I love my TiVo The Way We Eat Now is yet another article about Americans' eating habits and how they are related to our health and lifestyle. And then they drop this in the middle:

"The best single behavioral predictor of obesity in children and adults is the amount of television viewing," says the School of Public Health's Gortmaker. "The relationship is nearly as strong as what you see between smoking and lung cancer. Everybody thinks it's because TV watching is sedentary, you're just sitting there for hours—but that's only about one-third of the effect. Our guesstimate is that two-thirds is the effect of advertising in changing what you eat."

Yet another TiVo/DVR advantage: it's a weight-loss tool! Where are the ads promoting THAT angle??

It's a good read, and later on they discuss the "Amish paradox" and how humans evolved to be hunter-gatherers and hence to be moving around all the time. Now, I'm normally not a fan of any argument starting with "humans evolved to," since evolutionary biology can so easily be misused and misunderstood. But I back this argument because of a bit of info i read in, I think, this book. Medical anthropologists who study modern skeletons turned to the study of ancient skeletons to look at the history of disease. Many diseases then were similar, until they went back to pre-agricultural skeletons--which were uncannily healthy, and all died of age or trauma. Because, of course, they were living the live they had evolved to live.

UPDATE: Dude, I hadn't even finished the article when I posted this, but the article makes this point and many more. Like that the "food pyramid" is from the dept of AGRICULTURE--not anything health-related--which is why it emphasizes grains a bit too heavily. And that you can only gain bone mass as a kid, everything after that just accelerates or decelerates its loss. Stuff you kind of knew...
¶ 1:18 PM