Too hot? Come on. I live in the "fat South" and just run first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Just like everyone else who's physically active here does.
I can't believe the author settled on "too hot" instead of "too uneducated". I guess the weather offends less people.
The South is both the poorest and least educated area of the country. Educated people eat better and exercise more because they know better.
Education is not the problem. I live in Mississippi, and can attest that we are bombarded daily with messages about obesity, diet, and exercise.
I am as educated as anyone on the mainstream teaching on this subject, yet I am clinically obese (though not for much longer).
I was poor as a child, so I think I can speak to this subject a little. It's anecdotal, but when accompanied by what I have learned from different sources (in particular, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes), I suspect that my experience was typical.
Poor people eat an unhealthy diet because they cannot afford high quality protein and complex carbohydrates on a consistent basis. Further, parents in poor families often work excessive hours, and quick meals become the norm due to the lack of time.
This leads to an excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates, creating an insulin imbalance that increases hunger. One of the worst offenders in this category is soft drinks. White bread is another big problem. A coke and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was a common meal around my house.
Sweet tea is another big offender. I have rarely seen sweet tea outside of the southeast, and almost everyone drinks it here. If you order tea in a restaurant, you are getting sweet tea unless you specifically request unsweetened.
Surely this enviroment is bad for adults, but I think it is particularly damaging for children. Kids that grow up with an excess of blood sugar and elevated insulin are headed for metabolic syndrome and Type II diabetes.
Make no mistake about it, it is insulin that controls fat storage. When your serum insulin is high, your body is storing fat. When it is low, you are converting fat stores to energy. No endocrinologist or reputable doctor anywhere will dispute this fact. Nutritionists are often unaware, resorting to the calories in - calories out causation fallacy.
When you eat lots of sugar and refined carbohydrates, your insulin is going to rise, and you are going to store fat. The worst part is that modern day nutritional education eschews fat and, to a smaller degree protein, in favor of carbohydrates, so the "educated" individual is really in no better position to regulate his endocrine system via diet and exercise.
I don't think you can just blame it all in poverty. People in poor countries (Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico) are much less obsese than Americans. And America had much less obesity when we were poorer as a country.
Being poor doesn't somehow cause you to drink soda. Water is still much cheaper.
There are no calories in water. When your brain is inducing your body to increase blood glucose, you won't crave water. Sugary drinks are some of the most calorically dense (wrt volume and cost) foodstuffs you'll find. Poor people don't drink sodas because they are thirsty, they drink them because they are hungry.
Mexico has a high obesity rate. They drink loads of soda. I don't think people in the Philippines are all that trim, either.
A lot of very poor countries in Africa and South America have high obesity rates. They can only afford cheap starch and not enough meat and vegetables.
Japanese and Koreans are the thinnest 1st world people on the planet and they eat more rice, more vegetables and a lot fewer steaks burgers and fries than Americans (or Canadians or British). The same is true for rural Chinese, who are far poorer than American southerners, and they don't have obesity and heart disease problems.
"Eating large amounts of high-fat foods for a sustained period raises the risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke and several types of cancer. People who can't use excess protein effectively may be at higher risk of kidney and liver disorders, and osteoporosis.
That's why the American Heart Association guidelines urge adults who are trying to lose weight and keep it off to eat no more than 35 percent of total daily calories from fat and less than 7 percent of total daily calories from saturated fat and less than 1 percent of total daily calories from trans fat. On most high-protein diets, meeting these goals isn't possible.
Some high-protein diets de-emphasize high-carbohydrate, high-fiber plant foods. These foods help lower cholesterol when eaten as part of a nutritionally balanced diet. Reducing consumption of these foods usually means other, higher-fat foods are eaten instead. This raises cholesterol levels even more and increases cardiovascular risk."
China and Korea are among the lowest consumers of sugar (7kg and 21kg per capita compared to about 70kg per capita in the US) in the world. What about other groups (e.g., Pima Indians) that eat very little fat and protein yet have the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and coronary heart disease? What about groups that eat very little plant matter and mostly fat and protein yet have almost no cancer, obesity, diabetes, or coronary heart disease (Inuits)?
Read Good Calories, Bad Calories if you want to get the background on why the AHA recommends what it does and why they are probably wrong on the subject of dietary fat and protein.
I do agree that replacing grains and starchy vegetables with green, leafy vegetables is a good dietary strategy. It is a good way to get variety in your diet without activating insulin secretion. The amount of calories you eat is largely irrelevant with respect to fat storage. Your body will adjust your appetite and basal metabolism to maintain homeostasis.
"Poor people eat an unhealthy diet because they cannot afford high quality protein and complex carbohydrates on a consistent basis. Further, parents in poor families often work excessive hours, and quick meals become the norm due to the lack of time."
I personally think this is BS (sorry for the tough stance) and I agree with others in saying it's an educational thing. My family grew up in poverty when we immigrated to Canada, but we still managed to eat healthy and cheaply. My parents also worked crazy amount of hours as the only jobs they could only get were poor paying remedial ones like dish washing.
Despite all our hardship, we managed to eat a healthy diet and we were able to do so because my parents understood the value of vegetables and fruit and stretching the dollar when it comes to groceries. Now that I'm all grown up, I can't go more than two days without feeling amazingly guilty if I don't integrate a good serving of vegetables into my diet.
When ever I hear stories about how people are claiming that the public is being educated, I always think of this interview that I saw once of a young girl who idealized Jared from the Subway commercials. She was with her mom and she basically said how it was so unfair that they didn't have a lot of money, otherwise she could afford to go on the subway diet like Jared. What was extremely sad about all of this was, her mom was nodding her head in agreement.
I've been out of school for quite some time now, but for the life of me, I can't remember being educated in school on a regular basis on how to eat healthier. I would hope that this is higher priority for schools now a days, but I highly doubt it.
You engage in physical activity when it is cool (first thing in the morning and last thing at night) and then dismiss heat as a factor?!?! Having lived in the southern US (albeit Austin, which is not completely unbearable during summer days) I remember how strange the adjustment was when I first arrived. No one walks anywhere if they can help it: you leave your air-conditioned house in your air-conditioned car and drive to your air-conditioned office, at lunch you drive somewhere else and then at the end of the day you drive home. As you indirectly point out, physical activity requires setting aside specific times and is not something that you casually do over the course of the day.
Poor and uneducated does not help, but there are a lot of poor and uneducated places in the US and around the world that do not have the same absurd levels of obesity. Air-conditioning and the lifestyle that developed around this invention are a major contributor to obesity levels in the south.
I grew up in Mississippi. I lived there for 26 years before moving to Portland, OR. The point the author makes about walking to the bus stop or to the local market is absolutely correct.
I've always been really slim, but I rarely walked anywhere in MS unless it was to the mail box. This is not because I was lazy (played a lot of sports), but because there's nothing to walk to. Practically everything involved an automobile as a means for access. Exercise as a daily routine didn't exist for me. That's not to say I couldn't make a conscious effort to exercise, but a commitment to exercise as part of a routine is much harder to adhere to than a routine that involves exercise.
In Portland, things are a completely different story. Almost nothing requires an automobile. My wife and I went 7 months on a single tank of gas when we moved to Portland. We walk practically everywhere. Exercise is built into our day to day life. We walk to the post office, bar, movie theater, coffee shop, grocery store, you name it.
On the topic of eating healthy - The food choices where I grew up were not that great. We had one grocery store, one diner, no fast food restaurants (we eventually got a subway) and two gas stations. Unless you lived in the town center, you had to drive to and from this limited selection.
Many of my family members hover just over the poverty line (although none of them consider themselves poor). Grocery shopping isn't an exercise in health, it's an exercise in conservative economics. Trips to the grocery store are usually prefixed with a question: "How can I get enough food so we can eat until the next paycheck and still have enough money left over for gas to get back and forth to work". It's a vicious cycle.
I can't believe the author settled on "too hot" instead of "too uneducated". I guess the weather offends less people.
The South is both the poorest and least educated area of the country. Educated people eat better and exercise more because they know better.