Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove

I don't know why is this even a question. Do people really think being overweight is a net positive?

I find that when I point this out, people often get mad. They feel they aren't obese. But the research doesn't support them, if you are anywhere outside of the "healthy" categorization you are at the same risk (that we know of so far) as "clinically obese" people.

I tried adding 10kgs and it said "Overweight".

Seems ok to me.

They even warn that BMI should be used along with other indicators.

We’ve normalised being fat.

That doesn't mean obese people are "to blame" for any medical complications they might suffer from obesity. It also doesn't mean that obesity is a death sentence; people's bodies function differently and we've all heard stories of pack a day smokers that lived into their 90s. But there is absolutely a connection between the two.

Has it? We've tried a few decades of fat positively and just pretending that being fat isn't a personal failure, and just a symptom of society. People have only gotten more fat in that time. Let's try some serious shaming. If you're fat, you should have to pay more for healthcare, food, flights basically everything related to your burden on society.

Let's give a few decades of strict control over food suppliers a try, and if that doesn't work, maybe we could look into alternatives.

Fat positivity? It's not really a popular position, and is in fact regarded as a loathesome movement.

You think every fat kid, especially those bullied, don't want to be thin?

You think shaming is going to work? That's an uphill battle, especially against the human body and the urges it generate, the causes we do not fully understand.

Normal healthy humans are supposed to be able to self regulate their weight at a healthy level. I have seen at least one friend who has an atrocious diet, poor eating habit, and yet remain rail thin.

If shaming did work, then it would have been implemented widely and obesity is solved. But it's not. We don't have anything that works as well as ozempic.

I am all for taking responsibility, but we ought to be cognizant about the current limitations of our tools and flexible at how we would solve problems, rather than sticking to dogma or trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

For example, I found a psychological trick that enables me to work long hours. Tricks for eventually getting rid of bad food addiction(sadly, I am at it again).

I'm a good example of how it fails. I have long arms and legs which causes my BMI to be fairly low. However, my body fat is fairly high. I need to lose fat but were I to rely solely on BMI I'd think I'm fine.

What I'd want instead of BMI is body fat percentage. I think that gives a much better measure of health problems.

"Overweight" is longer-lived than "Normal," and "Grade I Obesity" isn't significantly less longer lived than "Normal." So what you're pointing out is misinformation, which is why people are annoyed by it. There is a case that "Normal" includes more sick and dying people because sick people often lose weight, but the difference still can't be as stark as reddit knowledge makes it out to be.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23280227/

Conclusions and relevance: Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. The use of predefined standard BMI groupings can facilitate between-study comparisons.

What kind of reasoning is this? This is only true if you believe good policies always get implemented. You'll notice other countries like Japan don't require every man and child to be drugged to stop eating food, and they have a much stronger sense of shame for being an undue burden on society.

I saw more grossly obese people at that airport in the first ten minutes than I had back home in probably the previous year. It really stood out to me.

It must be your general dietary makeup and lifestyle. All that corn syrup. Also, I don't see any reason why it would have gotten better since then.

Just calling a spade a spade from an outsider's perspective..

https://doi.org/10.4158/endp.19.1.50042678317gx698

The evidence that being overweight is healthier is a bit dubious, but the evidence that having a "normal" BMI is healthier than "overweight" is nonexistent.

No. If you fall above healthy, you are "overweight". You need a higher BMI to be classified as obese.

Association of all-cause mortality with overweight and obesity using standard body mass index categories: a systematic review and meta-analysis

> Conclusions and Relevance: [...]overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.

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.

We dance around it and call it 'obesity' but the real medical cause of obesity is an addiction to unhealthy food.

This is compounded by the fact that it is completely legal for people to make their food more addictive and therefore unhealthy and advertise it to addicted people with underhanded marketing techniques that take advantage of their addiction.

Until we recognize this as an addiction issue that is compounded by dealers being able to operate with impunity we won't make any headway -- short of technological advancements like Ozempic that allow people to side step their addiction.

Depends. All cause mortality is notoriously lower for "overweight" people than "normal weight" people.

IIRC mostly they had to do with seasonal sicknesses like the flu, the theory being that your body can burn the extra fat during periods you aren't able to eat well.

It’s not just America [1].

Norway’s obesity rate runs at roughly half America’s [2]. But the trend across the world is increasing rates of overweightness, obesity and--most worryingly--child obesity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41634611

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_acceptance_movement

Online there's tons of content encouraging fat gain - for example Tiktok women celebrating "BBW" as a sexy thing and the r/PlusSize subreddit, where members encourage each other to remain "big and beautiful" and post anti-science content claiming that being fat is healthy. I saw for example a post by a 20-something woman who was morbidly obese and had had a blood clot in her leg but everyone was still insisting she was a "healthy" type of fat person, herself included.

Of course you will find very few doctors who will endorse this movement or its ideas. And the vast majority of us understand that obesity is unhealthy. But the fat acceptance movement has almost certainly played some role in making people believe that obesity is less dangerous than the research shows.

I won't be shy about my view here, obesity is a terrible disease and if you have it you must take steps to cure it. If you don't your quality of life will be lower in dozens of ways and you will die younger, probably not in a comfortable way. (Not to mention that its economic cost is enormous... a principal way that you can reduce health care costs personally, is to not be fat.)

First and foremost we must renew society's understanding that this is a disease, acceptance is not an option, and it must be prevented, treated and cured.

Disordered eating is a norm and being ashamed is a norm.

As in, inability to keep them long term is biological defense of organism that does not have genetic predisposition toward anorexia.

When you move toward obese or into underweight category, health problems kick in.