Fat Land

In Fatland, Crister traces America's obesity epidemic to Richard Nixon. Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of Agriculture initiated a new free trade policy to reverse declining farm incomes and rising consumer prices. The policy change coincided with Japan pioneering high fructose corn syrup and Malaysia making palm oil commercially viable. These three ingredients made Americans fat.

During the 1980s fast food restaurants discovered customers would pay for value and returned for larger sizes. Fullness became a relative concept as chains super sized servings through the 1990s. And Americans ate it up, increasing the number of meals consumed outside the house.

Here my narrative diverges from Crister. Crister discusses how the government, church, and media all lowered standards to make fat people feel accepted. Unlike the 1950’s, fat people were no longer shamed as ugly, unhealthy gluttons. But the casual link between what these institutions say and what people do is dubious. Nancy Regan's “just say no” and the war on drugs didn't stop Americans from using drugs, Catholics get divorced and have abortions despite the church teaching, and the media’s condemnation didn’t stop Trump from the wining the Electoral College. But truly, each of these three institutions are too diverse to paint with a single brush.

Crister finds additional obesity causes by poverty: poor whites in Appalachia and the rural south, inner city blacks, and new immigrants from Latin America. He finds the last group whipsawed by hunger in their native country and excess in their new.

Crister concludes with some interesting science on how the body will more likely store high fructose corn syrup as fat than glycogen, how obese mothers are more likely to pass on obesity to thier children and how Latin American immigrants oxidize fat differently. He further catalogues all the health consequences of obesity from diabities and heart disease to asthma and acne.

In the end he finds obesity to be a class issue inversely related to socioeconomic status. The educated rich know the cost of excess and the rich shame fat. Crister’s own health journey started when someone called him a fatso. Stigma, not media, political, or religious oratory can be effective, but not at the price society pays.

I struggled though Crister's USA Today prose. He refers to an actuarial study by MetLife and then later as by Metropolitan Life. He refers to East LA as our Ellis Island, missing the point that Ellis Island was a pass through station in front of a major railroad terminus. Immigrants came through Ellis Island and if they passed they got on train to somewhere else. That's not east LA. He terms Appalachian whites as chronically impovrished, but in the same sentence, he describes inner city blacks as structurally poor when the same endless cycle of poverty equally plagues both groups.

Prose reflects thinking and this is true in Crister's solution to obesity. His solution reflects the have it now thinking that causes obesity and spur fad diets. A better solution has a longer horizon. We need a cultural change. Better education and prosperity can help. Agricultural policy needs to encourage Organic, nutrient rich food farmed sustainably. Food stamps need health guidelines. Junk food taxes should be analogized to the cigarette tax. Obesity is the new smoking. The social stigma will trail the positive agents of change.