On a daily basis, weight conversations seem to crop up everywhere. Try this pill. Shoot for hypnosis. Snap a rubber band around your wrist when the urge for Cheetos hits. Weight Watchers. Jenny Craig, Nutri-System. And what about the frustrated naturally thin people that are epically sick of hearing about how dietary news should revolve around a bunch of overindulgent potato chip addicts?
What I find interesting, though, are the many and varied approaches the media goes with in order to make what’s really a very old story at least kind of fresh and exciting.
After regurgitating the fact that America leads the world in excessive BMI (and that “U.S. eating habits and diets have been exported,” leading to a 5% increase from 1980 to 2008 in the population percentage that fit the “obese” definition), Yahoo Finance explores causes for America’s excessive need to feed.
Like so many other issues where data are collected in the public sector and the information is used to solve problems nationwide, the problems are local. 24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of factors which cause unhealthy diets and resulting obesity. These include income, access to healthy food sources, the ability to pay for healthy food, the concentration of fast food outlets, and the consumption of fruits, vegetables, sugar, fat and soft drinks. The levels of healthy eating defined with these parameters varies wildly …
