{"id":2778,"date":"2012-05-16T17:19:50","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T21:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/?p=2778"},"modified":"2012-05-16T17:19:50","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T21:19:50","slug":"fat-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/16\/fat-math\/","title":{"rendered":"Fat Math"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned recently<\/a>, knowing the math behind something doesn’t necessarily mean that your behaviour will change.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, this article<\/a> is a really neat look at how some smart nerds created a mathematic model to predict weight gain based on some general inputs.\u00c2\u00a0 They further modeled the root cause of why obesity is such a crushing problem today.\u00c2\u00a0 They concluded that the main reason isn’t a sudden lack of activity in the last 30 years, but rather the relatively sudden overabundance of food, most of it bad for you.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, when I was growing up, people rarely ate out. Today, Americans dine out \u00e2\u20ac\u201d with these large restaurant portions and oil-saturated foods \u00e2\u20ac\u201d about five times a week.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right. Society has changed a lot. With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have fast food.<\/p>\n

People think that the epidemic has to be caused by genetics or that physical activity has gone down. Yet levels of physical activity have not really changed in the past 30 years. As for the genetic argument, yes, there are people who are genetically disposed to obesity, but if they live in societies where there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a lot of food, they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get obese. For them, and for us, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s supply that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the issue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For my money, you never ignore the math nerds, sure there are problems with modeling, but man it’s compelling stuff overall.\u00c2\u00a0 They link to a super cool java Body Weight Simulator that is fun to play with too.\u00c2\u00a0 For me the most interesting bit of the article was this:<\/p>\n

…the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

That’s pretty interesting right there, and it drives home some of the anecdotal experience I have heard over the years that it’s “easier to maintain a healthy weight once you are there than it is to get to a healthy weight”, etc.<\/p>\n

Anyway, a very cool article, and a short one, well worth a quick read.<\/p>\n

Saw this on Metafilter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned recently, knowing the math behind something doesn’t necessarily mean that your behaviour will change.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, this article is a really neat look at how some smart nerds created a mathematic model to predict weight gain based on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piGNU-IO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2778"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2780,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions\/2780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}