4 Crazy Graphs That Show Why People Get Fat

4 Crazy Graphs That Show Why People Get Fat

1. People Are Eating More Junk Food Than Ever

In this graph you see how the US population changed its eating habits in the past 120-130 years.

At the turn of the 20th century, over 90% of meals were simple, home-cooked meals. By around 2009, about half of what people ate was fast food, or other foods away from home.

This graph actually underestimates the true change, because a lot of what people are eating at home these days is junk, compared to what they would of had in the year 1900.

2. People Don’t Burn as Many Calories When Working

Many blame obesity on decreases in physical activity, that we’re just burning fewer calories than we used to.

Although leisure time physical activity (exercise) has increased, it is also true that people now have jobs that are less physically demanding.

This graph shows how people are now burning around 100 fewer calories per day in their jobs, which may contribute to weight gain over time. I think what’s missing is the change in average number of calories consumed while at work, which I’m sure would show the opposite of this. So it’d really be a combination of sitting more at the work desk, and then having the opportunity to eat and drink more through the day.

3. Carbs Increased, While Fat Consumption Never Declined

People love to argue about the causes of obesity… was it sugar, carbs, fat, or something else.

Ultimately, it was the combination of everything.

This graph shows how many calories each nutrient contributed to the average persons total calorie intake each day.

You can see the calories we got from protein remained quite constant for the entire 90 years of this data, only increasing by 10%.

Carbs, which includes sugar, decreased a lot before bouncing back up.

Fat consumption increased steadily, and never wavered. Up by more than 30%.

This data about fat consumption is particularly interesting because people love to point to the introduction of the low-fat guidelines in the 1970s and low fat diets as the cause of obesity. But of course now we know that fat consumption never actually decreased.

All that happened here was that people began eating more carbohydrate-based foods, thinking they had replaced high fat foods, but never actually reduced their fat consumption. You can see the spike in carb intake from the 1970s onward. So people never actually went low-fat.

4. Increased Calorie Intake Overall

The fact that people ate more carbs without cutting fat explains why calorie consumption has increased dramatically and consistently over the past few decades. People are eating more fat, more carbs, and slightly more protein.

It works out to be an average of 360 additional calories per day, per person compared to 1960.

You can see that the increased calorie consumption closely correlates with the rise in obesity rates. This is because ultimately the rise in obesity comes down to more calories in and less calories out.

Now at the start I mentioned my favorite graph is the last one, but that wasn’t it.

I actually want to show you the promising latest trends in obesity.

After decades of increasing, the national childhood obesity rate has leveled off.

You can see here that in the US, childhood obesity rates have remained stable for the past decade — at around 17%.

Since 1980, childhood obesity rates have more than doubled from 7%, but at least it has plateaued in the last decade, which suggest we are making some progress.

Of course there’s still a long way to go, but we now have access to more information than ever before and I really hope its set us up on the right path.

Studies and reference mentioned in video:

Reference 1: Stephan Guyenet- www.wholehealthsource.blogspot.com
Study 2: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19623/
Study 3: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0019657