A series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.
According to the first National Health study, which was done in the early nineteensixties, 24.3 percent of American adults were overweight. By the time of the second survey in the early 1970s, the proportion of overweight adults had increased by three-quarters of a percent, and, by the third survey in the late 1970s, it had edged up to 25.4 percent.
During the 1980s, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 percent of adults now qualified as overweight. In 1994, published findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that in just ten years, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. "If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic," another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.
During the next decade, Americans kept right on gaining. Men are now on average 17 pounds heavier than they were in the late 1970s, and for women that figure is even higher: 19 pounds. the proportion of overweight children, age 6 to 11, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age 12 to 19, has more than tripled.
Something big must have changed in America to cause so many people to gain so much weight so quickly. But what, exactly, is unclear--a mystery batter-dipped in enigma.
In America today, 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.
Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements: 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."
Give us a lot and we'll eat a lot
Thanks to jumbo-sized popcorn & hamburgers, along with "supersized" soft drinks, the elasticity of America's appetite continues to be stretched.
Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in the past few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a bargain. Between 1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils declined by sixteen percent. During the same period, the real cost of soft drinks dropped by more than twenty percent. Today, soft drinks account for about seven percent of all the calories ingested in the U.S., making them "the number one food consumed in the American diet." If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.
Before McDonald's discovered the power of re-portioning, it offered just a small bag of French fries, which contained two hundred calories. Today, a small order of fries has two hundred and thirty calories, and a large order five hundred. Similarly, a McDonald's soda used to be eight ounces. Today, a small soda is sixteen ounces (a hundred and fifty calories), and a large soda is thirty-two ounces (300 calories). Perhaps, owing to the influence of the fast food culture, up-sizing has by now spread to all sorts of other venues.
According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month. No wonder, some bagel bakers are offering mini-sized bagel packaging today for enlightened grocery shoppers who are now in the know of the dangers of supersizing.
Collecting the maximum number of calories with the amount of effort is, after all, the dream of every creature. But, as anyone who has ever gone on a diet knows, weight that was easy to gain is hard to lose.
Whether anything can be done to stem the global tide of obesity is, at this point, an open question.
Source: THE NEW YORKER, July 20, 2009
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