Women Smoking May Be the Cause of Obesity

Health problems in developed countries are attributed to disproportional power of large food conglomerates and sedentary lifestyles.

An article in the Lost Angelas Times suggests the real problem started in the fifties:

The obesity epidemic has multiple causes, Sothern acknowledges. Food has changed in the last five decades. Americans have become much more sedentary. But she thinks that obesity rates soared just when they did — in the 1980s — because a generation of young women decades earlier smoked, spurned breast-feeding and restricted their weight during numerous, closely spaced pregnancies.

“It was the evil ’50s. A perfect recipe for obesity,” she says.

You can read the full article here.

She then suggests a few additional measures that, in my opinion, are a little whacky.

Among them:

1. Overweight women should not be allowed to reproduce
2. Reproductive age women become the focus of public health campaigns.

The idea that “nutrition starts in the womb” has a lot of validity, but I wouldn’t get carried away. People undergo significant body changes in the middle of life all the time.