Friday, December 20th, 2019
Stephan: Obesity has become a defining characteristic of Americans but, as this report describes, it is not uniform across the country. It is worse in Red value states, and in states (often the same) where income is lower. It is one of the reasons life expectancy in the U.S. has been declining for the past three years.
When I look at the research data it seems obvious that this obesity is arising because of wealth inequality, which results in a large percentage eating processed foods,
which are aggressively promoted, making it a deadly loop. This is all a function of making profit the only social priority. The entire food system in this country could be transformed from farm field to kitchen into a system that promoted wellbeing. It is a lie that social programs that foster wellbeing cannot be profitable. Nor is it best as Neoliberals assert for everything to be private. There are things like healthcare that are best run as a public national system with wellbeing as their first priority. The same with prisons.
As a people we are literally killing ourselves under the system now operating.
everything to be private. There are things like healthcare that are best run as a public national system, as like as they have wellbeing as their first priority. The same with prisons.
As a people we are literally killing ourselves under the system now operating.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this news: Nearly half of American adults will be obese within a decade and one-quarter will be severely so, a new report predicts.
It corrects for a weakness in previous estimates that may have made the problem seem not as big as it really is. Those estimates often relied on national health surveys and people tend to understate their weight in those.
The new work used a decades-long federal study in which weight was measured to get a more accurate picture of trends and to project into the future.
“It’s alarming,” said a nutrition expert with no role in the study, Dr. Lawrence Appel of Johns Hopkins University. “We’re going to have some pretty awful problems” medically and financially because so many people weigh too much, he said.
The New England Journal of Medicine published the study Wednesday. It was led by scientists at Harvard and George Washington universities.
Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and other health problems. It’s gauged by body mass index, or BMI, a measure of weight relative to height. Underweight or normal is a BMI under 25; overweight […]
