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Americans are wanted to be fat.
We are wanted to be fat by those who produce and market the foods that render us obese and diseased.
We are also wanted to be fat by those who sell us all the merchandise of weight loss-and whose profit more from our failures than our successes.
Most of all, we are wanted to be fat by a corporate-manufactured mass/trash culture and a governing imperium that prefers us passive, indolent, torpid and dumb.
And they get away with wanting us to be fat because of the many of us, fat or not, who refuse to understand that America's obesity epidemic is neither purely a matter of individual responsibility nor anything to be "solved" by "Fat Liberation" movements or PC pseudo-tolerance. Our fatness is, rather, both a symptom and a cause of America's ongoing and accelerating decline as a civilization. But it is a symptom and a cause we can do something about-provided we face the issue as citizens.
There is no nice way to say much of what I'm going to say. So let me begin with an affirmation of civility. We engage in a monstrous, hugely self-destructive delusion when they (we) pout that "hating fat people is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices." And facing this is not about hate. It's about refusing to tolerate a national gluttony that neither we nor the planet can any longer afford. It's about the future of us all.
So how bad is the problem?
Bemoaning our national obesity is a national obsession, a splendid exercise in non-binding self-criticism. Hardly a day goes by without something on the subject appearing somewhere. So only a few points need to be made in this regard.
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), 66% of Americans over 20 are overweight; 30% of Americans over 20 are obese. Between 1960 and 2004, overweight Americans went from 44.8% of the population to 66% and obese Americans went from 13.3% to 32.1% of the population. Most of this increase occurred after 1980. These figures are derived from a formula known as the Body Mass Index, or BMI. Because the BMI is based on weight and height, it does not always accurately measure the fitness of athletic people, who tend to be more heavily muscled and have denser bones. Nevertheless, the BMI is also generous and most of us are simply not athletic, or even active.
Fat costs. In 1995, the direct and indirect costs, which have been adjusted to 2001 dollars to account for inflation, were $61 billion in direct costs and $56 billion in indirect costs; since fatness and obesity are more common in 2008 than they were in 1995, these costs are going to be far higher now. The Department of Health and Human Services defines the costs in the following manner: "Direct health care costs refer to preventive, diagnostic, and treatment services such as physician visits, medications, and hospital and nursing home care. Indirect costs are the value of wages lost by people unable to work because of illness or disability, as well as the value of future earnings lost by premature death." (All preceding figures may be found at http://win.niddk.nih.gov/statistics/#preval, accessed 28 July 2008.)
So, given that two thirds of us are overweight-and almost all of us because we are fat, not because we are muscular-regarding fat people as some sort of oppressed minority is nonsense. Hating fat people is not the last acceptable form of discrimination in America. (It's still OK to hate people for their professions: Ask any lawyer or journalist.) Yet every time the New York Times runs an article on America's increasing problem of the girth, you can read a pandemic of reader comments claiming that it's all a matter in the eyes and minds of the beholders: irate rantings that appear with such frequency and regularity that one might conclude that these people are reimbursed by the fat or the fat treatment industries.
Yes, most of us bear at least some responsibility for our condition and its effects. The first aspect of this responsibility is the fact that the natural antidote to obesity is well-known. If we exercise and eat moderate portions of nutritious foods in order to balance energy intake with energy output, the overwhelming majority of us will not get genuinely fat. It really is quite as simple as that, even though we are mammals who evolved to store fat. Until the invention and common use of canning, packaging and refrigeration, around a century ago, fat
