Fat Land - How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

Written by Greg Critser (Geration RX) in 2003, Fat Land is certainly amongst the top of my recommended reading list. Unlike Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, Critser shines light on the obesity pandemic in a very palpable way that any reader can easily understand. In spite of the fact that this book is six years old - the truths within ring bells that cast a sounding alarm into the future of every American.

Urbanization drove the long-term forces behind the farm problems we began facing during the Nixon era. Once created as a cheaper alternative to sugar, the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup is now used in many products that normally don't even contain sugar - such as rolls and biscuits because it makes the products look "more natural" - as if they have just been browned in the oven. Fructose - as produced by modern food processors and used by the American consumer - is about the furthest thing from natural that one can imagine, let alone eat. Fructose, unlike sucrose or dextrose, takes a decidedly different route into the human metabolism. Where the latter would go through a complex breakdown process before arriving in the human liver, the former, bypassed that breakdown and arrived almost completely intact in the liver...metabolic shunting. With all of the mutated food products and bi-products on the market shelves, we are beginning to witness accelerated evolution. For example, obesity is a main cause of soaring rates of early puberty among girls as young as nine years old.

Considering these facts, it's as if becoming obese has become a NORMAL response to the American environment.

Also, the Politically Correct "Me Generation" played nicely into the current shape of our current social norm. In the 90's, weight gain was becoming accepted as people began practicing you're okay, I'm okay. Through the late 80's, early 90'sthe Dietary Guidelines Committee continuously loosened its recommendations on weight. In 1980, the message for American's was to "maintain an ideal weight" based on a very clear weight by height chart. By 1985, the message drifted to "maintain a desirable weight" and by the 90s the message became, "it's okay to gain significant weight as one ages."

The problem with this is of course, if you ask less of people you will always get less from people and a culture that condones obesity, whether consciously or unconsciously, undermines any attempts to convince people to pare down.

This philosophy of thought invaded just about every institution imaginable. As we moved through the "politically correct age" even the American church became like therapy. It was suddenly all about love and tolerance and acceptance, not about individual discipline. There is, of course, a societal cost to religion's abandonment of the little sins. Religion was at one time a maker of boundaries. Religious beliefs generate the development of moral communities, which in turn, serve to guide and constrain the action of individuals.

American's became so obsessed with self-esteem issues and tiptoeing around the stigmatization that goes with being overweight that they ignored the most basic truism about fat and stigmatization: The best way to prevent it is to avoid becoming obese in the first place. It should come to no surprise that obesity is largely an issue of self control.

Aside from these factors, Critser also sights technology's role in the obesity problem in America because as technology expanded to make life easier for people, the modern lifestyle led to a sever decrease in physical activity. American's worked more hours, spending more time commuting, and increasingly working jobs that were not "sweat friendly." The new American worker toiled not in a factory, but rather in the rising field of professional services. People became so over developed that they became underdeveloped. Convenience became king and by 1996 Americans were spending more than 40% of every food dollar on meals obtained away from home.

TV viewing and video gaming merged parent and child into one seamless inactivity bubble - a bubble filled with billion-dollar cues to eat, even when one was not hungry. Take, for example, that by 1993, 41% of all Saturday morning kid show ads were for high fat foods. What was once a time for children to get a few laughs on a non-school day had become a time to indoctrinate them on the benefits of grease, salt, and ever increasing amounts of sugar. Soon there was so much money for youth advertising that entire new ad agencies were formed simply to handle the "Saturday A.M. buy."

Then of course, Critser discusses the role of the school sytem in all of this. In schools, the cafeterias serve a menu laced with excess fats and sugars and for the most part, the food service staff has no idea how to make fresh fruits and produce palatable to kids. After school care is bereft of any meaningful physical activity. Teachers in the districts have few if any classroom materials for teaching TRUE sound nutrition and exercise practices.

The most tense battleground is that of soft drink pouring contracts, in which schools are paid large sums of cash in exchange for an agreement to sell only one kind of soda (usually Pepsi or Coke). Contracts that can run in the SEVEN FIGURE range - a great deal of money for any chronically hard-strapped school system. Nationally, there are thousands of such deals in place. They have become the norm in most large school districts, with principals, parents, and administrators justifying the consequent omnipresence of soda (and soda ads) on campus as a way to pay for athletic uniforms and a variety of after-school programs.

Consider that the soft drink industry alone spends upward of $600 million annually to promote its trash compared with the National Cancer Institute's paltry $1 Million budget for promoting fruit and vegetable consumption. Not much of a fighting chance there.

Critser also includes many revealing studies throughout Fat Land. Here's a list of the facts I found most interesting:

• There is a direct correlation between portion size and the amount of food a person eats in one sitting.

• There is a direct correlation between the spike in new food products on the market and obesity.

• There is a direct correlation between the amount of television viewing and the amount of high-calorie snacking.
  

• The largest concentrations of the obese, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, reside in the poorest sectors of the nation.

• The child of obese parents is at increased risk of becoming obese.
  

• The calories from just one soft drink a day give a child a 60% greater chance of becoming obese.

• Simple, consistent changes in diet and activity levels can dramatically alter an individual's metabolic destiny.

The main thesis of Mr. Critser's Fat Land seems to be that the economic and personal health costs of the overweight and obese are enormous and compromise the health of the entire United States. More Americans are obese than smoke, use illegal drugs, or suffer from ailments unrelated to obesity. That being said, MORE has to be done to combat the issue of obesity, particularly in the growing numbers of obese children.

I recommend purchasing this book (it's 1 cent on amazon) if not reading the FREE PDF VERSION HERE. A book like this should be in every family library and (along with Fast Food Nation) the messages within shared with the younger generations.

Are You an Addict?

David Gutierrez, staff writer for Natural News wrote a gripping piece on how Junk food-addicted rats chose to starve themselves rather than eat healthy food which puts scientific study behind what many of us already suspected - that junk food is essentially a highly addictive drug .

Here is a copy of the article verbatim:

(NaturalNews) A diet including unlimited amounts of junk food can cause rats to become so addicted to the unhealthy diet that they will starve themselves rather than go back to eating healthy food, researchers have discovered.

In a series of studies conducted over the course of three years and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Scripps Florida scientists Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny have shown that rats' response to unlimited junk food closely parallels well-known patterns of drug addiction -- even down to the changes in brain chemistry.

"What we have are these core features of addiction, and these animals are hitting each one of these features," Kenny said.

In their first study, the researchers fed rats on either a balanced diet or on the same diet plus unlimited access to junk foods purchased at a local supermarket, including processed meats and cakes. Within a short time period, the rats on the junk food diet began to eat compulsively and quickly became overweight.

"They're taking in twice the amount of calories as the control rats," Kenny said.

The researchers hypothesized that the rats were eating compulsively because, like drug addicts, they had become desensitized to smaller amounts and needed more and more for the same rush of pleasure.

Many recreational drugs work by directly stimulating the brain's pleasure centers, particularly the dopamine receptor known as D2. Overstimulation of this receptor causes the body to start producing less dopamine, leading the addict to compensate by taking more of the drug.

Since dopamine can also be released by pleasurable activities such as food or sex, Kenny and Johnson speculated that food addiction could develop in the same way. To test whether the rats had, in fact, become habituated to dopamine, the researchers took the rats from the first experiment and hooked their brains up to a device that would directly stimulate their D2 receptors when they ran on a wheel.

Rats eating a junk food diet ran on the wheel significantly longer than rats fed a normal diet, suggesting that their receptors had indeed become desensitized. This "profound" desensitization occurred after just five days on a junk food diet.

"They're not experiencing rewards the way they should," Kenny said. "When you experience that, one way of feeling better is to go back to the junk food."

"They lose control. This is the hallmark of addiction."

In another test of their addiction hypothesis, the researchers used a virus to block the D2 receptors in healthy rats. All those rats soon became compulsive eaters.

"This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings," Johnson said.

Having established that the junk food rats had become addicted, Johnson and Kenny wanted to know how far this addiction would push them. So they took both junk-food addicted rats and rats that had not previously been exposed to such food, and exposed them to electrical shocks whenever they ate junk. Rats that had just been introduced to junk food quickly stopped eating it, while the addicted rats ignored the discomfort and kept eating.

Perhaps the most shocking finding came when the researchers took away the addicted rats' access to junk food and started feeding them only healthy rat chow again -- the same diets the rats had eaten as pups. When junk food was no longer available, the rats simply refused to eat for two weeks.

"They actually voluntarily starved themselves," Kenny said.

"It's almost as if you break these things, it's very, very hard to go back to the way things were before. Their dietary preferences are dramatically shifted."

The research strongly suggests that many modern humans also suffer from junk food addictions. Kenny notes, however, that unlike the rats, all humans with access to junk food do not become obese. He attributes this difference to the influence of health knowledge and social pressure in moderating people's natural eating habits.

"The rats don't suffer from the same social pressures that we do," he said.

The idea of junk food addiction is not a new one, and the dopamine-junk food connection was actually put forward by former FDA Commissioner David Kessler in his best-selling book, The End of Overeating.

"Certainly, we see this addictive pattern in humans," nutritionist Sandy Livingston said. "They know they shouldn't overeat, but they do it anyway."

Livingston expressed hope that better knowledge about the biochemical side of food addiction might result in lessened guilt and judgment surrounding obesity.

"A lot of people blame themselves -- 'Why don't I have any willpower?'" she said.

"Food can be highly addictive," said author and nutritional supplement producer Jordan Rubin. "When people describe overeating and weight loss as a battle, this is why."

He called for more research into which individual components of junk food, such as MSG, might be behind its addictive effects.

Obesity researcher Ralph DiLeone of Yale University noted that more research is needed into the long-term effects of such addiction, even if an animal later switches its diet and loses weight.

"They might be a normal weight, but how they respond to food in the future may be permanently altered," he said.

Suggesting yet another area for future research, Kenny has expressed hope that better biochemical understanding of food addiction might someday enable the development of a drug or vaccine as a treatment for compulsive eating.

Johnson and Kenny's research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Bank of America and The Margaret Q. Landenberger Research Foundation.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/health
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/titleJunk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts

It's Okay to Be Fat and Gross - It's What's On the Inside (of TV Guide) That Matters

What are ad execs to do about emerica's ever growing population of fat lazy slobs? Lobby the food industry to do better? Create awareness on the pandemic of obesity in children and how it directly relates to fast-food and "sports-drinks"?

Nah...

Instead they start television programs that make it seem okay to be morbidly obese. This way kids can relate to other porkers on the screen and everyone can feel okay about eating a quarter pounder and watching some television. They can team up with other self-esteem shaping enterprises like seventeen magazine and confuse teens even more as they fill out surveys and quizzes that lead to the conclusion that they should "make peace" with varicose veins and stretch marks at age 14.

I'm sorry but in my opinion the only thing worse than anorexic models flashed in your face 24/7 to make you feel self-conscious is a show about obese teenagers on television with the message that it's okay to be unhealthy.

This is NOT okay! Drop a line to ABC Family and tell them that seeing some tub o'lard on television teaching life-lessons to your teenager may as well be horseback riding tips from the Marlboro Man.

Either we can start taking some action for ourselves, or we can wait until the same forces that started this mess come knocking with their own solution....