Michiko Kakutani, Land of the Free, Home of the Fat nytimes.com
[ A review of FAT LAND: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, By Greg Critser. Clip: ]
As he sees it, several developments in the last few decades are to blame for our thickening waistlines and widening butts. To begin with, Mr. Critser argues, two developments that occurred under the 1970's aegis of President Richard Nixon's secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, helped alter the American diet for the worse: corn surpluses led to the production of an inexpensive sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup — which both Coke and Pepsi and dozens of other companies were quick to adopt — and cheap imports of palm oil, combined with new technologies, led to the embrace by convenience-food makers of this highly saturated fat.
Because the body processes fructose differently from sucrose or dextrose, Mr. Critser suggests, its overuse may skew "the national metabolism toward fat storage." As for palm oil and palm kernel oil, he says, "both are implicated in insulin resistance," and "both tend to raise total and LDL, or `bad,' cholesterol, thereby contributing to atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease."
As sugar- and fat-rich snack foods became easier and more affordable to manufacture, there was a proliferation of high-calorie products: "Where all through the 1960's and 1970's the number of yearly new candy and snack products remained stable — at about 250 a year — that number jumped to about 1,000 by the mid-1980's and to about 2,000 by the late 1980's."
At the same time, fast-food portions were starting to inflate: the Del Taco Macho Meal weighed in at four pounds, while 7-Eleven's Double Gulp was five times larger than a standard can of soda. A serving of McDonald's French fries, Mr. Critser reports, "ballooned from 200 calories (1960) to 320 calories (late 1970's) to 450 calories (mid-1990's) to 540 calories (late 1990's) to the present 610 calories." By the end of the 20th century supersizing had become the norm; between 1977 and 1995, the Department of Agriculture reported, average individual caloric intake increased by almost 200 calories a day.
[ my personal take on this is that the fat/carbo angle isn't all that big a deal when the overall calories are going up, up, up. Like money and oil, calories are fungible. If you want to talk evolution and genetics, we're probably programmed to stuff ourselves every chance we get, lest the lean years start tomorrow. ] |
