Obesity Trends and Dietary Changes

Look at this pool,

July, late 1970s, and almost everyone in it is slim.

Not athletes, not dieters, just people

who never counted a calorie in their lives.

Back then, one in six American adults was obese,

and that number had held steady for decades.

Around 1980, it began to climb,

and it never came back down.

Today, it's more than four in 10,

nearly triple in a single lifetime.

Same country, same genes.

Too fast to pin on biology,

too widespread to pin on willpower.

Nobody set out to make a country fat.

A handful of quiet decisions did it anyway,

seven of them, each switched on by someone with a reason,

and none ever announced.

We told part of this story in an earlier video,

the one about the sugar and the shrinking dinner plate.

This is the rest of it.

We'll count all seven.

The first is in the pan on your mother's stove.

One, the fat.

For thousands of years, Americans cooked in animal fat,

butter, lard, beef tallow.

In 1911, Procter & Gamble took cottonseed oil,

a waste product from the cotton mills,

hardened it into a solid that passed for lard,

and sold it as Crisco,

with free cookbooks that called for it in every recipe.

Sales climbed from 2.6 million pounds in 1912

to 60 million by 1916.

Lard fell out of fashion, then it scaled.

Over the next century, the soybean oil in the average diet

rose more than a thousandfold.

Seed oils now supply close to a fifth of American galleries.

Cheap, long-lasting, nearly tasteless,

slipping into bread, dressing, crackers, and almost every restaurant fryer.

The same process that hardened Crisco also made trans fats,

which the FDA ruled unsafe in 2015 and pulled from shelves.

The fat sold to replace butter

became the one the government banned.

Whether today's seed oils harm you is still argued,

and we'll leave that open.

The swap is the story.

The fat at the center of the kitchen got

traded out in a few generations,

and almost nobody noticed.

Two, the movement.

Nobody at that pool got slim at the gym

because almost nobody belonged to one.

The effort was built into the day,

and it got stripped out of three places at once.

At work,

the average job now burns about 140 fewer calories

a day than in 1960,

when nearly half of private sector jobs were physically active.

That share is down to one in five.

At home,

people spend about seven hours a day on a screen

and sit for six to eight,

and childhood changed most of all.