No it isnt. Now its about what YOU consider to be an anecdotal post or not and if relevant anecdotal stories are acceptable or not to YOU. Not that anyone really gives a flying fuck if they are acceptable to YOU mind you,.......they DONT.
Alabama's obesity crisis; discuss
- Thread starter Diogenes
- Start date
Yes, but it really grew during the 70s and onward.
Yes, do. I'm sure you'll make some disparaging comment about him being a Dem.
Do it.
I shall.
He created the committee and became its only chairman because of his record on food and hunger and because he was the senator who forced the issue onto the Senate floor.
What put hunger on the agenda in 1967–68
- Senators Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark toured the Mississippi Delta in 1967 and found severe child malnutrition.
- CBS aired the documentary Hunger in America in 1968.
- The Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty published Hunger USA, documenting conditions many people assumed existed only overseas.
Standing Agriculture committees were uninterested. Their chairs treated hunger as ignorance or local failure, not a federal problem.
Why McGovern
- He had run Food for Peace under Kennedy (1961–62) and spent his career on agriculture and food aid as a South Dakota Democrat.
- After watching Hunger in America—especially a child who could not buy a school lunch—he told his family the shame was his, not the child’s. The next day he introduced a resolution for a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. A 2008 Senate resolution dates that introduction to April 26, 1968.
- Activist Robert Choate wanted a joint House–Senate panel. McGovern judged a Senate-only select committee more likely to act and gathered 38 co-sponsors. The Senate passed the resolution on July 30, 1968, and named him chairman.
The original job was hunger among the poor, children, and elderly—food stamps, school lunch, WIC—not the later diet-and-chronic-disease work. The committee had no power to report bills; its leverage was hearings and publicity. McGovern used that, often with Republican Robert Dole, to expand those programs. Only in the mid-1970s did the same committee pivot to “overnutrition” and produce the 1977 Dietary Goals.
So he headed it because he built it, he already owned the hunger portfolio, and the existing farm committees would not.
@christiefan915;
Can obesity be causally linked to a post-1977 growth of fast food restaurants?
No. You can associate the two. You cannot treat post-1977 fast-food growth as a proven cause of the obesity epidemic.
Timing lines up, which is not the same as cause.
Fast-food chains existed well before 1977 (McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King). What accelerated after the late 1960s–80s was franchise density, highways, two-earner households, and eating away from home. Restaurant count roughly doubled from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s; by 1983 fast food was about 40% of U.S. restaurants. Obesity, which had been nearly flat through 1976–80, then rose. Same window, many other changes in that window.
Eating fast food often is linked to weight gain. Putting a restaurant next door is a weaker story.
So: frequent customers get heavier. The map of restaurants does not cleanly explain the national curve.
Why a single causal link fails
Obesity rose across ages, sexes, and regions at once. Fast-food density did not. Calories also rose from grocery-store ultra-processed food, larger portions, sugar-sweetened drinks, and cheaper refined carbs—the same era as the low-fat/high-carb shift discussed earlier. Sitting at work increased. Women entered the labor force and home cooking fell. Those are parallel supply-and-demand changes, not one industry flipping a switch in 1977.
Fair summary
Fast food is energy-dense, easy, and heavily marketed. More of it made overeating cheaper and more convenient. That is a real piece of the environment. It is not a demonstrated cause that can carry the epidemic by itself, and “restaurants opened after the McGovern report, therefore they caused obesity” would not survive a causal test.
Can obesity be causally linked to a post-1977 growth of fast food restaurants?
No. You can associate the two. You cannot treat post-1977 fast-food growth as a proven cause of the obesity epidemic.
Timing lines up, which is not the same as cause.
Fast-food chains existed well before 1977 (McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King). What accelerated after the late 1960s–80s was franchise density, highways, two-earner households, and eating away from home. Restaurant count roughly doubled from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s; by 1983 fast food was about 40% of U.S. restaurants. Obesity, which had been nearly flat through 1976–80, then rose. Same window, many other changes in that window.
Eating fast food often is linked to weight gain. Putting a restaurant next door is a weaker story.
- Prospective cohorts (for example CARDIA) find that people who eat fast food more often gain more weight. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines advisory review called that association moderate for younger adults. That is about behavior, not store count.
- Studies that try to isolate access—new outlets near homes or schools, highway-driven placement as an instrument—are mixed. Currie et al. found a fast-food restaurant within 0.1 miles of a school raised ninth-grade obesity by about 5%, but calibrated that proximity explained only a sliver of the 30-year rise. Anderson and Matsa, using rural interstates, found no causal effect of restaurants on adult obesity and evidence that people offset restaurant calories later. Other papers find small effects, effects only in some groups, or none.
So: frequent customers get heavier. The map of restaurants does not cleanly explain the national curve.
Why a single causal link fails
Obesity rose across ages, sexes, and regions at once. Fast-food density did not. Calories also rose from grocery-store ultra-processed food, larger portions, sugar-sweetened drinks, and cheaper refined carbs—the same era as the low-fat/high-carb shift discussed earlier. Sitting at work increased. Women entered the labor force and home cooking fell. Those are parallel supply-and-demand changes, not one industry flipping a switch in 1977.
Fair summary
Fast food is energy-dense, easy, and heavily marketed. More of it made overeating cheaper and more convenient. That is a real piece of the environment. It is not a demonstrated cause that can carry the epidemic by itself, and “restaurants opened after the McGovern report, therefore they caused obesity” would not survive a causal test.
I never said that. My comment was that fast foods can contribute to obesity. There is correlation, not necessarily causation. There are institutions that keep track of these things. For instance:
What were the average body weights of Americans in 1977 compared to today?
In 1977, the average weight for men was approximately 168.5 pounds, while for women it was about 145.5 pounds. Today, the average weight for men is around 199.0 pounds and for women, it is about 171.8 pounds.
T. A. Gardner
Serial Thread Killer
Have you ever seen Southern food? It's mostly 'Heart attack on a plate.'
I never said you did.
Anecdotal and stereotypical (“heart attack on a plate”), not a data dump like some of the earlier posts. It does not prove causation, quantify the contribution of Southern cuisine versus poverty, food access, activity levels, or ultra-processed grocery food, or address individual variation. It is an opinion.
The standard is “does this address why Alabama has a pronounced obesity problem?"
T. A. Gardner
Serial Thread Killer
Southern dishes are full of fat, grease, lard, and butter.
Crackling bread: Corn bread with small chunks of lard in it. Traditionally cooked in an iron skillet with bacon grease.
White gravy: Bacon grease or lard with flour. Sometimes butter is added too.
Fried foods like: Chicken, chicken fried steak
It is neither anecdotal nor stereotyping. It is a fact that Southern foods are heavy in saturated fats. Bacon grease is a staple cooking item in the South.
Is that so?
You do realize the obesity rate has soared since the late seventies, don't you?
Obesity rates were relatively stable, then rose sharply after the late 1970s.
Using CDC/NHANES measured-height-and-weight data for U.S. adults ages 20–74 (the longest consistent series):
- 1960–1962: 13.4% obese (BMI ≥ 30)
- 1971–1974: 14.5%
- 1976–1980: 15.0%
- 1988–1994: 23.2–23.3%
- 1999–2000: ~30.5–30.9%
- 2021–2023: ~40.3% of adults 20+ (latest age-adjusted figure)
Severe obesity (BMI ≥ 40) went from under 1.5% in the 1960s–70s to about 9.7% recently.
I don't believe you can blame that on a stereotype.
Problem?
It's both.
Is it?