About Obesity

The meaning of the word has changed some since The Affordable Care Act passed. Now we adopted the British scale or the way they calculate Obesity. They use the BMI Method. By calculating your Body Mass Index, it tells doctors your percentage of body fat. So if your BMI is 30 or more you are now Obese. If your number is between 25 and 30 you're considered to be overweight and if you're less than that your normal. You should know your number. You can find out by using the BMI Calculators that are free on fitness websites like WebMD.com

So Is it our fault we're overweight, or not. I think it’s a little of both. Some of this we can’t help, but some of the fault is ours because we haven’t been keeping pace with the times. The world has been changing right before our eyes. The food industry has made the biggest change next to medicine. Most of our food today is processed. What does that mean? Manufacturers are in the food industry today and they’re making big money. Back in the 1950’s and 60’s we bought food from a grocery store in the neighborhood, you bought meat from a butcher and we could buy fruit and vegetables from a produce stand.  We could do all of this even in the big cities.

Today, your food comes from all around the world. Many of the foods are genetically altered to make the product more resistant to drought, more resistant to insects and altered to grow faster so It can get to market quicker. All of these changes will allow the grower to grow more product each year and make more money. So, why is that bad?

Humans have found out the hard way that processed foods aren’t very good for us. We have more cases of cancer, more obesity and we don’t get the same nutrition that we would get from locally farmed products. That’s one reason you see the organic produce in the stores today. Yes, they make more money from the organic foods, but people are demanding organic produce. We want produce that was grown without chemicals sprayed on them. Small organic farmers don’t make enough money to afford pesticides and fertilizers.  

So when you look at the changes in the last 40 to 50 years, for humans, they’ve been rather dramatic. In the sense that obesity and being overweight was not nearly the problem it is now. I mean, our rate has literally doubled. That’s a huge change. So, what happens? Number one would be, our genetics were set up for a life where one, we had to move a lot more, and two, there weren’t near as many calories, salt and sugar in our foods.

 We didn’t have this constant intake of calories. And so fast-forward now, 2016, what’s different? Ok, one is, calories are everywhere. Two, you take a bite of something, there’s many more calories per bite. And three is, our portion sizing is much, much larger. And we have data to show that.

The average man and the average woman, eat clearly twice the calories per day than, say, 50 years ago. So this is a tough one and the problem is, our genetics really were set up for people who were much more active. Today, we work more with our minds than with our bodies. In other words, we have millions and billions of bacteria in our intestines that actually have genetics, to try and hang onto calories and put them into the human body as well. 

Today’s human eats much more and has much more food available then people did 50 years ago. I was growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s and if I wanted a snack after school, my mother told me to get a piece of fruit. We always had apples in the house. Today, I still keep a bowl of fruit. Apples, pears or oranges and bananas.

As consumers, if we want to stay healthy, be a normal weight and avoid a lot of health problems that being overweight causes, then we have to pay more attention to the food we eat and the amount of food we eat.

People today just go along to get along and spend most of the time on remote. They go through their daily routine without giving much thought to what going on around them. They go through life eating and drinking whatever they want regardless of the harm they might be doing to their body. 

If we want to be healthy and fit we have to pay attention to your bodies need.

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