Maybe I should have a better attitude about exercise..

I just heard on Democracy Now! that only 3 out of 10 Americans are at a normal weight. They were talking about how the 1 billion obese people out number the poor people and help drive up food prices. Here's a small excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: Raj Patel, you write in the beginning of your book, “Our Big Fat Contradiction,” that “the hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical fact: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.” Talk about that contradiction.

RAJ PATEL: Yeah—well, I mean, it’s a contradiction actually that you see everywhere. I mean, you see it in the States. I mean, the US is the most obese country on the planet. There are only three in ten Americans are now at a normal body weight. And at the same time last year, about thirty-five million Americans went hungry at some point last year. So this contradiction between hunger and obesity is worldwide.

And in the past, we had a situation where the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Today, because our food comes from the sort of industrial market of highly processed food that extracts value from poor farmers and gives us processed, highly fatty food, a sort of fast food, as convenience food for people living in cities. Well, the upshot of that is that you’ve got both poor people who are going hungry and poor people who are predominantly overweight. I mean, it’s a sad contradiction that today in the United States the lower your income, the more overweight you’re likely to be.

Yikes.