How did Americans get so fat?

There is a stand-up sketch by Ricky Gervais, in which he overhears two morbidly obese American women sitting in a plane. One of them is eating a bucket of KFC chicken, and tells the other:

“This is the best chicken I had all day.”

How did Americans get so fat?

We just spent some time in the US, and on one of the last days, we grabbed a movie in a dine-in movie theatre in Las Vegas. (The Meg 2 — don’t ask.) When a waitress came to take our order, we asked for the smallest size of popcorn they had. She had a hard time understanding the question (“why order the smallest size ?”).

She kindly explained that they only had one size, and that was a bucket.

With the three of us, we managed to eat about a quarter of the bucket, but we saw other people finish an entire bucket on their own.

I think this is one of the main reasons of America’s obesity problem: Americans eat by the buckets. In many restaurants, the portions of the food are so grossly exaggerated that it is hardly a mystery why so many Americans are (morbidly) obese. Same for soda drinks and the like.

And besides that, American food is in general much less healthier than your average European or Asian food, due to less strict food regulations and the enormous amounts of added sugar in virtually everything.

Add to that the fact that Americans stopped walking altogether (so to speak), and that more and more, the obesity pandemic is embraced instead of fought. In the places I have lived in mainland Europe, I have never seen a morbidly obese person ride around in a trolley (such as in the picture), but you see them on a daily basis in the US.

Instead of actively losing some weight, such people simply step into a trolley because walking has become too hard. The woman in the image is twenty-three, by the way.

So there you have it: Buckets, Trolleys and Sugar.

The problem is BTS.