Colorado Is Becoming More Obese
In his quote-of-the-day spot, "Say What?," Garry Trudeau, the artist behind the long-running comic strip "Doonesbury," recently singled out Governor Bill Ritter for a statement he made about obesity: "There are kids who are obese in this state who are going to school hungry" (via Westword; Trudeau's quote has since been updated and is no longer available in his Town Hall at Slate).
But it seems nobody in Colorado was prepared to graciously handle the bad news that the state is losing ground in the battle of the bulge since being named the least obese state in the nation in 2008.
Now, Colorado health officials have added some important statistical information: obesity rates rose faster than in the rest of the country between 1995 and 2008, up 89 percent compared to 67 percent nationwide, points out the Colorado Springs Independent. Worse, over the 13-year period, the number of Coloradans considered obese nearly doubled from about one in 10 to roughly one in five.
"That's still lower than the nationwide obesity rate of 26.6 percent, but Colorado's trend is discouraging," the Indy writes.
Comments
Submitted by ohwilleke (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-01 13:11.
When you are starting from a place better than any other state in the nation, it is hard to improve one's situation and easy to let it slip a little. There is a strong draw to the mean.
Ritter's point is also on point. Obesity in influenced by food quality and exercise, not just food availability. Low quality, high obesity risk foods are often the cheapest and thus a heavy part of the diet of kids who don't get enough food.
Indeed, obesity exists because it is an adaptation to food insecurity. The capacity to become obese evolved because an ability to have food reserves helps you survive when you may experience food shortages.
The liturgical Christian Lenten season we are in now, and Ramadan in Islam, are both religious reminders of the fact that food shortages in the early spring that required fasting and denial as a form of food rationing used to be routine, for most of society, rather than a rare exception.
