A quick update to Bottled H2Uh-Oh… The bottled-water industry, feeling shell-shocked from some of the negative publicity that it has been receiving lately, is responding by saying, essentially, that all water — tap or the fancy bottled kind — is the same. Yup.
The issue has never been whether bottled water is healthier than beer or coffee or soda. Nor is the bottled-water debate fundamentally rooted in revealing or defending America’s conspicuous consumption. Rather, there is an environmental — and therefore ethical, if not moral — point to be made about consuming bottled water. See a few posts below for further commentary.
On another note — and this one more curious — also offered to us by the good folks at Newsweek, Americans, who used to be “the tallest in the world since Colonial times,” are now among “the shortest and fattest in the industrialized world.”
The Dutch, with the average man and woman standing at 6′ and 5′7″ respectively, are an average of two inches taller than the average American. Less than 150 years ago — a blink in the eye of evolutionary biology — Americans towered over the average man or woman from the Netherlands by two inches. A four-inch swing since 1850?! What does it all mean?
The authors of the research report, published in Social Sciences Quarterly, comment on the correlation between a nation’s wealth and its height. “Prenatal care, nutrition and the way childhood diseases are treated are usually better in nations with higher per capita incomes—and all these factors can affect height.”
The United States leads the world in scientific advances and technological breakthroughs, but our healthcare system is severely fractured and results in a disproportionate distribution of both the quantity and quality of health services. Plus, we eat a lot. So much so that by 2015, more than 3 out of every 4 Americans is projected to be overweight or obese.
Americans — until recently the proudest and the tallest in the world! — now “don’t even break the top 10 in terms of tallest nations.” Nor do we break the top 10 in terms of child well-being.
In 2007, UNICF surveyed the 21 wealthiest countries in the world for child well-being. “The report looked at material well-bing, health and safety, educational well being, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks. The United States was No. 20—behind countries like Poland (No. 14) and France (No. 16) and ahead only of kids in the United Kingdom.” The country with the best child well-being was the Netherlands. Remember–also now the tallest people in the world.
We are stunting our children.
Wandering and wondering,
J.R. Atwood
Hey Jason!
I haven’t done any research to really back this up, but I would think that the rise and subsequent fall in American’s heights has nearly everything to do with the quality of the American diet.
If you look at homes built in the early 1900s, doorways were much shorter–people were shorter. The average American male was 5′6″ tall. America back then was more akin to a third-world country when compared to the relative wealth and abundance of America today (for some, anyways). As agriculture and food sciences advanced, however, the nutritional values of the food we ate increased, as well…beginning with Wonder Bread, perhaps. The food vitamin values established by the RDA back then were a joke–they represented only the bare minimum vitamins and minerals one needed to digest in order to prevent diseases contributed to malnutrition–but they served their purpose. There were no true vitamin supplements being sold back then, merely Snake Oil hucksters trying to make a quick buck on cure-alls that usually consisted of something made of opium. And really, only the rich could have afforded them anyway. Imagine what it must have been like when foods like “Vitamin-enriched Wonder Bread!” came out, and with a slice you no longer had to worry about your children getting rickets, scurvy, etc.
Now flash-forward a century later.
We as Americans are more obese and eating more than ever before; food is abundant; it’s everywhere you look. For 99 cents you can get a double cheeseburger. And with today’s hectic lifestyles, who has time for anything else? Why take the time to go to a grocery store, come home, prepare a meal, then cook it, when it costs more in terms of both money and time? Have you ever compared the price of a chicken breast versus a Tombstone Pizza? Depending on the day, you can sometimes buy an entire pizza for the price of one chicken breast!
Fast food is easy. It’s cheap. It’s convenient. It’s also chocked full of chemicals and fats to preserve its freshness and make it more flavorful to the American palate, and nutritionally dead.
We are literally eating more food than ever before, fatter than ever before, and still getting less healthy vitamins and minerals than we did at the half-point of the twentieth century. As a result, we’re shrinking. Seems logical to me.
On a separate note: did the authors of the water article address the role that taste or nutritional additives may play in contributing to overall consumption? Many water products today have added flavors, “vitamins,” caffeine, and many water companies add or subtract certain elements from their water products not to have any substantial nutritional effect on their product, but simply to alter the taste. It’s like Coke versus Pepsi; Americans may know in their heads that their bottled water comes from a tap in a land far, far away–Michigan–and that there’s essentially no difference between that and their local tap, but there sometimes is a substantial difference in taste… and that means everything to some people.
Jon