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Impatience Makes Americans Fat
March 17, 2004 -- "Do it now," Americans like to say. But we're more likely to be talking about eating a pizza than working out.
And that's why we're so fat, argue economist John Komlos, PhD, of the University of Munich, Germany, and colleagues. In a provocative paper, the researchers find that Americans started getting fat about the same time they stopped planning for the future.
Their major evidence: As Americans began spending more and saving less of their income, their weight began to rise. The less we save for the future, the more weight we gain. People living in countries that that save more of their income are less obese. The findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science.
"People have tried to look at a lot of reasons why Americans are getting so overweight. But nobody has thought about the idea of connecting it to impatience," Komlos tells WebMD. "If you are willing to forgo present satisfaction for future benefits, you are patient. If, however, you want your satisfaction right now, then you are going to have that extra dessert and that extra ice cream and you are not going to be able to forgo the pleasures of today."
Obesity: The Future Is Now
The future, said French novelist Gustave Flaubert, is the worst thing about the present. Americans solve this dilemma by simply ignoring the future. Economists would say Americans have a "high rate of time preference." In plain language, this means we ignore future health risks and maximize current consumption.
Such people are impatient, says study co-author Barry Bogin, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
"When it comes to spending money, they say, 'Let's go out and buy the stuff I want.' When it comes to food, they say, 'If they put it all in front of me now, I will eat it,'" Bogin tells WebMD.
By now, everybody knows that if you eat less and exercise more, you'll lose weight. Keep it up, and you will be more healthy. But that means valuing the future so much that you'll shove your plate aside and make time to go jogging or to work out at a gym. Fewer and fewer Americans do this.
"All you have to do is get out and exercise for an hour, but people won't do that because of their time preference," Bogin says. "They say, 'Why invest an hour? I should be writing another paper, doing more work, watching this thing on TV -- whatever seems important right now."
A widespread phenomenon such as obesity has no single cause, notes study co-author Patricia K. Smith, PhD, an economist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
"People have to think about how what they do now affects the future -- about what [they] will do about the future," Smith says.
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