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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people have become far more health conscious in recent years. Working out regularly and caring about your diet used to be fringe activities, but now it seems like almost all anyone talks about! Maybe these trends are concentrated in urban areas? That would help explain why the highly-urbanized West and Northeast have managed so much better than the less-urbanized South.

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Fitness activities and being fit are major upper-middle-class (talking social class here, not strictly income) markers right now. There's pressure to be or become fit(ter) if you run in those circles, so you don't seem "other". Not so much in other classes—of course perpetually being about to try some new diet or other is a thing in certain groups, but not the same kind of conspicuous fitness stuff the upper-middle's currently big on. Of course upper-middle culture is fairly urban (aside from their vacation houses on the lake or in the mountains) for a bunch of reasons so the trend is most noticeable there, aside from urbanites trending thinner generally than country dwellers (in the US, at least).

Upper middle class jobs are almost universally desk jobs, even in industries that have a lot of physical activity, e.g. building engineers vs. construction workers.

When you sit 9 hours a day you need to hit the gym or diet. When I was waiting tables and bartending in college (and a lil after) I didn't need to workout -- a doubleshift on my feet kept me very lean.

When you have money and a real need for activity then yeah the gym lifestyle becomes a thing.

The urban areas in 2010 had significantly higher obesity rates than even the rural areas in 1990. So regardless of what people are yapping about, it's not working.

...or is working, but at too small a scale to overcome general nationwide trends.

I mean, even if we attribute 100% of the urban-rural difference to yuppy diet fads -- neglecting the almost-certainly much more important class, income, genetic, and cultural differences -- the effect of those fads are being absolutely crushed by the general nationwide trends. Whatever it is that us urban people get out of talking about diet fad that people in the rural areas don't keep up with, I don't think it's motivated by a desire to understand the obesity epidemic.

Idk, where I live in the city I find these trends pretty shocking. Mind you 2010 is 10 years ago, but just from looking at the people around me I'd expect this to have leveled off or reduced.

It’s also possible you’re simply used to a certain level of adiposity without realizing it.

Almost everyone over 30 has some level of gut now, even those considered comparatively fit and thin. This wasn’t normal decades ago, but is normal now.

How often do you see people shirtless? Clothes hide a lot of bellies. Having muscles, being a jogger, eating salads or riding s bicycle is completely consistent with abdominal fat.

So, what standard are you using when you say urban people now are likely thinner than rural people in 1990?

Maybe it's because more people HAVE to be health-conscious or else they'll become obese. From what I've read, peer groups matter a lot [1] and this research would suggest most peer groups are more overweight than they used to be.

1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22543686

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