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Comment by sundvor | Hacker News Reader

As a Norwegian, my first (and so far only) trip to the US was in the (northern hemisphere) autumn of '99, for an Allaire developers conference in Boston.

My first impressions when landing at New Ark airport was one of being flabbergasted by how utterly fat so many people were. In 20 minutes I very likely saw more grossly fat people than I had seen in the previous year in Norway. For me it really was the most bizarre thing.

Now in my early 40s, my memories are vague on this matter, but I'm pretty sure Coca Cola and the likes were completely banned from my school canteens. There just wasn't that much junk food to be had either. I mean in general ... as for the schools, forget about it. Pizza would be a very special occasion.

Whatever the US were doing, it was doing it completely wrong.

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The rest of the world is catching up.

http://www.thelocal.no/20150506/norways-men-soon-to-be-among...

Most developed countries are about 20-40 years behind the US in obesity rates--if you look at overweight and obesity rates (and rate of change) in the US from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they match pretty well with the same data from many other developed countries from the 2000s.

US obesity and overweight rates have mostly stabilized and will hopefully decline, so maybe the same will happen elsewhere (maybe sooner?).

Other countries are catching up in overweight and obesity but there's rarely data on BMI levels above that. Anecdotally it does seem like the US has much higher rates of super obese people at 50+ BMI. The mobility scooter using, as wide as 2.5 normal people kind. There's a stark difference visiting from here in Australia despite our similar overweight rates.

I don't know if it's because your food is so much cheaper that people who have eating problems/don't care about their health and appearance can afford to crazy, or if it's cultural, but there's a class of super fats waddling around in the US that you really don't see in other countries.

At least in part it's cultural. We work much longer hours with much less vacation days than pretty much the rest of the first world (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364), often sitting in front of a computer all day, then go home too mentally exhausted to make good decisions about eating or exercise, driving in cars to go everywhere because everything is more spread out and very few cities are set up to make walking or biking feasible, so some people get very little exercise at all during the day, all while being served (and thus eating) larger portions of food at restaurants than most other countries.

I'm not saying we shouldn't exhibit greater willpower, but we're animals, and animals tend to be lazy when given the opportunity. If US cities (especially small cities and suburbs) were designed more to facilitate walking I think we'd be healthier overall.

I know in college I was in much better shape and I had to walk at least two miles a day to get to and from all of my classes (we had a large campus and a giant quad separating the buildings), and I often worked out at the gym since it was literally a two minute walk from my dorm.

That class of mobility scooter using super obese people you're talking about starting popping up about 20 years ago and really became noticeable about 10 years ago [1]. If the rest of the world is several decades years behind the US, then you wouldn't expect to see very many people in this class for another 20 years or so.

[1] Though it isn't really that common. It's just that super obese people are very noticeable, so it feels like their are more people in this category than there really are.

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