The latest news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on America’s obesity epidemic is not good.
After crunching the numbers in 2009, more states got fatter.
Specifically, the number of states with an obesity rate of 30 percent or more has tripled to nine states in two years, according to the CDC report “Vital Signs: State-Specific Obesity Prevalence Among Adults — United States, 2009.”
To put the report in startling perspective, no state had a 30 percent obesity rate 10 years ago.
I am not obese, but stuff like this is disheartening:
“There are regional differences in soda consumption, which I bet also apply to sugar-sweetened beverages, and the South has quite high rates — for example, sweet tea.”
I do confess addiction to sweet tea. BUT, this sort of thing is easily modifiable–all the tea I drink or brew is unsweet, then sweetened with Splenda or Sun Crystals packets(1-2, the equivalent, max, of 4 t. sugar). I think it tastes better than when sweetened with sugar, and without the empty carbs.
And, those who like carbonated beverages have the option of “diet” sodas, which don’t even taste too much different from the originals.
Sometimes, even small modifications like this can have large, beneficial effects; and, it doesn’t have to be all McDonald’s–eating healthy can also be fulfilling and fun(and tasty!!!) 🙂
I’m with you Bottom Feeder. I prefer my tea sweet, but sweeten it with Splenda. I drink enough soft drink (universally referred to in my part of the world as “Coke”) to float a battleship, but it’s Diet Rite. On the other hand, I like nothing better than fried country ham, barbecue, bacon, any kind of potato, cheese, grits, etc., that can put one on the road to obesity. The main problem with folks today is, in my humble opinion, less about what they eat than how sedentary they are. As a boy and young man I ate huge quantities of my mother’s cooking which would now be called comfort food. It was washed down with gallons of iced tea sweetened with scoops of suger. About what one would expect in a southern farming family and all of it would give a dietician the vapors today. Still, at 6’2″ I weighed in at around 167 lbs. well into my 30s. But ours was an active life style. No video games, no computer, no satellite or cable TV. Lots of manual labor on the farm and hunting, horseback riding, canoeing, chasing girls, etc. for fun. It was only in my more sedentary post-Army life that the battle of the bulge became a perpetual struggle, even with changes in diet.
There was an extraordinary cover article in THE ATLANTIC a couple months ago called Beating Obesity. It touched on a number of things, including all the different public health strategies being considered.
But even more important it was written almost in the form of a personal essay and it had a touching awareness of the problem of the bound will (see Romans 7) and cruel judgment. Some excerpts from the article:
Putting individual solutions and free will up against the increase in portion sizes, massive technological and societal changes, food-company taste-engineering, and the ubiquity of effective television advertisements is like asking Ecuador to conquer China….
This jumble of circumstances and effects is what Thomas Frieden means when he says that just being an American can naturally lead you to be obese: obesity is an almost inevitable consequence of living with our cultural norms, our history of agricultural production and subsidies, our long-standing socioeconomic inequalities, and the impact of technology on our behavior and bodies. Against this formidable dynamic, America has erected two lines of defense: name-calling, and hectoring about diet and exercise.
For the average fat person, life can be an endless chain of humiliating experiences. On a flight to Denver not too long ago, I watched as a very large woman struggled to settle into her seat. Next to her, a much skinnier man curled his lip in disgust. The woman softly asked a passing flight attendant for a seat-belt extender. The flight attendant didn’t hear her over the roar of the engines, so the woman had to ask again, and this time, everyone looked at her. Grocery shopping, eating at restaurants, going to the movies, having drinks at a crowded bar—for the fat person, these are situations to be negotiated and survived, not enjoyed. The workplace is no different: a television executive once remarked to me that my career as a political analyst would “really take off if [I] would just lose a few pounds.” When I was fat, I avoided meeting people’s eyes. I didn’t want to subject them to my ugliness.