“Because when the aliens come down to earth, they come inside raindrops, making the rain chubby. Chubby rain!” – Bowfinger
Rumor has it that Axel Rose ate the rest of the members of Guns n’ Roses after their bus broke down while on tour and they were separated from food for several hours.
It’s the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it’s a time when people traditionally gain weight like Christian Bale getting ready to star in a movie about as your mom. On an annual basis, this had been my norm. Up until about four years ago, January started a (fairly) simple routine where I’d work out really hard, and lose the weight I’d gained in December in a few weeks, or maybe even into February. As I get older, the techniques of youth begin to not work so I have resorted to hacking off unneeded limbs until I get to an acceptable weight. I mean, who needs both a right arm and a left arm?
Christian Bale lost weight down to 110 pounds (653 kilograms) to play the role on the right. His diet was an apple and a can of tuna a day. After a while, I’d probably include the label and the can for extra fiber.
But it’s not just me that’s getting heavier over time. Since it’s easier to think about why in a bigger picture manner than it is to think about the fasting (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) and treadmill time I’ll be spending in 2020, I thought I’d think about what’s going on, globally, since it appears that the individuals that comprise humanity seem to be more globe-shaped every year.
Despite the world stereotype that the United States is filled with fat Americans, it’s not just the United States. The entire world is pretty chunky now. As you can see from the (pretty neat) embedded video, in 1975, the world wasn’t particularly fat.
The video only lasts about 40 seconds, so if you have a couple of Snickers® bars, your mom should be able to make it through the video.
From the video it’s obvious that the Soviet Union and the United States were pretty good at feeding their people, maintaining and obesity rate of somewhere between 10%-15%. I’ll maintain that a well-fed society is going to have some natural variation in weight, and in order not to have malnutrition, some portion of the population (including your mom) is going to be obese.
Of note, the places in Africa and Asia where you’d expect starvation back in 1975 show less than 2% obesity. Yup, science is proven right again – people starving to death rarely get obese.
If lifting weights was easy, it would be called “Your Mom.”
Fast forwarding to 1987, the very first country to increase to a greater than 20% obesity rate is Saudi Arabia. At that point in time, Saudi Arabia was transforming into a very wealthy country based on oil money. The next two countries to trip the 20% threshold were Libya (!) and the United States in 1992.
In 1998, Saudi Arabia jumped to 25% to 30% of population being obese. In 2000, the United States joined the Saudis, and Canada, Mexico, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Argentina and Chile all joined the 20% club.
Getting to 2014 (when the video ends) with the exception of Africa, China, India, (for major regions) and some smaller places here and there, the rest of the nations of the world have a greater than 20% obesity rate. The world is officially ranked: Mostly Chubby.
So, I’m officially not supposed to know that fat Bugs Bunny® is known to the Zoomers as Big Chungus. Pugsley HATES it when I know something like that. I even say “yeet” to really drive him nuts.
The title of the video is “How the World Became Obese”, and it’s a bad title. The video shows where the world become obese, and it shows when the world became obese. However, it never showed how the world became obese. Heck, even how is a boring question. How is just a matter of shoveling more Milky Way® candy bars into my body than my body needs for energy. Thermodynamics is simple that way.
As a result, kids are objectively bigger now. One kid on Pugsley’s 8th Grade FB team was over 260 pounds. On my high school football team, the heaviest guy was 218, and he was 6’4”.
To me, the question is: why?
I don’t think you can pin the increase in obesity to a single factor. Here’s a (likely incomplete) list of reasons we’re fatter:
Kidnapping is word that has such a bad connotation – my parents just called it a “surprise adoption.”
Wealth. The world, as a whole, is wealthier now than at any time in history. It’s no mistake that wealthy countries got fattest fastest. Heck, we’re wealthy enough that Jupiter called and told Earth to get its own Netflix® subscription.
Inexpensive food. While the world is getting wealthier, food is cheaper than at any time in history. Farmers now have the ability to analyze in real time the missing nutrients for optimal plant growth, and apply the right amount of fertilizer to maximize profitability. Just like nutrients are managed, moisture can be managed as well. Finally, inexpensive herbicides and pesticides have kept bugs and weeds from getting fat instead of people. Food costs for a family in the United States have dropped from about 17% of disposable income in 1960 to about 10% today. Food is cheaper than your mother now.
Air conditioning and heating. Yes, mankind has been heating shelters for warmth since at least 1973. And that’s a long time. But mankind also used to have to work for it, gathering and chopping up firewood, and that burns a lot of calories. Air conditioning has been around at least since ancient Egypt (really), but it involved a lot of work, too. Perfect temperatures all the time with little physical effort is certainly a new condition for humanity. I don’t mean to brag, but I turned on my air conditioner before it was cool.
Improvements in transportation and logistics. When I was a kid one winter day Ma Wilder asked me what fruit I’d like from the store to put on ice cream. I answered, “Strawberries.”
Ma Wilder: “Nope, not in season.”
Obviously, this led to a long discussion of what “in season” exactly meant. Even when I was a kid, most things were available most of the time. And, when I was a kid, that didn’t mean that you couldn’t get strawberries, merely that they’d be hugely expensive. More often than not, Ma would just buy frozen strawberries instead. That was okay with me, since they were packed in sugary syrup. Just like blood is thicker than water, strawberry syrup is thicker than blood, so I have proof that ice cream is more important than family. I apologize to those of you that were offended, that joke was just perpetuating a viscous cycle.
Today, most foods we eat don’t go “out of season.” If it’s not the right time of the year in the United States for a food to grow, it’s the right time somewhere. Perishable foods are produced year-round, and shipped with great speed to your supermarket.
In an early example of international food trade, 10,000 cases of Hellman’s® mayonnaise were on the Titanic, headed for Mexico. The Mexicans were so upset that their precious mayonnaise was lost that they commemorate the day every year – Sinko De Mayo.
Inexpensive fuel. Increased production and fast transportation of refrigerated perishable food requires lots of fuel. Moving people around in cars, buses, trucks, and airplanes requires lots of fuel. Fuel is, even at $2.50 a gallon, historically cheap. It’s so cheap, I’m thinking about filling my hot tub with kerosene instead of water, so I can get that freshly waxed smell all of the time.
The additional effect is that motorized travel is the standard. Rather than walk to dinner, people drive, even for a few blocks in many cases. Schedules become built around cheap transportation – rather than spend fifteen minutes walking, I’ll drive it in three – and the remaining twelve minutes I can do whatever I want to do. Uber and other rideshare services probably add to, rather than subtract from this problem.
We walk less, bicycle less, and, in general, get less exercise walking around than at any time in history.
Infinite amusement exists. When I was growing up, we had two televisions. And they were small. And there were only three channels – pretty much nobody counted PBS® as a channel. When we said there was nothing on, there was (especially after they turned off the station for the night) really nothing on.
Now, when my entire immediate family is in the basement, (The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I), there might be as many as 10 screens available to entertain us in the room. I’ve been watching a television show and looked around the room to see The Boy checking his phone, me writing this blog, Pugsley on his computer, and The Mrs. on a tablet.
Available to us now instead of the three channels of my youth are hundreds of channels, thousands of movies on streaming services, and most of the knowledge of human existence along with pictures of billions of humans. Some of these pictures even include clothed people, I have been told.
How could that not be the single most addictive thing in the history of mankind? That’s far more interesting than learning how to skip a stone or catch a fish. It’s certain that the Internet reduces physical activity in nearly every kid growing up today.
Hey! I have a crazy idea – let’s go stare at our phones somewhere interesting this weekend!
Types of food consumed is changing. 150 years ago, a typical diet would have had whole-wheat bread made from four ingredients, whole milk, butter, onions, cabbage, beets, apples, plums, actual meat, fish, corn and potatoes – food with virtually no artificial ingredients. And sugar would have been rare.
You know what you eat now, and it’s nothing like this list, at least for most people.
Food itself is changing. A million years ago we invented cooking. 10,000 or more years ago, we invented beer and decided farming was a good idea so we could brew more beer (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer), which also added grains as a big staple food. About 3,000 years ago, we began to change a single plant species, brassica oleracea, into over 21 different foods (LINK), and began to cultivate hundreds of other plants as well. We were changing the food.
Five hundred years ago, Columbus took smallpox to the New World, but brought back syphilis, as well as corn and potatoes. I guess it was a fair trade. But our diet changed again.
In the 20th Century, however, all of that changed. Doritos© have more than forty ingredients. French bread? Four. I wrote a little bit more about that here: (Doritos, Obesity, Addiction, and Nic Cage). Now with replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup? Certainly the same thing, right? Oh, they’re metabolized differently? Nah, that shouldn’t matter.
Okay, I know I’d get in trouble if I didn’t include this one.
Work is changing. As people innovate, jobs become less labor intensive. Even small jobs have specialized mechanical tools to save labor. Desk jobs are now more numerous, and they have changed, too. Computers likely lower overall movement in an office – I haven’t seen a study to this effect, but I’m guessing that the average person sits twice as long at work in 2019 as compared to 1975. I discussed that here (Sitting? Death. Get up. Neal Stephenson says so.)
Lower tobacco consumption. Tobacco has the obvious negative issues, but it has some positive ones as well: it helps keep weight down. As tobacco consumption decreases, the stimulant/weight loss effect of tobacco disappears, and weight goes up.
None of these factors constitute an excuse – it’s an explanation for a global trend. We actually live in the first time in human history when hunger is the exception, rather than the normal condition. I certainly hope that’s a condition that we have for a long, long time.
If you are, like me, carrying more weight than you’d like – own it. If you don’t own it, you’ll never do anything to change it. Now where is that egg nog?
