What do you think of the obesity epidemic in the U.S.?

amelia_atlantic

I'm actually writing a research paper on the "sociology of food" for my class. The childhood obesity rates are ridiculous and public schools have a lot to do with it. In what world does cutting funding for LUNCHES and athletic (or even gym class equipment) seem like the logical place to start handling a budget crisis?!
We base student's intelligence and over all competancy as an education system based on standardized tests. If we're feeding our kids starches and fried food washed down with soda; how can they really perform on these tests or study for them without the inevitable sugar crash?

Something very interesting I've found in my research is a book called "Fat is a Feminist Issue" by Susan Orbach (I think). She states that "owning your body image" even at an obese weight and shunning society's perception of what "feminine" is. Now, I have feminist tendencies though I've never been an extremist. I think this idea is good in theory. No, we shouldn't carry self hate around but "owning" an overweight body image doesn't change the health risks of carrying around that weight. What we should be "owning" is our health not just our image.

I could go on for days...

Blacklance36

Two of my overweight neighbors have a three year old. They were bragging to me about how "big" he is for his age. It starts right there with some people. The kid was not tall, he was overweight. Nothing to brag about as far as Im concerned.

I was recently in Vegas (I live in Alberta) and was shocked at the difference in weight of the population between where I live and what I saw in Vegas.
I could not believe the serving sizes at restaurants either. My buddy and I started sharing meals after the first couple as we were leaving food behind. One restaurant had three different kinds of gravy....

Sweet_Potato

I live in a thriving urban neighborhood and actually experience the opposite. I do a double-take when I see an obese person here because it's such a rare sight! My neighborhood is very walkable, with good bike paths and an excellent bikshare system, and a lot of outdoor spaces for people to exercise in and for children to play in. The neighborhood is full of gyms and yoga studios and other fitness studios, and when the weather gets nice there will be a lot of free outdoor exercise classes. We also have a lot of farmer's markets and good grocery stores.

My place of employment is another story. My coworkers all live out in the suburbs and most of them are overweight. They have to drive to get anywhere and have extremely long commutes, and I'm guessing they don't eat as well.

The problem is that most of the U.S. is like where they live and not where I live. But the good news is that more and more people want to live in cities or are putting pressure on their communities to become more walkable and bikable with better food options.

k8blujay2

To me, it just shows me how lazy and full of excuses we all are (I'm including myself here). We opt for the easy way out instead of what is better...

SoDamnHungry

I had a similar experience to yours. I was sitting at a table in a restaurant one day and looked around...and realized that truly, it looked like 2/3 of the people were actually overweight. I think it's terrifying. And it makes me angry that people are either so uneducated, so lazy, or have so little self control that they get like that, accept it as normal, and then pass it on to their kids who often never even have a chance when it comes to being healthy and physically fit.

Interestingly, I'm spending some time in the city and have noticed how much trimmer people are there. I'm in one of the "hip" neighborhoods, where people walk a lot and and are young and pretty concerned with how they look. Not that overweight people don't, of course, but these people are trendy and in pretty good shape.

Bane81

It's a real sad state in our society. Even though I'm Canadian, the same kind of issues have been plaguing us as well. The fast food industry is a huge reason why there is such an epidemic. It's much faster and cheaper to buy a happy meal for your kids, which is what a lot of parents will do. Meal planning and preparation takes more time then what the average person is willing to do in this day in age. If there's an easy way out, a lot of folks will naturally go that route.

I fell right into this trap, the high school cafeteria sold a lot of junk, vending machines full of salty, sugary snacks. I used to play football as a defensive line back so I figured the bigger I was, the harder they would fall. Unfortunately it all eventually caught up with me because as we age our metabolism slows way down.

I'm not sure if we can ever solve this epidemic, but we can salvage some of it. Food industry corporations are way too powerful, lobbying and paying off politicians to dump tons of chemicals into the food we eat and water we drink. Not to mention all the GMO's scientists have started to mess with, our bodies are getting bombarded all the time from this crap.

smantha32

The higher divorce rate- Single parents have to work full-time in order to provide for their kids, pay their bills, and keep a roof over their head. Somebody who works 40+ hours per week doesn't want to come home and cook a healthy meal, it's too time consuming and exhausting after a long work day- or at least that's the excuse I've heard from others. Ordering pizza or going through the McDonalds drive-thru is far more convenient. This also applies to families who are not divorced. Since the economy has gone down hill, there aren't many stay at home parents anymore. So both parents work full-time, go home and the house needs to be cleaned, the kids need to be cared for, yadayadayada and mom and dad are too tired to cook after all of that.

I was raised by a single mom.. however in the 70's she could work part time and still have enough money to raise us. She still cooked.
People can't do that anymore.

sunman00

An outsiders view if I may;

I travel to the US a lot, & there are some big differences in what you might call 'average size'

the two worst offenders; Hawaii & Florida, lots of huge people in both states; it's 'all you can eat' all over the place, and where you're served the portions are what one might call 'massive'.

the best? NYC & most of California; healthy lifestyles stand out here, lots of joggers, walkers, healthy eating shops, salads, fruit juice bars etc

something else I've noticed, actually in Dallas & Boise, Idaho; people drive everywhere, there's little or no what we call pavements, I'm not saying the prevalence is obesity but folk don't have ankles or calf muscles, the legs are undefined ?

when we order in the protions that come will easily do dinner & lunch the next day; pizza sizes are simply huge, it's fries with everything,

the worst thing we saw was in Disney, Florida, a family of 4, Mum & Dad were in those motorised wheelchairs, barely able to walk & their kids were well on their way to a similar fate; they'd paused for a mid morning snack from their rucksacks, all 4 of them ate a whole tube of pringles and drank a litre of soda, i dread to think what was for lunch.

There's a big deal about healthy eating here in the UK at the moment; Jamie Oliver has been getting involved in school lunch menus, 'cookery' TV is big with the accent on a healthy balance of fruit & veg thrown in BUT it's noticable that you see more obses people of all ages, it may be a whole Western world problem?

darrenhough1976

Portion size is easily 2-3 times what it was when I was a kid in the early 80's. It's not just fast food places either. Check out the calorie count on the AVERAGE meal at a restaurant like Maggiano's or Macaroni Grill....easily 1000 calories, probably 1500-1800 without even including drinks. An entire day's worth of eating in one meal. And that's not even including desserts and giant bottomless sodas and sweet teas. Order fries at a chain sit down restaurant and you're going to get what three people would've eaten in 1979. I ordered the salmon at Pappdeaux once and was presented with a plate the size of a snow shovel that held at least a 12-14 oz piece of salmon, sitting on a bed of probably 1500 calories worth of french fries. And that was one of the more reasonable things they had on the menu.

Fries used to be in a tiny paper bag....now they come in a cup that could hold 32 oz of liquid. When my grandfather was a kid, sodas were in 6 oz. bottles. 8 oz. bottles came along when my dad was a kid, 12 oz. cans were normal when I was a kid, and now you're hard pressed to find anything less than a giant 20 oz serving of soda sold as a single serving.

Coffee is another hilarious one. For so many people a normal coffee is a 600 calorie 40 oz. frappachino with whipped cream and chocolate chips. That's not a coffee, that's a milkshake with coffee in it.

it's been my experience that people usually have no clue as to how many calories they are cramming into their bodies every day. They ingest 3000+ calories a day, walk on the treadmill once or twice a week for 15 minutes while reading a magazine, and say that diets "don't work".

I

Sweet_Potato

I notice this stuff too all the time. I play a game as I am driving and count how many overweight ppl I see vs how many healthy people. Nearly everyone you see is overweight.

However, when you go to places like San Diego CA it is the opposite. Nearly everyone IS in shape. My bf and I played a game to see if we could find an overweight person. It took us about an hour and we only saw ONE. Everyone was walking, biking, skateboarding. I guess where it is warmer, there is more of an opportunity to "get out and move". In colder states we would freeze many days in the winters if we tried to walk. The ice, snow and freezing rain are also a factor. Lack of sun is yet another factor as the sun (vit D) can speed metabolism.

That is my city. I moved here from Houston where it is either too cold or prohibitively hot and muggy. Eating is just the only thing people do there. There are more restaurants than people in that city, it seems.

I know a women who moved from here to Houston for work for a few years. She put on 25lbs there and took it off again when she returned. It's crazy.

I don't think weather is necessarily a factor. The population here in Washington DC is very fit, but the weather is crappy most of the year: unpleasantly cold in the winter (it's snowing right now, in fact) and insanely hot and humid in the summer. Yet people still get out and move around. I actually thought San Diego's population was a bit on the heavy side, for a city. You have the beautiful weather but you also have to get in a car and drive to most places which encourages inactivity.

Phrakman

Quite simply the fact that the calorie/dollar ratio is so skewed.

damienmyers69

I'm in the UK, and things not much better here.

I do think about the problem, but not all us people can be blamed.

For instance:

As a diabetic, it is far more important to me to watch my sugar intake than calories or fat, though cholesterol important too.

Because of this, I have to look at foods in a uch different way to someone who just diets.

over 90% of low fat foods have so much sugar in them, I dare not touch them.

Baked beans, dietician said thats a must, high in fibre, low in fat, great for diets.

Shakes head, no way, over 12g of sugar per portion, that for me on its own would take 2 metformin and 30 units of fast acting insulin 6 hour to stabilise my sugar levels.

so add on the sugar in veg, and other carbs, all low fat things yet dangerous for a diabetic.

Salt we all know too much raises blood pressure, yet best sodium we have in uk is one third salt sodium, can't buy potassium based salts to help counter it here.

coffee creamers/milk whiteners, in the USA can get sugar free stuff, not here, can get low fat but full sugar.

Over here in the u, we call it carbs that sugar, think in the USA it called net carbs, you check it out, each product you eat, or drink, work out how many grams of net carbs your having a day and if it say 40g, then ya having 40 teaspoons of sugar that day.

And as we all know, sugar turns directly into fat via glucose, unless ya a serious keep fit fanatic to burn it all up.

And being honest, all this I have learnt since I was forced to take charge of my life to stop myself from going blind with diabetic damage behind my eyes, before that I never truly understood just what I was eating, and how bad the supposedly good foods were for me.

So the governments have a lot to do with how we eat, plus the food industry itself, until they make the effort makes it so much harder for the rest of us.

Maybe we as a community should start up a petition to get some changes made.

servilia

Blaming vaccines? Wow. Just wow. Doesn't account for lower rates in Europe.
In my personal opinion making your kid fat and unhealthy is paramount to child abuse. So sad.

savithny

Obesity numbers in many western countries seem to have peaked and are dropping, actually.

I think the numbers that come out of studies about how much exercise we really get, vs. how much we tell ourselves we get, are very, very telling.

I think the numbers on how much we eat out, and what we eat when we do eat out, are also very telling.

We don't walk anywhere anymore. We spend far more time sitting passively in front of screens than we did 20 or even 10 years ago. Older neighborhoods with sidewalks are unfashionable; we'ved moved to housing tracts with no sidewalks and no place for our kids to ride bikes or play outside, and no safe way for them to walk to school. But they couldn't walk anyway, since "school choice" means kids don't go to the neighborhood school, either. And when they get to school, gym and recess have been cancelled by schools in favor of more drilling to prepare for developmentally inappropriate standardized tests. When they get home, kids don't want to play outside if its at all too hot, because all our homes are air conditioned (which actually also changes our metabolisms, according to a friend who is a physiology professor). No one goes out and plays pick-up games with neighbors and friends; if you're not in an organized high-pressure kids sports league, you're probably in front of an x-box instead, because unless there are trophies for participating, outdoors is too hot or too cold, full of bugs, and not as visually stimulating as inside is.

We eat out multiple times a week, yet we treat eating out as if it is a special occasion every time, ordering foods that were truly special occasion foods to our parents and grandparents. And to make us want to eat out more, the food industry creates versions of our favorite foods that have TWICE as many calories as the version you'd prepare at home, yet somehow are no more filling. We've convinced ourselves that meals require flavored beverages, that we don't like water -- but we take the water glasses our parents used and fill them with the flavored beverages that used to be served in special small glassware. Even kids*sippy cups* have been supersized: twelve years ago, the standard cups I bought held 7 ounces, just like my grandmother's juice glasses; last week when I browsed the baby store, the vast majority were 10 ounces, 12 ounces - holding more juice for a toddler than my grandparents had as their daily allotment for adults.

terem00

I was actually pretty disgusted when I went into a Walmart last year in Northern Michigan.
There was a section at the door for scooters. There was probably 40 of them. Every person I saw in one was fat!
They were so fat they couldn't walk thru the store. Nearly all of them had their front basket full of garbage crap food. Most of them had some sort of extra large soft drink in the cup holder with a bag of chips opened and they were stuffing their faces.
I totally blame these giant corporations that cater to this type of lifestyle. If those scooters were taken away, Walmart would have no business.
Instead they should be promoting a healthy active lifestyle. Their stores are huge, certainly someone who is obese could burn quite a few calories with just one trip around the store.

damienmyers69

Portion size is easily 2-3 times what it was when I was a kid in the early 80's. It's not just fast food places either. Check out the calorie count on the AVERAGE meal at a restaurant like Maggiano's or Macaroni Grill....easily 1000 calories, probably 1500-1800 without even including drinks. An entire day's worth of eating in one meal. And that's not even including desserts and giant bottomless sodas and sweet teas. Order fries at a chain sit down restaurant and you're going to get what three people would've eaten in 1979. I ordered the salmon at Pappdeaux once and was presented with a plate the size of a snow shovel that held at least a 12-14 oz piece of salmon, sitting on a bed of probably 1500 calories worth of french fries. And that was one of the more reasonable things they had on the menu.

Fries used to be in a tiny paper bag....now they come in a cup that could hold 32 oz of liquid. When my grandfather was a kid, sodas were in 6 oz. bottles. 8 oz. bottles came along when my dad was a kid, 12 oz. cans were normal when I was a kid, and now you're hard pressed to find anything less than a giant 20 oz serving of soda sold as a single serving.

Coffee is another hilarious one. For so many people a normal coffee is a 600 calorie 40 oz. frappachino with whipped cream and chocolate chips. That's not a coffee, that's a milkshake with coffee in it.

it's been my experience that people usually have no clue as to how many calories they are cramming into their bodies every day. They ingest 3000+ calories a day, walk on the treadmill once or twice a week for 15 minutes while reading a magazine, and say that diets "don't work".

I

I so agree with most of that,
most people have no idea and eating out is a norm in most places now.

not like a barcode is printed on a receipt so it can be scanned for dietary info, though would be cool if we could lol..

And yeah sizes well bigger now, even i remember going McD's and their large milkshake was like a tiny one now, and the friens were like a mouth ful.

Though we tend not to have the super sized drinks and meals like you do in the USA, yet, though some local eataries do have a special kind of supersize, where ya get an hour to eat it all, if you do you get it free if not it like £40 to £50 for the meal.

nicola1141

Here's an example of how in denial we are of this epidemic. Rather than insult people with the realization of how obese they are, clothing sizes have shifted with our body sizes over time. A woman's size 8 in 1950 would wear a size 00 today. Most people can't actually even fit into vintage clothing. There is a similar trend with clothes sized S,M,L. The simple fact is that people don't like buying clothing that tells them how fat they are, so retailers select brands that are sized larger than others and over time this has increased the size of S,M, and L. Retailers that make their own brands are really aware of this and market to their clientele, so S, M, L run larger at Walmart than say the GAP.

So true. I was very thin in high school (20 years ago), there would have been very little space for losing weight. I recently found my prom dress and it was a size 10. It absolutely would be a size 2 (MAX 4) these days.

naschulze

I don't really know what to feel about obese people. It saddens, disgusts and angers me all at the same time. There are resources to get healthy and lose weight on almost any budget or lifestyle and people just don't do it. They are either fine with the way they are, to uninformed to seek a way out or too lazy to try. Possibly a combination of all three. It has a lot to do with how accessible unheatlhy foods are, and how flavorful they are in comparison to other foods because of all the added sugars, sodium and fat. That's how it was for me and how it is for other people in my family.

My weight gain started when I got a desk job. I went from exercising regularly to sitting at a desk, being tired/stressed at the end of the day, just to go home and sit on the couch. I ate out because it was easier than cooking and I chose bad foods because I could and they tasted better. Once I got to 195, I realized this had to stop. I'm was only 23 and I realized I was too young to be looking at a 200 on the scale. I wanted to be fit and to enjoy my life while I could. I broke out of my slump, researched ways to do it best, and 1 1/2 years of trial and error later, I finally found a sustainable diet and exercise plan that works best for me. I didn't give up and I didn't just accept my weight as part of me.

carolose46

I moved to Florida from Colorado last fall. When we first got here, we stayed with my in laws while we looked for a house. The school that my daughter went to for the first month was in the free breakfast/lunch program, and like 75% of the kids at the school were on the plan. The options they had were HORRIBLE. Pop tarts, sugary cereals, bagels loaded with flavored cream cheese.... and it wasn't one thing they could pick, but 3!!! The kids would line up every morning and get all this food and nobody would be there to tell them that it was enough. Sadly, I think I is way cheaper to eat horribly than to eat well, so I think the obesity epidemic goes hand in hand with our economic problems. The drive through line at mcds wraps around the block on Tuesdays and Thursdays when happy meals are cheaper. If we want to change things, we need to make healthy food more readily available and educate people about what they are eating/ feeding their children!

i agree

carolose46

Here's an example of how in denial we are of this epidemic. Rather than insult people with the realization of how obese they are, clothing sizes have shifted with our body sizes over time. A woman's size 8 in 1950 would wear a size 00 today. Most people can't actually even fit into vintage clothing. There is a similar trend with clothes sized S,M,L. The simple fact is that people don't like buying clothing that tells them how fat they are, so retailers select brands that are sized larger than others and over time this has increased the size of S,M, and L. Retailers that make their own brands are really aware of this and market to their clientele, so S, M, L run larger at Walmart than say the GAP.

So true. I was very thin in high school (20 years ago), there would have been very little space for losing weight. I recently found my prom dress and it was a size 10. It absolutely would be a size 2 (MAX 4) these days.

true!