Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world (11 page)

76

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

sider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our communities," he once wrote. "We do not want our children to become a nation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life."

To motivate the nation, the council had turned to the tools of the newly emerging complex of public relations specialists, sports celebrities, and Madison Avenue survey takers. There were specialized fitness magazines for girls (Vim) and boys (Vigor). There was a council theme song, by Music Man composer Meredith Willson; its refrain was "Go You Chicken Fat Go!" It became a national hit. There was the council's charismatic chairman, the baseball great "Stan the Man" Musial. And there were the tests — those annual rites of pull-ups, sit-ups, shuttle runs, and long jumps so loved (or dreaded) by schoolchildren from Sacramento to Poughkeepsie.

All of this seemed to work — or at least to give the impression that it did. In a 1965 survey entitled "Closing the Muscle Gap," Musial wrote: "In 1958 the average 15-year-old American boy could run 600 yards in 2 minutes 19 seconds and do 45 sit-ups. Today's average 15-year-old can run 600 yards in 2 minutes and do 73 sit-ups." Although academics might quibble with the basis of such testing, few could argue with the basic upbeat message, not to mention the council's overall mission. Here were the denizens of Camelot, doing jumping jacks in the sun.

By 1985, however, when it confronted the results of its third national survey, the council had evolved into a more complicated beast. At its head sat its celebrity chairman, the football coach George Allen. A longtime friend of Republican presidents, Allen was obsessed with one idea: the creation of a national academy of fitness. Characteristically, he had thrown all of his energy, charm, and connections into the task, and spent most of his time on the road, raising funds, locating possible sites for the campus, and enlisting old gridiron buddies in the cause.

This left the running of the council increasingly to its execu-

FAT LAND

tive director, a former San Diego PE teacher and fitness expert named Ash Hayes. Tall, rangy, and physically striking, Hayes was the embodiment of the postwar California fitness buff. Born and raised in Iowa, he had moved to California after a stint in the army during World War II. "My parents had moved there, and once I saw no one ever shoveled snow there, I decided to get my BA in San Diego," he recalled. "I turned into a beach lover." And a fitness lover. As an administrator in the San Diego school district, Hayes had found himself drawn to the growing field of physical fitness. He began to teach the subject. Then to coach. "The need for fitness was always very clear to me, really instinctive," he says. "Even as an undergraduate and as a young farmer and soldier before that, everything told me that the body was designed to be physically active. It was common sense." By 1981 Hayes was head of the health and physical education department of the San Diego City School District, and president of a number of national fitness and sports organizations.

By then he was also a regular in California Republican party politics. So when Casey Conrad, a longtime GOP activist friend and then the council's executive director, called on him for assistance, Hayes said yes. He first served as the council's state coordinator, then as co-director. In 1985 Conrad retired. Hayes assumed the directorship.

He also assumed a headache. Just that year the council had released its third national fitness survey. As with the one it had done in 1975, results were lackluster. Studying the fitness abilities of eighteen thousand American boys and girls, the survey had concluded not only that there had been little general improvement in overall fitness levels, but that there also had been slippage, particularly among young girls. About 50 percent of them (compared to 30 percent of boys) could not run a mile in fewer than ten minutes. The same held true of other test items, from the 50-yard dash to the flexed arm hang. Among girls in particular, the rate of improvement was flat, with some declines in individual age group performance.

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

But for Hayes, that wasn't the worst of it. At almost the same time the results of a parallel study were published, this one conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service. The report looked at the ability of 8800 students to perform rigorous physical tests designed to assess overall health and fitness. The results showed that about half of American children were not getting enough exercise to develop healthy hearts and lungs. Even more alarming was what the service found out about fatness and American youth. Median skinfold sums were 2 to 3 millimeters thicker than a sample taken by the PHS in the mid-1960s. Kids were getting fatter.

Yet if his mission was growing larger by the day, Hayes's resources were shrinking, partly from Reagan-era budget cuts, partly from pure lack of interest by other arms of government. "My total budget was $1.5 million," Hayes recalls. "That, basically, was zero. We were constantly with our hat in hand, trying to find corporate sponsors for various projects." Some of those sponsors eventually included such unlikely partners as 7-Up and McDonald's, "but we never thought of that as a conflict of interest, because we never let them use the council seal in their advertising."

Despite the lack of resources, when it came to communicating the issue of fitness, the council already owned one potent weapon: its annual Presidential Fitness Awards and the tests that went with them. True, there were better, more scientific assessments of fitness. But none had the standing or reach into the average home and school in quite the way that the council's did. By 1985 the award had been won by some 8 million American children.

Since its inception, the test had been administered by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD), the nation's leading organization of fitness professionals. It had been designed at a meeting of its research council in February 1957, when members — responding to Eisenhower's plea to develop some way to measure American

FAT LAND

youth's declining fitness level — came up with eight tests. These were the pull-up (for boys), modified pull-ups (for girls), sit-ups, the standing broad jump, the shuttle run, the 50-yard dash, the softball throw, and the 600-yard run. Over the next decade there would be minor tweaks to the regimen; in 1964 the modified pull-up for girls was replaced by the flexed arm hang, the softball throw was eliminated, and modified sit-ups (with flexed knees) were substituted for the conventional straight-legged ones.

But by and large the test proved amazingly durable. By 1975 some 65 million pupils had been tested. The president's council adopted the test as a basis for its own Presidential Fitness Award, given to any child who scored in the top 15 percent of his or her age group. It awarded a lucrative contract to AAHPERD to conduct the test. To recoup some of its costs, the council sold its award patches to individual school districts.

Yet even within AAHPERD, the test was controversial. Many of its own members had argued that pull-ups and 50-yard dashes and standing broad jumps had little to do with fitness and everything to do with measuring performance. This, they argued, was because the battery had been designed with largely military concerns in mind. In that context, the pull-up made sense — every soldier ought to be able to pull himself out of a foxhole. So did the broad jump, the flexed arm hang, the softball throw, and the 50-yard dash. A good soldier should be able to jump quickly out of harm's way, lob a grenade, hang from a window, or sprint toward the engagement line.

But what did those abilities have to do with fitness for everyday life? For two decades AAHPERD, despite the rising chorus of its own members, sidestepped the question, at least when it came to the tests for the council's Presidential Fitness Awards. If this was what the client wanted, that is what they would give the client. Such was the thinking until two trends came to undo it.

The first was the ascendance of aerobic exercise — jogging, as experienced by most Americans of the 1970s. The concept had been popularized by Kenneth Cooper, a former military physician who, after almost dying of a heart attack, had restored him-

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

self to top condition through what he liked to call "LSD — long slow distance" running. At the core of Cooper's exercise prescription — which he detailed in his 1968 bestseller Aerobics — was one key fact: that improvements in cardiovascular abilities — the ability to use and expend oxygen — came mainly from moderate increases in energy expenditure. In the past, conventional wisdom had held just the opposite. The old notion was that one would have to raise one's "Vmax2" — deciliters of oxygen expended per kilogram of body weight — to over 60 in order to force the body and its muscles to get stronger and to endure more. Using a treadmill, Cooper had demonstrated that such "training effects" actually happened at a much lower level of exercise, at, say, a Vmax2 of 40. In other words, it was better (and more efficient) to jog slowly for a half-hour than to run swiftly for ten minutes. Cooper also showed that body composition, specifically percentage of fat, played a big role in cardiovascular health, regardless of whether or not you could sprint 50 yards or jump 8 feet. In this light AAHPERD's — and the council's — preference for things like 600-yard runs looked highly unscientific, if not downright archaic.

The second force was the rise of a new generation of exercise physiologists, scientists who study exactly how the body responds to various forms of physical activity. Of these men and women, none was more aggressive — and intellectually pugnacious — than Charles "Chuck" Corbin. A Cooper protege and a professor at Arizona State University, Corbin had long harbored reservations about the AAHPERD fitness test. As a young PE teacher he had administered it himself, year after year, only to observe something that he found deeply disquieting. "Basically, the same kids won it year after year," he recalls. "And eventually some of us began to say, 'Hey, wait a minute — the so-called fit kids under this test are the ones who already got the award patch, and the kids who aren't fit under this test, well, they just give up.' So kids came to hate PE. I became convinced that this was a bad thing — I saw that they grew up to be parents who hated PE too."

Then, in a series of studies conducted with his co-author Bob

FAT LAND

Pangrazi, also of ASU, Corbin was able to show that almost every item on the AAHPERD test battery correlated not with one's fitness levels, but with one's hereditary and environmental advantages. Moreover, the decades-long notion that only children who tested better than 85 percent of their peers deserved an achievement award didn't make scientific sense either. Corbin and Pangrazi saw significant fitness improvements in those who scored as low as the 50th percentile. Combined with Cooper's growing body of work documenting the importance of longer distances run more slowly, a new consensus began to emerge among younger AAHPERD members. "Many of us started to say, 'Why is activity important? What kinds of activity are important to adulthood that we were not teaching in schools?' We started to say, 'Hey, what's important to lifelong fitness? What things really made a difference?' We were saying that not everybody could be a sports star. And that, to be candid, was very counter to the ideals of the founders [of the council], who all thought that every kid would be able to get into the 85th percentile."

By 1980 Corbin and Pangrazi had convinced AAHPERD to develop a new test, this one designed to assess health-related fitness skills. The new one was Corbin and Cooper, distilled. Gone was almost every item on the traditional test. Instead, there were distance runs (one for nine minutes, one for twelve minutes, and one for the mile) for cardiovascular health, a sit-and-reach test to measure flexibility, modified sit-ups for trunk strength, and, truly radical, skinfold measurements for body fatness. Developed with Cooper at his Dallas Texas Institute, the new test would be called the "Fitnessgram."

Right away, the new test rankled the old-timers, who viewed it as a form of "dumbing down." As Hayes saw it, "if you ask less of people you will always get less from people — everything in my background told me that. Why was a pull-up so important? Ask any soldier who had to pull himself out of a foxhole, or any fireman who had to hang from the window of a burning building." John Cates, then an assistant to George Allen, also worried

WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES

about the dumbing-down effect, but also says, "There was a whole self-esteem issue here, and not just of the variety of 'making it easier' so kids don't feel bad about not getting an award. The financial cutbacks in the schools had also done something else to PE classes — it forced very dissimilar kids, kids of very different physical abilities, into one class, where comparisons were inevitable." He adds: "But one thing was clear: The kids were getting worse and worse. Do you water this down? Do you lower standards or do you keep the old ones and possibly stigmatize some kids?" To this Corbin again responded with new data that showed — convincingly — that far from inspiring children to work harder, the old standards simply turned them off to exercise altogether. "The basic response of most kids was 'why bother?'"

After a few years, it was clear that the new test was becoming troublesome in another way: It began to confuse school districts, which could not distinguish it from the more traditional council test. In effect, AAHPERD had created a competitor to one of its most important clients.

To reconcile the two tests, AAHPERD and the council set up an advisory committee. For three years those favoring a health-based test battled over one key bone of contention: the council's insistence on maintaining the 85th percentile. Though it was something both sides felt deeply about, the science clearly favored the reformers. And so, by 1986, as the annual AAHPERD conference approached, the two groups reached for a consensus: In the new test there would be elements from both the old test and the new. They also agreed to consider a new awards scheme — one, as Corbin saw it, "that was based on science, and that rewarded process and improvement rather than the end product."