Day 323 Obesity: A solution from the Old Stone Age

           How much energy does Mr.Kim need to have a meal? If he goes to underground food courts in the building where he works, he will need 10 minutes for it. Assuming that waiting and using the elevator takes him five minutes, he only walks five minutes to get his meal. Five-minute walking requires 20 calories. We can see how small energy he spends considering that a cup of coffee with sugar has 55 calories.   

           But how much energy does a primitive man has to spend to earn the same calories meal as Mr.Kim takes in today? Let’s say that he catches a rabbit. There would be an unfortunate day that he can’t get one despite his endeavor. If he catches a rabbit fortunately after a 5 hour walk and a 2 hour run, he would’ve spent would have spent 2400 calories. If two people share a rabbit, there would be not much difference between the energy they get from eating the rabbit and the energy they consume to hunt it. It would not change the situation much if a primitive man picked fruits and ate them. There had been not many wild fruits and the fruits at that time were not big and didn’t have a high sugar contents as today’s fruits have. Therefore, he had to chew something like the root of a tree, a blade, which has very low calorie.

           The reason why I talk about the life of a primitive man is to raise the question about obesity. The time is gone where plump people are regarded as generous people, and now obesity becomes a disease that should be wiped out. 

           Korea’ obesity rate reached 31.7%(over 20 years old adults). This number is increased by 5.4% for the past 7 years. The problem does not just lie in adults. 12.1% elementary school children were overweight in 1998; however, the rate goes up to 18.3% in 2005. According to WHO, a billion people are overweight, and three hundreds million people suffer from obesity. It seems that the whole world is now fighting against obesity.

           It’s been 6 million years since the advent of human beings. At first, human race used pal eolith, but after they experienced the Neolithic revolution ten thousands years ago, they stepped into an agricultural society where they don’t need to wander for their foods. Since the industrial revolution, however, human life has experienced an unprecedented change for merely hundreds years. In modern society, an increased agricultural output improved the people’s nutrition level, and the number of white color workers increased miraculously.

           The problem is that we still have the same body that we had in the Old Stone Age, even though our lifestyle is remote from the one we had in the Old Stone Age. We have lived 5.99 million years with those old stones in the 6 million years of human history. It’s less than ten thousand years since the Neolithic revolution. Ten thousands years is like eternity for an individual, however, it is just a moment from the point of evolution. Therefore, obesity is resulted from an imbalance in life where people whose body used to require lots of energy to have a meal rarely spend energy to get a decent one.

           We would predict that the human race would develop into a new race with new genes that would suit us to new eating habits after a hundred thousand years. Then, obesity will not be a big social problem and the business related to obesity will decline.

           After all, we just need to wait a hundred thousand years to solve this problem. But if we couldn’t endure to wait until the time comes, we have to imitate some of habits from the Old Stone Age. We have to lessen the time we sit, need to walk more, and avoid eating sugar-rich foods, soda and meats. Instead, we’d better eat more foods with low calorie such as vegetables.