I think that this should probably be filed under “stating the blindingly obvious,” but when The New York Times runs a story which points out that…
In 1970, the average American ate about 16.4 pounds of food a week, or 2.3 pounds daily. By 2006, the average intake grew by an additional 1.8 pounds a week.Among other things, that's an extra half pound of fat weekly - mostly from oils and shortening. That doesn't count the fat in the extra quarter pound of meat Americans now eat every seven days.
…is it remotely surprising to read of a new study which suggests that all U.S. adults could be overweight within 40 years?
While throwing out absolutes—like 100%—are probably exaggerated, two-thirds of all American adults are overweight today. And thanks to the western diet and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, things aren't likely to change for the better:
“Genetically and physiologically, it should be impossible” for all U.S. adults to become overweight, said Dr. Lan Liang of the federal government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one of the researchers on the study.However, she told Reuters Health, the data suggest that if the trends of the past 30 years persist, “that is the direction we're going.”
Reading this reminded me of one of this summer’s great films, WALL·E. It may seem absurd to label a cartoon as prescient, but not only has the movie accurately pegged our disposable culture’s disregard for the environment, it seems to have nailed our future selves as well.
I don't think I could describe WALL·E’s frightening dystopia any better than Tobin Hack’s commentary on the film in Plenty. He calls our future selves:
…morbidly obese blobs who spend their monotonous days zooming heavily around on hovering easy chairs, watching private TV screens, and drinking meals-in-a-cup. They can’t walk, and have even forgotten how to interact physically with one another, raising the question of how they’ve been procreating for the past few centuries. Machines take charge of their every need to the point (possibly) of no return.
The movie does treat the future’s fatties with some measure of kindness—a choice I suspect was made to avoid alienating the crowds of overweight Americans watching the film whilst gobbling popcorn by the tub, washed down with their meals-in-a-cup reminiscent slurpees.
I think the reason the story works so well is that for a sci-fi cartoon, it comes across as credible. Apart from a few athletes and overachievers, if everybody is fat by 2048, what will we look like in Wall·E’s 22nd century? How many additional pounds of food will be we devouring each week?
So, what do we do about it? How do we reverse the trend?
Personally, I like Michael Pollen’s advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”