Word: us
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...living like kings. Thanks to increasingly high-tech farming methods, the fatty foods we crave have become plentiful and cheap in the U.S. and other developed nations. At the same time (thanks again to technology), physical exertion is no longer a part of most people's lives; most of us have to drag ourselves away from our computer or TV to burn off the excess calories. The result is inevitable. In 1950 one-quarter of Americans were classified as overweight; today half...
...nerve cells have also been implicated in weight regulation, and it's not clear how these different pathways relate to one another. "Not a month goes by," says Dr. Eric Ravussin, director of endocrine research at Eli Lilly, "without publication of a new pathway that regulates feeding behavior, giving us new potential targets...
These concerns may seem counterintuitive. We evolved as hunter-gatherers and ate meat for a hundred millenniums before modern times. It's natural for us to eat meat, one might say. But today's factory-raised, transgenic, chemical-laden livestock are a far cry from the wild animals our ancestors hunted. When we cleverly shifted from wildland hunting and gathering to systematic herding and farming, we changed the natural balances irrevocably. The shift enabled us to produce food surpluses, but the surpluses also allowed us to reproduce prodigiously. When we did, it became only a matter of time before...
...predicting the end of all meat eating. Decades from now, cattle will still be raised, perhaps in patches of natural rangeland, for people inclined to eat and able to afford a porterhouse, while others will make exceptions in ceremonial meals on special days like Thanksgiving, which link us ritually to our evolutionary and cultural past. But the era of mass-produced animal flesh, and its unsustainable costs to human and environmental health, should be over before the next century...
Viruses are moving into the human species because there are more of us all the time. From a virus' point of view, we look like a free lunch that's getting bigger. My grandfather was born in 1899, on the eve of a new century, when there were 1.5 billion people on earth. He died in 1995, and by then there were almost 6 billion people. Thus in one lifetime the population quadrupled, and it's heading for 9 or 10 billion. In nature, when populations soar--and become densely packed--viral diseases tend to break out; then the population...