America’s Obesity Crisis, Explained

Three quarters of Americans are overweight or obese. Now, that stat is nothing new. This crisis has been brewing for over 50 years. But what I've never understood is, why is the problem so much worse in the US? Because sure, other countries around the world have this problem too. Just not nearly as bad. So I had to know, how did this crisis spiral out of control? And maybe, just maybe, is there a way to turn it around? I have a confession. Growing up, I used to love watching shows like The Biggest Loser. You don't come off for 30 seconds, okay? That's all I'm asking. Looking back, shows like this created a black and white narrative that overweight people just needed to work harder. And that healthy people had good habits and accountability and blah, blah, blah. I hate to say it, but back then, I actually kind of believed all of that. Don't get mad at me though. I was like 10, and I'm definitely not the only one who felt that way. I can prove it. Because in 2013, the National Institute of Health asked 800 Americans who was to blame for the obesity crisis. They were given seven options. Individuals, parents, farmers, food manufacturers, restaurants, grocery stores, and government policies. And of all of those options, you know what they picked? 80% of the people in that survey said that individuals were to blame for the obesity crisis. 80%. So it wasn't just me. And honestly, it wasn't just The Biggest Loser either. The majority of society had, and honestly still has, this belief about health. But if you think about it for like 10 seconds, it doesn't really make that much sense. It's too simple of an explanation. Because if it was just up to you and me, right? Why is the problem so much worse in the US compared to other countries? Because it's up to them too. So I decided to do some Googling and found out that it's not really a motivation problem. 93% of Americans want to be healthy, to take care of themselves. Let's line up all of those facts. Most people want to be healthy. Most people feel responsible for taking care of themselves. And yet, most people in the US are still overweight. And the problem gets worse every single year. What's different between the US and the rest of the world that's making this crisis worse? Growing up, I was always the scrawny kid who was told to put some meat on my bones and gain weight. Except as work got busier, and I was working hard to try and make this YouTube thing work, I kind of stopped taking care of myself. It was easier to just stop at McDonald's or eat frozen chicken fingers for dinner so that I could keep working. Not to mention having a healthy number of PBRs on the weekend too. So when the lockdowns hit in 2020 and I was stuck at home, that diet and a lack of physical activity took its toll. For the first time in my life, I was gaining weight. Suddenly, I wasn't that scrawny kid anymore. And the truth is, I didn't really know what was causing it either. Okay, so I've been doing a lot of research. I've got like 21 pages of notes. It's a little excessive. But the more I look into this topic, the more I'm realizing there's a lot of conflicting information going on here. It's obviously really frustrating to work through all of that. So I decided to start with the foundations first. This might be a dumb question, but what are the true risks of being overweight? I only ask because I've heard tons of information about the obesity crisis over the years, but I've never really been told why it's such a big problem. So I took a look at a study, this one here to be specific. And just looking at it, you can pretty quickly tell that this is a big concern. Beyond the fact that obesity can affect quality of life, it also directly increases the risk of a handful of other major conditions. Heart disease, cancers, type 2 diabetes. In some cases, these are life-threatening conditions. So when you look at it like that, the fear around this crisis starts to make a lot of sense. Because 255 million people are overweight in the US, which is 255 million people at risk of these conditions. That's pretty scary. So how do we get here? I spent a few days looking through different websites and studies. And after looking at all of the potential reasons that people can become overweight, I realized this isn't just one core problem and there won't be one simple solution. This crisis is created by a web of factors that all influence each other. Some of them are completely out of our control, like genetics, for example. But some are fixable. And I think that there are four things that are specifically worse in the US compared to other countries, which we can break down into four layers. I went deeper on this video than I've gone in a long time, and we're about to dive in. Oh, and while you're here, I would really appreciate it if you could subscribe and turn on notifications. Got a lot more videos just like this coming for the rest of this year. Every time I visit the US, no matter how good I eat, how clean my diet is, I always end up having weird digestive issues and feeling like garbage while I'm there. Meanwhile, as soon as I get home to Canada, I suddenly start feeling better again. I feel like normal. That kind of raises some red flags, and it has for a long time because I don't really feel like the food we need to eat should make us feel like garbage. So I found this website that compares the ingredients in US foods compared to other countries, specifically in this case, the UK. A few of these are interesting, so I wanted to show you what I found. Looking at something like McDonald's fries, for example, you can see that the ingredient list is significantly longer than it is in the UK over here on the right side. What does compare are the potatoes, the vegetable oil, and the dextrose. In the US, they also use sodium acid pyrophosphate, as well as a vegetable oil blend with citric acid and dimethylpolysiloxane. Now, I'm not naive to the fact that just because I don't know what it means, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad, but there's significantly more ingredients in the US version. Looking at another example, we've got Quaker instant oatmeal. In the UK, very simple. There's significantly more ingredients in the US version than there is in the UK. That's now a trend that we're seeing between these two products, right? So what about Doritos, for example? If we look at Doritos in the UK, there's definitely quite a few ingredients. There's corn, vegetable oils, cool original flavor, whatever that means. A lot of different things. There's colors in here as well. But if you look at the US version, again, it is longer. Again, there's more variance in what's being used. And most importantly, there's three different artificial colors, including red 40, blue 1, and yellow 5. There's a lot more artificial ingredients in the US version than there is in the UK version. Just that direct comparison paints a pretty clear picture. What I find most interesting is that if you compare the ingredients in different drinks and foods in Canada versus the United Kingdom, they're typically pretty similar. Same with the European Union. But almost everything that you compare with the US looks different. The US uses more ingredients, more flavorings, more whatever. Different ingredients than you would see around the rest of the world. And that really got me wondering, why? What is the biggest difference maker here? I'm going to try and explain this as simply as I can. Most countries have some sort of simple system that you have to follow to get your food approved. In the case of the US, this is called the FDA or the Food and Drug Administration. 80% of the food supply is under their control and under their watch. And they have to approve the food before you can put it on the shelves. But sometimes that can take years or months to get that approval. So they have this other workaround, which is called Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS. Basically, with this system, what you can do is you can find a panel of proven experts who are knowledgeable in their field, who generally agree that your food is safe. And if you can prove that your food is generally recognized as safe, then it gets approved by the FDA. The problem is that anyone can be an expert on this panel as long as they have experience. So you can pick and choose who's going to be on your panel and who's going to be validating the health of your food. Basically, there's a workaround that benefits corporations a lot more than consumers. And that's causing a lot of junk to be added to our food. So in other systems, which go through slow, meticulous processes to make sure that the food is definitely safe for consumers, the FDA doesn't take that approach. They just focus on ease and speed for corporations. And that's why a lot of junk is still allowed in American food. While I was learning about everything that's in the food supply, I was starting to wonder why I'd never really heard about this. I mean, I'd heard about the junk that was in the food supply, but not how the system worked. But once I remembered what I'd actually learned in school, it started to make a lot more sense. Here in Canada, we learned about this, the Canadian Food Guide, which is pretty similar to what you might have seen in America, the food pyramid. These guides came from the government as a recommendation for what you should eat in a day, your daily diet. Looking at it, they recommend a lot of grains, a lot of dairy, a fair amount of meat too, which matches up with what I saw on TV back then, I guess. Milk would make me strong. Cereal was part of a healthy daily breakfast. But since then, those recommendations have completely changed. And here's why. The idea for these guides started off mostly pure, a scientific guide showing people what would make them healthy. But over time, the dairy, meat, and grain lobbies heard that this guide was being made, and they saw their opportunity. Because if the guide recommended you eat more meat, that could mean billions of extra dollars coming in. So what was supposed to be a scientific guide turned into a pay-to-win advertisement. We grew up with misleading information about what to eat and what's actually healthy for us. Not to mention the fact that since then, there's been a ton of short-term fads and easy, quick health trends. When the information about what you're supposed to eat is constantly changing, how are you supposed to stay healthy? And how are you supposed to know what you're even putting into your body? Okay, so like I mentioned, I did a ton of research for this video. And everything up to this point was showing me that there's a clear cause for this problem, right? It's mostly around corporate funding and lobbying. This layer specifically changed that. This was where things got a little bit more muddy and confusing. So let's dive in. Because even if you know what's good for you and what you should be eating, it doesn't guarantee that you're going to be healthy because of a little something called food insecurity. Long story short, this happens when you don't have good and reliable access to enough healthy and fresh food. The main factor behind this is cost. Obviously, if you take a look around the grocery store, processed food is typically going to be cheaper than the fresh food. It makes sense. Fresh food grows seasonally, it expires, it's expensive to import, and it has more regulations. Meanwhile, processed foods can be made year-round, preserved for longer, and there are usually less rules to follow. Which means that there's not fair access to healthy food for everyone. There is a barrier to eating well. But even if you can afford it, it doesn't guarantee you'll have that food readily available to you. Let me show you what I mean. Across the country, 10% of people live in food deserts. Basically, these are communities with less access to affordable, healthy, and diverse food stores, like supermarkets. So if you live in an area where the only store nearby that sells food is a Dollar General or a local convenience store that mostly has processed foods, that's a food desert. Or if the nearest grocery store to you is something that's a little bit more expensive, like a Whole Foods, for example, you're also living in a food desert there. Man, I don't know. The sun's kind of going crazy here. I feel like I might need to close these blinds soon. To keep this simple, food deserts take away your choice, making it a lot harder for you to access fresh, healthy food. The point here is, even if you knew what foods were better for you and how to work around the broken food supply, you still might not be able to get everything as equally as other places. But for this last layer, I want to take a step back. Your weight is usually determined by the food you eat and the amount of exercise you do. We know these things. This isn't news to anyone. I hope, at least. But in America, only 24% of people are getting enough physical activity in their day-to-day lives. Why? Earlier this year, I went to London and Paris. And to get around, I had to do a lot of walking. Walking between places, walking to the train station, walking to the metro. Looking around, most people were walking or biking. Whereas across most of the U.S., it's honestly hard and sometimes even dangerous to walk or bike around. Living in places that are built around cars, it's really hard to get physical activity in your day-to-day life. So you specifically have to go to a gym or do some form of workout beyond what you would normally do in your daily life, which takes more time and that's another barrier to being physically active. Adding in the other layers that we already looked at, this is like a cherry on top that encourages people to live more sedentary lifestyles. The truth is, when you look at these four factors together and see how the problems that exist in other countries are even worse in the U.S., it starts to become clear why this problem is also worse in the U.S. It's hard to get food. It's hard to know what food is actually clean and healthy and good for your body. And it's hard to get physical activity too. So with all of that in mind, why has the problem never been fixed? I remember when I was in school, we watched Super Size Me and Food Inc. a couple movies that painted a very clear picture of the problems with the American food supply. Looking back, I remember feeling so confident that this crisis was cooked and that we had so much information about how to solve the problem. But obviously that didn't happen and the problems only gotten worse. The truth is, though, a lot of efforts have been made to solve the underlying problems, but very few of them have been able to fundamentally shift how people in the U.S. engage with food. I sat with that for a while, thinking about how that was the case and how the problem could keep getting worse. And then I realized something pretty interesting. The countries that I mentioned that had lower rates of obesity have something else in common too. Something unexpected. Universal health care. They had universal health care. What I'm about to walk you through might sound a little bit strange, but trust me, I promise it'll make sense in a second. Every person that can potentially be working is a source of profit for the government. They work, they live, they spend money, they buy houses. Every bit of that is a potential source of tax revenue for the government. Now, let's say someone gets sick. They're unhealthy. They need to go on disability. That person is no longer a profit source for the government. But even beyond that, they're actually costing the government money too. But here's the thing. In countries where there's universal health care, like where I live here in Canada, there's an added incentive for the government to make sure that people are healthy. Because if someone gets sick, they also have to pay to make them healthy again. That means that the investment into education, into improving the food supply, all of those things, those are no-brainer investments because it saves you money down the line on health care. But in the US, that's not the case. It actually just costs the health care industry money to invest into these programs. And the government doesn't really have a vested interest in solving this problem. So I honestly think that because the US doesn't have universal health care, it's allowed this problem to get worse because the government doesn't have as much of an incentive to solve the problem. Now, do I think that having universal health care would solve the problem overnight? No, I'm not naive. This is a pretty big challenge and a big crisis. But I do think that it's a big part in helping to help people understand and learn and really be able to prevent themselves from becoming obese in the first place. The truth is, though, I'm learning that this is beyond just you and me. It's not about our own individual accountability and health. It's about systems that aren't necessarily built to help us stay healthy. Back when I started gaining weight for the first time in my life, I was honestly pretty afraid. I felt unhealthy, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my life feeling unhealthy. I just didn't know what I was doing wrong. I went on a mission to find healthy foods that I enjoyed and that I'd be able to eat over a longer period of time. And most importantly, I found ways to make exercise fun, like daily walks and enjoying weightlifting. Learning those things, it makes sense to me now how I was able to create a healthy lifestyle. I wasn't just going with the flow and doing whatever the system built for profit was telling me to do. I was really just trying to understand and learn and feel good. I started this video with one question in mind. I wanted to understand why the obesity crisis was so much worse in the U.S. compared to other countries. I still feel like I don't fully know the answer to that question. What I did learn is that there's a lot of reasons that someone can become overweight. And a lot of those factors are actually out of our control. And that there's a lot of small problems that have really built up to create this bigger crisis. There's the lobbying of the FDA to get junk approved to be used in our food. There's the use of cheaper ingredients like high fructose corn syrup to save money. There's the car industry advocating for roads over sidewalks and social media becoming a big part of our lives and making us more sedentary. The pathway to solving this problem is complex. I'm not gonna lie, it feels really overwhelming. But having good information and understanding how we got here is the first step towards living a healthy life. I heard a quote recently that went a little something like this. We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. To me, that says everything about this crisis. We all know it exists. We've all heard the millions of stats and reasons it's happening. But most of us don't know what we can do to actually turn it around. It's gonna take a lot of time and a lot of learning for us to really solve this crisis. So instead of trying to pretend I'm an expert and giving you a clear solution to a problem that I don't really understand, I'm gonna ask you a question instead. What information surprised you? What information did you already know? And how can we work together to spread this information and share this knowledge? I'd love to hear your own take and your own thoughts on that. So let me know down in the comments. And hey, by the way, thanks so much for watching this video. I put a ton of time into researching this and really trying to perfect the script. So if you're still here, I appreciate it. If you like this, I'm gonna be putting more videos out just like this in the coming weeks. So be sure to subscribe for more and turn on notifications. And in the meantime, you're probably gonna love this video I made right here about junk food and how it took over America. So check that one out. See you next week.