Have It Your Way!

The face of America is changing…well, actually more like the belly and the butt of America is changing.  We are rapidly becoming the fattest country in the world.  Living in Colorado, which is one of the leanest and healthiest states in the union, it is still filled with people who are seriously overweight.  Studies conducted for the last 40 years have shown a shocking and dramatic change in the whole country.  Today almost one-third of all Americans are considered obese.

Many of you know I spend a good bit of time working in the medical field, and I bring this issue to you not so much in a spirit of complaining how people look but rather what is the state of their health.  Almost all the medical runs I go on seem to involve people of all ages who are seriously overweight.  It is a simple fact that a huge portion of our medical problems are related to what we eat, how much we eat and how little we exercise.  Type 2 diabetes used to be a disease relegated to the overweight and over 60 crowd, but today we are seeing it in ten-year-olds.  Forms of cancer have been linked to being overweight, heart disease has long been known to be a function of weight (remember, for every extra pound you need to pump through more capillaries), high blood pressure, and many more maladies all contribute to serious morbidity in our population as a result of obesity.

We often complain about how high our health costs have become, and yet quitting tobacco and carrying a normal body weight could drop that figure dramatically.  What is it with us?  Do we love those Big Macs, Coldstone, Pizza Hut and other fast food in large quantity so much that we will sacrifice our lives and our children’s lives to it?

Are we all such wimps that we can’t control what we eat and how much we exercise?