There have, of course, always been some fat people. Renaissance-era paintings show plenty of big women, and some men. King Henry VIII was famously fat, as was Henry Knox (George Washington's best friend). George IV, king of England in 1820, was fat. Mae West was certainly not skinny. But, back when most people had very physical jobs, there were no cars, and food insecurity was a real thing and not just something that sounds good in government publications, fat people were kind of rare.
In the 21st century, we keep hearing about an "epidemic" of fatness. Some 70% of Americans are said to be overweight. (Which makes us the majority. So don't piss us off.) Health pundits blame different things. It's because of sugar. No, it's because of corn syrup. No, it's because of feeding antibiotics to cows. No, it's actually because of aliens abducting humans and running fertility tests. Well, probably none of those things really help, but I think it's inaccurate to blame the number of fat people on any of them.
No, we need to blame the "epidemic" on evolution. And the First World War.
Lemme 'splain:
A Brief History of Human Evolution
The first critter that was pretty obviously a proto-human was Australopithecus, which showed up in Africa a mind-bogglingly long time ago. These guys were about 4 feet tall, walked upright, and probably looked like hairy humans, except their faces were more simian. Between then and now, about 30 different kinds of humans sprang up, branched out and died off until 50,000 years ago, when homo sapiens found itself the last man standing.
(Our nearest cousins, h. neandertalis, lived in the same spaces we did for tens of thousands of years before they were decimated by a pandemic disease, or climate change, or both. We hunted the same animals, ate the same berries, apparently didn't fight much, and occasionally dated (!). H. sapiens may have also coexisted with h. florensis and h. denisova.)
During most of that entire 2.5 million year time span, which is so much time I really can't even wrap my brain around it, our biggest problem was getting enough to eat. We hunted, we gathered, we gathered and we hunted, most of our waking hours, for most of our history. We got better at it, as evidenced by spear points and arrowheads and cave art and beaded objects that indicate we had more spare time as we went along, but a lot of us still starved to death before anything else could kill us. This pattern didn't really change until about B.C.E. 12,500 (ish), when we invented agriculture.
It's hard to explain what a game changer was this business of farming. For the first time in our history, there was plenty of food. Not only that, but there was enough left over to save some for next year, in case the harvest was bad or the weather wasn't friendly or--whatever. Fertility shot up. People lived longer, fought off diseases, survived broken bones. Our population doubled and doubled again. We spread out across the globe. We made buildings and houses and cities and civilizations. We invented laws and gods and religions. We came up with writing and started keeping records. We created countries and armies and ships and lots of nifty gizmos. It was huge.
12,000 years later, we fought World War I, and had another big leap forward.
A Brief History of World War I
In case you missed this part in history class, France and Germany started squabbling over some land called Alsace-Lorraine, as well as a number of other things. In February of 1916, Germany decided to march through Belgium to attack France. Belgium said the hell you will, somebody shot the Archduke Ferdinand and total pandemonium broke out.
Unfortunately, before any of that happened, we had the American Civil War. This occasioned the invention of the machine gun and the explosive shell. We then had sixty years after that to get even better at making efficient weapons to kill people. The Battle of Verdun began on February 2, 1916. Thirty thousand men died in a single afternoon.
Two years later, having basically lost an entire generation of young men, France appealed to England for help in its war against Germany. England did what they usually do; they turned around and asked us. I forget how we let them talk us into it. But they did, a draft was instituted, and thousands of American men, mostly the ones that weren't rich enough to get out of it, began pouring into Army camps. The Army took one look at these guys and got very unhappy. More than half of them were suffering from rickets, pellagra, beriberi and other diseases of nutritional deficiency. What's more, a lot of them were stunted, having never reached their full height or breadth of shoulders because, simply put, they hadn't had enough to eat for most of their lives. (They also, by and large, had bad teeth. But that's another blog post.)
The Army complained to the government. The government passed some laws. After the war, a number of food products sold in the U.S. were enriched; that is to say, they had nutrients added that weren't there before. Guess what, milk does not naturally have vitamin A and D. They added that when they put it into cartons. Wheat does not naturally contain vitamin B complex in it either. We added thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, and folic acid. And it worked. Nutritional deficiency diseases almost disappeared overnight. Other countries passed similar laws. Between that and significant developments in farming, more babies survived infancy. Life spans shot up, from an average of 47 years in 1900 to 63 years by 1940. We invented vaccines for more diseases. We made better drugs, including antibiotics. Life got a lot better.
We still haven't completely solved the problem of getting everyone enough to eat. There are still famines, and people still sometimes starve to death. But by and large, most modern famines are political. It's not that there isn't enough food, it's that we can't, or won't, get it to the people who need it. Either we can't pry it loose from the people who have it or someone is preventing us from getting it where it needs to go. But the last hundred or so years has still been a significant reversal in our relationship to food.
Which is, of course, why we have an "epidemic" of fat people.
Remember that 2.5 million or so years where food was scarce? Humans who, by some genetic twist of fate, were good at surviving famines were more likely to live long enough to reproduce, and their kids were also good at surviving famines. Do this generation after generation for 2.5 million years and you end up with a bunch of humans who are really good at surviving famines. Any time we lose significant weight, we quickly gain it back as soon as there's available food again. By doing that, we're better prepared for next famine, and the next, and the one after that. Having extra weight is like a bank account for times of unemployment.
In short, we have evolved to gain weight, not lose it. We did this over 2.5 million years. 100 years of food security are a drop in the evolutionary bucket.
Then, during and after World War I, we suddenly had abundant food for the first time. Couple that with the improvements in technology and labor saving devices, and the invention of cars and other forms of transportation. What you get is a lot more food and a lot less energy being expended through exercise, ie, labor. People began to gain weight. Not just fat people but everybody. We also got taller. The average American man is 5' 9" and weighs 200 pounds. In 1900, American men stood an average of 5'5" and weighed about 140 pounds.
By and large, we don't have famines anymore, but human beings still lose a significant amount of body weight (say, 10% or more) with great frequency. It's called dieting. What happens, when a modern human loses lots of body weight? Well, the same thing that used to happen before we were modern humans. Studies show that regardless of the method of weight loss, 80 to 90% of patients gain it all back, and usually more, in about 3 years' time. That's evolution in action, baby.
"But my Aunt Frieda lost 90 pounds and kept it off." Sure. Aunt Friedas exist. But we cannot all be Aunt Frieda. In fact, only about 10-20% of us can. That makes about 80% of the population not Aunt Frieda. When the system us not working for 80% of the participants, the problem is not the participants. It's the system.
(By the way, Americans spend about 70 billion--with a b--dollars on weight loss programs and devices every year. There are a lot of people out there heavily invested in convincing you that you, too, can be Aunt Frieda. The problem is, theyre not interested in your health. They want your money, honey.)
Since our culture values thinness to a degree that's pathological, people lose and gain weight over and over again. It's called weight cycling, and it turns out that weight cycling is really bad for you in the long term, even if it's good at keeping you alive long enough to reproduce. (Evolution is all about reproduction. The goal is to pass on your DNA. Evolution does not care if you live a long and healthy life. Once you've had your babies, you're a dead end.)
Look. If evolution wasn't real, fat people could go on one diet once, lose the weight, and be fine thereafter. But that's not what happens. In fact, people who lose weight, then gain it back (ie, basically everybody) often find that they have to eat fewer calories to keep from gaining even more weight. A man who can eat, say, 2000 calories a day at 180 pounds, can only eat 1800 calories a day to maintain the same 180 pounds after he loses 25 pounds and gains them back.
What's more, weight cycling causes bone loss and osteoporosis, muscle loss, diabetes and heart damage. It probably also causes mental health issues like depression and anxiety. It is said, and it is true, that fat people get more heart disease than skinny people. But, what's causing the heart disease? Is it being fat? Or is it all the damage done to your heart and your organs because you've lost and gained weight so many times?
The way to find out, of course, would be to get a bunch of fat people who have never tried to lose weight and follow them around for 40 years to see what their incidence of heart disease looks like. The trouble is, there are no such people.
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