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The obesity rate in the U.S. is continuing to rise (slowly, off the couch):
The new measure of the nation's weight problem, released early Friday by statisticians from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronicles dramatic increases from the nation's obesity levels since the turn of the 21st century.
Adult obesity rates have climbed steadily from a rate of 30.5% in 1999-2000 to 39.8% in 2015-2016, the most recent period for which data were available. That represents a 30% increase. Childrens' rates of obesity have risen roughly 34% in the same period, from 13.9% in 1999-2000 to 18% in 2015-2016.
Seen against a more distant backdrop, the new figures show an even starker pattern of national weight-gain over a generation. In the period between 1976 and 1980, the same national survey found that roughly 15% of adults and just 5.5% of children qualified as obese. In the time that's elapsed since "Saturday Night Fever" was playing in movie theaters and Ronald Reagan won the presidency, rates of obesity in the United States have nearly tripled.
The new report, from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, measures obesity according to body mass index. This is a rough measure of fatness that takes a person's weight (measured in kilograms) and divides it by their height (measured in meters) squared. For adults, those with a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 are considered to have a "normal" weight. A BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight, and anything above 30 is deemed obese. (You can calculate yours here.)
Obesity rates for children and teens are based on CDC growth charts that use a baseline period between 1963 and 1994. Those with a BMI above the 85th percentile are considered overweight, and those above the 95th percentile are considered obese.
70.7% of Americans are overweight or obese, according to the CDC's data for 2015-2016.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development expects the U.S. obesity rate to reach 47% in 2030.
Related: Obesity Surges to 13.6% in Ghana
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:14PM (5 children)
I grew up in a culture of self-reliance, so the learned helplessness that produces this kind of obesity boggles my mind. I've lived most of my adult life in places where people have that helpless mentality, but it remains alien to me.
If I were that destitute, I'd pick up my fishing pole and head down to the water to catch dinner. I'd grow what I could in window boxes and forage in parks and adjacent undeveloped parcels. Even in NYC you can do that, and that's without even having a share in a community garden. I forage now to keep my hand in and to pass it down as a practice to my kids.
Being able to find/grow/catch your own food is a fundamental human skill. It's the bedrock of personal freedom, too, because without it you're always going to be a slave to someone or something else in order to live.
Now, if you know how to do those things and buy food at the grocery store for convenience, that's different, because it's a choice you're freely making, not one that's forced on you.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:11PM (1 child)
What gets me is it's a chosen slavery because the skills aren't difficult or expensive to acquire. The Internet or your local library are happy to educate you for free.
Now, I'll grant you that I've spent quite a lot of money on fishing gear but I also know that if there's an old person out near me with a cane pole, they're going to make me question whether the $350 I spent on one reel was worth it when they're catching more fish than me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:32PM
And that's if you're playng fair. If you really want to catch fish as an actual food source, a weir or fish trap is easily constructable from available materials and will greatly increase your chances.
Same thing when it comes to birds. A person unafraid of social judgement could live off of pigeons forever.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 17 2017, @09:30PM (2 children)
<chuckle>
The subsurbian hunter gatherer/subsistence farmer, with two kids and a mortgaged house, working two jobs to barely stay afloat and eating junk food in her/his way from one job to the other.
Are you serious proposing subsistence farming in public parks for, say, all the homeless persons in California city, that city that denied its homeless people the use of 3 portaloos [soylentnews.org]? 'Cause they don't have windows to grow something in their "window boxes" (this is where the"mortgaged house" comes into the picture).
But you don't survive exclusively from foraging, do you? In fact, it's more like a hobby, right?
Do you believe you could do it at survival level?
Here's a story for your leisure time about one man in Sydney that sampled this for a year [abc.net.au].
Imagine what it would be like if only about 100 people will compete for the same foraging grounds before proposing this as a solution for the "poverty induced obesity" problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 18 2017, @12:11AM (1 child)
Try a little history [wikipedia.org] if you are certain it can't be done. Try a little research [youtube.com] if you're sure it can't be done. Ask TMB if it's possible to get your protein by catching fish. Ask anyone who hunts what they do with their kills.
You're scoffing because you don't do it or perhaps don't know anyone who does it. But many people do.
To answer your other question, foraging is a hobby for me here. I have never lived from it exclusively for extended periods of time. Growing up in the Rockies my cousins and i would go camping for a week with a day's worth of food and live on what we could forage, catch, and trap. It was fun for us. So i'm fairly confident i could do it for survival if i had to. That's without going all SERE school, too. Here in NYC the options would be less appetizing initially but they would be plentiful. There are millions of pigeons and millions of rats that would serve, and also a really big body of water full of fish nearby called the Atlantic ocean.
I do fish a lot in that ocean. I catch and eat sea robbins a lot. There's no limit and their meat tastes like catfish. New yorkers scorn them because it's a poor people fish. But the latinos, chinese, and russians are right with me.
In the summertime my garden keeps us in vegetables, and that's with only 20% of the yard. I could use more area and can the surplus for winter if i wanted to, the way my family did when i was a kid.
So your hypothetical two-job guy couldn't find the time to do all that, you suppose? I bet he still blows his entire sunday watching football and his evenings zoning out to netflix. If he chose to, he could instead use that time gardening, fishing, hunting, foraging. He could make his kids take up some of that burden instead of wasting time on social media. Other people in less pampered parts of the country do that and have always had to do that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday October 18 2017, @01:26AM
First at all, I'm not scoffing at all. It just happens I did and do it and know the reality (including the limitations) of doing it
Yes, it can be done...
I grew in an East European country and I remember very well my grandparents doing it with manual tools and using buckets for watering. It is done even now [blogspot.com.au]... if you have all the time required to do it.
Yes, there will be plenty of time to rest and enjoy your life (if everything else is paid for or in your ownership), but if you want that plot to be your exclusive your substance source, that work will be your first priority - it take only 2-3 days to neglect your subsistence crop for it to fail during hot days and you'll be starving the next winter.
I'm having a veggie patch in my backyard. It is good as a supplement with fresh veggies (it's more than good, it's delicious), but it alone cannot feed an entire family exclusively on that.
Even more, it can't be done without cooperation/produce exchange - when the crop is ready, you'll have plenty of ... say... fresh tomatoes, which won't last past 2-3 weeks time; more than you can eat for a balanced diet.
I'm simply giving them away to neighbors - it was 15 kilos of cherry tomatoes last year; since the neighbours are not doing it (well, it's either the veggie patch or the swimming pool for the kids), I get nothing in return - a good thing I don't expect eggs and chooks from them for my living.
Last year I had 4 weeks of eating zucchinis to saturation and beyond - those two plants were producing like crazy - this year I didn't put any in, only the thought of eating zucchini again... (shudders)... it's too soon.
---
Add-on subsistence is possible if you can afford it, but for sure, exclusive subsistence cannot be done:
a. when running one or two jobs that is/are barely enough to pay the mortgage and utilities (not enough time); *or*
b. when you don't own your plot of land and don't have at least water to keep you garden living (e.g. being homeless)l; *or*
c. on a limited surface like you 200 sqm backyard veggie patch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford