Obesity continues to skyrocket in the United States, according to a new CDC report on the prevalence of severe diabetes. The number of women with the condition is increasing at a faster rate than men; women are nearly twice as likely to be severely obese. Extreme obesity has been connected to numerous dangerous health conditions. The rise of the condition in America can be traced to the 1990s – and, according to the CDC, there has been almost a 25% increase over the last decade.
America’s Obesity Epidemic
In recent years, Americans have witnessed a concurrent phenomenon of embracing obesity as beautiful, praiseworthy, or even desirable. Criticizing people for being overweight is condemned as “fat shaming” by “fatphobic” people who oppress marginalized overweight citizens. Doctors must be cautious in addressing weight issues lest their patients erupt in irate defensiveness. This attitude is compounding an epidemic far more deadly than COVID-19.
Americans are being engorged with cheap, subsidized, ultra-processed foods. High fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats are essentially waste products converted to dining options using flavorings and appetite stimulators. The obesity rate for America now stands at 40%: Japan’s is approximately one-tenth of that rate. Are the Japanese fat-phobic, and are there lessons Americans can learn from their culture and diet?
The increase in consumption of processed foods has accompanied a rather sharp drop-off in the popularity of physical exercise in America, itself a politically contentious issue: left-wing ideology condemns active gymgoers as oppressors of those marginalized by their weight or body type. Fat people are not grotesquely obese, to be relegated to circus acts (as society would have judged a century ago). They are to be celebrated for their inner beauty and encouraged to take pride in their ill health “identity.”
Cultural Corpulence?
A culture that condemns bench pressing as oppressive but praises climbing onto a scale as virtuous seeds sickness in the very people it claims to be championing. Obese Americans are the victims of their health struggles, aggravated by an adversarial food system that they must view with suspicion if they are to overcome, more often than not reinforced by government regulatory agencies captured by Big Ag and Big Food.
A 2022 study of Japanese obesity rates reveals the cultural contrast with America:
“The worldwide prevalence of adult overweight and obesity has been rising, and high body mass index (BMI) is considered to be one of the leading risk factors in the global burden of noncommunicable disease. Japan has some of the lowest mean BMI values among high-income and industrialized countries, as well as one of the highest life expectancies at birth in the world.”
The CDC is not big on promoting exercise when Big Pharma offers a pill. Children in the United States are being provided stomach-reduction surgeries and new drugs (replete with dangerous side effects) as a “cure” for the epidemic of sickness associated with obesity. The fact that American women are dramatically more at risk of obesity than men should lead the social justice headlines. And if more black people are overweight, isn’t that disparity immediately laid at the feet of systemic racism?
If women and people of color wish to slim down, they will have to climb aboard a treadmill, choose healthier eating options, or eat less – just like anyone else. These are universal laws of nature and human biology. Others can be blamed for inequitable outcomes, but only individual behaviors (once called merit) can improve people’s plight. No amount of reparations or other monetary transfers can supply an education, job competence, or slender physique.
Safe Spaces for Healthy Foods
The CDC report speculates that US obesity rates would be even higher without the salvific exercise-and-diet-replacement drugs:
“This new data highlight the need for obesity prevention and treatment options, which start with building healthier communities where people of all ages have safe places for physical activity, and where health care and healthy food options are accessible and affordable for all,” Karen Hacker, MD, MPH, director of CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. . . .
“According to Dr. Samuel Emmerich, a CDC public health officer who led the study, it’s still too early to tell if new obesity treatments, including popular weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, will have a meaningful impact on the epidemic. The chronic disease remains tied to a range of serious health issues, and more time is needed to determine whether these drugs can help slow its spread.”
Is this really what Americans need, though – more drugs? The Japan study concluded:
“Our findings and implications are relevant to global public health policies for the prevention of obesity. The prevalence of overweight and obesity among OECD countries in 2019 was lowest at 27% in Japan, followed by 34% in South Korea, while it exceeded 70% in Chile, Mexico, and the United States. The prevalence of overweight and obesity has been rising in all OECD countries, especially it has increased by 15% or more between 2009 and 2019 in Chile, Mexico, and Turkey.”
America, the leader of the free world, is now also the world leader in sickness caused by obesity. Crafting drugs to enable people to continue gorging on toxified foods is a devil’s bargain – perhaps the CDC should instead coordinate with the FDA to prohibit chemical additives that switch off the body’s natural appetite control mechanisms to make people eat after they are full. New cancer, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, and diabetes drugs are also being frantically fashioned in corporate laboratories to rescue America’s children from the food additives and chemical pesticides (created in corporate laboratories) with which their school lunches and even their mothers’ milk have been laced.
There is a reason why Americans are being sickened and killed by obesity – but it isn’t thin people who eat conscientiously and exercise regularly.
