Engaging Multiple Arenas, Public and Personal, Will More Effectively Fight Obesity
For the first time in human history in the year 2000 more of us became overweight or obese than were underweight (Caballero, 2007). Today if any one of us in the developed world lives the life served up by the dominant culture we will sooner or later become overweight and inexorably creep, over time, to obesity. This is because the teetering balance between the food energy we ingest and the physical energy we use up has in the last forty years come crashing down on the side of excess food energy. We evolved to eat primarily edible leaves, tubers, scarce fruits and grains, and even scarcer meats and fishes while our lifestyle traditionally required so much walking, carrying, and hand labor that all but the most wealthy and gluttonous of us were perpetually lean. Those who observe our world’s food supply note that we produce enough calories worldwide to feed us more than two times over. And these calories are not evenly distributed among the world’s peoples. The majority of these excess ...