Fat

I am a fat American. My first jobs after college averaged forty-five to fifty hours a week. At one firm we were expected to bill a minimum of forty hours a week which meant guaranteed overtime. They even provided cots in a resting room and takeout for after hours. I gained fifteen pounds at that job alone. If I had lived my entire life in the US I would either be much bigger or much smaller than I am. Smaller because my waistline would have expanded much more rapidly so, maybe, I would have been more proactive about it at a younger age. Bigger, which is far more likely, because America is pretty much designed to make people fat.
There is the food. There is so much wrong with the food we eat in America. The biggest thing is that much of the stuff we are eating is not truly food. Too much of the food Americans eat is a construction designed in laboratories to fire the pleasure synapses in the brain. It is chemicals, additives, and preservatives that are added to what was formerly food but is now nothing more than an amalgamation of salt, fat, starch and/or sugar. In Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman Famine, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, has the idea of promoting nutrition free food. His dream is of a world of obese people starving to death. It appears he has been successful. We are constantly eating yet chronically malnourished.
Animal research has found evidence that artificial preservatives used in many processed foods may be associated with metabolic problems. Research from Georgia State University has shown problems specific to glucose intolerance and obesity. In rodents already genetically disposed to inflammatory gut diseases, the chemicals led to an upsurge in metabolic problems. Scientists believe the results are because of alterations in gut bacteria. The substances cause a disintegration of the mucus that lines and protects the gut. This allows unhealthy bacteria come into contact with gut cells, which produces inflammation. As a result there are negative changes in metabolism.
This applies to the processed foods we Americans delight so much in. Processed foods are designed to hit all our happy buttons including a low price. So cheap, in fact, that they are the only foods available to some populations. To worsen the problem even “fresh” foods in the US are augmented to the point that they barely resemble food. There are a few things Americans living in Denmark notice about food. One is that processed foods, though still ubiquitous, are less readily available. Two is that fresh and organic foods cost the same or less than in the US. In wildly expensive Denmark! Three is how quickly fresh foods rot compared to fresh foods in the States. Even the fresh food in the US is over processed.
Yet, as big an issue as it is this is only part of the problem. People now-a-days don’t move nearly as much as people in the past. Despite the nostalgic reminisces of our grandparents of waking up at dawn, coming home at dusk, and walking up hill both ways, today the average American spends more hours at work than in the past. Most Americans don’t work nine to five. Outside of a few, rare, government jobs. Most Americans – over two thirds – work in the service sector with the five most popular job industries being: technology, health care, communications, retail, and manufacturing. Service industries generally require their employees to work varied and non-repeating shifts. This does a number on the body’s circadian rhythms. For example, researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder found that people who work the night shift burn fewer calories during a 24-hour period than those who work a normal schedule. Imagine what it must be like for people in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and other jobs in which schedules and shifts can change as often as daily. This parallels research which found a relationship between body clock regulation, gut bacteria, and metabolism. When mice received gut bacteria from jet-lagged humans, they gained significant amounts of weight and had abnormally high blood sugar levels. Throwing off your body’s circadian rhythm can make a normal diet can lead to weight gain because of metabolic slowdown.
This is made worse by the fact that for both work and play we spend the vast majority of our time, old and young, unmoving in front of a glowing screen. Between television and the Internet we are passively enslaved, er, entertained for hours on end. How many of us have sat down for a minute only to look up and realize we’ve spent hours, hours, surfing aimlessly or watching shows we don’t even like? Media is just as invasive in the US as outside of it. But in the US people text and drive whereas here they text and bike.
Video/computer games create a world of their own. It’s easy to sit and play and play and play. The most insidious thing about video games is that they are not passive. While playing we are enraptured by the experience, reacting to stimuli, moving forward through the game, actually accomplishing something. The fact that we’ve only accomplished it in the ether doesn’t matter to the way we feel. Heck, when do we get to conquer the castle and save the princess in the real world anyway?
Well, all the time. Back in the day we’d play out these scenes in countless backyards and parks. After school, weekends and holidays kids would disappear on countless adventures before turning up for dinner. My parents still have no idea the things we got up to. (And thank God for it!) Kids now don’t do this. Partially because of the allure of all those digital toys they have stashed in their bedrooms and family rooms. In part because their parents feel more comfortable having them close at hand. After all the world is a lot less safe now than it used to be.
Except that it’s not. Violence is down all over the world. The crime rate in the US is lower now than it was 30, 40 years ago. Look it up . Considering the fact that a lot of crimes that would not have been reported years ago are more often reported now the difference is probably even bigger. Not only do we live under a false sense of menace now we lived with a false sense of complacency then. Most children who are abducted, abused physically, mentally or sexually, or otherwise exploited are done so at the hands of family members or people close to them; people in positions of trust. The vast majority of kids who runaway are doing so to escape abuse in their own homes. We know this. We get told this over and over, but keep looking for the masked boogeyman hiding in an alleyway.
If we focus on only the food aspect of this issue then we will solve only part of the problem. With both parents working to maintain a lower standard of living than the average household in the ’50s, parents so petrified that something will happen to their kids that they are content to leave them vegetating in front of whatever digital device catches their fancy, families having little time to talk, much less be active together, and “real” food costing an arm and a leg, is it any wonder that the average American is fifteen pounds overweight?
Companies, and the country, need to treat people as employees, not costs. To understand that the personal time that people spend on each other is at least as important to the state of the nation as the time they spend in their offices. We need to follow the examples of other developed countries that do not have this issue. We need to get people out of their cars onto their bikes. We need to offer affordable and efficient public transport that has people walking again. We need to get kids moving in school and after school. We need to respect who and what we are as people, not as consumers, not as employees, not even as citizens. People.