We are not alone. Fatness has spread itself like a sticky goo over most affluent societies. So while we may have led the charge, if your nation has started to modernize, then you too will slowly become fat.
Lot’s of reasons have been proposed for the change, but most are thought of singly. Life, though is always more complex, and as much as many of the singular reasons have been a good jumping off point for re-thinking our affluent way of life, in fact, there is no single answer. As an illustration of how singular ideas evolve, the history of cholesterol and heart disease serves to demonstrate what time and facts do to ideas that start with a simple insight. Decades ago, via autopsies, the blockages that were found to be the cause of fatal heart attacks were found to be made mostly made of cholesterol. Since eggs are a rich dietary source of cholesterol, Americans were asked to stop eating eggs (and reduce fat consumption, especially animal fats). But over time, we found out that, in fact, cholesterol is made by the body anyway, and that what makes serum cholesterol rise is not eating more cholesterol laden foods, but eating carbohydrates and smoking (and being inactive!).
So after decades where Americans were fooled into eating egg whites (similar to eating cooked sperm! Yuck!!) and Egg Beaters, a colored pretend egg mixture made by Con Agra, we are finally waking up to the fact the no, heart disease is not a simple disease tied to eating too many eggs. (Ok, yes, egg consumption can add to the problem, but the relationship is indirect, and selective.)
Even efforts to improve outcomes through medication are incomplete and complex. The reduction of serum “cholesterol” via medication does not translate directly to a healthier heart.
Ok, you get the picture. Things are never as easy as they appear with the first insight.
So on to our fat little kids.
Have you seen our kids lately? My interactions with kids are less and less. While I was once an active parent and volunteer with various scout groups and sports teams, now that my son is 31, I no longer volunteer, and so I see fewer and fewer children and teens. The kids I do manage to see in passing seem fatter, and teens even more so. Girls especially. As far as the girls are concerned, it could be their clothing, but I notice more belly flab than I remember from my youth. In any case, since the statistics say we are getting fatter, and childhood obesity is a problem, then let’s accept my observations as being on point.
So what do we do?
We can start with a little humility toward the complexity of life, especially our own, but also of the living things that we harvest, kill and eat. We may be able to explain 90% or more of food chemistry, yet what we don’t know will kill us. For example, we all have heard of studies that demonstrated that high fiber diets are associated with a lower occurrence of colon cancer, but what is missing in the analysis is the recognition that the studies involved populations eating traditional food – and traditional food is real complex food. Sadly, we have decided, rather than creating incentives toward eating real food, our incentives focus on commodity crops, with the result than most American are eating corn at each meal and with each drink of a sweetened soda. Our major food manufacturers have managed to sell us the notion that a worthless processed food or snack can be transformed into a good food by layering on some fiber, and changing the mix of sweeteners, so that the consumer no longer sees how much sweetener is in the mix. And one of the hidden sweeteners is corn syrup. The next time you see an advertisement for General Mills Fiber One Honey Clusters, remember that all it is, is a concoction made in a food lab.
Let’s add a tax to each ounce of sugared beverages sold. Let’s try $0.01 per ounce. And a tax on ounce of chips, cookies and so on.
We can also remove snack machines from public schools, or keep them off limits to students during school days. In my day (and yes, that makes me sound old, but so be it). I managed to thrive and grow while eating just a sandwich for lunch and drinking nothing but water.
Is there more we can do?
Sure, we need to reverse the incentives started by Earl Butz (Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture) that discouraged mixed farming in favor of commodity crops. And we can stop creating communities with no sidewalks where it is frankly unsafe to walk. Most of the suburbs are like this now. This last will take time to take hold.
But change must start somewhere.
I think of famine and democracy each year as we near St. Patrick’s Day. When I was a kid, I hated what I thought of as St. Patrick’s day Irish, which were chiefly overfed, boisterous and often inebriated men – this group included my father with his green tie and “top ‘o the morning” though his drinking was not a big deal by the time his children came along. But now, each St. Patrick’s Day I remember the great hunger and my poor forebears who managed to make their way here – and who never looked back after they landed.
In two generations they turned from being illiterates who signed documents with a mark to managers and eventually well educated strivers. The current crop are a mixed bag, all of us at very least capable of holding our own in a verbal battle. And even as we love our English language, and are only marginally Catholic, we remain a bit suspicious of the well born, and worry that when we are successful, that we may be moving above our place – which we are sure will never be at the top.
I’m not out to bash the Church, I may be a lapsed Catholic, but I still have great affection for the institution’s history, and for those who dedicate their lives to Christ through the Church. These earnest idealists were an inspiration to me when I was a child. And their lives are also familiar to me. Two cousins of mine became nuns (one eventually left) another was a closeted gay man who became a priest. He was a good man, but he is part of the story of how the Catholic Church covered up its greatest sin.
And yes, in this case the presence of gay men had something to do with it. Despite an effort to steer the discussion away from gayness, in truth the offenders were a mix of true pedophiles and those out for gay sex with teens. In the local church in my town, a Father T… was known to have had evenings out with a teenager who he hired to do snow shoveling and other errands for his church – he (the account goes) would go to a Broadway show with 2 other priests and the teenager. It’s sordid, but the admiration for youths is hardly pedophilia. Plato would have understood. Oh the priest was eventually defrocked for a proven story of his having molested two boys after a high school dance, the school where this occurred was the same one I attended and the priest taught religion there. It happened a decade after I graduated, and was hushed up by then bishop Rodimer.
To those who fear a rant on gayness, no, I don’t believe the issue is gay men. Rather it is a Church, which pretends that healthy desire must be contained unless it is expressed as marital sex for procreation. To then create a mostly male structure, filled with men who choose not to marry, and then put them in close and unsupervised contact with boys (especially altar boys) and young men is just madness. Yes, women also fill the churches, but their role is carefully subordinated.
Church policy is founded upon a complete failure to deal with honest and healthy sexual drives.
One of the most flagrant offenders turned out to be a good friend of my priest cousin, and (in a story that circulated widely when the sex abuse scandal was new) the offender reportedly attempted to confide in my cousin who turned him away. He named a number of priests who (he believed) also knew about his sins. One of these was well known to me – he said the funeral masses for both my mother and for an aunt who lived with my mother when she retired. After the abuses were made know, it was clear to many Catholics that yes, everyone was involved at least indirectly, many priests knew, and all of the higher ups did. By the way, the chicken hawk in our local church, the one who got caught with two high school boys, he used to rail about sin in his very angry sermons. What a hypocrite.
We don’t need to rehash the story of the sex scandal in the US. What should be remembered is how the Vatican dismissed the abuse as being simply an American problem. Well it wasn’t and isn’t. The Church has a long history of dismissing the US, and pluralistic democracies in general, preferring instead homogenous states rules by autocrats. Sorry, I offer no footnotes, but if you wish to read more, read anything written about the Church by Gary Wills and if you can find anything, read works by and about John Courtney Murray, a good man whose writings the Church suppressed.
Now the Pope’s home Church in Germany is under scrutiny, and it turns out, the Pope was in charge of the particular diocese when and where the reported abuses occurred. Curiously, his brother was also in charge of a boy’s choir where abuses also occurred – though he possibly was not in charge at the time. Of course the Pope knew, as did all of those who served the Church in Germany and elsewhere. Everyone in authority knew. The Church’s lies about it are the moral equivalent of Enron’s cooking the books.
Regarding sex – prominent Catholic writer Mary Gordon wishes that the Church would take maybe a century’s holiday in speaking about sex. There is much usefulness in an institution that concerns itself with matters other than money and success. Too bad the Church can’t find a way out of the ideological trap it has made for itself. Too bad too that it has refused to acknowledge gay sex as a normal variant. Given that a large minority of priests are gay, we can see parallels between closeted conservatives who talk to talk of old time morality but don’t walk the walk.The Church is now a troubled institution and probably a fading one. Its political influence masks its ongoing and inevitable decline. Young people are half as likely to attend weekly Mass as their peers 40 years ago. Young men are also far less likely to become priests than men in the 60s. In a few decades, good riddance?
It is too bad. In its heyday, the US Church did much good. It provided many of the great charitable institutions of our large cities, from the once prominent Catholic hospitals, to the Jesuit colleges, to relatively inexpensive schools that made a near prep school experience available to strivers.
And in the aftermath of the Papacy of John XXIII, idealistic young priests and nuns led a reform in focus away from bingo halls and fancy edifices toward the care of the poor and downtrodden. That many were also involved in the civil rights protests and anti-war marches is a mark of that earnestness of Catholics in that era. A similar dedication in Central and South America led to Liberation theology. Over time the ardor faded, and many who dedicated their lives to Christ left. And in the decades since John XXIII, the Popes have returned to a hardened conservatism appropriate more to 19th century Europe than to today.
Still you never know.
And maybe, with a smaller fan-base, the Church will become much more like what is was when and if Christ started the ball rolling.
Since Robert Bork’s failed bid for the Supreme Court, no justice has been completely honest when answering questions in a confirmation hearing, but more liberal (or moderate) justices had less reason to hide their views. Alito and Roberts’ answers should be considered an outright fraud.
Now that the president has scolded the Chief Justice, I hope that Justice Roberts remembers that he too operates within the political system. He should have recognized this going in.
NPR: James Sherk(ph) is a senior analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He says the jobless benefit system isn’t working … because it’s too generous. With the maximum number of extensions, workers … can collect nearly two years of benefits and that’s not helpful he says.
Mr. JAMES SHERK (Senior Analyst, Heritage Foundation): The jobs that have been lost are not coming back and workers need to change the new industries, move to new sectors of the country. And having two years of UI benefits allows those who are unemployed to sort of – to put off making those very difficult and very painful decisions, to keep imagining that the jobs that they used to have will come back.
I went to the Heritage website to look up more about this person. I also trolled the web to see how old he is, how he was educated and if he is a serious scholar. It turns out he is just a kid, educated at a right wing college, one that decided to refuse federal dollars as a means to avoid federal standards and monitoring on racial discrimination. He is not a respected scholar.
Can’t figure out why NPR gave this hack airtime.
Nonetheless, since Heritage also give this guy space to vent his absurdities, an excerpt from a recent posting to their website is a useful window into right wing thought. So note the following:
- The consequences of extended unemployment benefits are some of the most conclusively established results in labor economic research. Extending either the amount or the duration of UI benefits increases the length of time that workers remain unemployed.
- UI benefits subsidize unemployment. They reduce the need to search for new work and to make difficult choices–such as moving or switching industries–to begin a new job.
- Roughly one-third of workers receiving UI benefits find work immediately once their benefits expire. This happens both when unemployment is high and when unemployment is low.
- Economic research shows that each 13 week extension of UI benefits increases the average length of time workers receiving benefits stay unemployed by approximately two weeks.
By the way, any fair-minded discussion of unemployment will acknowledge that, yes, unemployment benefits do allow the unemployed person to keep looking a bit longer than he or she might without them. But that might mean the difference between a panicked decision and a successful transition to a new job.
*Regaring Mr. Sherk’s Heritage posting, referred to four articles, 2 of his own, and 2 from 2003 and 2000. Since the current downturn is an outlier, optimistic extrapolations average downturns just don’t apply to the current disaster.
I also was amused by Mr. Sherk’s comment in the radio interview that jobs are not coming back. That may have been true in during the job losses of the 70’s where old time factory jobs did disappear forever, but the jobs lost in the current downturn came from construction and the financial services sector. And if these aren’t coming back, we are in even deeper shit than we know!
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