Why southerners are fat

What about other groups e. What about groups that eat very little plant matter and mostly fat and protein yet have almost no cancer, obesity, diabetes, or coronary heart disease Inuits? Read Good Calories, Bad Calories if you want to get the background on why the AHA recommends what it does and why they are probably wrong on the subject of dietary fat and protein. I do agree that replacing grains and starchy vegetables with green, leafy vegetables is a good dietary strategy.

It is a good way to get variety in your diet without activating insulin secretion. The amount of calories you eat is largely irrelevant with respect to fat storage.

Your body will adjust your appetite and basal metabolism to maintain homeostasis. My family grew up in poverty when we immigrated to Canada, but we still managed to eat healthy and cheaply.

My parents also worked crazy amount of hours as the only jobs they could only get were poor paying remedial ones like dish washing. Despite all our hardship, we managed to eat a healthy diet and we were able to do so because my parents understood the value of vegetables and fruit and stretching the dollar when it comes to groceries.

Now that I'm all grown up, I can't go more than two days without feeling amazingly guilty if I don't integrate a good serving of vegetables into my diet. When ever I hear stories about how people are claiming that the public is being educated, I always think of this interview that I saw once of a young girl who idealized Jared from the Subway commercials. She was with her mom and she basically said how it was so unfair that they didn't have a lot of money, otherwise she could afford to go on the subway diet like Jared.

What was extremely sad about all of this was, her mom was nodding her head in agreement. I've been out of school for quite some time now, but for the life of me, I can't remember being educated in school on a regular basis on how to eat healthier. I would hope that this is higher priority for schools now a days, but I highly doubt it. You engage in physical activity when it is cool first thing in the morning and last thing at night and then dismiss heat as a factor?!?!

Having lived in the southern US albeit Austin, which is not completely unbearable during summer days I remember how strange the adjustment was when I first arrived.

No one walks anywhere if they can help it: you leave your air-conditioned house in your air-conditioned car and drive to your air-conditioned office, at lunch you drive somewhere else and then at the end of the day you drive home.

As you indirectly point out, physical activity requires setting aside specific times and is not something that you casually do over the course of the day. Poor and uneducated does not help, but there are a lot of poor and uneducated places in the US and around the world that do not have the same absurd levels of obesity. Air-conditioning and the lifestyle that developed around this invention are a major contributor to obesity levels in the south.

But if extreme temperature was the only factor the North would be obese, too, right? Running in snow is a lot harder than running when it's cool out. Caged on July 23, parent prev next [—]. I grew up in Mississippi. I lived there for 26 years before moving to Portland, OR. The point the author makes about walking to the bus stop or to the local market is absolutely correct.

I've always been really slim, but I rarely walked anywhere in MS unless it was to the mail box. This is not because I was lazy played a lot of sports , but because there's nothing to walk to.

Practically everything involved an automobile as a means for access. Exercise as a daily routine didn't exist for me.

That's not to say I couldn't make a conscious effort to exercise, but a commitment to exercise as part of a routine is much harder to adhere to than a routine that involves exercise. In Portland, things are a completely different story. Almost nothing requires an automobile. My wife and I went 7 months on a single tank of gas when we moved to Portland. We walk practically everywhere. Exercise is built into our day to day life. We walk to the post office, bar, movie theater, coffee shop, grocery store, you name it.

On the topic of eating healthy - The food choices where I grew up were not that great. We had one grocery store, one diner, no fast food restaurants we eventually got a subway and two gas stations. Unless you lived in the town center, you had to drive to and from this limited selection. Many of my family members hover just over the poverty line although none of them consider themselves poor.

Grocery shopping isn't an exercise in health, it's an exercise in conservative economics. Trips to the grocery store are usually prefixed with a question: "How can I get enough food so we can eat until the next paycheck and still have enough money left over for gas to get back and forth to work".

It's a vicious cycle. Because we tend to deep fry and eat anything not nailed down. Butter and fried food do not make people fat. Sugar and starch make people fat. Southern food is loaded with sugar. Sweet tea is revolting to anyone with a healthy pallet. Consuming more calories than you're burning is how you get fat. There are plenty of ways to do it. While that is true, the more interesting question is why some people are driven to consume a large number of calories despite the desire to be leaner.

Also consider that even obese people tend to reach a balance in their calorie consumption and expenditure even without a change in diet or an increase in physical activity. Let's phrase it more precisely then: Populations of human beings do not grow obese by consuming relatively high proportions of dietary fat. They grow obese by consuming relatively high proportions of starch and sugar. If you chained a person to a bed and stuffed them with lard every day, you could probably make them obese.

But that's not what we are talking about. People who are eating according to their appetite get fat from consuming too much sugar and starch, which screws up the whole endocrine system. They do not get thrown out of wack and end up consuming too much food when they feed on fat. University of Alabama at Birmingham recently took a look at the math by actually weighing people in a long-running study of obesity. When they did, obesity rates were found to be higher for every part of the country.

But they also found that certain parts of the country increased less than others. For example, the researchers found that the Northern part of the Midwest had obesity rates up to 10 percent higher than Southern states like Mississippi and Alabama, which often rank near the top. The study still puts the South at a 31 percent obesity rate, which is… bad. If you are still experiencing issues, please describe the problem below and we will be happy to assist you.

Researchers find big discrepancy between what they say they weigh and what the scale says. But it doesn't appear to be true, a University of Alabama at Birmingham study suggests.

The study recently published in the journal Obesity found that there's a significantly higher percentage of obese people in a region of central and northwest states including Minnesota, Kansas and North and South Dakota.

How did Southerners get such a fat reputation? Apparently because they are more truthful. The notion that the South is the fattest comes primarily from a nationwide telephone survey done by the Centers for Disease Control, in which the surveyor asks for height and weight, among other things, Howard said. UAB study compared nine Census Bureau regions and found that East Souh Central was fifth, not first, in percentage of its population obese.

But the UAB researchers found that when people were actually weighed, the numbers didn't add up.