Importance of our weight

dropdown One of the things that most surprises Europeans who set foot in the USA for the first time is the huge number of fat people. Not just "fat" people, such as one finds all over Europe too, people who are just a little bit overweight and happy to be so; but people of sometimes massive proportions, obese people who are not just twenty or thirty pounds heavier than they should be, but sixty or seventy or eighty pounds above normal. dropdown According to statistics from the American Center for Disease Control, at least a third of all Americans today (2008) can be considered obese — that is more than 25 pounds overweight for women, and 30 for men. Worse still, 21% of young people between the ages of 12 and 19, the age at which people should normally be most concerned about their looks, are obese, compared to only 6% in the 1970s. dropdown Obesity has become a real national disease, which particularly afflicts the poorer part of the population and cost America over 147 billion dollars in 2008. 50% of black women and 48% of Hispanic women are obese. dropdown The problem also tends to be worse in small towns and rural areas than in the big cities; there are not a lot of obese people in New York, for instance, where traveling by car can take such a long time that it is often much faster to go on foot, and many people live in old apartment blocks with no elevator. dropdown Obesity is definitely a disease of modern America, which began to develop in the 1960s following a fundamental change in lifestyles. Americans stopped walking and taking part in sport; nowadays, everything can be done by car, and even suburban and small town banks offer drive-thru tellers. dropdown Sport and physical education programs that used to be compulsory in high schools and universities have generally become optional, and instead of playing cowboys and Indians, kids now spend most of their time in front of the television or playing video games. When they go to the movies, they stuff themselves with pop-corn.