Why are people in the United States so fat? Is
it something in our food that is making us
fat?
My wife and I spend a few months every year in Mexico and one of
the things I have noticed is that Mexicans eat a lot of chicken.
They have chicken stores just like we have MacDonald's at
home. The interesting thing is that both the USA and
Mexico share the same obesity problem. I find this
strange as other health problems like Alzheimer's occur much
less in Mexico than it does in the United States. There is
one other group in the United states that is also more prone to
obesity than most Americans. This group is
African Americans and once again it turns out that African
Americans also eat a lot of chicken. All this
leads me to wonder if it is the chicken we eat that makes us
fat.
When I looked into chicken I found out that chickens are not grown
like other animals It turns out that chickens are a special
case. We have developed chemicals and
antibiotics that cause the growth rate of chickens to almost
double. Here is a quote from a site talking about
chicken food. "In 1957 the average growth period for an
eating chicken to reach slaughter weight was 63 days.
By the 1990's the number of growth days had been reduced to 38 and
the amount of feed required halved."
All this
was done with a combination of antibiotics and chemicals.
So could it be possible that these same chemicals and
antibiotics that caused the increased growth in chickens could
also be in the meat and continue to cause the weight of the people
that eat that chicken to also increase. I think
It may be possible. Here is some data gathered
from the internet showing the chicken consumption rates for
different countries as well as the percent of men that are obese
in those countries.
Countries Chicken Consumption / Year vs
Percent Obese
Country
Per
Percent
Capita
Obese **
Kg/Yr * %
United States
43.81 39.2
Australia
43.66
27.4
Brazil
39.94
22.3
Peru
37.45 20.9
South Africa
35.22 19.2
Argentina
34.13
33.5
Canada
31.34 33.0
Mexico
28.89
29.7
Spain
25.41 29.1
United Kingdom 23.93
30.5
Iran
23.04
21.9
Russian Fed
22.95 25.9
Colombia
22.82 21.5
Poland
22.49 28.6
Myanmar
22.34 3.7
Ukraine
22.05
24.9
Turkey
18.74
27.5
Thailand
17.37 9.5
France
14.86
28.4
Japan
14.62
5.7
Philippines 10.62
6.9
China
8.54
10.4
Indonesia
6.66 5.7
India
1.77
3.6
(* consumption per year for
2011
http://www.internationalpoultrycouncil.org/industry/industry.cfm
)
( ** Percent per year from WHO 2014 data for
men
http://gamapserver.who.int/gho/interactive_charts/ncd/risk_factors/obesity/atlas.html
)
And here is a scatter plot of the above data
