Study predicts 42 percent of Americans will be obese in 2030

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I think the obesity trend is going to reverse itself, simply because America has gotten so damn obsessive about it. If anything, we'll just continue to see a rise in anorexia and bulimia.

There's a big difference between being a little overweight, and being hundreds of pounds overweight. I work in a nursing home, and you would not believe the amount of money spent to take care of one person that is significantly overweight. Try changing the bandages inside of fat rolls. YUCK!

And go into a fast food place and try to find a reasonable sized portion. The menus are full of these huge super burgers the size of your head.

Like all studies of this type, projections,

We have the hotest year on record for the last twelve months, likely to be broken next month. Since it is one degree warmer, in twenty years it will be twenty degrees warmer.

By 2030, 114% of people will be Autistic, if not sooner. From 1 in 167, to 1 in 88, took less than a decade.

For as long as there have been IQ Tests, they have crept upward one point per decade. This proves that in the year 1,000 people had an IQ of Zero.

Weight gain can be measured, and in America, ten pounds per decade has been the normal gain. Sure, a few being over a hundred pounds over weight stands out, but the normal adult is thirty pounds larger than an adult in 1980.

While a third are a hundred pounds larger, 30+70, 2/3 are 30+.

the Lardification of America is not just Comicbook Guy from the Simpsons.

While family size has gotten smaller, houses have gotten larger.

Energy use per person has gone up, even when we manufacture less.

Projecting any trend is unsupportable over time.

Over the next thousand years, Americans will weigh 1200 pounds, and have eaten all the other animals, people, and topsoil.

I think the rise in obesity is connected to the loss of manufacturing jobs. People aren't meant to sit down all day.

Personally, I think the obesity trend is because of this post-industrial period.

People have survived for thousands of years because their bodies can store fat during famine--so the most "fit" people to survive would be the ones who tend to gain fat, not the ones who have high metabolism.

Society has evolved around famine too--people learned to stock up on food, to eat a lot when there was food, and to grow the most calorie rich food crops--like wheat and other grains.

So, now--BAM! We have the means to get enough food in post-industrial countries.

Instead of having to save meat for special occasions (because if you ate meat every day in an agrarian society, you'd soon run out of chickens and cows--so you only ate it sometimes)--we can go to the store and buy calorie rich foods any day of the week.

We are socially and biologically programmed to behave as if famine is a threat--now famine is not a threat in the US.

IMO, the trend will reverse itself when people adjust to the new culture of food accessibility. We have to adjust to modernity.

If people want to have the health problems associated with obesity, then let them keep stuffing their faces and not getting exercise. I plan on staying active and eating healthy.

priceless
for most of us children of a lesser god, it takes real sustained work to keep slender AND fit. slender by itself is nothing, just look at what happened to poor oprah the first time 'round [towing her wagon with the 60# of fat in it]. true fitness is when the fat STAYS off, and is [unless one has superior genes] accompanied by plenty of stringent dieting and huffing and puffing with the exercise regimen. it is not easy, never was. it is SOOOOOOO damned EASY to get fat and stay fat until a premature demise.

I don't think that it works like that. I think that obsessing about weight actually goes along with obesity.

For one thing, obesity and obsessing about weight would both be produced by an environment which subtly encourages people to eat unhealthy food as the "default" - some people would feel compelled to actively resist the norm and others would submit to it.

For another thing, obsessing about weight is not what healthy people do; it's what obese people do every now and then when they realise how bad things have gotten. People with a healthy lifestyle and diet don't tend to be obsessed with weight; they just have ingrained habits at a subconscious level which result in them making good choices over and over again. Remember, you might think that your society is obsessed with weight because you see beautiful thin people talking about it on TV. But who is the target market? They're not beautiful thin people.

If we think about sex instead of food, it is easy to notice that organisations and communities which are obsessive about celibacy are also the ones where we might find an abnormally high level of sexual deviance, and vice versa.

Europeans have tended toward obesity in countries where white collar workers are in the majority.

Bottom line: plentiful inexpensive food and work habits that do not require lots of calories burned will lead to obisity.


ruveyn

I know this study doesn't apply to me. I'm Canadian.
And I'm sorry to say our eating and exercise habits aren't much better than Americans.

poutine would be hard to give up.

I think this is pretty funny.

Mom Sues Nutella for Not Being Healthy Enough for Her 4-Year-Old

Should have learned from Bill.



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkfgvQWFY-4[/youtube]

I don't understand why people have such a hard time eating healthy. If you gain weight. Eat less, go for a walk. Change your diet. Whenever I start to gain more weight than I like, I cut my portions by a small amount and drink more water.

Also... if this is becoming a problem, then why are schools teaching children to eat this way by serving them absolute garbage?

And for the same reasons. Food is plentiful and relatively inexpensive and the prevailing work modes do not require much muscular exertion.

When north americans lived mostly on the land and had to hack away trees and plow the ground, they didn't get too plump.

ruveyn

Not sure if this is relevant here. About PE in schools. I hear that most high schools these days don't require PE. I had to do it for my freshman and sophomore years. The other high school I went to only required freshman year. But now it's option to take PE? For instance my cousin attends a private school and she's in 6th grade school which is considered junior high, but she gets PE only 45 min on Mondays only. I had to do PE Mon through Fri for an hour in middle school.