Social Assigment

Not long ago, a group of doctors, nurses, andmedical technicians wheeled a young man into the intensive care unit of Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, hooked him to a ganglia of life- support systems—pulse and respiration monitors, a breathing apparatus, and an IV line—then stood back and collectively stared. I was there visiting an ailing relative, and I stared, too.

Here, in the ghastly white light of modern American medicine, writhed a real-life epidemio- logical specter: a 500-pound twenty-two-year-old. The man, whom I’ll call Carl, was propped up at a 45-degree angle, the better to be fed air through a tube, and lay there nude, save for a small patch of blood-spotted gauze stuck to his lower abdomen, where surgeons had just labored to save his life. His eyes darted about in abject fear. “Second time in three months,” his mother blurted out to me as she stood watching in horror. “He had two stomach sta- plings, and they both came apart. Oh my God, my boy …” Her boy was suffocating in his own fat.

I was struck not just by the spectacle but by the truth of the mother’s comment. This was a boy— one buried in years of bad health, relative poverty, a sedentary lifestyle, and a high-fat diet, to be sure, but a boy nonetheless. Yet how surprised should I have been? That obesity, particularly among the young and the poor, is spinning out of control is hardly a secret. It is, in face, something that most Americans can agree upon. Along with depression, heart disease, and cancer, obesity is yet another chew in our daily rumination about health and fit- ness, morbidity and mortality. Still, even in dot-com America, where statistics fly like arrows, the num- bers are astonishing. Consider:

• Today, one fifth of all Americans are obese, meaning that they have a body mass index, or BMI, of more than 30. (BMI is a univer- sally recognized cross-measure of weight for

height and stature.) The epidemiological fig- ures on chronic corpulence are so unequivo- cal that even the normally reticent dean of American obesity studies, the University of Colorado’s James O. Hill, says that if obesi- ty is left unchecked almost all Americans will be overweight within a few generations. “Becoming obese,” he told the Arizona Republic, “is a normal response to the American environment.”

• Children are most at risk. At least 25 percent of all Americans now under age nineteen are overweight or obese. In 1998, Dr. David Satcher, the new U.S. surgeon general, was moved to declare childhood obesity to be epidemic. “Today,” he told a group of feder- al bureaucrats and policymakers, “we see a nation of young people seriously at risk of starting out obese and dooming themselves to the difficult task of overcoming a tough illness.”

• Even among the most careful researchers these days, “epidemic” is the term of choice when it comes to talk of fat, particularly fat children. As William Dietz, the director of nutrition at the Centers for Disease Control, said last year, “This is an epidemic in the U.S. the likes of which we have not had before in chronic disease.” The cost to the general public health budget by 2020 will run into the hundreds of billions, making HIV look, economically, like a bad case of the flu.

Yet standing that day in the intensive care unit, among the beepers and buzzers and pumps, epidem- ic was the last thing on my mind. Instead I felt heartbreak, revulsion, fear, sadness—and then curiosity: Where did this boy come from? Who and what had made him? How is it that we Americans,

1 “Let Them Eat Fat: The Heavy Truths about American Obesity,” by Greg Critser, reprinted from the March 2000 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Copyright © 2000 by Harper’s Magazine. Reprinted by Permission.

2 Let Them Eat Fat perhaps the most health-conscious of any people in the history of the world, and certainly the richest, have come to preside over the deadly fattening of our youth? The beginning of an answer came one day last fall, in the same week that the Spanish lan- guage newspaper La Opinión ran a story headlined “Diabetes epidemia en latinos,” when I attended the opening of the newest Krispy Kreme doughnut store in Los Angeles. It was, as they say in marketing cir- cles, a “resonant” event, replete with around-the- block lines, celebrity news anchors, and stern cops directing traffic. The store, located in the heart of the San Fernando Valleys burgeoning Latino popu- lation, pulsed with excitement. In one corner stood the new stores manager, a young Anglo fellow, accompanied by a Krispy Kreme publicity director. Why had Krispy Kreme decided to locate here? I asked.

“See,” the manager said, brushing a crumb of choco-glaze from his fingers, “the idea is simple— accessible but not convenient. The idea is to make the store accessible—easy to get into and out of from the street—but just a tad away from the—eh, mainstream so as to make sure that the customers are presold and very intent before they get here,” he said, betraying no doubts about the company’s mar- keting formula. “We want them intent to get at least a dozen before they even think of coming in.”

But why this slightly non-mainstream place? “Because it’s obvious …” He gestured to the

stout Mayan doñas queuing around the building. “We’re looking for all the bigger families.”

Bigger in size? “Yeah.” His eyes rolled, like little glazed

crullers. “Bigger in size.” Of course, fast-food and national restaurant

chains like Krispy Kreme that serve it have long been the object of criticism by nutritionists and dietitians. Despite the attention, however, fast food companies, most of them publicly owned and sprin- kled into the stock portfolios of many striving Americans (including mine and perhaps yours), have grown more aggressive in their targeting of poor inner city communities. One of every four hamburgers sold by the good folks at McDonald’s, for example, is now purchased by inner-city con- sumers who, disproportionately, are young black men.

In fact, it was the poor, and their increasing need for cheap meals consumed outside the home, that fueled the development of what may well be the most important fast food innovation of the past twenty years, the sales gimmick known as “super- sizing.” At my local McDonald’s, located in a lower-middle-income area of Pasadena, California, the supersize bacchanal goes into high gear at about five P.M., when the various urban caballeros, dry- walleros, and jardineros get off work and head for a quick bite. Mixed in is a sizable element of young black kids traveling between school and home, their economic status apparent by the fact that they’ve walked instead of driven. Customers are cheerfully encouraged to “supersize your meal!” by signs say- ing, “If we don’t recommend a supersize, the super- size is free!” For an extra seventy-nine cents, a kid ordering a cheeseburger, small fries, and a small Coke will get said cheeseburger plus a supersize Coke (42 fluid ounces versus 16, with free refills) and a supersize order of french fries (more than double the weight of a regular order). Suffice it to say that consumption of said meals is fast and, in almost every instance I observed, very complete.

But what, metabolically speaking, has taken place? The total caloric content of the meal has been jacked up from 680 calories to more than 1,340 calories. According to the very generous U.S. dietary guidelines, 1,340 calories represent more than half of a teenager’s recommended daily caloric consumption, and the added calories themselves are protein-poor but fat- and carbohydrate-rich. Completing this jumbo dietetic horror is the fact that the easy availability of such huge meals arrives in the same years in which physical activity among teenage boys and girls drops by about half.

Now consider the endocrine warfare that fol- lows. The constant bombing of the pancreas by such a huge hit of sugars and fats can eventually wear out the organ’s insulin-producing “islets,” leading to diabetes and its inevitable dirge of woes: kidney, eye, and nerve damage; increased risk of heart dis- ease; even stroke. The resulting sugar-induced hyperglycemia in many of the obese wreaks its own havoc in the form of glucose toxicity, further debil- itating nerve endings and arterial walls. For the obese and soon to be obese, it is no overstatement to say that after supersized teen years the pancreas may never be the same. Some 16 million Americans suffer from Type 2 diabetes, a third of them unaware of their condition. Today’s giggly teen burp may well be tomorrow’s aching neuropathic limb.

Let Them Eat Fat 3 Diabetes, by the way, is just the beginning of

what’s possible. If childhood obesity truly is “an epidemic in the U.S. the likes of which we have not had before in chronic disease,” then places like McDonald’s and Winchell’s Donut stores, with their endless racks of glazed and creamy goodies, are the San Francisco bathhouses of said epidemic, the places where the high-risk population indulges in high-risk behavior. Although open around the clock, the Winchell’s near my house doesn’t get rolling until seven in the morning, the Spanish-language talk shows frothing in the background while an ambulance light whirls atop the Coke dispenser. Inside, Mami placates Miguelito with a giant apple fritter. Papi tells a joke and pours ounce upon ounce of sugar and cream into his 20-ounce coffee. Viewed through the lens of obesity, as I am inclined to do, the scene is not so feliz. The obesity rate for Mexican-American children is shocking. Between the ages of five and eleven, the rate for girls is 27 percent; for boys, 23 percent. By fourth grade the rate for girls peaks at 32 percent, while boys top out at 43 percent. Not surprisingly, obesity-related dis- orders are everywhere on display at Winchell’s, right before my eyes—including fat kids who limp, which can be a symptom of Blount’s disease (a deformity of the tibia) or a sign of slipped capital femoral epiphysis (an orthopedic abnormality brought about by weight-induced dislocation of the femur bone). Both conditions are progressive, often requiring surgery.

The chubby boy nodding in the corner, waiting for his Papi to finish his café, is likely suffering from some form of sleep apnea: a recent study of forty-one children with severe obesity revealed that a third had the condition and that another third pre- sented with clinically abnormal sleep patterns. Another recent study indicated that “obese children with obstructive sleep apnea demonstrate clinically significant decrements in learning and memory function.” And the lovely but very chubby little girl tending to her schoolbooks? Chances are she will begin puberty before the age of ten, launching her into a lifetime of endocrine bizarreness that not only will be costly to treat but will be emotionally devas- tating as well. Research also suggests that weight gain can lead to the development of pseudotumor cerebri, a brain tumor most common in females. A recent review of 57 patients with the tumor revealed that 90 percent were obese. This little girl’s chances of developing other neurological illnesses are pro- found as well. And she may already have gallstones: obesity accounts for up to 33 percent of all gall-

stones observed in children. She is ten times more likely than her non-obese peers to develop high blood pressure, and she is increasingly likely to con- tract Type 2 diabetes, obesity being that disease’s number one risk factor.

Of course, if she is really lucky, that little girl could just be having a choco-sprinkles doughnut on her way to school.

What about poor rural whites? Studying chil- dren in an elementary school in a low-income town in eastern Kentucky, the anthropologist Deborah Crooks was astonished to find stunting and obesity not just present but prevalent. Among her subjects, 13 percent of girls exhibited notable stunting 33 percent of all kids were significantly overweight and 13 percent of the children were obese—21 per- cent of boys and 9 percent of girls. A sensitive, ele- gant writer, Crooks drew from her work three important conclusions: One, that poor kids in the United States often face the same evolutionary nutritional pressures as those in newly industrializ- ing nations, where traditional diets are replaced by high-fat diets and where labor-saving technology reduces physical activity. Second, Crooks found that “height and weight are cumulative measures of growth … reflecting a sum total of environmental experience over time.” Last, and perhaps most important, Crooks concluded that while stunting can be partially explained by individual household conditions—income, illness, education, and marital status—obesity “may he more of a community- related phenomenon.” Here the economic infra- structure—safe playgrounds, access to high-quality, low-cost food, and transportation to play areas— was the key determinant of physical-activity levels.

Awareness of these national patterns of destruction, of course, is a key reason why Eli Lilly &. Co., the $75 billion pharmaceutical company is now building the largest factory dedicated to the production of a single drug in industry history. That drug is insulin. Lilly’s sales of insulin products totaled $357 million in the third quarter of 1999, a 24 percent increase over the previous third quarter. Almost every leading pharmaceutical conglomerate has like-minded ventures under way, with special emphasis on pill-form treatments for non-insulin- dependent forms of the disease. Pharmaceutical companies that are not seeking to capture some por- tion of the burgeoning market are bordering on fidu- ciary mismanagement. Said James Kappel of Eli Lilly, “You’ve got to be in diabetes.”

4 Let Them Eat Fat Wandering home from my outing, the wondrous smells of frying foods wafting in the air, I wondered why, given affluent America’s outright fetishism about diet and health, those whose business it is to care—the media, the academy, public-health work- ers, and the government—do almost nothing. The answer, I suggest, is that in almost every public- health arena, the need to address obesity as a class issue—one that transcends the inevitable divisive- ness of race and gender—has been blunted by bad logic, vested interests, academic cant, and ideologi- cal chauvinism.

Consider a story last year in the New York Times detailing the rise in delivery-room mortality among young African-American mothers. The increases were attributed to a number of factors— diabetes, hypertension, drug and alcohol abuse— but the primary factor of obesity, which can foster both diabetes and hypertension, was mentioned only in passing. Moreover, efforts to understand and publicize the socioeconomic factors of the deaths have been thwarted. When Dr. Janet Mitchell, a New York obstetrician charged with reviewing sev- eral recent maternal mortality studies, insisted that socioeconomics were the issue in understanding the “racial gap” in maternal mortality she was unable to get government funding for the work. “We need to back away from the medical causes,” she told the Times, clearly exasperated, “and begin to take a much more ethnographic, anthropological approach to this tragic outcome.”

In another example, a 1995 University of Arizona study reported that young black girls, who are more inclined toward obesity than white girls, were also far less likely to hold “bad body images” about themselves. The slew of news articles and TV reports that followed were nothing short of jubilant, proclaiming the “good news.” As one commentator I watched late one evening announced, “Here is one group of girls who couldn’t care less about looking like Kate Moss!” Yet no one mentioned the long- term effects of unchecked weight gain. Apparently, when it comes to poor black girls the media would rather that they risk diabetes than try to look like models.

“That’s the big conundrum, as they always say,” Richard MacKenzie, a physician who treats overweight and obese girls in downtown L.A., told me recently “No one wants to overemphasize the problems of being fat to these girls, for fear of cre- ating body-image problems that might lead to

anorexia and bulimia.” Speaking anecdotally he said that “the problem is that for every one affluent white anorexic you create by ‘overemphasizing’ obesity, you foster ten obese poor girls by down- playing the severity of the issue.” Judith Stern, a professor of nutrition and internal medicine at UC Davis, is more blunt. “The number of kids with eat- ing disorders is positively dwarfed by the number with obesity. It sidesteps the whole class issue. We’ve got to stop that and get on with the real prob- lem.”

Moreover, such sidestepping denies poor minority girls a principal, if sometimes unpleasant, psychological incentive to lose weight: that of social stigma. Only recently has the academy come to grapple with this. Writing in a recent issue of the International Journal of Obesity, the scholar Susan Averett looked at the hard numbers: 44 percent of African-American women weigh more than 120 percent of their recommended body weight yet are less likely than whites to perceive themselves as overweight.1 Anglo women, poor and otherwise, registered higher anxiety about fatness and experi- enced far fewer cases of chronic obesity. “Social stigma may serve to control obesity among white women,” Averett reluctantly concluded. “If so, physical and emotional effects of greater pressure to be thin must be weighed against reduced health risks associated with overweight and obesity.” In other words, maybe a few more black Kate Mosses might not be such a bad thing.

While the so-called fat acceptance movement, a very vocal minority of super-obese female activists, has certainly played a role in the tendency to deny the need to promote healthy thinness, the real culprits have been those with true cultural power, those in the academy and the publishing industry who have the ability to shape public opin- ion. Behind much of their reluctance to face facts is the lingering influence of the 1978 bestseller, Fat Is a Feminist Issue, in which Susie Orbach presented a nuanced, passionate look at female compulsive eating and its roots in patriarchal culture. But although Orbach’s observations were keen, her con- clusions were often wishful, narcissistic, and some- times just wrong. ‘Fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue,” Orbach wrote. ‘Fat is not about self-control or lack of will power.… It is a response to the inequality of the sexes.”

Perhaps so, if one is a feminist, and if one is struggling with an eating disorder, and if one is, for

Let Them Eat Fat 5 the most part, affluent, well-educated, and political- ly aware. But obesity itself is preeminently an issue of class, not of ethnicity, and certainly not of gender. True, the disease may be refracted through its con- centrations in various demographic subgroupings— in Native Americans, in Latinos, in African Americans, and even in some Pacific Island Americans—but in study after study, the key adjec- tive is poor: poor African Americans, poor Latinos, poor whites, poor women, poor children, poor Latino children, etc. From the definitive Handbook of Obesity: “In heterogeneous and affluent societies like the United States, there is a strong inverse cor- relation of social class and obesity, particularly for females.” From Annals of Epidemiology: “In white girls … both TV viewing and obesity were strongly inversely associated with household income as well as with parental education.”

Yet class seems to be the last thing on the minds of some of our better social thinkers. Instead, the tendency of many in the academy is to fetishize or “postmodernize” the problem. Cornell University professor Richard Klein, for example, proposed in his 1996 book, Eat Fat, “Try this for six weeks: Eat fat.” (Klein’s mother did and almost died from sleep apnea, causing Klein to reverse himself in his epi- logue, advising readers: “Eat rice.”) The identity politics of fat, incidentally, can cut the other way. To the French, the childhood diet has long been under- stood as a serious medical issue directly affecting the future of the nation. The concern grew directly from late-nineteenth-century health issues in French cities and the countryside, where tuberculosis had winnowed the nation’s birth rate below that of the other European powers. To deal with the problem, a new science known as puériculture emerged to edu- cate young mothers about basic health and nutrition practices. Long before Americans and the British roused themselves from the torpor of Victorian chub, the French undertook research into proper dietary and weight controls for the entire birth-to- adolescence growth period. By the early 1900s, with birth rates (and birth weights) picking up, the puériculture movement turned its attention to child- hood obesity feeding times were to be strictly main- tained; random snacks were unhealthy for the child, regardless of how “natural” it felt for a mother to indulge her young. Kids were weighed once a week. All meals were to be supervised by an adult. As a result, portion control—perhaps the one thing that modern obesity experts can agree upon as a reason- able way to prevent the condition—very early became institutionalized in modern France. The

message that too much food is bad still resounds in French child rearing, and as a result France has a largely lean populace. What about the so-called Obesity Establishment, that web of researchers, clinicians, academics, and government health officials charged with finding ways to prevent the disease? Although there are many committed individuals in this group, one wonders just how independently minded they are. Among the sponsors for the 1997 annual conference of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, the premier medical think tank on the sub- ject, were the following: the Coca-Cola Company, Hershey Foods, Kraft Foods, and, never to be left out, Slim Fast Foods. Another sponsor was Knoll Pharmaceuticals, maker of the new diet drug Meridia. Of course, in a society where until recent- ly tobacco companies sponsored fitness pageants and Olympic games, sponsorship hardly denotes corruption in the most traditional sense. One would be hard-pressed to prove any kind of censorship, but such underwriting effectively defines the parame- ters of public discussion. Everybody winks or blinks at the proper moment, then goes on his or her way.

Once upon a time, however, the United States possessed visionary leadership in the realm of child- hood fitness. Founded in 1956, the President’s Council on Youth Fitness successfully laid down broad-based fitness goals for all youth and estab- lished a series of awards for those who excelled in the effort. The council spoke about obesity with a forthrightness that would be political suicide today, with such pointed slogans as “There’s no such thing as stylishly stout” and “Hey kid, if you see yourself in this picture, you need help.”

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, new trends converged to undercut the council’s powers of moral and cultural suasion. The ascen- dancy of cultural relativism led to a growing reluc- tance to be blunt about fatness, and, aided and abet- ted by the fashion industry’s focus on baggy, hip-hop-style clothes, it became possible to be “stylishly stout.” Fatness, as celebrated on rap videos, was now equated with wealth and power, with identity and agency, not with clogging the heart or being unable to reach ones toes. But fat inner-city black kids and the suburban kids copying them are even more disabled by their obesity. The only people who benefit from kids being “fat” are the ones running and owning the clothing, media,

6 Let Them Eat Fat food, and drug companies. In upscale corporate America, meanwhile, being fat is taboo, a surefire career-killer. If you can’t control your own con- tours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget or a staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: to the man, and the occasion- al woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat.

Related to the coolification of homeboyish fat—perhaps forcing its new status—is the simple fact that it’s hard for poor children to find opportu- nities to exercise. Despite our obsession with pro- fessional sports, many of today’s disadvantaged youth have fewer opportunities than ever to simply shoot baskets or kick a soccer ball. Various meas- ures to limit state spending and taxing, among them California’s debilitating Proposition 13, have gutted school-based physical-education classes. Currently, only one state, Illinois, requires daily physical edu- cation for all grades K-12, and only 19 percent of high school students nationwide are active for twen- ty minutes a day, five days a week, in physical edu- cation. Add to this the fact that, among the poor, tel- evision, the workingman’s baby sitter, is now viewed at least thirty-two hours a week. Participation in sports has always required an investment, but with the children of the affluent tucked away either in private schools or green sub- urbias, buying basketballs for the poor is not on the public agenda. Human nature and its lazy’ inclinations aside, what do America’s affluent get out of keeping the poor so fat? The reasons, I’d suggest, are many. An unre- constructed Marxist might invoke simple class war- fare, exploitation fought through stock ownership in giant fast-food firms. The affluent know that the stuff will kill them but need someone (else) to eat it so as to keep growing that retirement portfolio. A practitioner of vulgar social psychology might argue for “our” need for the “identifiable outsider.” An economist would say that in a society as overly competitive as our own, the affluent have found a

way to slow down the striving poor from inevitable nipping at their heels. A French semiotician might even say that with the poor the affluent have erect- ed their own walking and talking “empire of signs.” This last notion is perhaps not so far-fetched. For what do the fat, darker, exploited poor, with their unbridled primal appetites, have to offer us but a chance for we diet- and shape-conscious folk to live vicariously? Call it boundary envy. Or, rather, boundary-free envy And yet, by living outside their boundaries, the poor live within ours tat people do not threaten our way of life; their angers entombed in flesh, they are slowed, they are softened, they are fed.

Meanwhile, in the City of Fat Angels, we lounge through a slow-motion epidemic. Mami buys another apple fritter. Papi slams his second sugar and cream. Another young Carl supersizes and double supersizes, then super-sizes again. Waistlines surge. Any minute now, the belt will run out of holes.

Endnote 1. Certainly culture plays a role in the behavior

of any subpopulation. Among black women, for example, obesity rates persist despite increases in income. A recent study by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute concludes that obesity in black girls may be “a reflection of a differential social develop- ment in our society, wherein a certain lag period may need to elapse between an era when food availability is a concern to an era of affluence with no such concern.” Other observers might assert that black women find affirmation for being heavy from black men, or believe themselves to be “naturally” heav- ier. Such assertions do not change mortality statistics.