obesity in america

[DirtyD86]

"It's little wonder that we have an obesity epidemic. Food is everywhere - beaming from roadsides, advertised on television, screaming in bright colors from grocery store shelves, glowing in vending machines down the hall from your cubicle.

That, coupled with a life of sitting - in cars, at desks, on couches - has set us on the road to an obesity epidemic.

Obesity doesn't just make people feel uncomfortable about their appearance. It increases the risk of chronic and deadly conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Obesity may soon overtake tobacco as the number one factor in people's deaths. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts obesity will soon be the number one killer. In 2000, tobacco was linked to 435,000 deaths, or 18 percent, and obesity was close behind at 400,000, or 17 percent.

Nearly two out of three adult Americans, 60 percent, are overweight or obese.

"Basically, the numbers are pretty bad and getting worse," says Barbara J. Moore, Ph.D., president and CEO of Shape Up America, a nonprofit to encourage people to be more active and promote healthy weight.

"I am worried that by the year 2020, half of all children will be overweight. What this means is that people are going to be getting sick as children. These children will remain obese into adulthood. Heart attacks and diabetes will happen when they are 30 instead of when they are 60."

Wired for action

"We have a mismatch between our genes and environment. Our genetic profile is to eat a lot and be very physically active," says James Hill, Ph.D., director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center in Denver. He is a co-founder of America on the Move and author of The Step Diet. America on the Move is a nonprofit organization dedicated to getting people to exercise.

"We are in an environment that encourages us to be inactive. While technology is good, it has made us more sedentary. We have even built our cars to hold our food," he says.

Losing weight and keeping it off is difficult even if you reduce calories. Of the 3,000 people in the National Weight Control Registry - who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for more than a year, only 9 percent lost weight without exercising, Hill notes.
"


this is a topic i havent seen on TMW yet. im just curious what the general attitude is towards obesity here. it seems like being overweight is becoming more and more accepted in america. this is a bit of a mind***k, but ive been seeing and hearing people that encourage parents to instill confidence and self esteem in their fat children instead of encouraging them to become active and eat healthy. not that i think a parent should rag on their son or daughter for being fat, but trying to make them feel good about it is completely insane.

[VermilionX]

[DirtyD86]

jesus......... just, jesus.


knowing that somewhere out there, there is a parent with a kid as morbidly fat and disgusting as that, and yet they still decide to take them to mcdonalds.

im praying for nuclear holocaust

[VermilionX]

maybe the parents are big fans of michelin.

[TeamONEinc]

I personally think its sad to see the "acceptance" of obesity today. You are right when you brought up the idea that we are leaning towards teaching kids how to accept their obesity rather than fight it.

I think for some people its just a matter of what they want...you can't really do much to push them to address the issue.

My sister has always had an overweight problem and after the birth of her son, its gotten worse. She just has no urge to excersise or eat right or anything. Its not disgusting or anything, but I hope it doesn't catch up with her and cause serious health problems.

I work at a gambling and the only food we can eat consists primarily of fried food. I have been forced to add an extensive workout supplement to my original plan to accomodate for the crap I eat here.

So yeah...back to your question..my attitude about obesity is that ITS A PROBLEM.

[TechTMW]

Jean Baudrillard wrote this this in 1983

I would like to talk about an anomaly, that fascinating obesity such as you find all over the U.S., that kind of monstrous conformity to empty space, of deformity by excess of conformity that translates the hyperdimension of a sociality at once saturated and empty, where the scene of the social as well as that of the body are left behind.

This strange obesity is no longer that of a protective layer of fat nor the neurotic one of depression. It is neither the compensatory obesity of the underdeveloped, nor the alimentary one of the overnourished. Paradoxically, it is a mode of diappearance for the body. The secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has disappeared. The secret form of the mirror, by thw which the body watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unrestrained redundancy of a living organism. No more limits, no more transcendence: it is as the body were no longer opposed to the world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance.

These people are fascinating for their total oblivion of seduction. Furthermore, they no longer worry about it; thye have no complexes about how they live, insouciant, as if there was not even an ego ideal left for them. They are not ridiculou and they know it. They claim a sort of truth, and in fact they do display something of the system, of its empty inflation. They are its nihilist expression ... hypertrophied cellular tissue, proliferating in all directions. A fetal obesity, primal and placental: as if they were pregnant with their own bodies but could not be delivered of them. The body grows and grows without being able to deliver itself.

... It is not the obesity of a few individuals that is at stake, but that of a whole system, the obscenity of a whole culture. It is when a body loses its rule and its stage or scene that it reaches this obscene form of obesity. It is when the social body loses its law, its scene and its stakes that it also reaches the pure and obscene form we know it to be, its visible, all too visible, form, the ostentation, its investment and overinvestment of all spaces by the social - the spectral and transparent character of the whole remaining unchanged.

This obesity too is spectral - in no way heavy, it floats in the good conscience of sociality: it incarnates the formless form, the amorphous morphology of the social body: the ideal individual paradigm of reconciliation, of the closed and self-managed niche. These are no longer bodies, strictly speaking, but specimens of a certain cencerous inorganicity that now lie in wait for us everywhere.

[roscowgo]

Phat!

[Nibblet99]

Am I the only one who feels that schools should make the effort into teaching many forms of fitness, from athletics and normal sports, to other things like self defense classes and random, relaxed exercise (even as far as chucking a frisbee around). With the teachers able to give advice and direction to clubs related to ones you really enjoy.

Sure concentrating on one like football will get your schools team a better chance of beating other schools, but thats hardly important when a schools job is to set you up for life.

School should not be your sole exercise as a kid, it should be there to inspire you and help find an activity you love.

Just getting out in the sunshine for a lazy activity would be a good start for most kids, instead of the 10 metres from bed to arcade console.

[jonnythan]

Am I the only one who feels that schools should make the effort into teaching many forms of fitness, from athletics and normal sports, to other things like self defense classes and random, relaxed exercise (even as far as chucking a frisbee around). With the teachers able to give advice and direction to clubs related to ones you really enjoy.

Sure concentrating on one like football will get your schools team a better chance of beating other schools, but thats hardly important when a schools job is to set you up for life.

School should not be your sole exercise as a kid, it should be there to inspire you and help find an activity you love.

Just getting out in the sunshine for a lazy activity would be a good start for most kids, instead of the 10 metres from bed to arcade console.

I don't know how it is in the UK, but "health" classes in the US are a total joke.

It's unfortunate, because if schools made an effort they could really change things. It's not uncommon for the school lunch to be pizza or burgers and fries... with candy and soda vending machines everywhere. Actually teaching kids about eating healthy and having them do real exercises as part of a healthy lifestyle would do wonders.

[CNF2002]

Schools are no longer a place where kids can be active. Schools are being transformed into safety institutions where kids are expected to sit quietly, behave, don't move, listen to lectures, and do assignments. Playgrounds are quickly being abolished as fears of injury lawsuits rise. Recess altogether is already banned in many schools.

Mom and Dad are both forced to work full time to pay for the 'necessities' like xbox, brand new cars for 16 year olds, and fast food. Then they have to come home and take care of the home. Divorce rates are up, leading to single parent households, leaving children alone. Parents are exhausted, and weekend trips to the lake or the park are a thing of the past. Kids get up, go to school, sit all day, eat unhealthy food (or sometimes fast food) go home and have McDonalds for dinner, and sit around playing video games until they go to sleep and it starts again the next day.

There's no question why these kids are fat.

Yes, alot of 'experts' want to avoid telling kids that they are obese. Something about them not being ready to handle labels...more safety-protection garbage, the same kind of thinking thats making them fat in the first place.