In my new piece for Return of Kings, I look at the obesity crisis in the United States, and I try to figure out why obesity has become such a problem in the last 30 years or so.

So, as anybody who pays any attention at all to what’s going on around them in the world knows…Americans are fucking fat. And yet, when you look at percentages of obesity, America manages to not even be in the top 10.

Shocking, isn’t it? One question emerges from all of this adipose grievance: why? Why have so many billions of people become obese in only the last 30 years or so? Well, as luck would have it, this article is going to attempt to find that answer out, at least for the United States. I feel that if I can discover the “turning point” for when Americans started to become obese, then that might shine some light on the rest of the world as well.

For all of the talk of how “Everything in the past was worse than things are now”, I can safely say that at least in terms of Body Mass Index—which is a legitimate measure of obesity for approximately 95% of humanity, no matter what fat women say—things in the past were better. The average American man in the 1960s weighed about 160 pounds, and the average American woman was a slim and trim 120 pounds with a 28 inch waist. And nowadays the average American WOMAN is 160 pounds, and the average man much heavier than that.

What happened? Studies seem to indicate that the sudden spike in obesity only started around 1980. But is there a specific “X factor” that caused it to happen?

The answer to these questions and many more can be found right here