The expanding American waistline has been a well known subject of discussion and distress for decades now, hitting full domestic stride in the 80s at the latest with a continuing self-conscious diet sub-sector in our economy continuing to flourish. It's an odd phenomenon considering how much we know about the problems associated with being overweight, namely heart disease, cancers, diabetes, bone problems, muscle problems, poor circulation, and many other issues. Some specialists have put obesity as the greatest health risk of all, higher than smoking even (as in, it's better to be a thin smoker than an overweight non-smoker). As if knowing the risks weren't enough, we know all about what to do: get more exercise and activity and eat healthier. Americans don't move, eat suboptimally nutritious foods, and eat too much of it.
Oddly, even this combination of knowledge about problems and solutions isn't enough. Americans are getting fatter every second. It isn't just Americans either, though. As GDP rises, so does the percent of obesity, reflected from the east and west of the United States in Europe and Japan respectively. As it stands, modern economically successful social structures contribute to incredibly unhealthy humans.
Activity is a big problem, especially in the United States. Stop and think about how much activity you get. The few people who read this board actually probably get an average amount as many work in manual labor jobs, so exceptions are probably high in this sample. But many people walk around the house a little bit in the morning, walk to the car, walk to the seat they sit in for 80% of the next 8-10 hours, walk back into the house, and maybe a few hundred more steps around the house between the table, den, and bedroom.
I dare you to test your activity with a pedometer. I used to wear one (I still would but I didn't bring it with my to my in-laws when we moved here for the baby). 10,000 steps is supposed to be a good standard of activity; not really enough to burn weight off, but enough to keep you at wherever you are without gaining more, pending an intelligent diet. When I leave the house for school or work, I have a number of 10-15 minute connections between home, work, and trains as well as walking between classes, so hitting 10K isn't hard for me on work days. On study days, I'm pretty sedentary. My personal worst was 642 steps. That was essentially get up, hit the bathroom, sit in front of the computer save 1 or 2 bathroom breaks, 15 steps to the kitchen for lunch, and that's it. Shameful, eh?
At my biggest, I breached the 240 mark (109 kilograms = 240.3 pounds ±) but have been able to get down to a respectable 222 and falling as of today. The biggest thing for me was reducing the size of my portions. It's not that hard to do and has a huge difference. I've heard that restaurant portions in the U.S. have grown by 1/3 since the 1970s, and other researchers have shown how the way our food is presented to us actually leads us to eat more. We eat more fast food which is well known to be more fatty and less healthy than home cookin'.
But it isn't just that we eat too much, as everyone who is fat isn't guilty of gluttony. And it isn't as simple as the food being just high in fat and bad calories. Caloric content is closely related here, but the richness or energy content of the food is also a contributor. The type of food we predominantly eat now is consistently more energy dense than what our appetites have evolved for and thus we end up eating more calories. Our bodies have a metric that is employed to determine how much we should eat but this metric isn't tuned to the caloric content of the food we eat and we end up overconsuming. We get tricked by the food we are eating.
Some people try to compensate by eating healthy at home, a move that typically consists of adding more fruits and vegetables. It's been recently discovered though, that microwaving vegetables essentially destroys their nutritional value, at least as far as free-radical destroying antioxidants are concerned. It's best to cook vegetables at least a little bit, as even though they have more nutritional value raw, its locked up in forms that aren't so easy to digest. Steaming works best, and pressure cooking is decent, especially if you use the water left over to make soup or something. Boiling destroys about half the nutrition and a lot of what is left over gets thrown away in the water, and nuking the veggies destroys over 90%. Saves time maybe, but doesn't help you at all.
Will it matter for the citizens of the United States? I doubt it. I expect more and more people to keep getting fatter and fatter, dying of more heart attacks and cancers. Some people have suggested banning fast food advertisements aimed at children (I think we should ban all advertising aimed at kids actually), a proposal worth considering especially in light of evidence that fast food is addictive. I think we need to start being aware of what, why, and how we eat though, as a paradigm shift in our conception of diet is the only thing that will matter. But by then, the signs that our nation's growning fat and opulent is an indicator of our decline will likely be seen as predictors instead.
Come on in and tell us how fat you are!!
Posted by Nutrimentia at December 21, 2003 08:33 PM | TrackBack