Summary
A new Lancet study reveals nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, a sharp rise from just over half in 1990.
Obesity among adults doubled to over 40%, while rates among girls and women aged 15–24 nearly tripled to 29%.
The study highlights significant health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy, alongside projected medical costs of up to $9.1 trillion over the next decade.
Experts stress obesity’s complex causes—genetic, environmental, and social—and call for structural reforms like food subsidies, taxes on sugary drinks, and expanded treatment access.
The design of our cities and culture in north america definitely doesn’t help. Sit in your metal box and drive to the front door (or drive thru and don’t even leave the car), sit at a desk all day unless you’re in the trades, go home and sit down to consume netflix/youtube/games, order fast food delivered to your door.
Sure nobody is forcing people to live like this but parts of our society certainly feels like it is encouraged. People look at me funny and friends have questioned me if I park and walk into a business with a drive thru, even though I usually get faster service that way
The individuals make the collective, most Americans are making these choices everyday. There is not some boogeyman forcing Americans to live a certain way, they love their unhealthy sedentary lifestyle and will actively fight you to defend it, with guns.
The infrastructure that makes it impossible or dangerous to walk or ride a trolley into town to have dinner was built with lobbyist persuasion 50 years before I was born. Most of us cannot afford to buy into the narrow islands of places built for humans in north America.
But you can afford a car, or better yet a giant truck or SUV which most Americans choose to drive in, fucking please. And the infrastructure got funded and put in place by people, and then used by those people. Individuals make the collective, you are not isolated from the world you live in, your actions and choices shape the world you live in everyday, and they matter. Businesses and corporations get big because of the people funding and supporting them, they are not isolated and neither are you.
America has a severe lack of accountability and responsibility, somehow it is always someone else’s fault no matter what. No surprise it has become the unhealthiest and most obese nation in existence.
Affording the materialism which is creating the problem as described above is part of the problem, not the solution you think it is lmao.