>>Dr. Friedman points to careful statistical analyses of the
>>changes in Americans' body weights from 1991 to today by
>>Dr. Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health
>>Statistics. At the lower end of the weight distribution,
>>nothing has changed, not even by a few pounds. As you move
>>up the scale, a few additional pounds start to show up, but
>>even at midrange, people today are just 6 or 7 pounds
>>heavier than they were in 1991. Only with the massively
>>obese, the very top of the distribution, is there a
>>substantial increase in weight, about 25 to 30 pounds, Dr.
>>Flegal reported.
>>
>>As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled
>>slightly to the right, with more people shifting up a few
>>pounds to cross the line that experts use to divide normal
>
>
>from obese. In 1991, 23 percent of Americans fell into the
>>obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than 30 percent
>>increase. But the average weight of the population has
>>increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991.
>
>
And these aren't significant increases in 10 years? The median weight up 6-7 pounds, and the share of the pop obese up by more than a third?
Doug
-----------------------
Just ask anyone who works at a hospital if the fat have been getting fatter. A number of my family work in health care, and this has been a subject of recurrent conversation for years. A friend is a nurse at a small hospital that serves a mainly rural population, mostly of northern and central European descent. The hospital was built in the 50s, and the toilets are mounted to the walls so they're easy to mop under. They now see patients who are so heavy they snap the toilets off the wall when they sit on them. This has happened more than once, all in about the past 5 years, and never used to happen before. They can't reach to wipe themselves either, and call on the nurses or nurse's aides to help with this task. These folks are not in the hospital for obesity. They show up with broken bones, respiratory complaints, or some other common problem. You wonder how they manage everyday tasks and basic mobility in their daily lives, and the answer is that they have people in their lives who help (or "enable") them. My friend took care of one woman whose young adult sons would show up at the hospital a couple times a day to feed her.
None of this is the least bit funny. It couldn't have happened just because a significant portion of the population all at once lost control of their appetites for some unaccountable reason. There's a lot of human misery packed into those statistics.
Jacob Conrad