Tuesday, February 28, 2006
90% of US men over 60 now overweight
As the title link says, if you're over 60 and male, it's almost guaranteed you're overweight. The article goes on further to state that the average body mass index for women is 30 -- which means obese, and that's at all age groups. For men, 65% of folks over 20 years old are overweight (yours truly included) with 30% being obese. With modern health advances, we could lead happy productive lives until 80 on average, but with the weight problem besieging America, it's likely we'll spend our declining years miserable, sweaty and tired, with all the advances that medicine should be making being tied up in research for care of chronic conditions that we could wholly avoid. It's great that we've gotten a civilization in which the common man or woman can be so well fed relative to his or her exertions that obesity is common, but just because we can be so doesn't mean any of us want to be so. With more and more of our exertions being mental in nature rather than physical, what are we as a whole to do? We can try to get more exercise, which's realistic for those of us who enjoy some sort of sport, or who work as dishwashers (now that's exercise!), but for the rest of us, maybe the solution is poorer, less caloric food. We can put out incredibly calorly-laden food for cheap; if you haul sacks for a living, you should eat the double-cheeseburger and enjoy the high calorie to dollar ratio, but for us desk jockeys, perhaps the irony is that we should be paying more for less.
7 comments:
It is ironic that eating healthy food that tastes like crap (comparatively) is so much more expensive..
Keep in mind, however, that the government statistics on obesity are based upon the badly flawed (imho and that of some nutritionists) body-mass-index (BMI) calculation. The flaw in the BMI is that it does not make any differentiation between muscle pounds and fat pounds.
Thus, under the BMI, Tom Cruise who is 5'9", 200 lbs of almost pure muscle is considered 'obese' while a 5'9" blubberball at 150 without a drop of muscle on him (I know a few) is considered to be just fine.
True, but I suspect that BMI reflects the body compositions of most of us pretty well; we're an increasingly sendentary nation.
Actually, it's not necessarily more expensive, if you're willing to learn to cook. Salmon is four bucks a pound here at the Vietnamese market. That's not cheap. But that, some spinach, and some rice, with a nice garlic sauce, will feed us for two meals on much less than a fast-food place would charge us. Which screws me if I wind up single again, but still.
Jim, I'm having this out with Anna right now. Not openly, but as a habits thing. I'm not completely sedentary, but as long as I drive a desk, I can't eat like she does w/o getting fat. It's made even worse by all the feldenkrais -- I'm no ballerina, but I move efficiently enough that I'm pretty sure I don't need as many calories as most guys with my stats would. I can, otoh, go for long stretches of time w/o being bothered by not eating. Anna's one of those gals who needs to graze. So I've basically started simply fasting on non-workout days, eating maybe an orange or something during the day. So "just an orange" for lunch turns into Anna putting more food into the bag, b/c I think she has a hard time at the deep, gut level that she's letting her man starve...
(not YOU being willing to cook. I'm sure you can cook hexagons around me...)
I may be able to cook hexagons around you, or at least squares. :) Maddie & I are on the same page w/ the cooking, and are adjusting to much more peasant-like fare. She's totally unable to appreciate salmon, or in fact any fish that isn't a cod fillet (BOOOORING!); I baked a trout Sunday while she was away, so she wouldn't have to see that it had a head, but the cats loved it. At work, I just nuke a little rice and call it that, but what's really good is Maddie's figured out how to make real honest-to-goodness oat bars -- a little of that goes a long way.
You bake trout, that's enough to outclass me...
Yeah, but it's the only thing I bake, and I only know one way to do it. I may run squares or hexagons around you, but I do not run circles.
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