Healthy skepticism on obesity
Fat Politics
The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic
J. Eric Oliver
Oxford University Press: 228 pp., $28
*
PIMA Indians living in southern Arizona today are among the heaviest people in the world. The average Pima woman weighs 200 pounds; men weigh more. Before the 1940s, most Pima sported lean, muscular physiques. As their agrarian culture and low-fat diet was transformed into the sedentary lifestyle and a diet of highly processed food common in mainstream America, the tribe’s rates of obesity and diabetes skyrocketed.
Why have the Pima changed so much and what does it say about America’s so-called obesity epidemic? First, obesity is not a disease, J. Eric Oliver asserts in “Fat Politics”; it is a symptom, not a cause of, the nation’s health problems. Second, the University of Chicago political science professor contends, the “epidemic” is mostly a myth.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 60% of Americans are overweight and one in four is obese. But that’s only because body mass index (BMI), the U.S. government’s official measuring stick, considers weight solely as a function of height, ignoring tremendous natural variation in body type, percentage of body fat and overall fitness. As a result, Oliver contends, the incidence of obesity and its associated health risks have been grossly exaggerated by government researchers, pharmaceutical companies and the weight-loss industry to make money and fuel prejudice. “By worrying about our weight, we are focusing on the wrong target,” Oliver writes. “[W]e are not getting diabetes, cancer, and heart disease because of how much we weigh; we are getting these problems partly because of how and what we eat” -- and too little exercise.
Although Oliver agrees with “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser that we eat too much unhealthy food, he chastises Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Supersize Me” and many weight-loss experts for equating weight gain with poor health, fueling prejudice in otherwise intelligent people. “Not only do they assume that fatness is inherently bad, they also presuppose that fat people (that is, minorities and the poor) are too ignorant to know that they should be thin.”
Michael Pollan, author of “The Botany of Desire,” has written that cheap subsidized corn has helped fuel America’s reliance on fast food by making high-calorie corn-based additives ubiquitous in the American diet.
Oliver agrees, but he isn’t pushing smaller portions or the “slow food” movement (which advocates eating seasonal and locally grown food) to stem the trend, because economics trumps nutrition when poor people eat: Over the last three decades, inflation-adjusted food costs have soared, while the average family’s purchasing power has declined. Processed foods are more affordable for poor people with young children: “One dollar can get you more than seven hundred calories from a grab bag of Fritos chips,” Oliver observes. “It is hard to match that price-to-calorie ration with broccoli, squash, and greens.”
Like all humans, Pima Indians evolved to conserve calories in a world of fluctuating food supply. Beginning with the advent of agriculture and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, food became more available and easier to store at the same time that automobiles, mechanized labor and passive recreation such as TV and computer games dramatically reduced the necessity of burning calories. The Pima represent an extreme example: Living in a drought-prone climate for centuries, their bodies presumably have evolved to efficiently store calories during times of plenty. Now they’re fat.
Oliver’s weakest link, I think, is his indictment of snacking as a cause of poor health -- adding calories and eroding the social role of meals. “Throughout most of American history (and indeed throughout most of the world), the widespread snacking that we know today” -- cookies, chips, soft drinks, candy bars -- “simply did not exist.” Agreed, but I believe that throughout history, people snacked when possible -- but on healthier food. And we exercised more.
At 13, Oliver first visited Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland, a section of the amusement park filled with such futuristic technologies as moving stairs, big-screen TVs equipped with video disc players, computerized at-home shopping, microwave ovens, soda, candy and ice cream. “In my youthful eyes,” he writes, “the future promised a world that was free from physical chores yet filled with goodies; it was a world characterized as much by its ease as by its bounty.”
Disney got our future half right: It missed the part about dangerous obesity surgeries, diet quackery and potentially deadly weight-loss drugs such as fen-phen. “Ultimately, what the designers of ‘Tomorrowland’ failed to consider,” Oliver concludes, “was that making life easier does not necessarily make it better or that giving us more choices doesn’t always give us more power. These, I would argue, are the lessons of America’s obesity epidemic.”
Getting healthy shouldn’t be confused with getting thin.
*
Jim Rossi is a science and outdoors writer based in San Francisco.
