It's Not How Many Calories You Eat - It's What You Do With Them
That is my (partial) answer to the question I posed yesterday: ‘Why is there an obesity epidemic when we are eating less and eating better?’
It’s not rocket science to know that people get fat by consuming more calories than they burn. Yet at present, despite the mass population in the UK averaging just 2200 calories a day (according to recent Defra statistics), it is apparent when you look around you - or perhaps at yourself - that people are getting larger (and I don’t necessarily mean taller, although that is a factor).
One of the most obvious reasons is changing working patterns over the last 50 years or so. Far more people used to spend their working day outdoors in the past, and a greater proportion would walk or cycle to work.
Not only this, but the number of children walking to school has fallen from over 60% to less than 20%, and over 20% of children are driven less than 700 metres to the school gates. Habits begun at an early age are difficult to shake off in later life.
So it’s not surprising that the average British adult’s weight has grown by 6 kg since 1993, and that obesity in the UK is 5 times greater than in Japan.
However, laziness, or the convenience of our cosy cars is not the only culprit.
Are we too warm?
It’s a surprising fact that heat loss used to be one of the contributory factors which accounted for the slimmer population of yesteryear. The effort of keeping warm in cold weather actually expends more calories than walking - or even running - in normal temperatures.
What has changed over the last 50 years or so is our aversion to the cold and the vastly more prevalent centrally heated environments which we now take for granted. Do you expect to wear light clothes indoors at all times, with the heating turned up to a constant 20 degrees or higher? Of course you do.
That wasn’t the case even in quite recent times. I can certainly recall huddling around a single, pathetic gas fire just over 40 years ago (although admittedly that was as an impoverished student). Perhaps you can remember those days too.
So in present day Britain we burn very few calories to keep warm.
NICE Statistics
This pales into insignificance, however, compared with our newfound ability to be chronically lazy, should we so choose.
According to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE!), 41% of adults between 40 and 60 walk less than 10 minutes at a brisk pace over a given month. Compare this with NHS guidelines that adults should have at least two-and-a-half hours a week of moderate activity (which means walking at a steady 3 mph or so, for example, rather than ambling whilst shopping), and it is easy to see why some alarming statistics are being created about the nation’s health.
So how many calories do you eat? 2200 if your are a typical Brit, but how many calories you burn through exercise is something to think about, for the good of your long-term health.