We Did Most of the Damage Before Y2K
Why has the American population gotten so fat? That, just in health care terms alone, is literally the $64 billion question. (We’ve come a long way from the days when $64,000 was enough to get people watching a TV show.) There have been enough books, articles, reports, surveys and studies published purporting to have the answer(s) to that question to fuel a very substantial bonfire.
I am not being critical; there were so many different answers floating around out there that I was able to write an entire e-book just summarizing them all, “115 Reasons Why It’s Not Your Fault That You’re Fat.” But some of my “reasons” were strictly for laughs, and many more were applicable to only limited numbers of people, and still others were statistical quirks or associations rather than actual causes of fatness. Even so, there were enough serious possible contributing factors that trying to pin down any of them as primary seemed like a daunting undertaking.
Then I read a recent article by USA Today’s resident health editor, Nanci Hellmich, about rising obesity rates, and where they might be headed, and about halfway through the piece I came across the following:
“(D)ata show that the national obesity rate was relatively stable in the USA from 1960 to 1980, when about 15 percent of people fell into that category. It increased dramatically in the ’80s and ’90s and was up to 32 percent in 2000 and 36 percent in 2010. Because obesity has inched up slightly over the past decade, some experts have speculated that the increase in obesity may be slowing down or leveling off.”
It strikes me that there might be a clue as to the cause of our national overweight epidemic in the fact that the vast majority of it occurred in a 20-year span, when we went from a 15 percent obesity rate in 1980, where it had been for years, to a 32 percent rate in 2000, just 4 percent less than today. Given an obesity rate that more than doubled in those two decades, one might ask what other dramatic and notable cultural or technological changes also occurred in that period. A coincidence isn’t a cause, of course, but sometimes it can lead you to one.
From the dozen or so likeliest subjects in “115 Reasons,” I picked three off the top of my head and did a bit of Googling. Here’s what I came up with.
Fast Foods
I couldn’t nail down the precise growth rate from 1980 to 2000, but in 1970 we were spending just $6 billion a year on fast food, and by 2000 that number had ballooned to over $110 billion, so it had to be fairly heady. More narrowly, in 1980, less than 30 percent of all the food we consumed outside the home was fast food; by the late 90s, it was nearly 40 percent. Even closer to the mark, fast food outlets grew from 109,353 in 1982 to 228,789 in 2002, an increase of 119,436, or 109 percent. Over the same period, the number of full-service restaurants grew from 122,851 to 195,659, an increase of just 72,808, or 59 percent.
It seems safe to say that the number of places to get fast food and the amount of money we spent in them both soared during the critical 1980-2000 years. As suspect causes go, I’d give it an 80 out of 100. But don’t overlook the fact that between fast food and restaurants, we added 200,000 eateries over that period. Both restaurant meals and fast food pack more carbs and calories than home cooking, and we made it vastly more convenient to partake of either kind.
Carbohydrates
Specifically high-calorie sweeteners. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, our national intake of carbohydrates was actually experiencing a long-term decline heading into the early 80s, but, “Since that time, the level has increased. This reflects the trend toward increased consumption of grain products and sugars and sweeteners.” Especially sweeteners, and sugar in particular. In 1980, we were putting away about 80 pounds of sugar per American per year, a figure basically unchanged since 1940. By 2000, we were downing 110 pounds of the stuff per capita. When sugar consumption was stable, so was our obesity rate; when the former took off, so did the latter.
I also checked out the history of high fructose corn syrup, which some nutritionists regard as super sugar. Turns out that HFCS-55, the kind used to sweeten countless products, was introduced in the late 1970s. And what do you know: it seems that in 1980, Coca-Cola began sweetening its wares with HFCS. By 2000, it was the most common sweetener in packaged food; possibly the most common single ingredient. I’d have to rate carbs and sweeteners an 87 or so out of 100.
Microwaves
The primary cause of weight gain is excessive eating, and no technology in history has made doing just that so quick and effortless as the now-ubiquitous kitchen zapper. This wasn’t always so, of course. As Wikipedia tells us, “By the late 1970s the technology had improved to the point where prices were falling rapidly. Formerly found only in large industrial applications, microwave ovens increasingly became a standard fixture of most kitchens. By 1986, roughly 25 percent of households in the U.S. owned a microwave oven…” By 2001, it was over 90 percent of American households. Of course, you can use a microwave to cook oatmeal and well as bacon, and to poach salmon as well as to reheat pizza. So the best I score I can give it is a 70.
These three, of course, are all factors that influence our intake of food and especially of fattening food. But there are other plausible candidates in our panel of possible causes, including those that influence our energy expenditure, such as electronic diversions (video games, Facebook, etc.) and sedentary occupations, which have also increased over the years. Not to mention the use of suspect chemicals in agriculture and household products that may have interfered with our metabolisms. Do their growth patterns correspond to the great 1980-2000 weight gain?
I didn’t have time to find out for this column. But I’ll look into it, and get back to you.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
article source: http://calorielab.com
