This isn't exactly an improvement in fatphobia, because it was never about actually fat people. But I think the amount of cultural pressure on ordinarily thinnish women to be impossibly, unhealthily model-thin is down a lot since the 90's and early 2000s. I may be wrong about this -- it's possible I just see it less because it doesn't get aimed at middleaged women given that no one cares much what we look like -- but I think there's been a real change.

Also some improvement on genuine fatphobia, I think as well, but it's hard to quantify.

The tweet is so completely insane I wonder just how prevalent this kind of thing really was.

The "drink water" advice? It's certainly something I was familiar with as ordinary good advice. I wasn't listening to that kind of thing, and I wasn't getting heavy pressure from anyone I gave a damn about, but I was hearing it.

The tweet is so realistic to me.

Is that also why Millennials (at least on the internet) obsessed with proper hydration or the lack of proper hydration?

I was googling for an ancient post of mine where I was bitching about some Details article on how fat is sexy now, illustrated by photos of celebrity women who were thin but not skeletally angular, like Marilyn Monroe, and a photo of a pig. Can't find it, though.

To nitpick the post, though, "whale tail" wasn't about fat, was it? That was just the term for thong underwear showing above your low-rise jeans.

Gosh, the linked piece made me think there is a controversy completely orthogonal to what is at stake with food supply, BMI, health, diabetes, etc.

I saw the magazine cover and filed it under 'example of 90s skinny ideal' - because it shows a lean person - and then I found out it is not supposed to show that but an exception.

And then - on the other side of what feels like an utterly abyssal chasm - you have people losing limbs to vascular disease, uncontrolled blood sugars, etc.

7: THANK YOU. I could not for the life of me remember what a whale tail was.

THE ANTHROPOCENE DOES THAT TO YOU

7: The implication was if the woman had a smaller ass, you wouldn't see the thong. That was before we had butts in the way they are understood today.

Yeah, that was the same kind of thing as the article in the old post of mine I can't find. "Look at how we can see the appeal in even imperfect, heavier bodies", and then the illustrations would be pictures of flawlessly beautiful thin women. Gaslighting as a concept gets used too much, but it was certainly the sort of thing that could make you feel like you were losing your mind.

I really do think there's much less of that now.

12 to 8

AS IF ANY OF YOU EVER HAD BUTTS BIG ENOUGH TO WARRANT OUR ATTENTION

8: It was remarkable how many people were concerned about Jessica Simpson's vascular health.

Whales don't even have butts.

People should drink enough water to function, but as a substitute for food? Nuts.

Nuts don't count as a substitute for food, but for different reasons.

I had a small kidney stone once. Drinking water is better than that.

Don't eat that as a substitute for food, either.

Admit that I struggle to state - with compassion? moral decency? - something I believe, which is that there is a line that cannot be crossed wrt weight, body composition and such, at least not if you hope for a decent 'healthspan'. The line is fuzzy, and nobody can say exactly where it should be drawn, but it's there. If you're approaching that line, you will soon have to change something. But then - and especially in our current food environment - likely everyone has to change or adjust their food habits, at some point in their life. The constraint doesn't discriminate: possibly with a tiny number of exceptions, everyone lives with it, and acceptance of it is needed.

This is hard to articulate because there's a strong vein of feeling around that there is no such line, or it should not be said that there is. And then the issue is clouded hugely by arguments about beauty standards & chauvinism, which are different arguments, even if they connect somewhere.

(I guess for completeness I should say that there are two lines: you can also be underweight.)

It's not a hard thing to articulate. It's just not really related to the kinds of things discussed in the linked article.

Boringly, it seems that eating disorders are neither rising catastrophically (contra the article) or declining due to less pressure to be thin (re comment 1) but staying more or less the same, probably since at least the 1980s. Anorexia, anyway. Bulimia is actually down significantly since the 1990s.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8500372/

Neither the Kate Moss years of heroin skinniness nor our enlightened topless (though not muffin-topless) years of fat acceptance seem to have made much difference.

It simply isn't true, of course, to say that all millennial women have an eating disorder. The lifetime prevalence of eating disorders in the US is 9%. There was a spike in hospital admissions from eating disorders during the pandemic, mostly school-age children (boys and girls) but it isn't universal or anything like. There is a high degree of social transmission for ED, of course, so it's quite possible that it seems that way to Lucy Huber because she and most or all of her friends have an eating disorder, because they're basically an epidemiological cluster, like everyone on the same hotel floor getting norovirus.

What has increased really dramatically over the same period, of course, is obesity - and being above average weight is a risk factor for developing an eating disorder...

Yeah, I was going to ask if anyone listens to Maintenance Phase, which is Michael Hobbes who used to comment here as Rottin' in Denmark and Audrey Gordon talking about topics in diet and wellness culture from a strongly fat-positive perspective.

And I have mixed feelings about it. The implicit, or sometimes explicit, message is that there is no method of weight control that is effective or beneficial to health, and there's no good reason to believe that overweight is damaging to health in the absence of social and medical stigma. And I can't follow all the way along on either of those.

I think the problem circles around something raised in the Ozembique thread:
- there is no moral valence to having a healthy body
- there are habits (like exercising and eating fruits and vegetables) that increase your health, and those only somewhat correspond with fatness, but we take fatness as the ultimate end-all-be-all, to such an extreme point that it starts to seem like health wasn't the issue that we cared about after all.

That was to 21.

Something that I am on board with is that obesity is a physical condition that is very difficult to change, and so social pressure to keep from maltreating people on that basis, or treating them as if they could just decide not to be fat, is an unequivocally good thing.

"Gosh, the linked piece made me think there is a controversy completely orthogonal to what is at stake with food supply, BMI, health, diabetes, etc."

The linked piece is amazing in that it exists solely in the world of media. There is no attempt - none - to address whether all this business about Kate Winslet and whale tails and low waist jeans and so on has any effect on the real world or the bodies of real people at all - it's all just solipsistic anecdotal bullshit.

On Ozembique, I just learned that it can give you burps that smell like death. If it was just a bit cheaper, I'd be sold.

28: If you're concerned about how people think and feel about themselves, it's not bullshit at all to be interested in the media environment they're exposed to. I'm pretty alienated from, and sort of outsidery about, conventional beauty culture. And I've always been pretty thin -- I was heavier for quite a while when my kids were younger, but my heaviest wasn't all that heavy. And still, being immersed in all this nonsense made me consistently unhappy about my body when I was younger.

To put it another way -- say anything you like about how obesity is bad for health and society should be organized to make it likelier that people are not obese. (There are certainly people who would argue about both of those, but I'm willing to start from there.)

Is there any reason at all to think that fatphobia -- the sort of loony pressure in the article on thinnish women, and the much worse abuse and stigma directed at fat people, has any good practical effects toward reducing obesity? Because it certainly does make people miserable.

some Details article on how fat is sexy now, illustrated by photos of celebrity women who were thin but not skeletally angular, like Marilyn Monroe,

But that sort of build has always been sexy. What it hasn't always been is fashionable, which is different. And another thing it hasn't always been is radically unusual. Monroe had a 22 inch waist. She was quite a bit slimmer than the average American woman of the 1950s, who had a 25-inch waist. The average today is 34 inches.

25: yes, a person isn't obliged to be a certain way, and although I do sometimes think I should try not to do what my father did, which was die at 62 from diabetes / atherosclerosis, for the sake of my 9 yo. But can put that aside. It is a sentiment I have. Maybe it has hidden motivations (i.e. shame).

But still, when I read things like: "As in so many other instructional texts, the body becomes a project in need of constant maintenance in order to achieve its ideal, attractive form" I think:

- The body still is a project in need of constant maintenance (and this sucks quite a bit) even if not for _those_ reasons;

- Something important isn't being acknowledged here. Fatphobia is a harm, but this is a reform project. Something that still talks to body composition and diet has to take the place of fatphobia.

The linked piece is amazing in that it exists solely in the world of media. There is no attempt - none - to address whether all this business about Kate Winslet and whale tails and low waist jeans and so on has any effect on the real world or the bodies of real people at all - it's all just solipsistic anecdotal bullshit.

To pile on what LB said, half the problem is that it has basically no effect on the bodies of real people, but devastating effect on the mental health of real people.

This may be true:

It simply isn't true, of course, to say that all millennial women have an eating disorder.

but it's cherry-picking the data to draw a faulty conclusion. A ridiculously high percent of women are highly exposed to disordered thinking around food. Not everyone internalizes it, but everyone is aware of it as a modality.

Furthermore, the social costs of being fat are very real. So the motivation for someone to adopt disordered thinking can be high.

1: It's been pretty striking with the post-pandemic crop-top trend among the college set, that it's absolutely not just for the most skinny women. There's just lots of average or heavier than average women wearing tank tops. And of course, why not? Skin is sexy. But it still was a bit of a shock to me that people weren't ashamed to just have their midriffs visible even if they weren't at 90s-approved levels of thin.

All that said, I wonder if all good change here could come without talking about how people look and are at all. A discourse along the lines of: 'seriously, our food environment, from farming, to processing, to retail, to cooking, is _utterly terrible_, don't accept it a moment longer'.

If you're concerned about how people think and feel about themselves, it's not bullshit at all to be interested in the media environment they're exposed to.

But there isn't even any effort to show that the changing media environment regarding fatness actually affects how people think and feel about themselves and their weight. Just assertion that this is how the author thought, or rather how she thinks now she thought then.

One measure, and a rather extreme one, would be ED prevalence. Having an ED is a very serious form of "being unhappy about your body", I suppose you could say - that hasn't changed, regardless of the changes in the media environment. Maybe there are the same number of people now as in 1990 with EDs, but a lot fewer who are just non-clinically unhappy about their weight. (That would be good! Unhappiness is bad!) But there's no evidence that that's happened.

37 to 34.

37 is just beyond baffling to me. Do you know like literally any women?

Maybe the UK is different?

Brown bread and raw carrots for everyone.

I don't understand what Ajay is getting at, because until very recently, the media hadn't changed. The 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s all had unbelievably unrealistic standards for skinniness. So why would anorexia or bulimia rates change? Furthermore, I imagine diagnosis rates are painfully low and that actual prevalence is a whole 'nother thing.

65% of millennial women have disordered eating per this study:

https://sph.unc.edu/cphm/carolina-public-health-magazine-accelerate-fall-2008/survey-finds-disordered-eating-behaviors-among-three-out-of-four-american-women-fall-2008/

40: Bread??? Have you even heard of carbs????

We also have white bread with margarine and sugared tea.

Oops, old study, that's more GenX than millennials.

I sometimes feel like these conversations carry on along themes that are orthogonal to each other. Signing on to most of what LB says above.

It just seems obvious to me that a lot of the public discourse around body image is fucked up, and especially fucked up for women.

It also seems obvious to me that the solution to that is not to sign on for 24.2. At the population level, the correlation between body fat and ill-health is pretty fucking stark. It's also true that (as per LB and Charlie W's comments above) given the particular food and work environment we live in, it's really quite hard for most people to make changes to address that.

Millennials have avocado toast instead.

Bread, yes; also rice & potatoes. I thought I (a man in his fifties) had some clue about nutrition, but the news from my NHS-assigned dietician about high GI foods - once it had properly sunk in - was a shock. The lore about rice & potatoes is that they are low risk, a staple, a sound choice for a basic food, etc.

NHS-assigned dietician

We don't get those.

It's not a thing to envy especially. You have a choice: sit in a dusty church hall once a fortnight, like an AA meeting. Or download an app made by Germans.

I did the app. You upload photos of your lunch, and tag them, or let some ML thingy try to tag them. It's about your selection and serving ratios, not calorie estimates. Every now and then a remote 'coach' called Emily gives encouragement and advice, like 'berries are great, but consider having fewer of them'.

We don't even have fortnights.

51: THE HELL YOU SAY.

My doctor doesn't seem to set much by any specific diet. He just has a chart pointing out my weight over the years. He's also always suggesting I swim. I think he gets a percentage from the JCC.

I recently lost weight and lots of people commented on how great I look which is nice and all, but it also makes me aware that if I gain it back they'll certainly notice as well even if they don't say anything. I've already gained back some but am trying to put the brakes on and/or convince myself it's muscle mass because once I lost weight I felt up for more kinds of exercise. I just started running and was able to go straight to a no-walk 5k without any training. Doing my first official one this weekend.

I JUST DID 5000K WITHOUT STRETCHING

- there is no moral valence to having a healthy body

As I (maybe?) said in the other thread, I think people really, really, really believe that there is moral valence to having a healthy body, such that every possible connection, no matter how spurious, between one's health and one's deliberate actions gets obsessively hammered home even among strangers discussing strangers in comment threads. (For that matter, for plenty of people, there seems to be moral valence to having an attractive body.) There are degrees, but this stuff goes really, really deep. I suspect that everyone here believes that people have some moral obligation to look after their own health. There's a lot of disagreement about how far that obligation goes. Even less controversially, we believe that societies have some moral obligation to provide for the health of their members, and I'm not sure that belief can rest on a concept of healthy bodies with no moral valence. But when Charlie W in 21 talks about trying to compassionately "draw a line" around morally blameworthy bodies, it feels like a no-win situation for sure.

(As a meta-comment, the phrase "moral valence" is obviously collapsing under the weight i've put on it, but whatever.)

It's funny how people confuse "you look thin" with "you look good". My mother keeps telling me how I look great and I've lost weight, and while the first may be true although she's not an unbiased judge and her eyesight isn't what it was, the second objectively isn't unless you add in a parenthetical "(since 2014)". And I have seen her fairly frequently since then.

(Also I'm still hung up on the whiteness of AHP's list of celebrities and sources. It's not 100%, but that part really feels like a bygone era.)

56 raises some good issues. Trying to think of where I think "moral valence" lies around health -- I think we live in an interdependent society where we all have some level of obligation to help each other when we're in need. And so there's some matching obligation not to create needs that will require help unnecessarily.

But that matching obligation, while it's not nonexistent, isn't super strong or relevant in most circumstances. Mostly, any person's self-interest in being healthy should be strong enough that if they're acting in a way that doesn't make them healthy, it's not unnecessary -- their actions are likely to be constrained somehow.

I could have sworn "thigh gaps" weren't invented until the last decade. Am I old and losing track of the passage of time? Or just clueless as a young person?

MOBY-DICK, REST IN PIECE. MISS YOU, BROTHER

Women had legs in the 90s. I remember that.

62 And they knew how to use them

60: More than 10 years, but I'd agree that I never heard the phrase "thigh gap" until I was an adult with kids. The last 20, maybe?

Certainly yoga pants worn everywhere are a new and welcome difference. Though not strictly required for thigh gap.

There is a large and growing thigh gap, and I believe this demos should commit itself to closing it.

Trends for "thigh gap" - early-mid 2010s were the peak.

Demographic factors led me to read ED in 37 as erectile disfunction, though that's more a cause than a consequence of dissatisfaction with one's body.

But as an old guy, I am curious whether policing women's weight is more harmful when it comes from women or men, or if that distinction is irrelevant because the policing is a more general media onslaught?

Because two things stick in memory from back 4 or 5 decades ago to when I was single: (1) for self and most of the guys I knew, less so in what we said but very much more so in our actions, the ranking scale for looks as it pertained to dating-sexual attraction etc was not some 1 to 10 idiocy but pretty much binary: I like it [enough], or not. And among the women in the former, the far and away most important criterion for any further efforts was "do i think she's interested in me?" (2) Norman Buntz (a skeezy detective on Hill Street Blues) voiced a thought that many of us shared when he questioned the obsession with thinness (expressed in his usual charming manner as ~ "I don't get what the thing is for skinny broads")

As for low rise jeans, whoever decided that making plumber's crack fashionable has a lot to answer for.

65. "yoga pants" and "santa claus" have the same stress pattern, so any music that mentions santa claus can instead mention yoga pants and still scan just fine. I may have mentioned this before, apparently as people age they repeat themselves?

That's helpful. Thanks.

ranking scale for looks

Even as a teenager this idea seemed obviously stupid and poisonous. 100% reject the premise. I don't care who my friends think is hot, much less strangers.

68: This is really an Unfogged Classic topic -- we spent a lot of time on it back in the 2000s. My take on it, then and now, was that although, regardless of the currently fashionable body type, most men have always been attracted to ordinary women rather than holding out for model-thin angularity, that doesn't do a lot to take the pressure off. The social pressure to be thin is about how you appear in public and about how people treat you, rather than solely about whether anyone wants to have sex with you.

There have consistently been men out there willing to be be vocally unpleasant about the weight of women they would happily have had sex with if given the opportunity.

Strain on the healthcare system aside, I'd say people have a moral obligation *to themselves* to be healthy.

The root cause of all this stuff is the proliferation of processed foods.

I think it's more the economy and inequality.

I find it all kind of mysterious. Is "processed food" really that much more prevalent than it was in the seventies when I was a kid? We were eating Swanson frozen dinners in tinfoil trays where the gravy leaked onto the berry cobbler -- was that less processed in a meaningful sense than what people are eating now?

When I was a kid, my dad smoked two packs of Winstons every day. That helps stay thin.

Yeah, but it can't be all smoking. Go back another generation or so and men smoked a lot more than women, but weren't systematically thinner than women.

73: I dunno. Rigidly policing women's looks goes back even further than HFCS.

Rigidly policing my apostrophes won't help anything, either.

The Salisbury Steak was clearly made from people.

My personal prejudice would be that it's all car culture somehow -- that a reasonable amount of walking around for routine transportation has an outsized effect on preventing obesity on a population level, and that's gone down a lot since I was a kid. But I don't think there's any data that supports a causal relationship between the two things at the level that would be necessary to make it a complete explanation.

I find the added-sugar Gary Taubbes stuff convincing. He has a couple depressing case studies of things like specific populations whose diet drastically changed in a generation - Native Americans being put on reservations, I forget what else. In fact, I forget all the specifics. I just remember the emotion of being convinced.

There's probably a German word for that.

I've read (summaries of) studies that seem to suggest that our overall calorie intake hasn't really increased. Sugar, maybe, but not overall volume. That's UK, not US.

But levels of physical activity are dramatically down. So we eat about the same, but we move way less.

I'm lucky enough to live in London, so I can walk to most things. On average, that's about 13,000 steps a day, not as part of 'exercise', just walking my son to school, going to get groceries or coffee, etc. I read people talking about increasing their steps to 5,000 (no judgement, it's great) where it'd be almost impossible for me to walk that little except by making drastic changes, just because of the environment I live in and my daily routines.

But I'm sure my base level activity is way down from my parents when they were young. Even domestic labour was much less mechanically assisted.

But aren't there also studies that are like, "Those super athletic tribes in Africa are actually sedentary just like you! Compensatory twitchiness, etc, for the win!"

84: Even living in NY, I don't need to walk nearly that much. I average around 10,000 steps a day, but that's including jogging and deliberately going for walks. Just back and forth to work and grocery shopping and so on would probably come out to 4 or 5000 steps a day.

I used to average about 5,000 steps a day without trying to walk for exercise. Now I work from home, so I need to do more deliberate walking.

It's very easy for me to get 4-6K steps, so I stopped looking at my fitbit. That fixed it.

I remember at the beginning of lockdown, I was like, "I had no idea my fitbit could get so low! Did you know it's possible to only walk 1000 steps? Amazing!"

For many years, I did a minimum of 77,000 steps a week. But now my hip hurts, so I do more on the exercise bike.

But my theory does require a certain amount of "then a miracle occurs" -- on an individual level, reasonable amounts of mild exercise, which is all we're talking about here, may be good for you but certainly doesn't prevent high levels of fat. So why it would make a bigger difference on a population level doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s all had unbelievably unrealistic standards for skinniness.

I've been struck by how long and how strong it has been. All the decades before those, there were the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, slimming pills, living on coffee and cigarettes.

Tapeworms too.

I'm going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail to lose weight as soon as I get six months of paid vacation.

The cigarettes thing seems like it might really contribute to population-level waistlines. In conjunction with the cars and the sugar.

I still don't think so, for the gendered reason I gave above. There was a long time when women hardly smoked, and it didn't seem to have an effect of weight at a population scale.

72.1: This should be pretty intuitively obvious, the idea that "fashion" is driven by primarily people who are attracted to women is basically ridiculous if you know anything about fashion, straight men, or lesbians.

The yoga pants thing was pretty great so now I'm not so sure you're right.

Can we talk about Fatphilia instead?

No.

But I don't think there's any data that supports a causal relationship between the two things at the level that would be necessary to make it a complete explanation.

I was told otherwise by a guy from (IIRC) the CDC at a conference in 2002. This was around the beginning of the 10,000 step thing, and also around the widespread notion of 8 cups of water a day, so maybe it was anecdotal BS all along, but he presented it as causal and established.

One reason to think it's true is that modern car centric suburbs are dramatically less walkable than the Levittowns of yore, which in turn involved dramatically less walking than basically any human settlement built before 1920. So, kind of like with the lead-crime hypothesis, you do get parallel rising curves.

But of course there are countless other factors. As far as "processed foods" go, I think the issue is more quantity consumed than degree. That is, a 1970s diet had (probably) somewhat less fresh food consumption than 2020s, but dramatically less processed food simply because intake overall was lower. As we've covered before, snacking is a new concept (broadly speaking), and has been rising sharply. And virtually all snacking is processed foods--sure, some people are virtuous nut/dried fruit snackers, but I'm sure snack foods are 95% pretty heavily processed.

So why it would make a bigger difference on a population level doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

This is pure spitballing, but I think the difference would be about body composition in youth. I don't know what you'd get if you put a fitbit on a typical US kid in 1975, but I'm certain it would be many multiples of what kids do now. And that's about carcentric lifestyle, norms around unsupervised play, norms around electronics, etc. It all combines. And then there's the aforementioned snacking.

So kids go into puberty with a large cumulative caloric surplus (relative to all human existence prior to North American in the last few decades). And teens and college age kids are moving less while eating more. And so on, all the way through, so that it all adds up. Moving X amount doesn't take weight off, and it doesn't prevent all weight gain. But it pushes back on the desire of nearly all bodies to accumulate some fat for self-preservation.

Anyway, 24.2 strongly confirms my general sense of that guy, which is that his whole thing is to stake out an unsupportable position on any given topic and then sneer at anyone who objects as insufficiently lefty/righteous.

I like a whole lot of Hobbes' stuff, and what you're reacting to there is my disagreeable summary of my overall sense of the podcast, not quotes or anything. So you shouldn't hold it against him too much.

Signing on to 101.4 It's not the processedness but the availability and tastiness. Just a constant assault of new fantastic taste sensations, available everywhere at all times and in huge quantities for cheap. Gas stations in the 1970s might have had one snack machine with some very questionable choices in it. But they might not have. Gas stations now...well, you've probably been in one.

Who, Michael Hobbes? I haven't listened to any of his podcasts but that's not the impression I get at all from his Twitter.

106 to 103.

We have crunchtasticness in a way our ancestors couldn't comprehend.

Just a constant assault of new fantastic taste sensations, available everywhere at all times and in huge quantities for cheap.

There's a new anime where an ordinary Japanese guy is thrust into an unfamiliar medieval-fantasy-style world* with the magical ability of being able to order all the regular things an online grocery stocks in our world. He starts cooking with ingredients like bottled steak sauce and pretty much everything of his a local eats is the greatest thing they've ever tasted.

*the concept up to this point is now an established genre

Anyway, 24.2 strongly confirms my general sense of that guy, which is that his whole thing is to stake out an unsupportable position on any given topic and then sneer at anyone who objects as insufficiently lefty/righteous.

I want to tease you and say "Game recognizes game" but it seems more mean-spirited than I actually think is true.

I generally like Hobbes, though. He does get a little polarized sometimes where I think he's capable of nuance, but in general I think he's funny and smart.

104: No, I get that vibe off of him so consistently that he's one of my relatively few blocks on Twitter.

110: Funny, I was even going to say something about my own weaknesses along those lines. But really, the single way in which I think I've changed the most in my life is becoming less self-righteous and judgmental. Not that I avoid being judgey in all things--GOP Nazis fuck off--but I'm very forgiving, or at least patient with, the well-intentioned.

Not to be confused with the anime where a Japanese guy time-travels from Japanese baths to classical Roman ones. I didn't watch enough of them to see if they covered Garum. There was a lot about Roman ideas of civic duty and uprightness though. Speaking of which, where I am, Red Boat is now more expensive than good wine. I have switched to Three Crabs.

105: Exactly. I didn't want to get too into it, but addictive snack foods in 1975 were just, like, fat and salt. Cool Ranch hadn't even been invented! Now the finest minds of our age spend their entire careers perfecting addictive empty calories.

Red Boat is now more expensive than good wine

Yeah, I can't bring myself to spend that much on something that's one ingredient among many. Like, maybe I can taste the difference, but is it going to blow my mind?

Portion-size increase is real too, right? But also... as I understand it, weight gain is often a ratchet, and people's attempts to lose weight often result in increased weight gain, so you wouldn't necessarily expect population-level trends to be gradual and uniform across the decades.

112 that was an excellent anime

I don't even know what "Red Boat" is, but Cool Ranch was obviously a huge advance in making things taste good.

114. In our new work at home world where cooking at home all the time means every single bite of anything is inextricably linked to its dishes and prep time, like life and death or yin and yang, rice from the rice cooker with some fish sauce and maybe some scallion is something I eat pretty often. Better fish sauce is noticeable served that way. But three crabs is pretty good. My other rice condiments are pickles, gongura or lime and garlic.

Now on to brands of Basmati rice...

Now on to brands of Basmati rice...

I'd be curious for your preference. It takes me long enough to go through a bag that I don't have a large sample size, but the Daawat Ultima has been my favorite.

Snacking is normalized in a way it wasn't twenty years ago. Walking is hard in car-centric places: unlike ttaM, if I don't make a conscious effort, it's hard to get to 5000 steps. And it's not like it takes *much* extra snacking to result in population-significant weight gain.

I suspect this is pretty local, wasn't actually serious because I don't have the relevant details. Deer brand and Lal Qilla both good when available. There's a brand in a silver thick mylar bag, 10lb only, that's noticeably better than what I have now, long name that I can't tell you because I was cheap and bought something else that's just OK, not bad but a noticeable step down. Irrational to pay attention to the price of 10 or 20 lbs of a staple, but the good kind is like $27/10lbs at the Persian markets, under $20 at the Pakistani market. I feel a little neurotic writing any of this. I just keep 1 kind at home, cook E. Asian food with it also, so maybe my taste is weird/crude?

No, wait, I looked at the one grocer who works with an online order service, the magic brand is Shailalmahal (Shrilalmahal? Shitty font and different online vendors use both) no lie this is the St Emilion of Basmati rice.

I haven't tried Daawat Ultima.

Since 20lbs takes my house most of a year, it's a straightforward exercise to imagine actuarially likely life remaining as a diminishing pallet of rice sacks. You are welcome.

America getting fat is due to two things. We eat massively more than we used to. And we are engaged in far more sedentary labor. Far more desk jobs, far more automation of manufacturing & farming jobs.

In other news, another weight loss drug is in trials. It is also a weekly shot, and it causes about a 25% weight loss over 72 weeks. So now there are 3 such drugs approved, or soon to be approved. This is basically enough to reverse America's weight gain. The question is - how does this change the moral calculus about being fat?

They really wasted the opportunity in the graphic linked in 123 by not adjusting the size of the circles. Maybe visually the accurate adjustment wouldn't have been noticeable and they didn't want to inflate it.

OR MAYBE THEY'RE THERE! and I just couldn't tell because they were accurately scaled!

the magic brand is Shailalmahal (Shrilalmahal? Shitty font and different online vendors use both) no lie this is the St Emilion of Basmati rice.

Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it.

123.2: It's like with alcohol. Other people have problems, I'm just dealing with life.

41: "until very recently, the media hadn't changed. The 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s all had unbelievably unrealistic standards for skinniness."

Regrettably, the 2000s were not "very recently"...

My point - which I thought was fairly clear! - is that if the OP was right we should be seeing less ED now than 20 (30, 40) years ago. Because the media is, according to the OP, less pro-thin now than 20 (30, 40) years ago.

We are not - which seems to imply that the media being very pro- thin (or pro-very-thin) does not affect ED frequency.

Am I making sense here? Or, per the wise and thoughtful advice in 39, do I need to meet even more women than the 80% female workforce in the building where I go to produce (among other things) public health information about eating disorders?

"65% of millennial women have disordered eating per this study"

Disordered eating is not an eating disorder.

Other misrepresentations you have included in that brief sentence:
You've used the present tense to describe something that happened in 2008
It was an online survey, not a "study"
It was a survey of a self-selected group readers of a magazine about health and dieting called "Self", which does not require publishing methods or peer review
It surveyed women aged 25-45. They would have been born between 1963 and 1983 since the study happened in 2008. That's not millennials; it's Generation X.

127: I mean, that's the central question I was asking in the OP: has it meaningfully changed, per the tweet? I really don't know if the recent body-positivity movement has reached the masses of teenagers in a meaningful way or not.

The "drink water if you're hungry" thing is still out there.

120: I associated my personal increase in snacking with having a kid, but that's not a population-level thing.

130: except it kind of is. I was talking to my Mom's best friend whose kids are o,dear, because my Mon was 28 when she had me, and her friend is the unususuak, brainy good student who got pregnant accidentally atb19 and married the guy but finished college. Though not at Midddlebury. She did a stint at Dartmouth and the. Finished at Brandeis as she followed her now ex-husband.

Her kids were allowed 2 cookies after school, and back then it was the size of an Oreo cookie, not an enormous chocolate chip cookie. And that was it. They just didn't snack between meals. And now, in addition to being concerned about hydration on a 60 degree day, kids all have snacks. Not just junk food. It's carrots and hummus too.

127, 128: You have definitely established that this article based on a tweet is not rigorous social science, and that everyone, whether in the original post or the thread, claiming it was, has been definitively refuted.

Did you have a point beyond that, or can we go back to talking about diet culture of prior decades was the kind of thing that could (colloquially! Not referring to the DSM 5 here) make you crazy and it seems (in a subjective, impressionistic sense! I haven't done an exhaustive review of all media for the last fifty years!) to be better than it was.

I'm being snippy here, but I'm really unclear on what larger point you're trying to make.

We used to give Oreos to our pony. He would get irked if you didn't have the double stuffed kind.

129: good question! I read the OP as suggesting that the media environment had changed for the better, but I think I thought you were being more definite than you were. Sorry about that.
Maybe it hasn't changed for the better. Or maybe it has in places but that hasn't filtered down to teenagers. Or maybe the media environment is better, even for teenagers, but this hasn't actually translated into a decrease in eating disorders.
What can't be true is that the media environment is better for teenagers AND that the media environment causes eating disorders. Because the rate of ED hasn't changed. (Unless there's some countervailing force keeping them high.)

The "drink water if you're hungry" thing is still out there.

Looking at it, this seems to be a fairly nuanced subject. So, two points:
1. Even if it were true that thirst and hunger are often confused, "drink water when you feel hungry" would not be great advice because it wouldn't help when you were correctly, as it were, feeling hungry.
2. The actual problem seems to be, per this, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2467458/ that if you drink energy-containing drinks when you're hungry (or hungry and thirsty) then you'll take on energy but you won't actually feel as satiated as if you'd taken on the same amount of energy in solid food. So good advice would be not so much "drink water instead of eating food when you feel hungry" but "drink water instead of Coke with your meals".

Did you have a point beyond that

I did, and I made it in 127, clearly enough for heebie at least to understand it, but I'll try to explain it even more clearly for you later if I can be bothered.

Nobody wants to deal with an irked pony.

He pitched my brother and me off. My dad figured it would be fine since we weighed less than 120 pounds combined, but Tarzan wasn't having it.

Tarzan retired to a farm when I was about six. For real, we went to visit a couple of times. My youngest sister's supervillain origin story, should she be one, will be that her older siblings had a pony and she didn't.

134.last: So, your point is that stats you linked to showing that one eating disorder (anorexia) is stable over time and another (bulimia) has decreased over the same period definitively demonstrates that the media environment can't have improved in a way that affects the rate of eating disorders? You're going to have to do a little more work to make that as obvious as you seem to think it is. I'm not saying that the decrease in bulimia proves anything in particular about the effect of the media environment on eating disorders, but it does seem to be a stumbling block for a claim that changes in the media environment aren't affecting eating disorders.

It also seems very much plausible that serious eating disorders have largely different root causes than the culture-wide mildly disordered eating that the tweet in the post is talking about.

There's definitely a lot of social pressure for kids to have water and snacks ready to hand. Most of the time they're healthy or healthy haloed (granola bars are just substandard cookies) but it's definitely a change since I was a kid. I think it's less a problem for kids directly as they burn it off and self-regulate well, but perhaps less so for the habit of basically continual eating from morning till night.

re: 140

It's a really problem for us with xelA. He does just basically eat all day. Sometimes it's high quality actual food, and sometimes it's not (cereal bars, dried fruit, sweets). He's perfectly healthy,* and isn't remotely overweight, but I could easily see that habits established at this age could come back to haunt him in adulthood.

* you could argue he's in much better shape in a lot of ways than I was at the same age, and I was a vegan kid who basically never snacked at all. He's much more muscular and physically strong, for sure.

Maybe he needs a pony?

131, 140: Interesting. I remember having things like granola bars and Fruit Roll-Ups handy when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, but (a) I don't remember well enough to say that they were every bit as plentiful for me at that age as they are for my kid now, (b) even if I did it's just anecdata, and (c) maybe the change we're talking about had already happened by then, since I know I'm younger than at least some people here.

As for hydration, I feel like that came with the pandemic specifically. 5 years ago we didn't carry water bottles around with us everywhere even though we were aware of the "8 glasses of water" advice because we could always find water bottles or buy something if necessary, but then covid happened and public water fountains became fraught. Again, take this with as big a grain of salt as you want. Now public facilities are available again but we still carry the water bottles.

Yeah, I've bitched about that before, but of course more when my kids were little and it was my problem. There's a matching belief among adults that their moods and well-being generally are strongly affected by hunger in a way that eating regular meals isn't enough to manage, so it's important to have food available all the time so as not to be "hangry" or feel ill due to low blood sugar or something. I'm being dismissive about this, obviously, and I'm sure some people can't go several hours without snacking without suffering meaningful discomfort, but it seems to be a lot more common now than in prior generations.

Or just kids were hangry often, but they weren't around their parents so much so it wasn't a problem adults felt they needed to fix?

144: Someone could come up with a Unified Field Theory that the cause of frequent snacking is highly processed foods that don't provide long-term satiety.

We would run into the house for Kool-aid and cookies, then run back out. Baking cookies was a regular chore assigned to one of us each week.

The cookies were made with Crisco, because that was healthier than butter according to top 1970s scientists.

@145 This is a "god of the gaps" argument, as applied to hangry! Bravo.

I would not be surprised if children that are accustomed to snacking continuously throughout the day get hangry. But I believe (based on my own childhood), that children who are trained to eat only at meals will not get hangry.

Like everything else about the body, the ability to maintain blood sugar within appropriate levels over reasonable amounts of time is likely inherent. And something that the overwhelming majority of the population can accomplish. And only recently (like last 150 years or so) would you have prepared food ready for children to eat at a moments notice. Looking back even longer, breakfast is a new thing!

Based on my own children, I suspect that the pathway is: boredom --> requesting food --> becoming accustomed to eating as a response to boredom --> losing the ability to regulate blood sugar + learning to expect sweets whenever demanded --> "hangry".

We've tried to interrupt this at the first step. But it's hard. Particularly when we are also trying to maintain a policy of "no tv or internet, go read a book."

145 that's why they fought so often. That and all the lead.

It also seems very much plausible that serious eating disorders have largely different root causes than the culture-wide mildly disordered eating

Yes. The definition of "disordered eating" is extremely broad. I had a look at how various medical professional bodies define it...

"Dieting" is classed as disordered eating. "Avoiding a type of food or food group" is disordered eating (I am assuming here that they don't include "being vegetarian" or "keeping kosher" but maybe they do!) "Rigid routines surrounding exercise" are disordered eating.

"Doing more exercise because you've eaten high-calorie food" is disordered eating!

Maybe these are all on the same spectrum as actual serious illnesses like anorexia, which can damage your body or put you in hospital or kill you, but there is a lot of spectrum to cover first before you get to that point.

I found being lazy and disorganized about having snacky food available was a huge asset to my parenting in that regard. I didn't carry snacks around, so there weren't snacks, so there was no point in asking.

And of course my kids did snack some, and I did too when I was a kid -- in high school I was starving all the time, and ate a whole lot after school. There just wasn't an institutionalized culture of total snack availability.

@151 You have my sympathy, Ajay. This is pretty standard Motte and Bailey stuff. The choice of making the new, nebulous term a literal reordering of the words of the old term is just the cherry on top.

But I believe (based on my own childhood), that children who are trained to eat only at meals will not get hangry.

Based on my own childhood, I believe that if you are a child who only gets to eat at mealtimes, you will spend most of your day feeling hungry (especially as a teenager). That was certainly the case for me, with the exception of about an hour after each meal. But I don't think I spent most of my day feeling hangry because I was hungry - I just felt hungry.

I'd agree with that -- that the novel belief is that a feeling of hunger is a problem that needs to be resolved on a time scale shorter than waiting for the next meal, both for children and adults.

City people are cruel. Everyone I knew growing up got an after school snack. Plus, the school sold donuts at morning break.

We also got elevenses.

@154, 155 Perhaps you would feel hungry. I'm not sure that is a problem that requires a snack as an immediate solution. Any more than feeling bored requires an electronic distraction as an immediate solution.

Here is an interesting reference with population height and weight data from 1959, looking back over the preceding 60 years

given the nature of, and restrictions on, the evidence available i wonder if the pervasive mental space taken up by thinking about weight-body shape-food-exercise in service to aesthetic ideals* that is a widespread experience of mid 20c women (including girls beginning at a variable age) to the present is new or just that mid 20c is when women first started talking about it in any numbers or in non-ephemeral formats.

*as distinct from eating disorders as a dx of any kind.

When I was in Israel for 3rd grade in 1972, there was something called ten o'clock meal (a rough translation), as important a part of our daily routine as recess and lunch.

we strictly adhered to meals at mealtimes (& they are eaten with others at a table with mealtime conversation & table manners & all that shit) & for the kids that meant elevenses & gouter & midnight suppers liberally deployed as needed to surf growing & growth spurts. also me buttering your bread bc guaranteed you won't apply enough & i will. but we never did the "snacks" thing. all the kids are slim to skinny & delightful conversationalists. zero idea if it there was any causal effect.

159: There's certainly a thing where if you look at slightly older media, you see advertisements and so on for how to put on weight for the unattractively thin -- not that everyone was trying to gain weight rather than losing it, but that there was a beauty ideal that you could plausibly miss from either side.

I think pressure to be attractive has probably always existed over the centuries, maybe more or less intense over the years. Specifically holding up extremely unusually thin women as a universal ideal, on the other hand, is I think 1960s and later, and maybe is calming down a little now.

I want a snack right now. Not sure if it's society's fault or because I've been reading this.

I admit I find it wild that this conversation, last time and this time, more or less moved from "healthy at any size? That seems a bit extreme" to "unhealthy diets are a problem for everyone [at any size?], and we should properly focus on that." It ends up somehow borrowing the scale of the obesity crisis to make a more general point about food and morality. Snacking is bad, period!

162: yes, but it isn't just the intermittent twiggy-kate moss waves of really really skinny models. raquel welch & cindy crawford were unattainable ideals too (altho rawhr i mean who would you rather roll around in the hay with ??? rw of course!)

gene tierney talked about getting advice from a cameraman at an audition shoot to lise 10 lbs, did it, she started getting roles, & was constantly hungry until she quit the business & then spent the rest of her life not constantly hungry but always conscious of her fall from grace. that's a relatable experience for me & pretty much every woman i know. new? zero idea.

snacking as practiced among other umc west coast families with young children went with not sharing meals, not valuing cooking & regarding a meal at a table with conversation as either a special treat or an egregious burden. i'm a former professional cook, family meals & family conversation are super important to us. it's not possible to create a family without making judgements about what matters to you.

Most of the time they're healthy or healthy haloed (granola bars are just substandard cookies)

I do the healthy-halo thing with snacks with my own kids a lot, because I figure that half the point is to establish the idea that not all food needs to be the yummiest thing in the world. It doesn't need to fire off all your brain feel-good sensors in order to do the trick, satiate your hunger, and get on with life.

It's perfectly fine to have a fantastic dessert or meal or whatever. But for a regular snack, let's not expect it to be really delicious.

(In practice, this means they're eating some crap that doesn't even taste great and offers no nutritional value over the thing they'd rather have. But other times it means they actually eat an apple!)

I remember having things like granola bars and Fruit Roll-Ups handy when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, but (a) I don't remember well enough to say that they were every bit as plentiful for me at that age as they are for my kid now, (b) even if I did it's just anecdata, and (c) maybe the change we're talking about had already happened by then, since I know I'm younger than at least some people here.

My memory is that friends' had unrestricted access to their pantries, which contained cookies and fruit roll-ups, (memorable because I had highly restricted access to a pantry which didn't.) Jammies grew up with unrestricted access to a treat-filled pantry.

167.last: I guess it's for the best that my last banana bread isn't great.

My wife pretty much only eats snacks - she has cereal for breakfast, and sits down for that, but otherwise I hardly ever see her sit down and eat.

Ok, here's a question that I'm wondering as I read through the thread: when you all say increased snacking, is that because the parent or social setting is formally giving the kid something, unprompted? or does "increased snacking" refer to kids rummaging through the pantry, without adult intervention?

I don't believe the latter has changed. I could believe the former has changed, but if it does, I'm guessing it cuts down on the latter.

164: It is weird, and noticeable that the conversation always does this, and I drive it as much or more than anyone.

But I think there are two distinct social problems, and they're both real and significant, and plausible solutions to the two of them are sort of contradictory but maybe they don't have to be in a way that makes it hard not to bounce back and forth between them.

First, what the post was actually about, fatphobia, which you can break down into people maltreating and stigmatizing actually fat people, which is cruel and serves no good purpose, and people and media pressuring ordinary-sized women to be extraordinarily thin, which is also cruel and serves no good purpose.

And then you've got a population-level situation where there are a lot more fat people than there used to be, and this isn't a neutral fact in terms of people's happiness, it meaningfully makes people sicker and less happy. So if there are changes in society that have brought this about, it would be good if they could be identified and altered.

There's a dumb belief that the first problem is a solution to the second -- that if society is just horrible enough to fat people, and terrorizes not-fat people about how bad fatness is, it will keep people from being fat. This really seems like something that has been tried and failed at a societal level. But the dumb belief is strong enough that it's hard to push back on the first problem without wanting to drift into talking about how it's compatible with wanting to work on the second problem as well.

re: 158

What's interesting about that, is that while the 1955 people are heavier on the whole than their counterparts from the 19th century, women in the 1950s are lighter, at all heights, than their 19th century counterparts. Older menin the 1950s are lighter, too.

+1 to everything LB says in 173.

Things changed when McDonald's took the cigarettes out of Happy Meals.

172: I would say an increased commitment to stocking snacks, and having them available. Like, I could eat anything in the apartment when I was a kid. Sometimes there were cookies, usually there weren't, sometimes there were crackers, there might be fruit. But my parents weren't ensuring there was reliably non-meal food available.

174: Less muscle mass for the 20th C women? I would believe that housework might have been equally time consuming but have required significantly less physical strength in 1950 than in 1890.

see this is just unavoidably a judgment call where heebie & differ. "It's perfectly fine to have a fantastic dessert or meal or whatever. But for a regular snack, let's not expect it to be really delicious." i've consciously raised em to always expect, work for, wait for & relish delicious*.

* delicious is context dependent.

Based on how much my kids complain that there's nothing (good) to eat in the house, I'm happy to report then that we're providing a standard 1970s-1980s upbringing.

179 sounds more like high quality deliciousness, which is different from the hostess cupcake highly processed yumminess that I'm referring to.

We also do not do high quality deliciousness very often, but that is out of laziness and not conviction.

173, 164: personally - v v v personally! - i avoid directly engaging with any discussion of eating disorders here bc this would be a bad choice for me. i can discuss the bits around the edges that i've engaged with in this thread, further into the molten core - not going there in this space.

& yes, raising children with a structured relationship to food that relentlessly prioritizes social interaction, deliciousness & joy was v much a conscious choice to avoid burdening them if possible with own demons. as far as i can tell, worked altho who the hell knows.

I admit I find it wild that this conversation, last time and this time, more or less moved from "healthy at any size? That seems a bit extreme" to "unhealthy diets are a problem for everyone [at any size?], and we should properly focus on that." It ends up somehow borrowing the scale of the obesity crisis to make a more general point about food and morality. Snacking is bad, period!

I honestly can't tell if the last sentence of this is satire or admonition.

It's nice having adult children and getting some perspective on what their upbringing looked like from their point of view. I cared a fair amount about family dinners with conversation, not actually thinking about nutrition or health exactly, but just that it seems to me to be an importantly emotionally/socially healthy way to live. But I did not feel great about the extent to which I successfully made that happen.

Talking to Newt, though, recently, he at least perceived "family dinner with conversation" as our norm growing up, which was very comforting to hear.

183: Definitely satire.

re: 178

I could absolutely imagine that's possible. Plus, maybe having more children, as a factor, too? Along with getting broken down over time by years of hard labour. I look at my Czech in-laws, for example, and they are generally heavier than most of my UK relatives of a similar age, which I suspect is a factor of diet (sure), but also, just the long term effects of years of heavy manual labour (for all sexes).

183 last: pretty sure it was a jab at the dq school of child rearing, fair enough. just down here in the engine room of my fucked up self tinkering with the pipes & dials & levers & trying to spare beloveds from this particular var of fucked upness, knowing doomed to fail!

I aim for "family dinner with conversation" and Jammies kind of loathes it - he considers it a huge amount of work in order to listen to kids argue for an hour. I asked him recently what his alternative would be and he said, "I dunno, everyone makes a sandwich or has a bowl of cereal or something." Probably we should do a little more of that on occasion, but those tend to devolve into me making tacos for some kids and ramen for some and a PB&J here and another kid is making themselves a breakfast-shake, and they keep coming back for some of what the other kid had, because that looks good, and I don't know if it's exactly a net win in any sense. It's a change of pace, at least.

Obviously I stated my prejudices before, but you're right and Jammies is wrong. Sitting around talking with your family is how kids develop from being a chore to tolerate to being pleasantly social people. I mean, no harm letting everyone scavenge once in a while, but the family dinner isn't pointless work, you're really doing something good for the kids.

What's interesting about that, is that while the 1955 people are heavier on the whole than their counterparts from the 19th century, women in the 1950s are lighter, at all heights, than their 19th century counterparts. Older menin the 1950s are lighter, too.

Also most obviously among men, there seems to be a relationship between height and weight gain? In every gender/age grouping except one, as you go from short to tall, the change in weight gets less positive, or goes from positive to negative, or gets more negative.

Men 25-29: 65-inchers +14, versus 73-inchers +1
Men 35-39: +4 vs -5
Men 40-40: -1 vs -16
Women 25-29: -6 vs -6
Women 35-39: +3 vs -10
Women 40-49: -1 vs -12

I wonder if it's that a lot of people with short stature in the 1880s were that way because of malnutrition, and that was for economic reasons that persisted into adulthood, whereas in the 1950's short people were more often that way because of genetics.

189: hooray!

And AIMHB, we actually met with a therapist over zoom yesterday as a whole family to tackle the issue of how much arguing there is. I really like her a lot. The next session is just the kids. She wants them to more-or-less look to themselves to come up with goals and solutions to solve the fighting, and to remove Jammies and me from it. This sounds divine and I could not be more relieved and optimistic (at this particular moment in time, with classes ending and the summer opening up, etc etc).

Oh, that does sound like it should make things much pleasanter.

Lots of people were down on snacking, dq, definitely not just you. I also take the oblique route into these discussions for personal reasons, but I actually do find the philosophical questions interesting, particularly after reading a lot of philosophy in college during what was more or less the Atkins-vs-vegans era of extreme food positions. (A personal insight I will share: I never need to eat anything containing "sugar alcohols" again, yecchhh.)

Family dinners are probably good, but I'm a traditionalist and think it all comes down to toilet training.

I don't even know what "sugar alcohols" is.

193: Yeah, I'm preemptively cranky about snacking because I think allowing kids to develop snacking expectations (that there's always going to be something tasty immediately available) makes them whiny, and then I let that spill over into crackpot theories about how it affects lifetime eating habits in a way that is maybe not perfectly intellectually defensible.

Let's not put whining in a box! There is a vast world of interesting things that children can suck all the pleasure out of by whining about them.

197 is really true.

I think sugar alcohol is the real-life version of this.

194: Actual traditionalist here -- we're all doomed due to original sin.

(and just occurred to me that the original sin was snacking)

That's right. Good catch.

We had routine conversational family dinners (only book allowed at the table: the etymological dictionary), but it didn't make us scintillating conversationalists.

We used to have conversations, but now the son just eats as fast as he can and runs.

Eats, leaves, and shoots?

200 made me laugh.

What are sugar alcohols?
The term itself is actually misleading: There is no alcohol in sugar alcohols, and there's no sugar, either. "Sugar alcohols are a type of carbohydrate and have a chemical structure that's similar to sugar," Bissell says.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-sugar-alcohols/

I wasn't familiar with the term "sugar alcohols" but I have heard of some common ones -- xylitol, sorbitol, etc.

I also like how Ajay is like, "Clearly the media is not so toxic that it ever made anyone neurotic" and LK is like, "How do otherwise-sane people always devolve into thousands of comments navel-gazing about our weight and eating habits?"

We had routine conversational family dinners (only book allowed at the table: the etymological dictionary)

That seems unnecessarily restrictive. My parents always allowed, in addition, Crockford, Roget, Liddell & Scott, Debrett, Birds of the Western Palearctic, Jane's Fighting Ships, Glaisher on Medical Jurisprudence, the Field Service Pocketbook and the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae of Ubertino di Casale.

I'm pretty sure "hangry" was popularized, if not invented, by snack food companies. There is no way we have eight billion humans in all climates if we become nonfunctional without granola bars every ninety minutes.

I don't think there much wrong with snacking for kids who are growing like weeds, but if you're an adult who cares about their weight, keeping eating to mealtimes is probably easier than trying to portion out or resist hyperpalatable snacks several times a day. It's worth figuring out e.g. if I'm eating peanut M&Ms in my office because it's ten and I hate writing this report, or if I'm actually hungry.

The conversation keeps going this way because I presume most of us are in agreement that shaming people into thinness doesn't work and that also most of us are concerned for ourselves about the health risks correlated with obesity. I don't think it's a moral thing at all but it's not an easy problem to solve if your life is car-centric, as mine is.

172: social setting. E.g., kids have breakfast at 8, a playdate at 10 in the park, and I'm an outlier if I haven't packed snacks. Other moms have snacks stored in the console of their cars. And that's fine, if that works for them! But my kids aren't also having blood sugar issues because they had to wait until lunch, any more than they died of boredoms because I said no screens.

And also to hell with sugar alcohols.

My family used to eat dinner together while watching the evening news on our tiny black & white TV.

I'll speak up in defense of hangry: the legitimate use of it is not to snack pre-emptively, but instead to consider it as a solution when someone is going off the rails irrationally. There's some acronym I'm trying to remember: hungry, tired, lonely, and something else?

HALT! Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I think the idea is that you're stressed out or not acting right, and you're not thinking clearly about what's really going on with you, you should stop and see if one of those four things needs to be addressed.

You make bad decisions if hungry. At least I do.

I certainly reach for highly palatable snacks.

Lots of times I've had problems that I could not solve that were easy after a sandwich and a nap.

My son, when he was younger, if he wasn't overtired it was reliable that if he was behaving irrationally/irritably he was either thirsty or needed a poop. Now he's 10 it hasn't really changed. He is greedy for snacks but I don't think he's prone to 'hanger'.

We have a friend whose 10 years old son will break down in tears when he's hungry. He's stick thin, too.

212: sure! But feeling like one needs to eat is governed both by being physically hungry, and by social and behavioral cues. Eating peanut m&Ms so I don't kill the dean is probably a good choice, but it's also not really hunger - I don't need to snack in the middle of lecturing, or if I'm home not doing stupid reports.

Maybe the dean doesn't want to live?

166
snacking as practiced among other umc west coast families with young children went with not sharing meals, not valuing cooking & regarding a meal at a table with conversation as either a special treat or an egregious burden.

This is me (I'm not on the West Coast, although Cassandane is from there, is that relevant?) and I don't like it. Not sure if our kid is defective, we're failures as parents, or we're just at a particularly rough stage. But whether the 7-year-old has snacked recently or not it's a struggle to get her to eat anything new or flavorful - yes, when there's new stuff we insist she try it, but every time is like Groundhog Day - and her conversation is scatological.

172
Ok, here's a question that I'm wondering as I read through the thread: when you all say increased snacking, is that because the parent or social setting is formally giving the kid something, unprompted? or does "increased snacking" refer to kids rummaging through the pantry, without adult intervention?

It means I am snacking more than I did before I had a kid. It also means than we have a greater quantity and variety of snack-type food around the house than I think we did when I was a kid, and bring snacks with us on outings more often than I remember my parents doing.

However, the kid isn't allowed to rummage through the pantry unsupervised.

The delicious Korean-run chicken sandwich place near me is called Hangry Joe's. They make you sign a waiver to order spicy or extra spicy, the medium is wonderful but I can't eat it in company, leaves me in tears and sweaty.

Cyrus, my kids are comparatively snackless (after school is fruit or cheese) and we do family dinners and Pebbles still won't eat her dinner most of the time. She's healthy and active and would be fine with living on bread and cucumbers or McDonald's and hot dogs and doesn't like texture or flavor or foods touching each other or nutrients, as near as I can tell. I think it's just because she's seven. We serve a variety of foods and eventually they'll grow out of it.

@209

It came out of a snickers advertising campaign, as I recall.

The ads are a festival of subtext

Snickers isn't very good. Twix have more vitamins.

But whether the 7-year-old has snacked recently or not it's a struggle to get her to eat anything new or flavorful

As the manager of a picky eater who has grown up into a civilized human being, I can say what worked for us: focusing on manners about eating rather than so much about eating anything in particular -- explicit instruction on how, at other people's houses, to take a healthy serving of anything you can eat and a small serving of what you won't eat, and to inconspicuously mangle the stuff you aren't eating so it looks like you ate some; neither forcing the kid to eat anything nor putting much effort into providing preferable options; and when the subject comes up, explaining sympathetically that a limited palate is a condition that a lot of children deal with, but it mostly passes off in adolescence/adulthood, so it's worth trying things at intervals to see if they're edible now. Newt was a very limited kid and is now solidly omnivorous and a good cook.

But here is an interesting question:

The general consensus (expressed by Lizardbreath) is that we shouldn't stigmatize obesity because such stigmatization does not reduce the incidence of obesity.

But we are entering a Brave New World of anti-obesity drugs. And they seem to work very well. What if thinness is a co-pay and a weekly injection away?

My prediction is that the upper classes are going to get thin. And once they do, they will rediscover stigmatization.

I of course have no idea what effect any of my parenting had. But the explicit instructions on how to act civil eating in public were really useful.

225: There's already a class divide on obesity levels -- even without the drugs, it's easier to manage your weight with money and leisure. And there's already lots and lots of stigma. I doubt the drugs will change much on that front.

I do hope they're as good as they sound. It'd be terrific if they made people meaningfully better off.

It came out of a snickers advertising campaign, as I recall.

OED has many earlier citations all the way back to 1918, but those could have been nonce or limited to certain cliques . However, the word appears in the NYT in 2005 (and again in 2007), and that Snickers campaign seems to have been around 2010. Maybe it popularized it more than otherwise.

It probably started in the trenches.

221, 224: Nice to know, thanks.

I think the drugs are fascinating, mostly because of the reports about the changes with the relationship to food -- less of a drive to eat. I do worry about long term health consequences, if only because weight loss drugs haven't had the best track record.

Right, I have a non-specific belief that any weight loss drug is going to be a monkey's paw somehow. But maybe not!

Mmmmm. Monkey paw.

strongly endorse lb's approach. only rules re food itself are one good faith taste each time that food is presented (bc they hate eg plums-eggplant-pineapple-asparsgus-etc each year when first presented with it for the season until the year they absolutely love it & will vigorously deny ever having had a contrary opinion), & everything else is about politeness, including being polite about & to the person in your family who put the food on the table.

Pebbles has adopted this adorably cute mannerism, saying "it's not my favorite" while wearing a thoughtful look after trying something she doesn't like at all (e.g., most foods with flavor.). I guess we've managed manners?

The 1918 citation appears to be a letter Arthur Ransome wrote to his 8-year-old daughter from Russia in 1918, published in excerpt in a 2009 biography.

My Dear Babba, at last Dor-Dor has a lot of green and purple ink and a little, very little time, and so he can write a proper letter to his woolly Babba. All my beasts are well: the hen, the owl, the peacock and the elephant (although as you can see from the picture the elephant is very hungry and hangry from having had no dinner). Dor-Dor is very busy every day trying to make imperialists see sense [here Ransome has drawn a man with a pipe, cheerfully indicating a barn door to a scowling uniformed imperialist].

Eggplant is horrible.

Also zucchini is inedible.

235: That is, in fact, adorable.

And I'll eat them because they show up so often it's hard to avoid, but bell peppers are not enjoyable to eat.

I've already said that I'm on the injectable weight loss drug and that the effects in addition to a 10% weight loss have noticeably improved my quality of life.

I grew up in a dinner at a table every single night family and have been completely crushed out of it by my kid's picky eating and his dad's undermining. The dad also simply does not care if dinner at a table happens, or actively resents it sometimes.

It is a real problem for me, so much so that I am having a back house built with a kitchen that is kinda open to the public. I plan to run a dinner club type thing out of it. I will build a goddamned house and have dinner with strangers if that is what it takes. Fuck those sullen, non-eating jerks, even if I am related to them.

237: it's not your favorite.

We taught our son to say that to, but he managed to make it sound like "I'm not eating actual shit. Why are you serving it to me?"

Yeah those are some strong medicine, side-effects are no joke. Get your kidney function characterized before starting them, because it's going to be worse with them, and you'll want a baseline.

237: This is definitely the consensus view of my household, but I love Baba ghanoush. One thing I don't have to share when we order food from our local Middle Eastern restaurant.

242: a v close friend finally got free of a pretty bad partner who sees any family meal as a gross imposition if not actual oppression, & thankfully her kid is completely happy to enjoy meals with her. they are both so much happier not having to room with a total dick it is really wonderful. maybe he's a great parent when he has the kid in his own, hope so, but i've never seen it!

I used to hate green beans but now I eat them. People say this is because of matured tastes but I think it's because no one in rural Nebraska knew how to cook beans.

Actually, once the dinner club is up and running, I am not sure if I'll eat with either of them. (Don't know if you remember, but I'm not partnered with the dad anymore, but we both live on the property, since it is a duplex, soon-to-be-triplex.) Don't know whether the dad will join the dinner situation, but I've gotten myself too caught up in my kid's picky eating. For a while at least, I hope to have a kids' table. He can manage his eating on his own with other kids, at least until it doesn't infuriate me.

It may not be as bad as it sounds. Breakfast is smooth and easy and the most reliable meal. Lunch, I don't know, since it happens at school. It is dinner that has gone so wrong and I'm putting a very elaborate work-around in place.

Hopefully construction finished in August. Then, you know, all I have to do is create and recruit people for a weirdo dinner thing that no one does. And make it profitable enough for someone (not me) to be willing to cook.

248: I do remember about the not being partnered, but I don't remember you telling us about the dinner club. Can you tell us how it will work?

251 before seeing 250. "Weirdo dinner thing that no one does" -- I guess that answers my question.

Not sure. I'm hoping for something like a cottage food operator or micro enterprise kitchen. What I want is for someone to cook 12-15 dinners (two tables, plus a kid's table) and charge something, all signed up and paid online, Sun - Thurs. Not a menu, only the pre-set food choice. People from the block buy those, show up, eat, buss their dishes and leave.

Thing is, the money doesn't work. I'd like it to cost about what home dinner does: $8 or $9/meal. But that's only about $100/night gross, and after buying ingredients, it is probably not enough to tempt a cook. I don't mean for the food to be fancy or demanding. But it is still work to cook for that many people.

I haven't figured it out.

I do plan to rent out the kitchen at other times of the day (to cottage food operators or micro enterprise kitchens). Those are legal categories lower than caterers, that require less licensing. Could maybe combine that with the dinner set-up.

I basically want to re-create boarding.

My dad boarded for a decade.

Seems like it has to be part of a larger operation - like they produce 50 meals, 40 of them get picked up to-go and a handful of people visit to eat on the picnic tables.

250. I have a friend who cooked professionally, she recently used to run a farm-to-dinner thing in a barn on her+husband's place about 40 min outside St Louis. Probably already on your radar, but maybe that's a business model that could be bent into the shape you're looking for? I think she was doing restaurant supply before, possibly another venue where there are people who understand both sourcing food for a group and cooking.

Create weekly dinner plans, get ingredients, cook food. It is a lot.

That's what I do, and I hate it.

Have you tried buying dinner from a neighbor selling food in their yard?

What I want is a cafeteria. For a while, my friend did a faculty-in-residence thing, and it was the best. Her kids could wander over to the cafeteria if they wanted breakfast and she was out. They could all eat together, with zero planning, and have more-or-less healthy dinners that suited each individual preference. It seemed amazing. She also had a regular kitchen in her apartment, but I wasn't jealous of that.

The togo option sounds as if it might have potential. Like, if you could find someone who already had a business doing premade meals being delivered to people, offering your kitchen as a place to run that business out of, with the in-person dining as an add-on? The pre-existing delivery meals business is the tricky bit, but it seems like something that might exist.

That's exactly the dynamic that I think would make it tempting. How rad would it be to just walk a couple doors down, eat dinner with a few neighbors, with other kids to distract your kids, and then walk home? Dinner pre-selected for the week, paid online. I feel like lots of families (or other people) would love to do it if it were a thing.

It depends. Do I have annoying neighbors?

There were articles about the rise of the delivery meal business during COVID, and Sac does have a food academy thing that is supposed to train up people for food businesses. I was going to get in touch with them.

Heh. I've been pondering how to exclude annoying people.

This kind of business is the sort of thing? https://preppedeatsmeals.com/

If you found someone who wanted to run a business like that and needed a kitchen, doing your thing as an add on could work.

Was thinking more of this: https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-05-14/home-cooks-los-angeles

But again, I don't know. I'm not convinced I've landed on a model that makes sense for the cook. Overall, I am willing to add "kitchen capacity", if it makes the deal worth it.

We have a local business (which started pre-pandemic but, I think, did well during the pandemic) that makes meals in bulk (at any time the website offers ~6 options, mostly comfort food things like rice noodles and chicken curry or mac & cheese, etc)., either as individual servers or "family size" (3-4x larger). They charge restaurant prices (~$13-15/portion) and deliver. So you order online and then someone goes around and drops off all the meals.

That's convenient, but a full-time business (for multiple people).

We have a Wendy's down the street. They don't deliver and have less variety, but it's cheaper.

The company is based in Ohio, where life is cheap.

Anyway, I will find a way and I will make it work and then I will have pleasant dinner conversation.

does "increased snacking" refer to kids rummaging through the pantry, without adult intervention?

I don't believe the latter has changed.

Four-door fridges? That is, there's a wide shallow drawer low enough for kids to get their own snacks? I cannot imagine anyone having one in the 1970s, or even the 1980 (when we lived in a much richer neighborhood).

clew!

I think the situation Meghan is envisioning traditionally involved a grandma who cooks for the extended family. Unpaid, keeping costs down.

You could probably just enslave an immigrant, if you aren't into ethics.

Glad you're near completion on the new unit, Megan! BTW, I have finally found two brokers (of reputable firms) that actually finance ADUs for non-owner-occupiers, so I am getting closer step by step to building something in Sac.

Try using cob.

Four-door fridges? That is, there's a wide shallow drawer low enough for kids to get their own snacks?

Wow, I just realized the kid-implications of having the freezer drawer be the bottom like mine is. No ice cream shall be safe!

Was mulling this over. The intersection between discourse about fatphobia and discourse about health and diet lies where?

I've managed to mostly stop calling myself a fucking arsehole for being fat/slow/lazy/whatever; this actually came about after listening to some sports coaching podcasts. On one of those, a woman former pro cyclist made the simple point that the sorts of things she used to say to herself (internally, without necessarily vocalising) would be considered hugely abusive if said to anyone else.

But here's the thing - or so it seems to me - you still do need some sort of self-talk. There are decisions to be made about what you will eat, what you will do in your day, etc. and these are going to be based - in part - on a comparison of how things are with now against how you see your ideal (or preferred) self. So it seems that you are always at risk of self-directed fatphobia. In turn, this creates a risk of outwardly-directed fatphobia. The intersection between discourse about fatphobia and discourse about health and diet lies in modes of self-talk.

Analogues with other (possibly) shame-motivated behaviour don't seem to hold either, making this a special case. For example, internally-directed homophobia can drive homophobic abuse, but unlike the case with nutrition, nobody particularly needs to worry about their sexual orientation / preferences; those are (or should be) consequence-free.

We had enforced family dinners almost every night growing up. I used to resent both the imposed work [setting the table with the same dishes and utensils for everyone many of which were never used] and more importantly the time spent away from whatever book I was reading. In retrospect I was probably being something of a brat/not knowing how good I had it to have loving parents who made it a priority. But still trying to figure out how much I want to try to impose it on my own kids if they push back. My wife's family had some group meals, but it was less regimented that everyone start eating at once, and more acceptable to skip if you didn't feel like it that night.

Re: snacking, I don't think it matters at all what cadence you eat at, only what it is you're eating.

281: If you want my take (doesn't everyone, always?) I'd be much more tolerant of someone who wanted to skip a family meal entirely than of a practice where people wandered in at different times (barring occasional practical problems). I'm having trouble spelling out why, but the latter seems really destructive of the social value of the meal.

224, 234, "politeness" entailing trying a bite of other people's food: I actually want to push back on this. I think deciding what you want to put in your body is a part of personal boundaries/self-determination in the same mould as deciding what kinds of body-touching are and are not OK with you. I think learning to connect with your body and listen to it about what it wants you to eat is a huge part of healthy eating. Not saying it's the worst thing in the world to do and I know you all mean well and there are upsides like it is objectively good to try more foods at a younger age but just want to point out a downside.

I'm at a point in my life now where I'll guiltlessly turn down other people's food if it's not something I want to eat, and I don't think it's impolite. Demanding they cook something specially for me would be impolite as would bringing up the specific reasons why I don't want to eat it, but IMO there should never be a social obligation for anyone to eat anything. "Am I out of touch? No, it's Miss Manners who is wrong."

@279 I cherish the photo of my older daughter, at age 4, feigning a complete lack of knowledge regarding the chair beside her, which had been pushed up against the fridge to access the freezer.

I think you misread 224. I don't think politeness requires eating anything you badly don't want to, but it can require being as inconspicuous about not eating as you can manage. This all depends on the specific situation, but can include trying to give the impression that you are eating things that you actually aren't, by, e.g., taking a small serving and messing with it.

285: Sally, at about five -- "why do you put the cookies on the top shelf of the cabinet? I can't reach them even when k stand on the counter."

@287 that's awesome I love it!

286.last just makes me think of the scene in the Cassie episode from Skins about how she hides her eating disorder from everyone. Maybe if I didn't have that touchpoint it would sound polite to me, but having watched that episode it just feels like a deeply sad and fucked up thing to do.

Word. 234 does specifically say a good-faith taste. And even telling them they have to fake it feels wrong to me directionally, like what's wrong with "I would prefer not to"?

Being inconspicuous about not eating something because you don't like it and you don't want to hurt the feelings of someone being hospitable by feeding it to you and concealing the fact that you're starving yourself seem like different enough contexts to me that having the same emotional reaction to them is odd.

I think it's not something I conceived of the possibility of before that scene, and it's a very memorable scene. Like I was aware you could get something and not eat it or throw it out secretly, but the idea that you could fake eating by pushing stuff around on your plate literally didn't occur to me until I watched Skins sometime in my 20s.

290: 234 is the one I didn't write, and I don't endorse that bit. Encouraging a kid to take a bite, sure, but compulsion doesn't really work and I don't think it'd be a great idea if it did. I do doubt that DQ meant much more than asking the kid to try.

On "what's wrong with 'I would prefer not to?'" In practice, lots of hosts will be saddened, or annoyed, or upset by a guest, particularly a child, refusing their food. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. If you can avoid making people sad or annoyed or upset without doing yourself any harm, it's a good thing to do.

Our current rule is that if you don't want to eat the dinner, you can go make yourself a PB&J sandwich. You always have to eat the vegetable, but I'll give like 3 peas, literally, if the kid doesn't like them.

If you don't like the dinner but you're willing to eat the portion (which will be extremely tiny, since I generally know who hates what), then you can go make yourself any kind of sandwich.

289: it came to mind for me, too, but that's because it's a fantastic and memorable scene.

I wouldn't direct the kids to pretend to eat but also I don't want them to shout at the person who prepared the food telling them it's disgusting (happened to me twice recently, with friends' kids, over cupcakes of all things.) But it's hard - the kids are good at self-regulating but they're also neophobic in dumb ways so "take a taste" winds up being a compromise.

Apparently, I mispronounced "sandwich" my whole childhood. I said "sandwich."

Stupid autocorrect.

I was wondering if that was a pun too subtle for me to get.

Speaking of my youth, some asshole is now governor (2nd one in a row) and he put up a picture of a group of fourth graders blessing him and from a quick glance it looks like a bunch of little kids giving him the Nazi salute. Which they clearly aren't because they've got two arms up. On topic, because it's my old school and you can see how thin the kids are these days.

i was forced to eat store bought tomatoes as a child despite them making me gag, until my older siblings demanded that our parents stop making me ( proper ripe garden tomatoes - no problem). i never would & never did force a child to eat anything. a good faith taste means sufficient exposure to a food to determine whether it is edible to you or not. & no, i don't think asking a kid to put a tiny bit of ripe plum in their mouth once a year is unacceptable compulsion, particularly when there was always an absolute bedrock understanding that if they didn't like it, they didn't have to eat it.

he put up a picture of a group of fourth graders blessing him

Perfectly normal politician behaviour here, nothing to worry about.

It was a weird thing for me to see. Kids from my old school in the building where my dad used to work making what looks like a Leni Riefenstahl parody.

Well, since you ask me for a Leni Riefenstahl parody, it so happens I have a short clip here which you may find entertaining...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdmk3GP3iM

If only the Resistance had had Tumblr.

SOE airdropped that film clip into occupied Denmark and the Danish Resistance used to sneak into cinema projection booths and show it in the middle of the evening's programme. Rickrolling avant la lettre.

In practice, lots of hosts will be saddened, or annoyed, or upset by a guest, particularly a child, refusing their food.

Or indeed adult partners will be both saddened and annoyed by this. Especially if the person refusing has been asked for input on meals and meal planning and didn't provide it, even when reminded that input can be provided at any time during the week leading up to the main shopping. Especially especially if the person refusing has requested (and phrased it as a need) that the evening meal be prepared to fit their work schedule, and not the work schedule of the person doing the preparing.

Not that I know anyone to whom this has happened.

Indeed. The social obligation to be appreciative and cooperative with anyone who's feeding you cannot, I think, be overstated.

Thanks, LB. I'm glad to have an eclectic web magazine full of imaginary friends.