The Weight of the Nation on HBO

I just finished watching a four part series on HBO titled "The Weight of the Nation" and although incredibly informative and educational, it was so depressing.
68.8% of Americans are either overweight or obese and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
There's a ton of facts I can share with you about what I learned during this show, but it's very sad and completely unsettling.

Most likely, the kids that were born starting in 2000 will have a shorter life span than their parents due to the poor nutrition they suffer and lack of exercise.  Not just lack of exercise, but lack of motion - just moving around during the day.

Most people get a bulk of their unnecessary calories from soda.  Of course, we all know, soda has no nutritional benefits at all and they supply with you with a great source of empty calories.
Fruit juice is no better for you than soda.  There is just as much sugar in juice as in soda.
There's an easy way to tell how many teaspoons of sugar are in your drink, just multiply the grams of sugar listed by the serving size and divide by the number 4 and that's how you know.
EXAMPLE - a 20 oz. bottle of Coke has 65 grams of sugar and the serving size is listed as one bottle.  So, 65x1=65  then 65/4 = 16 and 1/4 teaspoons.  Just so you know, the American Heart Association recommends that women have no more than 7 teaspoons of added sugar a day, and for men, 9 teaspoons.

They showed a normal older woman's heart that died of non cardiac reasons who was at a healthy weight and the heart looked fist sized and pinkish.  She, in fact, had had a bypass surgery, which they pointed out, but that was under control and a heart attack was not the cause of her death.  Then they showed the heart of a man who was 500 pounds at the time of death and the heart had at least doubled if not tripled in size and had a massive layer of fat on the surface.  The heart is a muscle and when you weigh more, it has to pump harder, and gets bigger over time.  That man died of a heart attack.

There were a lot of things I didn't realize were going on in the country where it seems, the government is either working against getting its citizens healthy or special interest groups are bribing or lobbying for things to stay the same.
For instance, I had no idea that most schools dropped Physical Education a long time ago.  There's only a small fraction of today's schools where P.E. is mandatory.  This was the way it was when I was in high school.  I remember hating everyday of it, but it was mandatory, and it helped keep me moving.
Also, there's no one really watching over the food industry that controls things like aiming products towards children.  Advertisers can basically get away with just about anything for ads aimed directly to our children.  Some non-government groups tried to get the government involved with making companies like Kellogg, and General Mills accountable for the amounts of salts and sugars they put into kids cereals, but special interest groups, and the companies pushed too hard back and the non-government entity got nowhere fast.  The whole thing was dropped, so still, no one is governing how much junk is going into your kids food.  It's frustrating and just greed from big time corporations that want to get away with what they've been doing for decades.

If you missed the series and have HBO - Go you can still watch it:
http://theweightofthenation.hbo.com/

If you'd like to learn more, visit the website above.  It includes facts like these listed below.

In the 25 years between 1987 and 2010, the number of American's diagnosed with diabetes almost tripled to 20.9 million.
The obese workforce costs American business an estimated $73.1 billion per year.40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home40% of every dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared outside the home

Sugar-sweetened beverages are the largest source of sugar in the diets of children and adolescents.

The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate to intense aerobic activity every week for adults.

The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend 60 minutes of physical activity every day for children.

Children consume more than 7.5 hours of media a day, 7 days a week.

About 46% of adults' added sugar intake comes from sugary drinks.

According to Nielsen data, comparing 2008 to 2010, preschool children were exposed to 50% more TV ads for energy drinks in 2010.

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A nation of overweight people are just costing all of us money by missing days of work, it costs more to try to get them healthy then if they were just maintaining health, and it's a national embarrassment.  Look at the countries in this world where people are gravely underweight and they don't have enough food to feed their nation.  Children and adults dying of starvation in some African countries, while we sit here and almost boast sometimes about how fat this nation has become and make jokes about being lazy.
It starts with each individual.  Watch what you eat, eat sensibly and healthy, and keep moving everyday with enough exercise to make you sweat.