Food is too much involved in Americans daily life. Yes, you need to eat. Yes, you must eat a good balance of things. But it's every other thought and word for a lot of us. It's thrown at us constantly on our drive to work and back home, all over the television, sporting events, school events, so on and so forth. It's TOO available, unfortunately, and not great for you stuff, either. There is just too much of it, too much of a part of our daily conversations, thoughts, and plans. Eating is to needed to sustain us. We eat to live. But the way food is embedded in our every moment of the day, every sight and sound and smell, it is as though we are living to eat. And, on a more grand conversation, it's part of the "consumption narrative". America MUST consume to grow, or we go backwards economically.
Eat more. Feed others more. Buy more food. Gain weight as a result. Visit the doctor more. Find out you have health problems, so buy more medications. Join more gyms. Not go, opting instead to sit at home and eat. Consume consume consume. Eat eat eat. It is all symptomatic of our American obsession with consumption, and it's now necessary, unfortunately, or lots of doctors and nurses and clinics and entire industries die. If we stop our behavior that is bad for us, restaurants close, jobs are lost, recession ensues, and the cycle will deteriorate. But we wouldn't be fat. Or as fat, anyway.
But I'm not completely pessimistic. For my eternal optimists here, many Americans have stopped smoking. It's not because cigarettes aren't for sale anymore; sure, they are. But we buy less of them. We do it less. It can be done. And America didn't fold up because we stopped smoking, or slowed it down some anyway. We can get away from bad food, eating less of it, and caring about the next meal or snack less. Lastly, as it relates to tobacco use and food: I believe there to be some indirect correlation between Americans stopping smoking, or cutting it back anyway, and our weight gain.
I don't have research, but I've got 43 years on planet earth, and smoking began to tail off in the 1990's to 2000. And that's about the time obesity rates took off in America.
Maybe RJR or Philip Morris owns some fast food chains or something
.