Interesting article from Harvard Magazine about “The Way We Eat Now.” Covers familar ground about growing portion size, sedentary lifestyle and switch to foods with more sugars and carbohydrates.
Why the fuss about overweight: “three aspects of weight?BMI, waist size, and weight gained after one’s early twenties?are linked to chances of having or dying from heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several types of cancer, plus suffering from arthritis, infertility, gallstones, asthma, and even snoring.”
Article takes a swipe at TV: “The best single behavioral predictor of obesity in children and adults is the amount of television viewing,” says the School of Public Health’s (Steven) Gortmaker. “The relationship is nearly as strong as what you see between smoking and lung cancer. Everybody thinks it’s because TV watching is sedentary, you’re just sitting there for hours?but that’s only about one-third of the effect. Our guesstimate is that two-thirds is the effect of advertising in changing what you eat.” (Walter) Willett asserts.
Willett is author of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating. Tip: kottke.org remaindered links.