Tuesday, January 14, 2020

OBESITY





We had an ice storm yesterday.

On my  way into town this morning to get sand from the town sand pit, an interesting subject was brought up on MPR (Maine Public Radio.)   The subject was obesity.  

By the end of the 2020 decade, one half of the people in the United States will be considered obese.     

From an Ol'Buzzard point of view, having lived through eight decades, the cause is obvious:  


  • Fast foods
  • More processed foods
  • Less physical lifestyle due to technology making our life easier and less physical; young people spending hours on computers and computer games; people spending hours in front of televisions, snacking throughout the day....
Back during the forties and fifties people ate at home, meals prepared at home from non processed foods.   Snow removal was done with a shovel, not snow blowers and snow plows.  Families did things for themselves, not hire out maintenance and yard work.   People walked whenever possible, most families had one car.   Kids did not have cars, they walked or rode bikes.     Kids hung out with their friends, they did not want to be inside. 

The list could easily be expanded.  The fact being, as a young man living through the forties, fifties and sixties I never saw people the sizes that seems almost standard today.    People considered fat back then would not even be noticed by today's standard of fat, and morbid obesity today is common place.  

So what can we do about it?

Nothing.

This is where we are as technology relieves us of arduous physical daily obligations, and makes our life less physical and and more sedentary.  Our food are higher in calories and processed chemicals, and snacking is now an integral part of our life styles.   

We are, without realizing it, evolving into a slightly different species.  We are living through an evolutionary change.

Just my observation.
the Ol'Buzzard




9 comments:

  1. I'm reminded of the animated film 'Wall-E', I believe it was called, wherein people of the future were overly rotund do-nothings who moved about via hovering device. I thought: We are headed here.

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  2. I agree with the points you make. I think of my uncle, who ate heartily, homemade food - bread, sausage, maple syrup, donuts, roast beef, cheese... but he was a dairy farmer made of muscle and sinew who rarely sat down, got up before the sun, and even though he had tractors and machinery, used his body to do work on a daily basis. We are definitely more sedentary now. -Jenn

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  3. High fructose corn syrup. If you look at graphs of when more people, especially kids, started getting really fat and when high fructose corn syrup started showing up in just about every processed food on the market, there's close to a perfect match. The human body cannot process HFCS the way it does natural sugar. End result? Human blimps.

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  4. Someone explain to me how I've managed to remain thin (albeit mild belly fat, as over-60s always have SOME degree of it as a rule)
    ...and my diet isn't all that great either.

    Okay, so my younger brother and sister are heavyweight, but still ....

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  5. I too heard that NPR segment with a nutrition scientist explaning very logically how our livers are affected by sugar (just like alcohol) and store it up as fat. Also how the food manufacturers are adding salt and other additives to everything, even soft drinks, to make us more thirsty. Only RC Cola is salt-free. It will take more than personal willpower to combat the obesity epidemic.

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  6. Whenever I hear the report on obesity in the US I always think of the movie WALL-E and the fat people sitting doing nothing while machines do everything for them including stuffing their faces for them.

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  7. Two of our outside guys at work designed and built a simple forklift snow plowing device yesterday. I was impressed. What will they invent next? Fire? Evolution!

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  8. Nan is right. High Fructose corn sugar is a major contributor to obesity. Red meat and dairy products are not.
    We could use more exercise for sure. Not sure if it contributes to longevity though. People here tend to match your description of how our ancestors lived and the cemeteries are full of 60 year olds

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