Great article--in the form of a multi-book review--in the New Yorker last week.  Essentially, it's critical look at a handful of books which attempt to explain how Americans got so freakin' tubby, and why we're getting tubbier.  Some highlights, beginning with the theory often bandied about by mustache-twirling amateur biologists like me:

According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on...

...early humans lived, as it were, hand to mouth. In good times, they needed to stockpile food for use in hard times, but the only place they had to store it was on themselves....As a consequence, a person with a genetic knack for storing fat would have had a competitive advantage. ....

...as a practical matter, opportunities for eating too much were limited....Genes that controlled weight gain wouldn’t have been selected for because they simply weren’t needed.

In America today, by contrast, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; ...with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the "mismatch paradigm."..."We evolved on the savannahs of Africa," Power and Schulkin write. "We now live in Candyland."

But that doesn't explain the sudden plethora of portliness we've seen in the last 30 years.  If that were the full story, however, there wouldn't be a svelte waistline to be seen in the entire civilized world.  Hence the need for another theory:

Eric Finkelstein...argues that Americans started to put on pounds in the eighties because it made financial sense for them to do so. Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in the past few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a bargain...

"For most people, an ice cold Coca-Cola used to be a treat reserved for special occasions," Finkelstein observes. Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them "the number one food consumed in the American diet."

So cheap, caloric foods are going to account for part of the equation.  But, as article Elizabeth Kolbert notes, if that were the major factor in our choice of foods, well, why wouldn't we just eat less, not more? 

Another piece of the equation, this one rather more sinister:  corporate forces are out to hook us on their calorie-dense slop (which here is called one "eatertainment," a term you can be sure I'm going to be sprinkling into my conversations with waiters when I hit the burger joints this weekend: 

It’s not that sweet and oily foods have become less expensive; it’s that they’ve been reëngineered while we weren’t looking. [author] Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as "eatertainment." Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest: different "eatertaining" items mix these ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create "a lot of fun in your mouth" with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld "three different cheese notes" with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to "unlock the code of craveability," and a third about the effort to "cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish."

As a 'health and fitness pro' who's wolfed down his share of Pringles, utterly unable to stop, I find this pretty compelling.  For me, the only way to NOT eat the whole tube is not to start--something I've also heard said of crack cocaine.  I'm not addictive by nature, but those suckers (the Pringles, not the rock) practically dive down my gullet on their own.

Now for a quick detour into the land of academics:

According to the authors of "The Fat Studies Reader," the real problem isn’t the sudden surge in obesity in this country but the surge in stories about obesity. Weight, by their account, is, like race or sex or bone structure, a biological trait over which individuals have no—or, in the case of fat, very limited—control. A "societal fat phobia," Natalie Boero, a sociology professor at San Jose State University, writes, "in part explains why the ‘obesity epidemic’ is only now beginning to be critically deconstructed."

Undeniably, the fat—the authors of "The Reader" are adamant advocates for the "f" word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty....teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children, and...three out of five of the heaviest kids have been teased at school. The same people who are repelled by racist or misogynistic humor seem to feel that it is perfectly acceptable to make fat jokes.

 

So:  just to clarify:  America doesn't have an obesity problem, just a perception problem.  Fat people, bravely embracing the very label previously used to disparage them, are subversive, trend-bucking heroes who wear their nonconformity around their middles!  Hmmm....

Fortunately, Kolbert ain't buying it:

But, just because size bias exists it doesn’t follow that putting on weight is a subversive act. In contrast to the field’s claims about itself, fat studies ends up taking some remarkably conservative positions. It effectively allies itself with McDonald’s and the rest of the processed-food industry, while opposing the sorts of groups that advocate better school-lunch programs and more public parks. To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.

Finally, Kolbert summarizes perhaps the most ominous title of all...which suggest that it's not just Americans who are tubbing up, but that the problem is creeping insidiously abroad: 

As its title suggests, "Globesity" (Earthscan; $34.95) takes an international approach to the problem of weight gain. The book’s authors...observe that, while Americans were the first to fatten up, they no longer lead the pack. "Like it or not, we have no choice but to face up to the numbers: current data reveal that in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Malta, and Slovakia, the proportion of overweight adults is actually higher than in the U.S.," they write. In Asia, Africa, and South America, too, obesity is on the rise. Although nearly a billion of the world’s most impoverished citizens still suffer from too few calories, Delpeuch and his colleagues note that it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly. It may seem to go without saying that being fat is better than starving, but even this truism, the authors argue, is no longer entirely true: in the new world order, it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time....

The authors of "Globesity"...see obesity as a disaster, both for the individuals who suffer from it and for the health-care systems they are likely to enter. Type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, hypertension, various kinds of cancers—including colorectal and endometrial—gallstones, and osteoarthritis are just some of the conditions that have been linked to excess weight....It has been estimated that the extra pounds carried by Americans add ninety billion dollars a year to the country’s medical spending. No credible estimates exist for global costs, but, Delpeuch and his co-authors write, "Obesity is inescapably confirming itself as one of the biggest drains" on national health-care budgets.

With the costs of health care on pretty much everyone's mind these days, this is sobering news, indeed.

And on that note, have a great weekend!  (Sorry).

Andrew

Undeniably, the fat—the authors of "The Reader" are adamant advocates for the "f" word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty....teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children, and...three out of five of the heaviest kids have been teased at school. The same people who are repelled by racist or misogynistic humor seem to feel that it is perfectly acceptable to make fat jokes.