America's Fat Problem is New Because the Factors Causing it Are New

What's going on here? Look around any public place (almost any) in America today and you can see that there is a public health crisis. It's not a hidden epidemic either. It's not a stealthy killer like the plague or an epidemic of cholera, it's right out in the open for everyone to see. People are too fat. They are so fat that they can't walk and they are so fat that they are getting very very sick. And it wasn't always so. Americans didn't begin gaining huge amounts of weight until the mid-1980s and from that time until, by most accounts, just a few years ago, the weight gain (on average) was slow and steady and only recently, perhaps because the epidemic has run out of victims or perhaps because people are finally changing their lives, has it slowed to a halt.