My voracious reading friend, Ron, points toward this morning's squib from Jane Brody of the Times on the public health consequences of the continued rise of obesity in America: By 2020, demographers say, three out of four Americans will be obese or overweight, ands that by 2030, there will be 65 million more in those categories than there were last year.

Though certainly, the current proportion of two out of three is horrendous enough, she says:

It would mean 8 million more cases of diabetes, 6.8 million more cases of atherosclerotic heart disease and stroke, and more than 500,000 more cases of cancer.
Together, the added treatment costs of obesity, already at $75 billion in 2003, could exceed $66 billion a year, with an even greater cost in lost productivity of up to $580 billion.

When I hear stats like that, I think of a grade-school teacher's perhaps apocryphal tale of an early-20th-century Farmers Almanac that predicted that streets would be impassable for all of the manure being deposited by the increasing legions of buggies.

The point I've always retained is that extrapolating trends alone overlooks the paradigm shift that inevitably comes. But to allow us to look back on these stats and laugh, we will indeed need to change, and change dramatically.

I believe I see change coming — in greater interest in organic and/or local food, for example — but its arrival in forces significant enough to save us from an adipose drowning is by no means assured.