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The Citizen, 2010-09-30, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2010. PAGE 5. F or the first time ever, overweight people outnumber the average people in America. Doesn’t that make ‘over- weight’the ‘average’, then? Last month you were fat, now you’re average – hey, let’s get a pizza! – Jay Leno T’ain’t funny, McGee. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the USA is now officially the world’s third-chubbiest nation. Nearly 70 per cent of Americans are packing serious excess poundage. They follow American Samoa and Kiribati, two tiny island nations in the South Pacific where natives have embraced imported American crap food so enthusiastically that their three major food groups appear to be cheeseburgers, beer and Spam. Canada? You’ll feel smug to know that we don’t even make the top ten, but we’re not that far behind. According to the WHO, few human beings this side of Somalia, are. The WHO statisticians claim that one in three of the world’s adults is overweight and that one in 10 is flat-out obese. That works out to 1.6 billion bulgy bipeds, worldwide – slightly more than the entire population of China. The WHO predicts that number will balloon by an astonishing 40 per cent in just the next 10 years. Why the obesity epidemic? Pretty simple: calories in; calories out. I live on an island. The Irish immigrants who settled this land just a few generations ago thought nothing of rowing five miles to the end of the bay every Sunday, then walking another five miles to a church for a three hour service. And when that was over, they got to do the trip in reverse – clad all the while in their hot and woolly Sunday best. I spend most of my waking hours sitting in front of a computer or splayed on a sofa reading a book or driving, not walking, to various destinations. What’s more, my forebears fuelled themselves with real food, not processed puke from the KwikMart or the Shop ‘n Save Grosseteria. On the way home from church, I’m pretty sure they hardly ever stopped for double dip Rocky Roads in waffle cones. I’m not pointing fingers here. My physical profile is hardly Brandoesque but it ain’t exactly elfin either. Like just about everybody else I know, I could stand to lose a few pounds. But it’s not easy. Do you know what’s in just about every morsel of processed food that you put in your mouth? Corn syrup. Know what it’s good for? Almost nothing – aside from making you fatter. On the other hand, I can offer my fellow blimps one small consolation – we’re better in the sack. That’s not my fantasy – it’s the conclusion of a Turkish university study released just last month. The yearlong project correlated body mass index with male sexual performance. It found that men with significant excess body fat ‘last longer’ when it comes to making love, than their slimmer counterparts. Before we start winking lewdly and high- fiving each other, you should know the reason. It’s female hormones. Fat guys appear to have more of a female sex hormone called estradiol than skinny guys do. The experts reckon this extra chemical baggage slows down a tubby chap’s sexual response mechanism, making him less ‘flash in the pan’, if you catch my drift. Maybe – but I’m not buying it. I don’t have any university studies to back me up, but I’d wager a tofu and bean sprouts stir fry against a bushel basket of Chicken McNuggets that romantically speaking, a lanky lad like Brad Pitt hits more homers than Fat Albert. As for food advice, I guess you could do worse than the seven-word mantra from Michael Pollan, the American journalist, who advised “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I also like the advice from the comedian Lewis Black, who recommends his favourite health club – the International House of Pancakes. “Because no matter what you weigh, there will always be somebody who weighs 150 pounds more than you”. My personal tip for you: When standing on the bathroom scales, always remember to hold your stomach in. You’ll still weigh the same, but you’ll be able to see the numbers. Arthur Black Other Views Being overweight not all that bad Sure I joke about acting older than I actually am, being a curmudgeon about today’s music and popular culture. I complain about the low morals and high skirts of today’s “role models” but on Monday morning, I woke up feeling physically old. After playing competitive baseball for around 20 years, the move to Huron County made it geographically impossible to continue playing for my hometown Pickering Pirates. In our heyday, we played double-headers every Sunday, in addition to playing for house league teams and participating in tournaments peppered throughout the season. So to say we played a lot of baseball would be an understatement. That is, of course, in addition to spring training, practices and batting practice sessions. We did well though. We were a fixture on the provincial stage and at the annual battle for best in the province, we prevailed twice and came in second twice. We were a confident bunch and it showed on the field. We were, after all, wearing gigantic Super Bowl-like rings in high school that we earned as a result of our provincial championship, a season in which we went undefeated and I hit a whopping .700. Last weekend I was called upon by a friend of mine, a former Pickering Pirate, Chris, to play on his team in the fifth annual Kenya Cup, an inter-agency softball tournament held among dozens of advertising agencies from all around Toronto. It would be the first time I played baseball in nearly four years. I went out and bought a new glove, new batting gloves and hoped to brush up on my skills in the weeks approaching the tournament. No brushing up occurred and after throwing the ball around for a few hours and a few rounds in the batting cage, I was thrown back onto the baseball field once again. I took my familiar position at shortstop and had no real idea what to expect. After playing hardball on Major League-sized fields for the majority of my life, I felt dangerously close to the batter due to the 60’ bases and throwing a softball felt like I was trying to heave a volleyball to first base to throw runners out. It was new and different, and sure there were hiccups, but for the most part, I held my own. I flew out a few times and nearly came out of my shoes trying to hit the ball (it felt like it took forever for said volleyball to get to the plate after facing fastballs at over 80 miles per hour for years), but I made the plays I needed to make and hit one home run that very nearly crashed the party of runners making their way down Lake Shore Boulevard for the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon. So after playing highly-competitive baseball for over a decade, it would have killed me to come out and fall flat on my face. Our team made the playoffs, but we lost out to the tournament favourite by a score of 5-3. I thought nothing could bring me down from the thrill of playing baseball again, until I had to gas up on the way home and I couldn’t manoeuvre my body into a standing position. So after I gassed up in a hunched-over Crypt Keeper-like posture and penguin-shuffled to the kiosk to pay, I knew I was in for some pain in the coming days. And as I sit here typing, I am plagued by pain in muscles I didn’t even know I had, but it was great to play again with a group of good people. So in this case, I think the juice was certainly worth the squeeze, that is, of course, if I could apply enough strength in my arm through to my hand to squeeze an orange, which at the present moment, I cannot. Journey thru the past Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives appeared to be having the path to an provincial election in 2011 smoothed for them, but they have hit an unexected bump. A furiously contested race for mayor in Toronto has exposed a split on policy between the party’s far right leader, Tim Hudak, and some of its prominent moderates. While it is too early to assess the strength of the dissidents and there is no suggestion Hudak is not generally in control of his party, it is not the sort of division a leader would want a year before an election. The way seemed be unusually comfortable for Hudak first because Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has made many mistakes, particularly in being grossly negligent with taxpayers’ money, which have been largely responsible for his falling narrowly behind in the polls. Hudak has been making some gains with his promises to be more careful with spending and intrude less in residents’ personal lives. A mayoral contest in Toronto, in which a mediocre candidate has led in polls solely because he has promised to cut costs to the bone, also is being seen as indicating the outcome of the 2011 provincial election, particularly by this city’s Toronto-obsessed news media, which seem to have no thought people in other areas may have other reasons for voting. The Conservative division has shown, as the Conservatives around Hudak have been exulting over, the huge support polls are giving the far right candidate for mayor, Rob Ford, and taking this as indicating they will have similar backing across Ontario in the provincial election. A group of 40 Conservatives including three who were ministers under the former right- wing premier Mike Harris, two senators and several aides to Harris and Hudak have come out in favour of Ford’s Liberal rival, George Smitherman, who was deputy premier under McGuinty. The Conservatives, who distributed a leaflet titled “Why We Support George,” included Isabel Bassett, who was a culture and recreation minister under Harris. Bassett was a serious-minded television journalist known for her insightful documentaries and is the partner of Ernie Eves, who succeeded Harris briefly as premier and was less right wing than his predecessor. Another Conservative ex-minister now supporting Smitherman is Charles Harnick, who was an attorney general under Harris. Harnick is a rarity, independent-minded enough he blew the whistle on Harris that helped a judicial enquiry rule the premier’s anxiety to seek a quick end to an occupation of Ipperwash provincial park by aboriginals in the 1990s helped create an atmosphere in which police moved in and a protester was shot dead. Bassett and Harnick are typical of the educated Toronto elite the Conservatives have been unable to attract in recent years. Their recent candidates have been mostly far-right rabble-rousers and they have no MPPs in Toronto, where a couple of decades ago they dominated. Bassett also mentioned pointedly that she did not endorse Smitherman for mayor until she was sure John Tory, who was Conservative leader before Hudak and had to step down because he twice failed to win a seat in the legislature, decided he would not run. This again was a declaration voters should be looking for more moderate Conservatives, because Tory was the epitome of moderate, or Red Tories as they once were called, as senior back room adviser to premier William Davis, the moderate and electorally successful Conservative leader in the 1970-80s, and during his recent, aborted term as Ontario party leader. Some of the right wingers in the Conservative party constantly undermined Tory while he was leader. The moderates in the party now speaking up may feel voters should know there are are other views in their party. But they may also be taking some revenge and either way it does not help a party to have its members before an election marching in opposite directions. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk Shawn Loughlin SShhaawwnn’’ss SSeennssee Tories split over direction Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise. ’Tis easy enough to be pleasant, when life flows along like a song; but the person worthwhile is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong. – Ella Wheeler Wilcox Final Thought