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For years, public-health professionals have been warning
about the dangers of obesity among Americans, and last
week, they even produced some financial figures. A study
published on May 14 by the peer-reviewed journal Health
Affairs
said that medical spending caused by obesity
and overweight Americans amounts to about $90 billion a
year, or about 9 percent of total medical spending in this
country.
What makes this a public issue is that Medicare and
Medicaid finance approximately half of these costs.
Obesity is connected with diabetes, cardiovascular
disease, several types of cancer, musculoskeletal
disorders, sleep apnea and gallbladder disease.
That's quite a list, and a fair pile of money. Plus,
it's a lot of people: More than half of Americans are
either overweight or obese.
Since the report authors are scientists, they have to
use neutral politically correct terms, which are based on
the Body Mass Index.
This is calculated from your
weight and height. I'm 5-10 and weigh 178 pounds, which
gives me a BMI of 25.5. Anything over 24 (167 pounds) is
Overweight,
and 30 and beyond (209 pounds) is
Obese.
I'm not a scientist, and so I'll use a common term: Fat person. I'm a fat person, though I'm making progress. I was close to the Obese zone at the beginning of the year, and then I decided to do my best to walk for at least an hour every day.
Thanks to Salida's geography, I didn't have to set aside an hour. This town was laid out in 1880, before there were cars, and it's about the same size as it was a century ago with many enterprise remaining downtown. So the old part of town, where I live, has good sidewalks, and most of life's necessities lie within a few blocks. The common errands -- post office, bank, groceries, library, office supplies, etc. -- turn into part of my pedestrian hour. The remaining minutes are usually easy to make up.
I sleep better, work smarter and eat less. We save money -- not just on car costs, but at the store, since we're more cautious in our purchases when we have to carry them home, rather than haul them home.
To give proper credit, part of the inspiration came from a neighbor, Denny Daley. Our paths don't cross often, so I didn't recognize him the last time I saw him -- he'd lost about 100 pounds. I asked about costly designer diets and expensive gym memberships, and he said it was much simpler and cheaper. He and his wife had opened a store in Poncha Springs, five miles away, and he walked to and from work every day. That was it.
So there's an easy way to reduce the number of fat people in America, and I had visions of writing a book proposal and getting rich and famous as a health guru.
Then reality entered the contemplations. In a country run by oil men, walking is a profoundly subversive activity. Walk half a mile to the store, and you're just wearing out some cheap sneakers produced by exploited labor somewhere in Asia.
Drive, and you're supporting American wars to control oil resources in the Middle East. Plus the immense auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the associated litigation industry, to name a few.
Further, you're getting exercise without paying to use a gym or fitness center, and that's got to be at least as evil as visiting public lands without paying a user fee -- after all, you can't go to the movies for free, so why should you be able to watch a mountain sunset without paying?
And if it does improve your health, then you're not spending money on physicians, nurses, specialists, laboratory tests and the like; medical spending is 13.2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, and so thousands of jobs must depend on fat people.
There's even more subversion if routine pedestrianism got popular. People wouldn't want houses on big lots in distant suburbs -- they'd want to live within convenient walking distance of stores, schools and jobs. Smaller house lots means lower water consumption for the yard, and that's a threat to the water developers of our state.
It would also mean more small stores and fewer big ones. Immense shopping malls and big-box chain outlets -- that is, anything with a parking lot measured in acres -- would lose favor, and our municipal governments might even stop subsidizing them with tax and utility abatements, Their profits and stock prices would drop, and that could cause panic on Wall Street.
So while this pedestrian stuff works pretty well on a personal level in a small town, it would be irresponsible of me to recommend it on a national basis. America needs us to be fat; indeed, our current way of life relies on driving more and walking less -- unless you're paying by the hour to use a treadmill, of course.
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