Hog Nation: US Wallows in Obesity

Last October, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that obesity has become an epidemic - claiming 250,000 to 374,000 lives each year and making cellulite the second-leading killer of Americans after nicotine. Obesity (defined as being 30 percent over one's ideal weight) afflicts more than 60 million Americans.

The average American's weight increased 50 percent from 1991-1998. The fastest-to-the-fat state was Georgia, where average weights ballooned 101 percent during this seven-year period.

CDC Director Jeffrey P. Koplan notes that "the American lifestyle of convenience and inactivity has had a devastating toll on every segment of society, particularly on children." One-third of US adults are obese and at risk of heart disease and diabetes. Sixty percent of overweight children suffer from related medical conditions.

According to Koplan, the problem is fundamentally environmental. The only way to keep Americans from dying in their own fat is to redesign US cities and redesign the consumer/convenience economy. "Workplaces must offer healthy food choices in their cafeteria," Koplan advised, and he called on urban policymakers to "provide more sidewalks, bike paths and other alternatives to cars."

The Fat Epidemic of the 1990s was fueled by "the growth of the fast-food industry [and] the increased numbers and marketing of snack foods." One-third of all the vegetables consumed by US children is french fries and potato chips.

As San Francisco Business Times columnist Janet Colwell observes, "if a high-cholesterol, fat-laden diet with no redeeming nutritional value is an express ticket to the grave, McDonald's may one day find itself explaining its marketing strategy to the courts and an increasingly hostile public." In the meantime, Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, is calling for the institution of a "Twinkie tax" on high-calorie foods to price them out of the reach of children.

Globalization is spreading the American Lifestyle abroad. In 1997, the World Health Organization warned that a "pandemic" of obesity was sweeping across the planet. Three years ago, the WHO warned that "obesity's impact is so diverse and extreme that it should now be regarded as one of the greatest neglected public health problems of our time." WHO warned that "sedentary lifestyles and high-fat, energy-dense diets" had unleashed "an escalating epidemic of ... obesity [that threatens] ... to overwhelm countries' medical services."

WHO estimates that more than 300 million adults will have weight-related type 2 diabetes by 2025. Unless these people lose weight, they will be at increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, nerve and eye damage.

Many US newspapers chose to draw attention away from Koplan's critique of the consumerist lifestyle by focusing on new diet drugs and the fat-reducing hormone leptin. (This same status-quo strategy "protects" children's teeth by increasing their fluoride intake instead of reducing sugar consumption.)

There is one "cure" for rampant obesity, and it is likely to expand the fortunes of one of the world's oldest professions. As the Dallas Morning News reported last October: "Sales of oversized coffins at the nation's largest casket companies are up 20 percent in the last five years; the biggest jump was last year."