Despite the mass-media's recent and sudden interest in the subject, the idea that modern Western living produces entire populations of people who are overweight and averse to exercise is also not new. Only this season Research papers online for sale. Get Custom essay service at the lowest price! Unique offer for university students. Indeed, it is an idea that a variety of experts and writers of various kinds have consistently found hard to resist. This is interesting, not least because those who write about the ‘obesity epidemic' often hark back to a quite recent pre-epidemic period. According to these experts, this was a time without televisions and computers when people ate less fattening home cooked meals and did more exercise more often.
Today's 50-60-year-old adult is likely to have walked or cycled to school, played for hours outside the house, was not distracted too much by television, and eventually walked to work - which was probably a manual job. So, any baseline measurements of physical activity or fitness may be misleading, as we know there has been an inexorable decrease in activity levels in all sectors of society over the past 50 years.
Given that children were less sedentary 50 years ago, we believe that by instituting similar lifestyle modifications (watching less TV, eating fewer higher-calorie fast foods, and being more physically active), the current rising physical inactivity and obesity epidemics can be thwarted.
Western culture has a long tradition of suspicious ambivalence towards the process of modernization, with its urban lifestyles and labour-saving technologies, and it is clear the idea that modernization produces 'soft' and under-utilized bodies stretches back much further than the 1950s. Have you ever tried custom written term papers? In concert with what appears to be the almost universal tendency for adults from any period of Western history to see their children as insufficiently physically active, the story of physical decline is, it seems, one we all know. Socrates' often quoted words capture the joining together of these two ideas, such that each generation's allegedly lazy children are seen as a sign that society itself is going downhill.
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