Friday, March 28, 2008
Fun Fat Facts
This article:
Contains a number of fun facts:
- “Firearms will kill about 30,000 Americans in 2008, but obesity will kill 75,000 people.”
- “Since the 1970s, the U.S. obesity rate has doubled; two-thirds of our population is now overweight. (200 million fat Americans)”
- “Diabetes eats up one of every $5 Americans spend on health care.”
- “And today, a whopping 35% of our weekly caloric intake is consumed in restaurants. That’s up from 23% in the 1970s.”
- “At Outback, the Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing comes loaded with 2,900 calories and 182 grams of fat.”
- “In a 2006 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, consumers presented with obviously high-calorie restaurant foods still underestimated the nutritional heft of the items by an average of 600 calories.”
- “Eating 600 unexpected calories just once a week would add an extra 9 pounds to the average American’s weight each year.”
Three things become obvious after reading this article:
1) Someone needs to discover a cure for diabetes, or a cheaper way to treat it. That “$1 in $5″ statistic is amazing. In the ideal world, the government would sponsor a $1 billion “let’s end diabetes” research program, or DARPA might create “The Diabetes Challenge” with a $10 million prize.
2) Restaurants really should put nutritional info on their menus.
3) Since the NRA opposes putting nutritional info on menus, I will make the following prediction: either a new or existing restaurant will start putting nutritional info on its menus and will be very successful doing it. This seems like an exact parallel to airbags. All car manufacturers once opposed airbags (”too expensive!”). Then one car company broke ranks, made airbags available and was successful. Now we all have airbgs.
Labels: fun facts, obesity, USA Today
