Why are Americans so Obese?

xpost

i definitely think americans should smoke and drink more. and use crack. that's what makes you skinny. to hell with this "food."

http://thetrack.bostonherald.com/images/more_track/whitea01102006.jpg

More like 18 months ago maybe.

1: Learn another way of cooking which isn't deep frying
2: Stop making portions big enough for 3 people rather than 1
3: Learn to appreciate other tastes apart from salt and sweet.

I thank you.

"herpes makes you obese?"

Depends if you let the other on top or not.

haha!

That's why I don't really buy packaged foods much anymore, manufacturers seem to put high fructose corn syrup in everything. And it probably is one of the worst things you could eat.

Tuomas, you could just eat half a package and the rest later on in the week. :-) Not that I do this, I can never stop until the last piece is gone. :-(

FRIED TWINKIE TO THREAD.

http://www.kozyshack.com/

jaymc, I have my rep to maintain. Holy shit! New flavor!

Calories 383
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 21g 51%
Cholesterol 129mg
Sodium 1116mg
Total Carbohydrate 1g
Protein 45g

roasted:
calories 200 from fat 40
total fat 5gm
sat. fat 1 gm

higher yes. . . but geez the whole thanksgiving meal's over the top. we had roasted and fried and I ate more of the roasted b/c I personally like my meat drier.

I wish I had already uploaded my xmas pictures and I could post the one of my brother carefully lowering the bird into the 3 gallon pot of boiling oil. It was dramatic.

OTM

Too much sugary food, processed food, people don't take the time to cook very often, bad education on how to eat well, also the concept of value for money kinda warps things - a larger size is advertised as a better value so you may as well get the larger size, lots of restaurants (suburban chain types esp.) offer huge portions, the impulse to run after a good bargain rather than what tastes good. Also getting accustomed to shitty processed foods & sugary foods, you don't appreciate fresh & quality ingredients. I was out to eat with relatives one time at Olive Garden, and once at some Macaroni Grill place - I thought the food was tasteless, but they love it.

I would say 'not properly educated about nuitrion.

Fried turkey is a cajun thing and quite a delicacy in the south. Like all "bad" things, fried food is fine in moderation. I can't remember the last time I had a chicken-fried steak but I'm certainly not going to completely avoid them just b/c they're fried!

that, and a lot of people in america just don't have the money, time, or opportunity to eat nutritiously every day. most people don't even get real lunch breaks anymore and there's a culture of discouragement from spending more than 15 minutes away from their desk/station/whatever. if you work in a suburban office park and the only thing around is fast food, and you still have to wait in line with everyone else, that screws you out of ordering esoterically. you get the combo meal.

http://www.asso.org.au/home/obesityinfo/stats/worldwide/prevtable

time argument goes straight back to my "Americans don't know how to cook" argument because it doesn't take any goddamned longer to wait for a pizza or go to a drive thru than it does to make a freaking plate of pasta.

People being lazy and poor is a red herring and also implies that only the lazy and the destitute are fat, which seems a little odd and anti-fat people.

Sam OTM re: everything you want to eat is fine as long as you ain't eating the same shit every single day.

If you tracked obesity by class I imagine you'd find the whole thing a bit, umm, bottom-heavy.

Sure, being fat is intellectually unpleasant, but from a creature comfort level, it's simple and satisfying. Now, if we're talking about actual clinical obesity, that's a different story. Outside of the thread title, however, I don't think we are.

I don't agree with this. Waiting for a pizza is time you can spend doing other things. And cleanup is a snap! For years I ordered in EVERY night. Only when I was out of work did I finally start cooking. It was cheaper, tastier, healthier etc etc. But it took me longer, from chopping vegetables to the clean-up. Time that, when I got back to work, I didn't have.

Living by yourself, coming home from however long a day, pasta is one thing, but a simple stir-fry is too much for me to handle.

Also, there are issues with buying and keeping food when you're not constantly cooking or only cooking for one. I find whenever I buy produce I can't use it fast enough and it goes bad. However, I am getting better at buying other products, bread and meats mostly, and freezing them.

We could face a true national health epidemic in 30 years when these kids are all dying of diabetes and heart failure. Public schools serve the worst foods.

Class-wise I'd say it's closer to bringing up your kids on Easy-Mac with powdered-beverage chasers. This kind of processed stuff is cheap, easy, and simple; you can go off to work and let kids make it themselves. You can come back and just fry a piece of meat and serve it. You can given them sugary cereals for breakfast and processed-cheese sandwiches for lunch. All of this is cheap, easy, and common, and it shouldn't surprise us too much that people who are economically scraping by would rely on it. It does take a significant investment of time and money to start preparing healthier meals yourself -- shopping more often, buying decent cookware, spending time learning how to cook right, etc.

And like Ally, I'm not sure you can say "Americans don't know how to cook" and not relate that at least somewhat to class, too! Learning how to do stuff you don't know how to do tends to be somewhat easier when you've got other stuff under control.

IF THEY ARE DEAD THEY DON'T COST ANYTHING NOW, INNIT?

Absolutely not. I can't make 10oz of "good" food in 5 minutes any cheaper than can Banquet and a microwave. Its not possible. You find a way to make such meals given those two things and 5 minutes for under a buck, I'm on board.

time argument goes straight back to my "Americans don't know how to cook" argument because it doesn't take any goddamned longer to wait for a pizza or go to a drive thru than it does to make a freaking plate of pasta.

You need to find something to cook a plate of pasta with, though. Not many work places have stovetops and pots/pans with which to boil water and warm up sauce. Even then, you still have to get your sauce from a can or jar, which is probably going to be costly and not horribly good for you (HELLO SODIUM). When I go to work, I have a microwave. That's it. No dishes, no pots, no pans, no oven, no stove, not even a toaster that I can use for free. A microwave. I've gotten pretty ingenious with it though. I've learned how to cook ramen in it, for one.

People being lazy and poor is a red herring and also implies that only the lazy and the destitute are fat, which seems a little odd and anti-fat people.

Those without money are more likely to have fewer and less healthy choices in food where they live, and even if they're there, price is a bit of an issue when you're scraping by to pay the heat and phone bills. There's not many organic food stores near low end housing. There are, on the other hand, lots of dollar stores, discount supermarkets (eg, Aldi's), and fast food.

You need to find something to cook a plate of pasta with, though. Not many work places have stovetops and pots/pans with which to boil water and warm up sauce. Even then, you still have to get your sauce from a can or jar, which is probably going to be costly and not horribly good for you (HELLO SODIUM). When I go to work, I have a microwave. That's it. No dishes, no pots, no pans, no oven, no stove, not even a toaster that I can use for free. A microwave. I've gotten pretty ingenious with it though. I've learned how to cook ramen in it, for one.

I call bullshit. Some of them are called leftovers.

I work full time, am in grad school and commute for two hours a day and still manage to make my own dinner and lunch 90% of the time.

xpost

obv. i think the kids are a bigger concern since they have the least control over what they eat.

Leftovers require that someone has gone home and cooked first. That requires people have time. Unfortunately, society is such right now that people aren't alloting themselves that time, as they've let their professional lives over take much of their personal and the idea of cooking for an hour becomes difficult. This is particularly so in low income America, where single parent families have the provider out working 65-80 hours a week, while also transporting kids around to their various and asundry functions.

Leftovers also aren't guaranteed to be healthy. Delivery pizza and chinese are probably the most common leftovers in the country, and god knows neither is good for you.

Obesity in America is part of larger social epidemics, and just telling people "eat better!" isn't going to accomplish anything.

Keep olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper at your desk

you realize that most people don't have their own desk at work? i know i don't -- i have a desk that coworkers use when i'm not around, but it's not like i can just "keep" anything there because it inevitably goes missing the second i leave.

You can buy all the vegetables/spices/dressings to make salads daily for a dollar? I'd be damned impressed if you could, outside of growing them yourself.

it's all open season. i had a job once where i tried locking some personal items in my desk drawer and i got bitched out by the boss.

xpost - I'm sorry that you don't have someplace to store things -- that sucks.

I have a feeling that if I left a bottle of olive oil laying around where I work, it would last about 20 minutes before diappearing forever.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were lockers at work like there were in school? That would make things a lot easier.

This is a total crock if you are even passably familiar with the concepts of "baking meat" and "seasoning meat".

(hahahaha John)

ARG dudes I don't the class aspect here is about whether twenty-something office workers can pack a salad for lunch! It's about people with three kids in a shitty apartment who are all like "mommy has to work all night, just microwave yourself something."

I mean look, anytime you say "it's simple, just do this," you're kind of fudging: there's still that something to be done, and there are people in the world who have enough pressing stuff to worry about that salad-prep -- maybe even obesity as a whole -- just aren't going to get covered.

This isn't to whine that it's like so hard to eat decently, because there are simple steps that people can take, yes obviously. I don't think Alan's wrong, though, to point out that the whole way we get out food is trending in directions that make that less likely for a lot of people. Part of it is that bad food becomes more and more accessible -- it's everywhere and quick and easy and cheap and tasty, which lures people in when they can't help it. Another part of it is that good food becomes slightly less accessible -- when it's cheaper to mass-produce processed crap, high-quality food becomes a luxury, sometimes even a fetish item. And really the same goes for exercise: the opportunities to exercise socially and publically for free are always ever-so-slightly diminishing, converted to opportunities to pay money to exercise (gyms, sports leagues, etc.)

You guys are totally right that most people really wouldn't have to go that far out of their respective ways to eat better, but I'm not sure that's Alan's point (or I guess mine).

xpost

I completely understand the plight of urban poor people who can't afford fresh vegetables. I don't understand the plight of employed people who can't spare 5 minutes to prepare a sandwich and throw it in their bags.

Also before I could find five minutes to bag lettuce in the morning, I would need to find five minutes to not always be five minutes late for work. :(

Okay, I'll address this: I don't have lettuce in my refrigerator. I stopped buying vegetables when I saw that they'd go to waste in my crisper before I was able to do anything with them. (It's a rare day that I'm actually home around dinnertime to make a meal.) So it makes a lot more sense for me to eat out for most of my meals (except for breakfast, which I can eat right when I wake up, no problem). Now then, I do try to eat healthy when I go out: today I'll probably go to the salad bar at Mac Kelly's, where I can also pick up a bag of baby carrots. But I'm fortunate to have a plethora of lunch options in downtown Chicago. When I'm on the go, it's a different story. (Yeah, what Nabisco said.)

I posted all I need to say here on that thread too but I'll report:

people imagine that somehow a poor diet and lack of exercise are reasons to be fat, because that's obvious and gives you all kinds of ways to frame some kind of made-up moral argument about the issue and be an ass in front of people. Just like the concept that rape happens because of girls dressing a certain way around certain types of men.

What little real science has been done on the phenomenon is counterintuitive, involves shit that doesn't play to our intellectual midget of a cause-effect processor, and so it's been ignored. Your main contributors to obesity, across race, class, what the fuck ever:

1. Time spent daily in traffic to and from work
2. Hours of sleep at night

WHY DON'T YOU LIVE CLOSER TO YOUR JOB, FATSO FACE? GO BACK TO BED WHY DONTCHA LARD TITS just doesn't have the same ring to it, I guess.

I'm out. When I'm elected president I'll just give everybody their choice of a Foreman or a rice cooker and we can all shut up.

xpost

But doesn't "finding five minutes" mean "waking up 10 minutes earlier"? What is ten minutes of sleep going to do for you? It's ten minutes. The choice that (employed, non-child-having office-working) people make to sleep longer is affecting their dietary habits? That seems kinda silly to me. Just get up ten minutes earlier and make the effort, if it's important to you. If not, then don't. It's a choice for (employed, non-child-having office-working) people to make.

I have a question -- what do they teach in high school home economics classes these days? Do they have cooking/domestic management-type classes at community colleges? Something tells me that the budget for that got cut with the arts/gym budget. Too bad, because it would help a lot of people to know how to cook, etc.

Obviously not those jeans!

2 slices multigrain high fiber bread ~$0.20
1 slice fat free american cheese ~$0.20
1 Vegelicious veggie pattie ~$0.75 (http://www.vegeliciousfoods.com/veg-santafe.html#)
2 packets ketchup - free from work cafeteria

total cost < $1.50

takes slightly more effort than a banquet, and about as much time to prepare.

since i just quit my job and have nothing to do right now, i've made a point of buying tons of veggies and whole grains. they used to always go bad because i didn't get home til 12:30 and at that point was too blah to cook anything (not really good to eat at that time anyway). i'm looking forward to getting back to a regular sleeping/eating schedule.

Congrats on quitting the job! Maybe you said this somewhere else, but it's the first I've seen of it.

Lucky me, I think I eat it back on in the spring before I figure out that it's time to switch to fish & salads.

And this results in losing weight how, exactly?

I get fat every winter because a) it's harder to go to the gym, and b) midwestern comfort food (cheesy potato soup, chili, heavy drinking, etc.)

Water, too.

On January 20, 2003, the English journalist William Leith decides he has to lose weight. That’s the day he gets on the bathroom scale and finds that it’s “the fattest day of my life”: he’s just over six feet tall and he weighs two hundred and thirty-six pounds. He feels lousy. He feels repulsive. In fact, he is repulsive. His girlfriend tells him to stop tucking his shirt into his trousers—“It just bulks you out”—and she doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore. He resolves, not for the first time, to do something about it. He gets on a plane and goes to New York to see Dr. Atkins, and he decides, more or less at the same time, to write a book about his eating problems. “The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict” (Gotham; $25) is the result: Bridget Jones with a Y chromosome, a significant coke habit, and a sneaky sort of intellectual ambition.

Leith’s book is about food addiction, but he’s interested in all sorts of addictions and what it is about our culture that makes it so easy to stuff ourselves, leaving us filled but unfulfilled: “This is the fat society. This is where people come, so they can have exactly what they want. And what they want is . . . more.” Most of all, he’s interested in himself. If he can figure out why he’s a food addict, then maybe he can figure out why he’s unhappy: “I am fat because I have other, deeper problems.” And if he can figure out what these deeper problems are then maybe he can stop stuffing himself. The cure has two courses. The physical bit is getting the weight off; the psychological bit is getting the weight off his mind. Dr. Atkins takes care of the first. Leith arrives at Atkins’s Manhattan clinic just months before the great man’s death, and about two years before the “low-carb craze” will itself be pronounced dead, with the venture-capital-crammed Atkins Nutritional, Inc., going into bankruptcy. But Atkins is then enjoying a boom: some months before, Gary Taubes published a pro-Atkins polemic in the Times Magazine (“What If It’s All Been a Big, Fat Lie?”), and a copy of New York that Leith picks up declares, “Welcome to a City in the Throes of CARB PANIC.” Leith masters the Atkins metabolic mantra: carbohydrates cause a rush of insulin; the insulin reduces blood glucose, causing cravings for more carbs; the body becomes insulin-resistant; and it shifts its attention to saving fat. Food fat doesn’t make your body fat; carbs are the culprit. As the pounds fall off—thirty in four months—Leith becomes an evangelist: his obituary of Atkins in the Guardian of April 19, 2003, is a panegyric. He reads Thomas Kuhn’s historical theory of scientific development and decides that Atkins is achieving nothing less than a dietary “paradigm change.” Atkins is a hero of our time.

The other part of the cure is psychotherapy. The Atkins diet is the instrumental arm of a psychodynamic search: it’s good to lose weight in the most effective way you can, but Leith still feels the need to sort out the psychic reasons that he’s become a fatty. There’s much recollecting of childhood traumas; original sin for Leith was not an apple but an apple pie—one of his grandmother’s that he secretly gobbled down at the age of seven. By the end of his therapy, Leith has concluded that there are “many many reasons” for his food addiction. It’s too complex for him to understand and, perhaps, too complex for any specific diet to remedy or therapy to analyze. As the Atkins diet works its wonders, he feels happier: he gets fit, and he even goes for a twenty-five-mile hike with his (new?) girlfriend, at the end of which they pop into a pub and tuck in like ordinary human beings—“spaghetti with a meat sauce, and some garlic bread, and a bottle of wine.” He’s genuinely hungry for the first time in ages. As the proverb has it, hunger turns out to be the best sauce. He winds up—like the growing number of Atkins dieters who have fallen away from the faith—edgily wondering if moderation in all things might, after all, be the answer.

Leith wants to lose weight because he wants not to be repulsive, and he’s not alone. A fifth of American men and more than a third of American women say they would like to lose at least twenty pounds, and you don’t need a statistical survey to establish that sexual appeal is a big part of the reason. Thundering denunciations of the equation between female thinness and sexiness have little effect. The world is unfair that way—possibly almost as unfair to fat men as to fat women. In Paddy Chayefsky’s 1955 play “Marty,” the title character whines, “I’m just a fat little man. A fat ugly man.” Moreover, statistics do establish that fat people earn less: possibly because the sort of people who make less money tend to be fat, possibly because fat people are discriminated against, or, most likely, a bit of both.

It was not always so. When the Duchess of Windsor pronounced that “you can never be too rich or too thin,” it was a sign of a demographic shift with far-reaching cultural consequences. The language that our ancestors used to assess people’s weight generally had a qualitative and whole-body character: “thin,” “gaunt,” “lean,” “lanky,” “stout,” “fleshy,” “corpulent,” “beefy,” “plump,” “portly,” and, finally, “fat.” With some exceptions, it was good to be fat: in the Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of the adjective is “in well-fed condition, plump,” and in its figurative usages it signalled an abundance of good things—“the fat of the land,” a “fat living” for a cleric. In 1825, the French gourmand Brillat-Savarin wrote that “to acquire a perfect degree of plumpness . . . is the life study of every woman in the world.” Male or female, body fat showed you were a considerable person, that you commanded resources. Holbein’s great portrait of Henry VIII depicts not an obese man but a Big Man. And fat John Falstaff was, in his own estimation, “a goodly portly man, i’faith, and a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.” In societies marked by dietary scarcity—which is to say in practically any period before the twentieth century and in practically any present-day country outside the developed world—bodily bulk functions as a visible mark of power, affluence, and even good humor. In the late Middle Ages, the starving masses fantasized about the Land of Cockaigne, where you could idly gorge yourself on cakes and cream, and the American hobo anthem “Big Rock Candy Mountain” was a version of the same never-satisfied dream of abundance: “There’s a lake of stew / And of whiskey too / And you can paddle / All around it in a big canoe.” It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that fat became ugly when the poor became fat.

But being fat isn’t just an aesthetic bane; it’s understood to be a medical one as well. And this, too, is a historically recent development. When Prince Hal dismissed Falstaff by telling him that “the grave doth gape for thee thrice wider than for other men,” he meant to make a joke, not to offer a summary of epidemiological evidence. Writers from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century were, of course, aware that health risks might attend the very fat. Even Brillat-Savarin, for whom obesity was essentially a moral, mechanical, and social problem, not a medical one, noted that extreme obesity “opens the way for various diseases, such as apoplexy, dropsy, and ulcers of the legs, and makes all other ailments more difficult to cure.” Yet our ancestors certainly did not recognize a linear relation between increasing weight and health risk, and an over-all association between the gluttonously fat and a shortened life span was sometimes even denied, as when Francis Bacon judged that “the greatest gluttons are often found the most long-lived.” Whatever objections the early moderns had to corpulence were as much moral as they were strictly medical. People who gorged themselves gave a visible sign of poor self-control; what mattered was their flawed character, not their mortality risk. Gluttony was a vice before obesity was a disease.

And not just any disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control, which is the federal government’s official voice on public health, being overweight or obese “increases the risk of many diseases and health conditions,” including type-2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers, notably of the breast, colon, and endometrium. The World Heart Federation has just warned that being overweight or obese “can advance a first heart attack by four to eight years.” To the extent that there is an official consensus on such things, this is it: if you’re overweight or obese, you’re running a substantial risk of ill health and premature death; if you want to avoid these evils, lose weight.

The phrase “obesity epidemic” expresses the sense that obesity not only is a disease itself but gives rise to a wide range of other diseases; it also reflects the indisputable evidence of fat’s growing prevalence. About two-thirds of American adults can be officially classified as “overweight,” and more than a quarter are “obese.” The C.D.C. sees the epidemic as sweeping the country state by state: the “fattest” states make an arc that runs from Texas through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to West Virginia, with obesity rates greater than twenty-five per cent; the “thinnest” include Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, with rates below nineteen per cent. (Prudently, the C.D.C. draws no political conclusions, though its vivid map of our burgeoning national bulk colors the fat states red and the thin ones blue.) Averages can also be broken down by gender, ethnicity, education, and income level. Since 1970, according to one source, the average American man has gained seven pounds and the average American woman thirteen. However, there’s a lot of lumpiness hidden in these statistics. Some groups of individuals, such as the Pima Indians, of southern Arizona, are getting much fatter than other groups, such as white professional men with advanced degrees and personal trainers. It’s been some time since the average capitalist fat cat was actually fat.

What counts as overweight? In the United States, as in other countries, the body mass index is the officially approved way of deciding whether or not you’re too heavy. Leith, who curiously makes no mention of the medical issues associated with obesity, never seems to have worked out his own B.M.I. Had he done so, the answer would have been 32. (To calculate your B.M.I., divide your weight in pounds by the square of your height in inches, and then multiply the result by 703.) The C.D.C. tells you that a B.M.I. over 30 means you’re “obese,” while values between 25 and 29.9 mean you’re “overweight.” Still, the B.M.I. net catches some surprising fish. At six-six and a playing weight of two hundred and sixteen pounds, Michael Jordan was “overweight” (with a B.M.I. of 25); and, on the Boston Red Sox, Manny Ramirez and David (Big Papi) Ortiz are “overweight” (27.1 and 28, respectively), while the pitcher David Wells is “obese” (31.2), though that won’t come as a shock to Red Sox Nation. (Yankees fans should not feel too smug: both Jaret Wright and Hideki Matsui, at 29.5, are a Fenway Frank short of obesity.) The B.M.I. doesn’t tell you the percentage of body fat you’re carrying or how your fat is distributed, and it hasn’t got much to do with how you feel or whether you’re repulsive to potential sex partners. What it’s meant to do is provide a rough-and-ready index of a population’s health risks.

Precisely what those are, however, is less settled than it appears. Dr. Julie Gerberding, the head of the C.D.C., was one of the authors of a paper that was published, in March of 2004, in the distinguished Journal of the American Medical Association warning that obesity was responsible for killing four hundred thousand Americans a year—almost as many as tobacco. Some obesity treatments are now tax deductible as medical expenses, and some are reimbursable by health insurers. Three-quarters of Americans apparently see obesity as an “extremely” or “very” serious public-health problem, and the avoidance of premature death is a major reason that Americans seek to lose weight. J. Eric Oliver, a Chicago political scientist and obesity researcher, finds this whole state of affairs remarkable. His “Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic” (Oxford; $26) is an extended polemic against the causal association of overweight and ill health. He finds no reason to believe the usual assertion about the health effects of the “obesity epidemic”—that two-thirds of Americans weigh “too much,” that hundreds of thousands of us are dying each year from fat, that obesity costs hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care expenditures—and, though he’s not an epidemiologist, he stitches together a patchwork of epidemiological evidence to make his case.

Epidemiologists don’t even agree on whether overweight people who manage to lose weight improve their health. As one group of C.D.C. researchers put it, “Evidence that weight loss improves survival is limited.” We are getting fat, but, Oliver says, we’re not getting sick because of it. Excess body fat, and its effects on your joints, can contribute to osteoarthritis, Oliver concedes, and he grants that there is a decent causal story about cancer of the uterus and the higher estrogen levels found in overweight women, but that’s about it. A high B.M.I., in Oliver’s opinion, is most likely a proxy for things that are the direct causes of both obesity and disease, such as poor diet and lack of exercise. If you have a high B.M.I. and you’re fit, Oliver thinks that there’s no evidence that you’re more likely to suffer ill health than anyone else. Fat people are not usually fit, and they often eat foods rich in saturated fats, sugar, and refined carbohydrates, but it’s the lack of exercise and a poor diet that make for bad health, not “excessive” weight. Oliver discusses a number of studies purporting to show that weight loss is responsible for remediating a range of illnesses. However, epidemiologists are too quick to ascribe to weight loss what might be better attributed to the life-style changes that produce weight loss. This, Oliver claims, “is like saying ‘whiter teeth produced by the elimination of smoking reduces the incidence of lung cancer.’ ”

As it happens, a little more than a year after Julie Gerberding’s report appeared in JAMA one of her employees, Katherine Flegal, published a paper in the same journal which came to strikingly different conclusions. Flegal argued that obesity’s body count was far lower than Gerberding estimated; most of those deaths were among the small number of the very obese (B.M.I. greater than 35); people in certain age groups who were by C.D.C. criteria overweight but not obese had a lowered risk of death compared with those who were “normal”; and being underweight killed about thirty-four thousand Americans a year. The Times announced the good news on the front page: “SOME EXTRA HEFT MAY BE HELPFUL.” A number of epidemiologists and nutrition researchers welcomed Flegal’s paper. Obesity “is presented as a crisis and it’s presented as this horrible problem which has exploded onto the scene,” one expert said. “What this paper shows is that it’s just not true.” Not surprisingly, Flegal’s research was also met by heavy counterattacks, and the argument continues.

We can believe the dissenters or not—the way things are going, we probably won’t—but on several points Oliver’s is a valuable voice: obesity is an extremely complex phenomenon; inference from the population to the individual is always highly problematic; no one knows what course of behavior is certain to be good for you; some “cures”—bariatric surgery and the Atkins diet among them—may turn out to be more dangerous than the condition they seek to remedy; nutrition scientists and epidemiologists routinely contradict each other on matters of public policy and in the advice they give to individuals. The problem for the concerned but disinterested observer is not that there is no certainty in these matters; it’s that there are too many certainties. A diet slightly richer in humble pie might do nutrition experts some good.

For a skeptic like Oliver, the question is why, given the state of the evidence, we live in fear of an “obesity epidemic.” Why do so many of us want so urgently to lose weight? One answer he offers is that we’re largely ignorant about the endemic uncertainties and the disagreement among experts in this area. Another is that we have an irrational revulsion toward obese people. What he calls—God help us—“fatism” is a way of smuggling in prejudice against women and racial minorities. Significantly more African-Americans and Latinos are obese than non-Latino whites. Oliver generated computer images of men and women and noted that observers judged women to be “fat” at relatively lower body weights than men. He claims that seventy per cent of all Americans—and almost that many physicians—think that laziness and poor self-control are the predominant causes of obesity, and so obesity can be a vehicle for our moral prejudices.

Having told us that our attitudes toward obesity are irrational, Oliver thinks we should just give them up and move on. But that’s like fat William Leith telling the girlfriend who doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore that she’s being irrational. Maybe it should work, but it never does. The “soft” cultural, social, and moral facts of the matter about obesity turn out to be harder to shift than beliefs about the relevant scientific facts. Fat was once considered a sign of substance and now it isn’t. It was once thought sexy and now it’s the opposite. Historical and cultural variability in such things are also facts of the matter, but we’re snagged in the ropes of our own culture, and to be told that things once were, and ought to be, otherwise is of little help to fat people living in the here and now.

So even if you accept Oliver’s account of the evidence, you may still want to lose weight, and those who are interested in the psychic as well as the bodily health of contemporary American society may still want to understand why we’ve grown so fat. Maybe, after all, we can do something about it; and maybe, if we can’t, we can understand why not and so save ourselves the money and the worry. Here Oliver joins other obesity researchers in having one really good idea: the key to the spread of obesity in America is technology-produced abundance. There are a lot of calories around; they’re cheaper than they ever were; and they’re more accessible as we move about in the course of a day. Our genetic constitution, having evolved in scarcity, was designed to store up as much fatty tissue as possible in rare periods of plenty, and, since we now live in permanent glut, nature has programmed us for obesity, some of us more than others. The Land of Cockaigne is a nice place to visit; the trouble is that we’re stuck living there.

As the economist David Cutler and his colleagues have shown, since the mid-nineteen-seventies the average American’s calorie intake has increased by about ten per cent and American food production per capita has increased by twenty per cent. Some commentators also blame lack of exercise, and our working lives have indeed become more sedentary, but we wind up running around more, and Cutler isn’t convinced by the evidence that our over-all levels of exercise have declined. Others blame burgeoning portion size for obesity, but Cutler disputes that, too. It’s not that we’re eating more at meals; it’s that we’re eating more often and what we’re eating is often calorie rich. We don’t eat meals; we snack, graze, and nosh. We’ve become an eat-on-the-run, absent-mindedly feeding, cup-holder culture. Technology has made calories bountiful, cheap, and easy to consume, while new patterns of work, residence, mobility, and child rearing have squeezed the time that we are able or willing to commit to family or communal meals.

In the early-modern period, books of manners recommended that a gentleman always eat in company. King James I warned his son never to eat alone, lest people think it was for the “private satisfying of your gluttonie, which ye would be ashamed should be publicklie seene.” The social setting was understood to set moral limits on consumption. The shared meal marked the beginning and the end of eating: there was a time to eat and a time to stop. The meal defined the when, the what, the how, the how long, and the how much. You adjusted your consumption to those who were eating with you. You didn’t have exactly what you wanted, exactly when you wanted it, and exactly as much as you might want. The marking, ordering, and, above all, limiting character of the shared meal remained largely intact into the twentieth century: Leith’s grandmother used to warn him about appearing “greedy” at the table, and, while my own grandmother absolutely required that we have “seconds,” it was not a great idea to be seen eating when she wasn’t feeding you. Sometime in the postwar era, though, the domestic meal began its unremitting decline. Now, like many of us, Leith mostly eats standing up—no grandmother, no mother, often no one at all to witness “greed.” The individualization of eating has done much to cut us free of dietary limits. We’ve been told that an index of our times is that we “bowl alone”; something similar might be said of our gastronomic habits. We eat alone and we get fat together.

The feast, in times past, was a meal set off from the ordinary by its abundance and richness. Our feasts have now become as ordinary as they are mobile. It’s a little more than a mile from my house, in Central Square, in Cambridge, up Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Yard. As I walk to work I pass forty establishments where I can get fed (only five of which happen to be franchised fast food). There are five all-you-can-eat buffets (three Indian, one Chinese, and one Tibetan), and fifteen places where high-fat, high-sugar drinks and finger foods are visible from the sidewalk or available within several steps of the entrance. Many of the people I pass are eating or drinking as they walk, and others are doing the same alone in their cars. When I get to the building where I work, I pass, on the way to my office, a cafeteria whose display features an assortment of doughnuts, brownies, croissants, and pastries. It looks pretty good today, so I pick up a prune Danish.

He takes taxi-cabs, maybe he cut down on them!

Hee XXP

OTM.

I blame for obesity: sedentary jobs plus too much driving, microwaves, processed/fast food, bovine growth hormone, insecurity (usually financial or emotional) in the person eating, eating out being a more everyday experience than it was when I was a kid (and the portion sizes), 'diet' and 'fat-free' items combined with normal food, leading to false sense of lo-cal in the eater, oversugared and dairy-ed hot drinks, cheese and potatoes together.

i made a decision a few years ago, when i got into a higher paying job, to start eating better quality food: no fast food, less red meat, and cut wayyy back on soda. i didn't really lose much weight, but a chronic stomach problem i had been dealing with for two years went away in about two weeks, and i've felt more energetic - which has inspired me to do simple things like take the stairs instead of the elevator, and walk home instead of taking the bus.

still... when i do decide to "splurge", it's always really shitty food like taco bell or mcdonald's. luckily i don't do it often.

That said, I imagine people with long commutes will face two big health problems: they'll (a) do lots of grab-and-go food, even for dinner, because they're on the road and giving up the time between work and dinner when healthy meal-prep happens; plus (b) they won't have time or energy for daily exercise, what with getting home at like 8 and then eating dinner and then ... bit late for a workout! That's part of what I meant about health being in some ways like a luxury -- if you give up three hours of your day commuting, you're giving up a chunk of your opportunity-time for healthy cooking, healthy shopping, exercise, etc.

Except, yeah, I don't buy it really because you can drive 3 hours to get to work but if your work is doing hard manual labor you're gonna be getting more of a workout than someone who walks 10 blocks to work in Manhattan but then proceeds to sit and do data entry for 8 hours straight. I mean there are about 20,000 other factors that come into play here.

xpost

OK nabisco why do you seem to think that being at all healthy requires a huge amount of labor, time, and expense?

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/Atio/story?id=1548281&ad=true

so sorry Spaniards! welcome to girthworld.

The best idea I have heard is the 30/30 lifestyle.
incorporate 30 different types of food, eg vegetables, sugars, fruit, cerels, seeds, oils. Then incorporate at least 30min of exercise!

3 things that I was taught by my mother, and we all know moms are always right!
1) always eat breakfast.(fruit, yogurt, toast, ceral, juice) Breakfast isn't pizza, or sweets.

2) lunch is a salad/sandwich time! YOU WILL NOT DIE IF YOU EAT LETTUCE!

3) Dinner, meat and three vegetables, is good but four is always better.

After the dinner dishes have been done a quick 30 min walk! It helps digestion, and increases circulation!

When you cut mcdonalds away, then you will be truly happy!

yup, make sure you get both mono- and di-glycerides! both saturated and unsaturated fats! both low fructose and high fructose corn syrup! both modified food starch and corn starch! go wild!

-- health freak. (18...), April 21st, 2006.

Funny thing about this last nag is: I've seen more McDonald's in Australia and New Zealand each than in any American city today.

There were three McDonald's total in central Seattle, but one of them closed recently (the one in Wallingford) due to lack of business. (Granted, there are plenty of other artery clogging "independent" restaurants here too.) The two other McDonald's in downtown are still around, still just two blocks from each other, and still attract either a) no one, or b) junkies respectively.

Sorry for the side track.

Ha, I never answered Ally's question, but I guess that was probably because this thread seems to answer it already. The question's phrased in a mean way, though: I don't think it takes huge amounts of labor, time, and expense to be at all healthy. I think it takes some amount of labor, time, and expense to develop a whole healthy lifestyle -- if it were super-easy, we'd all be doing it. And so I think there are lots of people with habitually unhealthy lifestyles whose labor, time, and money are too stretched thin with other problems to really get healthy. That's not some kind of "excuse" for them, that's just pointing out why a lot of them aren't taking these "very simple" steps of totally reforming their diets and exercise levels.

More specifically: exercise takes time, and is itself a form of labor, and it can cost money, depending on how you do it. If you happened to be, say, a working single mother of two, I can see how it might be a little hard to find time and energy to invest into exercise, even if you knew it would make you feel better. Eating well ... that requires time, either to shop and cook, or to seek out places that serve healthy food, which are increasingly outstripped by places that don't. Having children to feed would also make that more of a battle. It could also cost money, because food that's both healthy and tasty is often sold at a high premium, whereas food that's fast, tasty, processed, and horrible for you is available everywhere at low prices.

None of those hurdles are huge ones -- you can get around them with a little effort -- but as with anything that involves changing habits, a little effort is a little effort, which for some people can be rough. Especially if you have loads of other stuff on your plate (haha) asking for your effort. I'm not saying this about people like me, but about people like my example single-working-mother, whose time and energy might be stretched thin enough that it's genuinely hard to find any left over for these changes.

"I have really enjoyed all of Dr. Sears books so, naturally I thought I would enjoy this one. Unfortunately I wasn't able to and here is why: I was looking for a book that would solve my problems of unhealthy eating. I bought it because of the good reviews and was sure I was going to love it and eat better because of it. I am not willing to re-learn how to shop for, prepare and cook healthy food. If you already shop at organic stores and if you know what flax seed is, or if you are willing to devote a lot of energy towards this healthy lifestyle, then this book is for you. However, if you eat (and even enjoy) hotdogs and you didn't know tofu wasn't just for oriental cooking than you might want to borrow this book from the library rather than buy it."

uhhhhh....

anyway I am going to try to institute the family after-dinner walk soon I think, the weather is so nice.

the solution: GET A HOBBY. I'd wager that most healthy (but not health obsessed) Americans are people that, say, like to go on bike rides or play pick up games of basketball or stay active in whatever sports they played when they were younger. Plus, FUN, DUDES. Join a kickball league or something. Whatever you do, make the activity the focus, not the exercise.

Alternately: bike to work. Every day. It isn't nearly as unpleasant or difficult as you think and, if you live someplace like Chicago, it's faster than driving or public transportation. Plus, you save money!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4933278.stm

;_;

ANY level of trans fat in your diet is harmful to your health.

if you happened to be, say, a working single mother of two, I can see how it might be a little hard to find time and energy to invest into exercise

None of those hurdles are huge ones -- you can get around them with a little effort

I'm not quite understanding why you qualify these with "a little." It's very hard to change habits! It's often very hard to find time to exercise if you work all day and have a commute and have to cook dinner and run errands and clean around the house and everything else! I am often completely exhausted at the end of the day and I just have myself to look after. Not to mention, where do you go to exercise? Now, if you live in an somewhat unsafe neighborhood, or even a relatively safe one, do you go out walking or running by yourself after dark? I certainly think twice about doing that. You pay to join a gym? How do you find the money and the time? When do you drive there? How do you schedule that when you have kids to take care of when you get home from work? It really isn't easy at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed

So that may explain why our Mcdonalds healthy choices stuff, for example, really *are* reasonably healthy.

just for profit/convenience, since the oil lasts however many times longer/it gives foods however many times as long a shelflife

yeah, I just assume, now, that most fish & chip shop fryers, etc, use the hydrogenated oils, etc. I mean, they probably keep using the extra-long"life" stuff twice as long as recommended, as well, so, haha

why wouldn't they? there hasn't been enough of an uproar about it, here, yet

I think, maybe, marks & spencer or someone has said they won't have hydrogenated oils in any of their foods, which is fine, if you can afford to do all your foodshopping there

Our culture is basically completely set up at this point to make it seem impossible to live a healthy lifestyle if you weren't put on that path at a very young age, that's true, but it's completely deceptive except for in the most extreme of cases. I was glad you kind of went with the term "a little effort"!

wtf with that show Honey We're Killing The Kids, btw.

those aged images are so ridiculous. and potentially traumatizing for the poor kids.

Yeah, totally, I agree that it's not that much effort that's required. But then again "a little effort" is all it would take for people to do any number of noble things -- be healthy, read more, spend more time with their kids, work harder at the office, whatever. I mean, it's "a little effort" in a pile of competing priorities. So I guess what I'm trying to defend against here is the idea that people are just being lazy and unwilling to put forth that tiny bit of effort. I feel like we should at least keep in mind that lots of people have their time and energy stretched out a bit as it is (having kids must be a huge change on this front!), and so I can at least understand why it would be hard for them to make lifestyle changes.

But yeah, like I said, that's not so much about people like me or most of the people here, and much more about that example "single working mother" -- which for the record I don't think is that unrepresentative a role in America! Oh and just to be clear: I'm not saying this stuff is the root of the problem. The roots of the problem seem to be systemic stuff about modern food and modern lifestyles, stuff in the world around us that we more and more have to take conscious steps to adapt away from.

Anyway yeah, I'm not trying to say that it's so hard and arduous -- and really, doing the opposite with "simple easy steps" cheerleading is probably better for helping people get stuff done. I just don't want to underplay the difficulty of it. (I'd feel like a hypocrite, too: I'm certainly not obese, but I don't think I'd find it very easy to really change my diet and exercise level! And I'm unmarried, childless, economically stable, and all that other stuff that should make it easier for me than anyone.)

I'm sure they watch the show once it airs! What if some impressionable little kid gets set in his mind that he's going to grow up to look like an unemployed pedophile. His self-image could be wrecked for life!

Eventually though, thru patient food education and try try again, he got them all eating well. The scary part really was one family who volunteered, at home, to switch to a normal healthy diet of fruit/veg/meats and no junk. Within days, one of the kids labelled as ADDish was all calm and happy. WITHIN DAYS. What in gods name is in the crap kids eat that this suggested it turns them into asthmatic/ADD/allergic messes?

1) My wife pointed out to me the other day the fact that buffets are "all you can eat" which has a different meaning from "eat til you're satisified," or even "eat as much as you want."

2) I saw an onion personal ad from a young woman whose quote was "I'm into exercising and eating healthy but I also like to relax"

w/r/t (1): many buffets now carry the slogan "all you care to eat"

"If you should choose to eat a variety of things until you are reasonably full rather than ordering an entree, we offer that service" two for one Tuesday at the Golden China #1 Super Buffet.

"Waste Not Want Not" Puritan ideal meets lassiex-faire Capitalist cut-throat concept = fat, confused kids

hurting, stop reading the personals, i doubt your wife would like that.

I was reading the Onion once at work and an older customer came in. She saw my monitor and told me, "Oh, the Onion, how fantastic! My son met a wonderful woman on that site and they're getting married in the spring!" When she left, she told me, "I hope you meet someone wonderful!" I'm pretty sure she thought it was just a personals site. Made me smile.

Years ago this boss/supervisor woman at this place I was temping at made the sweet gesture of taking me and these other guys who were working on this project there out to lunch. She chose a buffet place(N.B., she herself was obese).

We're basically a gaggle of scrawny college students, so we repeatedly go up to the buffet and heap up our plates with whatever is on offer. At one point, we observe a guy go up to the buffet thing, pile some stuff on his plate, begin to eat it as he's walking back to his seat...and actually finish it before he has a chance to sit down, thereby inspiring him to make yet another run back to the buffet.

I always think of that moment when I think of Americans, obesity.

That's kind of poetic, like a fatty perpetual motion machine.

would marry this onion girl

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/wdyt_photo6.article.jpg

sexyual personaae

dell -

Stop spying on me.

via James Wolcott, Movie Dialogue That Sounds Ironic in Retrospect:

"It's one thing I envy you Americans--you're all so thin. How do you manage it?"
--Juliet Mills to Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder's Avanti! (1972)

"cigarettes my boy!"

"I'm into exercising and eating healthy but I also like to relax"

That's like saying "I'm into laughing and dancing but I also like to relax."

usually "i'm into exercising" in a personal means "I want to have sex with a lean person "

"I'm a bit of a control-freak health-nut, but if you get me off, I tend to loosen up a bit."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bomkgXeDkE

"I'm into exercising and eating healthy but I also enjoy some of my life"

"hi mom"

death gulp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uArqI-LHXU

lol As if "more ice please" is ever a problem. They put as much ice into drinks as they can, because it means less soda.