“The most serious health problem in the U.S. today is obesity.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But that pronouncement about obesity’s primacy in the hierarchy of national health problems is not new. Rather, it’s the opening line to a remarkable article published 60 years ago in LIFE magazine. This photographs made by Martha Holmes to illustrate that March 1954 article, titled “The Plague of Overweight.” Photo: Dorothy Bradley (left), photographed for LIFE magazine article on obesity, 1949. (Photo by Martha Holmes/Time & Life Pictures)

Visitors walk past a family of scarecrows during the Scarecrow Festival in Heather, Britain July 29, 2015. The annual event asks residents of Heather to make scarecrows to raise thousands of pounds for local groups and charities. (Photo by Darren Staples/Reuters)

Merit: A Night at Deadvlei. The night before returning to Windhoek, we spent several hours at Deadveli. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the sand dunes in the distance, but the skies were still dark enough to clearly see the milky way and magellanic clouds. Deadveli means “dead marsh. The camelthorn trees are believed to be about 900 years old, but have not decomposed because the environment is so dry. (Photo and caption by Beth McCarley/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

French twins Thomas and Vincent (L) Seris take the tram in Bordeaux, November 12, 2014. Born with Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP), the twins cannot be exposed to the sun and its ultraviolet (UV) light, which could provoke precocious cancers due to an autosomal recessive genetic disorder of DNA repair. Colloquially referred to as Children of the Night (Les Enfants de la Lune) the Seris twins are among 70 to 80 people in France who suffer from the genetic defect. The French association “Les Enfants de la Lune” reports that there are between five and ten thousand such cases in the world. Thomas and Vincent have been testing a new protective mask for the last year which is transparent and ventilated and developed by several hospitals in France. (Photo by Regis Duvignau/Reuters)

A man walks past an advertisement sign promoting a bank in Seoul in this September 3, 2009 file photo. South Korea is expected to release GDP dara this week. (Photo by Lee Jae-Won/Reuters)

Gymnast Ahmad al-Sawas performs gymnastic moves near damaged buildings in the rebel-held Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood of Aleppo, Syria March 26, 2016. As Syrian gymnast Ahmad al-Sawas watched his country fall apart, his Olympic dream collapsed too. The last national champion before the fighting began, he knew that supporting the anti-government side in the five-year-old civil war would prevent him from being selected for the Rio Games. (Photo by Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters)

Graffiti saying “justice” partially seen above flood waters in Asuncion, December 27, 2015. More than 100,000 people have had to evacuate from their homes in the bordering areas of Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina due to severe flooding in the wake of heavy summer rains brought on by El Nino, authorities said on Saturday. (Photo by Jorge Adorno/Reuters)

In this Wednesday, August 2, 2017 photo, Borre, an 8-year-old cat sits in a basket next to the canal on the Catboat shelter in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In the heart of the Dutch capital, on a canal near one of the busiest shopping streets, a floating animal sanctuary called The Catboat provides refuge for about 50 stray and abandoned felines. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)