Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It Read Online Free PDF Page B

families range from $9 to $53 per week, or the equivalent of about $65 to $390 per week today.
1960: Durban, South Africa
    Among Zulu, 40 percent of the adult women are obese. Women in their forties average 175 pounds. The women, on average, are twenty pounds
heavier
and four inches
shorter
than the men, but this does not mean they are better fed—excessive adiposity, the researchers report, is often accompanied by numerous signs of malnutrition.
1961: Nauru, the South Pacific
    A local physician describes the situation bluntly: “By European standards, everyone past puberty is grossly overweight.”
1961–63: Trinidad, West Indies
    A team of nutritionists from the United States reports that malnutrition is a serious medical problem on the island, but so is obesity. Nearly a third of the women older than twenty-five are obese. The average caloric intake among these women is estimated at fewer than two thousand calories a day—
less than the minimum
recommended at the time by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as necessary for a healthy diet.
1963: Chile
    Obesity is described as “the main nutritional problem of Chilean adults.” Twenty-two percent of military personnel and 32 percent of white-collar workers are obese. Among factory workers, 35 percent of males and 39 percent of females are obese. Thesefactory workers are the most interesting, because their jobs quite likely involve significant physical labor.
1964–65: Johannesburg, South Africa
    Researchers from the South African Institute for Medical Research study urban Bantu “pensioners” older than sixty—“the most indigent of elderly Bantu,” which means the poorest members of an exceedingly poor population. The women in this population average 165 pounds. Thirty percent of them are “severely overweight.” The average weight of “poor white” women is also reported to be 165 pounds.
1965: North Carolina
    Twenty-nine percent of adult Cherokee on the Qualla Reservation are obese.
1969: Ghana
    Twenty-five percent of the women and 7 percent of the men attending medical outpatient clinics in Accra are obese, including half of all women in their forties. “It may be reasonably concluded that severe obesity is common in women aged 30 to 60,” writes an associate professor at the University of Ghana Medical School, and it is “fairly common knowledge that many market women in the coastal towns of West Africa are fat.”
1970: Lagos, Nigeria
    Five percent of the men are obese, as are nearly 30 percent of the women. Of women between fifty-five and sixty-five, 40 percent are very obese.
1971: Rarotonga, the South Pacific
    Forty percent of the adult women are obese; 25 percent are “grossly obese.”
1974: Kingston, Jamaica
    Rolf Richards, a British-trained physician running a diabetes clinic at the University of the West Indies, reports that 10 percent of the adult men in Kingston and two-thirds of the women are obese.
1974: Chile (again
)
    A nutritionist from the Catholic University in Santiago reports on a study of thirty-three hundred factory workers, most engaged in heavy labor. “Only” 11 percent of the men and 9 percent of the women are “severely undernourished”; “only” 14 percent of the men and 15 percent of the women are “severely overweight.” Of those forty-five and older, nearly 40 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women are obese. He also reports on studies in Chile from the 1960s, noting that “the lowest incidence [of obesity] exists among farm workers. Office workers show the most obesity, but it is also
common among slum dwellers.
”
1978: Oklahoma
    Kelly West, the leading diabetes epidemiologist of the era, reports of the local Native American tribes that “men are very fat, women are even fatter.”
1981–83: Starr County, Texas
    On the Mexican border, two hundred miles south of San Antonio, William Mueller and colleagues from the University of Texas weigh and measure more than eleven hundred