Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world (8 page)

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

every twenty-five years. At one point it was even listed as a "cure" for obesity in the Merck Manual, the prestigious physician's handbook.

The nutritionally savvy knew something else about the Banting-Atkins scheme: It was full of medical mumbo jumbo and fraught with potential peril for anyone who followed it for a sustained period of time. It was true that the body stored excess carbohydrates as fat, for example, but it was not so clear that depriving the body of carbohydrates induced the revved-up, fat-burning state that Atkins claimed. It was also unclear what medical consequences flowed from consuming enormous amounts of fat and protein. Gout — something long considered erased in modern times — was an ongoing concern.

But perhaps the biggest objection to the diet was that in the early 1970s the great mass of people simply could not afford to substitute meat for the bulkier — and stomach-filling — meal components like bread and potatoes.

As the 1980s dawned in the major New York houses, two forces colluded to erase the old editors' reluctance to promote "all the meat you want." For one, meat prices were now increasingly within the reach of the average Joe. Butz's revolution in commodity prices had seen to that. Eating a giant hamburger patty and cheese three times a day, or "all the bacon and pork rinds you can," was actually economically viable.

The other factor was publishing itself. The older, medically attuned editors were either retiring or, worse, facing increased pressure to come up with hot new diet books. If they didn't, they were told, someone else would. Calories in, calories out — that was not only boring, but the franchise for it had also been virtually sewed up by Weight Watchers. It was time to offer a bold new category of diet books — or risk losing the opportunity to the newly competitive alternative diet publishers like Atkins and his imitators.

The result was not only an outpouring of Atkins-like low-carb diets, but a like-style gusher of other "all you can eat" diets.

FAT LAND

In 1989 W. W. Norton published The T-Factor Diet, inverting Atkins's claim and instead focusing on fat as the villain. The book promised that one could "Lose Weight Safely and Quickly Without Cutting Calories — or Even Counting Them!" The key, author Martin Katahn wrote, was something called the "thermogenic effect," the ability of certain foods, in this case not protein as in Atkins but instead carbohydrates, to "rev up" one's fat-burning engine. Although the idea of a thermogenic effect had been hotly debated by scientists and diet pill makers for decades, Katahn and his editors decided to render it as fact. "It is primarily fat in your diet that determines your body fat, and protein and carbohydrate calories don't really matter very much," Katahn wrote. "Once you start replacing some of that fat with carbohydrates you will unlock your body's hidden fat-burning potential: that's the T-factor at work!"

In 1993 Dean Ornish, a California heart specialist who had reported remarkable results reversing heart disease by having patients follow a very low fat diet, joined the all-you-can-eat bandwagon. Now, instead of prescribing his extremely low fat diet for medical patients, he enlarged its prescriptions to a larger audience. As his book jacket described it: "Dr. Ornish's program takes a new approach, one scientifically based on the type of food rather than the amount of food. Abundance rather than hunger and deprivation — so you can eat more frequently, eat a greater quantity of food, and still lose weight and keep it off!"

By 1995, however, Atkinism was back again, this time retooled by HarperCollins and Barry Sears. Reacting to the growing obesity statistics despite the early 1990s consensus that it was fat and not carbs that was the villain, Sears went back to a low-carb basic: "Basta with pasta!" he proclaimed. And forget about exercising too. If one only mixed the right foods, why, "you can burn more fat watching TV than by exercising," he idiotically promised. That same year Bantam introduced Michael and Mary Dan Eades and their notion of "Protein Power," in which one could "eat all the foods you love — steaks, bacon and burgers, cheese and eggs."

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

The point, of course, is not that the publishing industry and its new ancillary industries in the diet supplement and video sectors were publishing pure schlock (although most of it was). There had been legitimate scientific debate about such things as ther-mogenesis, fat metabolism, and the metabolic effects of various foods since the mid-nineteenth century, when French scientists like Claude Bernard first discovered the glycogenic (glucose-making) function of the human liver. The point is what the new diets did not say. For completely missing from the new genre was one increasingly strange and distant concept: self-control.

The very notion of self-control was anathema to the new generation of diet books. A diet — even a weight loss diet — was no longer about limits to one's gratification. Instead, the subtext was one of scientific entitlement. After all, if one had worked so hard to get so far in one's career, well, how could self-control really be an issue? To even suggest such was to make fat a moral issue — and how appropriate was that? No, it was all a matter of using nutritional science to "trick" the body into doing what it should be doing anyway.

The new boundary-free notions about consumption weren't purely the provenance of diet books. In the South and in the Midwest, where conservative Christians had long valued such notions as self-control and personal responsibility, something was amiss as well — namely, a certain sin known as gluttony, which had somehow gotten a good name.

To be fair, it had never had a very bad one — at least not in the United States and not in most Protestant denominations. The seven deadly sins — those were largely Catholic notions, wrapped up as they were with papist ideas of sin and church-administered sacraments. (It says something that one of the most foreign-seeming things in the recent hit movie Chocolat was the obsession of the little French town's pious Catholic elder with the sin of gluttony.)

Yet the sin of overconsumption was something that had preoccupied a number of American clerics over the years. The early

FAT LAND

nineteenth century's Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and the inventor of the graham cracker, had regularly attacked overeating as the source of moral turpitude. As Graham saw it, overeating was a form of overstimulation, which could lead to no end of sinful behaviors.

Later anti-gluttons took a more pragmatic tack. In the 1950s, Charles Shedd, another Presbyterian, wrote a book entitled Pray Your Weight Away. Its message was simple: God did not make man to be fat. "When God first dreamed you into creation," Shedd wrote, "there weren't one hundred pounds of excess avoirdupois hanging around your belt." By being fat one was cutting oneself off from the joy that Christ had died to confer on us all. Shedd thus proposed a series of prayer-based activities designed to right the imbalance. There were mealtime affirmations like "Today my body belongs to God. Today I live for him. Today I eat with him." There was faith-based physical exercise. One involved fifteen minutes of karate kicks, executed while reciting the third chapter of Proverbs; another required one to time one's sits-ups to the spoken rhythm of Psalm 19. As R. Marie Griffith, the author of God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, observes, Shedd was particularly noteworthy because "he balanced his moral rebuke with positive thinking." His message persisted well into the early 1970s, when he published The Fat Is in Your Head.

By then things in the American congregation were changing. Fundamentalism brought with it a revival of biblical literalism, and the view that the spiritual world is split between the soul and the body. This worldview had a strange effect on the priority one placed on such things as fatness or thinness, let alone general health. As the Christian journal Communique noted in 2000, "Literalists are prone to view biblical texts denouncing 'the flesh' as references to the human body, instead of as symbolic of our human sin nature. Thus, they reason that since the body is evil and mortal, and the soul good and immortal, our priority is to nurture the soul, even if it means neglecting the body." With their

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

reliance placed firmly on a personal Savior, the new conservative Christians also tended to be more fatalistic when it came to illness; He would take care of them, fat or thin. And fat — that seemed to come more naturally.

It was also politically pragmatic. For the leaders of many American congregations, the challenge of the era was competing with the permissiveness rising in secular America. That meant "a little bit o' sugar," as one pastor recalls. Along with literalist, moral preaching about things like homosexuality and abortion would come a new tolerance for "the little sins." (Later on, when many of the new leaders had had their own personal failings televised widely, this doctrine became self-protective as well.) New seminarians were thus told that "holding the flock together" meant accentuating similarities. The same thing was taking place within more liberal circles. At places like Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, the student bookstore carried more titles about self-acceptance than it did about traditional moral failings. (Asked where a book about gluttony or sloth might be shelved, a visitor was told: "Where else? In self-help.") The end result of this reorientation, as Marie Griffith says, was that "the American church became like therapy. It was suddenly all about love and tolerance and acceptance, not about individual discipline."

There is, of course, a societal cost to religion's abandonment of the little sins. Religion, like belts or modest meal portions or argumentative family dinners, is a maker of boundaries. Religious beliefs generate the development of moral communities, which, in turn, serve to guide and constrain the action of individuals. As the sociologist Emile Durkheim observed early in the twentieth century, without a religion's "system of interdicts," a society will flounder. (Toynbee agreed, albeit in a secular manner, by noting that the disintegration of a civilization is always marked by "a surrender to a sense of promiscuity.") The relevant point here is clear. If, as Durkheim concluded, God and society "are only one," can there ever be a little sin, at least where religion is concerned?

FAT LAND

By the '90s, with such purely theological considerations aside, scholars who studied the sociology of religion began to notice a growing trend: Not only did religion no longer address overcon-sumption, it seemed somehow implicated in just the opposite — in aiding and abetting overeating. In a 1998 study looking at 3500 U.S. adults, the Purdue University sociologist Kenneth F. Ferraro sought to find out the answer to two interrelated questions: One, was religion related to body weight, especially obesity, and two, did religion intensify, mitigate, or counterbalance the effects of body weight on well-being? To the first, the answer was qualified: Obesity was highest in states where religious affiliation was highest, but the specific differences in body weight between groups were more likely explained by differences in class, ethnicity, and marital status. Of all the religious groups surveyed, Southern Baptists were heaviest, followed by Fundamentalist and Pietistic Protestants. Catholics fell at the middle of the list, while the lowest average body weight was found among Jews and non-Christians. Surveying attitudes within those groups, Ferraro concluded that obesity was associated with higher levels of religiosity. If one calculated in the fact that many of these believers were also of low socioeconomic status, one could almost conclude that eating and religion had become a unified coping strategy. "Consolation and comfort from religion and from eating," Ferraro wrote, "may be a couple of the few pleasures accessible to populations which are economically and politically deprived."

To the second question — did modern religion act to inhibit gluttony or obesity — the answer was more surprising. It didn't. Instead, the church had become a nest of unqualified social acceptance. As Ferraro wrote: "There is no evidence of religion operating as a moral constraint on obesity." Instead, Ferraro went on, "higher religious practice was more common among overweight persons, perhaps reflecting religion's emphasis upon tolerating human weakness and its emphasis upon other forms of deviancy such as alcoholism, smoking and sexual promiscuity."

WHO LET THE CALORIES IN

Ferraro warned that it wasn't that religion indirectly promoted higher body weight. Rather, most pastors simply saw obesity and overeating as too risky a subject. 'They feel they would risk alienating the flock — at least at this point," says Ferraro. "In that sense we are in a stage with obesity like we were with smoking in the 1950s and 1960s."

And so when it came to overeating, gluttony, and obesity, Christians, like everyone else in America, were in deep, deep denial. As Jerry Falwell said when he heard about Ferraro's findings, "I know gluttony is a bad thing. But I don't know many gluttons."

Family, school, culture, religion — in the late twentieth century, the figurative belt had not only been loosened, it had come off. But what of the literal belt? What of the most traditional measure — and reminder — of excess girth?

While it was true that Americans had been dressing more casually for much of the '60s and '70s, it was also true that they had retained a notion that a good public figure was a lean public figure. High and, more important, middle fashion certainly promoted that, particularly the ultra-slim fashions of the disco years. Jeans companies, particularly Levi Strauss, had not only serviced those inclinations but also helped to create them. The firm's ultra-slim cuts of the late 1970s were so ubiquitous as to inspire caricature in a number of teen movies. A typical scene took place in a Valley jeans boutique, where the jeans were so slim — and the girls so determined to wear them — that they all had to lie down on the floor and wiggle like worms in order to get into the tiny pants.

By the mid-1980s, however, both Levi Strauss and its new competitor, the Gap, had retooled their sizing. Market research had shown that the boomers — the spenders — were getting larger, and, typically, that they did not want to be reminded of their largeness. Nearly overnight, the ultra-slim cuts were gone. In fact, what was once a regular cut was now a "slim cut." And