It helps when everywhere in that mile radius (and more) is considered walking distance in much of Europe, but Americans would rather drive.
Walling that mile ain’t going to negate that much unhealthy food.
Nah, every american I’ve known who left America either immediately lost weight, or maintained despite eating 10x more and less healthy food.
I lost weight on a diet of fried food, meat, and fried noodles, I’ve seen other people lose weight eating ice cream 2-3x a day
“I visited europe” goes to the uk
The uk is somehow actually less european than the caucasian countries and kazakhstan which everyone criticizes for pretending to be european.
Is the UK american, or the US British?
How to start a war with a single question.
Fun related “fact”: Shakespeare supposedly sounds more period-accurate in a generic American accent than a modern British accent because the British dramatically changed their accent some time after the US split and the American accent has changed less over the centuries.
The British accent? There are hundreds, if not thousands of different accents.
And there are equally as many American accents.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english
One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”
American actors have a head start with performing in OP: it’s “so much more American” than the prestigious Received Pronunciation accent in which Shakespeare’s plays are generally performed now, says Paul Meier, theatre professor emeritus at Kansas State University and a dialect coach who’s worked on theatre productions like an OP version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
For instance, Americans are already used to pronouncing ‘fire’ as ‘fi-er’ rather than ‘fi-yah’, as most Brits would.
It’s useful to know how words would have been pronounced centuries ago because it changes our appreciation of the texts. Because British English pronunciations have changed so much since the era of Queen Elizabeth I, we’ve rather lost touch with what Early Modern English would have sounded like at the time. Some of the puns and rhyme schemes of Shakespeare’s day no longer work in contemporary British English. ‘Love’ and ‘prove’ is just one pair of examples; in the 1600s, the latter would have sounded more like the former. The Great Vowel Shift that ended soon after Shakespeare’s time is one reason that English spellings and pronunciations can be so inconsistent now.
So what’s popularly believed to be the classic British English accent isn’t actually so classic. In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.
As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer.
That’s super neat. Thank you for sharing that and linking the article! I appreciate it! :)
I love weird trivia like that. Another fun one is that scientists have discovered 3 or 4 different regional accents across the US in the calls of crows.
Yess, I love weird trivia like that, too! I didn’t know that about crows; that’s awesome. Thank you again for sharing that, seriously :D
Are they all distinct accents, or are they slight variations on an accent?
Bit of column A, bit of column B…
Well, they’re all equally fancy to me!
What’s generic American mean?
vowels tend to be spoken with a flatter, wider mouth/tongue shape
West Coast/Californian
Think Midwestern, not New York, Bostonian, or Southern twang.
yes
The idea that the UK has less in common with France than France does with Kazakhstan is hilarious.
Bravo!
Anon needs to learn that the UK isn’t representative of all of Europe
And does have an obesity problem!
You can’t rate world cuisine on England
I love how the post never mentions the country, but everyone just knows.
They did say fish and chips which is kind of an iconic British food.
Curry shops even moreso.
Notice how anon never mentions seeing any fat people tho…
The trend for obesitas in Europe has been steadily climbing. I read that in the Netherlands the adults have over 50% overweight
overweight is not obese
And yet both are true if you look at the numbers
Splitting hairs. Yall are fat now too
Hilarious that this is true and yet the US is still somehow fatter.
There is a vast difference between eating shitty food once a day while being able to walk everywhere and eating shitty food three meals a day and not walking anywhere.
The US both massively overeats the shitty food and is very sedentary for the most part. A bit contributor is our absolutely terrible work culture that wears people out so much that they seek pleasure from food and entertainment in the few spare hours they have each week because they are constantly advertised to encouraging that behavior.
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It’s sugar.
Sugar & HFCS
eats a tub of sugary chocolate sugar every morning
Pretty sure it’s the milk, guys!
Replying to your edit since you felt it was reasonable to retroactively be rude in an edit like a coward instead of at least in reply.
Damn, i guess managing my weight to be within 10lbs of my desired target weight for the last 10 years doesnt count because ive never in my life weighed enough to have to lose a lot of weight.
I consciously work to shed weight when I’m over and gain weight when I’m under. But what do i know?
I’m just a fuckbrained dogmatist.Right? I’ve never had more than an extra 20lbs to lose so I guess I know nothing about weight management.
It’s not the milk lol.
It’s the HFS. Not fucking milk. Like, yes, milk as a drink is high calorie and was forced on us by marketing in the 90s-00s, but drinking milk isn’t what’s making people fat.
The people who managed to NOT gain an extra 160 pounds that they needed to lose might know something about not gaining weight…
I’m going to tag you as the milk guy
As someone who’s lactose intolerant, it is annoying to find stuff without dairy in it. Not impossible of course, but it is in the most random shit.
You are being downvoted because what works for you is not going to work for everyone, and pretending like it will makes you look like an asshole.
I drink a gallon of milk a day (no joke). Take a look at my profile picture 😁
And yet the number of people obese in the USA is almost double that of the UK.
It’s the corn syrup more than the fried food honestly. The number of people who drink soda all day is wild.
The number of people I know in America who “can’t” drink just water and have to have some syrup flavored drink instead is astounding. Dude, you’re complaining about your weight. Maybe cut back on the sugar for one drink per day.
Depending on the region the soda may actually be healthier, we have looped right back to people avoiding water because it’s dangerous but instead of parasites it’s pollution and parasites.
Note I do drink water but only from my fridge with a high quality filter, tap water is a coin flip and if I can taste anything other than water I’m assuming it’s contaminated.
I used to work with a morbidly obese lady that kept a 2 litre of mountain dew at her desk at all times. She’d come in every Monday with 2 of them. It was wild to me.
Something I noticed when visiting the US. I went to one of their Wendy’s to try it out, and ordered a small chicken burger. It was very dry and bland, not really that good, yet I looked up the nutritional info and apparently this small burger alone was over 1200kcals??
I’m fairly sure it was the bun that did that as I doubt they raise some kind of super chicken with an energy density similar to petrol.
Anyway, surprise surprise I ended up with heartburn afterwards.
Edit: people always talk about the percentage of people who are obese in these discussions, but have you noticed just how big obese people can get in the states?
Genuinely, almost every day I was there I caught myself accidentally stopping and staring because I’d just seen someone fatter than I thought humanly possible. Like so big that I couldn’t understand how their flesh didn’t just tear and fall off their skeleton.
It was very dry and bland, not really that good, yet I looked up the nutritional info and apparently this small burger alone was over 1200kcals??
Fried food hides a lot of fat and carbs in the fried breading. There are a lot of calories in that crunchy matrix.
There’s another major reason tbh, cheap shite is unhealthy for you but very quick and easy to cook
And there’s more people in USA that live under the breadline, where they’re working stupid long shifts for stupid low pay - because there is not anything better available for them
And a car enforced society zeor active tranaport
This dude (Gen Z american living in the UK) talks about it in this vid (amongst other things) he walks to the grocery store walks home, cycles to work etc as jet says, he could own a car but doesn’t need one.
And honestly us Brits are pretty fucking lazy when it comes to walking compared to a lot of Europe too
Walkable areas go a long way
They walk more. That’s it. That’s the secret.
Portion sizes are a factor too!
I dont feel like they are. Traveling France and Italy a couple years back, I found myself not finishing meals much more regularly that I do in the states, Even though I was eating a bit more because I was walking 5+ miles a day.
Maybe i was in part over ordering due to language, or menu expectations. Maybe some of thw places I was in were touristy and over doing it to match ‘american portions’
But for instance, i got breakfast that was ‘oefs en cocotte de compagne’ at a café a couple blocks from the louvre, far enough to not be in the tourist trap surrounding area anymore.
It was massive- 4 shired eggs with a generous amount of mushrooms and gruyere, served with 4 pieces of toast. And I confirmed with the waiter that that was not a shared portion…
France doesn’t really do restaurant breakfast, that dish is a main. Breakfast is coffee and a croissant if you’re having it outside the house, otherwise it’s brunch.
Yeah, I mean brunch checks out. It was like 11:00 it was still a huge serving of a verrry rich dish though.
Yeah european breakfast is mostly just a cigarette and a bowl of creme
Nobody has ever had this kind of breakfast in France. Normal breakfast here is coffee and maybe the last of yesterday’s baguette.
Jesus, I top out at half that and I’m an absolute lardass, les that I used to be but still
I can do my weekly shopping without having to get in the car. Because in Europe everything’s all mixed together rather than zoned into miles of endless residential, that you have to drive for 25 minutes in order to leave to get to the big shopping mall was it’s one million car parking spaces.
i walk 10 minutes (1.0 km) to the second-nearest grocery store (because that has cheaper and better-quality food) and i’m already living pretty far out on the city borders.
And also didn’t replace all the fat in their food with sugar processed from corn.
Fat doesn’t turn into fat when you eat it - it turns into sugars, which then turn into fat. Eating sugar just takes one step out of the process and makes your body work less (and therefore burn less calories) turning it into fat.
You can’t outrun your diet.
It’s not that simple, if you are healthier with regular exercise your hunger is also better regulated and your diet will be better.
To me, no one really needs to be told that being fit and healthy is better than not being fit and healthy. It’s more that, as a society, we’ve been convinced over eating can be repaid with excersise, to sort of balance it out (an idea pushed by food lobby groups). I’m not saying that you disagree with any of that.
We evolved as persistence hunters. Being able to run off our winter fat reserves would’ve made us poor persistence hunters and we would’ve died out.
calories in, calories out. Use more than you eat and weight goes down. Eat more than you use and weight goes up. It’s an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong.
It’s very wrong, if only for the simple reason that not all calories are the same. Eating 1000 calories worth of protein will not have the effect as eating 1000 calories of HFCS.
Please stop parroting this piece of reductionist misinformation that is used to sell us ultra-processed foods.
What you said is an explanation of why what I said is an oversimplification. It’s an efficiency variable, just makes the math slightly more complicated, doesn’t change the formula.
I mean, you can, but it takes a lot of running to expend the calories taken in with a pretty typical American diet, especially when you account for the increase in appetite exercise typically brings.
But it is possible. If you can burn 2000 calories on a single run, that’s a lot of room to maneuver to fit your macros while eating a significant amount of junk food.
We compensate with gym time, you can’t outrun a cheeseburger
Fast Food!
Ironically fast food applies a speed debuff
Not being able to outrun your diet is a really strange concept to me, and I’ve exclusively heard it in this thread, and multiple times in this thread. Dafuq?
It’s a metaphor, exercise won’t fix a bad diet
That’s just br*tish “food”
I lost weight after two weeks in Paris eating like a hedonist king because of all the walking.
Fat isn’t unhealthy. Excess calories and absence of exercise is not healthy.
Also the U.K. population is unhealthy just like the U.S.
Yes! Fat by itself isn’t unhealthy.
The best example is Italy, it has the lowest obesity rate of Europe, (1) but also has the highest consumption of cooking oil of Europe (2)
I was surprised in Italy when I saw how much olive oil they used while cooking. For me oil was just like a cooking aid so stuff does not stick to the pan, in Italian cuisine olive oil is not just an aid, it’s part of the ingredients
BMI is also a bad measure of health. It only roughly estimates how statistically unhealthy someone would be if they were an american in the middle 20th Century. Bodies can be healthy at any size. Exercise helps.
That’s true to a point. Extra fat based weight is harmful that’s just a medical fact.
How much is too much for a specific individual can be somewhat variable, and body composition matters.
BMI as a tool can be clunky and not ideal at times, but if you’re more than 1 point off the healthy range and you’re not a body builder your health will be impacted (over time).
I’m overweight myself, but I don’t try to convince myself I’m in peak condition.
BMI isn’t perfect but it’s still a good tool to compare two large, similar populations.
And no, being morbidly obese is not healthy.
For country-level data, there is nothing wrong with BMI. There is at best a low single digit percentage of the population who is athletic enough that they’re BMI-overweight without actually being fat.
What’s crazy to me is that sumo wrestlers aren’t actually fat, they eat and exercise in a certain way that the fat only builds up on the outside, not in their heart or anything that would cause health problems. So it’s more accurate to say they have fat but are incredibly healthy.
You can tell this is London. They have some weird streets where every single shop sells the same stuff.
Not to mention the other weird streets where every single house is identical.
Carbs are much worse than fat. So drinking dozens of grams of sugar every day and putting sugar in every food is worse than eating fatty food.
We (Europeans) are just more active, including walking / cycling to work every day. Try it and see the difference.
i think it’s not just “activity”. lots of people in the US go to the gym a lot.
but what we have here in europe is integrating movements into everyday life. Like, when i drive anywhere in the city, it typically involves a 10 minute walk (to/from the subway/tram station). And i believe that does much more than going to the gym for 1 hour once a week. Because you stay moving daily, your body stays “awake” daily, instead of just waking up once a week and then falling back into slumber.
Anon, did you look at the people?
