Credit: Shutterstock
A study last year showed that the average woman in America today weighs as much as the average man in the 1960s, though Americans are only an inch taller now than then. The culprit is too many calories and not enough exercise. As the American Council on Science and Health has noted for decades, many diseases are lifestyle-related (e.g. smoking, alcohol, sexual behavior, calorie intake) which is in firm opposition to anti-science groups that claim there is a special cause for disease they can ban if you give them money, such as a particular food type, or a food process, or a trace chemical in the environment.
The latest exculpatory craze is to claim that obesity is epigenetic; it may not be changes in DNA but it can be inherited, so even if you are not fat if your dad had a bad diet, he is to blame for your child's obesity. Stop the madness; it's parents feeding kids too much Burger King, not the fault of grandparental food intake or marketing groups at food companies. It's also time to quit shuffling blame off on others and accept that if the food binge-ing doesn't stop, it's going to be an economic crisis along with a health one; because in an Affordable-Care-Act world, we all pay for the treatment of people who are unhealthy, not to mention the government vig we pay before they visit the doctor.
A small analysis from the University of Sydney's School of Public Health shows what could be in store for Americans; their examination of health care records of 350 children found that obese kids were up to 3X more likely to go into the hospital and incurred 60 percent higher healthcare costs. If that's the case when they're still young, it is difficult to fathom how much higher it could be in the future.
We're sending the exact opposite message we should be sending in the U.S.; we have online protests if female clothing models aren't overweight and thin women are all assumed to be anorexic. On the male side, "dad bod" has also become Sweet Lemons Rationalization.
It's good that people are not overly self-conscious about their appearance, unfortunately it also has become the case that people are not self-conscious about their health. Humans in general are not great about protecting against problems that may not happen (the big rush in buying burglar alarms happens after a home is robbed) but this threatens to increase the cost of the world's most expensive health care even more.
It's an easy problem to prevent. Most kids are born active and parents control purchases, so make high-calorie treats just that, treats, and let your kids go play and not have to wait until there is some organized play date. No one reasonable (so let's exclude those at Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Working Group and the rest) is advocating a War on Fun, but we don't let kids play video games all day and we can't let them have obscene calorie intake either. Currently, nearly a quarter of kids in America go into kindergarten overweight or obese.
We have created an America our ancestors always wanted for us, where science and technology led to food being so cheap and plentiful the poorest people can afford to be fat, now we have to make sure our cultural maturity matches our innovation.
###
Citation: Alison Hayes, Anna Chevalier, Mario D'Souza, Louise Baur, Li Ming Wen and Judy Simpson, Early childhood obesity: Association with healthcare expenditure in Australia, Obesity 6 JUL 2016 DOI: 10.1002/oby.21544
