Burning Issues

November 23, 2024

What are the burning issues of our times? If you were exposed to pre-election political advertising or went down the MAGA media black hole, you might think it was transgender athletes playing girls’ sports. I don’t want to get into a heated discussion about this topic, but, for the record, reliable estimates put the number of transgender athletes playing sports at about 100. For those of you good with math, that’s two per state. Some states probably have zero. Personally, I have concerns with transgender athletes playing girls’ sports, especially after following the career of South African track and field athlete, Caster Semanya, who dominated the women’s 800 meters before the eligibility criteria were changed. But, I am not going to get myself worked up over 100 people in a population of over 335 million. Again, for those of you good with math, that comes out to .0000003%. Seth Moulton notwithstanding, this is a less than minor issue that affects an infinitesimally small number of people nationwide. It is not a national emergency, and we don’t need to call out the military to get it under control.

So what is a burning issue? Massachusetts is on fire so I guess that qualifies as a burning issue, but who really cares? Drill, baby, drill. However, there is another burning issue. The burning of fat, aka, obesity. The number of adults, who are overweight or obese, has risen to the level of a national health crisis. In my lifetime, we have gone from a President (Kennedy), who extolled the virtues of being able to walk 50 miles, to a President, who extols the virtues of riding in a golf cart and eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers. A recent headline in the fake New York Times declared that “Three Quarters of U.S. Adults Are Now Overweight or Obese.” For the quants, that’s 75%. There has been a dramatic increase since 1990. Maybe it was reaction to the market crash of 1990, or the dot.com bubble crash of 2000, or the financial crisis of 2008. Given with what is going on with Bitcoin, we are going to get a lot fatter. Without aggressive intervention, researchers forecast that the number of overweight and obese people will rise to 260,000,000 by 2050, which will intersect perfectly with disappearing ice caps and rising sea levels.

Researchers were particularly alarmed by the increase in obesity of children, more than one in three (33%) of whom are now overweight or obese. Cell phones and social media may be detrimental to our children, but obesity is a killer, leading to increases in diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, asthma, sleep apnea, liver disease, kidney disease, stroke, infertility, and cancer. For children, we will also see increases in anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and bullying. Some people might call this an epidemic. Others might be diet deniers. A Joint Economic Committee report that Republicans released this year predicted that obesity will result in up to $9,000,000,000,000 in excess medical expenditures over the next ten years. This is at a time when one of the political parties wants to end the Affordable Care Act as well as enact major cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

This is a difficult problem to solve. As a certified spinning instructor, I am confident in saying that weight loss follows the 80-20 rule like everything else in life. Weight loss is 20% exercise and 80% diet. Factors working against us are ultra processed foods, sedentary/online activity, genetics, challenges of accessing fresh fruits and vegetables, and overly-scheduled lifestyles. Factors like income, employment and level of education also play a role. Drugs and bariatric surgery will have their places. There have been proposals to tax sugar-sweetened drinks like tobacco with a warning from the surgeon general. There are many fad diets out there, which are just that, fads. The one lifestyle diet that most dietitians can agree on that works is the Mediterranean Diet. You can look it up. I have been on it since birth.

The point of all of this is that there are very real and serious issues we need to deal with. We don’t need to devote an inordinate amount of resources to an issue that is just a political talking point made at the expense of very few, vulnerable kids. I think we need a little more perspective on what really matters.

Note: Many years ago, I was asked to play in a charity, golf event at a local club. The main attraction that year was Bob Hope, yes, that Bob Hope, who drove around all day in his Hope-mobile. I was joined in a foursome with someone I had never met before, Andy Hayes, yes, that Andy Hayes, fellow columnist from the right side of the tracks. Golf makes strange bedfellows.