Last Wednesday we linked to a Roger Cohen
New York Times article about France, where he was visiting. Stopping by the United Kingdom on his way home, he
writes many Brits are fat or obese. Experts he talked to in the U.K. were gloomy, with good reason.
A recent report in the Lancet medical journal found that 67 percent of men and 57 percent of women in the United Kingdom are either overweight or obese.
Cohen quotes Tony Goldstone, a consultant endocrinologist at London’s Hammersmith Hospital:
In the developed world we don’t eat because we are hungry. We eat because everywhere we look there’s a superabundance of food and we’re hardwired through evolution to keep our body weight up.
Who says that the will can overcome biology when biology trained us to get food when scarce? We evolved to prefer foods high in fat and sugar because they contain the calories we need to reproduce.
Or survive until the next harvest. Summarizing what he's learned, Cohen writes:
Our urges are out of sync with our environment. The environment has changed. Urges have not. Our instinct is to eat and rest. We have no instinct to stop eating and be active. We eat to survive and then want to rest because we may need energy to flee some wild beast.
Studies of early hunter-gatherer societies show members don't work terribly hard, but food scarcity and lack of secure shelter keeps them trim.
