No, the truth is that like cars, McMansion houses, food portions and soft drink sizes, Americans are getting bigger every day–and because it is happening everywhere, few notice. Worse, the harder we try to lose poundage with low calorie foods, fitness centers and personal trainers, the bigger we are becoming. Even people in non-industrialized countries are packing on the pounds as Big Food peddles it high calorie, addictive processed food in “new markets.”
A correlation without causation argument. And you do not have to go McMansions to make the same claim: the average size of new homes has increased from roughly 1,000 square feet to 2,500 square over sixty years. But, how might we really show that having other bigger items in our lives leads to having other bigger items in our lives? Would the reverse also be true: that if we had increasingly smaller items in our lives, we would desire smallness over all? If these are all linked, perhaps we could tie this to the big American frontier or the large American ideals at the founding of the country.
Perhaps there are other arguments to be made here. Do McMansions offer more space for people to spread out? Or, could heavier people be more likely to purchase McMansions (and is this related more to their stage in life)?
Legally Sociable 