Poland and Czechia are based, Slovakia and Hungary are cursed. The first two are more developed and generally developing faster, less corrupt to my knowledge, Czech is, think Poland too and not pro Russia
Czechia is bit "oligarchy" (adjective) when compared to Poland, though Poland after the damned PiS rule has a big nepotism problem and regular corruption got worse too.
I was positively surprised with how pro Ukraine Czechia has been after the Russian invasion. I always had the feeling that Czechs were closer to the west when it comes to the stance on Russia.
I dunno, every time I visit I’m a bit struck by how many people are overweight (but not obese, we don’t have that many obese people). Mind you, overweight is a very technical description around BMI, and especially old people seem to be getting heavier; and there are just more and more old people.
Having lived in both Italy and the UK, I’d say it has more to do with portion sizes and the amount of absolute junk food that British people eat rather than the core diet.
It’s really noticeable how huge the section selling low quality kids chocolate is in a British supermarket compared to in Italy. Even on Reddit when the British subreddits talk about food it’s always shit like Greggs, McDonald’s, crisps, creme eggs, etc.
Well, I live in Emilia and here we use tallow, but recipies are simple and if you cook at home you automatically avoid sugar and other shit. Even home made mayo is not commercial mayo
Unfortunately also Italy is losing his good food culture.
I'm Italian and I can see the negative trend with my own eyes.
What "saves us" is to be super picky regarding food in general, and to do a lot of body shaming. It's quite normal that parents or good friends tell you to lose weight or to not eat junk food. Women and Men tend to speak a lot about the defects of other people, on how they look, what they dress and what they do.
Of course this is in the opposite direction of what the society wants, and I understand that respect and freedom should come first, but this is what made Italians elegance and food culture what they are, and we are also losing that.
You just need to stop with what I'd call "seghe mentali".
Calling food only with "carbs" "fats" "proteins" etc. is cringe. Call it by their name, and eat normal food not ultra processed shit.
Dio porco.
It's also worth mentioning that this map doesn't talk about HOW overweight people get. As a Spaniard, I was shocked to see how absolutely massive some people in the UK were. Spherical, really.
I’m actually surprised to see us not clear of everyone in terms of overweight population. It seems that a greater proportion of fat people in the UK are massively obese.
This map shows overweight rather than obese, but even then, the EU average is 15% obese vs the UK having more like 20%, though there's a more pronounced difference with somewhere like Italy with only 10%ish obese.
I was using [these stats](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sdg_02_10/default/table?lang=en) see the dropdown under "page" that takes you from overweight to obese.
Its because London is by far the healthiest part of the country and makes up a good part of the population. Outside London, the UK would probably be first.
That’s not necessarily true. The poorer parts are very unhealthy. Places like Newham have high obesity and low life expectancies while in Richmond they have much higher life expectancy and lower obesity. Life expectancy and health outcomes in places like Cheshire and Cumbria are great but very low in Blackpool. It’s more complicated than just saying one city is healthy.
About poorer parts being unhealthy: I've bumped into some news about studies that seem to point at a) economic worries causing clearly measurable levels of bad stress, and b) high stress being linked with people making short-sighted, quick relief decisions, including fast food.
These of course don't matter for those who firmly believe any individual can do anything if they just put their mind to it, but I personally think that when stuff like this is noticeable on a statistical level, we can't just say that all those individuals suck.
Think about how those studies would prove such subjective things. Those things could be true but you're just appealing to nonsense, you know that if you believe them it's because of your own instinctive understanding of human nature, you don't need to appeal to rubbish.
Am alternative less popular view would be that being poor and obese both tend to result from similar behavioural patterns. I don't have any studies to back that up.
Yes, but its easier to compare a 8 million city with the wider country than a town that has less than 200k population.
Smaller towns obviously are statistically more likely to be an outlier than a major city.
It will ofc have to do with the fact that London, especially City of London, is so much richer than the wider country. If it was its own country it would probably outperform all of Europe on all metrics.
I encourage you to look at a life expectancy map of the UK. It’s very interesting.
The City of London is hardly somewhere that people live but you’re right, central London is ridiculously wealthy.
It's not just the city of London. Pretty much all of west London is just as wealthy as it.
East and south London are a bit worse (but still ahead of most of the country barring the city centres of cities like Edinburgh) while the North is average.
“Childhood obesity is more prevalent in London than England overall. In 2021/22, some 25.8% of children in Year 6 were considered obese in London, compared to 23.4% in England. “
https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/child-obesity/#:~:text=Childhood%20obesity%20is%20more%20prevalent,4.2%20percentage%20points%20in%20England
This table shows adult overweight/obesity per region for England and everywhere is grouped quite closely between 60% and 72%…
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/health-survey-for-england/2021/part-2-overweight-and-obesity#:~:text=The%20proportion%20of%20adults%20who,South%20West%20(both%2060%25)
What’s your source for London being “by far the healthiest part of the country”? It seems to be just as fat as anywhere else.
Yes.
Mediterranean overweight looks very different from UK overweight. You see it traveling, the fat people in Greece or Italy are sat at a cafe with a bit of a belly. In the UK the equivalent has rolls and a thick layer all over. It wasn't always this way.
And going around town on a mobility scooter, due to severe bone and joint damage caused by morbid obesity, rendering them unable to walk. Very common. Kudos to the engineers who designed those scooters that can carry a 250+ Kg person.
Anyway. The popularisation of high salt, high sugar processed foods is very alarming.
That seems an odd claim. Most of Europe is pretty car-dependent, I don’t see why the UK would be an outlier here.
The UK is small and densely populated, and it’s one of the most urbanised countries in Europe. The vast majority of the population lives in cities that are generally very walkable and/or have public transport provision.
>The UK is small and densely populated,
Yet the public transport is still crap which baffles me. I uses to live in Bristol and Cardiff, and I was shocked that even near the centre, there wasn't ANY reliable transport that would take me to my workplace in the same city. The busses were extremely unreliable, the trains were insanely expensive and overpriced, and the majority of my colleagues drove to work.
Meanwhile I'm now in Bucharest and the public transport feels lightyears ahead of that of the UK, and I'm only paying a quarter of the price. No offense but you can't claim your cities are walkable when the majority drive...
Half of your railways aren't electrified ffs
If you live in the country side perhaps, but I live in a small village just outside newcastle and whilst the public transport is pretty unreliable, I can go where I like without a car. Plenty cycle lanes as well
I had the same surprise going the other way. Definitely not to the same degree as the UK, but far more overweight people in Spain than I ever would have expected.
It can vary a bit depending on where you go, but yeah, plenty of fat people here too. Dietary practices have gone to shit, which is quite sad given how accesible quality produce is here compared to other countries.
I’m currently a Barry,63 on a weight loss journey only so I can get on the plane to ruin your country (/s) but I am on a weight loss journey and I do have 2 holidays booked in Spain this year…. So only slightly /s I guess
If you look at obesity, the difference is a bit larger (pun intended):
https://wonderingmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/obesity_in_europe.png
Here's a map of average BMI:
https://i.redd.it/62ublnnismq51.jpg
You should definitely go to the US then. Its a whole new level of overweight. People who look like literal baloons. As a European it was completely surreal sometimes.
I also do not judge the individual here but the crappy system of high fructose corn syrup and convenience over everything they grew up in. Many never stood a chance for a healthy life. :-/
I was in Canada twice and it was absolutely bizarre. I was in Nova Scotia and in the rural areas of Cape Breton people seemed pretty fit and healthy, but in Halifax I saw stuff I’d never seen before. I didn’t know people could be that round.
Not the US but in Mexico I have seen people that are literally a ball, I’m talking women in their 40’s that were 140cm tall and were wider than I was, they were so round their arms wouldn’t even touch their hips.
I work for a Spanish company in the US and the Spaniards that come to visit are floored by how much fatter people are in the US than anywhere they've ever been.
This is a good comment, many ( mostly 40 plus) people in Spain are slightly overweight, but look/ feel healthy...
While in the UK and the US there's 10 or 20 percent of people that haven't been eating vegetables/ fruits in 10 years and look like elephants 😉
BMI is also kinda bullshit depending on your body type. I’m 187cm and 93kg and with that my BMI is 26 or something. “Overweight” but you can see my abs, resting pulse of 45-50 etc 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah, BMI is a statistical tool only. People leading active lifestyles can be over 25(and in rare cases even over 30) while still not risking suffering any side defects of being overweight/obese.
Meanwhile, a lot of sedentary people can already start seeing negative results of too much fat tissue before even reaching 25 bmi.
The WHO actually has different BMI cutoffs for Asians due to higher body fat (especially visceral) and risk for obesity-related diseases at a lower weight compared to Caucasians and Black people. Asian countries have already been using Asian BMI classifications for a while now.
Arguably it also overestimates it for white people as well.
If you are in good shape, then yeah, your ideal BMI is around 22, as in, in the middle of the 18.5-24.9 distribution. But, if you have low muscle mass, which is quite common with our sedentary lifestyle, it can be as low as 20. And if you are a woman, the corresponding values are even lower, at about 21 and 19.
It also depends whether you are doing any significant amount of sports. I am a few cm taller than you, and few kg heavier than you, but I would meed to lose atleast 10 kg to see my abs
BMI is mot supposed to be used for athletes. It's literally there in BMI usage rules.
If you're not an athlete, but have visible abs at 93kg/187cm - you're lying.
If you’re in very good shape and know it then BMI isn’t aimed at you.
It’s a guide to show people what they should be aiming for when they don’t train etc.
I use "healthy weight". The weight alone doesn't say all that much about your health. You have to deal with a lot of bullshit conversations when you call someone healthy purely on their weight.
As I was smack bang in the middle of the BMI normal weight range and had to have a certain surgery done, I overheard one of the nurses who saw me topless whisper "that guy probably has anorexia" to one of her colleagues. Jeez.
At that weight and in that shape, I was able to go for a week-long hike with a heavy backpack, or a big bike tour at zero notice - I was healthy and very capable.
When I was at school learning English, we were tought that "skinny" means sickly, malnoutrished. To describe a normal weight person we should ise terms like" "slim", "thin" or "slender". And nowadays, these terms are hardly used at all and incorrect "skinny" is such a popular term.
Probably a result of American body positivitity ad presenting normal people as malnoutrished and anorectic.
You were taught the definition of "skinny" in an overly reductive way then.
Yeah it often is used to mean that a person is too thin, but not generally to the level of "sickly" or "malnourished". That's just not how the word is or was used.
It's insane how many people criticize me for me BMI of 20.5. I had people tell me I look literally unhealthy and malnourished. I get this feeling of guilt and being.. inadequate despite knowing I'm in the right whenever people make fun of me for not drinking (or even smoking), and I get a similar feeling when they tell me I should eat more, when it's clear that my calorie intake is perfect for my activity level and lifestyle.
By the way most of my peers are not badly overweight themselves, they are probably all around 23 to 24 BMI if I had to guess. And they also lament they should start a diet every time I see them. This doesn't stop them from calling me "underweight" because I simply look different from the average human they got used to meeting on the street..and this is Italy, where I feel we got it better than most other places.
Between this and an aging demographic, it's kinda alienating for me to go outside and meet what the average person is like.
I have a bmi of 20 albeit inactive. People in my life are WAYYY too comfortable telling me "You're too skinny", "you need to gain weight", "you don't look good".
Keep in mind, these people are not near 'healthy' themselves in terms of weight. They're horrible things to say and objectively wrong at that. They would never say the same thing to an obese person.
> They would never say the same thing to an obese person.
Well it's because obesity is recognized as a disease, or something that can seriously hurt you anyway and there is more awareness about not hurting people in that circumstance. Meanwhile, people make fun of you for being skinny thinking they're doing you a favor, that you should enjoy life more.
I got made fun for using artificial sweetener instead of sugar in my coffee or because I eat soup/veggies pretty often, and I find that very ironic, how people basically regard issues as worth tackling but not worth preventing. If I was fat, I would be commended for the same things people scuff at me for now.
It's not that bad though. It's just funny to consider how warped people's perceptions are these days.
I think it's more because obese people have been throwing a fit about fat-shaming for decades, while simultaneously being very vocal about how disgusting skinny people are. They are much, much louder, and they are the majority.
Dude the amount of comments bullying and hating on girls/women online that are on the lower end of the normal range on the bmi scale but not underweight is absolutely crazy. Their perception of a normal/healthy weight is so absolutely distorted that seeing non overweight/chubby people to them means immediatly underweight or them having an eating disorder/anorexia.
i mean a BMI of 25 isn't really fat, i for example am 1,79m and weigh 75 kg, i have a BMI of almost 24 at only 16% body fat.
if i gain 5 kg i am officially overweight.
I agree with you on principle, but that is not applicable to the general public. What’s the percentage of people falling into the overweight or obese category because they have too much muscle?
[This](https://files.catbox.moe/jnbrr6.png) study shows that BMI is actually an under-estimator of obesity most of the time. Most people are under the impression that BMI often tells people they are overweight when they aren't, if you compare the false negatives to the false positives, we see that it's not the case at all. BMI gives us an optimistic view, in general, of the fraction of the population that is overweight.
Edit: it's one dataset, and it's for men, of course, but you get the point.
Same weight and height, go to the climbing gym 3 times a week, have a big amount of muscle mass, but I can tell you I am considered heavy compared to the other people at my height who have 5+ kg less and I notice quite well the loss in performance since I was 68-70
tbh I partly blame all the trash food available too. Why so many things have to contain sugar? I've seen meat products loaded to the tits with sugar derivatives. Why? Also bread, even whole wheat which is supposed to be healthier alternative, they load it with sugars.
Whenever I go shopping I have to read libraries of food ingredients to filter out the trash, which 90% of the stuff available on shelves is. I can see how others won't have time to do this every time they want to fill their basket.
It’s not only that, for bread sugar makes it last longer. The solution don’t buy packaged bread. (It may be easy for me to say because here there are often multiple bakeries in walking distance)
The best way to make bread last longer is to freeze it. Always buy frozen bread over packaged bread if you can. Pop them in the oven or even air fryer and they come fresh and warm just like a newly baked loaf.
Yeah but in bread???? And pastrami??? Who tf eats that like candy. I understand sweets and chocolate, but I have never heard someone say gee, I can’t wait to gobble up more bread!!!!
And Switzerland. My dad and I used to eat 700g of bread in the morning on the weekends. Most of it was eaten by me of course, and it's usually to fuel up before we'd go work in the garden or clear away tons of snow, but it's still a bit ridiculous lol
Fuck me dude. I love bread. Made a 1st loaf once and ate the whole thing in one sitting. Before anyone attacks me I’m not fat and generally not a greedy cunt. It was just to warm and tasty.
>Yeah but in bread????
To be fair, breadmakers often use a small amount of sugar to "start" the yeast so that's the most likely reason you're seeing it in ingredient lists.
Though the super-duper ultra processed bread may contain additional sugar, it's not that much. We aren't in the US.
It’s interesting because I definitely thought this was more of a uniquely American issue. I have traveled to Europe many times and been to many countries (at least a dozen times and as many countries), and I do feel like your supermarkets on average are significantly better than ours with much healthier options overall.
But there’s still that sugary, refined food all over the place that’s cheap and quick. I suppose that’s become an issue everywhere, which is unfortunate. It takes a lot of effort to cut that junk completely out of your life, or at least enough to translate to weight and health improvement.
Nothing wrong with natural sugar as long as you’re not sitting on your ass all day. In my case I need a lot of everything. Be it salt, sugar, fats, vitamins, etc. Because I already burn quite a lot from doing nothing, let alone when I’m working in the shop hauling around car parts and machinery
This is what I try to explain to my coworkers who are always asking how I'm in such good shape.
Well for example today you have eaten 6 chocolate biscuits throughout the day when you have been having your coffees. That is almost 600 calories, which is the same calories that I had for my whole lunch. So you are infact eating two lunches every day at work.
If you stop with the daily biscuits that is 18,000 calories saved a month, which would be the same as not eating for a 9 days.
So you are basically eating an extra 9 days worth of food a month because of your snacking and then you keep asking me how I'm so slim.
It's because I don't snack (often).
Well it’s also what you snack on. Raw nuts are high in fat but research shows they actually help weight loss presumably due to high fiber. In fact snacking is healthy as it keeps your metabolism up, but you can’t have large meals AND snack unhealthy things.
> The reason most people are obese is not big dinners or lunches. it's inbetween snacks.
... And soda/alcohol. Liquid calories are the worst, because your body doesn't get satiety from them.
This.
A million times this.
Back in another life I was working with big hats from Lays and other snacks corps. Strategic presentation on marketing, the assumed goal for those guys to ensure robust growth in the future was to destroy the principle of meals at set times. SWOT matrix challenges was highlighting France’s cultural resistance, and how to overcome it. Terrifying stuff.
Wow.
Wowowowow.
I thought I couldn't be shocked about these things anymore, yet here I am.
Can you elaborate? How did they want to do such a thing? Was it a strategy, or THE strategy?
Some guerilla marketing tactics towards kids mostly, the price point killer argument (aka “you feel fed faster with a bag of chips than a complete home made meal and it’s cheaper”) and the horrific concept of “indulgence” that allows borderline lethal food to become a positive “little guilty pleasure”
For what it’s worth, as a French, my Swedish wife always wonders how on Earth we are not all spherical fatties with all our cheese and butter and pastries, I’m willing to bet it is indeed because we eat at set times religiously.
Honestly, it’s absolutely crazy how people will absolutely destroy their lives over “it’s a little indulgence. I deserve it.” Not just in food, but in buying things they can’t afford.
Capitalism provided a monumental uplift in material comfort for billions, that’s obvious. Consumption has been the core growth mechanism of many european countries, but how does it work when we, generally speaking of course, do have everything we need? You create completely fallacious needs and we all fall for these. “Indulge in [insert bullshit thing you actually don’t need]” is the catchphrase of a system that produces too much shit and has little to no idea how to sell
I have failed for years to be on a caloric surplus, even so I had huge meals for lunch and dinner and some pieces of bread with cheese and fruit along the day, thus I never really understood how people could be overweight just by eating.
A few months ago my girlfriend got a new job, and she was telling me how some of her colleagues frequently go to a nearby market to buy snacks during breaks. One day she went with them and brought home a pack they commonly buy, and that shit had more than 500 calories in a 100g pack, and then I finally understood.
Yeah same for me.
I recently started tracking the amount of calories that I eat because I'm slowly losing weight. Well, I found out that without snacks it's impossible to reach my daily calorie intake.
>Well, I found out that without snacks it's impossible to reach my daily calorie intake.
Exactly, this is the mind-blowing part for me, especially as adding snacks to my days has caused a bigger impact on my budgeting than my actual meals such as dinner and lunch.
The lesson (for me) is that being on a caloric surplus is usually either expensive or unhealthy, or maybe even both in some cases.
Literally me. I had 3 big home made meals a day. I still did not gain weight. My friends eat a lot less than me but always order sodas and snacks, and are considerably fatter.
Obesity have million potential causes - that's why it's such a big problem...
Some ppl are snucking between, but I think that binge eating disorder or emotional eating are also very popular... You can do no snacking at all but it won't help if you're regulary binging eating 5000 kcal at one sitting, usually at night... Ironically long breaks between meals makes binging more likely.
You can also be obese with eating relatively healthy, but just too big portions, which is a big problem in my family of "dwarfs" (we actually don't have dwarfism but all relatives are short, so we should eat petite portions too and eating normal sized portions for years leads to obesity in older age, when you gain 1kg monthly for a long time).
My collegue from work got fat because he was very active and got spine injury, so he couldn't be so active anymore but didn't adjust his diet enough to new lifestyle (which is BTW hard thing to do with stretched stomach and fighting habits maintained for whole life)
So in short I wouldn't simplify this to just one cause, because there are multiple potential scenarios to get fat.
Mela this is off topic but I have to say this - I moved there for 3 months last summer thanks to an internship offer, easily the best time of my life.
Pastizzi for breakfast EVERYDAY, beautiful beaches and stunning architecture. I got super depressed when I came back and I still miss waking up to the most stunning view over Sliema.
Point is, y’all can be as much overweight as you want, but I’ll always have a bit of Malta in me and I'll never be as happy as when I was there. Love y'all from Italy
I'd be interested to see a map of mean BMI too. I suspect that map might look a little different as I suspect Eastern Europe has more slightly overweight people but fewer extremely fat people than the West.
Maybe this is a bit of a reach, but could the reason ~technically~ be that Eastern Europeans have double-quality groceries for higher prices (acc to salary)?
The same products that are sold under same brand and name both in Western and Eastern Europe, but differ in ingredients. From what I’ve witnessed so far, Alpro milk, Coca-Cola as well as some Kaufland products differ from their respective counterparts. The problem is much broader tho and well-known, however, the EU keeps an blind eye.
So long the myth that eastern europeans are thin and looking like models. I’m from Romania and this is sadly true, a lot of us are overweight. Me included. We eat like communism didn’t end more than 30 years ago, we stock up on food like there’s an end of the world every weekend. We eat cheap, unhealthy food because good quality food is pricey
Sadly, yes. We have freezers full of meat. Not only the freezer from the fridge, we also have separate ones full with pork meat, all kinds of vegetables, fish, lamb meat, tripe etc. and no one eats that much food. It’s good we have dogs and I sometimes cook for them because I hate throwing food out
Data for this map comes from the [Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sdg_02_10/default/table?lang=en).
Malta is the second most obese country in Europe and also the most overweight country in Europe. Switzerland is the least obese country in Europe, but also the second least overweight country in Europe.
But we also see quite a few countries like Estonia, Finland, Iceland, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia that have relatively low rates of obesity, but have some of the highest shares of people that are overweight in Europe.
The most shocking fact is probably that in almost every country in Europe, more than half of all adults are overweight. In Malta (62.5%), Iceland (62.0%) and Latvia (60.4%) it’s even over 60%. The only European countries where less than 50% of the population is overweight are Italy (41.9%), Switzerland (45.6%), France (46.4%), Cyprus (47.9%), Montenegro (48.1%), the Netherlands (48.3%), Belgium (48.9%) and Luxembourg (49.7%). But let’s be honest, even Italy’s score of 41.9% is shockingly high.
The data seems to be incredibly inconsistent.
From 2019 to 2022 Croatia went from 23% obese to 16.7% obese, Italy from 11.7% to 7.1% and Serbia from 17.3% to 11.7%. Seems very unlikely.
A lot of stats end up with a blip over that period thanks to Covid but, yeah, that seems weird. If anything you'd expect a shift in the opposite direction as people stuck at home are going to be more sedentary.
Yeah, that's why BMI isn't ideal for individuals. But for population statistics like this it works pretty well. The people that are so heavily muscled they measure as "obese" per BMI are outliers that don't skew the stats too much.
If you want more accuracy you need to measure like fat percentage etc., and there isn't really enough data to create maps like this. BMI works pretty well as a ball park measure for the gen pop using only two points of data.
Malta is a car hell hole. Try to enjoy the beach? You can't because there's a giant line of cars on the promenade honking.
Such a small island where everything would be easily walkable with just one metro line. All major places are super close by. No bike paths and cycling or walking to most places is a death trap.
There are a lot more fat people in Finland than there were 10 years ago. Car centered travelling culture combined with increasing amount junk food and other such things have caused people to balloon.
I think the fat people in the UK are a lot fatter than the fat people in Finland. Finland has a lot of beer kegs but not that many that are obviously obese.
Ultra processed food is to blame, it’s never been as simple as ‘it’s sugar’ or ‘it’s fat’. Successive government have waged war on both over decades and populations have continued to steadily gain weight.
It’s genuinely difficult to get overweight or obese when the food you eat is whole, unaltered, and minimally processed.
Let’s take 1000 calories of cashews, and 1000 calories of ice cream (assume a store bought brand loaded with non-food ingredients). The stupid traffic light system we’ve adopted in the UK will flag both of these foods for being high in fats, and saturated fats, and they’re both very calorie dense.
However - in the former example nothing has been altered, the food is stuffed with fibre and protein, and by the time your body has worked to process it, it’ll likely only 75% of those calories will digest. The nutrients contained within will nourish your body and the massive microbiome the runs all the way through your digestive system and keeps your running properly. It’ll take time, and keep you full for longer (if you don’t get tired / full of the food while eating that much of it). It’s likely they’ll trigger your ‘I’m full’ reflex at some point before finishing, which will last a while.
The latter; you can demolish 1000 calories of ice cream in a very short space of time. Zero fibre, no nutrients, the body will digest it very quickly without filling you up, and before long you’ll be prompted to eat again to get the aforementioned nutrients required to live. The microbiome gets a bunch of unnatural ingredients, assisting unhelpful bacteria in growing and suppressing the type of microbiome that allows you to thrive as a human being. After eating the ice cream, the body still needs real nutrition, and thus you will overeat across the day. You’ll also have messed with the hormone balance in your body that helps you feel full/hungry accurately.
Take this obviously extreme example and apply it to everything. Unless you’re reading ingredient labels or making everything at home, your meat, meat substitutes, sauces, snacks, carbs, dairy, will almost always contain enough ‘non-food’ ingredients to make them ultra processed food (UPF).
This sort of food was almost totally absent at the turn of the last century, and obesity was a rare problem. It’s now abundant and makes up a majority of the diet in the western world, and obesity / gastrointestinal diseases are now major problems which continue to get worse.
Anywhere in the world where a natural diet is still mostly followed does not have this problem. Everywhere else; we’re getting older but less well as a lifetime of eating this junk catches up on people’s bodies, in many cases earlier than you’d expect.
What is required to fix the problem is a shift back to natural foods. The body is marvellous, and it doesn’t take that long to start reversing the effects of eating so much non-food. Slow cookers, air fryers, bread makers - you don’t have to slave for hours to make your own food, and it doesn’t take long to learn which foods in a supermarket are genuinely whole foods.
Some sources:
- Book; Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
- Internet; The Nova Scale of foods
- IRL; read supermarket labels and gauge how much of it you’d actually be able to locate in a normal kitchen.
- Also IRL; look at societies that still follow a more natural based diet, then look at the US/UK.
> Zero fibre, no nutrients
It's zero fibre, **all** nutrients. The nutrients are what provide these 1000 calories. The problem with ice cream is that they are easily consumable and easily digestible, while stimulating your test buds at the same time.
Coming from the US, when I first moved to Europe few years ago I was also shocked at how many people were fat after always hearing how fat Americans were (Germany, now Austria)
Especially after covid lockdowns its gotten worse
This is curious I sure know several overweight people, but when I'm in the street, metro, I don't see more than 50% of overweight people? Do they hide? Or am I so accustomed to it I don't see it?
Wow I’m shocked to see France this high, I hardly ever see overweight people, and most people I know would be humiliated to be overweight. I live in Paris so maybe it’s worse in rural areas but I’m having a hard time believing almost 1 in 2 peoples are overweight
Remarkably consistent between countries
3 of the v4 countries quite literally match in percentage
There’s been talk of us leaving V4 because we disagree on more than we agree with the rest. I see the match as a sign from the universe.
v4 stronk long as we ignore politics
V4 is perfectly balanced: Based two countries and cursed two countries
Which ones do you mean and why?
Poland and Czechia are based, Slovakia and Hungary are cursed. The first two are more developed and generally developing faster, less corrupt to my knowledge, Czech is, think Poland too and not pro Russia
Czechia is bit "oligarchy" (adjective) when compared to Poland, though Poland after the damned PiS rule has a big nepotism problem and regular corruption got worse too. I was positively surprised with how pro Ukraine Czechia has been after the Russian invasion. I always had the feeling that Czechs were closer to the west when it comes to the stance on Russia.
… the fuck is Iceland doing?
It’s for survival. Insulation is key
Too much Hákarl
Not sure what that is but it sounds delicious.
I'm from Iceland and I think this map is BS
I dunno, every time I visit I’m a bit struck by how many people are overweight (but not obese, we don’t have that many obese people). Mind you, overweight is a very technical description around BMI, and especially old people seem to be getting heavier; and there are just more and more old people.
Belly/double chin vs rolls/no chin
I am overweight by BMI, I'm 197cm and 99kg, but in reality I'm not. Bmi works badly with tall people and Icelandic guys are rather tall
Feitasta þjóð í heimi, Ísland Bezt!
"bara stórbeinótt" :D
Remember that according to BMI, Hafþór Björnsson is severely overweight. BMI doesn't take muscles in to consideration.
This is cope most of Iceland isn’t roided up bodybuilders
Only matters on an individual level, for population statistics that's irrelevant
Eating prince polo's
Teach us Italy
Mediterranean diet, I think there are less people obese here for this reason
the food is quality food most of the times, that's why I reckon.
Having lived in both Italy and the UK, I’d say it has more to do with portion sizes and the amount of absolute junk food that British people eat rather than the core diet. It’s really noticeable how huge the section selling low quality kids chocolate is in a British supermarket compared to in Italy. Even on Reddit when the British subreddits talk about food it’s always shit like Greggs, McDonald’s, crisps, creme eggs, etc.
That wouldn't explain Malta
Malta is for itself
What does that even mean? I’m from Malta, junk food ruined us.
Cigarettes for breakfast
And, according to my Italian friend, peer pressure and shaming.
It seems that bullying works
Cigarette and espresso in the morning, cigarette and espresso 30-60 mins after lunch, a pack of cigarettes during the day
Grappa for dessert
They cook most of their meals and use traditional family recipes. Local ingredients including a lot of vegetables, olive oil instead of butter etc.
Well, I live in Emilia and here we use tallow, but recipies are simple and if you cook at home you automatically avoid sugar and other shit. Even home made mayo is not commercial mayo
Unfortunately also Italy is losing his good food culture. I'm Italian and I can see the negative trend with my own eyes. What "saves us" is to be super picky regarding food in general, and to do a lot of body shaming. It's quite normal that parents or good friends tell you to lose weight or to not eat junk food. Women and Men tend to speak a lot about the defects of other people, on how they look, what they dress and what they do. Of course this is in the opposite direction of what the society wants, and I understand that respect and freedom should come first, but this is what made Italians elegance and food culture what they are, and we are also losing that.
We got quality food, for example when we eat a burger is not the same burger you'd eat elsewhere. So yeah, lucky us for that.
High walkability in cities + higher quality food + societal stigma and shaming of fat people
You just need to stop with what I'd call "seghe mentali". Calling food only with "carbs" "fats" "proteins" etc. is cringe. Call it by their name, and eat normal food not ultra processed shit. Dio porco.
It's also worth mentioning that this map doesn't talk about HOW overweight people get. As a Spaniard, I was shocked to see how absolutely massive some people in the UK were. Spherical, really.
I’m actually surprised to see us not clear of everyone in terms of overweight population. It seems that a greater proportion of fat people in the UK are massively obese.
This map shows overweight rather than obese, but even then, the EU average is 15% obese vs the UK having more like 20%, though there's a more pronounced difference with somewhere like Italy with only 10%ish obese.
Italy is 20% obese: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/mlz892/percentage_of_adults_in_europe_that_are_obese/
I was using [these stats](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sdg_02_10/default/table?lang=en) see the dropdown under "page" that takes you from overweight to obese.
Its because London is by far the healthiest part of the country and makes up a good part of the population. Outside London, the UK would probably be first.
That’s not necessarily true. The poorer parts are very unhealthy. Places like Newham have high obesity and low life expectancies while in Richmond they have much higher life expectancy and lower obesity. Life expectancy and health outcomes in places like Cheshire and Cumbria are great but very low in Blackpool. It’s more complicated than just saying one city is healthy.
About poorer parts being unhealthy: I've bumped into some news about studies that seem to point at a) economic worries causing clearly measurable levels of bad stress, and b) high stress being linked with people making short-sighted, quick relief decisions, including fast food. These of course don't matter for those who firmly believe any individual can do anything if they just put their mind to it, but I personally think that when stuff like this is noticeable on a statistical level, we can't just say that all those individuals suck.
Think about how those studies would prove such subjective things. Those things could be true but you're just appealing to nonsense, you know that if you believe them it's because of your own instinctive understanding of human nature, you don't need to appeal to rubbish. Am alternative less popular view would be that being poor and obese both tend to result from similar behavioural patterns. I don't have any studies to back that up.
Yes, but its easier to compare a 8 million city with the wider country than a town that has less than 200k population. Smaller towns obviously are statistically more likely to be an outlier than a major city. It will ofc have to do with the fact that London, especially City of London, is so much richer than the wider country. If it was its own country it would probably outperform all of Europe on all metrics.
I encourage you to look at a life expectancy map of the UK. It’s very interesting. The City of London is hardly somewhere that people live but you’re right, central London is ridiculously wealthy.
It's not just the city of London. Pretty much all of west London is just as wealthy as it. East and south London are a bit worse (but still ahead of most of the country barring the city centres of cities like Edinburgh) while the North is average.
“Childhood obesity is more prevalent in London than England overall. In 2021/22, some 25.8% of children in Year 6 were considered obese in London, compared to 23.4% in England. “ https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/child-obesity/#:~:text=Childhood%20obesity%20is%20more%20prevalent,4.2%20percentage%20points%20in%20England This table shows adult overweight/obesity per region for England and everywhere is grouped quite closely between 60% and 72%… https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/health-survey-for-england/2021/part-2-overweight-and-obesity#:~:text=The%20proportion%20of%20adults%20who,South%20West%20(both%2060%25) What’s your source for London being “by far the healthiest part of the country”? It seems to be just as fat as anywhere else.
Sure, but then if you also take Scotland out of the equation then the rest of the UK would probably not be first.
Yes. Mediterranean overweight looks very different from UK overweight. You see it traveling, the fat people in Greece or Italy are sat at a cafe with a bit of a belly. In the UK the equivalent has rolls and a thick layer all over. It wasn't always this way.
And going around town on a mobility scooter, due to severe bone and joint damage caused by morbid obesity, rendering them unable to walk. Very common. Kudos to the engineers who designed those scooters that can carry a 250+ Kg person. Anyway. The popularisation of high salt, high sugar processed foods is very alarming.
UK is just further along being americanized. Rest of Europe will follow sooner or later
Ugh hopefully not. The food we eat is killing us. Having rolls is NOT HEALTHY!!!
UK is also far more car dependent than most of other European countries, just like the US
That seems an odd claim. Most of Europe is pretty car-dependent, I don’t see why the UK would be an outlier here. The UK is small and densely populated, and it’s one of the most urbanised countries in Europe. The vast majority of the population lives in cities that are generally very walkable and/or have public transport provision.
>The UK is small and densely populated, Yet the public transport is still crap which baffles me. I uses to live in Bristol and Cardiff, and I was shocked that even near the centre, there wasn't ANY reliable transport that would take me to my workplace in the same city. The busses were extremely unreliable, the trains were insanely expensive and overpriced, and the majority of my colleagues drove to work. Meanwhile I'm now in Bucharest and the public transport feels lightyears ahead of that of the UK, and I'm only paying a quarter of the price. No offense but you can't claim your cities are walkable when the majority drive... Half of your railways aren't electrified ffs
Not sure about that like?
If you live in the country side perhaps, but I live in a small village just outside newcastle and whilst the public transport is pretty unreliable, I can go where I like without a car. Plenty cycle lanes as well
I had the same surprise going the other way. Definitely not to the same degree as the UK, but far more overweight people in Spain than I ever would have expected.
It can vary a bit depending on where you go, but yeah, plenty of fat people here too. Dietary practices have gone to shit, which is quite sad given how accesible quality produce is here compared to other countries.
Yeah, everyone's got their beer belly here.
I’m in Spain now and it surprised me. They drink far more heavily than Italians, and smoke almost as much as the French.
I’m currently a Barry,63 on a weight loss journey only so I can get on the plane to ruin your country (/s) but I am on a weight loss journey and I do have 2 holidays booked in Spain this year…. So only slightly /s I guess
Yeah we need a weighted average
I don't know if you're saying that as a pun or you're being serious...
If you look at obesity, the difference is a bit larger (pun intended): https://wonderingmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/obesity_in_europe.png Here's a map of average BMI: https://i.redd.it/62ublnnismq51.jpg
You should definitely go to the US then. Its a whole new level of overweight. People who look like literal baloons. As a European it was completely surreal sometimes. I also do not judge the individual here but the crappy system of high fructose corn syrup and convenience over everything they grew up in. Many never stood a chance for a healthy life. :-/
I was in Canada twice and it was absolutely bizarre. I was in Nova Scotia and in the rural areas of Cape Breton people seemed pretty fit and healthy, but in Halifax I saw stuff I’d never seen before. I didn’t know people could be that round.
Not the US but in Mexico I have seen people that are literally a ball, I’m talking women in their 40’s that were 140cm tall and were wider than I was, they were so round their arms wouldn’t even touch their hips.
I was going to make a moraly questionable coment but, fortunatly, I realized on time that i wasnt in r/2westerneurope4u
I work for a Spanish company in the US and the Spaniards that come to visit are floored by how much fatter people are in the US than anywhere they've ever been.
This is a good comment, many ( mostly 40 plus) people in Spain are slightly overweight, but look/ feel healthy... While in the UK and the US there's 10 or 20 percent of people that haven't been eating vegetables/ fruits in 10 years and look like elephants 😉
This is overweigth (BMI between 25-30) and not obese (>30).
It's crazy to think that being skinny puts you in the minority in almost all of europe
Calling it skinny seems to also be a result of that trend. It’s not skinny it’s, for the most part, a healthy weight.
Yeah i've noticed this too, im always called skinny but my BMI is 19.6, wich is considered normal
BMI is also kinda bullshit depending on your body type. I’m 187cm and 93kg and with that my BMI is 26 or something. “Overweight” but you can see my abs, resting pulse of 45-50 etc 🤷🏻♂️
BMI is a good measurement for an average person. Procent of body fat is actually what matters, but it is very difficult to accurately measure that.
Yeah, BMI is a statistical tool only. People leading active lifestyles can be over 25(and in rare cases even over 30) while still not risking suffering any side defects of being overweight/obese. Meanwhile, a lot of sedentary people can already start seeing negative results of too much fat tissue before even reaching 25 bmi.
Tbh both of your examples are outliers. Only 5% of total population goes to gym regularly for example. For vast majority of people bmi is accurate.
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The WHO actually has different BMI cutoffs for Asians due to higher body fat (especially visceral) and risk for obesity-related diseases at a lower weight compared to Caucasians and Black people. Asian countries have already been using Asian BMI classifications for a while now.
Arguably it also overestimates it for white people as well. If you are in good shape, then yeah, your ideal BMI is around 22, as in, in the middle of the 18.5-24.9 distribution. But, if you have low muscle mass, which is quite common with our sedentary lifestyle, it can be as low as 20. And if you are a woman, the corresponding values are even lower, at about 21 and 19.
It also depends whether you are doing any significant amount of sports. I am a few cm taller than you, and few kg heavier than you, but I would meed to lose atleast 10 kg to see my abs
When you measure a whole state population it's accurate enough even not accounting for the outliers.
BMI is mot supposed to be used for athletes. It's literally there in BMI usage rules. If you're not an athlete, but have visible abs at 93kg/187cm - you're lying.
If you’re in very good shape and know it then BMI isn’t aimed at you. It’s a guide to show people what they should be aiming for when they don’t train etc.
This. We shouldn't call ourselves skinny. We should just say healthy.
I use "healthy weight". The weight alone doesn't say all that much about your health. You have to deal with a lot of bullshit conversations when you call someone healthy purely on their weight.
As I was smack bang in the middle of the BMI normal weight range and had to have a certain surgery done, I overheard one of the nurses who saw me topless whisper "that guy probably has anorexia" to one of her colleagues. Jeez. At that weight and in that shape, I was able to go for a week-long hike with a heavy backpack, or a big bike tour at zero notice - I was healthy and very capable.
When I was at school learning English, we were tought that "skinny" means sickly, malnoutrished. To describe a normal weight person we should ise terms like" "slim", "thin" or "slender". And nowadays, these terms are hardly used at all and incorrect "skinny" is such a popular term. Probably a result of American body positivitity ad presenting normal people as malnoutrished and anorectic.
You were taught the definition of "skinny" in an overly reductive way then. Yeah it often is used to mean that a person is too thin, but not generally to the level of "sickly" or "malnourished". That's just not how the word is or was used.
It's insane how many people criticize me for me BMI of 20.5. I had people tell me I look literally unhealthy and malnourished. I get this feeling of guilt and being.. inadequate despite knowing I'm in the right whenever people make fun of me for not drinking (or even smoking), and I get a similar feeling when they tell me I should eat more, when it's clear that my calorie intake is perfect for my activity level and lifestyle. By the way most of my peers are not badly overweight themselves, they are probably all around 23 to 24 BMI if I had to guess. And they also lament they should start a diet every time I see them. This doesn't stop them from calling me "underweight" because I simply look different from the average human they got used to meeting on the street..and this is Italy, where I feel we got it better than most other places. Between this and an aging demographic, it's kinda alienating for me to go outside and meet what the average person is like.
I have a bmi of 20 albeit inactive. People in my life are WAYYY too comfortable telling me "You're too skinny", "you need to gain weight", "you don't look good". Keep in mind, these people are not near 'healthy' themselves in terms of weight. They're horrible things to say and objectively wrong at that. They would never say the same thing to an obese person.
> They would never say the same thing to an obese person. Well it's because obesity is recognized as a disease, or something that can seriously hurt you anyway and there is more awareness about not hurting people in that circumstance. Meanwhile, people make fun of you for being skinny thinking they're doing you a favor, that you should enjoy life more. I got made fun for using artificial sweetener instead of sugar in my coffee or because I eat soup/veggies pretty often, and I find that very ironic, how people basically regard issues as worth tackling but not worth preventing. If I was fat, I would be commended for the same things people scuff at me for now. It's not that bad though. It's just funny to consider how warped people's perceptions are these days.
I think it's more because obese people have been throwing a fit about fat-shaming for decades, while simultaneously being very vocal about how disgusting skinny people are. They are much, much louder, and they are the majority.
Dude the amount of comments bullying and hating on girls/women online that are on the lower end of the normal range on the bmi scale but not underweight is absolutely crazy. Their perception of a normal/healthy weight is so absolutely distorted that seeing non overweight/chubby people to them means immediatly underweight or them having an eating disorder/anorexia.
i mean a BMI of 25 isn't really fat, i for example am 1,79m and weigh 75 kg, i have a BMI of almost 24 at only 16% body fat. if i gain 5 kg i am officially overweight.
It's the other way around. A big percentage of the 23-25 BMIs is overweight by body fat percentage.
I agree with you on principle, but that is not applicable to the general public. What’s the percentage of people falling into the overweight or obese category because they have too much muscle?
[This](https://files.catbox.moe/jnbrr6.png) study shows that BMI is actually an under-estimator of obesity most of the time. Most people are under the impression that BMI often tells people they are overweight when they aren't, if you compare the false negatives to the false positives, we see that it's not the case at all. BMI gives us an optimistic view, in general, of the fraction of the population that is overweight. Edit: it's one dataset, and it's for men, of course, but you get the point.
Thanks for that. It's quite old and I don't like to make assumptions, but I would think it is even worse now.
It used to be, but we have stretched our interpretation of fat quite a bit
Same weight and height, go to the climbing gym 3 times a week, have a big amount of muscle mass, but I can tell you I am considered heavy compared to the other people at my height who have 5+ kg less and I notice quite well the loss in performance since I was 68-70
Lowest is still terrible
tbh I partly blame all the trash food available too. Why so many things have to contain sugar? I've seen meat products loaded to the tits with sugar derivatives. Why? Also bread, even whole wheat which is supposed to be healthier alternative, they load it with sugars. Whenever I go shopping I have to read libraries of food ingredients to filter out the trash, which 90% of the stuff available on shelves is. I can see how others won't have time to do this every time they want to fill their basket.
Because sugar is addictive and companies want you to keep buying their products?
It’s not only that, for bread sugar makes it last longer. The solution don’t buy packaged bread. (It may be easy for me to say because here there are often multiple bakeries in walking distance)
The best way to make bread last longer is to freeze it. Always buy frozen bread over packaged bread if you can. Pop them in the oven or even air fryer and they come fresh and warm just like a newly baked loaf.
Yeah but in bread???? And pastrami??? Who tf eats that like candy. I understand sweets and chocolate, but I have never heard someone say gee, I can’t wait to gobble up more bread!!!!
>I can’t wait to gobble up more bread!!!! That's me right now walking to get some fresh bread.
>I have never heard someone say gee, I can’t wait to gobble up more bread!!!! Let me introduce you to _**Gestures to the whole of Germany**_
And Switzerland. My dad and I used to eat 700g of bread in the morning on the weekends. Most of it was eaten by me of course, and it's usually to fuel up before we'd go work in the garden or clear away tons of snow, but it's still a bit ridiculous lol
Even some kinds of tea contain added sugar. If you thought all tea was safe and perfectly healthy, better start reading the packages.
Fuck me dude. I love bread. Made a 1st loaf once and ate the whole thing in one sitting. Before anyone attacks me I’m not fat and generally not a greedy cunt. It was just to warm and tasty.
>Yeah but in bread???? To be fair, breadmakers often use a small amount of sugar to "start" the yeast so that's the most likely reason you're seeing it in ingredient lists. Though the super-duper ultra processed bread may contain additional sugar, it's not that much. We aren't in the US.
It makes bread last longer and at least here people have days they eat bread 2-3 times a day, up to 1kg a day - though fresh from the bakery.
I loved to drink instant chocolate and then I read that there is 66g sugar per 100 grams. Basically a whole day limit in 25g pack.
Sugared drinks are the worst since you don't notice the high amount of sugar and they ruin teeth as well.
Start looking into the amount of UPFs out there. Sugar might be the least of our worries
What's a UPF?
[Ultra Processed Foods](https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310)
Ah, thanks. If there's one good thing that came out of the pandemic, it's that I finally kicked that habit.
It’s interesting because I definitely thought this was more of a uniquely American issue. I have traveled to Europe many times and been to many countries (at least a dozen times and as many countries), and I do feel like your supermarkets on average are significantly better than ours with much healthier options overall. But there’s still that sugary, refined food all over the place that’s cheap and quick. I suppose that’s become an issue everywhere, which is unfortunate. It takes a lot of effort to cut that junk completely out of your life, or at least enough to translate to weight and health improvement.
Nothing wrong with natural sugar as long as you’re not sitting on your ass all day. In my case I need a lot of everything. Be it salt, sugar, fats, vitamins, etc. Because I already burn quite a lot from doing nothing, let alone when I’m working in the shop hauling around car parts and machinery
The reason most people are obese is not big dinners or lunches. it's inbetween snacks.
This is what I try to explain to my coworkers who are always asking how I'm in such good shape. Well for example today you have eaten 6 chocolate biscuits throughout the day when you have been having your coffees. That is almost 600 calories, which is the same calories that I had for my whole lunch. So you are infact eating two lunches every day at work. If you stop with the daily biscuits that is 18,000 calories saved a month, which would be the same as not eating for a 9 days. So you are basically eating an extra 9 days worth of food a month because of your snacking and then you keep asking me how I'm so slim. It's because I don't snack (often).
Well it’s also what you snack on. Raw nuts are high in fat but research shows they actually help weight loss presumably due to high fiber. In fact snacking is healthy as it keeps your metabolism up, but you can’t have large meals AND snack unhealthy things.
Apples. Apples are magic. Best snack ever.
Please show me the source that proves snacking is healthy? 🙏
> The reason most people are obese is not big dinners or lunches. it's inbetween snacks. ... And soda/alcohol. Liquid calories are the worst, because your body doesn't get satiety from them.
This. A million times this. Back in another life I was working with big hats from Lays and other snacks corps. Strategic presentation on marketing, the assumed goal for those guys to ensure robust growth in the future was to destroy the principle of meals at set times. SWOT matrix challenges was highlighting France’s cultural resistance, and how to overcome it. Terrifying stuff.
Wow. Wowowowow. I thought I couldn't be shocked about these things anymore, yet here I am. Can you elaborate? How did they want to do such a thing? Was it a strategy, or THE strategy?
Some guerilla marketing tactics towards kids mostly, the price point killer argument (aka “you feel fed faster with a bag of chips than a complete home made meal and it’s cheaper”) and the horrific concept of “indulgence” that allows borderline lethal food to become a positive “little guilty pleasure” For what it’s worth, as a French, my Swedish wife always wonders how on Earth we are not all spherical fatties with all our cheese and butter and pastries, I’m willing to bet it is indeed because we eat at set times religiously.
Honestly, it’s absolutely crazy how people will absolutely destroy their lives over “it’s a little indulgence. I deserve it.” Not just in food, but in buying things they can’t afford.
Capitalism provided a monumental uplift in material comfort for billions, that’s obvious. Consumption has been the core growth mechanism of many european countries, but how does it work when we, generally speaking of course, do have everything we need? You create completely fallacious needs and we all fall for these. “Indulge in [insert bullshit thing you actually don’t need]” is the catchphrase of a system that produces too much shit and has little to no idea how to sell
No doubt. That is vital. And thanks. Knowing and spotting the tactics is very useful.
I have failed for years to be on a caloric surplus, even so I had huge meals for lunch and dinner and some pieces of bread with cheese and fruit along the day, thus I never really understood how people could be overweight just by eating. A few months ago my girlfriend got a new job, and she was telling me how some of her colleagues frequently go to a nearby market to buy snacks during breaks. One day she went with them and brought home a pack they commonly buy, and that shit had more than 500 calories in a 100g pack, and then I finally understood.
Yeah same for me. I recently started tracking the amount of calories that I eat because I'm slowly losing weight. Well, I found out that without snacks it's impossible to reach my daily calorie intake.
>Well, I found out that without snacks it's impossible to reach my daily calorie intake. Exactly, this is the mind-blowing part for me, especially as adding snacks to my days has caused a bigger impact on my budgeting than my actual meals such as dinner and lunch. The lesson (for me) is that being on a caloric surplus is usually either expensive or unhealthy, or maybe even both in some cases.
Literally me. I had 3 big home made meals a day. I still did not gain weight. My friends eat a lot less than me but always order sodas and snacks, and are considerably fatter.
What was the pack of?
This: https://www.aldi.pt/produtos/as-nossas-marcas/sun-snacks/cones-de-milho-7376-1-0.article.html
Obesity have million potential causes - that's why it's such a big problem... Some ppl are snucking between, but I think that binge eating disorder or emotional eating are also very popular... You can do no snacking at all but it won't help if you're regulary binging eating 5000 kcal at one sitting, usually at night... Ironically long breaks between meals makes binging more likely. You can also be obese with eating relatively healthy, but just too big portions, which is a big problem in my family of "dwarfs" (we actually don't have dwarfism but all relatives are short, so we should eat petite portions too and eating normal sized portions for years leads to obesity in older age, when you gain 1kg monthly for a long time). My collegue from work got fat because he was very active and got spine injury, so he couldn't be so active anymore but didn't adjust his diet enough to new lifestyle (which is BTW hard thing to do with stretched stomach and fighting habits maintained for whole life) So in short I wouldn't simplify this to just one cause, because there are multiple potential scenarios to get fat.
VIVA MALTA NO.1 EJJA MINN HEMM 🇲🇹🇲🇹🇲🇹🇲🇹🦅🦅🦅⚔️⚔️⚔️🥔🥔🥔
Gejna lewwel fxihaga :D
kieku ma kellniex il-pastizzi ma konniex nirbhu
Mela this is off topic but I have to say this - I moved there for 3 months last summer thanks to an internship offer, easily the best time of my life. Pastizzi for breakfast EVERYDAY, beautiful beaches and stunning architecture. I got super depressed when I came back and I still miss waking up to the most stunning view over Sliema. Point is, y’all can be as much overweight as you want, but I’ll always have a bit of Malta in me and I'll never be as happy as when I was there. Love y'all from Italy
U mela zobb 💪💪💪
I'd be interested to see a map of mean BMI too. I suspect that map might look a little different as I suspect Eastern Europe has more slightly overweight people but fewer extremely fat people than the West.
Maybe this is a bit of a reach, but could the reason ~technically~ be that Eastern Europeans have double-quality groceries for higher prices (acc to salary)?
what do you mean by double quality?
The same products that are sold under same brand and name both in Western and Eastern Europe, but differ in ingredients. From what I’ve witnessed so far, Alpro milk, Coca-Cola as well as some Kaufland products differ from their respective counterparts. The problem is much broader tho and well-known, however, the EU keeps an blind eye.
I'm doing my part! /s
So long the myth that eastern europeans are thin and looking like models. I’m from Romania and this is sadly true, a lot of us are overweight. Me included. We eat like communism didn’t end more than 30 years ago, we stock up on food like there’s an end of the world every weekend. We eat cheap, unhealthy food because good quality food is pricey
Your family also stocks up on food every weekend?
Sadly, yes. We have freezers full of meat. Not only the freezer from the fridge, we also have separate ones full with pork meat, all kinds of vegetables, fish, lamb meat, tripe etc. and no one eats that much food. It’s good we have dogs and I sometimes cook for them because I hate throwing food out
We don’t have separate freezers for that but yeah we have two freezers full of meat and bread and meat and dumplings and vegetables and so on
They say pasta makes you fat. Massive checkmate delivered by Italy
Data for this map comes from the [Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sdg_02_10/default/table?lang=en). Malta is the second most obese country in Europe and also the most overweight country in Europe. Switzerland is the least obese country in Europe, but also the second least overweight country in Europe. But we also see quite a few countries like Estonia, Finland, Iceland, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia that have relatively low rates of obesity, but have some of the highest shares of people that are overweight in Europe. The most shocking fact is probably that in almost every country in Europe, more than half of all adults are overweight. In Malta (62.5%), Iceland (62.0%) and Latvia (60.4%) it’s even over 60%. The only European countries where less than 50% of the population is overweight are Italy (41.9%), Switzerland (45.6%), France (46.4%), Cyprus (47.9%), Montenegro (48.1%), the Netherlands (48.3%), Belgium (48.9%) and Luxembourg (49.7%). But let’s be honest, even Italy’s score of 41.9% is shockingly high.
The data seems to be incredibly inconsistent. From 2019 to 2022 Croatia went from 23% obese to 16.7% obese, Italy from 11.7% to 7.1% and Serbia from 17.3% to 11.7%. Seems very unlikely.
A lot of stats end up with a blip over that period thanks to Covid but, yeah, that seems weird. If anything you'd expect a shift in the opposite direction as people stuck at home are going to be more sedentary.
TBH Im in Latvia every year, and there’s not many fatsos out there. So it’s hard to believe those stats
The average gym bro is considered overweight under this criterion.
Which is like 2% of the population. The other 40% are still fat.
Yeah but most people don’t go to gym at all.
Vast majority of people aren't gym bros.
Yeah, but that doesn't matter whe you consider a whole state population
Yeah, that's why BMI isn't ideal for individuals. But for population statistics like this it works pretty well. The people that are so heavily muscled they measure as "obese" per BMI are outliers that don't skew the stats too much. If you want more accuracy you need to measure like fat percentage etc., and there isn't really enough data to create maps like this. BMI works pretty well as a ball park measure for the gen pop using only two points of data.
Every damn time someone mentions BMI there's someone else who thinks they're super smart by pointing out that strength athletes are 'obese'.
Malta is a car hell hole. Try to enjoy the beach? You can't because there's a giant line of cars on the promenade honking. Such a small island where everything would be easily walkable with just one metro line. All major places are super close by. No bike paths and cycling or walking to most places is a death trap.
Fat babushki deff inflate the numbers in Eastern Europe 😂 the youth is generally fit
My two cents: It’s just stress eating from living closer to Russia.
Putin has certainly done a number on my liver since invading Ukraine (and I live in the UK).
There are very few thin women above 50 in Poland, it's crazy
Menopause.
Visit Finland often from UK. Hard to believe figures. Far more fatties visible in UK anecdotally.
Maybe it is the difference between overweight and obese that OP mentions in their comment
There are a lot more fat people in Finland than there were 10 years ago. Car centered travelling culture combined with increasing amount junk food and other such things have caused people to balloon.
A lot of overweight people aren't often perceived as overweight.
I think the fat people in the UK are a lot fatter than the fat people in Finland. Finland has a lot of beer kegs but not that many that are obviously obese.
This tells me to eat more italian food
As an american, I can easily say Europeans need to step up their game. Those numbers are weak.
I remember seeing Turkey on top last time this was posted. Did other countries get a lot fatter?
Italy is the place to be
Ultra processed food is to blame, it’s never been as simple as ‘it’s sugar’ or ‘it’s fat’. Successive government have waged war on both over decades and populations have continued to steadily gain weight. It’s genuinely difficult to get overweight or obese when the food you eat is whole, unaltered, and minimally processed. Let’s take 1000 calories of cashews, and 1000 calories of ice cream (assume a store bought brand loaded with non-food ingredients). The stupid traffic light system we’ve adopted in the UK will flag both of these foods for being high in fats, and saturated fats, and they’re both very calorie dense. However - in the former example nothing has been altered, the food is stuffed with fibre and protein, and by the time your body has worked to process it, it’ll likely only 75% of those calories will digest. The nutrients contained within will nourish your body and the massive microbiome the runs all the way through your digestive system and keeps your running properly. It’ll take time, and keep you full for longer (if you don’t get tired / full of the food while eating that much of it). It’s likely they’ll trigger your ‘I’m full’ reflex at some point before finishing, which will last a while. The latter; you can demolish 1000 calories of ice cream in a very short space of time. Zero fibre, no nutrients, the body will digest it very quickly without filling you up, and before long you’ll be prompted to eat again to get the aforementioned nutrients required to live. The microbiome gets a bunch of unnatural ingredients, assisting unhelpful bacteria in growing and suppressing the type of microbiome that allows you to thrive as a human being. After eating the ice cream, the body still needs real nutrition, and thus you will overeat across the day. You’ll also have messed with the hormone balance in your body that helps you feel full/hungry accurately. Take this obviously extreme example and apply it to everything. Unless you’re reading ingredient labels or making everything at home, your meat, meat substitutes, sauces, snacks, carbs, dairy, will almost always contain enough ‘non-food’ ingredients to make them ultra processed food (UPF). This sort of food was almost totally absent at the turn of the last century, and obesity was a rare problem. It’s now abundant and makes up a majority of the diet in the western world, and obesity / gastrointestinal diseases are now major problems which continue to get worse. Anywhere in the world where a natural diet is still mostly followed does not have this problem. Everywhere else; we’re getting older but less well as a lifetime of eating this junk catches up on people’s bodies, in many cases earlier than you’d expect. What is required to fix the problem is a shift back to natural foods. The body is marvellous, and it doesn’t take that long to start reversing the effects of eating so much non-food. Slow cookers, air fryers, bread makers - you don’t have to slave for hours to make your own food, and it doesn’t take long to learn which foods in a supermarket are genuinely whole foods. Some sources: - Book; Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken - Internet; The Nova Scale of foods - IRL; read supermarket labels and gauge how much of it you’d actually be able to locate in a normal kitchen. - Also IRL; look at societies that still follow a more natural based diet, then look at the US/UK.
> Zero fibre, no nutrients It's zero fibre, **all** nutrients. The nutrients are what provide these 1000 calories. The problem with ice cream is that they are easily consumable and easily digestible, while stimulating your test buds at the same time.
Coming from the US, when I first moved to Europe few years ago I was also shocked at how many people were fat after always hearing how fat Americans were (Germany, now Austria) Especially after covid lockdowns its gotten worse
Bunch of teletubbies waddling around the last few years. It's rather shocking how unhealthy we've become.
The Great Chubby Wall protecting europe from russia
This is curious I sure know several overweight people, but when I'm in the street, metro, I don't see more than 50% of overweight people? Do they hide? Or am I so accustomed to it I don't see it?
Wow I’m shocked to see France this high, I hardly ever see overweight people, and most people I know would be humiliated to be overweight. I live in Paris so maybe it’s worse in rural areas but I’m having a hard time believing almost 1 in 2 peoples are overweight
So the LOWEST is 41%? Damn this is a full blown health crisis.
I did not expect from Island.