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Remember this?!!!! Look in the URL: WHO! Wow!!! Yes, you saw this Lancet report. You *ignored* it. Because you’re reading none of my post, just nervously skimming.
BMI is not a measure of body composition, it is not an accurate barometer of health. Period. I’ve argued that, I’ve linked to sources proving that, we’re done.
I’m leading you into the forest pointing to the trees and you keep saying it’s the ocean.
What is your point even? That the UK is more obese than the US? Or that the US it not obese at all?
Try and condense your point into a single line of text.
What is your point even? That the UK is more obese than the US? Or that the US it not obese at all?
Try and condense your point into a single line of text.
I literally did and you ignored it. I don’t know how many times I stated it.
1st - go back and read the entirety of the first post. All of it.
Then come back here and read this:
Based on all of those logical conclusions and all of the available pieces of conflicting data on rates of exercise, childhood obesity, adiposity per ethnic phenotype, self-reported obesity rates, sub-regional obesity rates, etc, neither the UK or the US are more or less obese than the other.
There is no significant difference in the proportion of “fat people” per country - particularly between comparable western countries. Particularly when adjusting for ethnic-phenotypic differences per society.
Because of what I’ve already enumerated above, obesity epidemiology makes no sense. It’s futile. We don’t have ways to generalize weight to entire populations of people.
It’s logically unsound to do so anyways given that people can, um, gain and lose weight individually.
I literally did and you ignored it. I don’t know how many times I stated it.
1st - go back and read the entirety of the first post. All of it.
Then come back here and read this:
Based on all of those logical conclusions and all of the available pieces of conflicting data on rates of exercise, childhood obesity, adiposity per ethnic phenotype, self-reported obesity rates, sub-regional obesity rates, etc, neither the UK or the US are more or less obese than the other.
There is no significant difference in the proportion of “fat people” per country - particularly between comparable western countries. Particularly when adjusting for ethnic-phenotypic differences per society.
Because of what I’ve already enumerated above, obesity epidemiology makes no sense. It’s futile. We don’t have ways to generalize weight to entire populations of people.
It’s logically unsound to do so anyways given that people can, um, gain and lose weight individually.
Ah okay, the extraordinary prevalence of diabetes type II in the US compared to other western countries is just a funny coincidence.
Ah okay, the extraordinary prevalence of diabetes type II in the US compared to other western countries is just a funny coincidence.
Oh, so you’re just ignoring the posts now. Okay.
Okay, so the higher prevalence of death from Diabetes Mellitus in the UK compared to the US is just a funny coincidence.
Diabetes is most prevalent among Asians and in Asian countries and they consistently are surveyed as the least obese populations under BMI.
Hispanic and African Americans, ethnic groups which “other western countries” don’t have in comparable proportions, also have much higher rates of diabetes than the white American majority population.
Either admit the flaw in your argument or just be quiet.
Being totally serious, you’ve been very rude to me right off the bat. Can you admit you’re wrong? About anything? You seem to hold very bigoted attitudes towards Americans.
Okay, so the higher prevalence of death from Diabetes Mellitus in the UK compared to the US is just a funny coincidence.
Diabetes is most prevalent among Asians and in Asian countries and they consistently are surveyed as the least obese populations under BMI.
Hispanic and African Americans, ethnic groups which “other western countries” don’t have in comparable proportions, also have much higher rates of diabetes than the white American majority population.
Either admit the flaw in your argument or just be quiet.
Being totally serious, you’ve been very rude to me right off the bat. Can you admit you’re wrong? About anything? You seem to hold very bigoted attitudes towards Americans.
Why don't you give it up!? BNW has posted multiple links backing up everything he's said. People in the US are statistically fatter, more unfit and die younger, that doesn't mean everybody in the US is overweight and unhealthy though dies it!? There IS however a problem there with obesity (look there is a problem in most developed countries), now you can either face up to this fact and try and do something to correct it or you can bury your head in the sand, it's up to you. The one thing you shouldn't be doing is arguing the point when everything BNW says is backed up by real data because you're starting to look daft by doing it.
What got me thinking about this was an anti-American tirade a British golf-reporter went on against American fans - his name was Pete Willett, I believe. It was a bizarre article, that seemed to want to insult Americans for being attractive at the same time it described in 20 different ways how allegedly fat American Ryder Cup fans were - an American’s defense of the article contained the same self-hating nonsense, and a failure to call out hypocrisy where it should have been (“I mean, America DOES have an OBESITY PROBLEM”), especially because the real kicker was that, as is typical for British people calling Americans fat, the American Ryder Cup fans pictured in the article looked objectively fit and average weight, whereas Pete Willett was - surprise - the overweight one.
This got me thinking as to why this slander has become so beloved and highly regarded by anti-Americans the world over - to the point where Americans are always seen as the fat ones in the room, no matter how skinny or fit they are. So allow me to pose a question: is this hypocrisy, or do you seriously think the US is that proportionally more fat than “the rest of the world” - despite that being a logically unsound assertion, one that clearly stems from insecurity relating to American dominance in entertainment media (film, modeling, etc) throughout the 20th and 21st centuries?
For one, there are problems with obesity epidemiology in the first place, because weight is very hard to generalize to entire populations of people. The ‘weight’ variable is too fickle, because of the individual capacity to gain and lose weight over time.
On top of that, we’ve introduced indirect ways to measure it across entire, diverse populations, using height by white formulas as a proxy for a more direct measurement of body fat, which doesn’t accurately measure percentage of body fat, or body composition, at all.
On top of that, in the mid-90s, the WHO officially lowered the cutoff values for what’s considered overweight and obese overnight, to 25 and 30 respectively. The thing is, since this defines overweightedness and obesity at levels that are too low, the vast majority of athletes on any given high school or college sports team will have technically overweight or obese BMI’s. BMI only shows a mild correlation with mortality once someone reaches a BMI of at least 45, and less than 1% of Americans have a BMI that high.
Therefore, you have a dilemma, where the popular perception of the term “obese” doesn’t gel with how obesity is medically defined.
That introduction aside, then there’s the frustrating and kind of odd phenomenon that is obesity being so intrinsically linked to the concept of the American nationality at this point that it’s something “America exports”, even. The way people talk about fat people, you’d think they only, or mostly only, existed in America. What a logically sound claim! *sarcasm*
The verbiage used by people talking about obesity in this bizarrely nationalized way always outright insists that obesity is pretty much unique to America, and you can’t put forth an argument against this.
One, I think there’s been a bit of an attempt to intellectualize bias against Americans in these ways by creating subtly misleading datasets for quality of life, infant mortality rate, obesity etc…all they really need to do is cherry pick the pieces of data they want from the organizations they choose.
That’s the problem. A big issue is that no two ethnic groups have the same percentage of body fat per the same BMI, not within the US, and not outside of it.
The NHANES study, which surveys obesity in the US, over-samples African and Hispanic Americans and doesn’t bother to weight them for their actual proportions of the population. Since these two groups are phenotypically predisposed to being identified as obese under the current BMI cutoff values, this massively over-inflates the measured American obesity rate, which should be roughly comparable to countries like Canada and New Zealand. The real irony is that a Lancet survey found that White Americans have less body fat per BMI than do White Europeans (mostly those from the UK and the Netherlands were surveyed, I believe).
It doesn’t make sense that America’s measured obesity rate can be inconsistent with it’s self-reported obesity rate (25-27% according to the Gallup and Healthway Survey) by as much as 13+ percentage points. 3 Canadian provinces have higher self-reported obesity rates than any American state, and don’t try to tell me that the average white Canadian looks skinnier than the average white American…it just doesn’t really make sense.
Long story short is that I’m finding it increasingly hard to stomach a “stereotype” that is based on such obviously flawed logic, cheap insults, and blatant hypocrisy - another reason it’s so hard to stomach (aside from, uh, the blatantly insulting nature of it) is that it’s insisted upon like mad, you never stop hearing it, and it’s been used to impugn all sorts of things about American culture that are just over-the-top slanderous and contrary to certain axioms of American culture - there is, for example, no consistent data whatsoever that proves the US has larger portion sizes or sugar/calorie content in the average packaged food item than Canada or other comparable western countries do - this is just something that people started insisting MUST be the case, because look at how high America’s “obesity rates” are - and multiple surveys of vigorous physical activity show Americans (particularly American teens) to be some of the most vigorously active in the west…so pretending like America is this gluttonous, lazy society just doesn’t work.
It’s widely remarked upon, for example, that Americans receive tons of Olympic medals - that a wide variety of sports and recreational pursuits are beloved in American schools and society (wrestling, football, soccer, gymnastics, baseball, basketball, cheerleading, surfing, skateboarding, lacrosse, ice hockey), that America produces the most winning boxers and UFC fighters, has produced myriad health movements (gluten free, farm-to-table, the vegan craze), manages to have a world-beating Women’s soccer team, and has a notoriously prolific dieting and health industry…to start.
It seems more cartoonish and culturally inaccurate to me to suggest that Americans eat fast food every day, and never get exercise - it ignores and subverts all of these incontrovertible truths about American society. The UK has a much more historic national cuisine that strikes me as much more starch-heavy, that, combined with fast food culture and the higher per capita consumption of alcohol, leads me to scoff at people claiming the US is so superlatively unhealthy in this way - sorry, I don’t buy it.
It seems that cultural insecurity connected to the prolificness of the American film, modeling, and beauty industries throughout the 20th century largely created a need for a more insulting image that anti-Americans could hold on to - this sloppy, false assertion that the 330M strong American nation was statistically, proportionally more “fat” compared to any other major country became a very good way to dent American soft power worldwide - which was so heavily connected to the perceived attractiveness of the American nationality not too long ago. Fat America still manages to produce the largest share of the world’s models, movie stars, and porn stars though. Weird…how?
Has anyone else felt this way? I’m just kind of frustrated that there’s such an insulting image of Americans that is propped up by one misleading WHO data set, which is easily perpetuated via confirmation bias. What makes it all the more worse is that there’s no logic to the idea that America is more proportionally overweight than other comparable nations like the UK or Australia, and obesity epidemiology has no survey methods that are globally standardized enough so that these deliberations become kind of futile and nebulous anyways.
Yep, you’ve basically covered it all.
It’s not surprising that the response (mainly from British users) was to ignore any confounding statistics or information presented, while posting unrelated health surveys of narrow population categories that compare simply the US and the UK, to claim that this legitimizes the “obesity” hypocrisy and to derail the discussion - you’re right that people generally don’t know how to properly contextualize obesity data, and they don’t know the specifics of how obesity is measured (per country and worldwide) - they don’t know that the current BMI definitions of obesity aren’t actually correlative to fatness, and health defects only become mildly correlative to BMI value once you get into the 45< or <20 ranges. Flooding the thread with incessant reposts of the same survey reported via the likes of Salon and the BBC doesn’t do anything, it’s just a way to overwhelm the debate, and it is kind of to OP’s point about the amount of personally insulting anti-American propaganda there is pertaining to health - a lot of articles that make claims that they can’t support, that are not supported by a comprehensive review of health data from multiple different sources…
Is it possible that a narrow demographic like American 50 to 60 year olds has higher rates of, for example, stroke and cardiovascular disease than British people at a given time? Yes. But a lot of the claims Brave New World’s incessantly cited study makes it doesn’t clearly support with accessible, hard data, it obfuscates for that claim by talking about “health inequality” in the US - when they can’t prove something is worse in the US, that’s usually the first strategy anti-Americans use. These health defects, in any event, don’t correlate particularly strongly to obesity as currently measured, and BNW’s links don’t support the broad, absolutist and extreme claim that “America is less healthy than the rest of the west” or “Americans are less healthy than British people”. Interesting when you pointed out differences in % of body fat per BMI, vigorous exercise rates, and survival rates from specific diseases that benefited the US, various posters essentially just point-blank ignored all of these facts.
The nationalization of obesity epidemiology, and the bizarre attempt to manipulate statistical context, the refusal to adjust for differences in survey method and inherent ethnic differences in adiposity, and the ridiculous statistical cherry-picking to reach a determined conclusion, just strike me as particularly vicious forms of anti-Americanism. America’s population advantage and dominance in the entertainment-media space has given it a massive soft-power advantage, and the international journalism industry is very conscious of this - this is why you get constant anti-nationalist hit pieces with deliberately un-researched and poorly interpreted “obesity data” - there’s a desire to dent the image of the “oversexed” American that has existed for so long, and so it ends up looking cripplingly insecure when they harp on a claim that amounts to calling Americans ugly. Especially considering the hypocritical baggage that that tends to carry - comparing self-reported and subregional obesity rates between the US and Canada, for instance, there is no significant difference in the prevalence of obesity, and every study that compares the US and Canada in respect to obesity prevalence points out that the CDC’s measured number for the US is mostly down to the over-sampling of America’s phenotypically high adiposity minority groups (African and Hispanic) that America has in much larger proportions than Canada. The self-reported obesity rates between the US (see Gallup and Healthway), Canada, the UK, and Australia, are all in the mid-to-upper 20% range.
Okay, so the higher prevalence of death from Diabetes Mellitus in the UK compared to the US is just a funny coincidence.
Diabetes is most prevalent among Asians and in Asian countries and they consistently are surveyed as the least obese populations under BMI.
Hispanic and African Americans, ethnic groups which “other western countries” don’t have in comparable proportions, also have much higher rates of diabetes than the white American majority population.
Either admit the flaw in your argument or just be quiet.
Being totally serious, you’ve been very rude to me right off the bat. Can you admit you’re wrong? About anything? You seem to hold very bigoted attitudes towards Americans.
Among the US population overall, crude estimates for 2018 were: 34.2 million people of all ages—or 10.5% of the US population—had diabetes. 34.1 million adults aged 18 years or older—or 13.0% of all US adults—had diabetes (Table 1a; Table 1b).
Using QOF and SDS figures with estimates from the Diabetes Prevalence Model 2016 (Public Health England) and 2012 APHO Diabetes Prevalence Model, there are an estimated 4.8 million people with diabetes in the UK.
The US has a diabetes rate of over 10%, whilst the UK has a rate of between 6 to 7%, and this includes Type 2.
People dying from diabetes are often stated to have died of a related illness, as people with diabetes face a greater likelihood of stroke, heart disease or heart attack etc.
So it just depends how you classify a death, whether you class it as a stroke, heart attack or other death, or you classify it as diabetes.
Insulin to treat diabetes is provided free or at a low level of prescription in the UK, however in the US Insulin is far more expensive, and to some unaffordable.
As for your rant about obesity rates, the studies posted earlier in the thread are comprehensive and numerous, and involved leading US and UK universities working in partnership.
Last edited by Brave New World; 09-03-2021 at 04:07 AM..
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