Eat this now!
It's everywhere. Tank up your car, and you walk past soft pretzels with cheese sauce. Grab a cup of coffee, and you see doughnuts, danishes, and cookies the size of hubcaps. Stop at Staples for an ink cartridge, and you confront candy bars at the register.
Stroll past the receptionist's desk at the office, and find somebody's leftover Christmas cookies, Valentine's Day candy, Easter Peeps, birthday cake, or vacation saltwater taffy. "We're just surrounded. Food is available every time you turn around," says Marilyn Tanner, dietitian at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Overeating and its lethal companion underexercising are the recognized culprits in this country's rise in obesity rates. Today, two thirds of American adults are obese or overweight. A national team of researchers reported in last week's New England Journal of Medicine that obesity already reduces the current life expectancy in the United States by four to nine months.
What's worse, they project that the rise in obesity rates among children and teens could knock off as many as five years from today's average of 77 years as overweight people in that generation grow up and die prematurely. Diseases associated with obesity, such as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and some cancers, are likely to strike at younger ages. It would be the first time in 200 years that children would be statistically likely to live shorter lives than their grandparents.
It's a controversial prediction, called speculative and "excessively gloomy" by Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania.
And the outcome is far from inevitable. All it would take to change that dire prediction is to have millions of people change their habits. That means diet, exercise, and a strong will within every individual to pass up high-calorie temptations. Right?
It's not that easy, as every failed and yo-yo dieter knows. The playing field is heavily tilted--by advertising, fast-paced lives, convenience foods, and treats every time you turn around--away from healthful eating choices. Many experts in nutrition, public health, and law believe that the national obesity problem doesn't simply come down to millions of failures of individual will.
Attitude shift. A generation ago, it was considered rude to eat in front of others. Now, Americans eat everywhere, all day long--an average of five meals a day, counting snacks. Cars have cupholders, but they arguably need trays, too. Americans eat 30 meals a year in their vehicles. "That's the average. I'm sure it's higher when it comes to people driving to work," said Harry Balzer, vice president of the NPD Group, a consumer marketing research firm that tracks how Americans eat. "Look at our cars. They look like restaurants."
Riddled with anxiety, we take our meals with equal parts pleasure and guilt. We might say an internal no a dozen times a day, then give in to the Krispy Kreme near the bus stop on the way home. Or if we pass up the doughnut shop, we get home only to find that the latest issue of Cooking Light has arrived in the mail--with a cover photo of pecan pie. We have few common rituals around dining but a common hurried pace through eating. All of these triggers and gustatory seductions play into an obesity epidemic--even as the messages manipulate the national obsession with health.
Food is more than a way of staying alive, more than an edible commodity. "Food is never just the physical product itself," says Stephanie Hartman, who teaches a course at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., called Food and Media. "It's invested with national meanings, associated with comfort and nostalgia. There are class associations. Food can be elegant or cultured." Or it can carry a reverse snobbery. Where once the elite sampled truffles, today they might seek the best barbecued ribs or the richest macaroni and cheese.
Certainly, the descendants of immigrants may still prepare pasta or pirogi recipes handed down from the old country, but Americans as a whole don't have shared food values. We don't all cook with the same oil, have an attachment to a certain variety of plum, or dine with predictable ceremony. Such culinary eclecticism may make us uniquely vulnerable to fads. "We don't have a culture of eating, a national cuisine, a traditional way of eating that guides us," says Tanner. "So we fall prey to the latest fad or scientific pronouncement. The fact that we're more responsive to medical trends makes us more responsive to marketing." As soon as science tells us that oat bran is good for preventing heart disease, people start buying potato chips sprinkled with oat bran. "This is who we are. We're always looking for the newest way to attack this problem. We're going to try to figure out this health issue by eating," says Balzer.
Why, even when we know better, do we succumb to the lure of rich desserts and nutritionally empty snacks? Why is the look--even stronger, the smell--of the forbidden so compelling? "I've seen evidence that bakeries and supermarkets pipe faked aromas out in the store," says Doug Kysar, a professor at Cornell Law School who teaches consumer law and studies deceptive advertising. "Things like taste and smell and sight can overcome one's awareness. The classic example is the candy gantlet at the supermarket. We have a long-term desire to maintain a healthful life, but the short-term desire can trump the long-term."
Marketers know what works. They tell us we're worth it, that we deserve it. "Magnify that by 45,000 different products, add in the fake bakery smell, the mood music in supermarkets calculated to lower blink rates to a somnolent state, the way the aisles are set up to keep people in the store for a longer time--that's an enormous amount of situational forces to weaken the will," says Kysar.
Food to sell. America is truly a horn of plenty. In the early 1980s, food production came to an average of 3,300 calories a day available to every person. Then farm policy changed, and farmers no longer plowed food under or slaughtered animals to be entitled to subsidies. Today, America produces enough food to allow every man, woman, and child 3,900 calories a day. "That additional food production had to be sold," says Marion Nestle, professor in the department of nutrition at New York University and author of Food Politics. "One of the first things that happened was portion sizes started getting bigger."
Many Americans feel entitled to big servings or a top-of-the-line chocolate bar as a way to get some short-term happiness. "You walk past a doughnut shop, and you say, 'Yum. Doughnuts.' Part of you says, 'No, I'll get fat.' But another part is like Scarlett O'Hara saying, 'Tomorrow is another day.' This feels good now," says Gail Saltz of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
Almost all of us are prone to comfort ourselves with food when we feel deprived in other ways. Many families have forsaken the shared meal and the long time of food preparation, dining, and cleanup as a communal effort. Along with it, they've lost an important psychological support. "If we take a good hour and a half to talk about our day, go slowly through the meal, maybe have a glass of wine--we're much more psychologically filled at the end of that meal than if I decide to eat alone. Then, I'm going to grab a hamburger and some chips," says psychoanalyst Kathryn Zerbe, vice chair for psychotherapy at Oregon Health and Science University.
Of course, we can just say no. But it's a David and Goliath fight. We're battling an entire environment, massive societal change, government policy, and billions of dollars in advertising.
With Elizabeth Querna
This story appears in the March 28, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.