Death By Supermarket (34 page)

Americans joke and laugh off the fact that our factory-food diet is damaging our health. Everyone else is eating it, so it must be OK. Ha. Ha.
In fact, it’s socially acceptable to eat an unnatural, disease-causing diet. In fact, in his HBO comedy special, Bill Maher had his audience rolling in the aisle when he said, “In 1900, the average woman’s shoe size was four. In 1980, it was seven. Now it’s nine. We are evolving into a completely new species with webbed feet to support our massive girth.”
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The media plays a huge role in our acceptance of factory food, diets, and drugs. Today all bad news is delivered by bubbly newscasters. Terribly wrong nutritional advice is presented by these same trustworthy messengers. Many nutritional experts, fearing being pegged as fringy, kooky, or downers, soften their messages to the point of practically siding with the food, diet, and drug industries.

We’re the most highly evolved capitalistic, mercenary society to ever walk the face of the earth. So every detail, every molecule of copy on every factory-food package has been scrutinized, analyzed, test marketed, and reviewed to arrive at an image and message that is most likely to hook you into succumbing to your addiction. Madison Avenue refers to consumers as the lowest common denominator, and Madison Avenueites make it their business to know all the personas currently in vogue so they can best target our egos. If you want to be perceived as a cool, popular kid, sexy, brainy, a good parent, heman, caveman, manlyman, or master of the universe, there are products that will appeal to your sense of self.

Consumers are no longer targeted with quaint print ads and TV commercials. Susan Linn, Ed.D., associate director of the Media Center of Judge Baker Children’s Center, instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and author of
Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover Of Childhood
, said, “Comparing the marketing of today with the marketing of yesteryear is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb.”
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Companies use product licensing, promotions, and contests, co-branding (like Coca Cola Barbie), program-length commercials, advergraming (putting products into computer games) and kiosks, carts, and vending machines in schools. They infiltrate our minds subtly with product placements. Product placement
plays perfectly into our sense of community when it comes to consuming factory food, diets, and drugs.

TV executives have one goal: to get companies to buy commercial time during their programming. Companies have one goal, and that is to get you to spend money on their products. It’s part of the symbiotic relationship. David Chase, the creator of
The Sopranos
said, “The function of an hour drama is to reassure the American people that it’s OK to go out and buy stuff. It’s all about flattering the audience and making them feel as if all the authority figures have our best interests at heart.”
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Celebrity doctors contribute to our cavalier mentality about what we consume with books, pills, diet systems, TV shows, products, infomercials, and so on that make us feel all chummy about our obesity problem. Many people have the impression that M.D.s and Ph.D.s have all the answers and that is why they make such perfect spokespeople for the diet industry. Because doctors wield a lot of influence, some doctors are looking for ways to capitalize on their credentials beyond practicing medicine. For example, Dr. Agatston, author of
The South Beach Diet
, has developed factory-food products for Kraft. Dean Ornish, M.D., founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute and author of five bestselling books on the low fat diet, including
Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery
, is a paid consultant to the McDonald’s Corporation, PepsiCo, and ConAgra Foods. Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D., the “father of aerobics” and author of numerous books on the merits of exercise, beginning with
Aerobics
(1968), profits by allowing his name to accompany “health tips” on packages of FritoLay’s baked chips.
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Then there are doctors who are in the diet business to make money and who don’t care one bit about you or the quality of your life. As one bestselling diet doctor told me, “The more I charge, the more people want to see me.”

Over the past few decades, celebrities have gained such elevated status in our society that what they say is gold. And it doesn’t take much to
achieve celebrity status these days. Even those glossy-lipped, thin, beautiful, diet soda drinking girls are perceived as celebrities in our society. If they got on TV they must be, like, actresses or something. One of the top publicists in the country told me, “You can’t launch a book or product anymore without a celebrity endorsement. The morning TV shows won’t even talk to you unless you have a celebrity attached to your project. It doesn’t even have to be an actual star. It can be as insignificant as some celebrity’s hairdresser or ex-personal assistant. But it has to be someone who the public perceives as having celebrity status. If you’ve got a celebrity, you can sell anything to the public.” For many consumers, a celebrity or even a quasi-celebrity’s word is even more credible than a doctor’s.

The public has come to expect tantalizing real-people stories attached to any nonfiction enterprise. Case histories can take the form of “before and after” fat stories, they can illustrate how well such-and-such health or diet approach works, or they can infuse drama with tragic sagas of suffering. A well-known health book writer recently emailed me about her struggles to get a very important book into the public eye. “I met with producers from
20/20, Dateline
, National Public Radio,
Good Morning America, The View
, etc. in NYC and they told me flat out that they would be very interested in airing [my book], but only if I can get some of the parents [in the case histories] to go public, show their faces on TV, cry in public about their [tragedies].” In other words, the important message her book had to offer was not enough. Real-life pathos was necessary to sell it.

Indeed, many Americans are anesthetized to anything but the screaming of their own pain. Many Americans are numbly gorging on chemicalized factory food in a demoralized, deflated, and defeated state, and sheepishly laughing it all off. And when people are in this neurotransmitter-depleted state, companies can release their seductive siren call with promises of health, beauty, and satisfaction. All you have to do is eat, drink, or swallow their products—and go back for more.

Americans bear such enormous burdens that we’ve been compelled into our complacency as a coping mechanism. First we have the obvious
problems we’ve discussed above, such as the ubiquitous mind-controlling messages we are continually fed that seduce us into indulging in the abundance of factory products in our food supply. Then, even when we want to eat real food, we cannot even locate a source for real food in all-poison-sandwiches-all-the-time situations such as when driving on the interstate, airplanes, or hospitals, or at entertainment venues such as zoos, theme parks, movie theaters, sports arenas, and so on. Compounding these problems, we also have virtually no one in places of power taking our side. Instead, we’re told that what we’re “personally responsible” for what we eat and what we feed our children. Never are we as justified to retreat into our complacent cocoon as when this personal responsibility argument is used on us.

The factory-food industry has taken this defensive “personal responsibility” stand against arguments that it is wrecking American’s health. They argue that (1) the responsibility is on individuals for being overweight, (2) the factory-food industry is only responding to consumer demand by supplying us with factory food, and (3) free enterprise allows them carte blanche to market as they see fit—and any impingement would be an assault on their freedom.
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When the U.S. Surgeon General finally got around to acknowledging that cigarette smoking is bad for our health, cigarette advertising was banned from TV and cigarette smoking advertising directed toward children was ultimately banned, including, for example, the Camel cigarette cartoon character whose image was designed to target children. But today it’s still perfectly OK, even cute, for Ronald McDonald to peddle poisonous, extremely fattening and addicting factory food to children (and precious when he visits them in hospitals). Then when children grow up with compulsive eating problems, we have weighty legislation, such as the “Cheeseburger Bill,” which is supposedly for our own good as it will help these fattened-up-on-fast-food adults be more responsible.

I have no problem with people making money. I love stories about people who have taken a great idea and made a cool million or billion, as the
case may be today. America was built on great and innovative ideas. People should make money on their ventures. But writers, celebrities, doctors, and anyone else who presents a health message to the American public through books, TV, newspapers, radio, or the Internet have the responsibility to be accurate, truthful, and, most of all, rabidly focused on improving the quality of Americans’ lives. We can’t continue to make excuses about our free market system when people are dying on the vine. If a writer, celebrity, doctor, or food supplier is not part of the solution, then he or she or it is part of the problem. And those who are part of the solution must be committed to ending the trickery and seduction that leads people to eat factory food and must not be contributors to the exploitation of those people once they get fat and sick.

I’ve never watched a Dr. Phil show or even seen him on TV, so I may be completely off base targeting him as a celebrity who used his power to sell fattening diet products to overweight people. Still, I believe in our urgent obesity crisis that celebrities need to step up to the plate and be responsible—just as Dr. Phil undoubtedly preaches on his therapy show. Dr. Phil has been unapologetic about his foray into the nutritional food and supplement market. In an interview, when asked about his Shape Up! products, he replied that he didn’t consider endorsing these products to be a commercial venture because proceeds would go to a charitable foundation (though he didn’t elaborate). “I think it’s a good product,” he said, “and I’m doing it for a really good reason and purpose, although if I was doing it for a commercial—as a brand extension of my own—I wouldn’t apologize for that either.”
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I’m confused because I thought that if you have your grinning thumbs-up photograph plastered all over a product line that millions of people see and buy that that is a brand extension.

We’ll never know if Dr. Phil would have gotten hip to the fact that he was eroding the credibility of his brand and alienating his faithful by endorsing his so-called “nutritional” bars, supplements, and other such products if his hand hadn’t been forced by the FTC and by the class-action suit. He’s since broken off with CSA Nutraceuticals and dissolved the
shapeup.com
website. It originally appeared that Dr. Phil was concerned about restoring the credibility of his brand so he could continue to exploit fat people with other weight-loss products designed to inspire affable camaraderie, including complete non sequiturs like (I am not kidding) “I Love Dr. Phil” T-shirts (up to size 3X), photo coffee mugs, and baseball caps. Now you can only buy books and cassettes on his site.

Once we’ve determined that these messengers probably do not have our best interests in mind, the next step is to fully examine and come to terms with our own culpability. One area in which Americans are not scoring very high marks is in the feeding of their children.

PART TEN
The Home Front

MOBY DICK’S ON CAPE
Cod, Massachusetts, like many New England restaurants, serves up fried seafood, but they also have fresh lobster, coleslaw, grilled fish, and salads. On one beautiful summer afternoon at Moby Dick’s, I sat across from a mother, father, and teenage son who appeared to weigh in at 200, 250, and 350 to 400 pounds, respectively. They ordered fried seafood, fries, milk shakes, and ice cream sundaes. This family also had an adorable ten-year-old boy who was about 150 pounds, a boy who was condemned by virtue of the family he was born into to become a binge eater, to possibly reach 400 pounds like his brother, and likely to die young from a heart attack or complications of type 2 diabetes.

In the year 1900, only 5 percent of Americans were obese. Obesity rates have remained constant for the last five years among men and constant for ten years for women and children. Nearly 34 percent of adults are obese, and 17 percent of children are obese.

Acceptance of fat has changed dramatically in the past three decades. In the 1978 film
Midnight Express
, the true story of American drug trafficker Billy Hayes who was imprisoned in Istanbul’s infamously brutal Sagmalicar prison, the fat twin sons of the Turkish head guard Hamidou represent the juxtaposition of Hamidou’s brutalization of Billy and his allegiance toward his own. Back in 1978, when the boys first come on-screen, the reaction to the sight of them was both shocking and sickening—first, that they were so fat, and second, knowing that the boys were safe and
protected, eating baklava by the pound, as Billy starved, forsaken by his government and victimized by Hamidou. Today we see fat kids on-screen too, but they are cast merely to represent normal kids in movies and TV commercials.