Two topics are discussed almost daily; on TV, on the net, in
the newspaper. We hear them in the doctor’s office, supermarket
and coffee shops. Unless you are a hermit living in a cave
with no TV, radio, newspaper or magazines — you view
the subjects regularly. They pair up well together; electronics
and obesity.
It’s
my belief the bringing together of the two has caused many
of the problems our population is experiencing.
Electronics
have allowed us, maybe even caused us, to become lazy, inactive,
glued to our seats thus we have as a population
become obese. Let’s look at the office worker as
an example. In the past, a worker would have to leave their
desk many times
daily. They went to get paper for writing or typing on,
or
visited the shared copy machine. They went to answer a
phone (there may have been only one) or open a door to
callers.
They went to a supply cabinet for an envelope and visited
a shared
postage machine with their typed letter to post. Later,
they walked to the mail box, generally outside. If the
office
was on the second or third floor of a small office building,
trips
up and down the stairs were made to visit other offices,
perhaps numerous times daily. If you worked in an auto
plant on an
assembly line, you may have been required to lift heavy
objects or operate large machines or hand tools to complete
your
job. The operator of a stamping press had to lift materials,
pull
the press handle, and release the press. After removing
the shaped item, it would have to be stacked or laid in
a specific
location.
Today, assembly line workers sit in one place and push buttons
to engage an electronic welder, lift or handler. Press operators
push a button for a part to be placed on the press, push another
button to activate the press then push a third button to release
the pressed item. This action sends it to an automated conveyer
for transport to another position. All this is done while sitting
on a stool.
Automation
has made homemakers work easier also. (Don’t
get mad ladies; I know many of you have jobs outside
the home). Think about it, if you had to do the housework
the
old-fashioned
way, there would be no time for another job.
Laundry
day is a good example. It began with slamming clothes on
rocks followed by the use of a scrub board
until the
wringer washer came along. After the use of any of
them, you had
to hang up the laundry, wait for the fresh air to
dry it, take
it down, fold and put it away. Sounds like a big
day’s
workload with little time for sitting.
The
electronic age has relieved much of the manual labor in doing
the laundry but
it still needs to be folded and put away or laid
on the kid’s
beds with the hope it will make it to drawers. Meals still
have to be prepared and there are some good, old-fashioned
cooks and bakers putting in lots of time on them. I know one
who is smiling right now because she knows her name is on my
mind. No — not Pat, although she too does a
great job with cooking. Homemade meals, however,
are fast
becoming a thing of the past, giving way to grab-n-go
take out
or pre-packaged
foods shoved in a microwave or oven.
The man of the house can handle meal chores that
way while the spouse is still at work. Kids can
set the table from the
dishwasher which may not have been unloaded since
the last meal.
Yep,
modernization has contributed to our obesity in many ways
and we sure won’t give any of them up — right?
I know I was sitting all the time I wrote this
column.