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[falconcy]

I suspect it may be due to the addition of flavor enhancers, chemical preservatives and the addition of hormones into animals to make them fatter. Think about the hormone thing, if it makes an animal fatter, what would happen further up the food chain when that animal was ingested by someone? This is something that has been going on for a long time, though likely the effect would be more pronounced from the 80's onwards.

[Ann H]

I'm totally with Frenata on this one. I think it is a regular old ugly epidemic caused by some bug or something, and folks are so blinded by the "we're eating junk/too much food/not exercising enough/lazy slobs" thinking to really figure out what's up.

Clealy, I agree that eating junk/too much food/not exerrcising makes things worse, but I think it's manifestly a stupid infectious agent or some other thing that screws up the digestion/metabolism of affected folks, making us ridiculously susceptible to weight gain. Exactly as Frenata has pointed out, all those folks before us ate CRAP food, and "too much" of it, and "didn't exercise enough", yet stayed reasonably slim, or could lose weight with a modicum of effort.

I for one haven't eaten junk food in years. (How'd I manage that? I left the States at the beginning of the Bush administration. (Not related to that: that's just how I remembewr when I left.)) I eat healthy home-cooked, mostly vegetarian, predominately VEGGIES, tofu, etc. I lift hella weights. I am still fatter and heavier than I was 6 years ago, and in "obese" territory. SLD definitely helps, but it is a slow go for me.

You should see what happens to me on my yearly trips back to the States. I eat out a bit with my folks; I have a coupla slices of cheesecake over the visit; I gain TEN PLUS POUNDS in one month!! Even here if I eat restaurant food ONE NIGHT I will gain pounds.

Meanwhile, my skinny hubby eats crap and remains skinny. He eats that restaurant food many times a week. He also does not exercise or lift weights.

Anyway, what to do. Keep getting fatter or fight it with whatever helps our whole lives until a real understanding and cure is found. Sigh...

[K-Mac]

I think it's a combination of things.  Like Seth says, eating at home is more healthful because you prepare foods slightly different each time.  But with more and more women in the work force, who wants to cook when they get home?  So more and more of us started eating out.  (And starting in the 70s, you had a lot more single moms too...now mom's really tired and worn out after work and has screaming kids to feed...just grab a bucket of KFC on the way home, or order a pizza...let mom rest before she has to wake up in the AM and do it all over again.)  Then, as Seth also mentions in the book, fast food joints started popping up on every corner between the 80s and mid-90s.  More ditto foods for our busy lifestyle.  Then blue collar jobs started moving out of this country.  Now you've got a bunch of busy, ditto food eaters sitting around desks and computers all day rather than doing physical labor.  That's what did it for me.  When I was 21 years old, and went from being a waitress to a desk person, the weight just started packing on.  Then as my income increased and would allow for it, my husband and I were eating out 3, 4, 5 times per week.  I think it's cultural differences, prosperity, and too many restaurant choices.  From what I can tell from my friends and family, I think it will slowly get better.  People are starting to realize that our sedentary lifestyles and poor food choices are having ill effects and more and more people are wanting to do something about their weight, eventually.  And, amazingly, life expectancies in this country are still on the rise, so even tough we're fatter, overall, we must be healthier than we were 50 years ago, or we'd be dying at the same time or sooner, right?  Oh well, at least w/ SLD, I won't need the jumbo casket!   

[lvivianka]

high fructose corn syrup is in almost everything, even yogurt. check your labels. it makes people want to eat more and it adds on pounds. it probably is in baked foods where we do not get to see a label. trans fats added to the problem

[shinju_chan]

I`m not surprised in any way by the obesity in the country.  In fact, it`s sadly comical to me to see people wonder "why? how on earth can this be happening?" as they eat another cookie.

Yes, but once again -- I feel like a stuck record here -- what changed? I am astounded by obesity in the States. We ate HELLA junk food when I was a kid. We went to diners were the food was heaped on plates and shiny with bacon grease. And we were thin. Americans did not become the world's famously fat people until the middle 1980s.

And if you think people exercised in any way, shape or form or ate the least little bit sensibly in the seventies, you are under 30.

I can`t speak for any one person on their eating habits compared now to twenty years ago, but the fact that portion sizes have increased cannot be ignored:
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/nutrition/PDFS/young-nestle.pdf
And the psychological effect it has on people (one of many studies):
http://weightloss.about.com/od/eatsmart/a/aa062804a.htm

And though I am young, I am not under the impression that people exercised like crazy before I was born, but I do know that computers, one more reason to sit for hours, were not as widely used. 

I recently shocked a man in his thirties when we discussed school lunch in America by admitting to him that like many other students, I ate out of the vending machines which means I regularly ate a bag of Doritos, a beef stick, and a bottle of soda for lunch everyday without any intervention from teachers, in an effort to avoid eating hamburgers and french fries, which I didn`t like.

I remember distinctly the day that we got vending machines in my middle school.  People were lined up outside it for hours after school to buy something from it because snacks are fun and the school thought it was better to let us have fun and make some money than to give a damn about out health.  I also think that chemicals in the food has something to do with it, but this stuff cannot be ignored. 

I am growing up in the generation that is being hurt the most by this epidemic, in my opinion, and watching my friends in high school and college do nothing but drink beer, and sit around for hours watching TV, playing video games, surfing the internet and eating snacks was not something I imagined.  A lot of data tells us time have changed.

[K-Mac]

high fructose corn syrup is in almost everything, even yogurt. check your labels. it makes people want to eat more and it adds on pounds. it probably is in baked foods where we do not get to see a label. trans fats added to the problem

I know!  It's ridiculous!  (And people wonder why diabetes is on the rise?!)  I watched a really interesting documentary about the history of sugar and the last 10-15 minutes of the show talked about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) taking over due to the fact that it costs less than sugar.  Between sugar substitutes and HFCS, the sugar industry in America has shrunk tremendously.  Now that everyone's freaking out about the price of corn (due to Ethanol fuels suddenly being so popular), I am wondering if HFCS will become more expensive to produce than sugar, thus causing industry to go back to the natural stuff??