A frequent comment from my European and Asian friends is surprise at how many overweight people they see in the USA, and how overweight those people are.
If you search on YouTube, you’ll find a bunch of videos explaining “the one reason” why Americans are so overweight (and why there’s such an epidemic of diabetes in the country). However, none of these videos are right, because there’s really about four reasons, two of which are more important.
- Extensive poisoning of the food supply
- Frequent eating
- Portion sizes
- Less walking
Extensive Poisoning of the Food Supply
You can find about a hundred thousand videos on YouTube with titles like “This difference between European food and American food with shock you!” One will talk about differences in farming. Another will talk about high fructose corn syrup. Others will talk about sugar, what people eat at meals, how people prepare food, etc. The problem is basically all of these things. For some reason (that I do not fully understand) the USA has extensively poisoned its food supply from production, to processing, and even to packaging. It’s provided pots and pans that will poison you if you cook in them. It’s made it super convenient and very cheap to eat foods that will slowly kill you over time, or at the least, mess up your hormones and lots of other systems in your body. It provides no education to its children about how or what to eat, and leaves that all up to junk food advertisements, apparently.
Some of the poisonous components of the food are addictive, too, so you get all the behavior of addiction thrown in, to boot.
This is, by far, the most important contributor to the obesity and diabetes epidemic in the USA. People will, in general, do whatever is most convenient for them, when given no other education on a subject. We’ve made it super convenient to poison yourself through food. In fact, doing otherwise is very hard and surprisingly expensive. You have to be quite wealthy just to eat safe food, in the USA.
Frequent Eating
There are things that happen in your body every time you eat, pretty much regardless of how much you eat. Tens of thousands of years of evolution did not prepare human bodies to eat many times a day. Actually, quite the opposite. There’s a lot to know, here, but you can look it up online.
Americans seem to snack a lot and don’t really think twice about it. They’ll just casually eat between meals, multiple times a day, every day.
Portion Sizes
Every European friend I have ever had (and I mean every single one) comments to me about how large servings are at restaurants here in the USA compared to Europe. It’s even crazier if you think about the total amount of food eaten in a single restaurant meal, counting appetizers, the main meal, and possibly dessert.
Less Walking
My friends who visit Europe often comment to me how much they walked while they were there. True, they are being tourists and generally walking more than they usually do. However, a common complaint from my European or Japanese friends is that public transportation in the USA is so much worse than it is in Europe or Japan. Everybody has their own car in the USA, so you tend to drive from your house directly to where you’re going. The USA is a bit more spread out in general (because everybody has a car, so things don’t have to be close together) so it’s less likely that you can frequently walk places.
I don’t have extensive evidence to back this one up; it’s more of a casual observation.
Overall
One of the things I’ve discovered in my life is that when you can’t discover the cause of something, it’s often because there are many causes. When you’re looking for “the one answer” sometimes you never find it, because there isn’t just one answer. I’m pretty sure this is the case for America’s obesity epidemic, too.
Max Kanat-Alexander 