In 1948 the United States Congress gave out over $5 billion to European countries in the first installment of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan. At that point the World Health Organization was called in to existence and also pioneering study into cardiovascular disease was started in the hope it may lead to some answers on how to lose weight fast. The first results of this research helped not only to persuade the American Heart Association to encourage all Americans to stop smoking, or at least to take fewer cigarettes each year. A year later in 1961 they then moved on to encourage us all to cut down on our cholesterol intake if we wanted to know how to lose weight fast.
In the modern day, and thanks largely to the long-running government-health campaign, most Americans have far lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, they smoke far less, and many fewer die from any kind of cardiovascular disease. From 1981 to 2001, the death rate from all cardiovascular diseases fell by half in most of the world’s developed countries.
But we have not had the same success fighting. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy worried about physical activity levels it was stated that roughly 45 percent of all adults were considered to be overweight, including some 13 percent who were considered to be obese. For the younger Americans, aged between six and seventeen, the rate was just four percent. Obesity rates then remained relatively stable for the next two decades, but then, from 1981 to 2001, they suddenly doubled, prompting the U.S. surgeon general to say that obesity had become an “epidemic” in America. Today, as the obesity rate continues to rise, (over seventy five per cent of American adults are now overweight, and a third are obese) and approximately one in three children are overweight, with nearly one in five being obese. Americans now consume a staggering 2,700 calories a day on average which is over 500 calories a day more than forty years ago. In 2012, America still ranks as the world’s fattest developed country, with a rate of obesity more than double that of all of the European countries.