Diet, exercise, entertainment, quantity of food available, quality of foods available.
When you are the home of McD's, BK, Wendy's, DQ, Taco Bell, R. J. Reynolds, Phillip Morris, Hollywood, etc., you'll get a sick society.
When you have sports on a dozen different channels, blockbuster weekends EVERY WEEKEND, 10 hour+ "work days" that for a great deal of people consist of little more than talking, eating, and fucking off on a computer (even the cashier at McD's is doing nothing but talking, walking around, eating, and fucking off on a computer,) you'll get a lazy society.
When cell phone and video game saturation almost equals literacy rates, there's a new "war on" every week, and a new "get thin fast" diet (or pill) every week, the debate goes from "we need to..." to "how the fuck do we..."
It's a bed we made, all by ourselves. Big companies are only big because we made them that way. Microsoft started as a shit stain company by a geek that liked to drink and drive (Bill Gates, arrested for DUI in Albuquerque, back when it was Micro Soft.) Google is a behemoth, it's a giant that's becoming more and more intertwined with every single aspect of life (fire detectors, now.) Pillsbury, Campbell's, General Mills, Dole: they all started as little companies. Target started out as little more than a trading post. Canned veggies were once a good thing -- because we couldn't get fresh to the shelves everywhere. Now, they're a nasty concoction that's full of high fructose corn syrup, and artificial preservatives. Fruit cups, we send to school with our kids, are less healthy and less good than the (cheaper) fruit that they are supposed to represent.
