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The unholy trinity: fat, food and age - the fat stats

The mean body weight of Americans has increased by 7.9 pounds over the past fifteen years and is still rising.

This is no longer funny. Fat lady jokes aren't. This is no longer vain or] trivial. This goes way beyond wanting to zip up last year's dress for this year's party. This goes way beyond an hour of embarrassment at some weekly weight-loss meeting or a $300 investment in prepackaged diet food.

Even though some studies show that we are slowly getting the fat out of our diets, we are replacing it with extra calories, exactly 231 extra calories every single day. The result? We're still getting fatter. This is serious. This is scary.

We are dying here. Between the supermarket and our own kitchen table, we are committing nutritional suicide. There isn't a family in America who isn't affected by the killer results of fat. Our mothers get strokes. Our fathers have heart attacks. Our kids have high cholesterol. Our spouses have hypertension. And we are walking cancer factories. And what's our biggest concern? Finding our waistline before next Friday night.

And do you know what the real tragedy is here? In labs all over this country—all over the world—scientists are working to unlock those final few secrets of longer life. Miracles in longevity are happening. We are the first generation in the entire history of recorded time that can live to be 120 years old. There it is. The maximum lifespan achieved. What a mountain to have climbed! What a peak to have scaled! And do you know what? Most of us can't even make it up one single flight of stairs!

The average weight of men in their forties is 173 pounds compared with 140 pounds 100 years ago. The average weight of women in their forties is 140 pounds compared with 128 pounds 100 years ago.

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