The fattest, unhealthiest place in the USA

Discussion Open Forum
1

I posted this elsewhere, but Namahottie replied, “this could be its own thread,” and I agree (it almost was the first time). So here it is.

[quote]HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America’s fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.

“It doesn’t come up,” said David Felinton, 5-foot-9 and 233 pounds, as he walked toward City Hall one recent morning. “We’ve got a lot of economic challenges here in Huntington. That’s usually the focus.”

Huntington’s economy has withered, its poverty rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this city’s financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.

Nearly half the adults in Huntington’s five-county metropolitan area are obese — an astounding percentage, far bigger than the national average in a country with a well-known weight problem.

Huntington leads in a half-dozen other illness measures, too, including heart disease and diabetes. It’s even tops in the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth (half of them have). . .

Shari Wiley is a nurse at St. Mary’s Regional Heart Institute in Huntington. . ."A lot of the patients we were seeing were getting heart attacks in their 30s. They were requiring open heart surgery in their 30s. . .

The Huntington area is essentially tied with a few other metro areas for proportion of people who don’t exercise (31 percent), have heart disease (22 percent) and diabetes (13 percent). The smoking rate is pretty high, too, although not the worst.

However, the region is a clear-cut leader in dental problems, with nearly half the people age 65 and older saying they have lost all their natural teeth. And no other metro area comes close to Huntington’s adult obesity rate. . .

Poverty hovers, with the area rate at 19 percent, much higher than the national average. In the hilly coal fields to the South, people still live in houses or trailers with drooping, battered roofs. They stare hard at any stranger in a new car. In Huntington and its outskirts, many people think of exercise and healthy eating as luxuries. . .

The online Yellow Pages lists more pizza places (nearly 200) for the Huntington area than the entire state of West Virginia has gyms and health clubs (149). . .

Fast food has become a staple, with many residents convinced they can’t afford to buy healthier foods. . .

Lack of exercise is another concern. During a warm and sunny autumn week in Huntington — the kind of weather that would bring out small armies of joggers in some cities — it was unusual to see a runner or bicyclist. . .

When the health department tried to restrict smoking in local bars and restaurants, a group of local businesses fought it all the way to the state Supreme Court. (The restrictions were upheld in 2003.) Even hospitals have fought smoking restrictions . . .

Walden is a third generation physician in the area, but he’s also traveled extensively around the world. He says it’s always a little jolting coming home and realizing how obese his hometown is compared to the rest of the world.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a place where I’ve seen so many overweight people,” he said[/quote]
foxnews.com/story/0,2933,452945,00.html

Yikes, what a hopeless tangle of ignorance, poverty and poor health. And what a horrible place to live. On top of all of the above,24.3% of adults 18 years-of-age or older in Huntington, WV, report themselves as in poor to fair health! Ugh.

I know a little about West Virginia, because I lived there for three years. It’s very beautiful. John Denver was right, it’s almost Heaven. 3/4 of the state is national forest and there’s lots of great hiking, rock climbing and whitewater kayaking. But there’s also plenty of long-time poverty, ignorance, provincialism and just plain stupidity, including people dumping old cars, refrigerators and other trash off the side of hte road in beautiful wilderness areas. People don’t often move in to the area (we did and were definitely regarded as outsiders); instead they’re 5th, 6th, 7th generation locals. The article is exactly right that a foreigner driving through in a new car would get plenty of stares. So there’s not a lot of new blood, bringing new ideas, new opportunities and growth. The internet explosion and globalization never quite reached West Virginia. And the old ways, as is always the case, get stale, stagnant and less productive. The old economy, of hard-working, low-paid, coal mining, trucking and manufacturing, has withered over the decades, leaving the impoverished, obese, toothless stragglers described in that article.

This isn’t meant as criticism of West Virgina, per se. There are plenty of washed-up, provicincial, economically depressed backwaters, with stagnant populations, stagnant mentalities and pathetic, depressing lifestyles. I think housecat, who I believe lives in Arkansas, has seen much of the same. There are lots of pockets of the same throughout the US and probably in many other countries.

Anyway, it’s sad how poverty, poor health and low level education and jobs all go together at times, not that it’s surprising, but it’s really a triple whammy: some people get stuck with all the crap.

2

I thought Houston was the current winner. I know it’s been a contender. :doh:

3

The first thing I was surprised when arriving home was the size of people. It still disturbs me. Because I don’t think it’s completely due to lack of exercise, but rather what is being put in the food that we don’t know about. It’s a bit of stretch and some what of a conspiracy theory, but I actually got to thinking one day about hormones in chicken and beef… And I thought, who’s to say that the ingestion of those hormones is resulting in people being overweight? I’ve seen some people who don’t “look” like they are genetically are capable of being the size they are but some how are…

just my 2 cts.

4

it is hard to run away from the simple equation of ‘eat more than you need to, and you will get fat’.

if you are a person who stores fat easily, then eat less than others or exercise more or both. no matter what arguments are raised about genetics, hormonal additives, predisposition to weight gain from one’s ancestry, whatever, the fundamental still applies. the excess you eat will get stored. blaming the number of pizza places on one’s obesity is shifting the issue: eat less pizza, folks. even if you don’t eat healthy food, you can still eat less of it.

it is an exercise in will power, self control and personal judgement, and while supportive mechanisms do help, and food company marketing, portion size, one’s peers and so on do hinder the effort to control weight, primarily it still boils down to too many people eating more than they need.

5

You mean something like this:

[quote]Using a technique that identifies carbon and nitrogen isotopes in meat, co-authors A. Hope Jahren and Rebecca Kraft tried to determine the animals’ diets and in what conditions they were raised. Based on the high levels of carbon and nitrogen isotopes found in the meat products, the authors claim that the cattle and poultry were predominantly fed corn, which makes them as fat as possible in as short a time as possible, and were raised in extreme confinement.

[color=#0000FF]In an interview, Jahren, who is a geobiologist and professor at the University of Hawaii, even suggested that the nitrogen isotopic signatures found in meat products were so high that they were consistent with environments where animals had consumed their own waste.[/[/color][/quote]
From health at MSN

My home country used to export meat for McD. High quality, grass fed cattle. But then meat prices went down -wonder why- and someone got the idea that selling the land for tourism developments and housing was better… so mass production was halted. What little we had went to Japan. Then there was a huge drought… and that was the end of it.

So it seems that corn has turned into the melamine of the US. Actually, I believe it is the whole system set up. One of the joys here in Taiwan is to be able to walk to most places you want to go. Hey, even pushing your motorcycle implies an effort -not to mention taking it out of a parking space after it becomes entangled with others. Bikes, buses, parks to walk in… Now, the typical US town -and unfortunately, all the wannabe places that imitate their lifestyle- you have to drive everywhere, sedentarism is promoted -watch TV- and few venues are available for exercising. Marketing rules -does not surprise me the promotion of smoking- not healthy common sense.

6

[quote=“Namahottie”]The first thing I was surprised when arriving home was the size of people. It still disturbs me. Because I don’t think it’s completely due to lack of exercise, but rather what is being put in the food that we don’t know about. It’s a bit of stretch and some what of a conspiracy theory, but I actually got to thinking one day about hormones in chicken and beef… And I thought, who’s to say that the ingestion of those hormones is resulting in people being overweight? I’ve seen some people who don’t “look” like they are genetically are capable of being the size they are but some how are…

just my 2 cts.[/quote]

Well, I’ll agree that it is, IN PART, what is being put in the food. Some of it people are unaware of, like just how much fat and calories is in those processed goods. [color=#0080FF]But some of it isn’t that hard to see.[/color] If you start counting calories, fat, and/or Weight Watchers points, you quickly become aware of just how bad some of the food is, and how unnecessarily large many portions are. Au gratin, sauces with heavy cream, large, fatty steaks, cheeseburgers with bacon, cheese and meat ravioli, pot pies, banana splits, oversized cinnabons and so on go right out the window. One time a morbidly obese roommate of mine looked at the ingredients of the can of bean dip (yes, the whole can) that he was having with his giant sized bag of Doritos (yes, the whole bag), and ingredient # 2 was lard. Eew. (13 oz. of Doritos, 1820 calories, 104 grams of fat; add the whole can of bean dip and you’re way past your limit of food for two whole days!). That was just his snack, too.

The American diet is, frankly, abysmal. People order two meals in a restaurant, or a meal sized for two (or three), and still have a dessert? :astonished: Portion control is completely absent, and people gravitate toward the densest, fattiest foods at every meal.

No, looking at the way many people eat, I don’t think we need to resort to any conspiracies about hormones in food, or even any studies about genetics, to explain the obesity problem.

7

Brings new meaning to the line “West Virginia, mountain momma,” from ‘Country Roads’

8

[quote=“Dragonbones”]
Well, I’ll agree that it is, IN PART, what is being put in the food. Some of it people are unaware of, like just how much fat and calories is in those processed goods. [color=#0080FF]But some of it isn’t that hard to see.[/color] If you start counting calories, fat, and/or Weight Watchers points, you quickly become aware of just how bad some of the food is, and how unnecessarily large many portions are. Au gratin, sauces with heavy cream, large, fatty steaks, cheeseburgers with bacon, cheese and meat ravioli, pot pies, banana splits, oversized cinnabons and so on go right out the window. One time a morbidly obese roommate of mine looked at the ingredients of the can of bean dip (yes, the whole can) that he was having with his giant sized bag of Doritos (yes, the whole bag), and ingredient # 2 was lard. Eew. (13 oz. of Doritos, 1820 calories, 104 grams of fat; add the whole can of bean dip and you’re way past your limit of food for two whole days!). That was just his snack, too.

The American diet is, frankly, abysmal. People order two meals in a restaurant, or a meal sized for two (or three), and still have a dessert? :astonished: Portion control is completely absent, and people gravitate toward the densest, fattiest foods at every meal.

No, looking at the way many people eat, I don’t think we need to resort to any conspiracies about hormones in food, or even any studies about genetics, to explain the obesity problem.[/quote]

There is no argument there. I do, wholeheartedly, agree that our portion size has increase greatly and our emphasis on exercise has gone down. But did American’s exercise anymore or less or about the same 20 years ago? Don’t know, or have the time at this moment to research it. I know as a single person, one of my biggest complaints is how food is packaged and sold in the US. It is hard to find food that isn’t packaged for a family of four thousand. :laughing: That makes it a bit hard not have those late night snacks,etc. As for exercise, where can you find the time when you’re working 50+ hour weeks? By the time you get home, all you want to do is just rest, and next thing you know is you’re in front of the tv, zoning out and feeding your face from that giant-sized bag of Doritos because of the “endorphins” it gives you to fight off the stress of a hard day. Sure it’s an excuse but hey…And don’t forget, breakfast is a big part of the day and many people aren’t eating that, either.

Also, I’ve notice people are too busy to eat together. Or not even making the effort to do so. I see so many families eating out. I recall going into a fast food chain after work, and seeing a woman sitting at the window eating. She was just shoveling the food into her mouth with a blank stare. It just got me to thinking that, if she were eating with company she’d probably be more conscious of her portions and eat slower. When you gobble these large portions up in 15 to 20 minutes, I’m certain it makes it harder for the body to properly digest them.

9

I’d put a lot of this down to urban planning too. In many places in the English-speaking world, it’s pretty hard to get around without a car.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html

One thing I love about Taiwan is that, generally speaking, most things you do or need to get are fairly close to where you live. It’s much more organic in that respect. You don’t have to jump in a car and drive for twenty minutes in one direction to go to work, twenty minutes in another direction to shop, twenty minutes in another direction to do your hobby, etc. I can ride my bicycle to work in well under ten minutes. I can get to one of many supermarkets (including two Carrefours) in the same. There’s a small supermarket within a five minute walk from my place. I can be at the bottom of a mountain in under twenty minutes (on my bicycle). Taiwan, and many other countries, is simply more conducive to this kind of exercise that is integrated into daily life.

The rest, I think, is about making conscious decisions. People have to work fifty hours per week in soul-destroying jobs with horrible commuting times because they have a lot of material goods that chain them to the desk. Then they need the material goods to overcome the tedium of working a fifty hour job with a commute. Why not break the cycle and actually live a balanced life?

10

BEcause then I’d be Poor! :loco:

11

[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]
One thing I love about Taiwan is that, generally speaking, most things you do or need to get are fairly close to where you live. It’s much more organic in that respect. You don’t have to jump in a car and drive for twenty minutes in one direction to go to work, twenty minutes in another direction to shop, twenty minutes in another direction to do your hobby, etc. I can ride my bicycle to work in well under ten minutes. I can get to one of many supermarkets (including two Carrefours) in the same. There’s a small supermarket within a five minute walk from my place. I can be at the bottom of a mountain in under twenty minutes (on my bicycle). Taiwan, and many other countries, is simply more conducive to this kind of exercise that is integrated into daily life.[/quote]

Oh this is so true. I think that if companies like WalMart had come into play, local economies would be stronger therefore adding to less stress of having to do so much with such little time. I live on the South side of Chicago, but the area I live in is not as bad as most. I have a grocery store two blocks away, buuuuut it doesn’t offer as much a selection of fresh veggies as I would like, but I still make do. As for those who live further south than me, there have been studies showing how the lack of choice in these areas contribute to a high obese rate.

article

But you think if people had to use public transportation to do their errands then they would have some rate of exercise and not be as obese. I think even with all that, it boils down to what they are shopping for.

12

BEcause then I’d be Poor! :loco:[/quote]

Maybe you’re being tongue in cheek.

Define poor though. You can be rich in cash or materials but poor in other ways. Also, even if we only look at money, we see that people often have to work these jobs to support their lifestyles. Often, they’re deeply in debt too, but even if they’re not, it’s like they’re chained to a treadmill, having to run as fast as they can to keep up.

I don’t work particularly hard, really. I don’t have to. Yet I enjoy, what for me is, a nice lifestyle and save (and invest) a pretty decent amount of money. The reason is that I don’t feel that I have to go and drop several thousand NT, or even necessarily several hundred NT,
going out or buying “stuff” to have a good time. I largely control my spending and my lifestyle. They don’t control me.

The same can be said for food. I know what’s good for me. My body actually tells me this. If I don’t eat well, or sleep well, or anything else, I come to a screaching halt the very next day (or even that day) after I’ve done exercise. I’m actually at a point where not only do I generally not eat bad food, but my body seems to have given me a strong aversion to it because I’ll be missing out on something good that I need. Also, being tight with money, I don’t want to spend it on bad food.

Namahottie: Having said that, supermarkets themselves may not be the panacea. There’s a certain requirement of a particular mindset too. If such a mindset is present, there may not even be a need for supermarkets as local communities create local alternatives that better serve their communities’ needs.

13

[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]
Namahottie: Having said that, supermarkets themselves may not be the panacea. There’s a certain requirement of a particular mindset too. If such a mindset is present, there may not even be a need for supermarkets as local communities create local alternatives that better serve their communities’ needs.[/quote]

Nothing will be a panacea in all of this. As for the mindset, what would that be? These communities that lack choice in supermarkets, have created local alternatives that serve their communities’ needs. They are, what we call, local corner stores, which stock canned and processed foods. Albeit we both know that these are dangerous to one’s health, but they do serve a purpose. Economics does play a factor in all this.

But there is something to be said for having a wealth of consumer services in your neck of the woods. It provides a sense of support or connection which I think is important in the overall scheme of things.

14

I’m just wondering then why certain poor immigrant communities manage(d) to have their own market gardens and so on that supplied them with healthy food. There’s a different mindset there, I suspect.

15

Immigrants pack on the pounds

[quote]Long-term exposure to American culture may be hazardous to immigrants’ health.

A new study found that obesity is relatively rare in the foreign-born until they have lived in the United States - the land of drive-thrus, remote controls and double cheeseburgers - for more than 10 years.

Only 8 percent of immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than a year were obese, but that jumped to 19 percent among those who had been here for at least 15 years. That compared with 22 percent of U.S.-born residents surveyed. [/quote]

I did an article earlier in the year on Chinese immigrants and health, and one of my sources said in the last five years he has noticed a huge increase in diabetes among older immigrants and in their grandchildren due to having a wider access of fast foods as well as difference in lifestyle.

16

Yikes! That’s grim then.