America, Land of the Fat

I see we’re heading into another angst-fest over how fat Americans have become. It was about a year ago that I blogged on the breaking news that America was first in the world in terms of fatness. Today I read that starting next month, HBO will be showing a four-part documentary called The Weight of the Nation. A book with this title is forthcoming as well. We’re back with fat.

All the studies on American obesity give us the same droningly depressing numbers: Two out of three adult Americans are overweight or obese, as is one in three children and teens. Experts are zeroing in on American food as the culprit. In particular, we’re overweight because of American agriculture (we produce lots of corn sugar and fatty meats) and the excess amount of food we eat. Instead of nourishing us, then, our food is killing us.

Forces other than what’s in our food, and how much food we eat, contribute to American obesity. We don’t exercise. Since we drive so much, we hardly ever walk. We watch television and hang out on the Internet. We eat on the run. We eat at fatty food restaurants. We surround ourselves with images of food, leaving us continuously salivating. To appeal to our cravings for sugar and fat, corporations manipulate the ingredients in our food. We eat between meals, and we love snack food. And so on.

It’s been popular to argue that obesity among poor people is explained partly by their poor neighborhoods. With limited access to healthful foods, poor people resort to eating unhealthful foods. An article in today’s New York Times points to new studies that debunk this claim (who’s to say at this point which argument is right?). In any event, poor overweight people and rich overweight people (there aren’t as many of the latter—education and wealth, it seems, generally lead to better weight control) both use their enormous freedom to choose what they eat (compared to most other people on the planet) by choosing food that contributes to obesity—and, to boot, they eat too much of that food.

In his column on obesity in Monday’s New York Times, for example, Frank Bruni writes, “the surprise isn’t how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few.” Bruni quotes Thomas A. Farley, New York City’s health commissioner: “We’re simply not genetically programmed to refuse calories when they’re within arm’s reach.”

Today, most people studying American obesity see it as a systemic problem. People are fat not because of one or two reasons, or even three or four reasons, but because of a complex and confusing mix of multiple, disparate causes. There are as many causes for American obesity as there are causes for World War I, and arguing over which one of the many causes for obesity, or World War I, is the most important, is pointless. The problem, in each case, rests in the whole damn package.

Suppose we were to consider obesity not in terms of nutrition and health, but rather in terms of how it fits in with the overall picture of America. We Americans have, to put it mildly, a propensity for excess and bigness. We are the nation of big cars, big TV screens, big houses, big stores, and big malls. Obesity, on this account, is merely a part of our overall addiction to excess.

Oddly, although there are more overweight and obese Americans than ever before, a stigma remains attached to being overweight or obese, and there’s discrimination against heavier people in the work place. For all the “it’s not my fault” talk, people can’t shake the old-fashioned idea that obesity results from the vice of gluttony. Moreover, our idea of beauty remains attached to the slim physique.

If we stick to liberal ideals of the autonomous, self-reliant and responsible individual, obesity is no big deal. If individuals are fat, that’s their business. Only when we move on to more community-oriented philosophies do we see obesity as everyone’s business.

Pushing back against the obesity of Americans is not a hopeless task. Remember the U-turn this country made with regard to smoking? We went from a country where smoking was the norm—a sociable and relaxing habit—into a country that mostly sees smoking as noxious. Eating combines the natural appetite of hunger with the unnatural desires that derive from custom and habit. If we could somehow manipulate the latter in the right way, we’d have a chance at lowering the nation’s weight.

Perhaps the best way to approach obesity—which seems to be an even more intractable problem than smoking—would be to do an end run on the problem. Say we worked not to turn public opinion against being obese or overweight, but rather to turn it toward developing “a taste for the small.” Rejecting attachment to excess could never happen overnight, but with the help of a few, good laws (such as providing nutritional school lunches and prohibiting sugary or fatty additives to our food), and a few popular spokespeople who railed against excess, we might just save ourselves from collapse by reason of weight.