{"id":3548,"date":"2013-07-22T19:03:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3548"},"modified":"2013-07-22T19:18:33","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:18:33","slug":"obesity-is-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3548","title":{"rendered":"Obesity is Cool . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

We just survived our first major mid-summer heat wave here in New Jersey. Despite my advanced old age I’m still a bit on the thin side (BMI about 19), so the hot weather doesn’t bother me as much as for many other people (but of course, I pay the price in January and February during the dark, sub-freezing days). I recently saw an article on the Boston Globe<\/a> site suggesting that perhaps we could get used to living without as much air conditioning as most of us have now come to expect. I had to smile, as I never did come to expect AC that much; I don’t have an air conditioner in my apartment, and I hardly ever use the one in my car even in July and August (except when I have have someone with me who might get ugly if the A\/C stayed off). <\/p>\n

There was another recent note in the New Yorker reflecting on how cheap air conditioning has changed our social customs<\/a> and expectations over the past few decades and generations. I’m old enough to remember when many small stores and workplaces didn’t have it. I worked for a railroad during my college summer vacations, and none of the offices where I did my job had it (the railroad was broke and couldn’t afford it). Many small stores didn’t have it either. There were still trains, buses and subway cars in the 1960s and early 70s that didn’t have it. But as the 70’s, 80s and 90s progressed, air conditioners became cheaper to buy and more efficient to run, and thus conquered the world. After 2000, the victory of air conditioning became complete with world manufacturing (read “made in China”) and stable energy costs (due mainly to hydro-fracking of natural gas and oil; ask the anti-fracking advocates if they are ready to turn their AC’s off in August). You have to be really, really poor these days to be deprived of air conditioning. Most public housing in Newark (where I work) has central air, and very few houses or multi-family buildings don’t have at least one or two AC’s in the window (sometimes with anti-break-in window bars shaped to accommodate such a unit). <\/p>\n

So today, every car, store, home, apartment, workplace, bus, office, construction vehicle, control station, outhouse, just about every enclosed space that can be occupied by humans has AC. AC has become as much of a universally recognized right here in the USA as heat in winter. Summer becomes the inverse of winter, in that we suffer short-term bouts of heat or cold when we walk between our front door and our car, take out the garbage, or park our car and run for the mall or office entrance; otherwise we live in a climate-controlled 70 degree bubbles for most of our lives. Other than people in northern Maine, northern Michigan, northern Minnesota or northern Montana, only a handful of weird-o’s like me get by without it. (And even I admit that I could hardly survive in the sealed building where I work without climate control; I could hardly get anything done in a room that was humid, still and over 80 degrees for 8 or 9 hours.) <\/p>\n

I’ve also recently read a bit more on the obesity epidemic in America, and the costs to the public<\/a> that it imposes. E.g., increased health care insurance costs and increased taxes for govt healthcare, which are felt by most everyone. Plus, the eventual social and economic costs<\/a> of shortened life spans and thus lower life-cycle work productivity. <\/p>\n

As to the cause of burgeoning obesity rates in the USA, the usual suspects are the commercialization and heavy marketing of low-cost, calorie-dense foods and beverages by big business (read McDonalds, Yum Brands, Pepsico, Kraft Foods, etc); along with changing lifestyles and workplace patterns that encourage sedentary non-activity. I myself sit at a desk all day now, unlike the railroad jobs I had back in the 1970s where I had to move about and throw mechanical levers. And yet I’m not much heavier than I was when I worked on the railroad. <\/p>\n

By comparison, a friend who is also a former railroad guy but who remained a “working man” all his life now looks almost 100 pounds bigger then when I first met him around 1968, and has diabetes. A recent article<\/a> in the Atlantic about what might realistically be done to stem the obesity crisis points out that McDonalds and other “big food” companies aren’t entirely to blame for what my friend is going through (even though they are getting rich from this crisis). Many of them have tried to develop and market healthier food (e.g. McDonalds’ “McLean Delux” burger) but sales were low. Foods that are convenient, cheap, satiating and high in “taste intensity” are what the overall public (including my friend) seem to demand; that’s what sells, versus lighter and more natural foods with less fat, salt, sugar and with better nutrient structures. E.g., a simple bowl of cooked lentils, brown rice and broccoli.<\/p>\n

Obesity is not a simple subject, though. Various studies<\/a> show correlations between obesity and socio-economic poverty, i.e. with lower income and lower education levels. There is also correlation with the trend towards lower work participation rates<\/a> over the past 15 years (i.e., increasing numbers of working-aged people getting by somehow without working, thus having more time to snack on Doritos). And with the predominance of TV, computers, video game toys and smart phones used mostly indoors by children, along with increasingly unsafe street conditions, outdoor play isn’t as prevalent as it used to be for many kids, contributing to the childhood obesity problem<\/a>. <\/p>\n

So given the recent hot weather and those earlier-mentioned articles pondering “what if” there wasn’t as much AC out there, I couldn’t help but wonder if the air conditioning revolution also had something to do with the obesity revolution. I did a bit of Googling (or Bing-ing or Ask-ing, take your pick, they’re all good) on the topic, and in fact, there is at least one legitimate university study<\/a> that finds a causative correlation between AC and fatness. The study says that experiencing constant year-round indoor temps “causes the body to expend less energy, because it does not have to work to warm up or cool down, potentially leading to increased fat stores.” (Another possible contributor cited in the study is less sleep). <\/p>\n

Some other bloggers<\/a> have also been considering an AC \/ obesity link based on lifestyle changes and body physiology. In fact, one fellow from Las Vegas decided to experiment on himself<\/a> by going “cold turkey” on AC during the blazing desert summer heat. He reports having lost weight because of this (not too surprising; more surprising is that he made it all the way through the summer). He reports having to sleep wrapped in wet towels — sounds a bit messy unless you use a vinyl bed cover. By comparison, during the heat wave in NJ last week, I still needed light PJ’s and a light sheet over me as I slept, because my window fan and room fan were doing such a good job at circulating air into and out of my bedroom. But then again, our heatwave range is 80 to 95, versus 90 to 110 in Nevada.<\/p>\n

[One more AC \/ obesity anecdote: back in 1999, I was negotiating a new car purchase at a Chevy dealership, and I told the sales guy, whose name was Mark, that I didn’t want an air conditioner in my new Prizm. At first Mark looked at me like I was from Jupiter, then his face wrenched as though contemplating his being tortured. He said “I could never survive these summers without air conditioning!” Come to think of it, Mark was a rather stocky, hefty fellow.] <\/p>\n

There is no policy solution to what I’m discussing here. We can’t put a “fat tax” on A\/C as to discourage it. That would never fly politically, any more than taxes or bans on fatty or sugary foods (give Mayor Bloomberg credit for going down trying<\/a>). Thus, this essay is nothing more than an ironic observation on how the seemingly positive economic and social effects of advancing technology and world trade (thus keeping us cool and comfy in the summer with near-universal air conditioning) sometimes backfire a bit. I.e., they might help to encourage even higher levels of obesity than Coke, KFC and indoor video games have otherwise caused, and thus contribute to shorter life-spans, higher health care costs as manifest in higher insurance premiums and higher taxes, and lower overall quality of life. <\/p>\n

The present generations, from aging Boomers to the youngest Millennials, have bought the program and won’t give it up. It will be up to future generations (“Generation Z<\/a>” and whatever the following ones will be called) to decide if the almost unlimited pleasures of eating an Extra Value Meal in air-conditioned comfort while being entertained by continuously dancing images on your I-Pad are worth the eventual long-run cost to the enterprise of being human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We just survived our first major mid-summer heat wave here in New Jersey. Despite my advanced old age I’m still a bit on the thin side (BMI about 19), so the hot weather doesn’t bother me as much as for many other people (but of course, I pay the price in January and February during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,23,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3548"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3550,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548\/revisions\/3550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}