Same in Salem as in elsewhere in America as in the UK -- we shape our environment and then it shapes us. We are busily turning Salem into a place impossible to get around without a 2000+# appendage, burning fossil fuel calories instead of food calories.
The causes are scarcely different from elsewhere in a fattening world: cheap availability of calorie-dense food (burgers, fries, chips, sodas); "food deserts" in poor areas where healthy fare is hard to find and expensive; sedentary lives spent seated in front of the computer or sprawled on the couch with "Game of Thrones" blaring; too much sugar, fat and fructose; broken or weakened families where children forage in the fridge for prepared meals and snack all day rather than gathering for a family meal; speeded-up societies that breed bored, stressed, impulsive and compulsive behavior, including binge eating and constant eating.
As Tony Goldstone, a consultant endocrinologist at London's Hammersmith Hospital put it to me: "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.
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The new social divide sees the skinny affluent at their Knightsbridge gym raving about their personal trainer and favorite farmers' market, and the pot-bellied poor guzzling kebabs and fries. The counterintuitive association of poverty and obesity is an indicator of how much the world has changed. Survival is still an instinct but it is no longer an issue. More people today are overweight than malnourished.
Goldstone said he comes away from obesity conferences feeling gloomy. Telling fat people to get thin through dieting is, he suggests, like "telling an asthmatic to breathe more." Cognitive control cedes to the force of instinct. "Who says that the will can overcome biology when biology trained us to get food when scarce?" Goldstone said. "We evolved to prefer foods high in fat and sugar because they contain the calories we need to reproduce."
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. Once we've found our lunch, our instinct is to avoid being someone else's.
It may not seem like lying on a couch is part of our survival gene but it is. David Haslam, the chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum, told me: "It is in our interest to eat and be lazy. Put people in an environment like the current one that promotes eating and laziness and they will oblige." It's their genetic inclination.
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