Another year, another obesity study. Only this year's Nutritional Examination report from the geeks at the CDC drops in a "good news, bad news" sorta way.
The good news is that, across the board (or salad bar), we appear to have leveled out as a nation, despite the best public service efforts of so many nonprofits and our apparently angry First Lady. Only thing is, the scales have, too, with both adult and child obesity rates unreasonably high.
Roughly 36 percent of grownups and 17 percent of kids are obese. But when you expand that classification to include simply the overweight, the numbers really blow up, to 70 percent of grown folks and nearly one-third of our children.
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But, honestly, what else should we expect especially when beloved celebrity chefs – who happen to love both butter and bacon – come out of the closet to reveal their own battle with Type 2 diabetes? Which, of course, has already been parlayed into a drug endorsement deal. How do I sign up for one of those, by the way?
And now we have a national fast food chain helping out as well. Burger King announced entry to the home delivery market. So now you can have it your "weight." (At least they've retired that creepy mascot – can you imagine him showing up at your door with a Whopper?)
Somehow we've managed to (mostly) conquer both drinking and driving and smoking in this country as examples of preventable health care cost drivers. So, what is it about obesity and our fast food that this slow-moving society can't see as a bigger problem? Maybe we need to enlist the teetotalers over at MADD into the cause: I'm thinking Mother Against Another Dinner, you know, so we can still call it MAAD?
Or is it simply the opulence (corpulence?) it represents and we now wear our own tight-fitting clothes as a badge of honor in the richest (fattest/sickest) nation on earth?
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