Diets and Obesity
The diet of 2007 is Wu-Long slimming tea. Oprah swears by…. Whoops! That was an ad. When it comes to diet, it’s best to know what not to do. All diets work to some degree. Some, though, can kill you, and most will not work because of you. These advertisements try to sound as medically sanctioned as possible, tossing in very fine print Food and Drug Administration references to exhibit an aura of respectability.
It is said that 75% of those in the U.S. are concerned about be
ing overweight. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, written by Greg Citser, was published in 2003. From 1976 to 1991 fatness increased by 31%, then another 24% between 1994 and 2000. Lost productivity amounting to $75 billion per year has been shown. Worse, this trend is continuing, and being overweight is said to be our second leading preventable cause of death, responsible for as much as 365,000 casualties each year.
Yet, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) changed their earlier position and reported in 2004 that packing on the pounds can only account for less than 10% that figure. Here we go again, the medical profession reversing itself. Then, in 2007 CDCP, really did it, as they described some advantages for being overweight. While being fat increases risks associated with diabetes and kidney diseases, being slightly overweight does not affect cancer and heart disease. In fact some extra pounds protect the body from DEATH.
There is something called the Body Mass Index (BMI), where an obese person is classified as anything over 30, and overweight is from 25 to 30. The example provided is that a 5-foot-4 woman is overweight at 145 pounds and obese at 175. Whew, I’m male, but 160 pounds and about 5-ft-9, placing me with a BMI in the 23 to 24 category, definitely, then, NOT overweight. I can now stop trying to lose weight and enjoy life a lot more. A 5-ft-9 male becomes obese at 200 pounds. Obese is not good.
How to calculate your personal BMI? Easy:
o Weigh yourself in kilograms (or pounds divided by 2.2)
160 pounds / 2.2 = 72.7
o Measure your height in meters (or inches divided by 39.37)
69 inches / 39.37 = 1.75
o Calculate your BMI, which equals your weight (kg) divided by height (m), and, again, divided by height (m)
72.7 / 1.75 / 1.75 = 23.7
In any case, contrary to popular opinion, Americans are NOT the fattest people on Earth. (The following is from the book itself. This is a newer reference indicating that Nauru is the worst and tshe USA is #9.) Qatar, with 45.3% of all women being obese and 34.6% of men ranks as #1. Lebanon, with 36.3% men (38.3% women) is next worst, and the U.S. is #5 for males (27.7%) and #8 for females (34%).368 People in the Middle East appear to be the fattest. Here, I thought Muslims had a sparse and healthy diet. Some stewed sheep, dates, water. Not so in this global economy. In another part of the world, 13.8% of males in Mongolia are considered to be obese. Yes, there are fat people there, too. So eating less is probably good, but being subsequently skinny is not.
Eating just normally, apparently, might not be optimal, as rats on a subsistence diet have been shown to live 30% longer than those free to eat at will. So do skinny people live longer? Well, vaguely yes, except that being underweight could well pose an even greater risk as you age. Osteoporosis (disease of the bone), for example, can be controlled by body fat. For those 55 and older, an extra 5 to 10 pounds actually improve your chances for a longer life.
There must be a contagious obesity virus in fat countries, as there is at least one medical study showing that adenovirus-36 does tend to infect fat people. Whether this true or not, the chances are that genetics, lifestyle, attitude and other factors weigh more heavily. The bottom line is that if you don’t smoke and are healthy, being really fat is bad for your longevity, but being slightly overweight might not be all that bad, especially as you get older.
Finally, can you help control your weight by sleeping more? At first glance, you might wonder if this is also some kind of joke, for sleeping is the most sedentary of all activities. But, yes, obesity is linked to lack of sleep. Children sleeping 10 hours/night were 3.5 times more apt to become obese than those who slept 12 hours/night.16 Go to these references and read about the leptins and ghrelins, for me, I noticed that when I went to sleep later, I tended to get hungry and had a snack.
The body weight of a person is a simple matter of energy/mass balance. If you eat more caloric food and exercise less, you will get fat and probably be unhealthier. Like most things in life, you need to strike that proper and enjoyable balance. A very simple solution for anyone with diet on your mind is to just remember that cutting 150 calories per day, like a can of soda everyday, can result in 2 pounds less of you by the end of the year. In ten years, you should be 20 pounds lighter, unless you’ve then reached the age of 55, when you might want to think about increasing your weight. Stay tuned to any changes to the current medical belief that older people should be a little overweight, plus the advent of those anti-obesity pills (three are already on the market).
The above was a continuation of Chapter 2 from SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity.
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The Dow Jones Industrials went up 91 to 8529 and world markets all went up. Crude oil surged up and is getting close to $73/barrel, while gold dropped a buck to $939/toz.
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I guess that disturbance around the Yucatan Peninsula disappeared. But the ocean looks warm in the Gulf of Mexico and off Mexico.
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