The obesity era

[DainBramaged]

As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us


Years ago, after a plane trip spent reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Weight Watchers magazine, Woody Allen melded the two experiences into a single essay. ‘I am fat,’ it began. ‘I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?).’ It was 1968, when most of the world’s people were more or less ‘height-weight proportional’ and millions of the rest were starving. Weight Watchers was a new organisation for an exotic new problem. The notion that being fat could spur Russian-novel anguish was good for a laugh.

That, as we used to say during my Californian adolescence, was then. Now, 1968’s joke has become 2013’s truism. For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What's more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy.

And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness. After all, it’s obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it’s us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. What else could it be? If you’re overweight, it must be because you are not saying no to sweets and fast food and fried potatoes. It’s because you take elevators and cars and golf carts where your forebears nobly strained their thighs and calves. How could you do this to yourself, and to society?

Moral panic about the depravity of the heavy has seeped into many aspects of life, confusing even the erudite. Earlier this month, for example, the American evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller expressed the zeitgeist in this tweet: ‘Dear obese PhD applicants: if you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.’ Businesses are moving to profit on the supposed weaknesses of their customers. Meanwhile, governments no longer presume that their citizens know what they are doing when they take up a menu or a shopping cart. Yesterday’s fringe notions are becoming today’s rules for living — such as New York City’s recent attempt to ban large-size cups for sugary soft drinks, or Denmark’s short-lived tax surcharge on foods that contain more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat, or Samoa Air’s 2013 ticket policy, in which a passenger’s fare is based on his weight because: ‘You are the master of your air ‘fair’, you decide how much (or how little) your ticket will cost.’



http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/david-berreby-obesity-era/

Great read, please enjoy (maybe reposted in science?)


many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.

[snagglepuss]

1. to read later

[newthinking]

2. "Life out of balance"

Obesity is appearing more and more to be an indicator of the unhealthy cultures we live in.
Is it necessary for modern life to promote obesity? No. But the stress, treadmill. work pressures, and environmental factors (including factory food) around us make it very difficult to get all the factors into balance to be healthy.

Our parent's generation had extremely heavy diets, cars, and office/sales (not very physical) jobs, but obesity was not so prevalent, even amongst office workers.

[rrneck]

3. Good read.

If you liked that, you may like this.

http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-History-Causality-Science-Systems/dp/0691127689/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372206951&sr=8-1&keywords=a+cultural+history+of+causality

A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew. The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century.

[hedgehog]

5. After years of gaining weight by following all the advice in all the diet books -

limit red meat, lots of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, no potatoes, calorie limit of 1500 a day, I'm finally losing weight at a moderate rate following my physician's instructions to limit myself to 1000 calories a day. (Kids, don't do this at home! - Seriously, don't do this !)

Every resource out there will tell you that this is way too low. The dietitian my doctor sent me to told me it's way too low. Read any histories of WWII and sooner or later you will come across references to people starving to death - on 1000 calories a day.

So - thermodynamics rules, but why can I lose weight only when I cut back to a radically minimal calorie intake? Something is very wrong with us, our food and our environment!