to get fast food and eat it while watching TV or tiktok for the next hour or so beats making food and cleaning up for an hour.
Plenty of ways to automate the kitchen and also cook fast and easy meals. I can spend 20 minutes on the kitchen and have food for a week. 2-3 minutes of reheating per meal
When it seems like a lot of people don't want to do something that is obviously good for them but, instead, opt for things they know kill them slowly, that probably means addiction is somewhere in the mix.
lol, Alnatura is the worst. I’d prefer any Netto, Späti, or even the small shops in a gas station, anytime. Alnatura is a para-religious “anthroposophical” shop and everything you buy has low quality due to adverse selection and is overpriced by 3x
A consequence of universal healthcare that people don't talk about much is that it turns unhealthy citizens from an individual cost into more of a collective one. So it makes sense that countries with universal healthcare regulate in favor of their citizens as opposed to their food industry, because they're paying for the consequences more directly.
Not that this affects the political calculus (where perception may as well be reality), but the cost burden specific to universal healthcare is actually opposite this intuition.
Things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism all kill you before you can get too old. Healthy citizens end up using far more of the far more expensive end-of-life care, to the point where it outweighs the extra healthcare the unhealthy citizens use in their youth.
This (French) study [0] published in 2023 on data from 2019 calculates that the costs from legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, including higher helthcare spend during the life of smokers/drinkers, are still higher than revenue from unspent money on pensions and taxes, and cost of healthy person living years.
This is both an argument in favor of universal healthcare, and my favorite argument for why the US should not implement it without first changing a whole array of perverse incentives.
Indeed, I would caution pretty much everyone else in the world (except maybe Asians, but even then) to be circumspect when taunting Americans for their obesity rates. Germany, to use an example from this discussion, has been going up steadily for decades. Doesn't seem like this is a US-specfic problem or something that Europe has a good answer for.
Europe is just lagging behind. There's not that much difference between the US and Europe. Europe just has more history and culture which makes the changes less extreme.
Demolition Man said Taco Bell would be fine dining by 2032, they might be on schedule. (It also said they'd be just about the last restaurant left, though.)
I started a GLP-1 in October. I've been eating healthy and exercising for a decade, but I was still in the obese category and blood sugar tests indicated I was at the edge of pre-diabetes. If I pushed hard on calorie reduction or exercise, I could gain 10-20% improvement, but it seemed like that would always reverse itself when I'd hit an injury or got sick. I'm hitting my mid-40s and decided it was time for a drastic change. I could have continued yo-yo dieting or opt for a solution that gets me to a healthy BMI within a year.
I gained a lot of weight during puberty, coupled with a less healthy diet in my youth. I suspect many folks are in the same boat - by the time they realize they need to eat/exercise, it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.
In four months on a GLP-1, I've dropped about 18kg and since I coupled resistance training, I've increased on various strength parameters. The sudden reduction in weight has benefited my activity level substantially. There tends to be two classes of folks - those who need to stay on this drug forever and those who don't - I'm hoping in the end I fall into the don't, but I'm going to let the data from my continuous glucose monitor decide that.
I highly recommend the book "Ozempic Revolution" if you're considering the pros/cons of this path.
> it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.
I do want to be clear to anyone reading: there is no "too late". One's system does not become somehow damaged at some cliff of weight and eating habits. It doesn't become irreparably meaningfully physically more difficult to lose weight. What can happen is a shift in many systems that effectively make one feel hungry all the time and psychologically react very strongly to those hunger cues, which makes people eat more. Outside rare circumstances, if you eat less, you will lose weight. I do have a lot of compassion for the psychological side of things being extremely difficult, though.
Sorry - I think there's complexity with insulin at play that you're overlooking. When I did caloric restriction, I was constantly battling hypoglycemic events that made me not want to exercise. I don't get that with the GLP-1s. In online discussions, people tend to conflate GLP-1 with appetite suppressants - but there's also insulin stabilization that occurs.
Exercise to the extent that obese people will do usually does not a very sizable impact on weight compared to the effect of proper diet, and weight loss is very achievable with zero exercise.
My dad was in a similar situation a couple months ago. He has been very obese for decades, which started after he stopped smoking. He does not eat fast food, has long ago cut out sugar and he favors whole foods in his diet. It was getting a shock blood sugar result and diabetes warning that pushed him to take Mounjaro (similar to Ozempic) that actually cut his weight down.
In his own words, what he noted as being the main contributor to his obesity was the moment to moment urges to just eat something (I empathize with that a lot - I'm also obese). Losing that desire made sticking to good portions and fixed calorie intake windows much easier. He has lost ~50kg of weight in the last year and now walks and bicycles around everywhere for hours every day.
Wdym you were eating healthy for a decade and still obese? How does that work. A diet where you eat to obesity isn't healthy.
And how did surpressing your hunger via GLP-1 drugs (a pure change to a more healthy diet for you) lead to big changes, if you apparently already had such a healthy diet.
Seems to me your diet was unhealthy for a decade and now isn't.
Think of it this way - once you're in a state of obesity, resolving that situation is quite difficult. Eating healthy may not be enough, particularly if there are other metabolic issues going on.
The imbalance of fat to muscle leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance gets in the way of weight loss. After a long time of trying other means, I decided to directly tackle the insulin resistance problem. And it's been the only thing that's worked.
Agreed, but thermodynamics (calorie in/out) still holds. If you actually eat healthy (say 2500 calories), you will lose weight if you're obese and need >3000 to maintain weight, period.
Sustaining that healthy diet is harder insulin resistance, agreed!
But you said you ate healthy for a decade. To me that's not eating obesity-maintenance level amounts of otherwise healthy foods, but rather eating healthy foods at a normal (say 2500 kcal daily) amount.
In other words, under your statement the behavioral impact of insulin resistance was already overcome, you were eating properly, and still didn't lose weight. And that's just not conform the science, which states that you lose weight even with high insulin resistance, as long as you're eating healthy (i.e. in a caloric deficit vis-a-vis obesity level maintenance).
I am 47, Czech, slightly overweight (183 cm / 87 kg at the beginning), but with a lot of this fat concentrating on my belly. I don't eat horrible processed food and I exercise quite a lot, but I still wasn't satisfied, so I decided to try Mounjaro on the lowest dose (2,5 mg).
I don't think that I told anyone in my friend circle, so if you were my friend, you would not know.
4 kg down in 2 months, effortlessly, plus many metabolic parameters improved. My blood results are now similar to what I had when I was half that age.
What is more interesting is the general feeling of being better. Something subtle shifted in my overall bodily feeling, in a positive direction. I am more optimistic, sleep better, I like to go to the gym more. They opened a brand new gym right next to where I live and I didn't omit a single day since January 2, because I enjoy it.
It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us. Even in my grandparents generation of family had issues as well, and they were all blue collar manual workers that lived before processed foods.
This is not to say you are wrong. The food supply in the US is not healthy. The bad news is that the same greed that destroyed our food will find ways to get around the ways GLP-1s work.
I am not sure the genetic angle but there definitely is something happening at a craving level in the way the mind is responding.
On the flip side I don’t think your comment holds much weight either. A large portion of the population worked trade jobs and the access junk food was a lot less prevalent. You kind of have a good recipe for unhealthy population now. Low quality foods and less activity.
I have access to the same food as everyone else, I also have craving as everyone else, but as hairless monkeys we evolved a brain able to bypass instant rewards for future goals.
My step dad was obese and blamed everything and everyone but himself. We installed an app to count calories on his ipad, he lost 1/3rd of his bodyweight in less than a year and he's now cruising at an healthy weight, it really isn't rocket science
People who look for excuse will always find something, it's genetics, today is a cheat day, today was a bad day, I'm not feeling good, I crave chocolate, #healthyatallsizes, &c. people who stop making excuses get out of the hole surprisingly fast
How could you possibly know that? You don't even know how your brain works, let alone how other people's brains work.
I can drink alcohol and be perfectly fine, but a lot of people can't, because they're alcoholics. Similarly, Ive met people who have tried to smoke but couldn't pick it up, meanwhile for me it will be a lifelong, every day, struggle.
The mind is complex, have some humility. You are not necessarily a beacon of purity by your own doing.
This is a pretty massive assumption that your "craving level" is the same as everyone else. This takes a complex process (the feedback from the body to the brain on feelings of hunger, satiety, etc.) and pretends that it is a simple A-B thing. Just for type 1 diabetics, their insulin levels have a huge effect on feelings of hunger, with hyperphagia (feelings of insatiable hunger) being common. Diabetes is just an extreme example of the spectrum of how individual bodies regulate insulin, and insulin is just one hormone effecting and effected by food.
No, it was probably the incredible advances in everyday automation combined with massive increases in food availability. Survival is not nearly as physically demanding today as it was in the middle of last century.
It's almost like the difference in the way ultra processed foods are digested, absorbed, and the way hormones are released in response has something to do with that. It's almost like this is a biological process. It's almost like the brain is an organ and if its hormones and chemicals are messed with, that can have health implications. Or maybe it just "don't be lazy".
The obesity rate in the US tripled in 45 years... so clearly it's not about genetics or cravings. People had the same genetics, cravings and access to calories in 1980 USA as today, we're not talking 1580 here.
Yeah right, I'm obviously an elite genetical specimen and 75% of people are simply dumb animals with insane amount of cravings I cannot even begin to comprehend. And these people didn't exist 45 years ago.
Feel free to guide me to the literature explaining these phenomenons, it seems extremely interesting, I'm especially interested in knowing how the genetics of 3/4th of the population somehow converged to this "uncontrollable cravings" pattern over two generations
I'm not talking to you about obesity. I'm talking to you about the idiotic statement that you have insight into the qualia of other people. Everything else you're saying is irrelevant, I'm not trying to explain all obesity or whatever by appealing to cravings, I'm saying you're an idiot if you think you have insight into qualia.
No, that's still really dumb. For example, maybe we always had radically divergent populations with regards to cravings but limited access to food. It's so easy to come up with situations to account for.
And again, you can not say your cravings are the same as others. I'm not going to explain qualia to you.
You are blinded by your experiences. I don’t think it’s as clear as “stop making excuses”. Obviously there is a healthy portion that is probably this but I do believe there is a borderline if not full blown addiction that happens where people are not able to put it out of their thoughts.
I don’t think we fully understand why but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s a real problem. After all there is a reason that glp1 show efficacy with other addictions.
Accountability is important and I even think there is a healthy level of social shaming to be made, we should not be normalizing obesity. But I also realize that there is something at play that’s more than simply excuses.
What if some people's hunger is louder than others? What if your expended willpower to not overeat is a lot less than what is required by others?
I ask these as that is what the GLP-1's are showing. They change the hunger feeling and it might just be that you and others got lucky with a lower hunger feeling than others. There is no objective measure of food noise, but I think we all need to be open to the possibility that the food noise is different for different people and its not all willpower or laziness.
They still have a brain capable of complex thoughts and should be able to prioritise long term health over short term pleasures.
Again I don't really care, I managed to help people around me following this dead simple recipe, if you want to make excuses for yourself or others go ahead and suffer. Suffering from obesity is much harder on the body and soul than "suffering" from skipping a snack or counting calories
I'm convinced it is but you can't help people who don't want to be helped. People who want to be helped get out of the problem in a matter of months.
Fix your shit, it's much better than taking pills for life to fix your obesity, which is arguably the very last link of a long chain of problems. Eat clean, exercise, understand that food is fuel, understand how the fuel is used, learn discipline, learn timing, learn to recognise good and bad fuels... pills won't do any of this, and being skinny won't bring health if you don't do/learn the things I just enumerated. Obese people need a complete lifestyle overall, not pills. No amount of pills will help if they keep everything else the same, and if they implement the changes they don't need the pills to begin with
I have done that multiple times in the past but there came a point where I couldn't "white knuckle" my diet any more. GLP-1 has really helped a much better quality of life - lower cravings for food and alcohol, meaning that I am losing weight and feeling cheerful instead of gritting my teeth.
We have decades of experience telling people to exercise more and eat better. If telling people those things worked, we would know by now. It doesn't. This is not in any way new.
Ah yes, the ever popular "they are just lazy or weak willed" rhetoric. Obesity is a disease just like addictions are. But I'm sure another round of "just try harder" pep talks and motivation posters will solve everything. Maybe stop for a moment and realize your perspective is narrow.
Because genetics alone aren't enough, you also have to have opportunity.
If you don't have enough food, no one is going to be fat. If you have plenty of food availability, then certain people are going to have genetics that make it more likely they end up fat.
Vast numbers of these 'lean and healthy people' were suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies. Pellagra (generally caused by eating nothing but corn) wasn't really knocked out until around WWII, for example.
Genetic differences can exist and not be meaningful if the situation doesn't allow for them to be meaningfully expressed.
We know that people just have different metabolisms, different levels of hunger response, different levels of "food noise," etc.
We see obesity rates raising in nearly every country across the world as economic power and access to ultra-palatable hyper-calorie dense food increases. This is universal across the developed world with very few exemptions - Japan seems to largely be immune, but Korea and other portions of Asia aren't.
The growth curves look very similar, despite many of these cultures across the world putting even more emphasis on discipline and responsibility than America, things that in theory directly align with being more responsible about diet. If genetics weren't involved and it was all willpower (and where does the capacity for willpower come from? Is there no genetic component to it?) we wouldn't see these growth trends be so similar to America and each other.
Obesity rate more than tripled since the 80s (1980s), people had already access to more than enough food to become obese in 1980 USA, so this alone doesn't explain much
There's negligible "genetic" difference between German and American gastrointestinal systems. No DNA mutations occurred in your grandparents that caused all of their children and children's children to be overweight.
There may be cultural or behavioral issues - attitudes and habits around cooking, expectations of what a meal includes or does not include, taste preferences on what's too sweet or too fatty, etc - but it's not genetic.
>> It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us.
It's not genetic, this is just your family refusing to take responsibility for their own eating habits. The proof is people who have bariatric surgery so that they can't eat as much, and people on GLP 1 drugs so they aren't hungry. Both groups lose weight. It's not your genes, it's the fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food). As an overeater myself, knowing this does not help reduce intake... People have to make changes and stop blaming genetics, or thyroid (there are drugs for that too) or whatever it is they think is beyond their control.
> fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food)
I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes five years ago. I radically changed my diet to a hard keto diet with a cap of 50g of net carbohydrate per day (carbs - fiber = net carbs). My caloric intake quadrupled due to fats being high calorie. My weight dropped by 48 pounds. In every measurement, I'm healthier despite being older. My diet is also expensive and difficult:
Most foods in the us are high in carbohydrate. Cereals, added sugars, fake sugar free (sugar alcohol instead of sugar), and foods that have lots of integrated carbs... sandwiches, tortillas, etc. There's a huge preference for bad foods baked into the culture. It's hard to eat well. So culture is as much of a problem as any other factor.
You're assuming something they didn't say. Genetics might mean a poorer response to GLP1, or a poorer metabolic response to specific hormones, or how we observe that people with ADHD have poorer eating habits, or if you're genetically smaller then your metabolism may be smaller, blah blah blah. There are many genetic factors that obviously impact weight.
We know that alcoholism is genetic, addition is genetic, etc, and those are just tiny subsets of problems that genetics are involved in.
"So it makes you feel fuller without adding calories, like GLP-1 drugs"
Nobody really knows how GLP-1 agonists work, but given the other effects (e.g. insulin stability, change in other addictive behaviours etc.) it's definitely not just this.
What are you talking about?? Meat contains no fiber. The primary fiber source is plant-based foods (e.g., vegetables). So modern populations eating lots of meat means they're getting little to no fiber.
Why is it insane? You sound like someone who says to depressed people “just be happy”.
I’m on tirzepatide but not for obesity. It completely cures my life long IBS. These are miracle drugs imo and should be as cheap and widely available as possible.
The part of the population that deals better with our food system want to feel morally superior.
While I am in that part, I realize that having a fairly balanced feeling of hunger is just as much of a privilege as needing glasses to see is a disadvantage. Certainly some people just say fuck it and ballon to 200kg but a lot are just unhappy at 90kg in what should be a 65kg body being hungry every day and still overweight.
Yes if they ate only carrots and Brokkoli they would probably solve their weight problem but it is a hard ask to make in a world that looks like ours. Makes alcoholism look like child’s play since you cannot just abstain from food
When talking about ADHD medication, a doctor asked me why someone would choose not to wear glasses if they could see well with them.
There are some flaws with this argument, but I keep it in mind when I feel like others are "cheating" by getting a good trait that I was born with. We should not insist on people getting things the hard way.
>It improves quality of life, health, reduces risk when surgery is needed,
And as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, needs to be taken forever as the vast majority of patients regain most or all of the weight they lose after taking GLP-1s.
>Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?
Red herring. My account was not created today, I’ve participated in numerous other threads prior to this one, and it’s irrelevant to the content of my comment.
Oh well. I'll be taking my omeprazole medication for the rest of my life, too. Sometimes the body has a chronic issue that needs lifetime management, frequently with medication. Only with GLP1 does this suddenly seem like a moral issue for some.
Yeah, I'll be taking minoxidil for my hair forever. And zyrtec for my allergies forever. So it goes. "What if you get lost in a cave system for 30 years? What then?" I guess I'll lose my hair and be sneezing a lot, and gain weight. So it goes. Until then, it doesn't really bother me.
Why is it that people can't seem to grasp that the brain is just as biological as the kidney or pancreas? If your pancreas isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, of course we need to treat that. But if the brain isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, then obviously its willpower or laziness or whatever.
Literally no one is saying overweight people are magically defying the laws of physics. Managing weight involves the brain, and the brain is a biological organ that is affected by genetics and the chemical and hormonal signals from other organs in the body. this moralizing about using a drug to lose weight being wrong or lazy or cheating or whatever is no different than people saying depressed people need to just stop being sad or ADHD people need to just pay attention.
The solipsistic idea that because your brain has the ability to do X means that everyone must work the exact same way, therefore if my brain is able to do something everyone else must too. If I can sit down and focus, ADHD must just be lazy and choosing not to. If my feelings of hunger are mild and easy to moderate, overweight people must just be weak willed and gluttonous.
To frame this as trying to argue for basic thermodynamics is such a strawman that my pet crow flew out the window in fear. If you think fat people are lazy and refuse to use willpower, and using a drug is a lazy substitute for mental willpower, then say so and have an honest discussion.
I think it's a bit more popular outside the US than you make it out to be. As an anecdote, I know a handful of people on it in Denmark - and that's despite the local Danish price being higher than the German one and Denmark having notably lower obesity and diabetes rates than Germany.
I imagine you'll find that people of certain lifestyles tend to cluster together a bit, with those with more active lifestyles and healthy diets likely to have their friends and family be of active lifestyles and healthy diets, and in turn less likely to be in need of such drugs. Lifestyle changes are difficult to implement by nature.
Although, the term "processed food" is awful as it covers so many unrelated things. The problem is ultra-addictive, ultra-high glycemic index foods consumed in large amounts partly due to their addictive qualities - a quality some processed foods have.
For reference, Danish sausage sandwich toppings are highly processed foods, but it won't drive anyone to obesity or diabetes. Elevated blood pressure, perhaps. Junk takeaway, candy and sugary cereals on the other hand...
Foods, full stop, is easy to modify. More generally, a producer can arbitrary control any product composition according to their own goals.
Nothing to do with "processed foods" in general, despite a good portion of the affected foods being under that label. It's simply a matter of malicious companies combined with unknowing, unempowered consumers.
By trying to single out something as massively generic as "processed foods", you're just making it easy for companies to avoid the problem: Using and manipulating official definitions to be removed from it as a "solution", justifying the whole thing in the basis of numerous good things being in the same category, drawing attention to other foods in the same category that are more commonly associated with the term despite theirs being way worse, etc.
If you want to fix the problem, you need to attack the problem. That is not processing - it is addiction and glycemic value. Going for the underlying attributes means you cannot redefine your way out of it, and gives consumers a better chance to learn what to actually avoid.
An astonishing number of people are type two diabetic in this country due to poor health and poor access to healthcare. But glp1 is covered as a diabetic treatment so a tremendous number of folks can get it at a reasonable cost.
I was curious for a UK comparison so I looked it up.
At the start of 2025, about 3% of adults in UK had used GLP-1 drugs in past year in the UK. And "most GLP-1 for weight loss in the UK is from private, rather than NHS provision" [1].
I assume that translates to it being really hard to get in the NHS so people are resorting to buying it themselves. I wonder what the percentage would be if it was easy to get from the NHS?
UK numbers are always interesting because the NHS leans conservative about access to many types of care and medication.
For another example, rates of COVID-19 vaccination are significantly lower in the UK not because people there don’t want vaccines, but because the NHS only makes them narrowly available to people above a certain age or with a strict set of conditions.
I am not American, but I think you are unfairly dismissing the massive benefits GLP-1s have for people who struggle to maintain a healthy diet. It really feels like a miracle drug.
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.
Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant
I think you are misreading the comment you are replying to:
> Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant
It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US (and other countries like Canada)? This is the insanity they are talking about, not the users of the medication.
If you look at the increase in overweight and obesity rates in Germany over the last 50 years, it’s clear that far more of the population “needs” GLP-1 than is using it. The rate of use will almost certainly increase dramatically.
> It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US
Aside from whether the local healthcare coverage will pay for it, and the rate of GLP1 usage probably being proportional to the obesity rate, what is the basis for assuming there is disproportionately fewer people in Germany using these medications? Most people don't announce it.
American here who lived in Germany for 3 years and now Scandinavia. Its what makes up the food. Most of the food served in America cant be served in the EU. Its straight up poison designed to make you addicted to it.
Couple that with a very car centric lifestyle and yea. Its not great.
You seem to be misreading his comment. Some guy making some observation biased comment is irrelevant. It's flat out wrong that Germans 'need' it less. The obesity curve in Europe trails that of the US a generation or two, yes (and several Asian ones trail it more). But the numbers and trends don't lie.
True, but what would sanctioning producers do? I think it's not even the availability of fresh products in the supermarket, but the willingness of customers to prepare food themselves? I agree it's postmodern funny that you need to continually buy something (a medicine) to not buy somethings (fast food) that are bad for you. I've got co-workers who only eat out. Guess what? What I think are salt and fat related health issues. Sugar, salt and fat are too easy and too nice not to be everywhere.
We used to make baby food ourselves. That was like twenty portions of baby food in ten minutes, for pretty much no cost (all basis fresh staples are pretty much free: fresh carrots, potatoes, rice, onions, pumpkin). Chop some vegetables and perhaps add little leftover meat, steam it, blend it, freeze it. Philips had a great machine for that. But we were somewhat 'out there' here too. Most people give babies food from glass pots. Then I see [1]. Got healthy teens now who eat pretty much everything. We still cook most of the stuff ourselves, although time constraints are a bit harder now than a decade ago.
Same as for walking. That is the most basic instrument for health. But if you cannot go out for a good walk because your environment is car only, what can you do? You can sanction the car makers for not making us walk. But that's a bit silly? (You are not saying that, trying to make an analogy with the food producers.) I'm blessed with lots of forests nearby, with separate paths for walking, cycling, MTB-ing and horseriding. Going outdoors is trivial here.
Point I'm trying to make is that an unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle is a lot of factors working combined. That's why international comparisons are so hard (or impossible). I think the 'Boulder, Colorado'-lifestyle is comparable with my local EU-lifestyle. But all environments are different on many vectors.
Unless I've been horribly misled, it is the whole world that has very steadily increasing obesity rates. Framing this as a US problem is deluding yourself.
Food is addictive because all animals including humans are by our very genes instructed to be addicted to it. Even the most healthy food is addictive. Just like water and air is addictive.
I don't think "addictive" is the right term, but we have an evolutionary imperative towards eating to excess when there is food in excess, which wasn't maladaptive until recently.
I’d advise folks to consider a) the relationship between poverty, stress, and obesity Nd b) the income inequality of the United States relative to Germany
You cited poverty as a reason but then switched to income inequality as the statistic.
When citing poverty, simply look at poverty rates, not a different statistic. Income inequality is higher in countries with higher incomes, like the United States.
Regardless, obesity is not limited to people in poverty.
Absolutely. The American way of life traps people in a zoo. There is nothing to do other than work (if you are lucky), eat, and consume junk media. For ones who are poor the only difference is the degree to which the food is also junk.
This is patently false -- there is plenty to do besides consume junk media; the fact that our population is addicted to the dopamine associated with short-form video doesn't mean that there aren't other options.
I've made a concerted effort to consume less "junk media" in the last couple of years. In that time I've gotten an Amateur radio licence, I've built a couple of keyboards and speakers, I've started golfing (after a 20 year hiatus), I've learned to bake bread (from scratch, including grinding wheat!), I've read a lot of novels, and I'm happier for all of it.
Everyone has to work -- this is not unique to the United States. But outside of that, eating and living healthier is absolutely possible, it just takes some effort.
No, I want to tell that parent to spend the hour they use scrolling TikTok to do literally anything else, it'll improve their life. I understand my experience is not typical, but there are many things besides "junk media" that are not cost prohibitive.
it really doesnt have to be golf though lol. its all just excuses. i worked minimum wage (actual minimum mind you, no tips, nothing) for about 7 years and i didn't get obese, must be magic.
my hobbies included waking and running around, making stuff on an old laptop (I kept that one!), reading, making planes out of whatever material i could get my hands on that sort of stuff. i ate pasta, eggs, rice, water, tomatos. i never cared about eating the same thing everyday (i still don't but ive learned to eat a little better).
theres plenty more hobbies, obviously none of these being forbidden in the USA lol. and most make more money than I did, not to mention have food stamps and the like.
JFC you do understand that not everyone in America is a software engineer like you who is well compensated and has a proper work/life balance? There are tons of people in America that are just ground into the dirt day in day out with no end in sight. Have some empathy.
Sure, i'm not arguing against that. What I'm arguing against is the statement "there's nothing to do but eat and consume junk media"; That's simply not true, there is plenty to do, and a lot of it is not cost prohibitive.
I wish I could see you try to tell this to my father when he was working manual labor. I'd pay money.
Manual labor which was so grueling that he had sue his company in order to retire early because he could literally no longer walk and required surgery to remove the extreme bowing in his legs.
You could come in, look at the latest Creosote burns on his skin, and tell him that something-- anything! --would be better than watching an hour of Football.
And, while you're at it, you could try to convince him that smoking's bad too.
Another commenter twisting my words -- I'm not saying your father shouldn't be allowed to watch football. I'm saying he has other options, and he's not railroaded into only watching football.
Also, he should probably quit smoking (unclear if it's too late for that, if so I'm sorry)
I live in the US. If those numbers are true, then it seems likely that I know at least one person on it. I however don't know that I know someone one it, since people (at least in the US) don't usually announce "Hi everybody, I'm taking weight loss drugs." Being overweight is seen as shameful, and losing weight through any means other than diet and exercise is an admission of failure.
The best part is feeling the judgement from someone who thinks taking GLP1s is a moral failure when they are carrying an extra 50+ pounds themselves. I have met many people who seem to believe that being fat is actually the higher moral ground than using medication to help solve it. And these are religious people, too! Don't they know about gluttony?
Obesity is not evenly distributed by age or demographic. If you're a relatively young person in the workforce, you probably don't know such people. But it is true that obesity is much less prevalent in most of Europe. Even the places with less "healthy" diets, suprisingly.
> But it is true that obesity is much less prevalent in most of Europe
Let's put this into perspective. On average, the US has about twice the obesity rate as Europe (though in both cases there is a fairly wide variation regionally). And Europe has 4 or 5 times the obesity rate of Japan. So relatively speaking, Europe is not in a position to argue that their regulations or lifestyles are the answer.
That'd be a BMI of 47. There isn't a lot of statistical data for such high BMIs, but [1] lists prevalence of BMI>40. In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011, in the US it was 5.6% and 9.7% respectively in 2016. That's nearly four times as many as in Germany.
Most of the industrialized west is following very similar growth curves here to the US. America just got their first. Even Asia isn't immune - Korea has been following similar trends, as have parts of southeast asia, etc.
I suspect the prevalence of GLP-1 class drugs will halt this trend before the rest of the world catches up, but without them or similar drugs, I would have bet that 50 years form now much of the rest of the world would look just like America
Which has to be a pure coincidence, since the reported numbers are relative to population size. We could conclude that there are 4x4=16 times as many people with such high BMIs in the US, but that is not that useful
In my (obviously anecdotal) experience, that’s not who the primary GLP1 user is.
It’s the suburban mom (or dad sometimes) who wants help losing a little weight. Instead of being 300lbs like your example, she’s 160lbs and wants to be 140lbs.
6’1” 230 wanting 210 without having a third bike injury for it. 40 doesn’t heal like 20, turn your head wrong and you are in pain for a month. It sucks.
The morbidly obese people I know fall into two camps:
Those that still want to reduce their weight: All of them are on GLP-1s now (and losing weight!)
Those that had totally given up: They had long since stopped attempting anything to reduce their weight
I suspect that the larger you are, the more likely you are to fall into that second category - getting to 300+ lb involves a certain level of accepting defeat to begin with.
I really feel like this is just about the circle you are in. How many 300lb people do you know? 16% of the country is on GLP-1's as of mid 2024, Im sure its higher now. Every single massively overweight person I know has at least tried GLP-1s
We all drive to where we’re going we do not walk or bike daily like most Europeans do. When in Europe for my ten day trips I always come back five to ten pounds lighter.
Myself I count calories (1500 to 1800 a day for middle aged dude) and lol drive to do my daily five mile walks on a rail trail.
Foods here if ur lazy and just buy whatever indeed are lasted with preservatives but you can put some effort into ur health to maintain a European look :)
Most Europeans do not bike daily. Most drive cars where they need to go. You are not losing 5 to 10 pounds in 10 days (unless you are dehydrating yourself). 5 pounds would be a 17,500 calorie deficit or 1,750 per day. The base metabolism for a male is around 1800 calories. That means that you'd be eating 1/10th of a banana every day to get that type of loss. For me a century bike ride (100 miles with 5,000ft of climbing) consumes about 2,900 calories. Are you doing century bike rides every day while only eating 1,200 calories while in Europe?
I'm someone whose weight easily oscillates by 2kg (1kg up/down from my average trend line), and it took a while to accept only the trend line over several weeks matters.
So you did your math but I know me (50 5'11 maintain 175 pounds and under) and weigh myself daily/count calories/exercise a few times a week. If I see my weight go over 175 pounds I eat less calories and do more exercise.
I was in Europe in April for ten days and same amount of time in December. As noted I weigh myself daily and each time I came back i was 169 pounds and maintained my weight to under 175 for awhile the 1st time and not so long 2nd time (Christmas).
Because you are on vacation. That’s why you walk. Europe is much bigger than Amsterdam and Berlin. People drive everywhere here too. You should look up average steps per day by country and you will see the difference between the US and European countries is practically inconsequential, especially taking into account how few calories walking burns.
in europe there is a social stigma around GLP-1 drugs, a lot of people considered it cheating and lazy, so a lot of people don't dare talk about their usage
I read this online, I don't know where it was, so I can't give a source, it probably was on twitter:
"People really want these things - exercise, weight - to be important moral objectives for others, when they're not that important in the grand scheme of things. Now you'll just have to find another easy visual marker for ranking people by moral superiority."
I would imagine we'll see a greater emphasis on muscularity. Already 'skinny fat' has long been a pejorative for slim people that hadn't 'earned' it (whatever 'it' is). Like just about everything, supply and demand will determine desirability. In a world where no-one is overweight being slim is no longer a desirable differentiator.
The social stigma in Europe exists, because these drugs are in limited supply. So, if a person who does not really need them is using them, the people who actually need them to stay alive might have difficulty accessing them.
I think it's somewhat related. The French social security site has a page asking phamacists to make sure the prescriptions are correct, in order to guarantee availability to people who actually need this [0].
This sounds pretty much like the supply is somewhat limited for whatever reason.
Mounjaro is the tirzepatide equivalent to Ozempic (semaglutide) in that it’s prescribed for type 2 diabetes. Wegovy (semaglutide) and Zepbound (tirzepatide) are prescribed for obesity. Otherwise you’re spot on.
you can just order them to your home on any of the websites selling GLP-1. Stop the propaganda inferring that the public healthcare is bad and doesn't allow people to get their medicine.
This is not exactly correct. The fda approved named items require a prescription. However from the shortage years ago compounding pharmacies were allowed to sell alternative versions. Basically they add a B vitamin to the normal drug and boom non prescription GLP1.
With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.
Honestly it’s just because people who use them are considered to be weak minded and lazy. That’s all, the supply doesn’t matter.
We have been able to diet for millions of years, our body is pretty good at it, but some people NEED that to diet. Yeah, just like some people can’t be put to work. Everyone know that kind of people who are a burden on society and themselves.
It just happens that this drug is more available in the USA, but with the same availability in Europe, I bet there would be around the same percentage of user.
You also forget it is expensive and in many cases not taking charge by the respective healthcare autority of the country, so it leads to less consumption.
I've known several users of GLP1's. None ever paid more than $600/mo for them once the "patient assistance" programs started, and even in the very earliest days the prices I heard were never more than about $1100 if paid in cash.
So, while they are very expensive, your understanding is not reflective of the situation on the ground.
Yeah, Zepbound is $499 now. Out of reach of many, but an improvement from $549 last year.
The terms and conditions are confusing. You can only use the half-off coupon they provide if you have prescription drug insurance. Even if insurance doesn't cover it, they still require the processing pharmacy to check that you have some sort of valid insurance and only process the coupon if so. If you fall into that bucket, it's $1200 or something. (Had to pay that amount one month because Amazon Pharmacy was very confused about my gender marker changing on my insurance. Many, many support tickets later, and it got fixed.)
There is also some price difference between the autoinjector and the single-use vial + provide your own needle and syringe. I haven't looked into that because it's the same with the coupon, but if you can't get the coupon to work, it's an option to just inject it yourself. Honestly I prefer not using the autoinjectors (I inject other medications), but it's the path of least resistance.
Finally, the coupon claims it only works for 7 fills, but I've been taking the medication for a couple years and all my fills have been covered. I don't really understand it. I have a feeling that I'm the only person in the world that read the fine print, including the pharmacies and manufacturer :/
And its for life. Unless you are doing it for Instagram only... "The Insta Diet" as it is called also.. When the diet finishes, you will gain the fat instantly also (just as with any diet obviously).
In Austria I have noticed a massive social stigma. I think that's embarrassing and backwards. As someone who is very athletic and takes nothing extraordinary besides creatine and whey protein I fully support anyone who wants to become healthier, with or without medication.
In my experience this is not healthy. People who had problems with weight are very quickly losing excess weight and displaying a range of symptoms related to that including sunken and starved looking faces and significant loss of lean muscle mass. Changes made to the face with rapid weight loss may become permanent and especially for older people the loss of lean muscle mass can become a major health problem. Sudden extreme changes in body composition are often neither healthy nor stable.
There might be health problems associated with these drugs but they need to be compared to the next best option. I think for a lot of people on these drugs the next best option is continuing the status quo which has a lot of negative health outcomes as well.
> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
It's my understanding in the EU that it's generally harder to get. Generic GPL-1s in the US are pretty easy to get shipped direct with very little doctor interaction.
I don't know a single person on it either (USA), but it's not exactly something that people talk about. I am naturally quite thin, as is the rest of my family, but there's certainly no shortage of hefty people here.
It’s not just hefty people. Swimsuit season is a thing. A interesting metric would be gym memberships during the run up to summer. I expect they will be going down over time.
It’s not just the processed foods. It’s the sedentary lifestyle. US cities are so car centric that actually getting a minimal baseline of healthy activity requires working into one’s schedule. When I lived in Japan, everything is so walkable/bikable that it makes a significant difference in the base activity level of average individual. I imagine Europe is similar.
I'm in the US and have a large friend circle across multiple states (from having moved for work over the years) and also do not know one single person using them. However my friends tend to be quite active.
The Added Sugars (that's how they are listed on labels in the US) are _insanely_ and insidiously pervasive in US food. it's truly nefarious.
A close family member and myself are both on them. They get very upset if I ever mention them using them while I happily tell anyone about myself. Wanting to lose weight is shameful to many.
Wait for swimsuit season and I have a feeling your even active friends might start without telling anyone.
There are vast differences in obesity rates between rural and urban areas, and red states vs blue states. Someone in San Francisco California is going to see a lot less obesity than someone in Plano Texas. I’m sure it is similar in Europe, with the caveat that Europeans are healthier than Americans in general.
16% is a huge number. Really hope this doesn't end up being one of those cases where a hidden negative isn't known until years later because that's a really large chunk of the population that would be impacted. That said, lots of people do seem to be getting a better life now because of the drugs.
Indeed, aside from online, where I don't feel consequences from admitting it, very few people know I've taken a GLP1. None of their business, and I don't need to waste seconds of my finite lifespan nurturing their need to feel morally superior. Let everyone worry about their own problems, I'll worry about mine. And I wish they were all as easily solved with GLP1s...
I'm quite open about my usage in real life because I want to be honest about how I achieved my weight loss - I'll also show some pride in all of the lifestyle changes I made, but I don't hesitate to mention the GLP-1 use and impact it has had. I'm not ashamed of it and if me being open helps normalize it, all the better.
But most people on the internet that I speak to that are on them have had specifically negative encounters from people learning - lots of moralizing, lots of denigration. A whole lot of them now specifically don't bring it up unless explicitly asked.
That's not how these drugs work. Think of it in terms of there being a programmable neural network in the gut (and associated brain I/O areas). This network is designed to get the animal to eat appropriately. But food makers figured out ways (by thousands of years of machine learning) to tweak its weights such that it tells the animal to eat too much. GLP-1 works by un-tweaking those weights (not quite: more like it clamps some of the inputs to the network but the result is the same). So it does indeed work by stopping the consumer from eating as much.
The overall food quality in Germany is significantly higher than in the US. Visit an Aldi or Lidl in Germany, then visit one in the US; night and day difference in food quality.
You can tell Germany cares for its population via food regulation and from what's offered; whereas, it's a toxic trash heap in America solved with drugs or paying a higher premium for healthier items. The healthier items in America should be a baseline instead of pricing out people. Feels like Americans are paying for a premium upfront or downstream via pharmaceutical/healthcare solutions.
Probably 95% of Germans live 15min from an Aldi. There are no Dollar General food wastes because the country is much denser and poor people have access to much better public transport
True. Population density differs by about 2.5x, and the US has some truly depopulated areas that essentially don't exist on the European contintent.
Although, rural Americans are also used to driving longer distances than rural Germans. I would venture that a 30-40 minute trip is not thought of as significant, especially if only done 1-2 times per week.
Rural grocery shopping (real food, not snacks), is typically done at Walmart or a smaller grocery brand or independent. For quick errands, DG does get a lot of it. You're starting to see grocery store logistics push in to what were traditionally gas-and-convenience-store corners, including Aldi, so the commutes for groceries are getting shorter.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the US with the price war over GLP-1 weight loss pills. Unlike Ozempic injections, they're going to penetrate into low income and rural households.
This is one of the major reasons why Americans are stuck with expensive private healthcare that never gets talked about. People who are used treating their insurance as an all-you-can eat buffet will feel like their health coverage is getting worse under a socialized healthcare system that is pressured to keep costs down. No government is going to foot the bill for a costly drug under patent when they can do perfectly fine with cheaper older generics a fraction of the price.
Americans (and increasingly us Europeans) are pigs.
The society is built to sit in a chair 8h, get in your car and drive 1h home and sit in a chair. Then repeat.
Also "eating 3 meals a day"
I eat 3 full meals, I blow up like a balloon. I don't get it. It's like they have to constantly eat. When I was a teen or in my 20s yes. Now in my 30s its game over.
It is also the way society, public transport, cities are designed.
I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?
>> I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?
I had a business trip to Germany (from the US) and found it enlightening. We all went out to eat after work one night and a couple of the local Germans had to walk 20 minutes from the restaurant to the train station to go home and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a big deal to walk, but you'd never do that here in the US - or at least in Michigan where we have no real public transportation.
I eat one meal a day for as far as I can remember. Fatties love to tell me it's unhealthy, my doctor hasn't figure out yet though so I imagine it really isn't that unhealthy.
Eating three meals a day is a very very very recent thing if you account for human history, or even modern human history
180cm, 75kg, leanish, I optimise for rock climbing and do kettlebell workouts 2 to 3 times a week. I do close to the bare minimum of what is available to stay in decent shape, it takes me less than 4 hours a week total. Not counting the time I save cooking/eating
mhm! i do pretty well portioned 3 meals. small breakfast, small lunch, average sized dinner. i really like just grazing all day, eat a cracker or two, have a yogurt, have some chips etc. id honestly say im snacking a good bit whenever i feel like it. but exactly, portion and contents. im a pretty lean 150lbs
You can't out excercise a bad diet.
You can hit the weights for 2 hours straight every day and eat those calories back with a single bad dietary choice (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).
Diet is important, but if you think that a handful of peanuts is leading to your issues I'd first task writing down _everything_ you touch to eat.
IMO, especially when one has snacks fully stocked, it's easy to 'forget' that you ate something.
One big breakthrough for me was reading Arnold S. "encyclopedia of body building". There's a lot of physiological tips and also very practical advice.
I'm sure you can get it from anywhere, but for me this was a big change. Sizing the reps, the workouts, the weights helped a lot in trying to make progress. Additionally endomorphic bodies need different excercise and I was doing too much ineffective cardio for months with few results.
My experience, in my mid 30s, has been that I slim down pretty damn quick when I'm able to run 10k 3-4 times a week. Unfortunately, due to my knees and my childcare responsibilities that's "not anymore". More generally, anytime I've trained for performance at anything other than pure powerlifting (climbing, kickboxing, cycling), my experience has been that my weight more or less falls in line.
It's not like I live off McDonald's or anything. But I'll be overweight, change only my exercise habits, and notice big changes in body comp on the timescale of a couple months.
So clearly I'm out-exercising my evidently-bad diet.
IDK. Maybe it's different with this kind of functional exercise vs 30 minutes on the elliptical or whatever.
OP isn't saying peanuts are a poor source of nutrition. OP is saying a few peanuts are calorically dense and it is easy to consume hundreds of calories through seemingly inconsequential amounts of snacks and drinks.
Calories isn't everything, there is a lot more focus these days on how different foods affect metabolic hormones affecting satiety, blood sugar, etc. On those metrics, fat alone (which account for most of the calories in peanuts) is very satiating and does not trigger a later blood sugar drop (which causes cravings). That's why people on a diet drink 'bulletproof coffee' (coffee with butter in it), because it is extremely filling while not making you hungry later.
Depends on what your entire diet is. If you are eating only peanuts - or anything else - that is bad. If you eat a handful of peanuts once in a while that is fine. Even a cookie every few weeks is fine, but 6 cookies a day every day would be bad. Someplace in between is generally a good place to be.
I'm assuming of course that you are "normal". If you are allergic to peanuts they are of course worse than a cookie. If you are diabetic cookies are bad.
It's not that it doesn't work. It's not the primary tool for weight management. Gym is great for strength, muscle, cardio, and general fitness, but weight management is mostly about counting calories that go in. The calories that you burn are a function of your metabolism first and to a lesser extent the amount of exercise you do. The exercise side of things is < 500 kcal for most people per day.
If I go for a 10k, I burn ~1100 calories (I'm a big dude). I can eat that deficit no problem, hell, I was able to maintain my weight during my marathon training last summer.
It's always a balance, there's always nuance, and there's no one single solution.
Overeating doesn’t just happen in a bubble - there is a confluence of issues creating anxiety and stress in Americans’s daily lives leading to the obesity issue.
I agree with this take too. Culture influences it but I don’t think anyone can be singled out being immune. We are stressed and overworked. Simple food takes work. We no longer have a village. If you have kids so many are just stuck at home.
I compare it to my childhood which was a while ago but not that far and I would go out in the middle of the day with instructions to come back home before dark. I would be running all over town on my bicycle. Now parents in the US are obsessing over travel sports and keeping booked calendars for their kids. Both parents will be working. There is nobody around put a meal together.
Eh, the drugs work. A great many people in the US struggle with weight despite shifting to high quality foods, fad diets, exercise etc. I'd honestly attribute the root cause to high general stress levels in daily life.
There are so many things going on in the US impacting our health. Nobody's been more passionate about fixing it than RFK Jr but there are so many entrenched financial interests it's a long road.
Completely different demographics, too. USA has large sub-Saharan African and Hispanic populations, which seem to have higher rates of obesity and so forth. Ethnically, Germany is probably majority North-African, Middle Eastern and Central European. Genetics plays a big part.
Nothing surprising for me. Unless you're in the top percentiles in terms of self-discipline, becoming obese is usually a one-way road. GLP-1 is a lazy solution for a problem that primarily stems from laziness.
"Lazy" is a pejorative term, which makes your comment sound denigrating to users of GLP-1s. If that is your intent, then your issue with people using medicine to help them avoid diabetes and heart disease is that....it's too easy?
So what? Why does that bother you? Is the (European) hatred towards your fellow brothers and sisters so strong that you prefer them to be chronically unhealthy, when there is a solution for them?
idk about them but to me people who don't value their own life and well being to that point are repulsive to me. Such a lack of discipline and self esteem, if you can't even control what you put in your mouth what can you even control? Why even bother if all you're capable of doing is mindless consumption? What can I trust you with if you can't even be trusted with yourself?
Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system when they're obese and still a major strain when we have to put them on drugs for the rest of their lives because the drugs will never fix their willpower and only temporarily fix the symptoms
We should also obviously send 90% of food industry CEOs for a life long retreat in a dark cell somewhere underground because they clearly are part of the problem. I understand some people have legit health issue making them more prone to being overweight but these people don't even account for 10% of the total.
I hope one day you'll realize how easy it is to be judgmental on the internet and think of people you don't know as somehow less than human. If you think people who "can't control what you put in your mouth" are incapable of self control, you should see the amount of self control it took me not to post the things I wanted to post about you. Try to have more empathy and compassion in your life.
> Try to have more empathy and compassion in your life.
My position is way more empathetic than the other side who think people are dumb beasts or cattle who can't do anything about their conditions and need external magic pills to save them from themselves
People are cable of recreating themselves and digging themselves out of holes, sometimes even to later become greatly admirable.
An Ozempic cure might be just the right push needed for someone to start a healthy cycle, which then has massive beneficial effects in all aspects of life for that person, as well as for others.
> Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system
Except for victims of crime, you cannot point to a single adult receiving healthcare services, who is not to blame for "burdening the system". Whether that is obesity as you mention, or chronic injuries, or sports injuries, or traffic accidents, work accidents, any disease spread by virus or bacteria, and so on. All of those could be avoidable, and the patient is solely to blame for that and for "burdening the system".
Europeans generally have the perspective that people are born a certain way and cannot change. That's why it is a continent with immense hatred against the rich and successful, because those are considered inherited statuses, something you get from estates and serfs. That's why so much focus in European politics is to ease out differences instead of striving for success. And naturally, that's why Europeans are (the only people in the world) against Ozempic. Because it's seen as helping people who are inherently bad to cheat on their discipline and gain benefits they don't "deserve". Not as a first step to a great new life for the individual.
Just look at the angry European hackers censoring and [dead]ing the other guy's comment below mine, where an already admirable individual used this medicine for great personal health benefits.
> Except for victims of crime, you cannot point to a single adult receiving healthcare services, who is not to blame for "burdening the system". Whether that is obesity as you mention, or chronic injuries, or sports injuries, or traffic accidents, work accidents, any disease spread by virus or bacteria, and so on. All of those could be avoidable, and the patient is solely to blame for that and for "burdening the system".
Some are way more avoidable, and much more of a burden (cig, alcohol, obesity, &c.). Nobody's upset at old people who get the flu and use an ICU bed. But if you're 40, smoking, obese and get the flu imho you're ripping what you sow and I won't be crying for your demise.
> Europeans bla bla bla
If you want to go into caricature I could tell you Americans are trying to recreate Matrix style pods, for them it would be paradise, you could go from birth to death without any single inconvenience. All of your problems come from over consumption... of foods, of medicine, of tech, and you keep piling more on top of it thinking the next layer will solve the previous layer's consequences.
I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US.
In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.