Downside to walking is a weekly family shop isn't easy to carry around.

The trick is that you pick stuff up “on your way home”, you aren’t making extra dedicated trips. Not hard to supplement with grocery deliveries these days either.

When I think back to the weekly grocery shopping I did with my parents as a kid? Those huge carts full of food, having to cover the entire store, then hauling it amd packing it in the car, then all the unpacking and organizing sorting and storing some of it in the main fridge and some in the backup fridge some in the pantry … to me that seems like way more hassle than speading the work out.

I have kids, tried different systems, more and smaller trips works for us. Probably it’s one of those things that everyone works out differently

What about that is a hassle?

right now i live a block down from a grocery store and a grocery run is 15 minutes tops.

because grocery shopping was such a hassle in the suburbs we did it once a week and tried to buy as much as possible to avoid going back. in the city i just grab whatever is on my list walking home from the train station.

California is vast, so there are many areas that are almost comically walk-proof, but there are also cities with a high average "walk score".

https://www.walkscore.com/CA/

I live in a SoCal coastal city of 60K which has a fairly low "walk score" of 43. The services I'd need on a regular basis are in the neighborhood of a 20-45m walk (one way).

Median age increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.6 today.

I suspect an increase in using computers both at work and home has played a role.

Urbanization has increased from 79% in 2000 to 83%, among everything else I think fewer people are doing yard work.

> A majority of infrastructure in the US makes it extremely hard to be healthy

This is a copout.The only hard thing about being healthy is having the discipline to do so. Certainly more than 6.8% of people have the means to have healthy diet and they choose not to. There are definitely extreme cases of poverty where it would be difficult (which people who are well above that will use as an example to make themselves feel better about their choices) but I'd argue it's still very reasonable to be able to lead a very healthy lifestyle.

We're fat as hell because we live a life of extreme abundance.

A combination of brutal heat and lack of pedestrian friendly routes means almost no one walks.

They’re pretty healthy though. Lots of veggies and being fat is bad.

We could try that too!

There needs to be good frequent public transport on dedicated rails or priority lanes, so it is faster than a car can be. Good bicycle infrastructure so people want to take the bike. It's crazy that many people see cycling as some kind of sport or free time activity, while it is for so many people a serious way to commute to work or get the groceries or visit family.

But it is so cultural, so embedded in society, it is probably never going to be fixed. Also probably thanks to the motorvehicle lobby.

We weren’t part of the problem, we were just kids. But it’s easy to get pulled in when you grow up like that. There’s a big difference between visiting or driving through and growing up in such a place where you feel like you always had to watch your back. Because you spend more time in such a place, it increases your chances of bad things happening.

But it also meant, playing around the streets with the neighborhood kids, great food, neighbors giving each other things like food and essentials, a sort of camaraderie that we had each other’s back. Not everything was bad. However, you never feel truly safe.

I think you partially addressed that already with the privilege part. I know my city has rough areas that definitely have an increased risk of getting mugged, robbed or just jumped for no reason. Knowing that is enough to keep me from going around there unless I have a reason.

food deserts are real.

not having enough free time to exercise is real.

If only there was a magical food that gave you energy, satiated hunger, tasted like pepperoni pizza, and had no calories.

Life's a bitch.

Fruit, a rare treat, tastes like candy.

It depends on what you've become accustomed to eating.

We're hunter/gatherers.

Babies are designed to shut up and be happy when we're walking around with them and jiggling them. That's a survival feature.

Strollers sometimes worked, but they never lasted more than 5 minutes in a papoose/backpack type deal.

When we had a third, I took my first (who was 6.5 years old) on bike rides with the youngest in the stroller. Worked ok until but a lot harder to juggle.

Pandemic helped but now that we are going back to the office (twice a week for now), morning exercise is the first thing to go (home cooked meals a close second).

I've been doing intermittent fasting and only garbage collect in the evenings, but the temptations are high when you WFH.

Buy caulipower brand pizza (either the pepperoni pizza or the cheese and add your own slice two of pepperoni.

Let thaw for 20 min.

Bake at 425 for 9 min.

Checks all the above.

What does this even mean :-D

A home gym setup will save you the 30-40 mins to and from the gym. Barring space for any equipment / weights some exercise bands and a yoga mat will do. App based fitness classes such as AppleFitness+ also make it much much easier to program your workouts.

Two years ago, I started dating a vegan and slowly became vegan myself and I now eat a plant based diet.

Between the exercise and the diet, my cholesterol numbers have totally turned around. My doctor commented last month at my physical that she's never seen anybody turn their cholesterol around like that without drugs.

Funnily, I'm kind of the opposite story -- mid-40s and fairly athletic. I run around 14 miles every other day at sub 7 pace, play other sports, and am generally in good shape and have been my whole life. My diet is mostly vegetarian without much alcohol. Trying to do everything right to live a healthy lifestyle, but my cholesterol was terrible... LDL around 240.

My doctor chalked it up to bad luck with genes. After a few months on a statin it was at 90. Since I didn't have much room to change lifestyle, I'm very thankful for drugs!

edit: form those disagreeing, please let me know the flaw in my statement.

Dairy: https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/4-ways-to-eat-yo...

> White sugar (and some brown sugar) produced from sugar cane may be refined using bone char by a few sugar cane refiners.[2] For this reason white sugar from sugar cane may not be vegan. Beet sugar has never been processed with bone char and is vegan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar

>White sugar (and some brown sugar) produced from sugar cane may be refined using bone char by a few sugar cane refiners.[2] For this reason white sugar from sugar cane may not be vegan. Beet sugar has never been processed with bone char and is vegan.[3]

which pretty definitively say that it's only cane sugar that might be processed that way, and beet sugar is "never" processed that way.

https://www.virtahealth.com/research

3 years ago I found out I had 3 total occlusions and needed an immediate coronary artery bypass graft. 3 years later and my heart is still only half as efficient as a normal man my age because of extensive scarring! Take care of yourselves people, there is more to life than shipping software!

I ride 25 miles 3/week on average and probably walk another 3 miles 3/week. Pretty much intermittent fasting (1 meal/day) plus some protein shakes.

Probably the most depressing thing to me about the US is how car-dependent almost everything else. In most places in the country you can't even have a walkable lifestyle (without driving somewhere to "hike") even if you wanted to. IMHO it's a lot harder to become unhealthy and morbidly obese if you routinely walk places.

I do six 30~40 minute plyometric/metabolic workouts per week and have had one steak in the past 4 years, and gave up bacon around 2012. I eat three low-carb squares a day, all home made, nothing from a box or pre-made. When I drink I binge, I'll have a bottle of wine in one sitting but only twice a month.

The only advantage I have over most people is I work from home so my workouts fit nicely into my schedule. If I had to work 8-5 with a commute I would find it difficult to fit the workouts in since I live far from the nearest city. Fortunately, I also have a Wegmans grocery store 5 miles away that has nice produce, and I like to cook, so eating well is easy.

I count myself lucky.

We should all try to walk and sleep more, it seems.

Driving a car to get around gets me much more time with my friends and family and myself.

1. Weight: I've been 50+ lb heavier than I am now and I, personally, hated it. It makes everything harder and that only gets worse with age;

2. Fitness: this one is (IMHO) less extreme than weight differences but if you can't walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded that's going to impact your life in negative and real ways;

3. Health: when you're young this is less of an issue but as you get older being overweight and/or unhealthy becomes a more significant risk factor for many health problems. Heart disease, strokes and a host of others;

4. Quality of life: getting fresh air, sunlight and exercise is generally good for your state of mine. At least, it's good for mine. It can help put thing sin perspective (professional and personal) and improve your mood.

YMMV

As far as time goes, this was a big motivator for IF for me. As in, the effort of preparing (or even buying) meals annoyed me. It's one of the big things I appreciated about working in tech: the free meals. Not for the quality necessarily but primarily for the convenience. I don't have to plan for (many) meals.

Treating eating as a leisure activity can be a trap too like some people have weight issues because they like food and end up treating it as a reward, which reinforces the cycle.

I prefer to think of food as necessary fuel.

But how much time do you spend on food?

At work I became more productive because I wasn't struggling through half the day feeling fatigued and worn out, or pushing into a panic attack from all the caffeine needed to keep me conscious. Outside of work, despite (and as mentioned in many cases because of) the exercise I spent more time with friends and family. And I probably bought more than 2 years at the end of my life. I was on track for a heart attack in my 40s the way I was going.

I'd strongly recommend finding some sort of physical activity that you enjoy, rather than seeing as a chore.

This specific amount of cardio fitness is probably not strictly needed. Given the choice I believe most people should chose more strength training. But at any given time, being able to pop out at least a 5km run or equivalent is probably a good place to be.

↑ This paper seems to be studying the same data and has it’s own take on the results.

Conclusions go in the same direction, but at least we have more info on how they look at it and their comments on the methodology and findings.

Bet let's get this out of the way first: I eat a lot of carbohydrates.

  HDL: 1.96 normal range 0.90-1.60 ("good" cholesterol, above high normal)

  LDL: 2.19 normal range 2.00-3.40

  Triglycerides: 0.54 normal range 0.60-2.30 (below low normal, lower is better)

  HbA1c: 4.9% normal range 4.5-6.5% (measure of average blood sugar over about 3 months)

At one point I ran a half marathon, but that was 4-5 years previous to this. By this point I was on 20 minutes intense cardio 3x week, and heavy weights. By heavy I mean heavy for me, as in I didn't show up at the gym expect to do 3 set of 10 no matter what. If I could do 3x10 of a certain weight, it was time to up the weight for constant improvement.

I ate balanced protein and carbs with some fat, a habit I picked up from Body for Life a long time ago. I ate a lot of chicken, plenty of beef, also fish. I also love candy, and will eat a lot of it while coding or studying. Never skimped on things like popcorn, triple butter please. Love eggs. Love eating out, rich meals and dessert. I have never been vegan or vegetarian. When I really wanted to build muscle, I ate lots of meat.

For a genetic background, I have a sibling who ended up with NAFLD in their early 30s. Aunt and grandfather with T2DM. Mother is on statins now in her late 60s. Generally my family is average build, maybe a big chubbier. I would say my health is 90% effort.

I think the key is, you have to use absolutely everything you put in your body. If you are not building a stronger body with it, it's going to waste.

Congratulate your parents as well for the good genes.

> I also love candy, and will eat a lot of it while coding or studying. Never skimped on things like popcorn, triple butter please.

> I think the key is, you have to use absolutely everything you put in your body. If you are not building a stronger body with it, it's going to waste.

I mean I’m totally in the indulge in moderation crowd if only to enjoy life, but I am still at a loss how your two statements above are connected. How are you building a stronger body with the triple butter?

> How are you building a stronger body with the triple butter?

The point is that I used it all. I burned all of the calories I put into my body. Even if the calories were "crap" I burned them instead of consuming the quality protein I ingested for basic metabolic needs. My weight crept slowly upward from 155 to 165 over the course of 10 years and it was muscle, not fat.

It isn’t “it”, but you sure as hell know that lipid metabolism has a considerable genetic component.

> Mother is on statins now in her late 60s.

Even with your lipid levels posted if you have even a touch of hypertension you will have an indication for statin in your late 60s based of CV risk.

Seriously I am happy that you’re physically fit and doing well not trying to diminish that - but I could not help but be amused that you’re flexing off of results seen in medical training. Granted some of us train in relatively healthy areas - but I trained and work with a patient panel with A1c often in the teens - so just the thought of gauging my own progress off that comes off somewhat sadly as ludicrously funny.

My somewhat tech related story was we recently had a transfer patient with an A1c of 127. The limit on these assays is typically around 20% - but apparently the lab interface in this case stores A1c as a signed 8 bit integer and a maxed out value as +max - after mentioning this the endocrinologist gave me a blank stare and walked away.

My mother is on statins based on her lipids. I suppose my situation could be the result of some favorable de novo mutations, but if you look at an extended family photo I am definitely the odd one out, something that only emerged with hard work starting late in my teens. Nothing with my fitness has been a gift. I could barely run 500m in my early 20s. It was far harder for me to gain muscle than most other people at the gym. That can be discouraging, but I stuck with it all became a form of meditation and a constant in my life when other things were changing.

> point is that I have not seen better numbers in any patient.

Well that’s a biased or too small sample size. 2.19 is a great number for most adults (barring those with very high risk ASCVD where these days we want to squash it down much lower) - and if you were my patient I would be congratulating you but alas you are just a rando on an Internet forum where we can discuss data dispassionately and.. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.106.25.3237 If I see only 20 patients in clinic or realistically a cohort of clinics that is representative of the American population I expect 1 or 2 to pop better numbers.

It’s better than average but not rare or uncommon by even American standards (and don’t look at the Dutch numbers if you want to feel good about yourself).

You've sent me the distribution of lipids across all age groups, done for research purposes. In clinic you rarely test anyone in those younger age groups for lipids as screening starts at 40 for men and 50 for women. So, you know, you don't see results for 20 year olds in clinic, and if you do see those results for younger people it's because they have some pretty extreme risk factors like morbid obesity. Are you ordering lipids on healthy 20 year olds?

Interesting to see that even against the youngest age group, my triglycerides are low enough to be in the 5th percentile, HDL is above 95%, and LDL below 10th percentile. Total cholesterol was 4.40 so my ratio is 2.2, which is far below average for risk. My HDL was better than 95% of Dutch teenagers and my triglycerides were better than 90% of 20-somethings.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Soybean-Oil-Is-More-Ob...

If the effect is real it takes place over decades, gradually damaging mitochondria, making it difficult to cover with RCTs.

Obesity: https://fireinabottle.net/how-seed-oils-cause-reductive-stre...

Heart Disease: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/death-by-vegetable-oil-what-...

* By which I mean with references. And yes, big farma, etc etc, but really, decent studies please.

https://fireinabottle.net/how-seed-oils-cause-reductive-stre...

https://fireinabottle.net/the-mitochondrial-bottleneck-as-th...

https://fireinabottle.net/acetylation-turns-on-lipogenic-gen...

https://fireinabottle.net/what-happens-to-seed-oils-when-you...

https://fireinabottle.net/seed-oils-make-lean-people-behave-...

https://fireinabottle.net/pufa-as-an-obesogen-how-seed-oils-...

Tell that to the french. Also, this hasn't been true in the US for a few decades at least. Soybean oil is in pretty much everything now. If you go get a pizza, every single ingredient in that pizza has a healthy dose of either soybean oil or seed oil, from the cheese to the crust.

- Some form of resistance training (in my case oly and general strength training)

- Walking a lot (a benefit of a walkable city) as part of routine, rather than a scheduled exercise

- Not snacking, sticking to scheduled meal times

- For me personally, intermittent fasting in the form of skipping breakfast. Not only is breakfast unnecessary for most of us, you'd be surprised by how much you can achieve fasted, you might even find an enhanced energy.

I'm sure resistance training can be substituted for other 'training' by which we mean a stimulus strong enough to lead to an adaptation. With the adaptation to the exercise comes some of the benefits - like optimal cardiometabolic health.

Because of my past, I'm often contacted by recovering ex-vegans in my area. I immediately get them started on the carnivore diet and within a week or two, most will come back, often with tears in their eyes, to tell me that they finally begin to feel normal again, really a joy to experience.

This is just the abstract to anyone who doesn’t have access to the journal.

Studies seem to show that each of these often have meaningful effects on preventing, stopping and even reversing common diseases.

This is all really hard for people to do, though. There’s a lot working against us. It’s hard to see why we should do it at the individual level — it’s hard to believe these changes will make a meaningful difference.

But you’re right that there’s no financial incentive there. Not at all. There is for each of us, and here in Canada there is an incentive to reduce medical spending, but pharmaceutical companies stand to gain nothing and lose so much.

It’s hard to imagine this changing much, but what a difference it would make. Life could be so much different for so many of us.

not as good of business as treating it, but still great business

In this case there is also the incentive to solve it if anything out of selfishness given that everybody at some point develops cardiometabolic problems

Considering approximately $0 has been spent on drug discovery for my disorder (genetic, rare, not fatal), I'd substantially benefit from exercise-in-a-pill drugs if those come out, as would a lot of others in my position.

Not really; no one has cracked old age, for example. There's no cure for diabetes, either.

> but keeping physically fit was something that people did everywhere: sports in the park, exercise at home.

Nobody took away sports in the park or exercise at home

> This raising of the bar coupled with the fact that working out need to be done now in special locations that involve a lot more effort than doing 20 push-ups at home

Nobody took away 20 pushups at home, or is forcing you to do exercise at a gym.

If anything, the ease of access to high quality information on bodyweight exercises (/yoga/dance class/...) is miles beyond what it used to be - just go to youtube! They're SUPER effective as well!