THE ENLARGING AMERICAN A Plague of Obesity Threatens the Good Life
	APRIL 2005

by Chris Scott
Photo by Russell Byrne

Most of us over 50 years of age, or so, can remember eating dinner at home around the family table more than 300 times every year. Our diet typically centered on some version of meat, potatoes, vegetables, and some kind of salad. For Sunday dinner or in celebration of some event, we might have a piece of pie or a dish of ice cream. We usually carried our lunch to school consisting of something like a bologna sandwich, and an apple. If mom was feeling generous, lunch might include a cookie or a candy bar. In my family, at least, we didn’t eat in a restaurant once every year.

It was no coincidence, I think, that the 2,000-member student body in my high school did not include one student who was obese by today’s standard. A few kids retained their baby fat and were teased as being “fatty.” But in twelve years of public school I never knew a student who weighed twice their normal body weight, or anything approaching it. I can’t remember ever as a child even seeing a person like that on the streets.

The Broadening of America
The American family dinner table is beginning to go the way of the Studebaker. There’s a few of them around, but not enough to make a significant impact on our daily culture. On the other hand, you can buy fast food at the zoo, gas station, or in a hospital cafeteria. A recent survey revealed that 70 percent of the food served in California public schools belongs in the fast-food category. We now spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music combined. Cashier tabs for fast food last year totaled $110 billion dollars.

One reason we eat fast food is convenience, of course. But another reason is because it tastes so good. I remember my first McDonald’s French fry, which I popped into my mouth back in the 50s, when the sign out front said something like, “Over 150,000 sold.” I remember thinking that I’d never eaten anything like that in my life. Most people find McDonald’s fries to be delicious! Some gourmets agree. James Beard, a celebrated gourmet and author of over two dozen cookbooks, for example, praised McDonald's fries.

All the fast-food restaurants came along after I was old enough to remember their coming. I remember my first pizza, my first KFC, and my first Dairy Queen. “With a bee and a bye and a bow and a bop and a Dairy Queen with a curl on top.” Much later I remembered my first deep-fried oysters at Long John Silver’s and my first Arby’s. Wonderful!

The same fat, sugar, and salt that makes all that stuff so delicious, makes it bad for you, of course. My buddy has a theory of eating healthy that, he says, doesn’t require any concentration. “If it tastes good, spit it out.” I heard a nutritionist once say that you can eat healthy at McDonald’s if you buy one of their salads and don’t put any dressing on it. What planet does he live on? That’s rabbit food!

A Big Problem
The real problem isn’t simply that we eat unhealthy food; we eat way too much of it. The other part of the problem is that when we aren’t eating, most of us can be found sitting in a chair, usually facing a computer monitor or a TV screen. If we spent two-and-a-half hours in strenuous exercise every day, like our friend Suzanne does, we could eat a couple Big Macs and a super size fries every day. If we don’t spend that much time in strenuous exercise every month, however, we better leave McDonald’s alone, except on rare occasions.

A website called Healthy Eating Club, concluded a discussion on the subject with the words, “The take home message is that you can eat what you like 10% of the time if you eat the good stuff 90% of the time.” And then observed that many people get those proportions reversed.

No wonder an increasing percentage of the American population is growing too large. Since 1980, the total number of overweight and obese people has doubled, with twice as many overweight children and three times as many overweight adults. A wave of fat kids is threatening to overwhelm the future of our culture beneath a lardslide of truly immense individuals.

Like “the Man Who Couldn’t Stop Eating,” in our feature article, a number of us have grown too large to easily fly in a plane, use a porta-potty, or cross our legs when we sit down. I knew of a short man of almost unbelievable girth who liked to say about himself, “If I were three inches taller I would be perfectly round.” Looking at him, they said, it seemed he was speaking the truth.

Diseases associated with obesity are soaring along with the condition. Medical costs for treating the numbers of people suffering from obesity-related infirmities have risen higher than smoking. Whatever the explanation, we’re getting sick and dying beneath the layers of blubber that we add to ourselves year after year. Now it appears that we’re also doing it generation after generation.

Leaving out Fries
Cutting back on the intake of French fries is a good start on a healthy diet. Not only are we killing ourselves by the vast quantities of fat and salt that we take in, but there are other things about these things that may be detrimental to our health. In 2002 the World Health Organization began to express concerns about the discovery of a substance called acrylamide in potato chips, French fries, and some other fried and baked foods.

Acrylamide is known to cause DNA damage and cancer in rats. The EPA strictly regulates acrylamide in drinking water to less than 0.5 ppb. (parts per billion). Until 2002 nobody knew that the stuff was present in starchy foods that are heated to temperatures above 356 degrees. (Curiously enough, reducing the temperate just a few degrees — below 347 — dramatically lowers the amount of acrylamide produced.)

Some brands of potato chips contain 500 times the acceptable amount of acrylamide. In one case, at least, it was 7,000 times higher. McDonald’s fries were tested at 730 ppb., which is 1,400 times the amount permitted by the EPA for drinking water. Organic Kettle Chips were tested at 1,690 ppb.

This all might be much ado about nothing; nobody knows if acrylamide causes cancer and, if it does, at what levels it becomes significant. But there’s no doubt that cutting fries out of our diet, or seriously reducing them, would help most of us to get rid of the layers of lard that hang about us.

Isn’t the Pillsbury Doughboy cute? Poke his fat little tummy and he laughs. The fact is, however, if I’m a doughboy myself, and I look like a person being born again while trying to get out of the backseat of car or like a beached whale when I’m at a poolside, I’m not being cute! And I’m not being healthy! I need to fix that!

I discovered a miracle diet the other day, one I intend to adopt because it’s so easy even a self-control-challenged person like me can understand it and learn it. It is only four words long:

East less. Exercise more.

Sure, I can do that!