A global obesity epidemic

WTF? I am so disappointed in us. This is all since 1975? And we are shipping it abroad? No wonder everyone hates Americans. (I don't really mean that... well, maybe I do, but I am sure it's not our food that the rest of the world objects to... wait, or is it? Diplomacy by keeping our plastic food to ourselves?) Why have we not definitively agreed on the cause? I suppose the entire global economic system might implode if we did what was right for our health - like Michael Pollan said: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If we didn't eat the crap manufactured by the likes of General Mills and Kraft all the employees would be jobless... Check out this previous Blog Post for discussions about manufactured food and the American military. Can you imagine if we fell back to being an agrarian society? Crap, seems like a lot of news stories are about the younger generations doing just that... with their smart phones in their back pockets.

So, looking for the correct wording of Michael Pollan's quote I found this other quote. Perfect for this blog: "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Those are words to live by! Ok, Nellie Jane Kirkpatrick, I look to you from now on! (I probably should have been for a long time now.... I wish I had learned some things from her.)

Again, taken from the April 22 edition of The Week Magazine:

Obesity now affects more human beings on this planet than hunger. New research reveals that as wealth and abundant food spread throughout the world, chronic overeating has reached epidemic proportions, putting millions of people at risk for heart attack, stroke, cancer, and other life-­threatening ailments. Based on studies encompassing 186 countries, researchers found that the number of obese men has tripled since 1975, while the number of obese women has doubled. Just 2.6 percent of the world’s population was classified as obese 40 years ago, but by 2014 that figure had climbed to 8.9 percent, roughly 640 million people. “We have changed from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” says study author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London. The crisis has struck almost every corner of the planet, most severely in affluent, English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the U.K. If the trend continues, about one-fifth of the world’s adults will be obese by 2025, The Guardian (U.K.) reports, a particular threat to low-income nations ill-equipped to manage obesity-related disease. The epidemic is too widespread to combat only with medications or “a few extra bike lanes,” Ezzati says. “We need coordinated global initiatives, such as looking at the price of healthy food compared [with that of] unhealthy food, or taxing high-sugar and highly processed foods.”

I know it is not a popular position, but I agree we should tax high-sugar and highly processed "food". (Though I believe in the US we do not tax actual food, just the rest of the stuff in the grocery store, like tampons, but that is another discussion and probably not for here.)