BTW: one tiresome rant is that obesity is caused in children by soda drinks in school, lack of exercise and so on. Ms. Kolata cites a TWENTY MILLION DOLLAR FEDERAL STUDY that took high risk children, fed them only low-fat foods and bottled water and gave them daily vigorous exercise and even educated their parents, teaching them how to cook healthy. The result: virtually no significant weight loss of any kind.

But did they gain weight? The point of taking soda machines out of schools, serving kids well-balanced diets, and ensuring that they get vigorous exercise every day is to keep them from gaining weight in the first place. It's a hell of a lot easier to stay at a certain weight than it is to lose a significant amount of weight once you're already heavy.

Also: low fat =! low calorie. If I eat 2000 calories a day of low fat food, I'm still going to gain weight because I only need about 1200-1500 to maintain my weight.

Spoken like a true, hopeless fat person, anonymous...

You know, I think you might be more effective at making your points understood and acknowledged if you didn't come across as a total dick in every single post. I don't care for you or your rhetorical style, but that doesn't mean I'm fat, it just means I don't like you.

So far you have accused people you've never seen before in your life of being fat merely because they are arguing points that are tangential to your personal agenda (calories in versus calories out with relation to overall size, versus nutritional intake etc.) or because they dare to acknowlege that there are some slightly more complex factors at work here beyond the simple and obvious GIGO equation.

It is easy. Consider the average weight of an American 50 years ago, or even 30 or 20 years ago. The problem with people getting fat now is lifestyle. In fact, it is very likely that finding healthy food is easier now then it was for previous generations.

I disagree with that assertion. The demise of family farms, the rise of factory farming, the increase in city and suburban sprawl (reducing the ability of the average person to walk to a corner store), government subsidies for things like corn (eg corn syrup), all play a part in the increasing waistline of the average American. In fact, the book "Fat Land" asserts that the sharp increase in overweight and obese people correlated almost instantaneously with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup into almost *every* product on the market, even thing like tomato sauce which shouldn't have sugar in it at all!

What is the biggest difference between then and now? The internet (and the fascination with "super-sizing it").

See above. See also government subsidies for farming practices that increase production of low-nutrient, calorie-dense food products at the expense of things like actual vegetables.

People just sit and post messages and idealize strangers that they chat with because they are disappointed with their spouses and obsess over email at the expense of engaging in physical activity that was de rigeur years ago. That is why people are getting fat.

People are also getting fat because public access ways are disappearing in favor of housing-only suburban sprawl. Sidewalks are disappearing, walkable-distance villages are disappearing, both men and women are working, and working longer hours that make after-work exercise prohibitive at best, outright dangerous at worst.

Eating well and getting some exercise is not splitting the atom.

Depending on your income level and geography, it does take some creativity and time that a lot of people just don't have anymore. The 70-hour workweek also didn't exist 50 years ago.

You and heavy people like you don't want to change your behavior so you dress it up with, "gosh, it's hard. It's unrealistic, it's hollywood's fault."

The last "anonymous" said nothing of the kind s/he said that it was difficult and at this stage of the game won't come without some discomfort, at least to people who are trying to lose weight rather than maintaining an alread-low weight. This is yet another example of you reacting to what you want to see, just to have something to get pissy about, rather than what the person actually said.

I predict that if you respond to this, you will do so by prefacing it with how fat I am even though you have no idea who I am, what I look like, what my eating habits are, and how much and what type(s) of exercise I engage in on a daily basis.

I also believe that many of our doctors don't want universal health care because it means that their extravagant lifestyles may no longer be possible.

Expensive specialists, perhaps, but I think people would be stunned to find out how low reimbursement rates actually are for primary care and internal medicine practitioners. Add to that the incredible amount of red tape required to actually get claims paid by the myriad of insurance companies and individual plans within those companies (some require blue ink, some require black. Some must be typed in all caps, some not. Some require the individual ID number of the physician, some require the group number. This one is true and is my favorite: some require that supporting documentation be attached, but when it's received by the insurance company, the person opening the envelope detaches the supporting documentation and puts it into one pile and the claim form itself into another pile, which is given to the adjudicator, who then denies it stating that the supporting documenation is missing. Thats' 45 days just to get denied and have to start the process all over again. Meanwhile the doctor can't pay the staff who are filling out these claims and pulling charts to make sure they have everything in order when they send them out because they have no income because the insurance companies keep deying their claims...)

It's a clusterfuck, that's for damn sure.