As someone who is not naturally thin (although I am winning the battle at the moment), I would point out some changes in our general society:

• Increase in desk jobs/decrease in manual labour
  
• Enormous increase in "food wealth"
  

  (Many foods used to be expensive, which kept their consumption down in society as a whole)
- Central heating, increased car ownership and I'd particularly draw attention to "increased pace of life." Sure, many people could walk/bicycle to work instead of taking the bus, but turning a 15 min journey into a 25 min one (for example) is hard on busy people.

All this doesn't amount to the fast increase in obesity we are seeing, but it does amount to my generation finding it harder to stay healthy than my parents generation to some degree I think.

(did the internet rounds a couple of years ago)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I blame smoking bans. :-)

Okay, not really -- I have some serious thoughts on this, actually.  I don't know all the answers, but I think a huge thing that would help immediately is to get the junk food out of our schools.  I don't know if this has spead to Europe, but we have a ton of crap in the schools.

Cash-strapped schools have let in soda machines and other stuff.  I believe education is a good idea, but we already do have it in most schools.  Any answer that doesn't involve stopping corporate fast food sponsorship in schools is just hot air as far as I'm concerned.  

I'd also like to see some sort of reduction or regulation or something of advertising aimed at kids.

I think Page brings up another factor -- we're really busy and stressed over here.  It's becoming quite typical for people to work two jobs or 60 hour work weeks.  Who has time to cook?  Or shop?  There aren't many places where one can walk to the stores either.  

Plus, and this I think is a big factor, nutritious food is far more expensive than fast food now.  You can feed a family Taco Bell for dinner for less than it takes to buy the ingredients for a cooked meal.

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

I also meant to say how saddened I am when I see obese children: it is a growing problem here in the UK and it horrifies me. If poor eating habits are set up that way in childhood, how can they ever re-learn what healthy eating is like. I consider obesity in children to be a form of child abuse, as the children are not being given what they need to thrive as healthy young people who can reach their full potential.

I lived in Spain in 1987-88 and in 1990, and saw very few overwieght/obese people, and usually it was only older people who were overweight. I was there again just recently and was surprised to see American-style obesity, especially in younger people. At this point it's still a small percentage of people, but something has changed in the Spanish lifestyle and I fear the problem will get worse before it gets better. Same here in France--the average French person seems quite thin to me, but overweight and obese people are hardly unknown.

Education is critical, but not enough. Even if people know that eating is a particular way is bad for their health, that won't necessarily stop them from eating that way when they are stressed, in a hurry, don't have cheap, healthy food readily available, or have friends who won't or don't take the time and care to eat well. There needs to also be policy support: make sure schools serve healthy food to kids; make sure that the prices of fresh and healthy food are low enough for everyone to eat; keep a leash on fastfood chains; etc.

I don't think the US is going to fix this problem anytime soon, but I am more optimistic that Europe can make some decent progress if they start working on it now rather than later.

Fran, you ask if there isn't something systemic here, something proper to our society.

One very prosaic thing that is systemic is that our food production, transformation, and distribution have become totally industrialized. And it's not just a question of how food is produced, it's what is produced: the basic ingredients of high-calory/low-nutritive-value fast food, snacks, etc -- sugar, corn/maize, low-quality beef, pork, chicken, milk, all of these to be treated as raw materials for industrial transformation into cheap, eezy-to-eat crap. Market segmentation ensures that, as poemless and Izzy point out, the poorest are only offered this kind of food to the exclusion of any other, while categories who are better off have to make a financial effort to get decent food.

The other systemic thing, imo, is that obesity increases as equality decreases. As the distance between the top and the bottom of society grows, as the differences in income and potential for higher income become more marked, as social mobility tightens, so the sense of community founders and large numbers of people  find themselves alienated, solitary, deprived of a project they have sufficient self-esteem to believe in.   I'm not saying every obese person fits this description, but my feeling is the majority do.


When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

It would be nice to start with the sugar lobby as part of the problem.  Everything even most so called health foods has either sugar, fructose, corn starch etc as one of the top ingredients some with several of the sugar derivatives as ingredients.  It's almost impossible to get away from some form of sugar listed in everything you find in a grocery store.

Like anything there isn't one easy solution for the tremendous upswing in obesity here in the US but I do think that sugar that's in everything is a major problem. and with little chance of the sugar lobby being curbed in any way.

I've been joking to my sister for over ten years that all the poisons in the air, going into the ground so that even organic foods are tainted is changing the dna of people and causing some sort of fat gene..that either speeds up gaining weight or makes it almost impossible to lose weight. I'm wondering now if my joking isn't truer than I thought.  I've known people who exersize religiously, eat sparingly and are overweight..same way some people stay slim who don't exersize and eat whatever they want.

"People never do evil so throughly and happily as when they do it from moral conviction."-Blaise Pascal

Wish away obesity? Fat chance

The saddest part of the story is not just that we're drowning in a tidal wave of fat, but that we're watching ourselves go down. The Trust for America's Health releases its obesity study annually because the numbers now jump so quickly. This time, the obesity rate rose eight-tenths of a percentage point in a single year - hundreds of thousands of Americans gaining more weight even as they are bombarded with news accounts and doctors' warnings of the serious health risks fat incurs.

One thing is clear: burying one's head in the sand, or the cookie jar, won't solve this health crisis. While Americans cling to the belief that there's a pill to solve everything - or that a magic vaccine is floating just out of reach on the horizon - the obesity epidemic will have no such effortless solution.

But neither does the "fix" have to be as painful or Draconian as some dieters believe.

As the Enquirer editorial board pointed out in its five-part series, "Healthy Children, Healthy Future" - and as the Trust for America's Health study perfectly echoes - the real answer to obesity is a series of small but vital steps that individuals can undertake without guilt or much distress, and which communities can support.

Study recommendations, which we list in the "Recommendations" list with this editorial, bypass fancy science to get straight to the heart of this lifestyle ailment. Almost anything that makes us move more will help, as will even a modest switch to fresher, more natural foods.

One of the best things the new study has done is turn Americans' eyes to the generally unassuming state of Oregon, the only state that did not have an increase in obesity this year.

There are probably many reasons why Oregon has thinner people, but one of the most obvious is the design of its cities, which encourage an active and outdoor lifestyle. A Chicago Sun-Times story reported that 10 percent of Portland residents ride their bikes to work, for example, and the city of Portland pays its employees to do so.

The state has also had an increase in farms, growers and farmers' markets in recent years, another step that provides the healthiest foods directly to consumers and often builds a taste and demand for fresh, seasonal choices.

It runs in my family , I always had to fight kilos and as I am getting older it's becoming harder and more important...
But my husband has not inherited this problem and we were surprised to see how suddenly and in a few years we all including my husband has gained too much weight when we immigrated to Australia. I am definitely sure that there are many components in this problem and it's definitely "systemic problem of our society" (meaning developed rich countries).
I visited Serbia this winter and I can tell you they do not have this problem at all. As someone mentioned it's only older people that are fat there and all the young girls are thin as super models and boys are more athletic then thin , mostly  (they do all kind of sports)...
Not to mention children who are totally normal...But then again children are allowed to play without supervision all around area they live in because there are not that many lunatics and pedophiles in Serbia (thanks God).
Not that there are not fast-food everywhere and not that people do not eat it...but not every day and every meal, that's for sure. Also people are not "offended" if they walk to bus and even all the way to work. Here in Australia we have to go by car to the area where we can walk the dog and of course while we had grocery stores on every corner in Belgrade (not any more) and we normally walked there to buy what we need on a daily bases here we have to drive to big supermarkets and we buy stuff for two weeks or so. We buy too much...we eat too much.
Here in Australia it's almost like in USA...and it's horrific.
On the other hand Christ told us it's better for us to share with a poor and we (people generally)  do not do that ...Everything has some kind of "revenge" in it self to self correct what we people mix-up...Being rich is going to kill us...ha-ha...and literally...but pharmaceutical industry is here to fix everything I suppose...and make a lot of money in the process...
I don't think that anything could be done except on individual bases...It took me 50 years to start taking care of what I eat...and it's probably too late...

My son asked me the other day what kind of people are living in heartland America. Here is my response:

A male American there is fat like a bull and has brown fuzz all around his face and body except his head, with what looks like belly is protruding between his T-shirt and inversely-triangular jeans. He drives a dirty van of some kind never washed. His mate is an equally fat female with untrimmed hair. They have children and love to go into McDonalds and eat gigantic hamburgers with huge coke. Whenever one of the kids misbehaves, the wife gets mad like hell and whacks at the poor fellow, threatening never to do it again.  

Well, what you got here in Japan is a miserable male figure with an insolent grimace, who doesn't sleep with his wife who spends all her savings on Louis Vuitton. They have a Toyota which the male loves to wash and then leaves at an open parking space. They go into family restaurants with kids who run around, fight each other and scream, while parents pretend not seeing any of the mess as long as they don't demand another ice cream.

I will become a patissier, God willing.

It's about how much you move.

Seriously. We (and the main host of the doctors) talk 90 % of the time about what we eat and about how much we eat of it.

Now, without wanting to butt heads by portraying stereotypes, but a small research group calculated the amount of calories an industrious housewife from the 1950's would use based on an amount of daily chores (vacuuming, washing, doing dishes, doing shopping). The figure was approximately 1500 calories for one day work.

Then, they calculated how much calories a modern-day housewife would use for the identical set of chores, but using modern means (dishwasher, car to get to the shop, extra handy window cleaner, etc.). This figure was approximately 500 calories.

I can't remember the exact numbers, they also could've been 4500 to 1500. The gist, however, is: nowadays even in the household we use a third of what it used to be. What replaced it? Perhaps some more often bringing the kids to their weekly activities (by car), but otherwise not very much.

Dietist and the whole she-bang of doctors who preach about managing your food hardly ever stress the point that EXERCISE is inherently connected to battling obesity.

Mississippi, famous for its calorific mud pie, ranked the highest, followed by Alabama and West Virginia.

Neither here nor there, the name "Mississippi mud pie" gets its namesake from the mud in the Mississippi River, not the State...  

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

I found this article very interesting (warning!  PDF!)

It asserts a strong correlation between urban form and obesity.  Other studies have asserted strong correlations between class and obesity (much of this having to do with food pricing and availability in poor urban areas) in the US.  It is typical, I suppose, of US political/social thinking that approaches to the problem range from the technocratic/reductionist (there is a Fat Gene and we need genetic therapies or surgical interventions to combat it), to moralistic (fat people are deficient in character or will power and need behaviour modification).  Studies of structural contributions to obesity, like land use patterns and urban form or food availability, pricing, and "redlined" neighbourhoods, are largely overlooked.

I recollect a study at least a decade ago which found that Europeans on average were healthier than Americans despite (a) eating all kinds of "sinful" foods and (b) weighing approximately the same, simply because the Europeans studied routinely walked reasonable distances for short daily errands, instead of driving everywhere.  Regular moderate exercise made an enormous difference in overall health even for people the American medical establishment would dismiss as "obese" or at least "overweight."

The cluster of health issues around "obesity" seems to me far more complex than simple measures of body weight or BMI.  Fat people who get a lot of exercise and a nutritious diet can be aggressively healthy;  fat people who get no exercise or derive their fatness from poor nutrition can suffer all kinds of morbidity.  And so on.  Media coverage tends to focus obsessively (and pejoratively) on the fatness of the individuals rather than their overall health picture, inequality and class correlations, and other structural issues threatening to the neoliberal dogma...

And yes, I'm back.  Long story.  More later.


The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

It was enough to hear of the heroic efforts of the school districts when they removed the soda dispensers from the schools.  I remember when we couldn't even go to school with a soda in our hands.  If we broke one out of our backpack or lunch sack, we could get detention for a day or two.  You just couldn't do it.  However, in the 20 years since I left high school, the school districts were using these things as a way to gain a little revenue.

How sad is that?  Feed the kids empty-calorie habit with sugary drinks because the schools can't get all the funding they need?  Tells you a lot about the US.

Thank you Fran - fascinating diary. We definitely have this obesity problem here in Fargo, ND.

I've taken to calling it "sumo-wrestler-itis" when I discuss the issue, so as not to offend others.  

I do agree that all factors mentioned above my post are relevant. However, I do believe aspartame should be considered for discussion here also.

Aspartame is the sugar substitute in diet soda (and many other process foods here in the US.) These diet sodas are very popular with our local "sumo-wrestlers." To my thinking, the diet sodas appear to have a reverse effect as to weight loss.  

In doing amateur research using google, "aspartame" or "aspartame seizures MS" I found the following;

"...Aspartame has been demonstrated to inhibit the carbohydrate induced synthesis of the neurotransmitter serotonin (Wurtman affidavit ). Serotonin blunts the sensation of craving carbohydrates and thus is part  of the body's feedback system that helps limit consumption to appropriate  levels.  Its inhibition by aspartame could lead to the anomalous result of  a diet product causing increased consumption of carbohydrates..."

Obesity Link

Seizure Link

MS Link

A viable strategy for fighting fascism