The following is the first in a series of reviews of books I read this summer. Like anyone cares. Anyway, I called this the "Bizarro Oprah Book Club" because the first two books I’m reading are this one and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, neither of which would appear on Oprah’s book list. They're too frank and not touchy-feely enough.
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 224 pp., $24.00 (hardback; a paperback edition is also available).
I first became acquainted with this book in a very bizarre way. Looking for something entertaining online, I went to visit Dan Savage’s Savage Love, a weekly column about bizarre fetishes and sexual stuff. I happened upon it in the middle of a flame war. It seems that, a few weeks ago, Savage responded to a reader who requested, "Please tell women that low-rise jeans only look good on a handful of people. [. . .] If you don't have the body for it (and if you have to think about it -- even for an instant -- you don't!), DO NOT WEAR LOW-RISE JEANS!" Savage responded, "Low-rise is not a fashion statement we Americans should be making just now, what with our skyrocketing rates of obesity. If North Americans want to flounce around in belly-and-backside-exposing pants -- and apparently we do -- we should get the obesity epidemic under control first."
This launched a barrage of mail from angry readers. One wrote, "I'm a large woman. I read your two incredibly offensive columns about 'girl love handles' and the supposed 'health risks' of obesity. How dare you oppress women, large and small, with your judgments!" Supposed health risks of obesity? Since when is being grossly overweight not bad for your health? Is she reading studies written by the same "doctors" who claim that milk is bad for your health? Another reader wrote:
It's hate speech like yours that causes violence toward fat womyn. I stand a glorious five foot two and weigh a beautiful 450 pounds. My fellow sisters and I apologize to no one for our looks. We were born this way. THE HATE MUST STOP!
Apparently, people who are fat are proud of it? The woman cited above is off the charts in terms of obesity. She should see a doctor! And then there was a response from a reader who suggested that talking about obesity will only call body image into question, which in turn will lead to anorexia:
Take a letter about "girl love handles," mix in not one but two mentions of the obesity epidemic, and publish. The result? Thousands of women all over the country developing eating disorders, bulimia, and anorexia, all because they don't fit some arbitrary standard of beauty.
Savage takes this writer to task, noting that it’s a pile of baloney to conclude that critically talking about body image leads to anorexia. To do this, he references Critser’s book:
Our obsession with anorexia, Critser goes on, not only covers up America's true eating disorder (we eat too much and we're too fat!), but it also hamstrings efforts to combat obesity, a condition that kills almost as many people every year as smoking does. Eating disorders, by way of comparison, lead to only a handful of deaths every year.
And so this led me to Critser’s book, Fat Land, which is a terrifying read, especially if you like fast food. Critser leads us on a narrative of gluttony: how U.S. citizens became gluttons in the 1980s, and how it’s hurting us now. He begins by talking about the economic conditions which allowed terrifically unhealthy ingredients like palm oil (45% saturated fat, compared with 38% for hog lard) and high-fructose corn syrup (which replaced regular sugar -- dextrose or sucrose -- as the sweetener in many pre-prepared foods) to become prevalent in the country.
He then demonstrates how fast food restaurants keyed into America’s desire for more food by creating the "value meal." In the early 1980s, eating too much was taboo, and yet, McDonald’s director David Wallerstein observed people scraping the bottoms of their bags of fries: clearly, these people wanted more food, but buying two bags of fries would look gluttonous. McDonald’s was actually the last to jump on the value meal wagon; other restaurants like Burger King had value menus throughout the ‘80s, while McDonald’s didn’t get in on the game until the ‘90s. It gave the consumer more food what he perceived was a lower price (but McDonald’s profit margins were the same – or better, since a value meal guaranteed that a consumer would buy a hamburger and the holy grail of fast food, the highly marked-up fries and coke, which is where fast food joints really make their money).
The Baby Boomer generation was not helpful, either, as they demanded to lose weight with a minimum of fuss. In came a whole host of diets, most notoriously the Atkins diet, which promised that you could eat whatever you wanted and lose weight. The Atkins diet is grounded on suspicious science, and has a better chance of causing gout than weight loss (gout, an infection caused by overconsumption of fat and protein, was thought to be all but eliminated).
Through all of this, the medical establishment was slow to catch on that the American diet was responsible for increases in obesity and type 2 diabetes in children. Type 2 diabetes was long thought to be confined only to adults, but by 1999, type 2 diabetes “in some parts of the country would zoom to nearly 45 percent of new cases” of diabetes reported by pediatric diabetes centers in the U.S. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-‘90s that scholarly studies of the effects of fast food were seriously considered as causes of an epidemic of overweight children and adults.
While diabetes and weight can be downplayed as the result of genetics, Critser asks us to consider that the percentage of the population that was overweight skyrocketed from 25% (where it had remained for a long time) to as much as 40% in the late ‘80s. The book is as much an indictment of our culture as it is fast food restaurants and purveyors of pre-packaged foods, who insert unhealthy ingredients to increase shelf-life and maintain a good “mouthfeel” after an hour under the heat lamp. As television and video games became more popular, children stopped playing and stayed inside. As both parents moved outside of the house to work, convenience -- not healthfulness -- became most important in food choices. The more time a person spends in front of the TV, the more time -- inevitably -- that person will be snacking. The number of new candy and snack products that came out every year remained constant at about 250 – until the '80s, when this number jumped to 1000. "A revealing graphic of this trend, charted against the rise in obesity rates, was published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1999; the two lines rise in remarkable tandem," says Critser.
As Americans become increasingly fatter (although not the fattest people in the world, admits Critser; that title belongs to South Sea islanders), this book becomes increasingly important. One of the more disturbing elements of the book is the fact that fast food and junk food companies are increasingly attempting to hook new consumers at a very early age. McDonald's invented this idea in the '70s with the Happy Meal. These companies are now in our schools "in the form of 'sponsored educational materials': nutrition curriculum by McDonald's; math lessons using Tootsie Rolls and Domino's Pizza wheel graphics; reading texts that teach first graders to start out by recognizing logos from Pizza Hut and M&Ms." This is scary stuff, and in the penultimate chapter, Critser pens a terrifying account of a day in the life of the average American, who will inevitably be obese (this chapter, while obviously demagogically appealing to our sense of horror, is pretty effective in getting the point across). Above all, cultural attitudes must change: fast food is bad, junk food is bad, and there is no pride to be found in being obese: it is a health problem that must be dealt with rather than accepted. On more than one occasion Critser hopes that the stigma of obesity will force people who are obese to examine their diets and slim down before they start to suffer.
Post Script: Obesity kills!
A nutritionist once wrote that anorexia kills 150,000 women every year, reports Barry O'Neill of UCLA. The 150,000 figure was repeated by feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf. Christina Hoff Sommers, in Who Stole Feminism? revealed that the number is closer to 100; 150,000 is an estimate of the sufferers. O'Neill calculates the annual death rate to be 950. This is calculation based on a sample; it is not actual data.
Are there no data about eating disorder mortality? Actually, there are, but you have to dig for it. Using actual statistics dredged from the bowels of the CDC, I discovered that in 2001, only 221 people died from "Eating disorders" (as classified by the Tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases, ICD-10), whereas 3,139 people died from "Obesity." This is a change from 1999, when 256 people died from eating disorders and 2,599 from obesity. In two years, eating disorders as a cause of death declined 8.6%, while obesity rose 20.8%! Which one is the epidemic?
