Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world (10 page)

Nowhere was this more apparent than in California, once considered the leader in physical fitness programs. From early on, the cult of the body was codified in the Golden State. In 1866, not long after the former Spanish colony became a state, the new legislature directed all public schools to pay "due attention ... to such physical exercise for the pupils as may be conducive to health and vigor of the body as well as the mind." In 1917 California became one of only a handful of states to require daily physical fitness education. In 1928 the State Board of Education was one of the first such bodies to require four years of PE for graduation, and for the next three decades, even as many school districts in other states waned in their support for public fitness, California went on extending its requirements to elementary and junior college students. With its predictably endless drills of running and jumping about in the brilliant sunlight, PE became a spartan rite of passage — a warm-up for the various other cults of the body that the typical Californian would inevitably encounter later in life.

Although the conventional history dates the decline of PE in

FAT LAND

California to Proposition 13, the law that no one voted for, its origins trace themselves to two forces emerging at least five years prior to passage of the 1978 measure. Both were emblematic of the baby boom, its values, and its priorities. The first was Title 9 of the federal Education Amendments, passed in 1972. These much needed provisions held that "no person . . . shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits [of], or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Applied to physical education, where classes had long been conducted separately, and where boys' sports received the majority of support, the law was transformative. A year after its implementation, physical education in California went co-ed. Programs once reserved for boys now opened to girls. To accommodate them, PE staffs were split up and reassigned. And because equal facilities were mandated by the law, existing sports fields, equipment, and locker rooms had to be reapportioned as well. By 1978, when all schools were expected to be in complete compliance with the new law, remarkable progress had been made, with girls finally receiving many of the resources long denied on the basis of gender alone.

The progress came with a cost too. In boom times, those costs might have been absorbed by ever expanding school budgets. But the late 1970s were not exactly booming. Government spending was limited not just by economic trepidation, hut by the "small is beautiful" philosophy of the state's brainy new governor, a former Jesuit seminarian named Jerry Brown. Brown was the New Age opposite to his father, Pat, who as governor in the early 1960s had put the government — and its huge budget — center stage in the education field. Now the inclination was to contract. Or, as the younger Brown put it, "to focus resources on small projects that might bring fundamental change." The state legislature began retrenching. In 1976, trying to save money while complying with Title 9, the state allowed individual school districts to exempt juniors and seniors from PE requirements. By 1977 a de-

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

partmental survey found that almost all public schools had done so. It also reported a dangerous trend: "Staffing has been reduced and teaching methods changed as a direct result of the new programs." Such was the first of a hundred ultimately fatal paper cuts on the corpus of modern PE.

Betty Hennessy, a veteran PE teacher and later adviser to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, noticed the on-the-ground changes almost immediately. Where, in the past, unequal but abundant economic resources had allowed physical education instructors to get equipment and personnel support from district headquarters, now "teachers were on their own." With large classes, and the necessity of getting students in, suited up, and then showered and out the gym door, "the PE teacher became little more than a scorekeeper," she says. To relieve the strain, the state legislature passed a bill allowing non-PE teachers to coach. Although this was a bit like having a PE teacher with no science background tutor kids in chemistry, no one, at least at the state level, seemed to notice. By 1980 another Department of Education survey reported that only half of juniors and seniors were taking PE, and that while many schools were "successfully" implementing Title 9, "about 40 percent of schools .. . perceive that it has caused program quality to decline."

The second pre-Proposition 13 trend at work was more personal: the so-called fitness boom of the '70s. Originating in the popularity of aerobics — long, slow running, mainly — and its various health benefits, personal fitness had been taken up passionately by many California adults. The rise of private gyms and celebrity exercise videos was a natural outgrowth. But unlike the old PE, where group participation and peak performance were goals, the underlying premises of the new fitness boom were individualistic and medical. One exercised for specific ends. Many were, of course, purely cosmetic ends. Others were health-based — one exercised to "reduce health risks," or to "feel better about oneself." Fitness, the new acolytes believed, was about self-empowerment, about autonomy, about self-definition. It was, like

FAT LAND

the Reagan revolution it took place within, all about throwing off the old bourgeois liberalism of the past, particularly its idealistic but — and everyone knew this — highly unattainable group goals.

John Cates, then on the physical education faculty at the University of California at San Diego, saw the writing on the wall — but the problem, as he saw it, was not the fitness boom, it was the PE establishment itself. He was particularly frustrated by organizations like the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD). "We as physical educators were not savvy enough to deal with the change politically," he says. "We had numbers and results, tied to reducing absenteeism and all that, but that case was never marshaled. We were not politically savvy people. I mean, Jane Fonda? Richard Simmons? Give me a break. What a joke. We — AAHPERD — could have made those [fitness] tapes. But the leadership said, no, let other people do it."

With public fitness now seriously endangered, the effects of Proposition 13 cut ever deeper. Overnight the new law sliced $6.8 billion from the state budget. Even with remedial legislation meant to soften Proposition 13's short-term impact, that meant a 25 percent reduction in the schools' share of taxes. Local school boards were now charged with making do. That usually meant making more cuts. By 1980 average PE class sizes had doubled. The percentage of seniors taking PE dipped again, to 43 percent. Enrollment in sports teams dropped in 88 percent of schools, and almost half of all schools eliminated at least one team entirely. In 1983 the legislature codified what had been a reality for nearly half a decade: Students now had to pass only two years of physical education. To this there was little parental opposition.

Which was understandable. For one, many boomers did not exactly harbor the fondest memories of PE, California style. Many recalled it as a time, perhaps the last, when they were unfavorably compared to other people — as in the time they were the last to be chosen to play on the popular kids' team, or the

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

time when, nagging under the scorching sun, they had pooped out only halfway through the calisthenics, or the time they had clearly not won the Presidential Fitness Award, despite really trying at the pull-up bar. No, that wasn't for their child.

And fitness wasn't an important task for schools to perform anyway, was it? After all, there were more important priorities, especially in a nation that had now fallen behind Japan in productivity growth and job creation. Such was the general sentiment, especially after the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk." The study, which emphasized American children's lack of adequate science and math training and its impact on economic opportunity, had become a mantra for the back to basics movement, and in California (and, eventually, around the nation) that had meant anything but physical education. As a 1984 study by the California Department of Education concluded, "In a time of financial strain, declining academic test scores and strong pressure to go 'back to basics,' local school boards appear to have decided to reduce physical education. . . . PE teachers, budgets, enrollment and class size have been sacrificed in favor of 'higher' priorities." The sentiment was clearly not limited to the Golden State. By decade's end, Illinois was the only state to require daily physical fitness education.

What fitness opportunities remained for children grew increasingly class-based. In the nation's more affluent suburbs, where private gym membership by adults had been soaring, a new force emerged: sports clubs for children. Modeled in part on the old Pop Warner and Little League programs of the 1950s, the new clubs, most notably soccer, added a new twist: the notion that "everyone plays." To the boomer parent, psychically singed by the old PE, this was the place for Junior. The new soccer leagues were driven by the enlightened founders and executives of the American Youth Soccer Organization, or AYSO. Founded at an impromptu get-together at the Beverly Hilton in West Los Angeles, AYSO grew by leaps and bounds during the 1980s; between 1974 and 1989 membership increased from 35,000 to

FAT LAND

500,000. Because it was essentially driven by parents who had the free time to cart kids to twice-weekly sessions, and who also had the free time to "volunteer" to referee and coach, AYSO was "essentially a suburban movement," as Lollie Keyes, its current communications director, says. "It really wasn't until later that we focused and found the support for inner-city leagues."

The same could be said for almost every other category of youth sports, or, for that matter, for any other opportunity to play — period: Wherever a chance to freely expend calories appeared, it was likely to be contingent upon parental time and money. Or parental residence: Parks and streets tended to be safer in suburbs. And inner cities, increasingly filled with less politically savvy new immigrants, were often shortchanged in parks and recreation spending, not to mention adequate neighborhood policing. All of this was reflected in a 1999 survey by the Daniel Yankelovich consultancy, citing lack of sidewalks and unsafe neighborhoods as "major barriers to fitness." The new unspoken truth was simple: In America, fitness was to be purchased, even if you were a child.

The realities and values of inner-city immigrant life also augured against investments in fitness. In Los Angeles, the Ellis Island of postwar America, new Latin American immigrants proved to be not much different from previous generations of poor immigrants to the United States (save, perhaps, that their proximity to the border rendered them economically more vulnerable to wave upon wave of wage-undermining newcomers). For one, most of their time was spent simply making ends meet, a process often made more draining by a lack of adequate public transportation, affordable housing, and health care. For another, they were not urbanites but rather urban villagers; like the 1950s generation of Italian Americans, they were and are likely to act upon Old World ideas about exercise and health — in essence, the less the better. Studies by University of Pennsylvania epidemiologists under Professor Shiriki Kumanyika, for example, showed that when new immigrants were asked whether rest was

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

more important or better for health than exercise, a large portion "always says yes." The attitude was doubly corrosive: Among immigrant groups at the highest risk for hypertension and diabetes (see chapter 6), many respondents said that exercise "has the potential to do more harm than good."

Such attitudes have been reinforced by a growing knowledge gap about health matters. Consider a 2000 study of 1,929 Americans by American Data Sports Inc. Researchers asked interviewees to agree or disagree with the statement "There are so many conflicting reports, I don't know if exercise is good or bad for me." Thirty-seven percent of those earning under $25,000 agreed, compared with about 14 percent making $50,000 to $75,000 and 12 percent of those making $75,000 or more. Only 46 percent of those with earnings under $25,000 agreed with the statement "I would definitely exercise more if I had the time," compared with 68 percent of those making $50,000 to $75,000 and 67 percent of those making $75,000 and up.

Still, in the 1980s, perhaps more than any other decade, the working class, the middle class, and the affluent shared one inclination: the willingness to use television as their predominant personal leisure time activity. Of course, the observation that Americans watch lots of TV instead of doing other things is hardly novel. But, truth be told, a scientifically rigorous study of that pattern was almost nonexistent until the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that Larry Tucker, an exercise physiologist at Brigham Young University, decided to study three interrelated trends. One, that most Americans are sedentary; two, that many feel they do not have the time to exercise; and three, that the average adult watches about four hours of television a day. To find out the extent of that association, and to see if one were causal of the other, Tucker studied the association between TV viewing duration and weekly exercise for 8825 men and women. The results indicated an even stronger association than experts had previously suspected: TV time was strongly and inversely associated with duration of weekly exercise. One example: Among those

FAT LAND

who reported little or no regular exercise, 9.4 percent viewed less than an hour of TV a day while 33 percent — the largest single group — reported watching three to four hours a day. As Tucker dryly concluded, "Adults who perceive they have too little time to exercise may be able to overcome this problem by watching less television."

But adults were doing more than just kicking back and having a laugh with the Cheers gang; more than ever before, they were using the tube as a baby-sitter. It was, after all, an increasingly child-oriented media. With cable expanding and VCR use almost universal, entertainment firms entered the children's "edu-tain-ment" niche with a vengeance, marketing a torrent of children's programs, videos, and games. So did McDonald's, which in 1985 initiated its so-called "tweens" advertising strategy to reach older kids and adolescents (see chapter 5). In the United States, all of this seemed quite natural — in a free market, new needs are created and then new needs are filled. TV was a pragmatic solution to the harried lives that so many new working couples faced. And who was to judge? Only a cynical, and rare, European would be willing to prick the happy bubble, as was the case in 1999, when the French exercise scholar Jean-Francois Gautier put it this way: "Children are naturally very active, but their parents are restraining them. Children are only allowed to be physically active if adults decide it is appropriate."

More than anything, though, American TV-viewing merged parent and child into one seamless inactivity bubble — a bubble filled with billion-dollar cues to eat, even when one was not hungry. You could argue whether that was morally right or heinously perverted, as did the occasional public TV special. But you couldn't deny the reality as experienced by every American family worth its potato chips. "Kids and dads watching twenty-three to twenty-eight hours a week of TV — that's a lot of sitting," Brigham Young's Larry Tucker observed. "And where there's a lot of sitting, there's lots of snacking."

And a lot of fat children. To find out what the pattern Tucker detected in adults was doing to their offspring, the Centers for

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

Disease Control in 1994 studied the exercise, television-viewing, and weight gain patterns of 4063 children aged eight to fifteen. The results were stunning (if, in hindsight, predictable). Whether grouped by age, sex, or ethnicity, exercise rates were inversely correlated with TV time, which was in turn positively correlated with increasing body fat percentages. The more TV a child watched the less she exercised and the more likely she was to be either overweight or obese.

What was surprising, though, was the pronounced class and ethnic bent of the numbers. The poor, the black, and the brown not only tended to view more TV than their white counterparts, they also tended to exercise far less. The greatest disparity was between white girls and black girls; where 77.1 percent of the former reported at least three sessions per week of "playing or exercising enough to make me sweat or breathe hard," only 69.4 percent of black girls reported doing the same, with 72.6 percent of Mexican American girls so reporting. When it came to television-viewing, the numbers were even more disquieting. The percentage of white girls who reported watching four or more hours of TV a day was 15.6. The percentage of black girls: 43.1. Of Mexican American girls: 28.3.

Why was that? The CDC surveyed parents. Beyond the usual concerns about time, money, and the "need to rest," one rationale emerged among all parental groups: the concern about crime and how it acted as a barrier to some children becoming more physically active. About 46 percent of all U.S. adults believed that their neighborhoods were unsafe. Among the middle class, such sentiments fueled the growing inclinations to "bubble-wrap" all childhood activity, doubling up on safety precautions and delimiting spontaneous play. And parents in minority neighborhoods were twice as likely as white parents to report that their neighborhoods were dangerous. What the surveyed parents were implying was utterly reasonable: TV-viewing may be bad, but at least my kid won't get shot, molested, kidnapped, or jumped into a gang while doing it.

Yet the greater the TV time, the fatter the child. Cross-index-

FAT LAND

ing the TV numbers from its 1994 study with skinfold tests (for body fatness) and calculations of body mass index, the CDC found that "boys and girls who watched four or more hours of television per day had the highest skinfold thicknesses and the highest BMIs; conversely, children who watched less than one hour of television a day had the lowest BMIs." This, the study concluded, was a "worrisome trend." No wonder that, between 1966 and 1994, obesity prevalence among youth jumped from 7 percent to 22 percent. Worse, there were huge increases in the percentage of fat children defined as morbidly obese or super-obese — bigger than 95 percent of their peers.

But what did that mean? For one thing, it meant the beginning of a lifetime of medical problems. Study after study had unequivocally indicated that becoming overweight and sedentary as a child or adolescent predicted being obese as an adult. Fat children became fat adults. Moreover, the risks of obesity in adulthood appear to be greater in persons who were overweight in childhood or adolescence. It also meant reduced physical fitness, particularly when it came to cardiovascular fitness. A study by the Amateur Athletic Union of the 1980-1989 period found large increases in the amount of time it took the average child to complete a standardized endurance run. The greatest slowdowns were found in the eight-to-nine-year-old category — exactly the age at which the young are more likely to gain weight anyway.

Numbers, studies, reports, and surveys. By the mid-1990s, they were all saying the same thing: Children were getting fatter, exercising less, eating more (and more often), and watching TV and playing Nintendo in ever greater amounts. Did any of this come as a great shock? No. But what did come as a shock — first in small awarenesses, then in still greater ones — was just how disabled — and just how socially disenfranchised — the young could become from being fat.

In California, the onetime model of physical culture in America, fat abounded. By the late 1990s, only one out of five students in public schools could pass the minimum standards in the state's

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

physical fitness tests. And everywhere — but especially in the Mexican American community — childhood diabetes rates were soaring. So were the rates for a wide variety of other weight-related diseases, among them coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease, bone disease, and a wide range of endocrine and metabolic disorders. The Spanish-language standard-bearer La Opinion often blares: diabetes, epidemia en latinos!

There were other, less predictable consequences too. A growing number of Latino children were showing up at their school nurse's office, either for their daily shot of insulin or for a number of other blood sugar regulating medications — so many that the L.A. school administration tried to talk the nurses into letting school secretaries administer the doses in the nurses' absence. (The nurses said no.) There were the victims of the newest form of childhood cruelty — the fat kids who would end up as the target of the daily dodgeball game, wherein balls were hurled so hard as to cause black eyes and bruised midsections, not to mention deep cuts in self-esteem.

And there were the changes occurring outside of school. Strange, weird, tragicomic changes. One of them was taking place in the sport of surfing, long the hallmark of the state's international image as a kingdom of perfect bodies. The change dawned on Steve Pezman, the longtime publisher of Surfing magazine, one summer day in the late 1980s. Pezman had headed out to Santa Monica Beach, the most popular of L.A.'s beaches and the destination for thousands of downtown and east side families every weekend. As was his custom, when he got there he sat down and took in the scene. Out on the ocean bobbed the usual lineup of young men and women, waiting for the best wave. They were very white, very lean, and, for the most part, blond. Far closer to the beach floated another lineup, also waiting for waves — essentially for the waves that had been too small or too unformed for the blond kids farther out. The young people in this lineup were very brown and, more often than not, rounder than their white counterparts.

FAT LAND

As Pezman sat and watched, he realized what he was really seeing. One, that those in the group closer to shore were not just a little chubby, but downright fat. The other thing he noticed was that many of them could not — or did not — swim very well. Instead, they relied heavily on what had become a standard piece of equipment: the surf leash. The leash attaches the board to the surfer's ankle, so as to prevent the board from getting away after a wipeout and causing the surfer to have to swim after it. Wow, Pezman thought. "Not only had the sport segregated itself according to ability, like any other sport," he recalls. "But it had also segregated itself by body type and by reliance on a laborsav-ing technology. Unfit surfers! Fat surfers!

"Who would have thought?"

Who would have thought? Well, for one, the National Institutes of Health, which had, between 1977 and 1985, issued not one, not two, but three warnings about obesity and its unhealthful effects on both children and adults. To each of these the nation had yawned. Fortune magazine, in a typical screed, proclaimed that the real problem was not obesity but, rather, the NIH, which it alleged was using the issue as yet one more way for the government to intrude into "private" affairs. What could one do about such a problem anyway? And who might do it?

More than any one organization, the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports might. Founded in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower after a series of reports detailed the poor fitness of many American troops, the council had long occupied the national bully pulpit on all things PE. Under JFK, it had even asserted a hold on popular culture. Kennedy himself took a leading role in the issue, making much publicized fifty-mile hikes and writing articles on the subject for such popular magazines as Life and Look. At its core, fitness was to Kennedy a matter of national survival, both literally — a number of studies had shown that Soviet boys had pulled far ahead of American boys in many tests of strength and agility — and metaphorically. "All of us must con-