by eating whatever you want without doing a lick of exercise.

[intro music]

Oh no, seriously, I'm here to tell you about Skinny Hank.

For ten days you eat nothing but corn dogs and my patented fat metabolizing

peanut sauce wrapped in a flour tortilla

make sure you take the stick out.

you eat that and exclusively that, you understand, for ten days.

you might notice that your face and feet start getting a little puffy, but don't worry about that, that'll go away.

Then, after ten days of that, you can eat whatever you want, I promise.

Bada-bam, you got ryan gosling abs and I'd show you mine,

They're there but,

we have like an agreement with our advertisers

and I'm contractually bound to keep my shirt on.

Was that too much? I don't know if that was too much. It may have been too much.

I apologize if it was but there was a point in there somewhere

amongst the cheetos, and the point is that you can't go anywhere these days

without someone telling you how you might be able to become thinner.

Partially because it's a really good way to sell people things because we're very conscious about our bodies

but it's also because Americans these days..are getting fat

and not just fat but obese

and it's happening really, really fast.

This is a map of the United States

starting in 1980, because that's when the CDC started collecting data on obesity

it was about at 10%

and as time goes on

things start to get a little scary

and the whole country but mostly...focusing...mississippi

What is mississippi doing? Stop doing that!

You can see suddenly, in the last 30 years, a lot of America has an average obesity rate of above 30%

I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings or anything, but we're fat and we're getting fatter

and it's not just Americans, we like to make fun of Americans particularly

for getting so rotund so quickly

but it's the whole world really or

the whole developed world. We have seven

billion people on the Earth right now and a lot of people

studying this think that 2.3 billion

of them will be obese by 2015.

dang, that is a lot of obese people.

and to be clear here, doctors don't go around hollering about how we need to lose weight because

they're being paid off by the health foods industry

it's actually really bad for us.

carrying around a lot of extra body weight can kill you

in many unpleasant ways

including our two favorite ways to die: heart disease and cancer

but also the new epidemic of type two diabetes

so being fat is objectively bad for you.

but the question remains, how did it happen so quickly and why did it happen so quickly

so! what's going on?

because the data on obesity would suggest that we're all just sitting around eating pork cracklin's all day

[crunch]

that, I think was the very first pork cracklin I've ever eaten in my life

and I can tell you why

why do people eat these?

that's not food.

It's not just certain groups of people, it's everybody.

It's little kids and it's old people and it's rich people and it's poor people

and it's new immigrants to America and it's people whose ancestors came over on the mayflower.

Conventional wisdom and scientific rationality tells us that this is a numbers game.

It's calories in verus calories out. It's the first friggin law of thermodynamics, people.

Our doctors never shut up about having us eat right and exercise, and they're basically right.

If we do that we should be able to maintain a normal, healthy body shape.

Whereas a quick perusal of the contents of your average grocery store will tell you,

that we do not eat right and a quick examination of the way that I, for example, live my life

would indicate that we don't - we don't exercise very often

I...love to sit.

But, doctors are now pretty sure that, in fact, its not just diet and exercise.

There has to be some other reason why America, and the rest of the world, is having this crazy obesity epidemic.

Because scientists and doctors have been setting out again and again to prove that it's just diet and exercise

and everytime they come back and they pretty much fail.

For example, in the year 2000, they took 1700 school children from forty different schools

and they divided them into groups, kind of a cruel thing to do but they did it,

and they gave one of the groups better physical education and a better diet

and they gave the other group less physical education and the same old diet.

The same old diet they had always been eating, which, if you remember school lunch - not good.

At the end of three years of that, some of the smartest people in the world, armed with the best research equipment that you could buy,

and millions of dollars, and lots of free time, couldn't find a difference in the BMI of those two groups of kids.

So researches are now setting their sights at overall macro changes in the way that humans are living

and even changes to our genes, that may be defining why we are so obese now,

and maybe we don't have to blame ourselves anymore.

First reason: not enough sleep.

It's hard to get precise data on how long people sleep at night,

but our best guess is that since the 1960s we've lost about two hours of sleep per night.

We're just very busy people.

And there are a bunch of studies that show that as you sleep less, your BMI goes up.

Which is why I like to sleep 10 or 12 hours a day.

And this is kind of hard data to figure out, because obesity actually leads to sleep disorders,

and so obese people have a harder time sleeping,

and so it's hard to figure out whether the lack of sleep is leading to the obesity or the obesity is leading to the lack of sleep.

But scientists have actually done a pretty good job of figuring out that sleep depravation actually causes obesity.

and they figured out, one mechanism at least, as to why.

For example, there's a hormone called Leptin and theres another called Ghrelin,

and when you're sleep deprived, those hormones get all out of wack

and they start to tell your body that you're hungry

when what, in fact, you probably need its not food but sleep

Reason #2: climate control

So this doesn't immediately make sense, but we're warm-blooded mammals.

We have to expend energy to keep our bodies at the temperature at which they can exist.

If our bodies get too hot, then we die, and if they get too cold, then we die.

Over the past 30 years, our indoor spaces have become more and more exactly what we want them to be.

We have really good climate control systems now.

It's warm inside when it's cold outside and it's cold inside when it's warm outside.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to argue against this, I love that

I love coming home and having it not be 30 degrees inside,

but it does in fact take a huge amount of our calories to keep our bodies at the optimal temperature,

and we're simply not expending those calories anymore, because it's always 72 degrees inside.

Reason #3: We all quit smoking.

To be clear, cigarettes are much more deadly than obesity.

Facts is facts people, nicotine is an appetite supressant.

So, if you smoke, you eat less.

Even worse, if you smoke and then you stop, you eat more.

I've also, in the same vein, heard that meth is a really great weight loss strategy.

Especially because you lose your teeth and hair, and those things have mass, so you know...that's good.

What I'm saying here is don't start smoking.

Also, don't do meth.

Making crystal meth, #3 reason that we're all getting fatter. Industrial chemicals!

Everyday, you and I, and everyone else in America, is exposed to thousands of industrial chemicals.

Resins, solvents, perfumes, dyes, all that lovely weird stuff that they put in chicken nuggets.

We swallow them, we inhale them, we absorb them through our skin.

Researchers, for example, are working with these poor, chubby, little rats,

and exposing them to hexochlorobenzine, which is an industrial pesticide,

and the rats exposed to [this chemical], are significantly fatter than rats that aren't,

even when you feed the exposed rats half as much food as the control rats. That is unfortunate.

Another reason why we may be getting fatter: your mom.

So your chances of getting fat, unfortunately, may be set even before you are born.

First, because overweight women tend to choose overweight men to father their offspring.

Then you end up with two sets of overweight genes overlapping in your chromosomes.

Also women who are overweight during pregnancy or contract gestational diabetes, tend to give birth to babies who will later in life become obese.

Also, your changes of being obese later in life, are also affected by how old your mom was when she gave birth to you.

The average age of a first time mother jumped from 21 in 1970 to 25 in the year 2000.

And some studies have come up with weird studies about this, like,

"For every 5 years a woman waits to have a baby, that baby is 14% more likely to become obese"

and now is the part where I explain to you why this is,

except...no one has any idea.

The final contender in the "your mom" category: your mom.

You can blame her for pretty much everything now.

It's epigenetics. We've done a whole episode on epigenetics and you can click over here to go to that episode.

You'll learn about all of the things your parents did to you before you were born.

So you should watch that episode because it's gonna make you be like [exaggerated voice] what?

Basically, we used to think that your genes were your genes,

but it turns out there's a bunch of information that's above the genome.

Which is what epigenetics means; above genetics.

That epigenetic information can be created just one generation before you,

and totally change the way that your genome is expressed

So basically the way that your mom ate food and whether she smoked cigarettes,

and how stressed out she was can all effect your changes of becoming an obese person.

and finally, our last reason why people are obese: Gut Bacteria.

So the bacteria in our bodies are fantastic and we like to think of ourselves as big, independent, individuals,

but actually, we're a symbiotic ecosystem up in here.

There are more bacteria cells in our body then there are us cells. That's weird, huh?

So the bacteria in our gut are super fantastic, really great hard-working little guys,

and they help us metabolize food, they help us create certain types of vitamins

and it turns out that skinny people tend to have more gut bacteria and different types of gut bacteria than obese people.

I mean, the question is what do we do about that?

It's not like you could take a healthy person's gut bacteria and put them in......actually, you can do that,

and it's really simple to do.

It's just hard to get people to agree to it. It's called a fecal transplant and it's exactly what it sounds like.

So, yeah.

Take healthy gut bacteria, extract it from a healthy person and insert it into an unhealthy ecosystem of gut bacteria... and it works.

It could solve all sorts of weird problems.

From like really bad intestinal infections, to actually helping people with obesity.

So in conclusion, Skinny Hank's Weight Loss Peanut Sauce (tm), is not going to help you,

We do now have a prescription for weight loss for you.

#1: Get More Sleep

#2: Have your mom give birth to you when she's a little bit younger.

#3: See what you can do about before you're born. Make sure your mom doesn't smoke, overeat and gets with skinnier guys.

#4 Do not heat or cool your house.

Think of all the money you'll save on utilities.

#5: Move to a different planet, that isn't laced with industrial chemicals.

Yes, it is also probably a good idea to eat better and exercise more.

[sources in the description and promo for social media]