I often wonder if there are other causes.
For example, in Europe, isn’t corn sryup equally cheap?
I wonder how American’s sleep hours and caffeine intake correlates to obesity, and how this compares with other countries. We are a 24-hour country that works hards, drinks coffee and cokes by the truckload, and stays up late watching TV.
Sounds a lot like one of Kilgore Trout’s “novels” from Breakfast of Champions. At least I think it was Breakfast of Champions. Correct me if wrong.
I blame our school system in part. Schools from elementary to university have enormous pop-dispensing machines on every floor next to huge candy machines. In one high school I remember used to be a good school, they have also installed gumball machines because they think chewing gum will lead to fewer outbreaks of violence by pacifying the “students.” Schools receive money from companies for putting in these machines.
Also people are unable to concentrate on much of anything, partly because of tv and radio being constantly interrupted. There are interruptions within the interruptions. This one channel puts this certain symbol on the screen after a few minutes of a movie and then there is a large number of commercials. Then they put the symbol on again so you think the movie is about to start up again, but instead they run an equal amount of endless commercials. The commercials and promos are being interrupted by the symbol that after commercials should be symbolizing that the movie is going to start. Anyways, there are other reasons for why people can’t concentrate, also partly caused by our school system. Children and older students expect to be entertained, which includes timeout to visit those machines and snacks and ice cream socials. But more important, entertainment causes boredom: the more entertained people are, the more bored they are, as proven by a recent statistic that Americans are the most bored people in the whole world. Entertainment is passive, and you get out of something ONLY WHAT YOU put into it. Sitting around waiting to be entertained, constantly reaching for good things to eat that are readily nearby your chair doesn’t lead to a lean population.
In direct response to the OP,
it’s because I’ve been sitting on my ass, doing nothing but stuffing my piehole.
I consider the addition of sugars into just about any processed food to be a big culprit. If you look beyond just the breads to just about any other processed foods in the average store, you will find some kind of sugar/brown sugar/honey/corn syrup in nearly everything. Why does bread need sugar in it? Better yet, why do processed juices need sugar in them? Fruit is already sweet, it doesn’t need added sugar.
I think there are LOTS of reasons.
The NYT article blames the farm subsidy program for encouraging the farmers to produce as much as possible and then sell it cheaply.
Then restaurants and prepared food manufacturers find their raw materials so cheap that adding portion size adds a negligeable amount to the cost.
Then voters are so niggardly about funding schools that school boards have to scramble for money so they put vending machines all over selling sodas and chips and whatnot.
When I was growing up in the 40s, there were relatively few cars in my lower middle class neighborhood. How few? Well, my family didn’t get a car till my senior year in HS, that was 1953.
For more evidence of that, we kids played on the street. During the summer, nearly all day and the rest of the day from the end of school till dark. Either touch football or a baseball family game called boxball. During the daytime, there were no cars in our way and a car came down the street forcing us to move maybe every 10-15 minutes. This was in 1945 and by 1950 there were too many parked cars.
There were no TVs, and we played out all the time. What I see with my grandchildren is that their lives are full of scheduled activities. This means getting into a car and being driven some place to get instruction and play and then getting back into the car and driven home. They are driven to school because walking is perceived as dangerous (and maybe with all the cars fighting to get into and out of the school yard, it is). They get maybe a half hour of real activity in an hour and a half and they get this once or twice a week. Compare with when I was growing up.
Even after we got a car, we used public transportation for many things. This involved walking several blocks to the trolley and bus. When I first moved to Montreal, it had pretty good public transport, but while the Metro is still good most busses run only every 20 to 30 minutes and often omit a scheduled bus when a driver doesn’t show up, so they are no longer reliable either.
Many suburbs don’t even have sidewalks nor any place to walk if they did. And where there are public busses, they often run once and hour if that often.
People used to go out at nights. Now they stay home and watch TV. The effect of TV (and, admit it, computers) on kids is even more profound. My grandchildren do not go out to play. I am not sure they would be permitted to. And they live in a cul de sac where it would be very safe.
Then there are all the TV dinners, prepared foods and the like. I suspect they are higher in calories than scratch foods, because fat, sugar (and salt, BTW) sell.
I think it is all that, and more. I haven’t even mentioned labor-saving devices (till now).
Hmmm…Caffeine typically works as an appetite supressent- it is a common ingrediant of diet pills, which used to employ caffeine’s meaner cousin, methamphetamine. There is a reason why a cup of coffee makes a decent breakfast-on-the-go but a cup of water doesn’t. Caffeine also holds a quite position of much affection among anoretics.
Now when you add caffeine to calorie-rich corn syrup water, and you’ve suddenly got a lot of people addicted to corn syrup water, thats a problem. But of all the ills you can blame caffeine on, obesity isn’t one of them.
I took a blow off class in college called…“Healthy Living”.
For the most part it was a snoozer…but the section on Weight Control was very enlightening. The textbook’s philsophy about weight control was very simple but for me it hit home.
It basically said to treat caloric intake and output like a debit/credit function. When you eat/drink something, you credit your body calories of what you just consumed…when you exercise (in any form) you debit away those calories.
If you want to lose weight, you have to have a negative caloric sum at the end of the day…if you are trying to put on weight, you should have a positive…to remain constant…break even.
So why are their so many more fat people than ever before? They eat more calories than they burn through the course of the day.
Reasons for that? There are million…but they all funnel to this one statement…eat less and/or burn more calories or you will become a fat ass.
I don’t buy the whole lack of exercise thing. It’s not like people in the 50s and 60s were going to gyms in droves. If anything, I would think gym membership is more prevalent now than it was back then.
I think it’s due to the fact that we have become a more “busy” society, and consequently, have become reliant on the quick and easy foods in order to save time.
Those same foods are full of fat and refined sugars.
Did anyone else notice that the sharp increase in obesity exactly coincides with the availability of diet sodas containing aspartame in the United States? There is some evidence that in certain individuals aspartame creates a craving for simple carbohydates. I know it’s true for me. I have almost no carb cravings but within 30 minutes of drinking a diet soda I can’t keep away from the cookies. The people who are most likely to react this way are people who’s bodies are extra sensitive to carbs and gain weight easier anyway.
All you carb cravers, try it, go a day without aspartame and see if you don’t feel less cravings.
Of course the portions now are bigger but why do we suddenly feel the need to eat so much?
OH MY GOD…you might be the biggest Southern Californian that has ever walked the face of the earth.
People didn’t need to go to a gym to “exercise” in the 50s and 60s…exercise wasn’t something that they “scheduled” it was something that they did all the time.
This one I haven’t heard yet.
The cause of obesity is the very damnation of obesity, since teh 50’s.
We become what we fight. When being fat is a heavy taboo, dieting becomes an obesession. Food gets an obsession. The whole concept takes up a larger part of individual and cultural consciousness, and, thusly, of our actions. And, with food so readily available, the circle of becoming obsessed by food, begins.
The way out is to make the whole food thing less important. Stop dieting. Stop letting food symbolize sin, seduction, comfort, activity, love, punishment, success, failure. Food is food. It’s quite harmless, actually.
A parallel can be seen in the way sexual vice, or ones sexual honor, in Western society is no longer an obsession, and has, in fact, stopped being the cultural problem nr 1 it was around 1900.
Obesity and dieting will, in another three decades or so, go the way of a girls “reputation” and a guys “honor”.
So what are you saying? That people exercised at home? What difference does it make? The point I was making is that more people exercise now than they did back then, as evidenced by increased sales in exercise equipment, videos, and books.
And the point HE was trying to make was that a more GENERALLY active lifestlye probably makes more difference than sitting on your sofa-shaped rear end all day and schlepping to the gym three times a week to spend 30 minutes on an elliptical trainer. We don’t have the same levels of LIFESTYLE activity that we used to. The levels of gym time are not relevent to his argument.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned this (maybe you did, but I missed your post).
In America, we are accused of being fattys big time by other nations. Especially in the last decade. Well let’s look at what we’ve accomplished in the last decade. Technology. We are like 1000% ahead of most nations in this area. We are in a digital age. Not an industrial age. Our bridges are built, our streets our built, our skyscrapers our built. We have food at every convenience. Anything you could ever want is right here. We have it all. We’ve built everything. There isn’t much else to build. The only thing left is to move into another age. Technology has taken over a huge amount of physical tasks. Everything from manufacturing cars to receptionists, have been replaced by robots and automated telephone systems.
3rd Worlds
Now look at a developing nation. Skinny bastards, aren’t they? They’ve yet to master the blue-collar world. Or at least are in the age of manual labor (until Sony moves in). Modes of transportation is made via bicycles, mopeds and horse carriages. They are still building highways, transportation, skyscrapers and such. There is still a TON of work to get done as a society in developing nations. Not to say they don’t currently have technology, but nothing like ours. We’ve already done all that stuff. All that’s left for us is to get laid off, collect unemployment and play video games while we stuff our fat asses with Twinkies and Old Milwaukee while we wait for the next big thing (my prediction is space travel at a higher level so we can build up human races on neighboring planets). But that’s for a later time. It’s coming.
the point
Which I think I’ve already made, is we shouldn’t blame soda, carbs, and I think even Corn Syrup was mentioned? No. Our fat asses are not to be blamed by any one thing. It’s the side- effect of something we as a society wanted, but didn’t know until after the fact. The advancement of ages will yield less physical work as we move on in the centuries to come. And as that happens, will we become bored stupid with nothing to do but eat and socialize. So until we propagate the human race to other galaxies, or find Halo 2, we will continue to be bored stupid and eat. It’s cause and effect.
*I don’t know why, but I feel proud of this post.
our, are. I know.:smack:
While I agree with you in principle, bread does need sugar of some sort in it (corn syrup will work, I suppose) in order to feed the yeast. It’s still mostly flour of some type. Whole wheat loaves are typically heavier than white bread loaves, and some of the boutique brands’ slices are 50% larger than the average slice. So, while they may be adding sugar to bread, it’s just as likely that they’ve just added more bread to the bread, so to speak.
There’s still no excuse for adding sugar to fruit juice.