OUR WEIGHTY COUNTRY-69

According to a program of studies designed and implemented with the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 69% (approximately 160 million) of adult Americans are overweight. This is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of greater than 25. The BMI is calculated by the formula: BMI = mass (kg.) / (height (m.)) sq. or mass (lbs.) / (height (in.)) sq. x 703. An obese person has a BMI > 30 (36% of adults) and a person classified as extremely obese has a BMI > 40 (6%). The obesity rate in this country has doubled since the 1970’s. It is true there is no accounting in the survey of factors such as the size of an individual’s frame and their musculature to the extent that one person may be classified as a bit overweight, while another person is not considered overweight. However, when considering those factors the reverse could actually be true. Still, these are averages that are definitive overall. I can personally attest to this massive (so to speak) change in the heft of the American people. In a 1939 extended family photo of 38 people (I was the cute little tyke in the front row) one woman could be described as fat (obese) and two as “chubby” (overweight); that is all. The rest of us were not overweight. There is a hypothesis that during the Great Depression being poor meant being thin while now, owing to the abundance of cheap, but high caloric fast food, being poor means being overweight. There may be some validity to that, however I also believe being overweight means putting on the feedbag too often. Clearly there seems to be a more widespread (again, so to speak) tendency for a lack of discipline pervading the American population to a greater extent now than in the past. As with other excesses, this also applies to eating. A further breakdown of the weight situation of American adults by gender and race is given below: OVERWEIGHT OBESE EXTREMELY OBESE White Males 74% 36% 4% Black Males 70% 39% 7% Hispanic Males 82% 37% 4% White Females 60% 32% 7% Black Females 82% 59% 18% Hispanic Females 76% 41% 6% In 2012 I briskly walked 760 miles in segments from 2 to 5 miles that is the equivalent in distance of walking from Plano to Texarkana and back, twice. That seems like a lot, yet it is only circa 15 miles/week for 50 weeks. At a walking rate of 15 minutes/mile I thereby burned approx. 54,720 Kcals (190 hrs. @ 288 Kcals/hr.). The classical definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat one gram (one cubic centimeter or 1/1000 of a liter) of water one degree Celsius. The calorie associated with weight loss/gain is really 1000 calories (commonly referred to as a Kcal or the amount of energy it takes to heat one kilogram, 1000 cc, or one liter of water one degree Celsius). There are approx. 3600 Kcals burned per pound of weight loss, therefore I lost about 15 lb. (only!) of weight for one year’s worth of walking (calories continue to be burned for a while after exercise stops so I may be understating the weight loss a bit). Look at it in the long term. By walking 50 weeks per year at the same distance/week the weight loss would be at least 15 lbs. and over 5 years, everything being the same, it would amount to 75 lbs. or a bit more (270,000+ Kcals). Of course everything would not be the same, nor would I want it to be else I would look like an inmate in the Civil War Andersonville military prison camp. Ironically, my exercise regimen means that I have to eat more than I would otherwise just to keep from expiring. Now for the amusing part of this essay which I extracted from my 2007 blog essay, Fools, Frauds, and Fakes and applied it to the weight problem of myriad Americans with a story as told by Jack Cashill in his 2005 book Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Huckstered Have Hijacked American Culture. Paul Ehrlich was not a fraud or a liar. He was a good old-fashioned fool and fanatic who sincerely believed all of the folderol he espoused. His exegetic antagonist would be a man named Julian Simon. Ehrlich wrote a number of best selling books – the two most famous were The Population Bomb in 1968 and The Population Explosion in 1991. Among the crack pot predictions he made were: “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people [this writer’s note: the current world population is 7+ billion].” He predicted that by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million [the current USA population is about 315 million]. He envisioned the president of the USA dissolving congress during the food riots of the 1980’s, followed by the United States suffering a nuclear attack for its mass use of insecticides. Jack Cashill opined that Ehrlich was postulating that the United States would get nuked for killing bugs! In his 1968 book Ehrlich’s most optimistic outcome for the world in the next decade or so was that a new Pope would give his blessing for abortion and only half a billion people would die of starvation. The most pessimistic prediction was that worldwide famine would cause a nuclear war and the most intelligent survivors would be cockroaches. And you may have thought I was grossly exaggerating when I intimated this guy was a real nut case. But don’t think he was some obscure ‘mad as a hatter’ recluse writing out of his basement in his B.V.D.’s. His book The Population Bomb sold 3 million copies and he made 20 appearances on the Johnny Carson show alone. Ehrlich helped push the Sierra Club and Greenpeace to even more leftwing radical positions – which is like encouraging an alcoholic to belly up to the bar more often; and he was, surprise, a founding father of Earth Day. The left just loved him, tendentiously supporting him and his risible theories, ipse dixit. He was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and the Crawford Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel equivalent for environmentalists. Jack Cashill says about him, “In his naturalist faith, and rejection of God, Ehrlich hews to type. Giving Ehrlich the benefit of doubt, his is not the conscious fraud of the Bunco artist, but rather the self-deception of the blowhard. He appears to have drunk often at the well of his own snake oil.” Julian Simon became increasingly tired of hearing Ehrlich’s twin themes of population increase disasters and acute shortages of natural resources so he decided to challenge Ehrlich. Simon attended Harvard on a naval ROTC scholarship and served as a junior officer after graduation until the completion of his tour of duty. He received a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Chicago and then returned to New York to work in direct marketing. Not finding that line of work fulfilling, he went to the University of Maryland as a professor of business administration until he died in 1998. Simon made a famous bet with Ehrlich. He told Ehrlich to pick any five commodities and hold them for ten years. If scarcity caused the prices to rise at the end of ten years, then Simon would buy then from Ehrlich thereby giving Ehrlich the profit difference. However if the prices declined then Ehrlich would have to pay Simon the difference between the current price and what Ehrlich purchased them for. Ehrlich picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Not only did the prices decline on all five commodities, but of 35 standard metals 33 dropped in price as did oil and food. Ehrlich paid Simon $570.07 and he paid himself much more in lost reputation. Ehrlich allowed as how the bet might have been a mistake – he could have laid long odds that it was. Simon also had a thing or two to say about Al Gore’s book Earth in the Lurch (well, perhaps the actual title is Earth in the Balance). Simon said, “The book is as ignorant a collection of clichés as anything ever published on the subject.” And he exposed the clichés of vanishing farmland, poisonous DDT, deadly dioxin, and lethal Agent Orange with hard and undeniable data. Al Gore never tried to answer Simon anymore than he tried to justify calling the internal-combustion engine the most destructive invention of man in history. To this day some on the paralogistic left still support Ehrlich in his long ago discredited chimerical theories and Ehrlich himself said just last year that refutation of his predictions is like the man falling from a building who has not yet reached the ground and stating all is well. If Ehrlich were alive 100 years from now he would likely still dispositively be saying, you just wait and see, the world is about to end – et c’est definitif.