Willravel

I dunno. TFP is good at squeezing good conversations out of loopy articles.
I'm not suggesting everyone has the same access to the same food, only that regardless of income and geography, at least in the US, you do have access to at least some healthy options. It's simply a matter of choosing these options on a regular basis.

And exercise, which every able-bodied person has access to.
But again I have to ask, can you demonstrate this? Can you demonstrate that there are areas that simply offer absolutely no healthy solutions for food? Even in some of the poorest places in the US, like Detroit, you can still get plenty of canned and frozen produce. Anything from spinach to peas to pears to raspberries, all rich in nutrients and low in harmful stuff like saturated fats and over processed sweeteners.
If you're talking about the unhealthy foods industrial complex, you're right, it is a global problem, but so far as solutions go, most people have the option of skipping the fried crisps and going with a carrot.
Wouldn't it make sense to tackle the main causes of obesity first and then move on to more minor causes? You yourself said that the main causes of obesity are simple, quoting the WHO:
These are the big ones. These are your main contenders for the cause of obesity, whether just in the US or even globally. Knock these out, get people eating healthier foods and moving around more, and then we can move on to the other, more complex, less central causes.

roachboy

the article i posted earlier is quite good on the relations between the supermarket model (which it defines) and the first of the who's claims as to cause. if you have a chance, read that. it makes the case i am making better than i can--and points to the main solution--which is a wholesale reorientation of how food is produced and the systems of distribution. i think it's entirely doable, but until that's taken seriously as a problem, obesity and it's related health issues are not going to stop and telling people to exercise isn't going to mean a whole lot.

the second problem is also far bigger than how folk choose to organize their leisure time. think about it.

i think you're flipping major/minor around to keep your earlier arguments consistent with the position you're arguing now--which is fine i suppose. but there are the relatively superficial things one can address--and you seem to be arguing like jack lalane on this matter. but he did alot of television and told folk to exercise for many years, yet obesity rates continued to rise. so say what you're saying all you want--hector your friends---live by them. hell, i like to bike and i don't eat processed foods. but that won't do anything significant to address obesity as a problem, particularly not given the scale of it.

structures. no way around them.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

guyy

I was in Japan regularly and in years-at-a-time stretches from 1968 to 2003. I was a student there and i taught in Japanese schools. I have a pretty good idea of what's happening there. But you can always look at the stats if you don't believe me.

The trends are:

More cars, more streets
Fewer open spaces
Even more TV
Home computers & computer gaming
More wheat
More sugar
More fats
More meat
Less variety in veggies
More processed foods

Willravel

I agree that the system by which we create and distribute food isn't working well, but that doesn't address the fact that regardless of income or location you likely have access to healthy food. It's probably surrounded by crap, sure, but that doesn't mean you don't have access. I would argue that everyone in the US has access to healthy food, in fact, and most of the developed world, and even a great deal of the third world. Again, specifically, where do people not have access to any healthy foods?
It's really not. When I was in college, I worked two jobs and went to school full time and I still managed to find time to exercise. I dare you to find someone that doesn't have 30 minutes a day to spare.
I don't remember ever saying anything but diet and exercise, but that's not important.
I'm not arguing that telling people to diet and exercise is necessarily the best solution, but certainly a lack of proper diet and exercise are the main causes. And considering the fact that each of these main causes can, in the lion's share of cases, be remedied by slightly different choices at the supermarket and maybe walking or running a few times a week speaks in volumes about the situation.

If we're going to delve into solutions, then the discussion should probably go to education. That, though, may be enough of a tangent to require another thread.

JumpinJesus

While there is a lack of education, an overabundance of advertising and processed foods, I still am not sure who is forcing obese people to eat unhealthy foods and who is preventing them from exercising.

Can anyone help me understand that?

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

Plan9

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Baraka_Guru

No one's forcing them to do anything.

Environment, culture, and psychology. Mix them together and look what you get.

Foods that are bad for us are desirable, abundant, convenient, popular, and cheap (and taste pretty damn good). While I do believe that we are each ultimately responsible for our personal health, there are clearly those out there who are either ambivalent about the whole thing or are affected by a number of factors that have brought them to a particular situation related to their health.

The problem that many of us who aren't in that situation face is that it's too easy to oversimplify things. It's not as easy as saying, "Stop eating unhealthy foods; start exercising."

I hinted at this earlier in the thread. We don't get far by simply telling the depressive to cheer up or the alcoholic to stop drinking. Of course that's what they probably should do, but it's not that easy. All of these problems have a number of factors that make each situation what they are. Much of it is tied to environment, culture, and psychology.

If obesity had such a simple solution, it would have been solved by now.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

raeanna74

Ah, but my problem isn't so much that they're fat but that they're doing nothing to aleviate it, they don't work, and YET they still mooch off the state to remodel their house... it's not that they ARE fat, it's that they are fat and do NOTHING about it. Its that they are fat and are LAZY too. It's that they are fat and complain that they don't have energy to walk the dog. They have no right to complain about the state of their home or health of their body because they are doing absolutely nothing to improve themselves in any way on their own.

It's the complaining and laziness, not so much the state of obesity that bothers me and I'm guessing most everyone else who complains about obese people.

__________________
"Always learn the rules so that you can break them properly." Dalai Lama
My Karma just ran over your Dogma.

mixedmedia

Does everyone understand how universal this question is?

I have a lot of questions about people and how and why they behave the way they do. Being fat isn't one of them.
-----Added 29/1/2009 at 10 : 53 : 32-----
But not all obese people are like this. And many non-obese people are. Therefore it is very unfair and misleading to use this account as a condemnation of fat people. Right?

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce