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| Real | 84% | 257 votes | Total: 307 votes | |
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Add to FavoritesAll you have to do is walk down the halls of any school in North America and it will become obvious that obesity is a serious epidemic in North America. A staggering one in four students suffers from obesity and there is no signs of it letting up any time soon. Children as young as ten and twelve are being diagnosed with type two diabetes and heart disease and it's sinful. It's sinful because it's parents, teachers, schools, retailers and advertisers who are to blame for feeding the appetite of the obesity monster that could well be the demise of civilization as we know it for many different reasons.
Children are a product of the environment they have been born into. Before they can even complete a whole sentence, they are pushing those little shopping carts down super-market aisles as they join their parents on the weekly shopping trip. What a wondrous journey for those wide eyes and growing appetites! Aisles and aisles of soda, potato chips, ice cream, candy, cereal full of sugar-bombs, and processed and packaged foods. Right next to the soda is a small section of healthier water and mineral and nutrient-laden replacement drinks. In amongst the 60 feet of potato chips there are a few varieties that are free of excess salt and poor fats. Beside the 24 feet of ice-cream there might be 12 feet of frozen vegetables. Right near the end of the candy aisle you might find a few packages of whole kernel popcorn, a much healthier treat. Down that huge cereal aisle with dozens of choices for those saucer-sized eyes, reside about four cereals that are truly healthy. They all have one thing in common. They only have one ingredient. Oatmeal(oats). Wheat Puffs(wheat). Rice Puffs(rice). Shredded Wheat(wheat).They are all whole grains and there are no additives listed on the ingredients list.
As you leave pretty well any big-box department store or super-market the last thing you and your kids will see as you pay for your purchases is a big rack of chocolate bars and candies that are there for only one reason. They are there to trigger the sugar response that is ingrained into all of us at an early age. If ever there was an attempt at an obvious "Impulse sale" this is it. Once we-or our children-start on the slippery slope of "simple carbohydrate" over-consumption the journey on the road to obesity has begun in earnest. If you compound the trips to the super-market with the plethora of fast-food outlets lining the streets of cities and towns everywhere, and the junk-food dispensing machines lining school hallways, it's easy to see just how obesity issues have become a catastrophic problem for much of the world.
How can this lead to the demise of our way of life as we know it? Well, for the first time in generations the kids of today will most likely have a shorter average lifespan than their parents. Is that catastrophic enough? With the gains in knowledge and medical science, this should never happen. Today's kids are on the cusp of what should be a fabulous journey toward the 22nd century and many won't make it half-way there. The boom of High Technology is really a boon to our children. Too much is done for them too easily. Cell-phones, lap-tops, I-Pods, and Personal Computers make it easy to do things without being motivated into calorie-burning motion and action. This is the ultimate double-whammy that is the sure road to obesity. Poor diet and lack of fitness are at the crux of so many major problems that plague us today. The Agricultural infra-structure is being used up in order to keep pace with demands to produce the food that in turn is slowly killing us. If all of North America was on a healthy diet and embraced fitness as a way of life there would be no strain on medical systems everywhere. There would be on line-ups at the doctor's office. Type-two diabetes, high cholesterol problems, and diseases of the heart would all but disappear.
For a perfect example, take a look back to the mid-nineteenth century when children were born into a farm family. These children were also products of their environment. They grew up on a diet made up of the crops and animals that were grown and raised on the farm. They had a steady diet of vegetables from the garden, and milk, eggs and meat from the cattle, sheep, and chickens they raised. Their flour came from golden fields of grain, and maybe the kids would go out and pick succulent wild straw-berries so mom could make a mouth-watering pie for Sunday dinner. there were no fast food joints, junk machines, dangerous fats and additives or chemicals to worry about. They probably walked or ran to school. They worked on the farm to help out the family. So what you ended up with was a big, healthy, strapping farm boy and beautiful girls with bright eyes, shiny hair, and glowing skin. Type-two diabetes? I doubt if very much.
We are all products of our environment and unless we have the individual courage and resolution to change the way things are, we are doomed to stay on the path we are on until it's too late. It's time for the world to get back to basics and come to an understanding that essentially we eat to provide our bodies the fuel and the tools that will see us through the physical and mental demands of each day and if we ignore that fact, those days will be numbered.
Learn more about this author, Ray Fauteux.
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Hype
Yes, obesity is a problem that needs to be addressed. Yes, there is a growing rate of obese people in the world. These are undeniably true, and indeed should be confronted. But the claim that this is an epidemic is a hype that has inflated to a degree much higher than the implications of obesity, unset by two factors, nostalgic misinformation and societal pressures.
Obesity hype followers will give you a list of reasons why we're facing such a frightening epidemic of obese people in the world. One of them is rooted in nostalgic, good old fashion memories of lifestyles that seem sunnier than they really are. They will tell you that back in the old days, they came home from work or school and sat down to a wonderfully fresh, healthy meal prepared by their loving stay at home mother. I challenge anyone to spend 10 minutes flipping through a few "Old Fashioned" cookbooks and come back to still support the assertion that people in past days ate healthier food. Because, they didn't.
Looking through any "Old Fashioned" cookbooks of any types of meals will find lots of fat, butter, lard, and sugar in every recipe. The base of a meal for the larger part of human history was meat and carbohydrates. No, a hundred years ago food didn't have all the preservatives and modifications, greases and frying oils, but it still was fatty and filled with carbohydrates. But a hundred years ago people didn't have anywhere near the kind of access we have now to foods of every kind you can imagine. Now, you can pick any type of vegetable, fruit, meat, nut, bread, etc, and have it at any time you desire, for any meal of the day! They simply didn't have that option back a hundred years ago; they had to eat what they could afford and what was local at the time. This means there was never a wide variety of fruits and vegetables around, and meals were centered on fatty meats and carbohydrates.
Secondly, old-fashioned dreamers will tell you that people "now days" are so much lazier than the good old days, and it's the inactivity that's the problem. Thing is, people alive now have so much more to do to sustain there lives than those a hundred years ago! Our educational requirements have been increased massively, forcing older students in higher universities to juggle their grades and a part time job to keep from going into a hopeless debt. Working parents have 40 hour plus careers per week, while driving their children all over town to school, practice, lessons, and whatever else their children are involved in. We aren't any lazier; we're so much busier! Yes, people need to set more time aside to maintain a healthy lifestyle, but this isn't a cause for the call of an epidemic.
Society also has had an unquestionable effect on the inflation of the hype over obesity. The pressures culture places on each individual to be as skinny or fit as possible is eternally damaging. This is the one side of the story that you could take by defending past ages. The focus of societies in the past had a lot less to do with the physical appearance and weight of a person. Even 50 years ago, the accepted norm was a few pounds of what we in today's culture would call overweight, especially in females. Now that the norm has shifted to being completely fit with no noticeable extra weight, obviously this places a lot of pressure that pushes individuals in a lot of different ways. This focus on weight has not only driven to an increase in obesity, but to a massive increase in eating disorders, that either leaves a person dangerously underweight or overweight. In this way, the paranoia of obesity is actually quite self-sabotaging in that people who are overly concerned with their weight end up in unhealthier circumstances.
The "Obesity Epidemic" has been used as a sort of character assassination on the modern person. Blaming it on modern laziness and the modern lifestyle is a just confusing warp of nostalgic feelings fed by people's fonder memories of the past. Taking steps backwards to the "good old days" does not provide the key to a healthy body, and buying into the cultural paranoia of weight and self-image isn't going to help either.
It's unquestionably true that now, here in the 21st century we have every tool available to achieve and maintain a healthy body. We know more about the body that we ever did before, and this change is astronomical for a healthy society. Not only that, we now have access to an immense selection of healthy foods that people before us could have never imagined of having. You can get any kind of food you want, at any time of the year, by simply going into a store. This is untouchably advantageous to people that are lucky enough to be alive in today's world.
The tools for living a healthy life are all there for us to use here in the 21st century. It is now simply an issue of choosing a healthy lifestyle. Anyone can lead a healthy life with a little knowledge and perseverance!
Learn more about this author, Michelle R. Bishop.
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