A Chemical Hunger

It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older. Those Civil War veterans we mentioned above had an average BMI of 23.2 in their 40s and 22.9 in their 60’s. In their 40’s, 3.7% were obese, compared to 2.9% in their 60s. We see the same pattern in data from 1976-1980: people in their 60s had slightly lower BMIs and were slightly less likely to be obese than people in their 40s. It isn’t until the 1980s that we start to see this trend reverse. Something fundamental about the nature of obesity has changed.

Rodents eating diets that are only high in fat or only high in carbohydrates don’t gain nearly as much weight as rodents eating the cafeteria diet. And this isn’t limited to lab rats. Raccoons and monkeys quickly grow fat on human food as well.

A Chemical Hunger in Slime Mold Time Mold

The myth of affordability

In his 1857 classic Die Productions- und Consumtionsverhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen (Conditions of Production and Consumption in the Kingdom of Saxony), Ernst Engel, the long-time director of the Royal Saxon and Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau, used data that provided information about the cost of living for 153 Belgian working families, which he grouped into three socio-economic categories. It was from this material that he developed the so-called Engel’s law, according to which the food expenditure of individual households with declining incomes decreases absolutely, but increases progressively as a proportion. As he writes, ‘the poorer a family is, the greater part of its total expenditure must be spent on procuring food’.

Engel arrived at a quite different assessment of the burden of housing costs, which he did not highlight specifically, but merely included in a summary table. This summary shows that the share of housing costs across all incomes amounts to 12%. David Hulchanski, a professor of housing and community development, has noted that ‘Engel’s 1857 survey of Belgian working-class families was one of the best known statistical analyses of budgets for many decades and the first to draw empirical generalizations from budget data’.

The myth of affordability in Eurozine

An Atheist Tries Religion

Although the baggage of religion is too burdensome for me to bear, and I'm unsure of what role that kind of codified spirituality will have in my life in the long run, I'm enjoying my spiritual journey quite a bit. I've found prayer to be uplifting and soothing. I've found groups of other people interested in discussing things I care a lot about. I've appreciated finding ways to spend some of my spare time that don't feel wasteful and meaningless.

My posture toward religion has shifted from purely antagonistic to curious but skeptical, which for me is a pretty dramatic change. It's no secret that the church as we know it is dying. As an outsider it's not hard to see why and honestly hard to have any attitude about it other than "good riddance". I see a lot of promising signs of growth amidst the ruins of those communities, though, and I'm quite interested in being a part of a new generation of church goers, more focused on faithfulness and spiritual exploration than moralistic legalism and slavish obedience.

An Atheist Tries Religion by Kira McLean

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PS: You can buy me a coffee in the ko-fi.