Michael Pollan: The Government Makes You Fat - Government policy determines what we eat and why "the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth." He quotes a study by Drewnowski of the University of Washington, who determined that a dollar will buy 1200 calories of cookies or chips but only 250 calories of carrots. If you don't have a lot of money, the most rational thing to do is buy junk food to get the most calories for your buck.
"If I buy four litres of milk it's costing me almost $7.00 but if I can go buy two-litre bottles of Coca Cola, it's going to cost me two and change. That's a problem that I have... ." - TreeHugger
TreeHugger has done post after post on why people in the United States are fat, detailing everything from the effects of farm policy, suburban develop, the recession, and sedentary lifestyles on the growing number of Americans with soaring Body Mass Indexes.
US Was Much Thinner Not That Long Ago
I bring this all up not to just pour more fuel on the fire--though the scale of this is such even that couldn't hurt--but to point out that you don't have to go back to the 1970s and 1980s to find a country of thinner people; you just have to go back to the early 1990s. For many TreeHugger readers (and this author) it's not our childhoods we're talking about, it's our late teens when the great fattening took hold.
I bring this all up not to just pour more fuel on the fire--though the scale of this is such even that couldn't hurt--but to point out that you don't have to go back to the 1970s and 1980s to find a country of thinner people; you just have to go back to the early 1990s. For many TreeHugger readers (and this author) it's not our childhoods we're talking about, it's our late teens when the great fattening took hold.
Stop Supporting Agri-Business and Start Helping Smaller Farmers is Big Part of Solution
Since we've covered this all pretty thoroughly before, check out the TreeHugger archives (linked at top) and the report itself (linked below the images) for an in-depth look at all this.
Since we've covered this all pretty thoroughly before, check out the TreeHugger archives (linked at top) and the report itself (linked below the images) for an in-depth look at all this.
But if it's the top-line causes and solutions that you're looking for, the following summary from SmartPlanet is about as accurate and succinct as can be reported, so I'll just quote at length:
Our obesity epidemic is not a demand problem. It's a supply problem. The mass production creates the mass production, ...Current U.S. Department of Agriculture programs still support low cost, mass production of protein, starch, and corn-based sugar. Some of these specific programs date from the Great Depression.
Both images--taken from the F Is For Fat report [PDF]--show obesity trends in the US among adults, the top from 1991 and the bottom from 2007-2009.
The lightest blue areas have less than 10% obesity rates, the next two blue shades represent 10-20% obesity rates. This is where we were in 1991, with no state in the US (which reported data, the white areas didn't report) having greater than 20% obesity.
