Fat nation

I was on line in a bank with a friend, looking at the lead article in today’s New York Times, about the epidemic of diabetes in New York City, especially among minorities and also among children, which 20 years ago was unheard of. While diabetes can be an inherent disease not due to the person’s own behavior, in the great majority of cases it is caused by eating too much high-sugar, high-fat foods and not getting exercise. Considering the shocking spread of hugely overweight people in our society, a high rate of diabetes is also to be expected. As we were discussing this , a young woman ahead of us in the line turned toward us and said, “It’s because healthy food is too expensive, so people have to eat junk food.” I said, “Hamburger is not expensive.” She said, “Hamburger is not healthy.” I said, “Hamburger doesn’t cause diabetes.”

Such is the liberal mind. If there’s a social problem, any social problem, it’s caused by the inequality brought about by an oppressive economic system. In the world according to the liberal script, inequality forces people to eat lots of candy and potato chips. So America—a country in which food, including healthy food, is cheaper in relation to income than in any country on earth—is blamed for people indulging themselves with junk food. Of course, America is to be blamed, not for supposedly oppressing poor minorities, but for making high-caloric food, particularly junk food, more accessible to more people than in any society in history, while simultaneously relieving people of all standards external to the self and its desires. Overweightness is thus both a manifestation and a symbol of the worship of the self in contemporary culture.

Low IQ people seem particularly prone to eating junk food and not exercising. That is not a racial comment. The fattest people I’ve ever seen, and in great numbers—it was a shocking experience, I’m not talking about mere overweightness here, but about a whole different shape and scale of the human body, like seeing a new species branching off from Homo sapiens—were at the New York State Fair near Syracuse, New York a couple of years ago. And all of these oversized humans were lower-class whites. But so self-indulgent—not oppressively unequal—is America that the phenomenon is spreading beyond the lower classes to the middle classes. Last year in Northern Minnesota I saw middle class white people the size of the Hindenburg.

[Note: many more readers comments have been added since early Monday afternoon.]

Mr. Anachronism writes:

Mr. Anachronism would not be quite so censorious. There are a large number of persons of peasant stock in our population, whose metabolisms have evolved to withstand occasional famines. Put that together with the explosion of junk-food sources, mothers working outside the home, the decline of families dining together, lots of disposable income in the pockets of the young, etc., etc., and what do you get? Disgusting fat people! Poor Mr. Anachronism himself has 300-pound male ancestors on both sides of his present avatar, and if he ate just a normal American diet, even without any severely gross excesses of slobbering Roman indulgence, he would balloon up to 280 in a trice. He must restrict himself to an average intake of 1900 calories a day (thank God for calamari) to stay under 210 pounds, and persons less obsessive about record-keeping than Mr. A simply aren’t going to be able to do that. Thus, the Hindenburgs and von Zeppelins in our midst.

By the way, I was quite Surpriz’d & Honour’d to see passages penned at this desk turn up in your esteem’d Columns.

Respectfully yours,

Mr. A.

I agree with Mr. Anachronism about the factors he mentions that encourage overweightness. Nevertheless, I submit that people would not accept being that large, unless society—meaning other people—had given them the message that it was ok. In the name of equality (not inequality), our society has eliminated standards, and so made it ok for people to go around in public looking like human dirigibles.

Another reader writes:

I would like to comment on your article “Fat Nation.”

When I lived in Russia, we did not eat healthier food, we ate unhealthy food, but we ate less. That’s why diabetes was rare. However, complaints about society that it “makes” people eat unhealthy are not completely unjustified. This society gave every person the right and the ability to live any way they want; and many people just cannot cope with this freedom. I believe the complaint should be interpreted as a wish to live in a more restrictive society, with more discipline imposed on people by authorities. Freedom works well only for those who can control themselves.

An Indian living in the West writes:

Modern American society is one of the most egalitarian in history. In the past, going back to the medieval period, real inequality existed during feudalism. But the serfs and most noblemen were not obese. India is a very unequal society even now. And the majority of people are not obese (although obesity has increased of late even with a greater equalizing of social conditions in recent times).

Americans are the same genetic stock as Europeans and yet you will struggle to see overweight people like that in Europe. In London it is almost unusual to see really fat women (of the type you’ve described). Even women in their 40s and 50s regularly exercise in the gym. And the other point about the “peasant propensity” to store food is actually rubbish. The vast majority of extremely obese people have too much High GI Carbohydrate in their diet (this includes excessive intake of sugary stuff like chocolates and so on).

It is true that some people have high metabolisms and they won’t get really fat even if they eat a lot. However, even people who say they have a slow metabolism can lose weight rapidly if they stick to a low carbohydrate diet and also do cardiovascular exercise. However, this only works if people have DISCIPLINE.

It has to do with self-indulgence. Again, there is probably less economic inequality in America now than there was a hundred years ago. But people as obese as this were a lot rarer back then. How, if inequality is the explanation?

Liberals are essentially brain dead. Their brains function like the customer services help line of a badly run company that lists out a set of standard responses and if your query doesn’t fit, it just wants you to fit it into one of the categories listed.

I speak with some confidence on this issue because I work out regularly in the gym and have a regimented diet – not because I get too fat but because I was once very scrawny and had to work very hard to put on muscle.

Another reader writes:

Your comments on gluttony recall the observations of Paul Fussell and Jonathan Raban over 20 years ago. In Class (1983), Fussell cites a diet-book ad claiming obesity is “four times more prevalent” in the lower-middle than in the upper-middle and middle classes, then adds:

“And not just four times more prevalent. Four times more visible, for flaunting obesity is a prole sign, as if the object were to offer maximum aesthetic offense to the higher classes and thus exact a form of revenge. Jonathan Raban, watching people at the Minnesota State Fair, was vouchsafed a spectacle suggesting calculated, vigorously intentional obesity:

“’These farming families … were the descendants of hungry immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia … Generation by generation, their families had eaten themselves into Americans. Now they all had the same figure: same broad bottom, same buddha belly, same neckless join between turkey-wattle chin and sperm-whale torso. The women had poured themselves into pink elasticized pantsuits; the men swelled against every seam and button of their plaid shirts and Dacron slacks.’

“ … Raban found himself so fascinated by U.S.A. fat that he proposes a Fatness Map, which would indicate that the fattest people live in areas where the immigration has been the most recent and ‘ancestral memories of hunger closest.’ On the other hand, ‘states… settled before 1776 would register least in the way of fatty tissue. Girth would generally increase from east to west and from south to north. The flab capital of the U.S.A. should be located somewhere in the triangle of Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas.’”

(This part is questionable. There is plenty of fat in the South, and Philadelphia was recently tagged as the country’s fattest city.)

Your comments on the N.Y. State Fair, near where I grew up, just intensify my suspicion that evil, devious downstaters are deliberately leaching the sensible middle-class out of Upstate, in order to make the state that much “bluer.” (Perhaps in revenge for their rejection of native son FDR, unique in presidential history?)

Some recent class-line blurring on overweight might stem from the strange embrace of the white-trash Clintons by the otherwise ultra-fit “New Class.” That phenomenon confused everybody.

another reader writes:

I submit to you the following: Zeppelin, Hindenburg, Hamburger. All words used in your article, all of German origin! Like much else that troubles our world, this too is the Germans’ fault! No wonder the Germans are so self-hating…

Fatness is obviously a subject of great interest. Here are several more e-mails received today:

A reader writes:

Mr. Auster:

First let me say that your post is very funny, mostly because it was you who said those things. In Cicero’s De Oratore there is a lengthy discussion of humor where it is observed that witticisms are made funnier when uttered by those with grave demeanors. In your writings you come across as very serious.

But I think both of the comments to your post miss the mark. Mr. Anachronism’s thesis that there is a sub-variety of “peasant-stock” to this species is unfounded (I know he didn’t characterize it this way but he’s the one who took the genetics tack). We cannot presume that the proportion of peasant lineage among whites in America has increased in the last 20 years. And no matter how “disposed” you are to gain wait, you have to eat like it’s a job to get a fat as the people at whom you marveled.

There is a biological component, however (although standing alone it cannot account for the phenomenon). The strange emphasis in our diet on the huge amount of “complex” carbs, as put forth in the Dept of Agriculture’s Food Pyramid. Six to Eleven servings of starches is just plain gorging on the worst carbs there are (at least table sugar has to travel to the liver to be converted to glucose). Of course, only those who are ill enough to be placed on such a diet by an “expert” will actually follow these recommendations, but the Pyramid is illustrative of our waywardness. I hate to bring up fad diets, but if you’ve read The Zone you understand that it’s based on the pre-historical diet of our species as determined from the fossil record—the precise opposite of a “fad.” The introduction of agricultural (grain) products into the diet around 10,000 years ago (more recently in some areas, like the Americas), although having immediate deleterious effects (decreased stature, increased mortality, loss of bone density and tooth rot), did not kill sufficient numbers of people before procreation age to give rise to a rapid genetic adaption to the new food source. (Mr. A’s thesis runs contrary, putting forth a much more rapid and smaller-scale adaption.) In other words, according to their biology people still should be eating like hunter-gatherers. (As an undergraduate I confirmed these bare facts of pre-historic nutrition with the Anthropology department [which contains a very serious Archaeology dept]).

The Russian comes closer to the truth, I think. Obviously, most people cannot control themselves, but need external contraint. To one raised in a totalitarian state, this would call to mind a need for “authorities,” i.e., other people with the power to dictate such affairs. With this I disagree. Freedom itself is not the problem, but the lack of a counterpoint to freedom. To Tocqueville is appeared that Americans previously were able to manage freedom very well only because their Chrisitan faith supplied that necessary counterpoint. But as much as we nowadays consider “faith” to be subjective, it really supplies an external contraint on individual desires, which are never extinguished. In the alternative, I would say good-ole-fashioned shame would have done the trick against this type of repulsive vice, but this broader cultural pressure may have derived as well from Christianity.

This is a long way to say that I think you got to the kernel of the problem the first time. It results from idolatry—the worship of the Self. These other things—assertions regarding inequality, “problems” of liberty, and genetics, are mere rationalizations.

To be fair to Mr. A., I come from a fat family, too, and was a very obese kid. But the 1900 calories/day standard he’s on suggests that he’s following the advice of the Food Pyramid. If he replaced the starches with fruits and vegetables he’d have no problem.

This reader has a surprising explanation of why we don’t see hyper-fat Europeans:

One of your readers wrote the following:

“Americans are the same genetic stock as Europeans and yet you will struggle to see overweight people like that in Europe. In London it is almost unusual to see really fat women (of the type you’ve described). Even women in their 40s and 50s regularly exercise in the gym.

The reason why you don’t see too many overweight people in Europe is not because the Europeans are more “disciplined” (if that were the case, then their economies would not be in the toilet). They are not overweight because food is horrendously expensive. An example: my mother was visiting a friend in Germany who then took her to visit a friend in Denmark. Being hospitable people, the Danish couple served what my mother described as the smallest meal she ever saw (and my mother is a health nut). She later find out why: food prices in Denmark are extraordinarily high. A raw chicken, for example, costs $7 (American) a pound. Imagine that…paying $7 a pound for raw chicken. Now imagine paying that with per capita GDP’s half the size of the United States. If the drive is not too far, Scandinavian citizens sometimes do their grocery shopping in Poland.

In contrast, Americans can buy 500 calories for $1 at a McDonald’s dollar menu. Ergo, people are fat.

Comments like the above are just one of the many off-base things Europeans say. Another is their ridiculous “feel for the road” and “driving pleasure” crap as an explanation for why so many cars over there have manual transmissions. The reality is they are too poor to upgrade to automatics.

Equally wrong-headed are comments like the following:

“When I lived in Russia, we did not eat healthier food, we ate unhealthy food, but we ate less. That’s why diabetes was rare.”

“Modern American society is one of the most egalitarian in history. In the past, going back to the medieval period, real inequality existed during feudalism. But the serfs and most noblemen were not obese. India is a very unequal society even now. And the majority of people are not obese (although obesity has increased of late even with a greater equalizing of social conditions in recent times).”

Yes. And you ate less because you were lucky to get a meal at all. Third-world levels of malnutrition and Middle-Ages levels of starvation coupled with back-breaking labor would certainly reduce obesity and diabetes. So what? I’ll take the gluttony and egalitarianism over that any day, problems or no.

As for why the upper classes tend to be thin? It’s probably due to fine-dining. Top-tier restaurants dole out small portions of food over long periods of time. At Chicago’s Tru restaurant, for example, a buddy of mine and his girlfriend were served a 12-course meal of tapas-sized portions over a dining period of four hours. Eat like that every day and your bound to stay thin…if you can afford the $600 price tag.

Another reader writes:

There are many sides of fat egalitarianism. I’d like to quote Dinesh D’Souza:

“Indeed, newcomers to the United States are struck by the amenities enjoyed by poor people. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s when CBS television broadcast a documentary, “People Like Us,” intended to show the miseries of the poor during an ongoing recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have TV sets, microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception that I witnessed in an acquaintance of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

Of course, on the same kind of theme we have the comment by a young Iranian after just seeing Michael Moore’s Farenheit 911:

“This guy gets to publicly accuse Bush of lying and becomes famous and adored worldwide. We, here, complain about some decrepit and inconsequential government lackey and we not only go to prison but some of us get death sentences. He ought to thank his lucky stars he lives in a country where he’s allowed and even encouraged to be this obnoxious…”

Another reader:

Yes, it is a fat nation. But more importantly, as you pointed out, it is an indulgent nation. How many food commercials does the average American see during his 2 hours of daily TV viewing? We are a fat nation for the same reason that during “Black Friday” consumers were trampling over each other at Circuit City at 4am to buy Flat Screen TVs. And this from the nation that “just can’t find the time” to read to their kids, or ride a bicycle, or go to Church…

Shrewsbury, who is a mail-order book dealer, has his own angle on fatness and U.S. geography:

By the way, a few months ago there was a map making the rounds showing the areas in the U.S. with the most fat people, and I could not but notice the close correlation between Fatness and low rates of mail-order book purchasing (e.g., Arkansas, Michigan), and, on the other hand, greater slenderity and high rates of mail-order book purchasing (e.g., Massachusetts, Oregon).

A reader writes:

The West side of Colorado Springs is very white, having few blacks until the Hurricane Katrina refugees showed up. Now I see a number of them every time I go to Wal-Mart and nearly every one of them is as big as a house. They’re not just a bit overweight, they’re mammoth. Even if they were white they would make quite a contrast as they mingle with the traditionally fit Coloradans.

Coincidentally, I recently met a middle-aged couple who run a homeless shelter in New Orleans, having moved there from another state shortly before Katrina hit. They told me that they were absolutely floored by the entitlement mentality of the New Orleans blacks, which far exceeded that of any other people they had associated with doing the same work in other cities. They said they were surprised that any of the blacks got out of New Orleans alive as they expect somebody else to do everything for them.

That’s the point, and not everybody gets it yet. We’re not talking here about fat, overweight people, or even very fat, overweight people. We’re talking about a different SCALE and SHAPE of the human body, something I personally never saw before the last several years.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 09, 2006 12:29 PM | Send