Do you think metabolism is hard to grasp because of science's tendency to try to reduce everything to its constituent parts? That for example an actual human diet would produce synergies between different foods that are bigger or lesser than the sum of their parts.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Body fat is not simply a matter of calories eaten vs calories burnt. Other factors have an impact on how much energy the body stores as fat. People doesn't become obese overnight, it is a slow process where the excess fat they acquire only represents an amount of energy equal to about a teaspoon of sugar each day.
If you really apply yourself and expend a lot of willpower it is possible to eat less calories than you burn and lose weight that way. All experience shows this method to be as inefficient as it is strenuous, most people will gain the weight again. At the other end of the spectrum studies has been made where non-obese people forced themselves to overeat for a period. They gained some weight but they lost it again once the study was over and they just ate like they used to do.
Body fat is a survival mechanism that evolved to help the body endure periods of hunger. Today in the imperial core hunger is no longer a real risk for most people but the mechanism is still there. Obesity has less to do with fat people being too lazy to do exercise and too weak-willed to leave the cookies on the shelf and more to do with triggering the fat storage mechanism.
Several factors are at play in triggering the storage of body fat. One important factor is genetics. Another one can be various medical conditions that impact the storage of fat. There is also a connection to mental health. The ability to store every as fat evolved to deal with threats to survival so when an individual feels threatened, insecure or lonely the body can respond by increasing efforts to build supplies. So, in a way by alienating us and making us fearful of the future, capitalism is making us fat.
And although the individual can do something to eat better and do exercise those things are also inevitably tied to capitalist class society. The poor and downtrodden have no mental energy left to go jogging after a hard day's work whereas the bourgeoisie spends all day surrounded by people who tells them how special and amazing they are, and if they don't feel good enough about themselves they can afford to hire personal trainers to motivate them.
Assigning blame and moral judgement on the individual for being fat is a form of liberalist fetichation of personal responsibility. It will not be effective. An effective effort to minimise obesity needs to be collective. We need drugs developed to regulate fat storage, not body-shaming. We need free public exercise facilities that are inclusive and creates a social community around physical activity, not talk about being lazy. We need a safer, more caring society where people feel secure and included.
Changing people's diets and their knowledge/access to cook is way more important than fat drugs. North America is fat as hell because no one cooks anymore. It's pretty rare to see the massively obese people who are also home cooking for themselves all the time. There are chubby people who cook for themselves, but that's a separate issue from the social issue of obesity which is almost entirely caused by bad food subsidies, advertisements, fast food restaurants, unhealthy food production/preservation in general, and the current family situation of fewer people living in houses together with more people working concurrently.
We need drugs developed to regulate fat storage, not body-shaming. We need free public exercise facilities that are inclusive and creates a social community around physical activity, not talk about being lazy. We need a safer, more caring society where people feel secure and included.
Diet is much more important than exercise in controlling weight. I agree that the focus should be more on collective rather than personal responsibility, but the focus of that should fire and foremost be on enabling and encouraging healthy eating habits.
I share your disdain for fat-shaming but your understanding of metabolic science is simply incorrect.
There is no mechanism for the body to discard chemical energy that it has absorbed into the bloodstream except to store it as fat. There are no hormones or genes affecting the rate that absorbed nutrients are stored as fat, because there is no other metabolic pathway for those nutrients to take.
There will never be a drug which regulates fat storage, because that would involve messing with your body's ability to lower its blood glucose levels and kill you by hyperglycemia. Something affecting nutrient absorption might be possible but I don't know.
Body fat is not simply a matter of calories eaten vs calories burnt.
There are genetic, hormonal, health, and environmental factors which affect things like hunger, cravings, and satiety. The reason that people have a hard time keeping large amounts of weight off, aside from the inherent difficulty of significant lifestyle changes, is that their bodies are placed into an altered hormonal state for many months or even years as a result of their weight loss, which includes elevated levels of appetite hormones like leptin.
Historically obesity have not been a huge problem as food was scarce. If there isn't enough food around to cover your energy needs you will lose weight, no matter what your genetic dispositions are. Today however there is an abundance of food in the imperial core and no periods of hunger to use the energy stored as body fat.
Obesity is a problem in all core countries but there are significant differences. Some of them can be ascribed to the kind of food you have in different places but I don't think the difference in obesity between for instance the US and France exists solely because French food is better than American.
I have a pet theory that part of the reason the US has so high levels of obesity is that it is a very unsafe country compared to those in western Europe. There is no healthcare, no social safety net, there's guns everywhere, the police is more violent etc. etc.
Another explanation for the difference lies in what kind of activities society encourages and enables. For instance a place with walkable cities, lots of bike infrastructure and a culture that teaches children to walk and bike from an early age is going to have a healthier and less obese population than a car-centered place.
I agree with a cultural approach to endemic obesity a lot more, not 100% sold on it because societies like Japan have low obesity rates, despite being alienated as fuck
Well I'd say the fact that there's such a difference between Japan and the US shows that the root is cultural, as otherwise you're left with "Japanese are better at personal responsibility than Americans". It's just that alienation isn't the only important factor. I'd say that having a highly alienated population isn't, on its own, sufficient to cause high obesity rates, but fixing it is necessary to seriously address obesity in the US.
Could also have underlying health issues that impact their ability to fully digest food, or cause them to expend way more calories just doing nothing than most people do
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Do you think metabolism is hard to grasp because of science's tendency to try to reduce everything to its constituent parts? That for example an actual human diet would produce synergies between different foods that are bigger or lesser than the sum of their parts.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Body fat is not simply a matter of calories eaten vs calories burnt. Other factors have an impact on how much energy the body stores as fat. People doesn't become obese overnight, it is a slow process where the excess fat they acquire only represents an amount of energy equal to about a teaspoon of sugar each day.
If you really apply yourself and expend a lot of willpower it is possible to eat less calories than you burn and lose weight that way. All experience shows this method to be as inefficient as it is strenuous, most people will gain the weight again. At the other end of the spectrum studies has been made where non-obese people forced themselves to overeat for a period. They gained some weight but they lost it again once the study was over and they just ate like they used to do.
Body fat is a survival mechanism that evolved to help the body endure periods of hunger. Today in the imperial core hunger is no longer a real risk for most people but the mechanism is still there. Obesity has less to do with fat people being too lazy to do exercise and too weak-willed to leave the cookies on the shelf and more to do with triggering the fat storage mechanism.
Several factors are at play in triggering the storage of body fat. One important factor is genetics. Another one can be various medical conditions that impact the storage of fat. There is also a connection to mental health. The ability to store every as fat evolved to deal with threats to survival so when an individual feels threatened, insecure or lonely the body can respond by increasing efforts to build supplies. So, in a way by alienating us and making us fearful of the future, capitalism is making us fat.
And although the individual can do something to eat better and do exercise those things are also inevitably tied to capitalist class society. The poor and downtrodden have no mental energy left to go jogging after a hard day's work whereas the bourgeoisie spends all day surrounded by people who tells them how special and amazing they are, and if they don't feel good enough about themselves they can afford to hire personal trainers to motivate them.
Assigning blame and moral judgement on the individual for being fat is a form of liberalist fetichation of personal responsibility. It will not be effective. An effective effort to minimise obesity needs to be collective. We need drugs developed to regulate fat storage, not body-shaming. We need free public exercise facilities that are inclusive and creates a social community around physical activity, not talk about being lazy. We need a safer, more caring society where people feel secure and included.
Changing people's diets and their knowledge/access to cook is way more important than fat drugs. North America is fat as hell because no one cooks anymore. It's pretty rare to see the massively obese people who are also home cooking for themselves all the time. There are chubby people who cook for themselves, but that's a separate issue from the social issue of obesity which is almost entirely caused by bad food subsidies, advertisements, fast food restaurants, unhealthy food production/preservation in general, and the current family situation of fewer people living in houses together with more people working concurrently.
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Diet is much more important than exercise in controlling weight. I agree that the focus should be more on collective rather than personal responsibility, but the focus of that should fire and foremost be on enabling and encouraging healthy eating habits.
I share your disdain for fat-shaming but your understanding of metabolic science is simply incorrect.
There is no mechanism for the body to discard chemical energy that it has absorbed into the bloodstream except to store it as fat. There are no hormones or genes affecting the rate that absorbed nutrients are stored as fat, because there is no other metabolic pathway for those nutrients to take.
There will never be a drug which regulates fat storage, because that would involve messing with your body's ability to lower its blood glucose levels and kill you by hyperglycemia. Something affecting nutrient absorption might be possible but I don't know.
There are several ways your body burns energy (not just exercise), but otherwise it really is that simple. But that's not to minimize the difficulty that people have maintaining their weight.
There are genetic, hormonal, health, and environmental factors which affect things like hunger, cravings, and satiety. The reason that people have a hard time keeping large amounts of weight off, aside from the inherent difficulty of significant lifestyle changes, is that their bodies are placed into an altered hormonal state for many months or even years as a result of their weight loss, which includes elevated levels of appetite hormones like leptin.
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Historically obesity have not been a huge problem as food was scarce. If there isn't enough food around to cover your energy needs you will lose weight, no matter what your genetic dispositions are. Today however there is an abundance of food in the imperial core and no periods of hunger to use the energy stored as body fat.
Obesity is a problem in all core countries but there are significant differences. Some of them can be ascribed to the kind of food you have in different places but I don't think the difference in obesity between for instance the US and France exists solely because French food is better than American.
I have a pet theory that part of the reason the US has so high levels of obesity is that it is a very unsafe country compared to those in western Europe. There is no healthcare, no social safety net, there's guns everywhere, the police is more violent etc. etc.
Another explanation for the difference lies in what kind of activities society encourages and enables. For instance a place with walkable cities, lots of bike infrastructure and a culture that teaches children to walk and bike from an early age is going to have a healthier and less obese population than a car-centered place.
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Well I'd say the fact that there's such a difference between Japan and the US shows that the root is cultural, as otherwise you're left with "Japanese are better at personal responsibility than Americans". It's just that alienation isn't the only important factor. I'd say that having a highly alienated population isn't, on its own, sufficient to cause high obesity rates, but fixing it is necessary to seriously address obesity in the US.
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Could also have underlying health issues that impact their ability to fully digest food, or cause them to expend way more calories just doing nothing than most people do
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Evolution didn't build them for your happiness, it just built whatever would survive.