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White House Fingers PlayStation As Obesity Culprit
theodp writes "The winners of the childhood obesity infographic design contest sponsored by GOOD and First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative are in, and the overall winner calls out Sony's PlayStation as a major milestone on its timeline of childhood obesity (together with Coke, Pepsi, mall food courts, fructose and high sugar tariffs, TV, McDonald's, and other fast food). Somewhat ironically, the First Lady's other anti-childhood obesity efforts include a $60,000 video game contest."
"lets throw in a gaming console amongst other big culprits that help fatten up kids" If your fat its because you didnt exercise enough as a kid and you probably ate shit. More so, its probably the fact that you ate shit. Oh, and your parents probably didnt push activity and exercise on you. "LETS BLAME SONY!" I call it a witch hunt
To be fair, the basic laws behind statistical mechanics are equally simple, yet thermodynamic behaviors can be complex and non-obvious.
The epidemiology is:
Why are people using less energy?
Why are people consuming more energy?
What subtle biochemical and metabolic effects might be involved?
There are a lot more subtle biochemical effects than one might initially suspect.
Does reading books also cause obesity?
America is sugar addicted and everything we eat has corn syrup and corn starch.
> The basic fact that consuming more energy than you use makes you fat
;).
:).
;) ).
> seems too obvious to even bother arguing about anymore.
Obvious but wrong. Clearly it's not so simple. You like many other people miss out the amount excreted. Unless you consider excretion of calories to be using those calories, which would be stupid.
I don't see many diet researchers measuring the amount of calories in the feces or other excretion. And there certainly are differences.
Also people are now noticing the differences in digestive systems: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100526141845.htm
Many obese people have bacteria and digestive systems that are more efficient and/or converts food into stuff that makes them fat.
Some probably have cultivated those bacteria through poor diets (poor at least from a modern day "plenty of food" sedentary lifestyle perspective), others might just be unfortunate.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that in some unfortunate people the food becomes changed by their bacteria so that they need to eat more or feel like eating more.
For example:
a) Say you need a minimum of 10 x A, 10 x B, and the food is 10 x A and 10 x B, but the bacteria keep converting half of the A to B, so you need to consume 20 x A and 20 x B, and end up with 10 x A and 30 x B. You meat the "A" requirement but you get fat and unhealthy.
b) Alternatively your bacteria might just do better on a fattening diet and so they have evolved to make sure (by various means) that you feel like eating a fattening diet suitable for them. After all who's the boss? You (10 trillion cells) or the 100 trillion bacteria in your gut? If it's a democracy you lose
It's certainly not all due to bacteria either, but just pointing out it's not so simple when you get to the details
FWIW, I'm not fat (puny and skinny actually), but I'm not one of those who place the blame for obesity completely on the obese. Or think they are lesser beings than I am (they most certainly are greater in some ways
You stopped tracing it back a bit too soon. Try an economic system that forces two parents to be full time employees outside of the home resulting in neighborhoods devoid of responsible adults in the afternoons so that kids aren't safe playing outside. Make part time employment and single income more viable and the problem can begin reversing itself. The 8 hour day was reasonable when the basic assumption was that a family had another adult that wasn't in the workforce at all.
Given our current unemployment rate, it's obvious that society has no pressing need for people to put in that many hours. Salaries have plummeted compared to the GDP/capita.