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0 pointsKaiserPro3y ago0 comments

In the UK average calorie intake has been dropping, but thats negatively correlated to kids being fat.

I would suggest that the big change is the amount of activity that an average kid does. which seems to be conducive to the calories in/vs out. the cause of this is complex. But a lot of it relates to stranger danger. Parents don't let their kids out after school unattended (for various reasons) which means they are inside not burning off as many calories.

The other thing to remember is that food is now cheap. Its perfectly possible to be in the bottom 20% of the UK income bracket and still have enough cash to eat more calories than you need. (This is a good thing. People starving in the UK is unforgivable.)

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bombcar3y ago

Also, it's not the activity that matters much as simply being further away from food while doing it. The amount of calories you burn running through a forest playing Robin Hood is minuscule; but since you're thousands of feet (miles even) from your fridge, you can't just continue to eat all the time.

InitialLastName3y ago

Not just "stranger danger", but fewer people (in the US, and AIUI increasingly other parts of the developed world) live in a place where you can do anything without driving. As a result, not only are children barred from operating independently of their parents' time, but everyone is more sedentary, by nature of replacing active travel with automotive travel at every opportunity.

wtetzner3y ago

I suspect something we're eating more of now (seed oils, chemicals in processed foods, something else?) is causing us to store more fat that we otherwise would have. i.e. we seem to store all excess calories as fat, but maybe that's not actually what a healthy human body would do.

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