Invention of processed foods? Hah. More like mass production of sugar.

Bit of a pointless graph though.

You see this a lot on breakfast cereals. A “30g serving with skimmed milk provides”. 30g of cereal is not a proper breakfast for anyone other than a small child.

People are fat for a variety of reasons. Knowledge is certainly up there. The comment about transfat shows this. People pin the blame on something specific. Now I agree trans fats aren’t great but they are not the work of the devil and if you eat too many calories cutting out trans fats won’t help you*. We are no seeing the backlash against “low fat” but stupidly high sugar foods. People having smoothies for breakfast. Strange diets cutting out specific food groups.

I don’t know what the answer is but i guess it would lie in moderation, excercise and education.

*FWIW I would guess that paying attention to what you ate would make more difference. If I were to design an experiment I would have you and your identical twin living identical life styles, one eating only trans fats the other only cis fats.

miketually – Member

Correlation does not equal causation… but you may be right.

Bit of a pointless graph though.

Not really: the high sugar consumption fits nicely with the fatty-fatty-tum-tum figures.

I don’t know what the answer is but i guess it would lie in moderation, excercise and education.

I would add wholesomeness to that list.

Not really: the high sugar consumption fits nicely with the fatty-fatty-tum-tum figures.

And a boatload of other things.

I think most things only become unhealthy when you eat an awful lot of it or don’t do enough physical activity to burn off the extra calories

That’s the whole point of MyFitnessPal: track estimates of Calories In versus Calories Out and keep the numbers in your favour.

And…. Ahem…. The point of this thread I think. Namely that ANY food can be marketed/packaged as “healthy” if you fudge the portion size. When reading a label now, I look at the number of cals in a “portion”, then check the net weight of the food, then calculate how many actual “portions” a normal human being would consume, then work out how many calories there would be in a real-life portion. That’s not exactly making it easy for people

The thing that’s mfp opened my eyes to was not just how calorific some foods were, but how inefficient exercise is at burning those calories.

Onzadog – Member
The thing that’s mfp opened my eyes to was not just how calorific some foods were, but how inefficient exercise is at re i . . burning those calories.u

Tell me about it – you realise how skewed your perception is! I did consider myself relatively educated/aware about diet and exercise, but it’s a question of perspective. I have learned that if you have a sedentary job, no amount of exercise is going to make up for a bad diet 🙁

I see no scale on that graph, or a definition of what constitutes sugar or processed food – I assume it doesn’t consider cheese or wine or bread or cakes or pastry as processed foods for eg?. Also as a minimum I would want to and an equivalent plot of total calories, average daily activity levels, analysis of diet constituents etc etc.

Doesn’t mean that sugar isn’t a problem (or a big part of the problem) but is part of a much wider set of issues.

mfp opened my eyes to was not just how calorific some foods were, but how inefficient exercise is at burning those calories.

Hate to say it but in my experience MFP seems to over-estimate the calories burnt for cycling by a fair bit (at least compared to other estimates and pulse-based guesstimates).

molgrips – Member
Invention of processed foods? Hah. More like mass production of sugar.

Bit of a pointless graph though.
Poor comment. The graph records the rise in sugar consumption during a time when we have also witnessed the emergence and proliferation of obesity.

Correlation does not equal causation… but you may be right.
The increase shown in the graph is historical fact, its not conjecture. Also, sugar is big business, someone is meeting the increase in demand and consumption of sugar. It is not a coincidence.

And a boatload of other things.
The degree to which you selectively stick your head in the sand, so as to keep a grip on your cheesecake and coke, is staggering, for someone your age.

I see no scale on that graph, or a definition of what constitutes sugar or processed food
Reading the graph fail. The graph clearly shows time against sugar consumption. As for scale.
Try this, around 1800, total global sugar production was around 250,000 tons. By the 1980s it was over 100,000,000 tons.
Someone is demanding this sugar, and someone else is producing it.

I’m sure that when I was a kid (70’s and early 80’s) we knew that too many sweets/chocolate, fat, alcohol and not enough greens or exercise would lead to you getting fat. I remember being nagged by my parents constantly – e.g. we weren’t allowed chips or Coke and were told off for eating between meals. They’d learnt this from their own upbringings (early 40s and 50s)

I’m not sure how we’ve managed to forget this as a nation, and how most of the rest of Europe seems to have remembered it…

a big warning saying if you eat half this bag that is RED = bad for you

You’d probably have to red or amber light most of the fruit that is supposedly so good for you, but is actually just more sugar…

The three worst culprits for weight gain are white bread, soft drinks and crisps, it’s as simple as that.

Bit of a pointless graph though.

Depends if its corrected for the global population or not – if it’s not the amount of sugar we’re eating is probably pretty even.

A graph with a scale, from which the above graph is derived:

You’re eating 6 or 7 times the sugar that your great-great-grandparent was eating.

You’re eating 6 or 7 times the sugar that your great-great-grandparent was eating.

….and living longer.

What a wonderful time to be alive!

average daily activity levels

IIRC, daily activity levels in the UK have changed surprisingly little. And, as the comments on MFP show, exercise does very little to control weight.

and living longer.

People who survived into adulthood lived pretty much as long as we do. It’s the infant mortality rate improving which has led to an apparent increase in life expectancy.

A graph with a scale, from which the above graph is derived:

Obviouslly all of the fat blokes were easier to shoot so didn’t make it out of either of the wars past the age of 60.

Sugar (or perhaps more appropriately HFCS) is a massive problem. I’m not sure how wine or cheese somehow demonstrates that it’s not. Watch the documentary; the men who made us fat.

Watch the documentary; the men who made us fat.

If we’re watching a film…

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9QAPch2o6Q[/video]

….and living longer.
Complete bollocks, again.

Now obviously there are other reasons that people are over weight besides just not eating healthily, but I would guess for the majority or people that where the problem is. It would be interesting to see what the average weekly diet is of someone who’s overweight and how much of their food is high in sugar and carbs, and to a lesser degree, fat.

I’d make an almost totally uninformed guess that most of the calories are coming from eating crisps, snacking on chocolate bars and drinking a lot of booze. Throw in the amount of sugar in a lot of breakfast cereal and processed ready meals and I’d guess that’s part of the problem.

I’d even go so far as to say that if the Government banned sugar sweetened drinks then as a nation we’d benefit a lot in a short amount of time.

Complete bollocks, again.

I would engage you, Solo, but given your propensity for the above levels of discourse I think it’s best not to.

If we’re watching a film…

GAH. No Flash. What is it? Please tell me it’s the expendables…..

GAH. No Flash. What is it? Please tell me it’s the expendables…..

It’s the expendables 😀

…well, it’s not. It was a advert from the 40s that used to show in cinemas to sell popcorn/treats etc.

I would engage you, Solo, but given your propensity for the above levels of discourse I think it’s best not to.
There’s a good boy, you stick to your crayons while the grown ups chat.
😉

Thing is what we really need is a bracelet which tracks our expendure of calories and figures out the amount of calories we’ve eaten(da tricky bit)…

now the cool part is it could send signals to brain to either lock your jaw or release your bladder if you are going to over eat .

First person to market this will make a fortune.

A graph with a scale, from which the above graph is derived:

Comparing those two graphs, there’s a couple of other conclusions which aren’t apparent from either in isolation.

1) is that they change country (from the UK to the US) for their source data around the 70s, right where that second massive spike is, and

2) the biggest direct correlation between the rise in obesity and the rise in HFCS.

HFCS consumption is massive in the US (there was some governmental “grow corn!” mandate a couple of decades back, it’s all a bit weird). They swapped refined sugar for HFCS in a lot of foods (because it was considerably cheaper) some time around the early 80s, but didn’t really eat more (sugar / HFCS combined) overall as far as I’m aware.

Conclusion to the conclusions; the inference from the graphs that “we’re eating a lot of sugar, sugar is bad” may well be correct. However, they don’t show what they appear to be showing at first glance and therefore can’t be trusted.

I think.

Conclusion to the conclusions; the inference from the graphs that “we’re eating a lot of sugar, sugar is bad” may well be correct.

That are studies (from the US, I think) that definitely show a direct correlation between the amount of sugar consumed in liquid form and obesity. IIRC people consume liquid calories but then don’t compensate by eating less.

There’s a good boy, you stick to your crayons while the grown ups chat.

If nothing else, you make a good fist of proving his point.

Conclusion to the conclusions; the inference from the graphs that “we’re eating a lot of sugar, sugar is bad” may well be correct. However, they don’t show what they appear to be showing at first glance and therefore can’t be trusted

This..

and it doesn’t help the argument when the evidence is offered in a way that’s easy to critique – eg my point about the invention of processed food being mid C20 –

The graph was just the first clear(ish) graph from an academic domain I found from doing a Google image search, rather than anything I carefully researched. It backed up what I’d seen elsewhere.

The degree to which you selectively stick your head in the sand, so as to keep a grip on your cheesecake and coke, is staggering, for someone your age.

You have absoutely no idea what or how I eat, you’ve totally misconstrued everything I’ve said, so please stop commenting about me! Otherwise it looks like you’re deliberately trying to make me out to be an idiot (without provocation), which isn’t very nice.

The graph DOES NOT show a causal link between obesity and sugar, even though there almost certainly is one. I’m objecting to the potential poor and unscientific insuations through use of statistics.

IIRC, daily activity levels in the UK have changed surprisingly little.

Mean activity levels? Half the coutnry could be much more active whilst half is less active – that could send the mean weight up without activity levels changing.

A finger of Fudge is just enough and The treat that won’t spoil their appetite (milky way if you’re interested)

Were the two adverts that stick in my mind growing up. The message that was “Don’t eat between meals” became, it’s not only OK, but here’s a whole bunch of chocolaty finger snacks based solely for that purpose.

Snacking…I see nearly everyone doing it, grazing pretty much constantly when we really really don’t need to. And nearly always High Carb/ High sugar foods… I wonder how much that contributes

some time around the early 80s, but didn’t really eat more (sugar / HFCS combined) overall as far as I’m aware.

According to the program, there was a big study done which said that we need to eat less fat and sugar.
The report scared the bejaysus out of the food industry and their lobbyists got hard to work. The (American) food industry agreed to reduce fat in food which they replaced with HFCS as food with out sugar or fat tastes a bit shit and HFCS coincidentally happened to be highly profitable. So all of this low fat food marketed as healthy actually contained loads of sugar/HFCS. The report was never published as a result of the (US) food lobby. If it were, we would likely not be in the mess we are in now, but some american farmers wouldn’t be quite so wealthy so it’s a trade off I suppose.

Well, that was the gist of the documentary anyway. It’s a really good watch and on youtube I believe.

Indeed, but the calories do (IMO).

Calories do not make you fat. Excess calories AND a lack of movement make you fat.

A couple of observations we have made on moving back to the uk. We’ve been into Asda, Sainsburys, Tesco and they all have about 4-5 aisles of purely sugary processed crap. The Sainsburys actually took us 4 aisles to find anything you could reasonably cook with and make a nutritious meal. The veg is all packaged to high heaven and on v short sell by dates. The number of ready meals is mental. It really really disappointed me. We’ve ended up sourcing an organic veg box delivery, a meat delivery from a butcher and milk, eggs from a local provider. Hopefully that means i don’t buy another 10 packets of those fish’n’chip things that i had when i was a kid. They were delicious….
But seriously, its scary, i did a quick tally of what other people were buying and there was a LOT of processed and or heat and eat stuff. What happened to cooking a meal – it doesn’t take very long FFS.

What happened to cooking a meal – it doesn’t take very long FFS.

This evening, we’re having pie (mine’s a chicken, mrs deadly’s is a veggie), crinkle cut chips and baked beans. It would take us **** ages to prepare that from fresh ingredients.

I had a big mac, chicken sandwich and large fries. It took 32 seconds from ordering to eating.
Beat that!

Delicious and nutritious and now I learn that the fat won’t make me fat – I’m loving it!