By Futurist Thomas Frey
What Happened Between Woodstock and Now
Look at photographs from Woodstock in 1969. Thousands of people captured in countless images, and you won’t find a single fat person. Not one. Scroll through those iconic photos of half a million young people gathered in the mud, and what strikes you isn’t just the fashion or the hair—it’s that everyone is thin. Not fitness-model thin, just normal thin, the way humans looked for thousands of years before something went catastrophically wrong.
Fast forward fifty-five years, and nearly three-quarters of American adults are overweight or obese. We went from a society where being fat was rare to one where being thin is unusual. What changed wasn’t human genetics or willpower—we didn’t suddenly become lazy or undisciplined. What changed was the environment. We engineered a maze of wrong choices and placed them front and center at every storefront, every restaurant, every convenience store. We supersized portions, hyper-processed food to trigger addiction responses, and built a food system optimized for profit rather than health.
The Woodstock generation didn’t have more discipline. They had a food environment that hadn’t yet been weaponized against human biology. Now we’re drowning in engineered calories designed to override satiety signals, and we blame individuals for failing to navigate a system designed to make them fail.
Continue reading… “The Skinny Path to Skininess: How AI Ends the Obesity Crisis We Created”