Obesity in America revisited

Great Debates
41

You know, it was in the middle 1980s that I was driving through my town and made a realization, or Quantum leap, as it may be, that the local kids were not only getting heavier, but turning into tubs. This was shortly after the explosion of video games, ATV’s and the beginning of the Child Molestation Fear which spawned Children’s Rights along with the marked increase in personal incomes for the middle class.

I spotted a kid riding his bike past the high school, something a whole lot of kids did during summer break, and he had his shirt off. What caught my attention was that not only was he pale as could be, but his stomach actually sagged over the waist of his shorts! As I drove around town, I started seeing more and more kids, especially boys, who were chunky, most of whom looked sullen, as if Mom and Dad had shoved them out and told them to go play.

Back then I started making comments about the kids getting fat because, when I was a kid between 6 and 19, we all played outside and we played hard and we were all skinny, tanned and healthy. There were mobs of us at the beaches, the lakes, the playgrounds, riding bikes all over town, filling the skating rink, surfing, boating, camping and running happily all over residential communities.

My comments went either ignored or disputed. Then, several years later, I started seeing the girls plumping up and why they were behind the boys, I have no idea. By then, a few people agreed with my comments about the increase of fat and started blaming it on video games, the new attitude of not firmly disciplining the kids, the scare of being accused of being considered a molester and violating the Child’s Rights by kicking them outside to play and the fear of them being snatched by a pervert.

The food industry did not help by adding tons of fattening, tasty quick foods that they advertised the crap out of, mainly directed towards kids. Within a short time, some schools dropped physical education because of lawsuits by parents of chunky kids, claiming forced physical activity was discriminatory towards the athletically malfunctional and schools should not ‘force’ their little chunky charmers to have to do anything.

Shortly after, schools started packing in snack and soda machines in the cafeteria, not only to gain revenue from the companies providing the machines, but responding to Children’s Rights pressure which insisted that Kids did not have enough dietary selection from the cafeteria and had the right to eat crap, if they so chose.

In the passing years, I started seeing more and more chunky kids, finding more and more parents reluctant to make their kids to physical activity and this was reinforced by the higher salaries allowing families to buy sports gear that you rode in or on to have fun. Many adopted the new ‘time out’ type of child rearing, and I started finding kids who had an attitude of they could do what they wanted, when they wanted to. Spoiled, lazy and selfish.

And increasingly chunky.

Then I found ‘new’ mom’s who could not cook! Oh, they might whip up a stew, open some soup, stock the 'fridge with fresh fruits and vegetables and boil eggs, but they ordered out for pre-made foods most of the time. Fried chicken dinners from KFC, cheaper ones from the grocery stores, platters made up for the ‘working woman’ at another containing meats, veggies, salads, sauces and rolls, fast food joints all over the place and TV commercials pushing sweet sodas and drinks over milk, fruit juice and just cold water.

Milk is pushed, but mainly for you to dump your high calorie powdered chocolate mix into and the drinking of soda now apparently is supposed to transport you into some ethereal world and make you cool!

One parent told me that he could not let his kids run around like we used to do because the world has changed and just the other day, a guy in a truck tried to entice a little girl into the cab but drove off fast when she ran and this was just a block away! He controlled what his kids ate, but he and his wife both worked and frequently they were too tired to cook – something his wife did not like to do anyhow – and either ordered or went out.

Now, because of the skin cancer scare, he and other folks are reluctant to have their kids play in the sun without smearing on sunscreen! Some kids I know are almost firmly convinced that going outside unprotected is dangerous!

Now, over 15 years since I started making comments about the increasing number of fat kids in the area, professionals are observing the same thing. They should have listened to me back then. Now, when I go to elementary schools on jobs, I find the highest amount of fat women and men, parents, waiting for their kids than I ever noticed before and more little chunks streaming from the classes than in my youth!

I have one more observation that I made years ago, shortly after parents started suing schools and teachers lost control of their students. I’m starting to see signs of it popping up now. I started seeing so many spoiled, chunky kids and so many reared without actual discipline consisting of corporal punishment that figured they could do whatever they wanted, that I just knew these selfish chunks and skinny kids of the same ilk were going to grow up to run our businesses and government.

In the last decade, I’ve observed the destruction of the American business ethic, the big ‘me’ attitude of the government, including 3 wimpy presidents almost in a row and even a change in the military. (Under a stronger President, Dessert Storm would not have ended with Sadaam alive.) I’ve never seen more hostile corporate takeovers than in the past decade, more companies firing loyal, long time workers to make more profits by eliminating their jobs, people actually buying the stock of such companies. Nor have I found so many lawsuits filed, so many businesses adopting the attitude of ‘there is no such thing as too much profit’ and deliberately breaking laws, withholding information on defects, fighting against pollution control, fighting against disease control (food industry), turning more and more previously nonprofit hospitals into profit making businesses, charging prices to the very limit that the buyers will pay, and becoming massively turned inward. The term ‘buyer beware’ has taken on a whole new meaning as the chunky, spoiled kids turn into chunky, spoiled adults and gain control over businesses.

Now, we’re all going to pay for allowing things to get out of control concerning the kids. That little video game playing, mouthy, obnoxious little kid you’re rearing by the Spock Method, able to get any adult in major trouble with a single, hard to disprove lie, with his value system based on your obvious consumption of luxuries, diminished empathy to the poor, dependence on lawyers, decreased consideration of others and predatory business attitude will eventually run a major company or have a major governmental position.

We’re not going to like it when he or she does and we’re going to wonder what happened. Hell, it’s already started.

When your population gets too fat, you know that something is wrong and it ain’t genetics.

I know I never even figured that the day would come when so many young women would enter into marriage hardly knowing how to cook!! Then again, I never expected Coke bought from a machine for 10 cents would eventually sell for $1.00 in a store!

42

Do YOU know how to cook? If you wish to imply that due to the ubiquity of convenience foods, too many PEOPLE are GROWING UP hardly knowing how to cook, you’ve got a point. I suspect however that you mean something else entirely.

43

Well, the changes in our society within the past 20 years or so, I think, greatly contribute to the current proliferation of obesity. Neon Frying Pan was right in saying that one usually doesn’t see neighborhood kids playing hide-and-seek, etc., nowadays. That’s because when we were growing up, Mom was usually at home, you didn’t have to worry about strangers enticing you into their car, and, because everyone knew everyone, it was nothing to have supper at a friend’s house on a moment’s notice. I suppose we were also unsophisticated by today’s standards, in that there were very few town-wide team sports (and hardly any for girls), everyone rode bikes, and if worse came to worse, you could always hang out on someone’s front porch.

Nowadays, despite all the couples-with-kids in my neighborhood, I hardly see any of them. Where do they go? Day care, I presume…or, if they’re a little older, T-Ball or soccer…perhaps locked away with their computers or watching the boob tube? Are any of them obese? I honestly don’t know because I never see them, save for the 2-year-old next door who isn’t fat by any means.

Doing a million things at once, exhaustion, and plain laziness are the hallmarks of society today. Why should you bother cooking when there’s 100+ kinds of frozen meals to choose from? If the kids are hungry and you just got home from work, it’s easier to give them junk food to shut them up for a bit than to actually prepare a sit-down meal. And who wants to go out for an hour-long walk after supper when all you want to do is slump in front of the TV and fall asleep? I’ve fallen into these traps (save the kids, as I don’t have any) many times, so I’m not immune, nor am I proud of it.

And, oh, let’s not forget the dreaded “middle age spread”…aaaack!

44

kiz, I am not sure home cooked meals are necessarily any better or worse than prepared stuff. Fat is fat where ever you find it and healthy is healthy. You can not cook and eat very healthy. I used to have a girlfriend who loved to cook and we both put on quite some weight because she cooked delicious stuff. Although I can cook pretty good, I am too lazy to cook when I am alone so I hardly ever do. This means I eat much healthier because I eat a lot of cereals, fruits, and things like that.

She, like many people, wanted to find the magic trick which would allow her to eat all she wanted and be thin. I would put a bowl of cereal in front of her and she’d complain it tasted like cardboard. There’s the trick: eat stuff which tastes like cardboard and you are much less prone to overeat.

I think the gist of how the changing times have affected this issue is much wider in scope. Earlier generations grew up in harder times. There was much more discipline and kids learnt self-discipline very early. Self discipline is essential for success in anything. People with self discipline are the ones that still succeed. If you have self discipline you can use it to succeed in many things and this is one of them.

We have grown in a world that taught us we are the center and reason of the universe. That the others should adapt to us. That we deserve things without earning them. A person who grew up in the depression had it easier to do what he felt he should do over what he felt like doing, because he had grown with that self imposed discipline. We do not have that so we feel we have the right to be satisfied and not satisfying our desires makes us very unhappy. This is true when it comes to food, marriage or whatever. We are a spoiled lot.

45

kiz: *Well, the changes in our society within the past 20 years or so, I think, greatly contribute to the current proliferation of obesity. *

No question about that; one change that I haven’t seen mentioned (except early on by Osip and Merrywood), amid all the severe moralizing about laziness and lack of self-discipline and moms not wanting to cook, is the change in habitat/transit patterns. It’s not just a “scary evil strangers” issue, it’s a mobility issue. How many kids do you know who live within a couple of miles of the local park, or playing field, or school, or friends’ houses, and have a safe way to get back and forth between there and home? How many kids do you know in neighborhoods that don’t even have any sidewalks? As was noted above, we try to structure our lives for maximum convenience, but we don’t realize that often what’s best for our health or fitness or neighborhood morale or kids’ development is a little inconvenience. Then we try to counteract the ill effects with some artificial inconvenience—forcing ourselves to go to the gym, for example—but it usually doesn’t work as well.