Comment by hn_throwaway_99

To be fair the framing of “carbs are evil” is also lazy. The root cause of most cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes is obesity due to excess calories of any sort (although once you’re diabetic or prediabetic carbs are a HUGE problem no matter what).

The modern lifestyle is incredibly sedentary and every civilisation is built on staple foods that can feed hours of manual labour (with modern snacks thrown on top).

Calling a major food group evil is just a good scapegoat because it’s much more palatable than telling people that they don’t move enough and eat too much food.

All of this shit is stupid. Research has pretty conclusively shown at this point that a high proportion of calories coming from saturated fat specifically will raise LDL cholesterol levels, in people who have neither genetic predisposition toward low or high LDL. If you have one of those, it won't make a difference either way.

Whether that leads to actual heart disease is iffier, but not terribly controversial among cardiologists as far as I can tell. It's only doubted on the Internet where everyone wants to be a galaxy brain with some answer the doctors don't want you to know.

But nobody ever demonized fat in general, and demonizing carbs is just as stupid. Eating enormous amounts of carbs is fine as long as you actually use them. My daily calories right now are around 3,900 with carbs at 650 grams a day, a fair amount being syrups I eat early in the morning while running. If you listened to the Internet, you'd believe I was diabetic already, yet basically every remotely serious endurance athlete eats like this and is fine. Glucose that is continuously and immediately shuttled into muscle cells to power mitochondria and provide energy for movement does no harm whatsoever. It's roughly the entire point of animal metabolism. Glucose that sits around in your blood forever because you're sitting around staring at a screen for 16 hours a day while stuffing your face is what causes problems because of all the oxidizing effects of glucose when it isn't taken apart quickly and turned into ATP.

My BMI is 21.6 for what it's worth. As far as I can tell, the whole "mystery" behind why no diets work is because no diet can magically make people eat less when they spend the overwhelming majority of their time not moving and hunger decouples from energy expenditure. If you're sufficiently active as a lifelong athlete, every diet works. I ate super sized McFlurries, entire boxes of Entenmann's donuts, and Little Debbie's treats as a teenager as staples of my diet. As an adult, I've tried paleo, zone, mediterranean. Right now, I pretty much just eat the standard American food pyramid. None of these has managed to magically poison my brain or destroy my metabolism because metabolic function can be trained just like any other bodily function and it is trained by doing regular athletic activity with a high energy demand. Just like your muscles atrophy if you never do any resistance training, your metabolism atrophies if you never do any aerobic exercise.

I can't claim to know the secret to weight loss but I know how to never get fat in the first place. On every team I was ever on from middle school to college to my time in the Army, whether that be cross country, track, volleyball, basketball, tennis, or general outdoor adventurism and long-haul hiking with a weighted pack, the overweight rate was never 0 but it sure as shit wasn't 70%. And we were all eating the same "poisons" and manufactured foods from evil Nestle that the rest of you were eating.

    > However Canadians have free healthcare

I don't like this use of "free". It is paid for by taxes. That is no where near free. It is extremely hard in a highly advanced economy to provide quality healthcare at less than 10% of GDP. That is a huge number for any wealthy country.

Also, Canadians are pretty fat. It looks like 65% are overweight, which includes obese. Ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1317268/overweight-obesi...

We're talking years of increased life expectancy.

Huh? Statins are a medication type in which increases in life expectancy are extremely hard to point to all. I think they're almost a "poster child" for medications that correct a problem to an extent but whose overall benefit is quite dubious.

(and given that these medications were highly prescribed before any long term studies were finish - creating considerable incentive for people to find benefit - I'd personally wager they are overall harmful but that's me guessing - the main point is they definitely aren't boost-life-expectancy-by-years drugs but probably aren't reduce-life-expectancy-by-years drugs either, given the studies)

Link from google: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3531501/

Portion sizes. The average plate is larger than it was, say, in the 60's.

Insane prices for insulin?

edit: you really think insulin prices don't have an effect on the lifespans of diabetics?

Yes. Why is everyone tiptoeing around this? The obesity rate has increased by something like 50% since the turn of the century. It is a major risk factor for all the causes of death being discussed here. Sure there are probably many factors but this is clearly a big one.

I am on track to lose about 40lbs in 2024 and I suspect the main variable is really as simple as we have mastered the art of making really incredible tasting food.

It is so pervasive though it is hard to tell until you go on a really boring and restrictive diet. It is just hard to not gain weight on average when the food tastes this good with such incredible variety.

That is even if you buy something at the store. With our "foodie" culture, restaurants are an entire other level of choice and taste on top of that.

Kind of. The tricky thing here is that most people have a rigid view of "obesity" in their minds as it's easier to shift blame to, but the only thing research has shown is that abnormal BMI leads to increased cardiovascular issues. Which includes slightly overweight people.

All those things you mention are almost certainly contributors. Another one for you to investigate if you'd like to get pissed off: endocrine-disrupting chemicals. They are everywhere and many of them are strongly tied to metabolic disorders including obesity.