A Chemical Hunger – Part I: Mysteries
The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.
Back in the 1890s, the federal government had a board of surgeons examine several thousand Union Army veterans who fought in the Civil War. This was several decades after the end of the war, so by this point the veterans were all in their 40’s or older. This gives us a snapshot of what middle-aged white men looked like in the 1890s. When we look at their data, we find that they had an average BMI of about 23 (overweight is a BMI of 25 and obese is a BMI of 30 or more). Only about 3% of them were obese. In comparison, middle-aged white men in the year 2000 had an average BMI of around 28. About 24% were obese in early middle age, increasing to 41% by the time the men were in their 60s.
(Most experts consider measures like body fat percentage to be better measures of adiposity than BMI, and we agree. Unfortunately, nearly every source reports BMI, and most don’t report body fat percentage. Here, we use BMI so that we can compare different sources to one another.)
