Asymmetrical Information

Did you ever read Laura Ingalls Wilder's books? You must have - those, and "Free to Be You and Me," were the great stepping-off points of libertarianism in our generation.

Anyway, there's a description in one of them that you would never find in a book written today, that wedged itself in my mind: "she was plump and pretty." I remember reading somewhere else that the average American family spent half of its money on food at the turn of the century; it goes a long way toward explaining all of those bloated-looking plutocrats - well-fed was not a condition people were ashamed of, and the poor were genuinely slender and slight.

Musculature was embarrassing, too - it was a sign that you worked with your hands for a living. And for women, suntans were unfashionable - a sure sign that you had been working outdoors, probably with farm animals.

...and were taller than our ancestors! If you visit any 'turn of the last' century or victorian era home, you will find the doors and the rooms uncomfortably small. its not just because the modern age has provided you with bigger homes, but because the average person in the modern age is much larger(taller) than the people who lived just 100 years ago.

My father used to make furniture and one of his best markets was for custom furniture for people with older homes. The problem is that you cant simply go to the furniture store and buy a sofa for victorian era home, because most of the time you cant even get it into the room and once you do, the dimentions of the furniture usually make it look odd and out of place. Modern humans often find themselves having to duck or turn sideways to fit through a doorway of an older home. Its not because of building materials, its because the people of today are simply bigger on average than they were 100 to 150 years ago.

Yes, we are all bigger than our ancestors and thats a good thing, eating regularly will do that to you. The modern obsession with 'fatness' is just one of the metrics at play, but it is the one that gets the most press. It's funny how now one wants to talk about the parallel epidemic in "tallness".

Yes, and look at what they had to eat...No convience foods, no corn syrup, no MSG. Not much fast food. Restuarants were expensive. They put real food in their bodies and they didn't eat because they were bored or lonely or stressed.

Kids went outside to run around, without adult supervision, or they worked in the fields. Only the wealthest of children were fat, same with adults.

I'm 5'2" and weight 155. I'm not "obese," I'm "pudgy" (really, I'm densely packed, even at my thinest I get down to 125-130, and I look gaunt). I've fought with my weight since puberty. You know why? Because I like food. I like cream and butter and sugar and steak. You know what I don't like? Exercize. I don't do enough of it.

Sure, I am predisposed to having a little extra meat on my ribs (both my mother and my father have had weight problems. My father still does. My mother doesn't. Wanna know why? She works out 4-6 times a week for a couple of hours every day). I weighed 185lbs in High School. By the time I graduated from College I was down to 125-130. Wanna know how I did it.

1) Stopped snacking.
2) Ate less.
3) Stopped eating prepared foods.
4) Exercized.

Food is accessable now; easy and cheap. Exercize is not accessable now; it's hard and expensive. That's why we have an obesity epidemic in the US today. In addition, our standards of beauty have changed (as the above poster noted). Just look at a fashion magazine from the 1950s, the models have hips and waists and boobs. Of course the women in your mother's era didn't have issues about their weight, there were fewer issues to have and society told them that as long as they were a healthy size they were a-okay.

I remember reading somewhere else that the average American family spent half of its money on food at the turn of the century

Just about: 42.5%, according to 100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston. That compares with 13.1% in 2002-3.

Yup. And in societies where hunger and privation aren't yet memories, attitudes are a little different - you won't send a Latin American woman to the bathroom if you call her "gordita."

you won't send a Latin American woman to the bathroom if you call her "gordita."

The largest country in Latin America (Brazil) very much has a problem with extremes of slender female imagery.

I liked my wife's Grandma Jo eating motto. She lived to be 100.

King
Prince
Pauper

Eat like a king for breakfast, a prince for lunch and a pauper for supper.

I think the wrong lesson is being taken from this photo.

There are certainly some girls in this photo that could shed a few pounds but they are hardly obese, and most are thin. The uniforms are hardly flattering to the female shape.

A similar picture taken at most schools today would have obese girls and boys and there would be much more of them.

The uniforms are hardly flattering to the female shape.

Speaking of which, the generally more revealing clothing worn by women today is part of the reason why there's greater concern about weight.

The real trick is to find some of those old photos and stand next to the same buildings for scale.

There are some old historical photos in a museum near here, showing people standing around various places (including the steps of the place itself), with crowds of people standing around.

Quite a few women I know are taller than most of the men from 100 years ago, and I'd be half a head taller than even the tallest of the guys in those photos.

Building standards were a big different, too. High ceilings and spacious rooms are a problem when you have to heat the place with firewood or gas (or no artificial heat at all, in many cases), so a lot of rooms were proportionally short and cramped because of economics.

Frank - my house, built in 1888, is not "uncomfortably small". The doorways are 8 feet high, and as wide as modern doorways, and the ceilings on the main floor are 12 feet. Before it was divided into 2 units, it was over 2400 square feet.

I agree with this: "A similar picture taken at most schools today would have obese girls and boys and there would be much more of them."

Maybe the girls you picked out are not "model" thin but they are not obese. A modern picture would show many that are.

I've always wondered about this--more the height difference than the weight, although I believe at least a partial explanation can be had for both in the blending by marriage of different ethnic groups. I would think that bone structure--short, dense vs. tall that are inherent in nationality just as blonde vs. brunette becomes less obvious as we mingle and intermarry. These days, we also eat a more diverse variety of foods whereas both in America and abroad traditional meals were pretty much the staple up through the 20th century.

Frank - my house, built in 1888, is not "uncomfortably small". The doorways are 8 feet high, and as wide as modern doorways, and the ceilings on the main floor are 12 feet. Before it was divided into 2 units, it was over 2400 square feet.

That would seem to be a luxury house by 1888 standards. I don't see how that refutes the argument, since the wealthy have always been able to overbuild.

Perhaps the distinction between that photo and now, is that although now you would find the same average weight as then, the tails on the bell would be a lot wider -- some of the kids would be trying for the anorexic waif look and some would be human lard balls, whereas most of the kids in the "then" photo look to be middle-range healthy.

I am 5'10" and 202 lbs. I am considered severly overweight. I don't look it (I'm no JoJo Giorgianni) but according to the BMI tables, I am tubby. Where does that leave the people who really look overweight?

Granted, I haven't grown taller since 9th grade. I graduated high-school in 1990 @ 155lbs and college in 1994 at 185lbs. I can see myself getting down to 175 but not much further.

My house was built in 1895 and it appears to have the same door sizes as a similar home built today. The only reason I have to lean when going through a doorway is because the house is leaning...

There are certainly some girls in this photo that could shed a few pounds but they are hardly obese, and most are thin. The uniforms are hardly flattering to the female shape.3

A similar picture taken at most schools today would have obese girls and boys and there would be much more of them.

OK, so that answers the question of how you could look at old photos and think we're fatter: you've made up your mind already.

To MY eye, the boys look pretty similar to today's, but she's right - the range of girls' weights is higher than what you see today. Looks to me like the boys were keeping fit already at that point, but the girls weren't.

But we are fooled by old movies into thinking that this means everyone used to be thin.

You know, actors in old movies old movies were mostly thin. But not as thin as actors today. Gene Kelly would never've gone anywhere in film with that much fat today. So, the movies themselves have gotten skinnier, like the society they reflect, and for the same reasons.

I've always wondered about this--more the height difference than the weight, although I believe at least a partial explanation can be had for both in the blending by marriage of different ethnic groups

Food availability and better general health in childhood are probably bigger factors. Even groups that haven't done much interbreeding show height increases over time, and the same is true for comparatively homogeneous countries that have gotten richer. (In the last century, the Dutch have gone from being among the shortest people in Europe on average to the tallest-- the average Dutch man is now over 6 feet.)

Robert Fogel (who won the economics Nobel for his analysis of antebellum slavery) has an interesting book on the general overall increase in size and health, trying to analyze causes and trends: The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World.

Kate wrote:

look at what they had to eat...No convience foods, no corn syrup, no MSG. Not much fast food. Restuarants were expensive. They put real food in their bodies and they didn't eat because they were bored or lonely or stressed.

Umm... sort of.

Part of the question hinges on what you mean by "real food."

Until recent decades, unless you were wealthy, you didn't get much in the way of fresh fruit or vegetables in between December and April in most of the U.S. or northern Europe. Heck, even when I was a child, even oranges at Christmas were a luxury item in rural Pennsylvania, and very much treasured when they appeared in the Christmas stocking. Fresh tomatoes or cucumbers in winter were exceedingly rare and seldom palatable. If you lived in the city, un-wilted lettuce any time of year was a luxury item.

Bacon, eggs, cheese, lard, butter, potatoes, white bread, noodles, and red meat -- all nowadays implicated in the "obesity epidemic" and its corollaries (cardiovascular disease in particular) were staples. Fish could be found, depending on where you lived and how much leisure time for fishing you had/how much money you could shell out for it, but shellfish was unsafe for quite a large chunk of the year. Hydrogenated oils in foods were plentiful for decades before today's "obesity epidemic".

People also drank (and, incidentally, smoked -- and don't get me started on the correlation between declining acceptance of smoking and the rise in obesity) quite a lot more, and started younger, than is typical today.

Time perspective is important. Last night, my youngest son (13) and I watched "Some Like It Hot" with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and the lovely Marilyn Monroe. MM was maybe as charming as she ever was, especially the scene where she explains how sax players have been her weakness.

At one point I ventured the opinion that Monroe was perhaps a little heavy and my son said, "But that was OK then, Dad". I asked how he knew and he ventured that "all the women in these old movies are bigger." "Ya think so?" I asked. He smirked and said, "Yeah but she sure looks good."

"Watch the movie" was my response. Maybe not the best parental guidance but he's always been whatever age, going on 26. His favorite scene is the one on the beach in which MM matches Curtis BS for BS and has nothing to do with looks..

So maybe it is subjective perception and opinion.

Height-wise, I once read an Army study that said that the average soldier (male) in WW2 (apparently the first time it was studied) was five feet, six inches tall. I would say that has increased but not by much.

As for that picture, with the shape disguising middy blouses skewing the norm, I'd say that most, if not all, of those girls would look good in jeans and a tank top today (which may just make me a dirty old man). The boys also look fit.

> There are certainly some girls in this photo that could shed a few
> pounds but they are hardly obese, and most are thin.

I would agree, but it's odd that I can't find a single boy who looks overweight in that picture.

I'm an old guy and when I think back to my elementary school days, there was only one fat guy in our grade, which was made up of four 30-kid classrooms. That guy was named "Pat", I remember, and he took a terrible hazing about it.

Kids today are just huge. It seems to be worse in some areas than others (my wife was recently in rural PA and she was appalled at the girth of young and old alike). A couple of months ago, I was behind a bus emptying out here in Texas and it seemed like at least half of the boys were of noticable girth. I have no idea if it's diet or lack of exercise or what, but they were some honking big kids.

Actually, these things run in cycles. In the old, old times people were huge.

http://www.econ.upf.es/docs/seminars/baten.pdf

in brief, since 1880, average male height has increased from 5' 4" to 5' 10"( sorry metric folks, I'm at work and scratching this out in a rush).

Its a world wide epidemic of tall people since the start of global capitalim and free markets! Weve got to do something to stop this globalist scourge before we are all horribly( gasp... ) tall!!

Yes, people were mostly healthy, when they ate wholesome, nutritionally rich foods that were not processed, refined and turned into obesity producing psuedo-food.

Can no one see the ultimate paradox in our grocery stores...that just about everything touts itself as "Low fat" or "non-fat?"

Yet with so much of our food not containing any fats, we are fatter than ever before.

Is it starting to sink in yet?

Here's the site that explains exactly why "People USED to be thin," and why that is no longer the case.

People used to be generally healthy too. People look at the average lifespan - which has become longer - and think we are healthier than ever...but it's really just pharmaceuticals and medical advances that have enabled us modern humans to expand our lifespans, DESPITE unhealthy diets of processed garbage and extreme nutritional deficiencies of the modern diet.

People used to be generally healthy too. People look at the average lifespan - which has become longer - and think we are healthier than ever...but it's really just pharmaceuticals and medical advances

What, are pharmaceuticals and medical advances cheating? :-)

People are healthier now. They don't just live longer, they have fewer debilitating conditions at every age. The Fogel book I mentioned earlier references the records kept of Civil War soldiers and veterans (one of the earlier groups we have health data on, because they were given pensions and so their lives and medical situations were tracked to some extent). From a short summary of Fogel's work in the U of C alumni magazine:

65 percent of men between 18 and 25 volunteered for the Union Army. A quarter of those volunteers were sent home because of physical disabilities: hernias, arthritis, tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease, blindness. Teenagers didn’t escape illness either. One-sixth of Union recruits aged 16 to 19 were rejected because of infirmity.

...

“Before we started, it was very common to believe that in earlier decades, infectious disease killed off the ‘weak sisters,’ the people who were constitutionally unsound,” Fogel says, “and that those who survived to 65 were fairly robust.” On the contrary, his research has revealed that by their mid- to late 60s, Union Army veterans had an average of 6.2 chronic conditions. For 65-year-old white men today, that figure is less than two.

Sure, there are problems of abundance and sedentary lifestyles. They're completely dwarfed by the problems created by privation and hardship.

A similar picture taken at most schools today would have obese girls and boys and there would be much more of them.

That, as I understood it, was Jane's point: "One of the criticisms of the set point theory is that people used to be thinner. And it is true, there weren't so many obese people around. But we are fooled by old movies into thinking that this means everyone used to be thin."

The change in weight has been on the heaviest end. Most of the weight curve hasn't gotten discernibly heavier and much of it, especially for girls, might well be lower.

You see the same thing in Europe. The 50th percentile isn't thinner than the American percentile, and the 10th might even be heavier, but you just don't see fat people like you do in the US.

The camera adds ten pounds.

Virtually all of the boys look scrawny in that photo. You don't see a lot of that these days.

Mike S. - Thanks for the info on the Fogel book. It's on my list.

Height has changed relatively slowly -- mostly since WWII. Weight has changed rapidly over the last 10-20 years. Walking by a school yard, I'm stunned at the size of so many of the kids.

As for houses, mine was built in 1875. It, too, has 12' ceilings and wide and tall doors and is about 2200 sq ft. It also used to house a family of nime and a staff of three. I can't imagine where they stuck everyone. Maybe some slept on the lawn.

I'm 42. There are definitely more fat kids running around now than there were when I was a kid, in the 70s. In my day, there was like, a few of them. At least with more of them, the one or two don't get picked on so hard.

Some of these girls are not "skinny" but I don't see any that look like a heart attack.

You must be nuts. Those kids are slimmer. Maybe your ideological blinders are in the way.

The fact is, we are biological creatures and we are responding to the environment we live in. The fact is that the industrial revolution, "warts and all", has provided living conditions that have greatly improved the conditions for a large majority of the human race. (everyone wants to live the green and the simple life of the past, yet no one wants to sign up to be Amish. It is a puzzlement...)

150 years ago, your food choices were small and your daily labor of life was quiet high. Just getting to work took, well it took work to get to work. Today, your food choices are, even for the poorest of us, vastly better more varied and most certainly chock full of more calories for far less money, than ever before. It does not shock me at all that given the huge positive change in living conditions that the species will have adapted (sometimes negatively) to those conditions. If you take a species of anything that has spent a million years living on 1000 calories a day and expose it to 10,000 calories a day, are you really surprised when it gets a bit "pear shaped"?

The life and general living conditions of the western world have greatly improved at all levels, not in spite of, but because of the effects of the industrial age. This is reflected in relative height of members of the species in the last 150 years when compared to almost any time since the end of the ice age, marking the start of modern civilization. My reference to the size of building structures comes from own personal experience and from hours of visits to museums where I am always shocked at the small size of boots, weapons, saddles, or just about anything in the day to day ephemera of the people of the very recent past. In my own family,we never had anyone over 5'6" until my generation. Now, no one is under 6 foot. That amount of change has occured in just in the last three US based generations, so it must be the soil, right?

Of course, it might be related to the fact that no one in my family every owned property or had an education prior to my fathers generation, which also probably explains why anyone over 50 was considered a "grand old man" in my grandfathers european born generation( He was 5' 3" - me 6'2").

Does exposure to property rights, access to education and the effects of human liberty cause people to become, ahem, "large"? Its an interesting idea and it certainly makes more sense than simply pointing to people and saying that they are somehow lesser beings because they are what other people now consider to be fat, as if fat was a measure of moral character.

Things have changed for us as a species and they have changed very fast, but the genes are still responding to feedback thats been laid down for thousands of years in condtions that up till just a few moments ago were quite different. That large rotund woman on the bus with you in the too small multicolored tutu is also wearing the genes given to her by her ancestors who survived thousands years of the very worst conditions that life on planet and the vast majority of that time was spent with little food and lots and lots of exercise just to stay alive. She is large, but she is also the product of survivors. Its as much a shock to her genetic makeup as her dress is to your eyes that she is now faced with living in such a paradise of easy calories. Her ancestors could never have imagined it( or that dress, but I digress...)

As a species, we have had to survive thousands of years of deprivation, mass death, starvation, plague and all forms of virulent disease and we developed the genes to survive all of that. The relative short period of time that we as a species have had in which we have to adjust to "plenty" and public hygene has left us with some interesting oddities, such as "poor people who are fat". Poor fat people? How does that happen?

I believe in the end we will adjust to these new conditions if they prevail, just as we had adjusted to all the other environmental conditions that have occured previously. As a species, we have lots of biological mechanisms for dealing with disaster, but it appears to me that "plenty" is another sort of problem that is now being made manifest in big, fat members of all levels of the species population.

I also think psycologically, we find ourselves uncomfortable when things are going well, and we go out of our way to find something to worry about as its our natural condition to be under assault in some fashion. We find ourselves in condtions our recent ancestors would find amazing and yet we worry constantly about the most inane things,almost as if out of habit we find the need to worry.

I dont worry about the effects of "plenty" on the population, it just seems obscene in light of those of our species who thanks to enlightened socialism and totalitarianism still do not have the luxury of that particular problem.

a picture? a blurry one at that...

that's your evidence? keep your anecdotes to yourself and let the big kids participate in the real discourse... the big kids who brought data to the party.

gimme a break.

I don't think you've been around a lot of high schools today -- especially schools with more poor children. There are FAR more obese kids than there were when I was in HS 25 years ago.

They eat more. They eat snacks, they eat junk, they drink lots of soda. They don't eat with their families (and this isn't just poorer kids). My mother didn't pack snacks for a trip to the playground. Today's preschooler's parent always brings juice boxes and crackers/goldfish/something with them everywhere. You'd think the kids were on the verge of starvation.

Kids also get driven everywhere -- or are encouraged to be outside only for organized activities.

There was a show on PBS a few years ago, I don't remember what it was called, but they chose families to live like pioneers (ah ha, I think that was the title: Pioneer Family). They had to try to build, farm and grow enough to last them through winter.

One family (actually very wealthy) demanded that they bring in a doctor to examine their son. They were convinced that he was starving, because they could see ribs from some angles. The doctor explained to them/the audience that in fact, the son was now normal sized and very healthy and that the rest of them could even lose more and still be considered very normal and healthy. My middle son who is a skinny thing laughed and laughed when the kid pulled off his shirt to show how "bad" it was -- it looked just like he did!

There was a show on PBS a few years ago, I don't remember what it was called, but they chose families to live like pioneers (ah ha, I think that was the title: Pioneer Family).

Frontier House. It was pretty interesting, not always for the simulation aspects. (I was especially struck by the couple who generously gave their bed to the newlyweds-- because, we later learned, they'd secretly traded with a modern family down the road for a box-spring.)

Of course, they would have starved to death if they'd actually had to go through the winter with what they'd managed to grow.

There was also a similar show with a somewhat larger group, set a couple centuries earlier in New England, Colonial House.

Oh yes, Frontier House, Colonial House, I believe there was a PBS-style reality TV where the TV family relived the conditions of WW-II England, complete with the kids whining about their hunger on the simulated wartime rations.

For crying out loud, what kind of cruelty is it to subject kids to those conditions strictly for some kind of TV historical reenactment? My parents had to deal with European-theatre-of-war civilian rationing as teens and they had some firm ideas that their kids or anyone elses kids should never be subject to that. Sure there are kids out in the wide world subject to similar deprivation, but to starve kids on purpose for a historical-reenactment TV show? Insanity.

As to Frontier House, my wife has ancestors chronicalled in her geneology who lived under such conditions. The survival rate under those conditions is not what one would think even for people who knew what they were doing. Again, why subject anyone to that, only I guess they don't because there are "cheats" going on in those programs and wink-and-a-nod that the reenactors are soft compared to people back in the day. You betcha the reenactors are soft -- people died back in the day. What is next, the Civil War reenactors start using live ammo? And get treated by Civil War-era trauma medicine?

I have an idea for a PBS-style reality TV program. This is for the post-industrial, post Peak Oil, post Western Civilization PBS later in the 21st century, and it is called 20th Century House. In this one people having running water and indoor toilets. They have gasoline-powered cars and electric appliances. And they don't even have to grow their own food because they had money and credit and got stuff from stores. And if something goes wrong with their teeth, they have what are only mildly uncomfortable dental procedures . . .

Nanonymous, go back and read The Long Winter again. It's a chronicle of near-starvation. And then read Farmer Boy, Wilder's re-creation of her husband's childhood on a prosperous farm in upstate New York. It's almost food porn,with its obsessive descriptions of hams and pies and breads and potatoes with gravy. It is clear in the books that the Wilder children almost never had enough to eat. Their frontier childhood was one of unrelieved poverty and failure as their father obstinately tried over and over again to make a life on land that would not support a family. He would come to an uninhabited area, and he and others like him would fish the ponds out and exterminate the game, and then move on. He finally gave up his dreams of independence and took work as a house framer in a railroad town, where he eventually became town clerk. Laura herself fled from the prairie and settled in Missouri when she was 27. I don't know what message libertarians can take from this- starve your children in order to indulge your fantasies of self-sufficiency?

In China there are no native fat people. Just a few slightly overweight middle aged types, millions of super skinny people and a bunch of pudgy little children. Contrary to popular belief, they are not short. They just don't eat as much as we do, except for the kids. KFC is bigger than McDonald's there, and in a society where every child is an only child, parents are more willing to indulge their taste for Western fast food.

The only truly obese people I've seen there are Western tourists.

Now that they have a somewhat market driven economy providing wealth and no famine since the 70's, lets give them 20 years and then lets go see what they look like.

I've personally seen a lot of fat chinese people; they live in San Francisco.

"In China there are no native fat people....

The only truly obese people I've seen there are Western tourists."

Derek, this is changing.

In China there are no native fat people. Just a few slightly overweight middle aged types, millions of super skinny people and a bunch of pudgy little children. Contrary to popular belief, they are not short. They just don't eat as much as we do, except for the kids. KFC is bigger than McDonald's there, and in a society where every child is an only child, parents are more willing to indulge their taste for Western fast food.

The only truly obese people I've seen there are Western tourists.

I've been there too, and it's true as far as it goes. But check back when their per capita income has been at Western levels for a generation or two. Right now, high levels of growth notwithstanding, the average is well below the American poverty line. (Shanghai, the richest city, averages about at our poverty line, maybe a bit above, and probably a bit higher than that in terms of purchasing power. But the statistics don't take into account that many illegal migrants there who are registered as living elsewhere.)

Where they'll be if and when they've been rich for a few decades is anyone's guess- they may be as slim as the Japanese or French, or as heavy as the Greeks, Germans, or Finns. But that a poor (albeit rising) country with repeated bouts of starvation in living memory doesn't have as many obese people as we do is to be expected-- but hardly envied.

Re China:

Data from the 2002 national nutrition and health survey showed that 14.7% of Chinese were overweight (body mass index (BMI; kg/m2) ≥ 25) and another 2.6% were obese (BMI ≥ 30), such that there are currently (2002) 184 million overweight people, and a further 31 million obese people, in China, out of a total population of 1.3 billion (table).3 Although the prevalence of obesity in China is relatively low compared with Western countries such as the United States, where over half of adults are either overweight or obese, it is the rapid increase of the condition,4 especially among children, that is particularly alarming. Data from the China national surveys on the constitution and health in school children showed that the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children aged 7-18 years increased 28 times and obesity increased four times between 1985 and 2000 (figure),5 a trend that was particularly marked in boys.

Overweight and obesity in China, British Medical Journal 2006;333:362-363 (19 August).

Their numbers are tiny compared with ours, so far. Still, the upward trend is already detectable. "About one fifth of the one billion overweight or obese people in the world are Chinese."

Obese girls, defined as at least 10 kilograms (22 pounds) overweight, had an 80% chance of developing breasts before their ninth birthday and starting menstruation before age 12 – the western average for menstruation is about 12.7 years.

link

There are new guidelines for pediatricians that are guaranteed to shock: girls who start to develop breasts and pubic hair at age six or seven are not necessarily "abnormal" (Kaplowitz, et al., 1999). In fact, by their ninth birthday, 48% of African American girls and 15% of white girls are showing clear signs of puberty.

The new guidelines, developed by the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society and published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Pediatrics, are based primarily on a study of more than 17,000 girls between the ages of three and 12 who were patients in more than 200 pediatricians� offices across the country (Herman-Giddens, et al., 1997). The study, by Marcia Herman-Giddens, DrPH, and her colleagues at University of North Carolina School of Public Health, is unique, making it difficult to know exactly how the age of breast and pubic hair development has changed over time. Previous standards of "normal puberty" were set more than 30 years ago, based on a study of less than 200 girls in a British orphanage in the 1960s (Marshall and Tanner 1969).
link

I find it ironic that Nanonymous quoted Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, given that in those very books, Laura worries about being short and plump and wishes she could be tall and thin like Nellie Oleson.

For white girls in the US, the age of first menstruation has remained stable over the past 45 years. In African-American girls, age at menarche has declined by about 6 months in the past 20 to 30 years. The authors felt that the change in age at menarche in African-American girls may be due to their coming closer to achieving optimal nutritional and health status.

Although there are few other sources of data to compare these new findings to, the authors state that white girls in their study appear to be developing six months to one year earlier than girls in earlier studies. There are no data available to determine whether African-American girls are developing breast and pubic hair earlier than in past years, although the data indicating earlier menarche suggest that this is likely.

link

"In China there are no native fat people. Just a few slightly overweight middle aged types, millions of super skinny people and a bunch of pudgy little children. Contrary to popular belief, they are not short. They just don't eat as much as we do, except for the kids."

In China it was traditionally a status symbol to be so incredibly fat that you couldn't walk. This, like having ridiculously long fingernails or a crippled wife (one with bound feet), showed that you were rich enough to have servants to feed, dress and carry you everywhere. If more of them weren't fat, it was due to lack of resources.

Northern Chinese aren't short, but southerners are. Go to Hong Kong and walk around Mong Kok, then tell me that Cantonese aren't short on average. They're probably growing (due to better nutrition) but still short, even though average per capita income in Hong Kong surpassed that in the UK more than a decade ago (of course, I would guess that the median is still well below, but the mean is higher).

But Derek brings up an interesting point. The Cantonese diet includes as much meat and fat as they can afford, they avoid exercise as much as possible, and they're almost obsessed with eating, yet relatively few in Hong Kong are fat. They have more of the French approach to eating - very rich, satisfying meals that are savored, but probably little snacking in between meals and surprisingly few sweets. They like their food very, very fresh (as in buying a live chicken from the wet market to kill at home just before cooking), and probably eat fewer processed foods than we do.

In general, it seems that implicit in this debate is the idea that truly obese people would have been non-obese a century ago. Perhaps people that are obese today simply wouldn't have survived in the past.

As for those that are overweight today, most couldn't have afforded to be overweight in the past, because they would have been forced to exercise more (i.e. walk many miles a day just to get places) and couldn't afford as much food. It wasn't that people were morally superior then, and it's not clear that keeping the weight off, if it requires a large time commitment, is optimal today. Maybe those that devote large amounts of time to pointless (i.e. non-work, non-transportation, treadmill-like) exercise and large amounts of time worrying over their diet, are the ones with bad priorities.

I remember a news show once where they interviewed a Chinese person that wanted to come to the US, about why he wanted to come here. He said that he wanted to go to a place where the poor people were fat.

Bloix,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane

The section titled "A controversial collaboration" is particulary interesting.

Only a New Yorker could believe that Americans are not getting fatter. I live in New York now, but I'm from the South, and whenever I go home I'm astonished by how much fatter people are--and by how much fatter even the fat people are!--than they were just ten or fifteen years ago.

No one in this photo comes close to the grotesque obesity one regularly finds among teenagers at any mall or Wal Mart in SC.

"I'm 42. There are definitely more fat kids running around now than there were when I was a kid, in the 70s."

That's because today's kids aren't doing enough running around. Between the lure of video games adn over-anxious parents, I'm amazed there are any skinny kids.

Frank Martin has said it best, IMO. We are in a period of adjustment to an unprecedented level of prosperity. It's a damn sight better than life on the verge of starvation.

CyndiF"Between the lure of video games adn over-anxious parents, I'm amazed there are any skinny kids."

Some of those video games are pretty absorbing. Get sucked into a real "just one more turn"fest with Civilization and you'll probably forget to eat or drink all day.

"Some of those video games are pretty absorbing. Get sucked into a real "just one more turn"fest with Civilization and you'll probably forget to eat or drink all day."

Yeah, I know. I'm currently addicted to World of Warcraft which helpfully tells you how many days you have devoted to the game every time you log in.

Sadly, however, I never forget to eat.

Some of those video games are pretty absorbing. Get sucked into a real "just one more turn"fest with Civilization and you'll probably forget to eat or drink all day.

I'm wary of absolutes, so I won't say that no one with a weight problem ever gets so absorbed in a problem that he forgets to eat. But I'd speculate that the sets of people who can regularly be so absorbed and the obese (or those who tend that way) don't have a lot of overlap. (And those who do more than make up for it when they realize they're hungry afterwards.) Someone like me doesn't forget to eat, he "forgets" to stop, absent fairly constant conscious attention to the problem.

(While my months-long engagement with "The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion" probably didn't ultimately hurt my weight control much, it was tearing myself away to use the treadmill that was the challenge rather than keeping my food intake up. What a surprise. :-) )

Jack has a point. I live near Boston and frequently drive to New Hampshire to shop. It seems as soon as we cross the border people get heavier. My wife & I kid that Wal Mart must have the heaviest customers in the country.

Nanonymous, go back and read The Long Winter again. It's a chronicle of near-starvation. And then read Farmer Boy, Wilder's re-creation of her husband's childhood on a prosperous farm in upstate New York. It's almost food porn,with its obsessive descriptions of hams and pies and breads and potatoes with gravy. It is clear in the books that the Wilder children almost never had enough to eat.

Near starvation in The Long Winter wasn't a matter of poverty, but of a failure of early industrial age transportation systems. Their little farming community could hardly have been succeeding at all unless it usually grew more food than they could eat, and if I've got the location right it was in an area that became very productive. The preceding summer had been one of bumper crops - but every year most of the harvest was sold and shipped away on the railroad before winter closed in, and they used that money to buy food and coal, shipped in by the railroad. That winter, much more snow fell than normal, and the trains couldn't get through. (Isn't it convenient that "Pa" joined the work crew trying to clear the tracks, so the girls could hear a dramatic story of how the railroad company tried everything before giving up?) They barely survived, burning hay in their coal stoves and sending their strongest young men out to find isolated farms and buy their seed grain.

Of course, it's possible that Laura overstated the heroism of those young men - she married one of them a few years later. If her description of the grain-buying expedition across the Great Slough was accurate, the real heroes were the horses, IMO. (I assume those were from the superior Morgan horses the Wilder boys' father was breeding in Farmer Boy.)

Notice that no one was worried about how those isolated farmers were going to survive, and I think there wasn't much reason to - as long as the Wilder boys didn't "persuade" them to sell more than their seed grain. They were living a largely pre-industrial life, meaning that they put away food for the winter first plus seed for the spring and only sold the excess, provided firewood or other fuel for the winter themselves, and planned to be snowed in until spring. If they'd been just barely scraping by, they might been unable to put away enough for the winter, but since there was a bumper crop that summer they would have been fine. (Of course, they may have slipped closer to bankruptcy every year, bumper crop or not - I grew up on a cherry farm when a good crop meant prices so low it was barely worth picking the cherries.)

In the earlier books, the Ingalls were living like that, but in worse places and often more isolated. Yes, they were often hungry. That was the normal experience in the pre-industrial world. You could be crowded together with a bunch of other peasants in a European manor, with too many people living off too little land, or you could be out on the frontier with homestead rights to many acres of never-been plowed ground, trying to plow a tangled mat of grass or tree roots to get just a few acres planted, but either way your food supply was small and unreliable. At least you were unlikely to die of bubonic plague in Kansas, and they never entirely starved. I suspect that somehow Charles Ingalls just wasn't a very good farmer; he was more successful at other jobs, but such jobs were rare...

Re: Chinese having higher incomes now - yes, that will certainly affect obesity rates. But on a purchasing power parity basis food in China is much closer to the West than the exchange rate suggests. You can get a very good meal there for just a few dollars.

But as I mentioned before, this could all change radically with the generation born in the last 20 years. My 6 year old niece in Beijing is very pudgy even though she has to walk up 7 stories to her apartment every day (elevators are relatively rare in older apartment buildings).

The Japanese have incomes comparable to anything in the West, but not the obesity rates (though I understand it's rising just as it has here).

And why the heck aren't there more fat people in France?

But on a purchasing power parity basis food in China is much closer to the West than the exchange rate suggests. You can get a very good meal there for just a few dollars.

Sure. (I heartily recommend Lao Sun Jia in Xi'an. :-) ) but that particularly benefits those of us who have dollars. China is far better of than it has been in the recent past, but it's people still spend 28.5% of their disposable income on food. By comparison, during the Great Depression, Americans spent 25% of their disposable income-- today it's 6.1% http://salem-news.com/articles/july192006/food_prices_71906.php

If food were as relatively expensive in the US today, you'd see less obesity-- and more malnutrition, as we did in the 30s and as China does now. (As of 2003, about 10% of the Chinese population was malnourished. http://www.china.org.cn/english/2003/Oct/77659.htm)

There's clearly a big cultural factor involved too, as witness the difference between France (one of the leanest rich countries) and Germany (one of the heaviest). Where China will wind up, if/when it graduates to First World status, remains to be seen.

"Her fashionably voluptuous figure brought her the nickname Chubby and the attention of many in the unit."

My quote for the day post a while back, found in a book about Yale students during WWI.

It occurs to me that the variation of opinion about how many of these girls and boys are "fat" might be related to the variance in aspect ratios of our monitors. Anyway, mine supposedly makes an adjustment for 1152x870 (by leaving a righthand margin) but I have no idea how accurate that adjustment is. We're way past standard aspect ratios here, at least for the moment.

The most astonishing thing I've seen here is Mike S. 's point.

"65 percent of men between 18 and 25 volunteered for the Union Army."

And after 9-11 we have Cindy Sheehan and a hard time meeting our recrutiment quotas.

Who says the 60's generation hasn't changed things?

The concept that we are substantially taller than our forebears is erroneous. Many studies have been done on this exact subject, and in three centuries the average height has not changed substantially. At the time of the Revolution, white American males "between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-five averaged 68.1 inches....virtually identical with final heights in the Union Army during the Civil War and in the U.S. Army during World War II."

There IS, however, a significant difference between the height of 18th century American men and their European counterparts, who averaged only 5'6".

The height of doors, ceilings, etc. relates to matters of building materials economy and heating, not body size.

More info: http://www.plimoth.org/discover/myth/4-ft-2.php

61 comments?

Jeez Louise. Imagine what we could do if we didn't spend so much mental energy thinking about overeating.

I can't wait for the arrival of a healthy, accessible appetite suppressant.

I don't think this kind of quasi-CIA photo analyst methodology holds much water. Doing a thorough study of weights in the past would be interesting, but you'd have to be more thorough and come at it from more angles (old clothing, recorded weights, etc.).

Two pretty conclusive counter arguments are:

(1) You don't have to dip into granny's photos to see the trend. Just go back to the 1980s. There is plenty of data, weights and heights and even a certain amount of waist data. In fact, just look at the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System database on their Web site.

(2) I live in Japan. I travel back to the U.S. frequently. To people who live in pre-obesity epidemic first world countries, the difference is clear as day. Fat people stand out in Japan. Thin people stand out in the U.S. I take it your personal experience is limited to two of the fatter countries in world, the U.S. and the U.K.?

Next time in the Mall or at the Airport, observe parents and their kids.

I see parents carrying kids who should be walking. I see kids in strollers who should be walking.

I see kids who are so fat they look like pigs.

Unlike my child hood, when I drive the neighborhoods, I see no pickup games of baseball, football, or soccer. I don't see dads out playing with their kids - walking, biking, or roughousing.

Unlike my dad's house back home, which is a hotbed of grandkids shooting hoops, hitting the pool, or riding their bikes and four wheelers, I see very few clusters of extended families and neighbors having fun.

I do see clusters at restaurants. Sitting. Down. Eating.

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean III. I kept noticing how thin Keira Knightly is. How could she even pick up a sword?
Give me Marilyn anytime.

Comments are Closed.