Too much of a good thing — say, affluence — may not be that good after all.
Sit on a park bench at Dupont Circle in downtown Washington on a sunny day, around lunchtime, as I found myself doing last week, and watch the crowds ambling along. Your assessment would be that two-thirds of them are overweight, with about 30 percent decidedly obese.
That jives with figures released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which characterizes the phenomenon of Americans blithely putting on those pounds as an epidemic, a burgeoning health problem in all areas of the country.
From 1960 to 2000, according to the National Institute of Health, the percentage of obese American adults more than doubled, jumping about 8 percent in the 1990s alone. And in March, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that poor diet and inactivity will likely surpass tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death by mid-decade.
No wonder then that in January 2003, as President Bush prepared the nation to go to war in Iraq, the US Surgeon General, Richard Carmona, warned Americans that they faced a more dangerous threat than Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He said: “Let’s look at a threat that is very real, and already here: Obesity.”
Last Thursday, in a story that made it to the front page of the Washington Post, the Center for Medicare and Medical Services, after years of review, abandoned a long-standing policy that obesity is not a disease, and announced it is dropping language that had led the federal agency to routinely deny medical coverage for weight-loss therapy.
Who is to blame for why America has transformed itself into an obese nation?
The conventional wisdom is that the culprits are the fast-food chains, with McDonald’s in the vanguard. Last March McDonald’s announced plans to introduce healthier menus in many of its restaurants. But soon it transpired that its salads may contain more fat than its burgers.
The corporate giant then shifted the blame on to the customer. “The obesity debate is a very complex one and is widely recognized to include considerations not just of diet,” it said in a statement, “but also individual responsibility and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.”
The law appears to agree, for when last year a group of teenagers tried to take McDonald’s to court, claiming its food was addictive and had made them fat, the presiding judge quickly dismissed the case, ruling that “it’s not the place of the law to protect them against their own excesses.”
Yet that’s not what researchers at Princeton concluded recently. In their published study, they suggested that “fast food may be as addictive as heroin,” detailing an experiment where rats, fed a diet of high sugar and high-fat foods (your regular staple of burger, fries and soda), suffered withdrawal symptoms when they were denied it.
Then let’s not forget how the culture views thin and fat. Thin is in, fat is on trial. Thin is healthy, fat kills. Thin gets you a date, fat is that lonely guy sitting by himself at the French restaurant, sentenced to solitary confinement inside his skin. Thin is chic, fat clings to you like a bad smell, keeping people at a distance. And never mind that fat people retort, albeit defensively, that fat is happy, thin is neurotic.
With the release last week of the report by the Center for Medicare and Medical Services identifying obesity as a “disease,” the nation’s leading health problem, the skinny on fat is out: America is eating itself to death.
That view is pathetic, Rick Berman, executive director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, told the Washington Post last Friday. “This is truly a dumbing-down of the term ‘disease’,” he said. “This is the only disease that I’m familiar with that you can treat by regularly taking long walks and keeping your mouth shut.”
America ns seem to agree. Why bother with broadening waists, they are effectively saying as they continue to stand in line at McDonald’s and other greasy-spoon establishments, when we have more pressing problems to deal with, say, thinning hair.
And, yes, what was I doing on a park bench at Dupont Circle on that sunny day last week?
It was my lunch break.
And here’s the thing, those darn chicken wings and French fries, washed down with a raspberry milkshake, tasted mighty good, man.
