smokers too, i'm paying for their cancer treatments here in canada =_=

it's the law! or move to tadjikistan, they don't have cigs there

Yet we're almost at a point where most of the smokers are highly sensitive for addiction, it's becoming more of a genetic problem over time, or ppl having an already deep established smoking habit. With the discouragement of smoking we see in our world, further progress in reducing the number of smokers comes for a next generation with fewer ppl starting to smoke.

Obesity is not much different, most of the differences we see between countries is education in combination with the culture already in place. Everywhere we have fairly high incentives to apply for a form of sports and incentives to reduce food intake to a point that we are enforcing eating disorders, anorexia becomes a larger problem than it already is. And you're paying for those ppl as well at an increased rate if you keep up this tone through social media.
/e imo it will be more effective to look for plans to reduce the supply of high energy consumables in the supermarkets.

This post was edited by Knaapie on Sep 21 2017 01:46pm

Have you ever been to america?
Honestly it might be true that there are a lot of incentives for a healthy lifestyle but reality doesn't reflect that whatsoever. The obesity problem is getting worse by the month in north america. Being fat is not discouraged in the same way smoking is at all, it's somewhat even being enabled, especially in recent years.
You have it easy on that front in euroland.

Energy balance isn't pseudoscience it's how people lose/gain weight. People think obesity is mainly genetic because obesity tends to run in families but that's simply because over eating is often a learned behavior. The parents overeat and tend to overfeed their children so the children get used to large portion sizes. That combined with people are more sedentary now than they used to be leads to weight gain and eventually obesity. Technically it's an easy fix for most people to lose the weight but a lack of education on nutrition makes it difficult. When you ask people for a 24 hour recall with what they ate you'd be surprised at the amount of calories it adds up to.

I've got it indeed easy, don't even need to sport to stay slim, part choices, part inherited culture, part genes. I'm the lucky bastard here... but I am defending the gene aspect in this argument as well. The US is doing better than China at this point (the genetically slim population with strict parenting.. or was that more a lack of food/luxury in the past?), as I've said in the first post in this topic. We are not yet evolved enough to deal with a food surplus and luxury of warmed houses year round (let alone the passive work we are doing in general). All we can do is try to make the best of it trough culture and regulation at this time, while keeping genetic variation in mind.

/e as for the energy balance, I've given training to a wide variety of youth selections to sub top speed skaters. The balance does work for everyone (I've trained), but you can't train ppl that are short on energy storage in muscles. Some genes prioritizes storing fat to a different degree than others. In order for them to loose weight, you'd have to go trough extreme harsh and controversial training methods. That's not a fair comparison towards how easy I have it.

This post was edited by Knaapie on Sep 21 2017 02:26pm

The problem here is you are using the word genetic as a basket term for environment + genes (which further confuses uneducated people) and at the same time you're saying culture/education is a key aspect in fixing this epidemic. Extremely ironic and counterproductive.

There is no need to make excuses for fat people, they are fat because they are either uneducated, lazy, gluttonous, have little self-control, or a mix of everything.

No one needs to go through any type of extreme regimen to lose weight, no matter what their genes may dict.
You are fat because you eat too much, there's really nothing else to it.
Even though one 183cm/80kg person might need 2500kcals to maintain his bodyweight, another with the same stats might need only 1800, and if he eats 2500 he will gain fat. That's what people need to understand. It's not magic, everyone can lose weight with fucking common sense. Let's not diverge into macro nutrient portioning because it is quite frankly mostly irrelevant.
Making excuses for these people and talking about thyroidal defects, anti psychotic pills, fat-loving genes is just a burden on our way to solving the issue

True in at least one of the posts, same has been done for intelligence btw. I mostly try to avoid it as it's always difficult to scientifically "prove" something to be genetic without a proper understanding of the genome. That's why I tend to replace it with "inherited", while in the mean time knowing that genes are inherited as well.

Still, you shouldn't generalize them all as "these people". We might need someone to post a list of researches on biological anomalies giving ppl a hard time to loose weight. You don't have to consider genes in that search.

This post was edited by Knaapie on Sep 21 2017 04:00pm

Yeah I know, but I think communicating with specific terminology is important when discussing science. Most of the 11 pages could have been avoided if people used the correct definition of the word Genetic when talking to each other.

I'm a believer that if you include every biological anomaly, medication, disease that make it exceptionally hard for people to lose weight, you'd get under 1% of the cases of obesity.

This post was edited by harumi on Sep 21 2017 04:17pm

this one is for you. I lol at the name of the docu. facts can be crosschecked though

This post was edited by Knaapie on Sep 21 2017 04:18pm