|
The U.S. Is A Too ‘Big’ Country
Recently someone, somewhere pointed at this statistic and I found it scary.
biggerThe average grownup man in the U.S. has a height of 68.9in [175.6 cm] and a weight of 199.0 lb [90.3 kg] for a Body Mass Index of 29.3.
The average grownup woman in the U.S. has a height of 63.5in [161.3 cm] and a weight of 171.8 lb [77.9 kg] for a Body Mass Index of 29.9.
A Body Mass Index [BMI] above 25 is considered overweight, above 30 is obese. I had of course known that the U.S. is a ‘big’ country. But that the average U.S. person is just decimals away from obese is astonishing to me.
For comparison:
|
U.S. (source) |
Britain (source) |
Germany (source) |
|
Male |
Female |
Male |
Female |
Male |
Female |
| Height [cm] |
175.6 |
161.3 |
175.9 |
162.4 |
179.1 |
165.9 |
| Weight [kg] |
90.3 |
77.9 |
85.1 |
71.8 |
86.5 |
69.7 |
| BMI |
29.3 |
29.9 |
27.5 |
27.2 |
27.0 |
25.3 |
Digression:
I am not one to blame a person for being overweight. Just a few years ago I myself had a way too height BMI of 29.0. I described here how I worked on it. It took me two full years of ‘eat half of everything’ to come down to a more healthy BMI of 21.6. (Currently I am down to 20.5 and, for health reasons, also have stopped smoking and drinking).
The whole population of a country being, on average, borderline obese is a huge problem. The immensely excessive health cost following from it are only one of the many bad consequences.
I would expect a resource rich society like the U.S. to work on and solve that problem.
The first step would be to publicly recognize that there is one.
But it is probably there where the failure to do something about it already occurs.
‘It’s not known how Ozempic works and its less known about the side-effects.’
Par for the course here.
If you get caught up in the cycle that NemesisCalling just wrote about you will be offered ‘therapy’ which always includes ‘antidepressant’ drugs.
My ‘addictive tendencies’ are legendary and I won’t go into the sordid details of my on-again, off-again life of hard drug use which thankfully is now over seven years behind me.
But I still smoke more pot than I care to admit sometimes and I would have a drink right now if I knew for sure it wouldn’t lead me back to the cocaine.
I never had any weight issues until they put me on Paxil because they said my ‘serotonin’ was low.
But there is no established baseline for what they refer to as ‘serotonin’ and even if there were the only way to possibly measure it is via a spinal tap!
It’s all ‘gut’ related too.
The US is simply a nightmare when it comes to ‘this stuff’ – the most basic building blocks aren’t even understood properly or, if they are by some, those people have absolutely no power to implement alternatives to any serious degree that would serve to at least begin to change the zeitgeist around these all-important issues of health and survival and living an even somewhat sane, decent life.
Of course, as Ian Welsh recently wrote, money is permission.
And there are still a lot of people in the US with the right amout of ‘permission’ to eat healthily.
And these people and the political and business class they support don’t care about the rest of society in any substantivly meaningful sense.
I don’t even blame them. This is what fifty years of commercial TV, radio and even internet – and of course now ‘smart’ phones – have done to people.
Posted by: Agonizing Reappraisal | Jun 26 2026 18:31 utc | 17
Most commercial cigarettes are loaded with all sorts of nasty crap that make them much more addictive than simply smoking ‘pure’ tobacco is.
Anyone who ever tried ‘American Spirits’ knows that they burn much slower. This is because it’s just tobacco rolled tightly in paper without the other additives that make most cigs burn faster than they otherwise would.
Newports have fiberglass in them and of course the menthol is a ‘double addiction’ and they were heavily marketed to the black population.
My mother smoked less than half-a-pack of Carlton Menthols every night until she quit way back when. They were hard to find so she would switch to Salems if she couldn’t get them.
My father never smoked but his mother – my grandma – smoked probably two packs a day. Benson and Heges 100s.
I smoked so many different brands over the years – mostly non-menthol but menthol goes really well with freebasing cocaine so there is that….
I was a regular pack-a-day smoker from late teens through my twenties – going to two packs or more if I was drinking and, err, doing other things.
Then I would go through periods of quitting and then starting again. I didn’t find that giving up the drinking and drugs would necessarily cause me to smoke more, in fact I would give up everything.
And then start again!
I never felt like I was hopelessly addicted to cigs though and my last tobacco cigarette was not long after my last hard drug binge all those years ago.
The pot smoking is not as bad.
I know that sounds insane and I am not here saying it is good for the lungs! But it doesn’t cause the same dark mucous crap to come out of me that I would cough up when smoking cigarettes and it doesn’t cause shortness of breath for me the way the cigs would.
I will say that the pot is not an ‘enhancer of life’ or even a ‘focusing agent’ for me the way it is for some. I will smoke sometimes before going on bike rides but I when I ‘explore’ nature and when I’m working outside I much more often than not prefer to be substance-free these days.
Posted by: Agonizing Reappraisal | Jun 26 2026 20:10 utc | 64
|
