I have to admit it’s a little hard to write something interesting or inspirational after a weekend of seemingly eating everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down (and a few things that were). But maintenance has taught me that these things come and go …

In the media last week there were the usual conflicting stories about weight and health. Its hard for the average person to know what to make of it all. So I always suggest digging down to the source material, whenever possible.

First off there were the blaring headlines that Americans are now so fat we don’t fit into x-ray machines any more. I saw this reported nearly everywhere. I’ve never seen an ‘x-ray machine’ let alone been inside one, so I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Nevertheless, I dug until I found the origin of the story, from the Radiological Society of North America. It does confirm the concept of the headlines, but the methodology was interesting. The researchers searched on the phrase “limited by body habitus” in the medical records for x-ray failures for the years 1989 – 2003. They found a rise in reports that was “small but progressively increasing.” In my mind, anyway, that’s a lot different from “we’re too fat to be x-rayed.” But that’s the sound-byte.

Second, there was a long piece in the Sunday NY Times (love that paper) about the difference between the health status of American men in 2006 versus their ancestors who fought in the American Civil War in the mid 1860s. I couldn’t find the citations, but the Times reported that record keeping for the war veterans showed an amazing number of ailments and maladies that led to difficult and short lives for many of the men in the mid 19th century. By way of contrast, the Times also showed contemporary photographs of the robust and, well, significantly overweight, descendants of a few of those veterans. The point made overall was to “illustrate what may prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence — a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable. Humans in the industrialized world have undergone a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.” Hmm.. better overweight than dead.

So. We’re too fat to fit into x-ray machines, but we’re the healthiest generations of humans ever to walk the Earth. Go figure.

As a lay person, I don’t know what to make of any of this. Perhaps its that we ought not to look to the past for inferences about the healthiest approach to living. Circumstances (food, medicine, culture) have advanced so much in the industrialized world that we probably need new paradigms to decide what defines “good health.”

I’ll think about this as I have my salad for lunch today.