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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today.

No, its not.

> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.

The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.

> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.

Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.

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So obesity rates haven’t increased dramatically? If that’s your argument, I’m afraid you’re simply misinformed.

And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.

> So obesity rates haven’t increased dramatically?

They’ve increased to “a very large minority, even in the fattest state”.

What used to be “fat” has not become “thin”, its just “fat" has become more common.

> And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.”

Yes, and they’ll show that overweight and obese people are greater proportions of the total. That I didn’t argue against.

The ridiculous hyperbole is what I took issue with.

>The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.

>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.

>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.

Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.

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