OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <svj.orionwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Obesity, diabetes, heart failure, and a slurry of other physical maladies > is the price we are currently paying for our civilization that has become > too successful. > No doubt that is the biological root of the obesity problem. That is why fat people exist. I doubt there are any obese chimpanzees in the wild. But the recent explosive increase in obesity starting in the 1970s has more prosaic causes, in my opinion. The main causes are things like changes in food technology such as frozen food; new types of food such as high fructose corn syrup; and Federal subsidies for things like corn, milk and meat. In North America, middle-class and wealthy people have had access to unlimited amounts of food at very low cost since the early 19th century, but obesity was rare until the 1970s. Middle class people did not exercise much after the spread of automobiles 1920s, so I do not think sloth is the main factor. The problem is complicated, as described in books such as "Prescription for a Healthy Nation" but the main issue is recent changes in diet, and in what anthropologists call "foodways." That is: when and where you eat, size of portions, what you select for each meal, who prepares the food by what methods, and so on. To me, the problem does not seem hard to fix. Just go back to the foodways of 1950. That's what I do, and my weight has not changed in 30 years. That is an example of a solution that is clearcut, direct, and yet also complicated and difficult to implement. Turning back the clock to 1950s foodways would involve many expensive changes, higher grocery costs, and also education. This resembles my solution to global warming: I say we should stop burning fuel and then break apart CO2 molecules into C and O2, remove several trillion tons of carbon from the air, and put it back underground. That is the direct approach that gets to the heart of the matter. Needless to say, you need cold fusion to do a thing like that. You also need my kind of imagination, which I shared with Arthur C. Clarke. I am not boasting about that! What I mean is that Clarke and I are both literal-minded people with the uncluttered imagination of a 6-year-old. Many people said that about him. They did not mean it as flattery. Given a problem we tend to ignore difficulties, politics, and so-called practical limitations. We gravitate toward the most direct method. Clarke and I looked at the problems with food production and farms, for example, which we were both pretty familiar with. Clarke grew up on a farm and I spent a lot of time in the countryside. We both early on and independently concluded that farms are wonderful but it would make a lot more sense to grow food indoors. We looked at automobiles and said they have their merits but there are too many. There is too much traffic and they cause too many accidents, so let us get rid of cars somehow. People say it is impossible, but I say things are sometimes easier than you think. In Atlanta voters will soon pass the SPLOST initiative to spend billions on highways. If people seriously want to fix the traffic problem, this is not the right way to go about it. Building more roads will only make the problem worse. Smart traffic lights maybe, but not more pavement. The first thing to do is implement widespread use of high-res video telecommuting. Then they should start dynamiting highways, permanently blocking streets, and charging a $20 toll to come downtown, the way they do in London. They should make the subway trains free, and charge people to drive, instead of doing it the other way around. I expect I am right about that policy. What I am describing is physically possible. It is probably the cheapest and best answer. But there is not the slightest chance that any politician in Georgia -- or anywhere in the U.S. -- would advocate this. Things can change though. Sometimes things change overnight, such as when two nuclear reactors blow sky high. Suddenly you get conservative Japanese politicians all in agreement that they should abruptly close down the nuclear power industry. - Jed
