I live in America (Illinois, specifically) and am certainly below the average weight here, but I don’t physically see the “obesity epidemic” that I hear about on the news and from “foreigners” on the internet saying America is full of lazy, fat people. That’s just not my experience. Apparently 1 in 3 American are obese. About 5 out of 100 in my graduating class (2010) were. Is this so rare? I think the numbers for youth obesity might have something to do with the fact that football and wrestling are so popular here, and they require either being of above average weight or being extremely muscular. Of course, this doesn’t make you unhealthy.
But is America really so unhealthy? If so, why? If there’s an epidemic, would a “fat tax” even help?
There are just as many Americans online who claim they see fat people everyday as there are Americans who claim they never saw a fat person.
Whatever it is, it’s worse when you are Indian. Every village in India would have unique idiosyncrasies not found in any other village, but some journalist will presume that what happens in one village applies to one million other villages. And thus, they can make one million possible generalizations, many of them contradictory, ranging from “Indians are too repressed” to “Indians are too decadent in sexual habits”.
I’ve noticed (no offense intended) that latinos seem fatter than most people. I don’t quite know what causes this. But as for everyone else, I haven’t noticed anything abnormal --maybe americans are just bigger than everyone not-american so from their POV they think we’re fat but from our POV we’re normal. I know I’ve scene french people and I think they’re a bit too skinny. But whether that means either of us is unhealthily over/underweight is another question all together.
Yes, that is statistically accurate. Black and latino Americans have higher obesity rates. Asians have lower. Racial differences do make America unique compared to Europe.
And Joe, I agree that BMI is probably part of the problem because it doesn’t account for muscle. I think if we fought any European country in hand-to-hand combat we’d probably kick their asses.
i dont know… maybe it is the steriods that we put in our meats or vegies, or the corn syrup that we substitute for sugar because it is cheaper because corn is subsidize by our fabulous government
America isn’t overweight. The weight of the person next door doesn’t change my own weight. Aside from government intervention that has made our food unhealthy, our economy is freer than most, so we’re able to produce more capital, meaning more food is available to us. I haven’t personally been to Europe, so you’ll have to blame my friend’s testimony to me if this is incorrect, but he said there really aren’t any restaurants open late into the night. If that’s true in a lot of places because staying open isn’t worth the money they’re forced to pay workers, the food isn’t available to people. I tend to go to pizza places late at night with my friends because restaurants in this city know college kids are up late and may just have lower taxes/regulations than anywhere else. It’s kind of like someone who chooses not to have sex until he’s married and criticizes the promiscuity of everyone else around him, but then suddenly a bunch of hot girls want to date him and his behavior changes. No one can really judge an American’s behavior until he or she lives in America for a while.
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why. I had fruit from a farmer’s market the other day where farmers actually care about the goods they produce, and it tasted so good. Now blackberries from large grocery stores taste like absolute shit.
Testimonials are useless. That said, I live in NY and regularly see men and women who are so huge I have to wonder how they manage in the bathroom, and I usually see them pushing shopping carts in the store full of foods that, if you tallied up the macro nutrients, would probably be mostly sugar and fat. The bottom line is calories are cheap as hell to get these days so a lot of people aren’t wanting for food but are wanting for the discipline to not eat so damn much of it. That said too, BMI sucks as a way to measure obesity. Height to weight ratios that don’t consider lean mass to fat make up are useless.
As for a fat tax, I guess it would ‘help’ in the short term perhaps in making calories more expensive. But this presumes people wouldn’t sacrifice other purchases and pay the higher price for food. Given the behavioral aspects of over eating and how for some people it even bleeds over into addict-type behavior, my guess is the demand for these foods would be somewhat inelastic and people wouldn’t curtail consumption as much as would be expected. And even if they would, this presumes the government and its regulators know what foods/calories to tax. If yo go by their old food pyramid people would have been sucking down pasta by the ton and not getting enough saturated and w3 and w6 fats. Now with the whole low carb craze going on it might shift the other way and then who knows, maybe constipation will become an epidemic when people don’t get enough fiber. There’s a pretense of knowledge built into the idea of a ‘fat tax’ that somehow the government and its regulators know which foods we should curtail consumption of and which we should encourage, both on an aggregate and individual basis, and that’s just plain BS on both counts.
So the fat tax might curtail the consumption of some bad food in the short term. In the long term it will likely do nothing but make producers of ‘healthy’ foods and other producers in general take a hit in profits as people reallocated their spending to cover the higher cost of the taxed foods. I wouldn’t be surprised at all in the end if the producers of the taxed foods ended up with higher market share and higher profits in the long run. And in the end the government will just have more power and more revenue and that’s not good for anyone.
As others piont out, the problem of America being overweight is directly tied to our higher living standards. Food is cheaper for the American than the European, which is why Americans overindulge in food. If we had a free market, I wouldn’t be surprised if health insurance companies (and life insurance companies) started charging higher premiums for the obese/overweight, which would create incentives for people to lose weight.
Cheaper (fast food style) food has higher fat and calorie content. There is a lot of healthy cheap food, but I’m sure much of the poor may not know or care.
The whole obesity thing like the ADHD and other made up problems is just a ruse to get a transfer of wealth from government (Read Chinese Lenders) to a special insterest group before the Chinese decide to stop lending the money.
Just look at the way these people measure obesity using some chart with height on one axis and weight on the other to get a number. The stupid thing is that the number has nothing to do with individuals. For example no player in the NFL and a few in MLB actually met their number and are not obese. Look at the running backs, linebackers, receivers, etc these people are solid bricks of muscle. The great receiver who has body builder size Terell Owens is obese by US Govenrment measurements. But those folks are outside the norm. What about Holly Wood celebs, they are not over weight in the slightest, in fact they have theselves surgically altered. But they are inside the values.
The whole thing is crazy and is build on a collectivist mindset. I suggest that you not worry about obesity and focus your energy on stopping those that do from stealing your money or stealing money that must be repaid by you to China.
The poor used to starve to death. Now they consume so many calories that their bodies and fat cells balloon. It’s definitely a “problem” of having food be less costly, thanks to the advances propagated by a capitalistic economy.
If it is true that the wealthy don’t tend to be as overweight as the poor (a claim for which you have not provided any evidence), then it is probably correlated with some other factor. For example, the wealthy might buy more expensive, healthier, lower calorie food than the poor. It might be an issue of psychological mindset: someone who grew up in a well-to-do family might not have the same impetus to eat as someone who grew up in a poorer family where food could’ve been scarce. It might have to do with something else: if we are to assume that the wealthy are wealthy because they’re more intelligent than the poor, maybe they’re also better at making healthy food decisions.
There’s a multitude of factors which could explain this apparent contradiction you describe.
I work at McDonald’s. The highest selling items are carby foods: mcflurries, ice cream cones, fries, and the seven billion cold and hot sugary drinks we make. The main problem is: 1) how much cheaper calories are now, thanks to capitalism and 2) all the sugary things people want to satisfy their taste buds.
As a way of explaining the American-European disparity you stated that cheap food makes people overindulge in it. This was the extent of your argument. This argument is nonsense since in America it is the people to whom food is more expensive who overindulge in it.
You would have to establish that food in Europe is so expensive that Europeans can not afford to be fat or else you have said nothing. And that is not the case, an average European has the same ability to overindulge in food that the poor American has.
Cheap food is a requirement to be fat. However you went further than that and claimed it was the cause.
But lets apply these qualifications to your explanation to the American-European disparity which is what you were attempting to explain:
Likewise Europeans might buy more expensive and healthier foods. Although as you said they have lower living standards. So how does that happen?
Ah but since the Europeans have lower living standards, then they should have more people with this pychological mindset and therefore more, not less, overwheight people.
Ah yes, but since you are musing about non-fatness being caused by intelligence, then are you also saying the less fat Europeans may be more inteligent than the Americans?
