"The average woman’s waistline today is nearly 4 inches wider than it was in the mid-1990s."

I assume they mean circumference rather than diameter, but this is still a shocking increase in only 30 years. I knew the obesity epidemic was an ever-increasing problem, but this really puts it into perspective. I wonder if we'll ever fully understand the causes behind this rapid shift.

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altairprime 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are some theories. Most fresh food in a generic U.S. supermarket has something like 10-25% of the nutrients per pound than it used to a hundred years ago, thanks to soil depletion, so each generation has to consume more pounds of food to get the same amount of nutrients. There’s been long-standing corruption in the FDA “food pyramid” and “recommended daily allowance” systems to bias the U.S. population from recognizing that added sugar leads to obesity. And there’s the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently. Those may not fully explain obesity, but they certainly are known and understood explanations for obesity — and yet they remain wholly unaddressed.

I think the problem is not whether we’ll fully understand the causes, but more that every cause we have identified to date would require regulating corporations in profit-damaging ways to solve, and it is likely that any future causes we reveal will be the same. That’s anathema in the U.S.: profits are sacrosanct to the two primary political parties, discounting their occasional extremists who argue (correctly) that we should be regulating in favor of consumers, not profits. Typically, the desire for a ‘full’ explanation is used to delay or derail efforts to implement solutions to each single proven explanation, and so I tend to caution against pursuing a complete answer first, and instead recommend asking why we have not yet addressed the known causes while continuing to search for more.

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brianleb 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Similar to a sibling comment,

>>the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently.

requires citations. People lump sugar substitutes together as one class of drugs, but they very much are not. Some are sugar alcohols, some are glycosides, others are different molecules. Different molecules have different mechanisms of action and paths of metabolism.

Much like one might take a "blood pressure" medication, it is a large umbrella consisting of chemically distinct ACE-inhibitors, ARBs, thiazide diuretics, loop diuretics, calcium channel blockers (dihydropyridine and non-dihydropyridine distinctly), and more. These drugs generally do have class effects, but the class effects from an ACE inhibitor (bradykinin cough, angioedema, etc) are quite different from diuretics (hyponatremia, frequent urination, etc). One person's 'blood pressure medicine' is not the same as the next.

I agree that the prevalence of sugar substitutes in the western diet demands scrutiny, and I am concerned about their effects, however any current research lumping them all together without strict attention to pharmacological mechanisms supported by translational research is worse than useless - it is misleading.

In the sense of what we 'know' about modern medicine, we 'know' almost nothing about sugar substitutes. The body of evidence is vanishingly thin. I want more research into this topic, but right now, it's just not there.

	▲	altairprime 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not providing citations for my tangent here; it's too far off-thread and I'm investing my academic research free time into WtHR instead (see elsethread).

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j-krieger 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is no source supporting your claim of nutrient decline in that magitude thanks to soil depletion. It's mostly due to modern crops that grow tall fast, and are thus mostly made up of water.

	▲	altairprime 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Some argue that it’s instead because we’ve promoted food strains that have more sugars and less nutrients, and I’m still studying that, so I have no position to offer about it yet. Brussels sprouts is a good example of doing this in a way that doesn’t damage the nutritional value, but the general U.S. avoidance of anything pungent or bitter is reflected in having bred out all of the ‘unattractive’ nutrients from our food strains. A good litmus test for this is to check for dandelion greens on the shelves; if present, the market likely sells a broad spectrum of produce that isn’t simply designed to be a sugar bomb; if absent, I’d be shocked if you found anything nutrient-dense at all.

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NewsaHackO 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Someone (not me obviously) should look it up, because I would think that if it was circumference, it would be "4 inches longer" not wider. Because that case, ...wow.

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steanne 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

part of it is just raw obesity increase, but part is also an aging population. even if women today WERE the same size as women of the same age 30 years ago, the average over the total population would still be up.

	▲	Legend2440 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Mostly though it's the obesity increase. 40% of Americans are obese, and 75% are overweight. 30 years ago only 20% were obese.
	▲	magneticnorth 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ah, yeah, the aging population is a good point. I can't find a citation now, but I recall reading at some point that weight gain with age (in adulthood) didn't used to happen very much before the obesity epidemic, though nowadays we take it as a given. I wish I could find a source for/against that idea, I'm curious now if it's true.

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AlienRobot 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average waist size is 38.5 inches (98 centimeters) for women older than 20 in the United States.2 This represents an increase of roughly two inches since the 1990s, reflecting broader trends in rising rates of obesity and metabolic conditions.3 Fryar CD, Kruszon-Moran D, Gu Q, Ogden CL. Mean Body Weight, Height, Waist Circumference, and Body Mass Index Among Adults: United States, 1999-2000 Through 2015-2016. Natl Health Stat Report. 2018;(122):1-16.

https://www.health.com/average-waist-size-for-women-11796627...