I enjoy a good perusal of some of the opinion pages out there and OpinionJournal.com (the WSJ’s on-line op-ed seciton) is always a fave of mine. I came across an article today on the politics of obesity, especially how our dear politicians (on both sides of the political spectrum) love to make a run at these kinds of issues and declaring it a moral imperative to fight the fat.
Anyway, was curious about the takeaway anyone else might have on the article:
Honestly, I find it overall a little uneven and I’m not 100% sure of the point that is attempting to be made, but the thing that troubles me most is the statistical change on how many deaths are caused by obesity in the U.S. each year. I don’t need to sift through the numbers to know it is far closer to 400,000 than 26,000.
Does anyone really think that the obesity problem is going to be solved? How many of you have worked with obese people in the past? I have, and while I have had my share of success I have also had many more failures. Someone who is 40+ pounds overweight needs to trun their entire lifestyle around and this is very difficult for most people.
I don’t see this problem going away anytime soon. In fact, it may get worse as “the land of plenty” becomes even more plentiful!
Free time
Readily available high caloric food
Lack of desire
Basic ignorance on how to go about a body transformation.
Does anyone really care if the cow down the street dies at 50 because they are fat? It is just less health care costs and less strain on the welfare systems… How many of these beasts are on disability? I know my 500lb uncle is…
One thing that is lacking in America is proper nutrition education in schools. Most parents don’t know how to cook healthy and we were not taught anything in high school. This needs to start from the ground up.
Actually, the cost burden on us from obesity and it’s health related issues is staggering. With diabetes in children up 400% in the past 20 years!
And believe it or not I do have empathy for the ‘fat cow’ down the street. Look how that impacts their lives. Look how that impacts the lives of their children.
It’s sad that more Americans aren’t motivated enough to eat and exercise properly. I believe it to be unhappy as well as unhealthy.
It is also a stirring indictment of our culture the dichotomy that exists with fat/obese people. How in many ways it is more and more acceptable, and yet reviled by those who think that all it is are a bunch of lazy asses who have no self control.
It won’t be attacked by some gov’t study though. It won’t be helped by adjusting numbers of those affected. I certainly agree with Kuz, it sure looks like more the big # than the smaller one is how many are affected in our country.
This will be the number 1 killer in America before I die. And the sad part is, most is preventable.