Something happened starting in the late 1970s. I blame Reagan.
Doug
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Close enough.
I blame capital and its business culture that determine the general physical parameters of most people's lives. So my theory comes down to work place as generator of the fat universe. Architecture and food. Radically change the architecture and food and fat will disappear---or quit your job and find something else.
So in the converse, it appears that individuals need to perform the necessary adjustments by changing their diet and getting more exercise. But this is the `individual' answer to what is a systemic problem. Individuals fail because they can't directly effect the causes of their problem. Diet and exercise are adjustments to changes in food and architecture---both of which are completely determined by capital needs.
Using drug therapies is just another way around confronting the systemic problem. It strikes me as something like treating a cancer that is known to be caused by a particular environmental pollutant. We keep the pollutant because it is too `costly' to capital to get rid of it, and then propose treatment of the people effected with vastly more `costly' medical care which they have to pay---or ignore them.
The most alarming thing that I see are fat kids, lots of them. I can't remember ever seeing really fat kids and very few regular fat kids when I was kid. Of course that was fifty years ago.
CG