Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Who To Blame for Obesity (the one-paragraph rant that would give my EL11 professor a stroke, or at least cause to bemusedly furrow his brow)

Yeah, I used to be all about blaming the fat people, but as long as we force kids to sit in one place all day doing things they hate for most of their childhood while stuffing them sweeties and soda (I mean, we got fucking frosted flakes and chocolate milk in my class when i was in 5th grade through the subsidized brekky program!!!), guess what, oops, they end up fat a lot of the time. so many factrors at work here... the companies that sell fatty and sugary foods get so much advertising time, have the most powerful lobbyists...people at the most risk of having a diet heavy in that stuff (the poor) don't get to hear from their physicians (much less nutritionists) often enough bc there's no universal healthcare...FOOTBALL is the most popular varsity sport among high school males, and that ENCOURAGES most of them to put on dozens of pounds each summer so they can push other kids around come fall (ultimate anyone?). And the kicker is that being a little overweight apparently DOES make you live longer, it's just the obesity that kills ya with heart disease and everything, but many of those of us who want to change this (myself included) have masochistic, puritanical ideals about absolutely staying at or below a healthy weight being the only way to be truly healthy. The encouraging thing is that most of the people I know and love who think about this issue have helped others in their own way, on an individual level, and that's where the change has to start.

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