The causes of obesity ARE obvious....

Today's post: Tuesday, 3-25-2008

Recently I saw a headline suggesting that the causes of the recent upsurge in obesity rates are not obvious.

Since they ARE obvious, I immediately read the article & decided to do today’s post.

The article actually was about the fact that, for policy makers, how to reverse the trend was not obvious or an easy question to answer. THAT there is actually some truth to.

But the causes themselves ARE obvious.

1. Until 60 or seventy years ago, very few people owned cars or relied on them for transport. So they walked or walked to & from public transit. Now increasingly in many countries people drive or ride in cars.

Then only some of the richer people failed to get the minimum amount of exercise to support good health. Everyone else tended to do so just from the walking they did. And, that alone made them lighter & less fat than people today.

2. Until 60 or seventy years ago people read or talked or played physical games or did something active while listening to the radio.

Now most people tend to use most of that same recreational time to watch TV, an activity almost always done sitting down. Sitting a lot tends to make you fat. And, watching TV induces you to sit so still it actually burns significantly less calories than lying in bed asleep !!

The evidence is in & has been for some time. The more hours a week a person watches TV, the fatter they tend to be. So when the average went from zero to twenty hours a week, the effects have been large & larger, fatter people.

3. Until 60 or seventy years ago people ate beef & poultry or consumed dairy products from animals that were all or at least largely pasture fed.

Now these animals are not only fed but over fed grain. So, the food people eat is higher in fat & saturated fat than it was then. Even worse in some ways for health is that the fat is higher in omega 6 oils & has virtually no omega 3 oils. These changes also have made these foods cheaper, so people tend to eat more. Both of these changes increase caloric intake & make people today fatter.

4. Until 20 to 40 years ago or less, sweet foods had real sugar. And, there were freshness problems with food that had been on the shelf too long.

Until very recently, this was changed to sweetening many if not most grocery store & commercially provided foods with high fructose corn syrup & substituting trans fats, or transfats, (partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) for more natural fats like butter.

We now know that this tends to increase people’s appetites & give them type II diabetes & heart disease.

These developments also have tended to increase the intake by most people of refined grain foods due to their greater shelf life & improved profitability to the food companies.

These developments have made people a good bit fatter & sicker than people in the past.

Unfortunately, these food additives are not only still legal, they are still in a large percentage of grocery store food & commercially provided foods. So, you have to be quite careful, always read labels, & even deny yourself foods you may have previously liked to avoid them.

And, since many people do NOT yet know these things or give up & take what’s most convenient, at least half the people still consume them & a lot of them.

This definitely makes them fatter.

Lastly, in the last 30 years & particularly in the last 15 years, the world wide deployment of computers & internet access has made most jobs increasingly sedentary.

Then, when that accelerator was added to the previous list of things that had already happened, the percentages of people who are overweight or downright fat (obese) shot way up.

To me the cures are also pretty clear.

Every community & school should teach people these facts & how to overcome them to keep from being unnecessarily fat & to help keep themselves in good health.

Since modern work & transport is here to stay as is at least some television use, this is particularly critical in helping most people to get regular exercise.

Workplaces that now make these junk foods routinely available in the work place need to reverse course & work to eliminate them from their work places. (This is a very large, common, & so far overlooked cause of the increase in obesity.)

Grain fed animals should be gradually phased out in favor of fewer more naturally raised ones & the cheaper grain fed ones should be taxed to pay for the added medical costs they create. (The good news is that use of grains for biofuel is already having this effect to some degree.)

Lastly, as soon as food additives including high fructose corn syrup & partially or completely hydrogenated vegetable oils appear & become known for fattening or health damaging effects, they should be made illegal. In the early stages, it might work to simply tax them to the point where they cost double or triple what the more health supporting alternatives cost. Then, the same profit motive that installed them in our food would automatically remove them.

This would be a great post to comment on as most of you reading this have experienced these things first hand.