The Recession Could Make You Fat: One reason: Poor neighborhoods tend to have more fast food restaurants and fewer grocery stores, so it's harder for residents to eat well.
"In Seattle we have found that there are fivefold differences in obesity rates depending on the zip code — the low-income zip codes have a much higher proportion of obese people," Adam Drewnowski, the director of the Nutrition Sciences Program at the University of Washington, tells Reuters.
Obese Now Outweigh the Overweight: Results from the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), released last month, indicate that an estimated 32.7 percent of U.S. adults 20 years and older are overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are extremely obese.
The obesity figure of 34.3 percent is up from 23 percent in a similar study done in 1988 through 1994.
Or, Why Fat is a Paranoid Issue: If adults are eating much less healthily than they used to, so are their kids. Instead of spending their evenings playing outside, children now have the delights of multi-channel television, computer games, and the Internet to choose from. And then there's the fact that increasing numbers of us just won't let our children outside on their own.
