Death By Supermarket (35 page)

Recently on a trip to South Beach, Florida, I got up at 5 a.m. to catch an early flight home. From the third-floor hotel window, I watched a full-on gang fight on the street below, with a policeman brandishing a gun, the arrival of several police cruisers, a chase, and a bust. I had never seen anything like that before in real life, and the violence was disturbing. But what struck me was that—although I hadn’t previously equated “tubby” with “tough”—the homies were
fat
.

Another time in the Phoenix, Arizona, airport, while waiting for a flight, sitting across from a Burger King, I watched enormous people lumber in and out of that establishment. What impressed me about that experience was that some of the obese people were with other obese people, but many were alone.

Although being overweight today is the norm, it is not yet socially acceptable to be obese. In a study that asked college students who they would be the least inclined to marry, an embezzler, cocaine user, ex-mental patient, shoplifter, sexually promiscuous person, communist, blind person, atheist, marijuana user, or obese person, the students said they would rather marry (in this order) an embezzler, cocaine user, shoplifter, or blind person before they would marry an obese person.
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Children who were shown pictures of children in a wheelchair, missing a limb, on crutches, facially disfigured, or obese said they were least likely to play with the fat child.
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Obesity is the last acceptable area of discrimination, and obese adults are discriminated against in many areas of life, including every stage of employment cycle (selection, placement, compensation, promotion, discipline, and discharge). Overweight people are even stereotyped as emotionally impaired, socially handicapped, and possessing negative personality traits. They get paid less money.
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The fact is that children of overweight/obese parents are more likely to
be overweight/obese.
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And once a child is overweight, he or she is likely stay that way for the rest of his or her life.
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Although obesity often condemns people to less than happy lives, our society accepts that a child born into a family of binge eaters will likely become a binge eater as well, and we shrug. Oh, well. Sad, isn’t it? And to make matters worse, our medical community has labeled this pattern “genetics.” Most doctors and most people cling to the belief that genes make people obese. Genes—not behavior. Everyone in my family is overweight. My genes are working against me. Type 2 diabetes runs in my family. Oh I see, genes give people type 2 diabetes, not the fact that by the time the little boy from Cape Cod was ten years old, he had eaten twelve hundred pounds of sugar, give or take several hundred pounds. This is not even counting the hundreds of pounds of other carbohydrates, like cereal, toaster pastries, chips, French fries, candy, cookies, cake, pie, pastry, donuts, bread, pizza, pasta, waffles, pancakes, muffins, and cornbread that American families typically eat. If a family feeds their children huge quantities of sugar/carbohydrates/factory food over the prolonged period of their childhoods, that is not genetics—that is behavioral programming that creates the conditioned response we talked about way back in
chapter 3
.

It’s becoming more common to hear heartrending stories of children and obesity in the news. Like the three-year-old British girl who weighed in at 83.6 pounds when she died of congestive heart failure and the thirteen-year-old California girl whose 680-pound, bedsore-ridden body was found nude on her mother’s living room floor, instigating a five-day trial wherein the mother was acquitted of felony child abuse. In the summer of 2010, a couple was arrested after authorities found their two children obese and living in filthy conditions. The five-year-old daughter, who could barely walk, and who had matted hair, rotten teeth, and bug bites, weighed 158 pounds. The four-year-old girl, wearing a soiled diaper and drinking from a bottle, weighed 89 pounds. As of this writing, the couple is facing felony child cruelty charges.
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You may say, “Well, those children were abused.” True, they were abused beyond just being fattened up way beyond a normal body weight for their ages. As much as it may be unpopular, shocking, and alienating to some readers, it’s my position that causing children to become obese or sick as the result of feeding them factory-food products is child abuse, with or without the bug bites and diapers.

Along those lines, I also can’t understand the bizarre concept of “kid food.” On one of my research outings, I went shopping at Star Market in Boston. At the checkout, I stood in line behind an overweight, early-thirties father and his chubby two-year-old son. The man spent $200 on a head of iceberg lettuce and three plums. I’m exaggerating. He only spent $3 on a head of iceberg lettuce and three plums. The other $197 were spent on Austin Zoo Animal Crackers, Nabisco Barnum’s Animal Crackers, ice cream, Kraft HandiSnacks, Elfin Magic Iced Apple Cinnamon Bars, Keebler Journey Peanut Butter with Fudge Chunks, Nestle Nesquik Chocolate-Flavored Milk Mix, and other cartoon-emblazoned kid food products. It was all I could do not to grab the man and plead, “Please buy some food for your son!”

In
The Ultimate Weight Solution
, when Dr. Phil urged his readers to “Begin today to reprogram your environment and set yourself up for success,” he went on to say, “Okay, I suspect that right now you’re thinking, ‘Well, that sounds fine and good, but there are foods I need to keep around for my kids. They aren’t fat. Why should they suffer?” Dr. Phil suggests designating a “specific cabinet” in your kitchen for kid food such as “pizza, brownies, potato chips, and all the rest.”
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This is supposed to protect you from temptation but allow your kids to eat factory products. In other words, a major role model and bestselling psychologist tells us that not feeding kids poisonous substances would cause them to “suffer.” Have you ever noticed that these so-called kid foods are the most processed, chemicalized and sugar-laden foods on the market? Can you imagine feeding that stuff to your dog? I’ve heard many people say, “People food isn’t good for dogs!” In other words people feed “kid food” to kids, but not to dogs. In conversations about nutrition, I’ve heard parents say, “Oh, we just go to McDonald’s for a treat.” With all due respect to parents, as I understand how time-consuming raising children is,
if McDonalds is considered “a treat” in your family, you really need to carve out some time to learn how to cook.

You might be saying, “But my kids won’t eat anything healthy. All they like is pizza.” Let’s say that pizza makers listed Drano as a pizza ingredient. Would you still feed them pizza? Of course not! Drano’s poison! But many pizzas contain partially hydrogenated fat (trans fats). Sodium hydroxide (i.e., lye, an ingredient in Drano and Easy-Off) and phosphoric acid (a chemical used in bathroom cleaners) are both used to process vegetable oils before they are hydrogenated.
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I don’t have children and am aware that the obstacles parents face today are formidable; however, I’ve yet to understand how parents can feed their children sugar and then sit in the dentist’s waiting room strumming through magazines and listen to the whine of the dentist drill excavating cavities from their kids’ teeth—and then (according to my dentist), greet their shell-shocked children with rewards of candy bars.

Consider this scenario that we’ve all witnessed in restaurants: A mother, father, and their four-year-old son sit down to eat, and the waitress comes to take their order. “Honey bunny,” asks the mommy, “want the macaroni and cheese with chips?” To the waitress, “He’ll have the macaroni dinner.” The waitress writes it down.

“I don’t want it!” the kid whines.

“What do you want then, precious? How ’bout the hot dog and fries?” To the waitress, “Change that to the hot dog.” The waitress writes it down.

“Noooo,” the kid whimpers, squirming in his seat.

“Hmm, well, don’t the pancakes with chocolate chips sound yummy?”

The kid nods.

“Make that the pancakes instead.” The waitress writes it down.

“I want another Coke,” the kid bellyaches.

To the waitress, cloyingly now because everyone’s nerves are tautly stretched, “Could you please bring another Coke when you have a sec?”

“I want it now!” the kid screeches.

“Listen, mister, I’m going to take you outside if you don’t lower your voice.”

The order comes. The kid takes one look at the pancakes. “I don’t want it!”

“What’s the matter, honey, you don’t like the nice pancakes?”

“I want French fries.”

The father takes the boy’s plate. “I’ll eat it.”

The mother pleads, “Could you please bring the hot dog dinner?”

So it goes. I’m sitting there thinking about my mother’s (sorry, Mom) unappetizingly overcooked pot roast, mashed potatoes, and peas that I sat and ate at least once a week for my entire childhood, whether I liked it or not. I am not saying that kids should be forced to eat my mother’s recipes, but only that someone needs to be in charge when it comes to selecting the foods that kids learn to like. In Japan kids eat the slimiest, strangest, most God-awful-looking stuff, with chopsticks no less. In India, toddlers eat eyeball-melting curries with their fingers. Millions of children all over the world happily dine on insects. I have seen children in France refuse an offer of dessert at the end of a meal. Tastes for food are established in childhood—some experts say as early as three years old. That explains why Indian babies can munch on chili peppers that would send us to the ER, why German children will eat liver, Finnish children will eat stinky dried fish, and French children will eat green vegetables like candy.

Here in the United States kids eat pretty much nothing but “kid food,” and many get fat. The logical response is to put them on a diet, though I can’t tell you how many tragic stories I’ve heard that have started with the sentence, “When I was eight, my mother took me to Weight Watchers.” Since the 1970s, obesity in adolescents has increased by 75 percent. Researchers have found that “the very act of starting any diet increases the risk of eating disorders in adolescent girls.” Obsessions with body image, low self-esteem, depression and suicide, and sudden cardiac death resulting from extreme weight-loss practices are increasingly common with teenagers.
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The practices of dieting, fasting, extreme exercise, taking diet pills, bingeing, vomiting, and using laxatives will soon creep from high school and college to elementary-school-aged children if parents do not
intervene. Starvation and vomiting both result in a pleasurable release of endorphins, which are our neurotransmitter equivalent to heroin, and if your child gets hooked on the pleasure associated with starvation and vomiting, you will have a much more difficult challenge on your hands in getting them to stop these behaviors.

On the other hand, studies demonstrate that kids can learn how to eat a healthy diet and will be much less likely to be overweight or obese if their parents provide them access to healthy foods and role models to emulate by developing good habits themselves.
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In other words, no matter how old your children are and how programmed they are, you can still begin to educate them about the difference between factory food and real food. You can teach them that factory food erodes health and that real food will give their bodies and brains the building blocks of nutrition so that they can fully realize their genetic gifts—and their dreams. In addition to talking to your kids, you can form your children’s lifelong attitudes about food by what you put on the table, what is in the refrigerator, and what you order or allow them to order in restaurants.

So it’s a hassle to take along your own freshly prepared real food when you are, say, getting on an airplane. But when you’re in poisonous food situations it’s even more important to set an example to your children that you will not accept what is being foisted on you by the food industry just because it’s more convenient or “free.” That you’ll go the extra step necessary to put real food into your body and into the bodies of your children will make a concrete impression on your children.

How trusting are kids? Do we really need multimillion-dollar studies to tell us? In the 1950s and 60s there was a zany kids’ program on TV called
The Soupy Sales Show
. On one show, Soupy (Milton Supman) gazed with his doggie eyes into the camera and suggested that kids sneak into their sleeping parents’ bedrooms and extract from their wallets and purses all the little green pieces of paper and send them to him at the Channel 5 in New York. Allegedly he received $80,000 from his fans, which his producer insisted was mostly Monopoly money. Soupy got in lots of hot water for
that prank. But the point here is that kids are innocent. Right now kids are getting mostly one side of the story about factory food—what advertisers want them to hear.

In 2005, Bill Clinton teamed up with the AHA to create the Clinton/ American Heart Association Initiative in an attempt to halt childhood obesity in the United States by the year 2010.
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As of this writing in 2010, the goal has been extended to 2015. So I guess that speaks volumes.

One very alarming campaign is ridding schools of sodas containing high-fructose corn syrup and replacing them with “healthier” choices: beverages containing caffeine, aspartame, and Splenda that will not only contribute to obesity (as you know, stimulants and fake sugar encourage eating) but will erode the developing brains of America with excitotoxins.
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Removing factory food from our food supply and feeding children real food that fosters brain health would be a step in the right direction as neurotransmitter balance is of the utmost importance in halting the unnatural hunger, craving, and bingeing cycles that condition children to knee-jerk react to every stressful situation by eating catastrophic and fattening substances. Remember the analogy of creating the best quality grape—or the best quality human being? Americans are not going to create the best quality human beings out of our children unless we provide them with healthy real, living food.