QUORA: HOW DID AMERICANS GET SO FAT?
---answered by David Lewinnek, I worked on crash safety for Honda automobiles in the 1990s, Updated Sep 1
I lived in Japan for two years, and lost a ton of weight. I drank a lot of alcohol, ate whatever food was convenient, and never consciously exercised. I lived upstairs from a Genkizushi sushi shop, and across the street from Chuuka Ton-Ton with excellent
ramen and surprisingly large Jumbo Bikkuri Gyoza. I had a car, but walked and took public transportation because it was more convenient. After two years of Japanese life, my BMI was 19, just on the underweight side of healthy.

I now live in an American suburb. I track my diet and exercise on apps. I have a home gym with weights, a Peloton exercise bike, and VR boxing subscriptions. I have another gym at work. My BMI is 29, overweight bordering on obese.

I’ve thought about the reasons for this. Why did I get thin without trying in Japan, then get fat while trying to stay thin in the USA? If you were trying to design the perfect obesogenic society to make people fat, you would do two things:

1. Subsidize low-nutrient foods with a lot of calories, like corn.

2. Use fear, zoning restrictions and tax laws to keep people away from sidewalks, parks, and “the gym of life.”

America does both of these things. Due to the peculiar way Americans select presidents, Iowa has outsized political influence. Iowa also grows a lot of corn, so it’s not surprising that American agricultural policy favors corn. Modern varieties of corn,
and especially those varieties processed into corn syrup, have calories but not much else. Our bodies didn’t evolve to directly sense the taste of nutrients, but they did involve to sense some tastes and aromas that are often seen alongside nutrients,
sensations that are a reasonable heuristic for nutrition in wild and natural foods. If your body tells you to eat until it senses that you have tasted enough, and you eat bland foods like corn, you’ll consume a lot of calories and still be hungry. If
your tongue tells you to eat until it has tasted enough, you can consume a lot of calories of corn syrup. On the other hand, traditional Japanese restaurants serve small amounts of carbs (rice or noodles) intensely flavored with small amounts of high
quality protein and fat (fish in sushi or pork slices in ramen). Japanese cuisine is quality over quantity, while common American food is the opposite. It’s easier to stop eating after a few bites of intensely flavored carb/fat/protein medley than a
few bites of bland fat-free sweetened engineered food.

At the same time that Americans consume more calories than Japanese people, Americans move around less. American zoning laws encourage large residential areas with no commercial areas nearby. Where there are commercial areas, there are huge parking lots
which are unpleasant to walk through. Parking spaces occupy the area that a sensible construction would use for walking paths. Japan is the opposite. There are plenty of walking paths and pedestrian-only areas. Mixed zoning with stores on the first floor
and residential units above are common, and possible without requirements for a parking space per bedroom or restaurant table. Parking and highway tolls in Japan are expensive, so people are encouraged to walk and take public transportation.

Finally, American media encourages people to be afraid. Afraid of kids getting abducted while walking to school, so they are driven instead. Aftaid of the neighbors calling the police because your kids are outside, so kids play inside instead. Afraid of
crime on public transportation, so everyone drives instead. Afraid of ticks and mosquitoes and sunburns and nature so everyone stays inside and watches screens instead. Japan has giant swallow hornets (so called because the hornets are as large as a
small bird like a swallow) that kill dozens of hikers a year, but nobody stays out of the mountains because of them.

It’s possible to live a healthy lifestyle in America if you constantly invest time and effort, eat unlike most Americans and live unlike most Americans. It’s easy to live a healthy lifestyle in Japan by just being lazy, eating common restaurant food
and taking the easiest path from home to work to shopping. Being unhealthy in Japan requires as much extra work as being healthy in America.

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