Although obesity is nothing new in America, there have been recent attempts to look at the epidemic (that's the CDC's description) with a fresh focus. Yes, we're too fat and have heart attacks and diabetes because we eat too much, but why do we eat so much more than other countries?
More specifically, why have we become so fat in only 20 years? The average adult weighs nearly 20 pounds more than his or her '70s counterpart. The number of overweight children has doubled and the number of overweight teenagers has tripled. As a nation, we've added billions of pounds.
The New Yorker attempts to answer the second question via several reviews of what it calls "weight-gain books." The first is The Evolution of Obesity, which argues that the downside of having a big brain is needing lots of energy to run it:
According to what's known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, earlyThe problem with this theory is that while weight gain would have been an advantage for our ancestors mentally, it would have been a significant disadvantage physically, and a lion doesn't care how smart you are if he catches you.humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back
on the energy used in their guts; as man's cranium grew, his digestive
tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than
his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding
further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a
strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest;
just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for
people to love funnel cakes.
Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in thepast few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a
bargain. Between 1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils declined
by sixteen per cent. During the same period, the real cost of soft
drinks dropped by more than twenty per cent... Today, soft drinks account for about seven per
cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them
"the number one food consumed in the American diet."
But like the obesity-is-due-to-evolution theory, the economic theory fails to account for all the weight gain.
Of the four other books reviewed, the one that comes closest to answering
the $90 billion question (that's how much we spend on
healthcare per year for overweight people) is Mindless Eating by Cornell professor Brian Wansink. First published three years ago, it argues that food isn't the problem, portion size is.
Consider the movie-matinée experiment. Some years ago, Wansink andhis graduate students handed out buckets of popcorn to
Saturday-afternoon film-goers in Chicago.... Some patrons got medium-sized buckets of stale popcorn and some
got large ones.... After the film, Wansink weighed the
remaining kernels. He found that people who'd been given bigger buckets
had eaten, on average, fifty-three per cent more.
In another
experiment, Wansink invited participants to cook dinner for themselves
with ingredients that he provided. One group got big boxes of pasta and
big bottles of sauce, a second smaller boxes and smaller bottles. The
first group prepared twenty-three per cent more, and downed it all.... "Give them a lot and they eat a lot," he writes.
Across the board -- from recommended portion sizes to recipes in
cookbooks to the invention of the supersize -- all foods have become
bigger. So if you're trying to lose weight, it's not so much about eating different foods as about smaller sizes. Though who knows, maybe that extra 20 pounds is because of some homo erectus ancestor.
Showing 1-1 of 1
And did you read about the study that found portion sizes have grown progressively larger across succeeding editions of Joy of Cooking? Here's one item on it: http://www.foodpolitics.com/20...
like
dislike
