Burgers And Diabetes

Here is the motley crew flipping away (missing from photo is Andrew).  We cook 300 hamburgers and 200 sausages along with cheese and onions, crisps and soda.  The queue 25-30 long for most of the evening so we don't have much time to watch fireworks.  We make some money for the school, which is what counts.  Since greasy fair, it seems appropriate to hear Sonnet comment on "Fast Food Nation" which she reads in bed as I blog. Did you you (she asks) that the average American adult consumes 56 gallons of soda a year?  Bloated, dude. Blo-ted.  Twenty years ago, teen-age boys drank twice as much milk as soda.  Today, they drink twice as much soda as milk.  Of course we know our eating habits bad - look at us, we are fat. Not just fat - obese, which leads to diabetes, high blood pressure and all sorts of terrible health consequences. And here is the epidemic: 26.4% of US men and 24.8% of women are now obese, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.  Over 40% over-weight.  Britain BTW catching up fast. We are fat because fast-food convenient tastes good and cheap.  A killer combinatin.

Sonnet and I in Kentucky driving across the nation following my MBA school circa June '97.  We had breakfast at a family restaurant and the waitress suggests the turtle pie and a cherry Coke: "a slice of heaven" she says.  Breakfast.  I kept to coffee.  I don't really see fat people in London or New York or California nor are my friends over-weight excluding the occasional 'love handles' us men seem to have.  No, the cellulite mostly in the Midwest (or the Midlands in the UK).  Arriving in St Louis for my cousin's wedding some years ago I was surrounded by happy, fat people ..  like Gulliver must have felt.  There is nothing funny nor cute about this - not only are the over-weights compromising their health and lifestyle, they will eventually bankrupt the medical system. The UK debates how diabetes may destroy the NHS: at our London arrival in 1997, 1.4 million had diabetes - today, it is 2.5 million. By 2025 it will be over four million. Most of the cases will be Type 2 diabetes, because of our ageing population and rapidly rising numbers of overweight and obese people. Japan does not have a similar concern despite their older society.  So we must eat less and exercise. Obvious but can it be done?  Or is it another one of those time bombs like the national deficit or global warming that just goes tick.. tick... tick ..