American Obesity
A lot of people want to blame the American Obesity epidemic on too much TV, too little exercise, and too much gluttony. But that’s blaming the victim, in my opinion. Why should guys give up Sunday afternoons with pizza and John Madden—and why should women give up Sunday nights with a bowl of ice cream and Brothers & Sisters on the tube? Indulgences like that make American Obesity life worth living. And really—did they not have cheeseburgers and fries (and television) back in the 1970s?
Indeed, I’d argue that Americans are working harder than ever to keep themselves in shape. Every year, we spend an estimated $542 million on health and fitness books, $18.5 billion on health club memberships, and $5.2 billion on diet foods and weight loss programs. And that’s not to mention the popularity of weight loss challenge programs like The Biggest Loser and fitness magazines like Bicycling, Runner’s World, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health. When all is said and done, we’ll have spent close to $60 billion this year on trying to keep the American Obesity pounds off.
But unless you understand how American Obesity food marketers have altered the reality of our weekly trip to the supermarket, it’s impossible to truly see where the battle lines fall in the fight against fat. See, the food industry spends $30 billion a year on advertising—nearly half of it pitching convenience foods,candy, soda, and desserts.
And while they’re busy using dancing leprechauns and talking teddy bears to sell you on how the new shrink-wrapped food of the month is going to make you the most popular mom or dad on the block, they’re obscuring the real story. And the real story is this: The food we consume today is simply different from the food that Americans ate 20 or 3o years ago. And the reasons are as simple as they are sneaky.
X We’ve added extra calories to traditional foods and thus the extra American Obesity. In the early 1970s, food manufacturers, looking for a cheaper ingredient to replace sugar, came up with a substance called high-fructose corn syrup. This new invention made perfect sense: Corn was cheap and adundant—thanks to heavy government subsidies—and Americans had an ever-escalating desire for sweet foods. Today, HFCS is in an unbelievable array of foods—everything from breakfast cereals to bread, from ketchup to pasta sauce, from juice boxes to iced tea. While most current research concludes that the body metabolizes HFCS in the same way it does ordinary sugar, this synthetic sweetener has a few sneaky “advantages” over table sugar: 1)
It’s cheaper to produce, 2) it has a longer shelf life, and 3) its liquid form makes it easy to incorporate into the types of products that never received the sugar treatments before (read: whole wheat bread). So Grandma’s pasta sauce now
comes in a jar, and it’s loaded with stuff just perfect for adding meat to your bones—and flab on your belly.
X We’ve been trained to supersize American Obesity. It seems like Economics 101: If you can get a lot more food for just a few cents more, then it makes all the sense in the world to upgrade to the “value meal.” And since this trick has worked so well for fast-food marketers, your average product in the supermarket has become Hulkified as well. The problem is the way we look at food—we should be looking at cutting down on our calories, not adding to them.
X We’ve laced our food with time bombs. A generation ago, it was hard for food manufacturers to create baked goods that would last on store shelves. Most baked goods require oils, and oil leaks at room temperature. But since the 1960s, American Obesity manufacturers have been baking with,something called trans fat. Trans fat is cheap and effective: It makes potato chips crispier and cookies tastier, and it lets fry-cooks make pound after pound of fries without smoking up their kitchens. The downside: Trans fat increases your bad cholesterol, lowers your good cholesterol, and greatly increases your risk of heart disease.
X Our fruits and vegetables aren’t as healthy as they once were. This is another factor for American Obesity Researchers in a study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition tested 43 different garden crops for nutritional content and discovered that 6 out of 13 nutrients showed major declines between 1950 and 1999: protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Researchers say the declines are probably due to farmers’ efforts to achieve higher yields and plants that grow faster and can be picked earlier. As a result, the plants aren’t able to make or take in nutrients at the same rate.
X Even the animals we eat are different today. Here’s a terrifying statistic about American Obesity: The average piece of chicken has 266 percent more fat than it did in 1971, while its protein content has dropped by a third, according to researchers at the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at the London Metropolitan University. Because we no longer eat chickens that roam the farm eating bugs and grasses—today they’re kept in cages and fed antibiotic-laced soy and corn and other unnatural foods—today’s chicken is actually higher in fat than it is in protein. (If that is what modern food management is doing to chickens, imagine what it’s doing to us!)
X We’re drinking more calories than ever leading to American Obesity. A study from the University of North Carolina found that we consume 450 calories a day from beverages, nearly twice as many as 30 years ago. This increase amounts to an extra 23 pounds a year that we’re forced to work off—or carry around with us. Many of the calories come from HFCS in our drinks—especially, when it comes to kids, in our “fruit” drinks that are often nothing more than water, food coloring, and sweetener. In fact, anything you have for your kids to drink in your fridge right now—unless it’s water, milk, or a diet soda—probably has HFCS in it. Go ahead—read the label.
X We don’t even know what’s in our food. More and more, American Obesity marketers are adding new types of preservatives, fats, sugars, and other food substances to our daily meals. Indeed, there are now more than 3,000 ingredients on the FDA’s list of “safe” food additives, and any one of them could end up on your plate. But often, they go unexplained (what is xanthan gum, anyway?) or, in the case of restaurant food, unmentioned. Unless we’re eating it right off the tree, it’s hard to know what, exactly, is in that fruity dish. We’re here to solve that problem once and for all. find out what exactly it is you’re feeding yourself and your family!
All of these disturbing trends in our American Obesity food supply are a lot to chew on—but chew on them we do, often because we feel we have no choice. Yet I believe there is a better way. I believe we can enjoy all the bounty of the supermarket—and heck, some pretty good TV shows, too—and not gain weight or lose control of our bodies and our health. I believe that taking control of our food, our weight, and our lives doesn’t have to be difficult. I believe that if we have the knowledge and insight we need, we can and will make the right choices.
Related tags:
- obesity in america
- current obesity rate in america
- obesity in u s
