diabetes
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One of this morning's headlines from Worldcrunch "While You Slept":
"More Than A Third Of The World Is Obese Or Overweight"!
Don't choke on your doughnut until you've looked at the statistics.
No matter how much you hated high-school math, surely you can do better than the people who wrote this headline and the accompanying article.
First, note that 2.1 billion is not "more than a third" of the world's population, which has passed 7.2 billion. It's more like 29%.
Home garden harvest. Photo courtesy ariadna de raadt/shutterstock.com
While relaxing on a friend’s back porch over a spicy vegetarian stew and homemade bread, the conversation turned, naturally, to food. Everyone around the table expressed concern over how much junk food kids eat and how little time children spend outdoors. Our host said that she watches every afternoon as a group of elementary schoolchildren head to the corner market to purchase their after-school snack. Each child comes out with a supersized soda and a bag of potato chips. Not a small bag — the family size, for each child, every day.
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Every day, or nearly so, women and men look in mirrors, step on scales, count calories, and worry about body fat and about their appearance. It happens enough that children as young as four begin to develop anxiety over food, or express fears of being seen in a bathing suit. Even eating healthfully can become an unhealthy obsession. And often enough, people become so desperate to get control over their eating as to spend huge amounts of money on drugs, diet plans, and surgery. Occasionally, the burden of eating, of bodily existence itself, is too much to bear, and people lose their lives to anorexia — the deadliest of all mental illnesses.