Now here's an economic analysis of body-weight issues I can wrap my head around (in contrast to the specious plus-size-models-will-make-us-fat theory floated last week by the dim bulbs at the London School of Economics). In a book coming out next month titled The Changing Body, a team of economists traces what they describe as the most rapid transformation in the size, shape, and longevity of the human body to occur in millennia--if not in all of human history. And much of the change has occurred in the past century and a half; a time frame, they write, that is "minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution."
This transformation is essentially a triumph of technology and medicine. The result: the average American man in 1850 was 5 foot 7 and weighed about 146 pounds. By the 1980s he was 5 foot 10 and weighed 174. And if you stop right there, you're just fine: we humans got big and strong because we were so damn smart. We mastered our environment. Success writ large.
But if you do stop there you miss the huge, tragicomic twist in the story—the disastrous denouement. In the years since that nice trim ‘80s man was measured, people have ballooned. You know this, of course, because one would have to live on Mars not to have heard ad infinitum about the obesity epidemic, our current scourge. Nineteenth-century melancholics wasted away from consumption. Having conquered bacteria, twenty-first-century mankind, it seems, is sinking into the grave from sheer poundage.
The sad truth is that today’s average man is the same height as the 1980s man, but he now weighs 191—at the upper end of what the National Institutes of Health considers “overweight,” nearing the precipice of “obese.” The average woman is currently 5 foot 4 and
weighs 164, landing in precisely the same “high overweight” territory. The combined proportion of the population that is either overweight or obese has gone from one-half in 1960 to more than two-thirds in 2006—another minutely short time-frame with gigantic repercussions. This is where the money comes in…and where the whole mess begins to remind me of climate change. Yes, climate change! (If economists can talk about fat, surely I can mention the weather.) Both the obesity epidemic and climate change are the result of our human brilliance at bitch-slapping our poor Earth into submission—forcing her to produce more and more food; squeezing more and more energy out of her and tossing its byproducts up into her atmosphere.
And both problems face powerful forces of denial and resistance. Why? Just follow the money. The climate-change-deniers in the petroleum, steel, and many other industries resist any attempt to rein in emissions or otherwise risk putting a crimp in profits. And the multi-gazillion-dollar food industry, while making a cursory nod toward obesity problems (those cute little 100-calorie snack packs!), continues to focus almost exclusively on creating edibles that people literally cannot stop consuming. If you don’t want to take my word for it, read David Kessler’s fascinating and horrifying 2009 book, The End of Overeating, in which he exposes how food chemists work to circumvent our innate neural and biochemical cues to stop eating. Because yes, Virginia, there is an actual, physiological reason why it’s nearly impossible to eat just one Lay’s potato chip or Snackwell’s Devil’s Food cookie. And the people at these companies feel no compunction about finding ever more ways to tempt us toward killing ourselves with food. These days the powers-that-be at Kraft and Quaker and Nabisco strike me as akin to the folks at Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.
What can you do? Eat an apple instead of Apple Jacks? Well, it’s a start—and no one can mess with an apple.
So where’s the sex, you ask? That was false advertising; coming next time. Stay tuned.
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