September 03, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Final post on diet, for
Final post on diet, for those who aren't thoroughly sick of the subject.
Ultimately, the main point that I wanted to make about the Taubes article is that Taubes was taking two trends -- the increase in our national consumption of carbohydrates, and the increase in obesity nationwide -- and saying that since they were both rising at the same time, the one must be causing the other. This is the worst sort of statistical nonsense unless it's backed up by solid regression analysis, and not only did Taubes fail to do any sort of real analysis, but also, the data he was looking at yielded a simpler answer, one with more scientific evidence to back it up -- according to the FDA, we didn't just increase our carbohydrate intake, we increased the number of calories we consume. There's no need to posit some conspiracy of pigheaded doctors Refusing to See the Light, although of course that makes a better story; we were eating more than we expended. Surprise! We got fatter.
So what do I think is the culprit? Well, Taubes might be surprised to find that I agree with him -- we ate too much sugar. 30 pounds more per person, per year. But I don't think it's because the government told us to, although it might have been because that's what we wanted to hear.
But actually, there's an even more interesting explanation than that. It has to do with the revolution in portion sizes we've undergone since the 1950's. Consider that, according to Fast Food Nation, in the 1950's the average fast food soft drink was eight ounces. Eght ounces! Hardly enough for a modern American to wet his throat. McDonalds sold hamburgers, cheesburgers, and the equivalent of today's small fries. And your typical family going out for dinner had one burger, one eight ounce soft drink or milk shake, and a small fries. How many of you ordered that daintily the last time you went out for some fast food?
A look through the 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook is instructive. It's filled with ways to economize, substituting bread and noodles and cheese for meat, making cakes that don't use expensive butter or eggs, dressing up horrible processed things with tomato sauce or pimientos to make them palatable. When was the last time you ate oatmeal because you couldn't afford the eggs? We didn't get scammed into getting fat; we got rich.
We also got marketing savvy. The revolution in portion sizes that we've undergone is not merely a function of better production efficiency or richer consumers; it's also a product of what we've learned about human consumption patterns since then.
Back in the 1970's, Pepsi wanted to study peoples' beverage consumption patterns in order to figure out how better to market their product. To that end, they gave some families an unlimited supply of Pepsi to see how much, and what, they would drink.
What they found was astounding. It didn't matter how much soda they gave them; they drank it all. They kept increasing the weekly ration, and the families kept pouring whatever they sent them straight down their gullets.
Out of this revelation was born the two liter bottle. And the Big Gulp. And the supersize. Remember, almost none of a fast food processors cost stems from the ingredients; most of it comes from the real estate, the advertising, and the labor. If they can get you to pay more money by selling you a huge portion, most of the extra money you give them is pure profit. Thus the proliferation of leviathan meals across the land. And not merely in fast food restaurants. Unless you're at a really top of the line restaurant, the kind most Americans can't afford to enter, the average restaurant portion is 2-3 times the size of a healthy meal. And as a nation, we're eating out more than ever.
But don't get too busy blaming the fast food companies. We're the ones opening our gullets and shoving a pound of french fries down there. The only reason they can sell it to us is that we're buying it. And don't give me that hogwash about how people don't know that it's bad for them. My grandmother's high school health class textbook says nary a word about calories, but she can tell you what makes you fat -- big, heavy meals, and lots of sweets. Those people on the street toting an extra hundred pounds or so did not spring from some primeval glade where the innocent natives were unaware of the relationship between the food you consume and the weight you gain; they came from the same culture you and I did, where everyone is well aware that if you eat too much, it shows. They may not have wanted to believe this. They may have denied it. Or they may have temporarily forgotten it for the purposes of consuming a Supersize Big Mac Meal (1600 calories and twice your fat RDA if you order it with a regular coke. And thank you, Dr. Atkins, but the carbs aren't the culprit -- well over half the calories in that meal come from fat.) But they weren't innocent victims of the lying, rapacious food processors who duped them into believing that a chocolate shake had the same health properties as a stick of celery.
The real question is why the Europeans aren't getting fat. After all, people everywhere like consuming soda. And it's not like the marketers there aren't aware of this phenomenon -- they sell 2 liter bottles everywhere now. But restaurant portions in Europe are tiny compared to those sold here. And you can get on a bus without getting whacked every three seconds by someone's spare tire.
Part of the answer is that they're poorer. They don't just eat less; they excercise more; outside of the cities (and New Yorkers, too, are skinnier than their country cousins), no one walks anywhere any more. I was in the Philadelphia suburbs this weekend, and I walked five minutes to the convenience store rather than go to the trouble of getting into my car. From the looks I got, you would have thought I was skipping along the roadway in a Dorothy costume singing the Liebestod aria from Tristan and Isolde.
Part of the answer is that agricultural subsidies there bias shelf space towards natural foods, and who wants to drink two liters of milk while watching the World Cup?
And part of the answer is that they are getting fatter. The British Isles are close to passing us in the Millenial Obesity Challenge. And portion sizes there are exploding. With the proles lining up twenty-deep at Mickey D's, can Europe be far behind?
So I think that Taubes was engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking we all do when we're dieting. We want there to be a magic bullet, an easy answer -- something other than "eat less, move more". But getting the nations on Atkins isn't the answer. As long as we are a sedentary nation with an overstuffed diet, we'll continue to expand.
What is the answer? Child, if I knew that, I wouldn't be running this blog. I'd be off making my fortune in the weight loss business. But for a start, how about turning off the computer, getting out of your chair, and walking around for a little while?
Posted by Jane Galt at September 3, 2002 03:00 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links