Percent of Obese (BMI > 30) in U.S. Adults
What a difference 20 years makes. These two charts (from the CDC) show obesity rates in 1989 and in 2009. Not shown are the increases in obesity associated diseases. The change in 20 years is rather significant, don't you think?
Why a post about the growth in obesity rates? This blog is about making the most of your 750,000 Hours. It's tough to make the most of those hours if you're too heavy to be active or ill. Our healthcare system is enabling us to have a lifetime that is 20 to 50 years longer than our ancestors', but where is the value in that if you're housebound or confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home - 20 years of that doesn't sound much like an ideal lifestyle or personal paradise - it doesn't even sound like living to me. So for those wanting to make the most of their 750,000 Hours, taking care of one's health and even more importantly preventing disease all that much more important.
I do pay a lot of attention to health and doing the things that will keep us in the condition necessary to enjoy this lifestyle we've chosen. We've spent a lot of time learning to cook and eat well, understanding what nutrients we're getting and what we need, and the impact of being more active. Steve has lost 60 pounds and I've lost 20 so the approach is working. A big aspect of this knowing what we're putting in our mouths and being really, really careful about what we choose - our choice is gourmet and as close to nature as possible.
One of the things that we're really careful about is sugar. No sugar goes into what we cook or what we eat unless we absolutely cannot avoid it (using a bit of sugar to activate yeast in bread making, for example). That is not to say we never eat sugar or sweets, but we want to choose when we eat sugar rather than having the choice taken away from us by a manufacturer or restaurant adding sugar in all our foods. By chosing when we eat sweets and not including sugar in foods which are not sweet, our taste for sweets is greatly reduced and our ability to detect added sugar in foods is greatly increased.
Since we've come ashore here in Florida, we've noticed sugar in almost everything we've ordered at restaurants - and not just a little sugar, but enough to make things sickly sweet. Bread is sweet. Sauces are sweet. Cocktails are sweet, sweet, sweet! I ordered a frozen lemonade cocktail yesterday that had teaspoons of sugar in it, it was frozen liquid sugar. It was too sweet to even drink, I sent it back.
When I provisioned the boat for our trip, it took me hours in the grocery store because I kept finding sugar or added sweeteners in the ingredients lists. I don't want sugar in savory foods!
If there is this constant ingestion of sugar, before one even gets to dessert, what impact is that having on obesity and on health? We're tasting sweetness everywhere, whether it is labeled as sweet, having sugar or is hidden in the ingredients list (or not!). It's unnecessary and it's having a big impact on people's health - the health you need to have a great 750,000 Hours rather than a really long, boring wait for death.
Steve always says, "If it didn't come out of the ground and it wasn't running around, don't eat it." I think we'll stick with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment