Who here remembers the 70s and 80s? Hi everyone. This is my first post here. This group is an affirming dose of sanity in a world gone nuts. The thing that strikes me about the obesity epidemic is the number of fat young people. From middle schools to high schools to colleges, they seem so prevalent, and it's jarring to older folks like me, who went to school in the 1970s and 1980s. Do you younger people remember going to school when nearly everybody was thin? It seems like a given to me. We had so few fat kids in my schools, that I can remember their names. Most were bullied (I felt sorry for them, because even though I wasn't fat, I was a nerdy unfashionable brain and got picked on for that). There was an occasional lumbering big kid who was considered okay because they were cool enough. The terms "fat shaming" or "fat phobia" didn't exist. Neither did social media. Hell, neither did the Internet. It was just expected that kids were active and were fed reasonably healthy meals. We ate our share of junk food and fast food, but they were treats rather than daily habits. By high school, we girls kept tabs on our weight and exerted friendly social pressure on our friends. It wasn't mean spirited, but more of a helpful "we're all in this together" kind of thing. We didn't let a five pound gain turn into 50 or 100. My god, I can't even begin to imagine the uproar if that had happened, and I didn't know anyone that happened to. Now, it seems common place. Why? Why is this? Why don't alarm bells sound when a child or teen goes from normal to obese? Is it because the more it happens, the more acceptable it becomes? Is it our politically correct culture of not wanting to damage self esteem? Isn't obesity more damaging to self worth than the temporary shame of having adults intervene?  We are living in unprecedented times. What's going to happen to all these fat kids, if their health is allowed to go unchecked? The prime of their lives -- the 20s, 30s and 40s -- what will life be like for them? Full of disabilities, illness and death at 50? These are things that never crossed my generation's mind. This cannot be genetic. We were not meant to evolve this significantly within one generation.