By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

Walk into any American airport today and pause. Look around at the travelers waiting at the gate, the families queuing for fast food, the crowds rushing past. You are looking at a country that our grandparents would not recognize. In less than three generations, the very shape of the American body has shifted so dramatically that what would once have been regarded as rare or concerning is now routine.

Airplane seats have been widened, retail clothing racks have been extended, mannequins have been reshaped, and soda cups have been enlarged. Entire industries have recalibrated to accommodate a physiology that is neither healthy nor sustainable.

Yet our cultural narrative increasingly insists that this shift is normal - sometimes even desirable. We are told that larger mannequins are a sign of "representation," that rebranded fashion shows signify "inclusivity," and that bigger chairs and bigger uniforms are gestures of compassion. But none of this changes biology. A mannequin does not get diabetes. A marketing campaign cannot erase hypertension. And no amount of "body positivity" cancels the cruel arithmetic of metabolic disease.

Obesity is not normal physiology. It is common, costly, and deadly. Pretending otherwise is not kindness - it is cultural anesthesia.

A Nation Grows Heavier

The data tell the story with unflinching clarity. In 1960, the average American man weighed 166 pounds, while the average woman weighed 140 pounds. By 2002, men averaged 191 pounds and women 164 pounds, representing gains of more than 20 pounds per person in a single generation [1-2]. Height increased by about an inch during the same period, which is nowhere near enough to explain the mass increase.

Obesity prevalence, once a marginal condition, ballooned in parallel. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of adults met criteria for obesity. By 2010, the figure had reached 36 percent. Today, more than 40 percent of American adults live with obesity[3-5]. This is not a slight cultural drift. It is a wholesale population-level transformation, visible everywhere and confirmed by every credible dataset.

The costs are staggering. Annual medical expenditures attributable to obesity are estimated at $173 billion in the United States. Adults with obesity generate, on average, nearly $1,900 more in health costs per year than their normal-weight peers[6-7]. These figures capture only direct medical spending.

They do not reflect lost productivity, shortened lifespans, military unfitness, or the millions of families silently managing the downstream complications: diabetes, heart disease, liver failure, sleep apnea, infertility, and cancer.

The Environment That Made Us Sick

What changed so radically between the early 1960s and the present? Not our genes. The human genome has not undergone significant mutation in half a century. What changed was our environment: the way we eat, the way we work, the way we live.

Per capita daily caloric availability in the United States increased by more than 20 percent between 1970 and 2010, a surge driven by the consumption of processed, shelf-stable, calorie-dense foods. [8] Portion sizes, which began to expand in the 1970s and continued to grow in the 1980s, exceeded what earlier generations would have considered a regular meal. Studies consistently demonstrate that larger portions lead to greater intake at a single sitting and cumulatively across days [9-10].

At the same time, the energy we burn at work fell sharply. As manufacturing and agriculture gave way to service industries and screen-bound labor, occupational energy expenditure dropped by more than 100 calories per day since 1960[11-12]. For an individual, that number might sound trivial. For a population of 330 million people, compounded across decades, it is catastrophic.

The composition of our food supply also changed. Today, more than half of all calories consumed by American adults come from ultra-processed foods: engineered...