Alternate title: the graph that broke HN's brain. You'll notice that 1) sugar consumption peaked around Y2K and declined after 2) the decline was driven by a decline in consumption of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (the most vilified sugar) specifically, and 3) the average American now consumes about as much added sugar as the average American did in 1970--yet their waistlines are not remotely comparable.
Technically the graph is of per capita added sugar availability and isn't adjusted for loss (due to spoilage, plate waste, etc.), but it meshes with NHANES survey data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9434277/
>In conclusion, over the 18 year time span, from 2001 to 2018, added sugars intake declined significantly among younger adults (19–50 years) in the U.S., regardless of race and ethnicity (i.e., similar for Black and White individuals), income level, physical activity level or body weight status, and declines were mainly due to reductions in added sugars intake from sweetened beverages (primarily soft drinks and fruit drinks). These trends coincide with the evolving emphasis in the DGA on reducing added sugars intake and the increasing focus on population-level interventions aimed at reducing intakes.
> Alternate title: the graph that broke HN's brain.
It breaks my brain, but on the "Holy hell, that's a TON of extra calories for the entire population to be consuming."
That graph shows almost 30 pounds of sugar consumption differential between 1970 and 2000. That's roughly 15 pounds of bodyweight per year every year in calories. That's a HUGE amount of body fat packed on that has to be explicitly removed.
In addition, even in 2020, there's a difference of somewhere between 5 to 10 pounds of sugar consumption relative to 1970 which is roughly 2.5-5 lbs of extra body fat every year. That's 4-8% more calories consumed by the population every year. That's a LOT.
If there is no corresponding decrease in caloric consumption in some other category (remember: there was a big anti-fat push which switched everything to turbo amounts of sugar) then it's no wonder there is an obesity problem in the US.
Side note: my favorite anecdata on this is iced tea in Austin, TX. In the early 1990s, the default iced tea serving was a 32oz glass of unsweetend iced tea. When I came back in the late 2010s, the default is now a 16oz glass of sweet tea which is actually a hyper dose of sugar. Think of the gigantic amount of extra calories that people eating out are now consuming.
Every time there is some discussion about weight here, somebody will come with the whole "there is no good or bad food, calories in/out is the only thing that matters" argument. And while technically correct it's also overly symplistic. The whole point about "bad" (processed) foods is that they make it very easy to take in a lot of calories without feeling sated.
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
Anyone who says only calories matter should try tracking their calories, then eating processed food one day, unprocessed the next. If you stick to the same total calories, you’ll be very hungry the first day.
Obvious answer to this is that if you create overly simple model of human body so that you can apply the easiest law available without thinking, then you are not trying to deduce off laws of physics.
Some people are hungry all the time regardless, so it doesn’t matter that much whether you’re hungry after you ate healthy unprocessed foods, or hungry after you ate sugary junk food.
I do think there’s a difference, though, between processed and unprocessed foods. My guess is that your body can extract more of the calories from highly processed foods than it can from unprocessed foods, or that extracting the calories from unprocessed foods takes more work, burning calories in itself.
I'd rather say that the cause of weight gain is excess calories, the cause of weight loss is a calorie deficit. To achieve a change in weight requires a change in calorie intake. How one can achieve that calorie intake is obviously more complicated than just changing calorie intake, because hunger is extremely difficult to ignore.
The goal is changing weight. The immediate means is to change calorie intake. The hard problem is that doing so requires changing hunger, and we don't have a good (safe, cheap, widely available) way to do so.
CICO is necessary to understanding, but is not sufficient. Any proposed solution that doesn't address hunger is bound to fail.
It's more like cars. Different engines have different efficiencies. So filling up a few gallons at the pump will get you less pollution per mile on car A than in car B.
But regardless of the efficiency, if you overfill the tank and the fuel starts to spill on the pavement, that is not going into the milage but straight into the pollution bracket.
The idea that intake is irrelevant is just as ridiculous as the idea that everyone's metabolism is an exact clone.
I stopped drinking fruit juice when, randomly, one day I stopped and thought about how many oranges it takes to make an 8oz. glass of orange juice (and no one drinks 8oz. at a time, it's usually more like 12 or more). And though, "There's no WAY I would ever eat that many oranges in one sitting."
It's not how many calories you put in your mouth and swallow though. It's how many calories get taken in through your digestion system. Gut microbiome likely has an effect on that as well as a few other things.
If I overeat for one meal, then I won't have much appetite for the next. How satiated I feel immediately after eating doesn't matter much, it averages out over time.
One thing that distinguishes me from my obese family is a lifetime of for the most part getting the doctor recommended amount of exercise.
Regardless of how many calories I burn with exercise, I am also training my metabolism.
My metabolism includes feelings of hunger and satiation, as well as cravings for particular foods. It is plenty capable of going out of whack for all kinds of reasons, but my best tool for bringing my metabolism back to a healthy place is a spate of vigorous exercise, and I've relied on that.
If my metabolism were conditioned to be in an unhealthy place over a long period of time then I would have an uphill battle ahead of me to correct it, and I believe many people are stuck in such a situation.
One observation is a growing class divide between the fat and the fit that saw a sharp uptick over the pandemic. Our culture unfortunately is very poor at accommodating healthy activity and getting poorer. Conversely, the national parks the last 2 years summers were mobbed with people who found healthier lifestyle practices during their downtime and were out to challenge themselves.
Fascinating. Japan's caloric intake per capita has declined since the peak in the early 90s. No wonder everybody here is so lean. I'm always shocked when I step off the plane in Germany or the US at how fat everybody is.
Fat taxes. [1] The Western world is/was adopting a fat acceptance mindset, at the same time Japan decided to start fining businesses and governmental regions for having overweight workers/residents.
Fat acceptance? Turn on any form of broadcast media and you are going to be inundated with products/lifestyles/coaching on how you can lose weight to get the body you want.
Random web hit claims 89% of American women are unhappy with their weight[0]
I think capitialism/consumerism have a "double speaking" nature. They want you to believe it's okay to be fat so you buy more food than you need, then they want you to believe it's not okay so they can sell you weight-loss products.
The amazing part is that it works: humans are capable to believe two contradicting things at the same time.
That data is calorie supply, not consumption. It could be true that Japanese consume just as much as ever, but waste slightly less food than they used to.
Fair - and accurate anecdotally. Food waste is something that is way more avoided. Also, portions in restaurants are about 30% the size compared to the US, so a lot of food waste is avoided.
The point is the added calories aren't coming from sugar, contrary to what everyone here thinks. And even if sugar did somehow magically make you fat regardless of calories, sugar consumption has actually gone down, yet the obesity and diabetes epidemics have only gotten worse.
But, body weight increase is going to correspond to the "area under the graph" (the integral) and NOT the current level (the instantaneous value).
Yes, it's nice that we're getting sugar consumption back down to 1970 levels so we don't keep adding more obese people to the cohort, but that doesn't help everybody who gained weight prior to 2020.
From 1995 to 2005, people ate roughly an extra 10 pounds relative to 1970 of bodyweight in sugar every single year. That's an extra 100 pounds in bodyweight over 10 years if you don't adjust something else. That's huge. Literally.
Actually, there is significant research that shows that childhood obesity is an excellent predictor of adulthood obesity. Because sugar drinks made it so easy to take in way too many calories for children and hence became overweight, we now have a big cohort of adults with weight problems.
> Actually, there is significant research that shows that childhood obesity is an excellent predictor of adulthood obesity.
Fact.
> Because sugar drinks made it so easy to take in way too many calories for children and hence became overweight, we now have a big cohort of adults with weight problems.
Once you become a young adult, from that point on the total number of fat cells is conserved. Even liposuction will not change that.
This isn't completely hopeless, though. Fat cells "remember" the weight you are when they are created and fat cells turn over roughly 25% per year. However, it does mean that you need to hold your weight down for 3+ years for new fat cells to forget about the "fatter" you.
Per the data, caloric supply dropped after/during the great recession (2007-2008) to the levels of about 10-20 years prior. Did obesity drop during this period, too?
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
1. It dropped to like ‘97 level which was already too high
2. Pretty sure calorie intake is not uniformly distributed so if avg dropped bc some folks went from 5000kcal to 4000kcal a day it’s not going to reduce overall obesity rate
Calories absorbed vs calories expended is physics, but it doesn't explain why people are storing more calories over time.
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
Dietary fat is even more easily stored as fat, since it doesn't require the added step of de novo lipogenesis (DNL) like carbohydrate does, or the added steps of gluconeogenesis + DNL as protein does. And go look up recent photos of Lustig: he's fat (bordering on obese) himself.
>Robert Lustig: I carry a few extra pounds and I’m not happy about it. I don’t eat sugar.
>Alec Baldwin: You don’t.
>Robert Lustig: No. I have dessert twice a year. When I’m in New York I have a piece of Junior’s cheesecake and when I’m in New Orleans I have bread pudding -
Notice his twice yearly dessert sugar indulgences are high in fat.
> If dietary fat is more easily stored as fat,
You seriously believe your body preferentially uses de novo lipogenesis to convert carbohydrate to fat (which entails some energy loss) rather than just storing fat as fat? DNL on a typical mixed macro diet is rare, to the point that something like 90% of your bodyfat came from fat you ate, and the fatty acid profile of your body mirrors that of your diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12324287/
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
I'm not saying overeating carbs won't make you fat, but arguing that it somehow makes you fatter, calorie-for-calorie, than fat is ridiculous considering that eventually your body runs out of fat and has to use DNL (which is inefficient), and that fats require the least energy for your body to digest of any macro.
> why do keto diets work?
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets. They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass, i.e., water, glycogen, and probably at least some lean body mass (muscle and bone density). See the graph on p. 4 of Kevin Hall's NIH study comparing the diets:
Notice his twice yearly dessert sugar indulgences are high in fat.
If it was only twice a year why would it matter at all? He also might drink alchohol, but the point he was making was not that you can't get fat unless you eat sugar, it was to explain the systemic rise of obesity.
These two things are completely different.
You seriously believe
I don't 'seriously believe' anything, I was just asking for evidence, which seems to make you upset. Your link also doesn't back up what you are saying, it is only says "Adipose tissue is a suitable biomarker of dietary fatty acid intake"
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
Says who? This is another claim you aren't backing up.
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets.
You should tell that to thousands of people that post non stop about their 50-150 pound weight losses while exclusively doing keto diets.
Also you seem to be saying a high fat diet and low fat diet work the same, but then you're also trying to say that fat is treated differently by your body.
* They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass,*
Anyone who looks at a keto forum like /r/keto can see that that isn't true. People slim down to half their weight, that isn't 'water and glycogen'.
Calories are equivalent to joules. Diesel fuel has lots of calories, but you probably won't get fat drinking it. (The human body can't process diesel fuel.)
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
What is the expected effect here? Are you saying you can’t gain extra weight by consuming alcohol? Well that is simply not true - you just haven’t applied yourself enough
Note that some artificial sweeteners produce an insulin response like sugar - which leads to calories converted to fat.
Also, I wonder about fiber and other carbohydrates. Fiber moderates carbohydrates of all types and prevents glucose spikes (and crashes). and other processed carbs/starches can be very similar to simple sugars - breads, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereals, etc.
Did a ctrl+f on this page to see if anyone had mentioned fiber. Absence of fiber is probably the key characteristic of "ultra" processed food. Foods with fiber are lower in calories, take longer to eat, increase satiety, and moderate glucose response. People are looking all over for scapegoats ("plastics!"), but fiber barely gets any attention.
But yes[0], while metabolic pathways have been identified where artificial sweeteners certainly could cause insulin issues, RCT's have failed to find this effect expressed in vivo.
Artificial sweeteners do cause notable changes in gut biomes, and the effects of that are unknown.
Right, but for the purposes here, it's probably enough to say that several artificial sweeteners are unexpectedly bioactive. As such they perhaps are doing things that are undesirable.
> the average American now consumes about as much added sugar as the average American did in 1970--yet their waistlines are not remotely comparable.
But people don't become obese overnight. People ate much more sugar in 2000-2010, and those people, if not dead now, are still contributing to the obese rate today.
Also this graph shows people are still eating more sugar in 2021 than in 1970. Just not as much as in 2000.
No one says sugar is the only reason causing obesity. But this graph doesn't debunk the correlation between sugar and obsesity either.
I sometimes ponder how quickly we are descending into Wall-E. I spend so much of my life in front of a screen, I have to force myself to get a baseline amount of daily physical activity.
Now it is entirely possible to spend the entire workday having barely taken any steps or physical exertion.
One possibility: we have been collecting learning to use our feet less throughout life.
"In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011)."
The amount of calories burnt through exercise is completely negligible. For instance running a mile at a good pace will generally burn around 100 calories, the same as you get from eating about one banana, or about drinking about half a bottle of Coke.
Exercise does have many positive metabolic and other benefits, but not anywhere enough to be a causal explanation on its own. If people started walking 5 miles a day, every day, not only would there still almost certainly be a widespread and growing obesity epidemic, but there's even an argument that it could be worse. Increases in activity tend to drive increases in hunger which will typically surpass caloric deficits if somebody is not actively controlling their diet, in which case they would not be fat in the first place.
This is made even worse by misleading advertising which will do things like showing fit athletes drinking Gatorade, Coke, etc during their training or competition. And somebody goes and does a couple of miles on a training bike and does the same thing - which is going to send their net caloric input skyrocketing.
I can regulate my weight by doing sports regularly or not with zero conscious attempts to change what I eat. And yes, non sports like taking daily walks have measurable effects too on me.
People who stop doing sports suddenly gain weight. People who get into sports habit like running or swimming slowly loose weight.
So, imo, this uber simplified model of just don't work like that.
Exercise does more than just use calories, it also changes blood glucose profiles, and I suspect lots of other metabolic things too, given how impactful it is on general health. It's distinctly plausible those things influence weight.
Proper physical activity burns a lot of calories, especially when its cold. It also changes some metabolic components, so not just the burning alone has an effect. It will not necessarily lead to hunger surpassing calorific deficits (and at very high activity it isn't even possible to eat enough to cover the deficit).
On the other hand, 50 calories x 365 days a year x 20 years x 5,000 calories per lb of weight = 75 lb of additional weight.
> Increases in activity tend to drive increases in hunger
As far as I know, certain types of high intensity exercise do so but not necessarily all exercise.
I'm not fond of the calories/lb calculations because everything's really relative to where your caloric equilibrium point is, but this is an aside. Let's take your numbers at face value, and now consider that in 1970 the average American was eating 2,025 calories. Whereas by 2010 we were up to 2,481 [1] - a total increase of 456 calories/day!
If we take your numbers at face value, that'd be a delta of 684 pounds per 20 years. Again kind of an obvious indicator why these long term calorie/pound measurements are pretty dubious, but at the same time also an indicator of why diet is just so much more important than exercise for weight management.
Yeah, I always get a bit amused when people point to one sole food or environmental issue ("microplastics!" says one comment) to blame for the obesity epidemic, when there are two glaringly obvious pieces of data:
1. As another commenter posted, total calories consumed per capita has gone up considerably since 1970.
2. As you posted, we move a lot less than we used to. There are tons of studies that confirm this across a number of different metrics (e.g. average grip strength has gone down considerably since the 80s, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/13/4815909... ).
We eat a lot more, of more foods that have higher calorie-to-nutrient ratios than we used to, and we move a heck of a lot less.
Yeah I'd believe a stronger sedentary lifestyle is the biggest factor in the waste line stagnation if the diet is not the same.
They did not have omnipresent smartphones in 1970.
It's probably multifactoral. For example, here's a recent provocative paper from a highly respected researcher (John Speakman) arguing metabolic rates have actually slowed since then: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10445668/
A massive increase in environmental plastics may also have something to do with it.
"The scientists theorize relationships among the global increase of plastics production, human exposure to microplastics, and the global increase of overweight and obesity in populations." https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newslett...
The obvious answer is more calories. The obvious answer for why more calories is pretty obvious to non-Americans - your portion sizes are crazy, albeit everyone else in the world is catching up. Even if you buy a "healthy" meal in a quick service restaurant or as a pre-packaged retail product, the smallest portion size is still likely to be grossly excessive.
The obvious answer for why portion sizes are increasing is that food keeps getting cheaper, in particular relative to other costs in the food service industry. The traditional formula for restaurant pricing is 1/3 ingredients, 1/3 labour and 1/3 overheads; if your food costs have decreased over time but your rent and labour costs continue to increase, it's natural to increase portion sizes to maintain the appearance of value-for-money. The same would apply (to a moderately lesser extent) to convenience foods sold at retail. This has a quite drastic anchoring effect - when you normalise excessively large portions, reasonable portions seem meagre.
I think a major factor is that today people eat a lot of food designed by engineers to maximize sales. Designs that makes people overeat probably increases sales so they optimize for that.
So we should expect people to continue to get fatter as we get better at engineering food.
Note that I don't think that engineered food is inherently bad, just that today most food are engineered to be unhealthy because that is better for sales.
What about them? Are they designed to make you overeat? Or do they fill you up? I don't know which is why I ask. It is possible that they regulated things differently or their food companies had different values so they engineered snacks and fast food to not make you overeat.
As I said, engineering food isn't bad in itself, it depends on what goals you have when you engineer it. Just because Japanese people eat a lot of engineered food doesn't mean it is bad for them if that food wasn't engineered to make them fat.
Many say they slim down as they visit Japan, so I wouldn't rule it out.
What I'd want to see is if two countries that has the same snacks available had vastly different outcomes. But as far as I know most countries has domestic snacks so it varies wildly around the world. For example, why is Czechia much fatter than Slovakia? They were the same country 30 years ago.
Ok, so this time look in good faith? Japan is famous for their huge variety of junk food. Is it equivalent? No. Is the ratio of availability the same as the ratio of obesity between the two countries? No.
I'd be surprised if the ratios matched up exactly. That'd mean the only factor dictating the level of obesity is food culture. Not likely.
I'm sure Japan has a variety of unhealthy foods, I don't see how that matters. That unhealthy food exists in Japan doesn't tell us anything about how much of it people actually eat.
That's why I linked the video, its author talks about the experience of the average person, here's an exact link: https://youtu.be/lr4MmmWQtZM?t=176.
I cannot stress this enough, the only thing that matters is what is readily available to the average person. That's the determining factor of most people's diets, not what's theoretically possible to purchase.
Sugar's effect to 1970s waistlines would be determined by preceding decades. Insulin tolerance and other MBS things develop slowly over a person's life.
One simple explanation is protein. Modern diets have terribly low protein levels, and much of that protein comes from sources with extremely poor digestibility [1], meaning the effective protein consumption levels are even worse than they seem.
Protein is a major appetite suppressant. I'd read this but never really realized how true it is until starting on a protein heavy diet. I now eat near 500g of chicken breast a day, and by the end of the day I'm basically having to force feed myself. Yet 500g of chicken breast is less than 800 calories! And the other stuff is just to balance out my diet.
And I love eating as much as anybody else. But you simply cannot eat that much when you're on a protein heavy diet. Finding data on protein consumption rates over time is difficult, but I'd hypothesize we were probably much higher on effective protein consumption in the past. I know absolutely nobody that regularly had something like 'steak and eggs' for breakfast, yet it seems that was indeed a thing at some point.
That's world, not USA. And the obesity inflection point was in the mid to late 70s. Pew has an excellent study on American diets from 1970 to 2010 here. [1] In short our consumption of meat, in terms of calories, is pretty much flat-lined, and at an abysmal 400. But grain products, fats/oils, and sweetener consumption has skyrocketed.
Something you have to keep in mind in modern times is also food processing. A 10 piece set of McDonalds chicken nuggets weighs around 163 grams, but contains only 23g of protein. By contrast 163 grams of chicken breast contains just about exactly 50 grams of protein. The more processed something is, the more it tends to drift from its nominal nutritional value, and it's safe to say that a much larger chunk of people's "meat" is also coming from these sort of heavily processed meat-like foods.
As for the studies, you have a common bias they suffer from. You're comparing some group of people opting into some diet or another, versus the population at large. An apples to apples comparison would be something closer like comparing those on a long-term vegetarian diet to those on a long-term carnivore or keto diet. The idea is to just make sure you control for the "I care about my diet and have sustained dietary self control" variable. Unfortunately actually controlling studies means you'd get far fewer exciting headlines and bullet points for our CVs.
Pure sugar may have peaked, but total calorie intake is still much higher than it was in 1970. Pew[1] has it 23% higher, which corresponds reasonably well to the rate at which weights have been increasing[2] over the past few decades (i.e., at about 3-4%/decade). The data is reasonably consistent with weight increasing ~linearly with calorie intake.
Technically the graph is of per capita added sugar availability and isn't adjusted for loss (due to spoilage, plate waste, etc.), but it meshes with NHANES survey data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9434277/
>In conclusion, over the 18 year time span, from 2001 to 2018, added sugars intake declined significantly among younger adults (19–50 years) in the U.S., regardless of race and ethnicity (i.e., similar for Black and White individuals), income level, physical activity level or body weight status, and declines were mainly due to reductions in added sugars intake from sweetened beverages (primarily soft drinks and fruit drinks). These trends coincide with the evolving emphasis in the DGA on reducing added sugars intake and the increasing focus on population-level interventions aimed at reducing intakes.