This was originally written on:
Thursday, August 2, 2007


Obesity an Alternative View

While half of the world starves and suffers from various degrees of malnutrition the other half is facing obesity as what some people call a medical emergency.  Now I could go on about how ignorant it is for half of the population to starve while the other half gets fat.  However the problem is not that simple.  People tend to try to package the problem in a way they can deal with or in a way too complex for them to understand.  If it is too complex to understand, they do not have to deal with it.  If it is something they feel they understand completely, they are an expert and no one can convince them they are wrong.  

Instead I am going to ask why is obesity suddenly such a problem in the West?  I am sure the West has had more people with weight issues than other places for many years.  However it has gotten steadily worse in the past 50 years or so.  Let’s try to look at this logically.  

Can we honestly say that modern fast food is so much worse than what people used to eat in the past?  Is the grease you get from Wendys really so much more terrible for you than the lard your grandmother or great-grandmother cooked everything in?  Now I am not a nutritionist.  However I will bet money that if you compared the diet people have today with diets of people from 1890ish to 1950 or so, you would be able to find plenty of pros and cons with both.  Until the glory days of the liberal dream during the 1950s (in the West) most people lived in rural areas.  You ate fresh eggs daily; you slaughtered or hunted your own meat.  Now getting past all the additives and questionable practices of factory farms and just looking at the basic pros and cons of such diets.  I really do not see much difference between people using the most fattening ways to make food tasty then, with the food we eat now.

Okay, so if we can actually agree that the diets are similar.  What in the world is the problem?  I already touched on it, ever so gently.  The problem is not the food we eat, it is us.  We, as a species, used to live in rural communities.  We used to be farmers.  Farmers used to have to till the soil by hand, farming was hard work.  You did not have a lot of help from technology until the late 20s or so.  Even in urban areas you had to work hard for a living.  Factory work was not automated.  Construction was done more by muscles than machines.  Yes you took in a lot of calories and fats, but you burnt them up in your daily life.

Now let us look what happened as society became blessed (or cursed) with advances that enabled machines to help us work more efficiently.  I will not say these advances were bad or that we should try to go back in time.  That is pure foolishness.  However as machines made it easier for us to travel over distance quicker, the suburbs popped up.  Now people had yards to care for.  They may have been working less hard in the factory or in office jobs.  However caring for their yard was hard work.  You had a push mower that was not gas powered, it was powered by you!  As you pushed it, it caused blades to rotate which cut the grass.  If you wanted to edge the concrete, you had to do that manually.  Trimming bushes, trees, weeding flower beds all had to be done by hand.  When you played, you played hard!  People would go for bike rides; sports in parks, even bowling took physical effort.

Now what has happened since?  Well computers have made factory lines more and more automated.  Computers force people to sit in front of a monitor for 8 or more hours a day, sitting on their ass!  How many physical jobs are honestly left?  Even farmers have equipment which is so costly, they either have to rent it or have farms worth tens of millions of dollars.  They are sitting in the seat of a combine for 14 or more hours a day trying to get a harvest done.  That is a lot different from dealing with oxen for the same amount of time.  

What about our yards?  For those of us that have yards.  How has lawn care evolved?  Well that push mower became gas powered, but you still had to push it manually.  Then it became a walk behind, walk behind because all you had to do was direct it, the wheels were powered.  Let’s not forget riding mowers.  Don’t need to edge manually anymore, thanks to machines.  Now you can buy powered trimmers, edgers, hedge trimmers, you can even blow the grass and leaves away rather than rake them up!  However the fact that industry has become automated has decreased the need for so many employees.  Luckily the mass production of powered equipment for lawn care has made it cheap enough for almost anyone to enter the lawn care business.  No longer do you see an industrious 12 year old or young teen walking down the street with a lawnmower and gas can.  Now you see pick ups, with trailers full of lawn care equipment.  These people will cut and trim more lawns in a day than one of those teens of old could do in a week.

Now this efficiency could be good, if we got to use this extra time we had for reward pursuits.  Maybe more of those community sports, intellectual pursuits or even local political action.  However what do we end up doing?  People end up working 50, 60, 70 or more hours a week.  Sitting on their ass.  Both husband and wife are doing this; there is no time to cook what is referred to an old meal.  So we eat more fast food, with all of its preservatives and junk that even bacteria does not want to deal with.  However if we do not have to work so many hours, what do we do with our time?  We sit in front of the computer playing video games; talking to people we could call or even see in person!  We research useless information and deal with a mass abundance of fallacies that does not help our mental health or common sense.

If you think about it, you can see this progression in almost any area of modern life.  Think of hunters.  They used to go walking into the woods or maybe on horseback, looking for some game to kill.  Now many hunters go off hunting on ATVs.  People used to go to the beach to go swimming or surfing.  Now you got jet skis.  Fisherman would go walking to look for a secluded spot where the fish would bite or maybe row out to a similar spot.  However now you have cheap outboard motors and trolling motors.  Fishermen say that it really does not matter how many fish they catch.  Then why do they spend thousands on fancy toys to help them cheat nature?

Even in sports you see a similar progression.  What is the fastest growing sport in the usa?  NASCAR.  People that they call athletes that drive around in circles for 4 hours and they call it a sport.  How much more technology would we really need for the cars to be completely automated and race themselves, without the drivers?

I am not saying I am not guilty of any of the above situations.  I live in the West and I am basically Western by nature.  However we really do need to be realistic in why the West is growing in weight, despite the fact we are shrinking in population.  The only way we can hope to deal with our weight problem is to have honest facts on the causes.  If we ignore some of the reasons, any solution we try to enforce will most likely fail.  Then, maybe, we will be able to deal with the greater problem of people starving in the other half of the world.  As the clock ticks and we run out of time, a very select few enjoy the good life.  While the majority of us suffer in our own private hells.

   

As the author of the above essay I grant permission for it to be reposted as long as the content is not changed in anyway whatsoever. Please direct any and all comments or questions to me through my profile/homepage or public e-mail:

http://sitespaces.net/profiles/Pseudo_Che

http://www.2minutesofhate.com

respond2pc@yahoo.com