With this blog post I’m returning to blogging after a long hiatus. This one is on a topic that is not particularly relevant to my interests, but I find it remarkable: According to a new report on obesity in the U.S., the state with the lowest obesity rate today (Colorado) would have had the highest obesity rate in 1995. And we are long past the point when we switched from the term “adult-onset diabetes” to “Type 2 diabetes,” in significant part because the disease has become so common in children. One other tidbit: for most of human history, poverty has been positively correlated with being underweight. Now poverty is positively correlated with obesity. As you move down the income scale, obesity increases. The same, by the way, is true of education (less is correlated with more obesity). See pages 20-21 of the report. Whatever the causes are, the results really startling. I suppose the only good news is, to paraphrase Herbert Stein, this rate of increase cannot go on forever: at this rate, we’d hit obesity rates of 110% of the population in a couple of generations.