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You Can't Teach Away Fat

Olga Khazan |
February 25, 2010 | 7:29 a.m. PST

Senior Editor

Creative Commons Licensed (Marshall Astor)
One of the countless by-products of the healthcare debate seems to be a renewed vitriol against fat. 
For decades, we've been trying to politely edge fat out of the realm of social acceptance by sending emaciated fashion models down runways and putting nymph-sized actresses on movie screens. But that pesky American tendency toward doughiness persists nonetheless.
Up to a third of us are obese, and if only we could lose all that weight,  we could save oh so much money on healthcare. No more pricey triple bypasses, no more kids on insulin. Diabetes, heart attacks, cancer -- all these would go the way of scurvy and smallpox, or so the thinking goes.
And when it's not just lives, but money, that's on the line, the wonks decide it's time to intervene.
On Wednesday, Governor Schwarzenegger hosted the 2010 summit on Health, Nutrition and Obesity in downtown L.A., hoping that, with a little help from Bill Clinton, they could come up with some "concrete actions" to stop childhood obesity. 
A few weeks ago, Michelle Obama announced her "Let's Move" initiative to try to get kids back on the kickball field, or at the very least, in front of the WiiKickball.
In his obesity-denouncing Ted talk, jaunty haired culinary Briton Jamie Oliver spoke about the time he visited a West Virginia mom and tried to get her to get her to feed her family more kale, or something.
 "You're killing your kids," Oliver said, sitting down next to her before a kitchen table covered in a trans-fatty mountain of corn dogs and pizza from her freezer.
"Yes, you are," he said, clutching her shoulder as tears streamed down her face.
No, she isn't. 
Or not willfully, at least.
There's a tendency to assume that the obesity epidemic is something we brought upon ourselves out of negligence. 
But there hasn't been a switch flipped in the American psyche that has caused us to want to treat our bodies terribly and shorten the life spans of our children. It's more often food prices and poor urban planning that are to blame.
American food is not categorically worse than that of other countries. I'm sure Oliver has seen a British pub menu, which would put anything on thisiswhyyourefat.com to shame. Even the Japanese, who do indeed consume vast amounts of raw fish and seaweed, also tend to deep-fry their carrots for no apparent reason.
Instead, it's the fat-inducing structure of modern American life that has pushed our knack for potato chips into a national obesity crisis. People like to feel good, and unfortunately, most suburban lifestyles offer us very few healthy, low-cost ways to do so. 
The vast majority of American cities are not walkable (or bikeable). You get in a car to get to school or work, where you sit at a desk all day, eat reconstituted corn-based meat product for lunch, and go home to watch television because there isn't anywhere to go to socialize but Applebees. To make matters worse, if you've come upon hard economic times, you eat French fries off the dollar menu because you can't afford vegetables from Trader Joe's. Not to mention that there is no Trader Joe's where you live.
State and federal governments can urge people to eat right and exercise all they want. But only when anyone can walk to a produce store, when rough neighborhoods become safer for kids to play in and when the government stops subsidizing corn-laded crap, will policy-makers have the right to chide Americans for their girth.


 

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