Don’t Eat This Book

One

Do You Want Lies With That?

Don’t do it. Please. I know this book looks delicious, with its lightweight pages sliced thin as prosciutto and swiss, stacked in a way that would make Dagwood salivate. The scent of freshly baked words wafting up with every turn of the page. Mmmm, page. But don’t do it. Not yet. Don’t eat this book.

We turn just about everything you can imagine into food. You can eat coins, toys, cigars, cigarettes, rings, necklaces, lips, cars, babies, teeth, cameras, film, even underwear (which come in a variety of scents, sizes, styles and flavors). Why not a book?

In fact, we put so many things in our mouths, we constantly have to be reminded what not to eat. Look at that little package of silicon gel that’s inside your new pair of sneakers. It says DO NOT EAT for a reason. Somewhere, sometime, some genius bought a pair of sneakers and said, “Ooooh, look. They give you free mints with the shoes!”—soon followed, no doubt, by the lawsuit charging the manufacturer with negligence, something along the lines of, “Well, it didn’t say not to eat those things.”

And thus was born the “warning label.” To avoid getting sued, corporate America now labels everything. Thank the genius who first decided to take a bath and blow-dry her hair at the same time. The Rhodes scholar who first reached down into a running garbage disposal. That one-armed guy down the street who felt around under his power mower while it was running.

Yes, thanks to them, blow-dryers now come with the label DO NOT SUBMERGE IN WATER WHILE PLUGGED IN. Power mowers warn KEEP HANDS AND FEET AWAY FROM MOVING BLADES. And curling irons bear tags that read FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY.

And that’s why I warn you—please!—do not eat this book. This book is FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY. Except maybe as food for thought.

We live in a ridiculously litigious society. Opportunists know that a wet floor or a hot cup of coffee can put them on easy street. Like most of you, I find many of these lawsuits pointless and frivolous. No wonder the big corporations and the politicians they own have been pushing so hard for tort reform.

Fifty years ago it was a different story. Fifty years ago, adult human beings were presumed to have enough sense not to stick their fingers in whirring blades of steel. And if they did, that was their own fault.

Take smoking. For most of us, the idea that “smoking kills” is a given. My mom and dad know smoking is bad, but they don’t stop. My grandfather smoked all the way up until his death at a grand old age, and my folks are just following in his footsteps—despite the terrifying warning on every pack.

They’re not alone, of course. It’s estimated that over a billion people in the world are smokers. Worldwide, roughly 5 million people died from smoking in 2000. Smoking kills 440,000 Americans every year. All despite that surgeon general’s warning on every single pack.

What is going on here? It’s too easy to write off all billion-plus smokers as idiots with a death wish. My parents aren’t idiots. I don’t think they want to die. (When I was younger, there were times when I wanted to kill them, but that’s different.) We all know that tobacco is extremely addictive. And that the tobacco companies used to add chemicals to make cigarettes even more addictive, until they got nailed for it. And that for several generations—again, until they got busted for it—the big tobacco companies aimed their marketing and advertising at kids and young people. Big Tobacco spent billions of dollars to get people hooked as early as they could, and to keep them as “brand-loyal” slaves for the rest of their unnaturally shortened lives. Cigarettes were cool, cigarettes were hip, cigarettes were sexy. Smoking made you look like a cowboy or a movie starlet.

And it worked. When my parents were young, everybody smoked. Doctors smoked. Athletes smoked. Pregnant women smoked. Their kids came out of the womb looking around the delivery room for an ashtray to ash their Lucky Strikes. Everyone smoked.

The change began in 1964, when the first surgeon general’s warning about smoking and cancer scared the bejesus out of everybody. In 1971, cigarette ads were banned from TV, and much later they disappeared from billboards. Little by little, smoking was restricted in airplanes and airports, in public and private workplaces, in restaurants and bars. Tobacco sponsorship of sporting events decreased. Tighter controls were placed on selling cigarettes to minors. Everyone didn’t quit overnight, but overall rates of smoking began to decrease—from 42 percent of adults in 1965 to 23 percent in 2000, and from 36 percent of high school kids in 1997 to 29 percent in 2001. The number of adults who have never smoked more than doubled from 1965 to 2000.

Big tobacco companies knew it was a war they couldn’t win, but they didn’t give up without a fight. They threw billions and billions of more dollars into making smoking look cool, hip, sexy—and safe. They targeted new markets, like women, who increased their rate of smoking 400 percent after the surgeon general’s report. Yeah, you’ve come a long way, baby—all the way from the kitchen to the cancer ward. They expanded their markets in the Third World and undeveloped nations, getting hundreds of millions of people hooked; it’s estimated that more than four out of five current smokers are in developing countries. As if people without a regular source of drinking water didn’t have enough to worry about already. Big Tobacco denied the health risks of smoking, lied about what they were putting into cigarettes and lobbied like hell against every government agency or legislative act aimed at curbing their deadly impact.

Which brings me back to those “frivolous” lawsuits. Back when people were first suing the tobacco companies for giving them cancer, a lot of folks scoffed. (And coughed. But they still scoffed.) Smokers knew the dangers of smoking, everyone said. If they decided to keep smoking for thirty, forty years and then got lung cancer, they couldn’t blame the tobacco companies.

Then a funny thing happened. As the lawsuits progressed, it became more and more apparent that smokers did not know all the dangers of smoking. They couldn’t know, because Big Tobacco was hiding the truth from them—lying to them about the health risks, and lying about the additives they were putting in cigarettes to make them more addictive. Marketing cigarettes to children, to get them hooked early and keep them puffing away almost literally from the cradle to the early grave, among other nefarious dealings.

In the mid-1990s, shouldering the crushing burden of soaring Medicare costs due to smoking-related illnesses, individual states began to imitate those “ambulance-chasers,” bringing their own class-action lawsuits against Big Tobacco. In 1998, without ever explicitly admitting to any wrongdoing, the big tobacco companies agreed to a massive $246 billion settlement, to be paid to forty-fix states and five territories over twenty-five years. (The other four states had already settled in individual cases.)

Two hundred and forty-six billion dollars is a whole lot of frivolous, man.

What these lawsuits drove home was the relationship between personal responsibility and corporate responsibility. Suddenly it was apparent that sticking a cigarette in your mouth was not quite the same thing as sticking those sneaker mints in your mouth. No one spent billions and billions of dollars in marketing, advertising and promotions telling that guy those sneaker mints would make him cool, hip and sexy. Big Tobacco did exactly that to smokers.

Still, a lot of people were skeptical about those lawsuits. Are the big bad corporations with all their big bad money and big bad mind-altering advertising really so powerful that we as individuals cannot think for ourselves anymore? Are we really so easily swayed by the simplest of pleasant images that we’ll jump at the chance to share in some of that glorious, spring-scented, new and improved, because-you-deserve-it goodness, without a thought about what’s best for us anymore?

You tell me. Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: Consume. Consume. And then consume some more.

In 2003, the auto industry spent $18.2 billion telling us we needed a new car, more cars, bigger cars. Over the last twenty-five years, the number of household vehicles in the United States has doubled. The rate of increase in the number of cars, vans and SUVs for personal travel has been six times the rate of population increase. In fact, according to the Department of Transportation, there are now, for the first time in history, more cars than drivers in America. That’s ridiculous!

Did we suddenly need so many more vehicles? Or were we sold the idea?

We drive everywhere now. Almost nine-tenths of our daily travel takes place in a personal vehicle. Walking, actually using the legs and feet God gave us, accounts for appallingly little of our day-to-day getting around. Even on trips of under one mile, according to the Department of Transportation, we walked only 24 percent of the time in 2001 (and rode a bike under 2 percent). Walking declined by almost half in the two decades between 1980 and 2000. In Los Angeles, you can get arrested for walking. The cops figure if you’re not in a car you can’t be up to any good. If you’re not in a car, you’re a vagrant. Same goes for the suburbs, where so many of us now live.

And what do you put inside that SUV, minivan or pickup truck you’re driving everywhere, other than your kids? Well, lots of stuff, that’s what. In 2002, the retail industry in this country spent $13.5 billion telling us what to buy, and we must have been listening, because in 2003 we spent nearly $8 trillion on all kinds of crap. That’s right, trillion. How insane is that? We are the biggest consuming culture on the planet. We buy almost twice as much crap as our nearest competitor, Japan. We spend more on ourselves than the entire gross national product of any nation in the world.

And all that shopping—whew, has it made us hungry. Every year, the food industry spends around $33 billion convincing us that we’re famished. So we all climb back into our giant vehicle filled with all our stuff from Wal-Mart, and we cruise to the nearest fast-food joint. If not McDonald’s or Burger King or Taco Bell, then a “fast casual” restaurant like Outback Steakhouse or TGI Friday’s or the Olive Garden, where they serve us portions larger than our smallest kid, with the calories to match.

What does all that consumption do for us? Does it make us happy? You tell me. If we were all so happy, would we be on so many drugs? Antidepressant use in the U.S. nearly tripled in the past decade. We’ve got drugs in America we can take for anything: if we’re feeling too bad, too good, too skinny, too fat, too sleepy, too wide awake, too unmanly. We’ve got drugs to counteract the disastrous health effects of all our overconsumption—diet drugs, heart drugs, liver drugs, drugs to make our hair grow back and our willies stiff. In 2003, we Americans spent $227 billion on medications. That’s a whole lot of drugs!

This is the power of advertising at work, of billions of hooks that’ve been cast into our heads in the last thirty years, billions of messages telling us what we want, what we need and what we should do to feel happy. We all buy into it to some degree, because none of us is as young as we’d like to be, or as thin, or as strong.

Yet none of the stuff we consume—no matter how much bigger our SUV is than our neighbor’s, no matter how many Whoppers we wolf down, no matter how many DVDs we own or how much Zoloft we take—makes us feel full, or satisfied or happy.

So we consume some more.

And the line between personal responsibility and corporate responsibility gets finer and more blurred. Yes, you’re still responsible for your own life, your own health, your own happiness. But your desires, the things you want, the things you think you need—that’s all manipulated by corporate advertising and marketing that now whisper and shout and wink at you from every corner of your life—at home, at work, at school, at play.

Consume. Consume. Still not happy? Then you obviously haven’t consumed enough.

Like this book, the epidemic of overconsumption that’s plaguing the nation begins with the things we put in our mouths. Since the 1960s, everyone has known that smoking kills, but it’s only been in the last few years that we’ve become hip to a new killer, one that now rivals smoking as the leading cause of preventable deaths in America and, if current trends continue, will soon be the leading cause: overeating.

Americans are eating themselves to death.

Two

Girth of a Nation

The United States is the fattest nation on earth. Sixty-five percent of American adults are overweight; 30 percent are obese. According to the American Obesity Association, 127 million Americans are overweight, 60 million Americans are obese and 9 million are “severely obese.” In the decade between 1991 and 2001, obesity figures ballooned along with our own figures: from 12 percent of us being obese in 1991 to 21 percent in 2001. Almost double. In ten years.

Over 20 percent of the adults in forty-one states and Washington, D.C., are obese. As of fall 2004, obesity is highest in Alabama (28.4 percent) and lowest in Colorado (16 percent). All that mountain climbing and hiking really must be good for you.

We’ve added so much weight in the last couple of decades that even the airline industry has to struggle to haul us around. In November 2004, the Associated Press reported:

America’s growing waistlines are hurting the bottom lines of airline companies as the extra pounds on passengers are causing a drag on planes. Heavier fliers have created heftier fuel costs, according to [a] government study.
Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 just to carry the additional weight of Americans, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine….
The extra fuel burned also had an environmental impact, as an estimated 3.8 million extra tons of carbon dioxide were released into the air, according to the study.

So many of us are obese that we’ve created a market for a whole industry supplying us with extra-large and reinforced car seats, giant chairs, super-heavy-duty bathroom scales, “toilets rated to 1,500 pounds, beds built to hold 1,100 pounds, even something called a ‘trapeze’ that helps people who weigh 1,000 pounds turn over in bed,” the AP reports. Even our military forces are fat: 16 percent of active-duty troops are obese. (Well, they always said an army moves on its stomach.)

This was posted on my blog at www.supersizeme.com in December 2004:

I am in the USMC in Iraq…. Not only is the Marine Corps experiencing drastic problems with obesity (yes, obesity) but they’re also running into more cases of severe depression, bipolarity disorders and severe hormone imbalances. In addition, the average MRE (meal-ready-to-eat) contains 1,400 calories (and that’s one of the modest ones) and hundreds of different preservatives, high fructose corn syrup and large quantities of salt. I guess if you’re starving in the trenches, then it’s not so much a problem, but the grand majority of us aren’t.
Who supplies a lot of the food products that go into MREs, and our hot chows from Sodexho [the food service company contracted by the military]? You guessed it. Kraft, Mars, Hershey’s, etc. Theoretically (and we’ve gone through the nutritional information on our side), in order to eat healthily from the chow hall for three meals a day, you would have to completely skip over the hot meal section (you know, the cafeteria portion where they serve you fried beef patties and potatoes) and go straight to the salad bar, and even then, you would be minus major nutrients like protein, calcium and essential fats (unlike unessential grease and butterfat). So, yeah. Obesity is even hitting the Marine Corps.

We’ve taught our kids how to be fat, too. Obesity rates in children remained stable up through the 1960s. They began to climb in the 1970s, and in the last twenty years, the rate of obesity has doubled in children and tripled in adolescents and teens.

Sixteen percent of American kids are now overweight or obese. As of September 2004, nine million American kids between the ages of six and eighteen were obese. Kids are starting to clock in as obese as early as the age of two.

The obesity epidemic is truly nationwide, cutting across class, race, ethnicity and gender. But like so many health issues in this country (smoking, for one example), it has the worst impact among poor Americans, especially African Americans and Hispanic Americans. The Journal of the American Medical Association says that 77 percent of African American women and 61 percent of African American men are overweight or obese. The National Women’s Health Information Center says that Mexican American women are 1.5 times more likely to be obese than the general female population. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that in the Seattle area, “nearly 22% of adults living in households with incomes of less than $15,000 a year are obese, compared with almost 15% in homes pulling in $50,000 a year or more.”

There are many interlocking factors that probably contribute. Some of it may be genetic: Blacks and Hispanics seem to be genetically more at risk for some diseases, like diabetes, than whites, and may be genetically more prone to obesity as well. But many factors are social, economic and environmental. For one thing, obesity rates decline as the level of education increases:

Less than high school: 27.4 percent
High school degree: 23.2 percent
Some college: 21 percent
College or above: 15.7 percent

Obviously, lower-income folks don’t have the access to health education and information that people of higher incomes do, just as a matter of course.

Maybe more critically, they also don’t have access to health-promoting facilities or institutions. There are far fewer supermarkets in low-income urban neighborhoods than in better-off suburbs—and even if they can get to a supermarket, they may well find junkier, less nutritious foods more affordable than healthier items like lean meat and fresh veggies. The USDA reports that the cost of vegetables and fruit rose 120 percent between 1985 and 2000, while the price of junk like sodas and sweets went up less than 50 percent on average.

What the lower-income neighborhoods do have is an overabundance of predatory fast-food joints, bad takeout and small corner grocery stores stocked with nothing good. For example, go to the McDonald’s website and look at its location map for a major metropolitan area—say, Los Angeles. You’ll see so many Golden Arches in lower-income areas like South-Central and East L.A. that they overlap on the map. Now look at Beverly Hills. How many Golden Arches do you see?

You don’t see many Bally’s Total Fitness or Crunch gyms in low-income areas, either. Also, most diet plans and programs are priced for and marketed to people of middle income and above. Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington, says that sticking to the Atkins diet (not that I’m advocating that) costs about $15 per person per day, whereas low-income families spend more like $3.57 per person per day on food.

Being poor discourages healthy eating habits in lots of ways. Many lower-income kids depend on the federally funded National School Lunch Program for their primary hot meal of the day—and get basically the same high-fat, low-nutrition food dumped on them there as they’d get at a fast-food joint. Then, too, according to The Baltimore Sun, families who rely on government assistance have a tendency to splurge when the monthly check or food stamps arrive (which I think is human nature), then find the cupboard bare toward the end of the month. Nutritionists say that kind of cyclical feast-or-famine diet unbalances your metabolism, so it’s easy to store fat and hard to get rid of it.

Being overweight doesn’t just mean you get called names by other kids. Fat is deadly. Obesity-related illnesses will kill around 400,000 Americans this year—almost the same as smoking. “The epidemic of childhood obesity is only the latest grim chapter of a burgeoning American tragedy,” The Washington Monthly has declared. Obesity brings on a whole host of health problems, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, colon cancer, gout (which I thought went out with Henry VIII), arthritis, menstrual abnormalities, sleep apnea and diabetes. The United States spends about $117 billion annually on treating these illnesses.

The prevalence of diabetes has skyrocketed among American kids in the last twenty years—right along with their blood pressure. There are basically two types of diabetes. Type 1 diabetes develops when the body’s immune system destroys the cells that make insulin, and is generally thought to be caused by genetic, autoimmune or environmental factors. Type 2 diabetes is the kind you can develop through bad diet and excess weight. It used to take years to develop type 2 diabetes—that’s why it was called “adult-onset” diabetes. Now, so many kids have type 2 diabetes that we have to stop calling it by that old name. New cases of type 2 diabetes in adolescents increased by a factor of ten between 1982 and 1994.

You want a really sad and scary statistic? In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one out of three kids born in America in the year 2000 will develop type 2 diabetes. Among African American and Hispanic kids, it’s almost one out of two.

One out of two! When I was a kid, type 2 diabetes was something your classmate’s neighbor’s overweight Uncle Joe might get. Now every other kid in your class might get it.

If you have diabetes or know someone who does—and the chances are growing that you do—you know it’s no joke. Diabetes can lead to heart attacks, strokes, blindness (in 12,000 to 24,000 Americans a year), kidney failure (in 38,000 per year) and nerve damage in the lower legs, which may result in amputation (in 82,000 per year). Diabetes-related chronic kidney failure doubled in America in just the years from 1990 to 2001. Diabetes also makes you more susceptible to death from flu and pneumonia. Diabetes is currently the sixth-highest cause of death in America, but that’s obviously going to increase a lot as today’s kids grow up and we become a nation where one-third to half of us are diabetic.

And then there’s the Big C.

Larry Axmaker of Vanderbilt University’s Online Wellness Center writes: “According to studies conducted by the American Cancer Society … more than 20 percent of all cancer deaths in women and 14 percent in men are linked directly to being overweight. Another 33 percent of cancer deaths are linked to poor diet and physical inactivity…. That’s a lot of people dying needlessly.”

Specifically, diet and obesity have been linked to increased risk for breast, colon, endometrial, esophageal, and kidney cancer. Diets rich in plant-based fibers—whole grains, vegetables, fruits and beans—apparently reduce risks for these types of cancer. Diets high in animal fat seem to promote cancer and inhibit recovery from things like breast and colon cancer.

Where do people eat high-fiber, plant-based diets? The nonindustrial world, that’s where. Where do people eat too much meat and fat? Guess.

In 2004, the American Cancer Society reported, “Because up to 60 percent of cancers may be prevented through healthy lifestyle behaviors that often begin in childhood, children and youth are an important audience for cancer prevention.” Instead, overweight parents are teaching their kids not to exercise and to go to Mickey D’s for Happy Meals.

Then again, it’s less likely that very overweight people will have children in the first place. Very overweight women are less able to become pregnant, even when embryos are fertilized in the lab. Very overweight males are likely to have poor sperm quality, possibly because they often have too much estrogen, which is produced by fat cells.

You want to know how truly, sadly ridiculous things have gotten? Pet experts now say that we’re even training our pets to be fat. One in four cats and dogs in America is now obese. No wonder they won’t come when you call them.

And in the last few years we’ve been spreading this epidemic of obesity around the world. As we export American values, the American lifestyle and especially American fast food to other cultures around the world, we have sparked a global obesity crisis.

Way to go, America. Making the world safe for diabetes.

. . .

The sudden obesity epidemic that has erupted over the last thirty years invites the obvious question: What has changed in America during the last three decades? If your answer is that we’ve become more genetically predisposed to be fat, tzzzzzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. But don’t worry—your parting gift is a lovely, extra-large toaster oven, where you can heat up a whole box of Pop-Tarts at one time.

It’s true, there does seem to be some sort of genetic predisposition to obesity. It’s thought to be one reason obesity is especially prevalent among African Americans and Hispanic Americans. In 2001, the BBC reported that a French team of scientists had pinpointed an “obesity gene”—but, they went on to note, “the majority of people in Europe carry the gene—so it is only one piece in the jigsaw of reasons why obesity develops.”

The point is that our genes haven’t changed over the last thirty years, just the waist size of our jeans.

So what has changed in the last thirty years? Experts cite a complex list of social factors that have contributed to the epidemic, but when you de-jargonize the language, it’s really simple:

We are eating more food than ever before—way more.
We are eating more food that’s bad for us—way worse.
And we are getting less physical exercise—way less.

Between 1971 and 2000, the daily caloric intake of the average adult American woman went up from 1,542 calories to 1,877. For the average adult male it rose from 2,450 to 2,618. The government recommends women take in around 1,600 daily calories and men around 2,200, so the average American adult is now overeating by a few hundred calories a day. For kids, it’s gone up anywhere from 80 to 230 extra calories a day.
   Ah, but what’s a few hundred extra calories a day between friends, right?
   Wrong. Here’s the math:
   An extra 10 calories a day translates to the addition of one extra pound of fat a year. If the average American is overeating by about 200 calories a day, that’s a whopping twenty pounds of flab every year.

Everybody in the world, in every culture, has known that overeating was bad for you. From the ancient Greeks to the modern age, we have been told to be moderate in our eating. In the Judeo-Christian tradition on which our society was supposedly founded and to which we Americans give so much lip service (pardon the pun), overeating wasn’t just bad for you, it was bad, period. As in morally wrong. They even made it one of the seven deadly sins—gluttony. In Dante’s Inferno, gluttons are tormented for all eternity in the third circle of Hell, where the three-headed dog-monster Cerberus entertains himself by tearing them limb from limb and flaying their skins off. And no one ever tells them, “You deserve a break today!”

In just the last thirty years, we’ve trashed those thousands of years of civilized tradition. In our new consume-consume-and-consume-some-more culture, gluttony isn’t a sin, it’s a virtue. We’re encouraged to eat, and eat more, and eat a big dessert on top of that. Everywhere we look, there are all-you-can-eat-buffets and super jumbo value packs of candy, and chocolate chip cookies the size of footballs, and hot-dog-eating contests, and bored teens behind fast-food counters telling us that for just a few pennies more we can double the size of that burger, those fries, that Coke or Pepsi.

How did this happen? In his book Fat Land, Greg Critser cites a couple of things that got us started on our national binge. Once again, your government at work for you, looking out for your best interests. No, wait, I mean your government at work against you, looking out for your worst interests.

To start with, in the early to mid-seventies, the American economy was stuck in a long, grinding recession. It was the era of long gas lines, longer lines at the unemployment office, war debt, “stagflation” and the economic collapse of the big cities (as in the infamous New York Daily News headline, FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD). Two groups who felt the pinch the worst were American farmers and American families. On the farm, inflation was driving food-production costs into the stratosphere. At the grocery store, this translated into sky-high prices on basic items like hamburger, sugar, cheese, coffee and margarine. Everyone was unhappy. Farmers went to Washington to complain to their congressmen. Families actually held protest rallies inside grocery stores.

I remember during this time how great my mother was at stretching a dollar and making food last. She would roast a chicken for dinner on Sunday, and on Monday, we’d have chicken sandwiches, chicken soup on Tuesday, chicken salad on Wednesday, chicken pot pie on Thursday, and on Friday I would crawl into the kitchen, pleading with my mother, “Please tell me there’s no more chicken.”

“Nope,” she’d say. “Chicken is all gone. Tonight we’re having roast beef!” And the cycle would continue.

So the federal government tried to appease both families and farmers. It did a bunch of things to stimulate farm production, and at the same time did a bunch of other things to bring prices back down at the grocery store. The result was that by the 1980s American farms were producing an overabundance of food, and it was affordable again. In fact, there was more food, and cheaper food, than ever before in human history. Americans responded the way you’d expect us to—by buying more and eating more.

The other, and I think much more influential, factor in the fattening up of America was the rise of the fast-food industry. It’s no coincidence that the explosion of obesity in this country happened at exactly the same time as the explosive growth of the fast-food industry. Before 1970, a “fast-food joint” was a burger or hot dog stand out on the highway somewhere. Now we’re literally surrounded by fast food, everywhere we go—in every city and town, in every mall and shopping center, in airports and on airplanes, even in our schools and hospitals. As I’ve traveled around the country, I’ve been to a lot of places where fast food was the only kind of food available “on the go.”

In 1970, there were around 70,000 fast-food establishments in the country.
In 2001, there were 186,000.
In 1968, McDonald’s operated about 1,000 restaurants. Today it has about 31,000 worldwide—almost 14,000 of them in the United States.

In 1970, Americans spent $6.2 billion at fast-food joints. In 2004, it was $124 billion. Twenty times as much! The American Journal of Preventive Medicine published a study in 2004 showing that the percentage of fast-food calories in the American diet has increased from 3 percent to 12 percent over the last twenty years.

The fast-food industry has been pretty relentless in encouraging us to eat. Critser explains that during those recession years of the mid-1970s, Americans cut way back on what they spent at the movies, in restaurants and at fast-food joints. The problem for the fast-food industry was how to convince them to eat and spend more.

A McDonald’s exec named David Wallerstein came up with the answer. He’d faced the same problem in the movie theater business. Movie theaters make tons of money on popcorn and the other crap they push on us. It’s what they call a “high markup” item—it doesn’t cost them much, so there’s a big profit margin on it. Wallerstein wanted to get people to eat more popcorn. He tried two-for-one specials, but they didn’t work—no one wanted to be caught scarfing down two boxes of popcorn. ”So Wallerstein flipped the equation around,” Critser writes. ”Perhaps he could get more people to spend just a little more on popcorn if he made the boxes bigger and increased the price only a little. The results after the first week were astounding. Not only were individual sales of popcorn increasing; with them rose individual sales of that other high-profit item, Coca-Cola.”

Call it the Birth of the Super-Size Nation. The fast-food industry took the idea and ran with it in the mid-seventies. Instead of trying to get people to buy two burgers, they put a bigger patty on one sandwich, called it a Whopper and charged you a little extra for it. Instead of two Cokes, they started offering larger cups. Who could forget the birth of the Big Gulp at 7-Eleven? That giant quart tub of cola that cost only a fraction more than what you used to spend for half as much soda! People got to eat more, and they felt like they were getting a good deal. They were even called “value meals.” Sales skyrocketed. Everybody in the fast-food industry started doing it—Taco Bell, Burger King, Pizza Hut and of course Mickey D’s. By the mid-nineties, one out of four meals sold at fast-food joints was a value meal, a special combo or a super-size meal.

“Fast casual” and “family” restaurants also started increasing the size of their portions—and even the plates they served them on. Since food only represents about one-fifth of a restaurant’s expenses, they can pile a lot more on your plate and charge you just a little more for it. You’ll feel like you got to stuff yourself at a good price, so you’ll come back.

Outback Steakhouse, with its “Aussie-size” portions, is a particularly grievous offender. (Outback is not really an Australian company, by the way. It’s based in Tampa, Florida.) When I called Outback to ask, they told me that one order of its Bloomin’ Onion rings wallops you with up to 2,500 calories—that’s what the average adult male is supposed to eat in an entire day. And that’s an appetizer. Throw on, say, a Drover’s Platter of ribs and chicken, a salad drenched in cheese and fatty dressing, and finish off with one of their mountainous Sydney’s Sinful Sundaes, and you’ve packed in as many calories as you should be taking in over several days. In one meal.

“The portions that are served are so enormous that to finish a portion is like you’ve eaten enough food for a week,” New York Times restaurant reviewer Eric Asimov told me. “People … feel they’re disobeying their mothers if they don’t clean their plate.” At the same time, he says, “I can’t tell you how many people complain to me about the small portions in more expensive restaurants, or when they travel in Italy or France or Japan. They get much less food than they’re used to, and they feel cheated.”

Believe me, I understand. I come from a long line of eaters. Every family function I go to is centered around food. And I grew up in a house where “value” was very important, as I’m sure a lot of you did. So when we see ALL YOU CAN EAT, TWO FOR ONE, SUPER-SIZE or MORE FOR LESS, those messages go straight to a very basic instinct that has been banged into our craniums since birth: Get your money’s worth.

Lisa Young, a New York University professor of nutrition, food studies and public health, explained to me how the portions grew. When fast-food places first opened, they tended to offer one size of fries, for example. At McDonald’s, that size, which contained about 200 calories, eventually became the “small order.” Then they added “medium,” “large,” and “super size.” A super size order of fries, which came in a cardboard bucket the size of a small child’s head, packed over 600 calories. A Big Mac Combo delivers a hefty 1,140 calories. Until 2004, you could super size it and get 1,460 calories for just pennies more! The average meal at McDonald’s, according to Critser, expanded from 590 calories to a jumbo 1,550 calories. By the end of the century, Del Taco was offering a “Macho” meal that weighed four pounds.

Young helped conduct an NYU study that compared the portion sizes of what’s served at fast-food joints and family restaurants to what the FDA and USDA call “a portion.” They found muffins that were three times what the USDA calls a portion, restaurants that served five times the pasta, and cookies that were 700 percent of a USDA portion! That’s a big-ass cookie! Even the portion sizes in diet food like Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers have increased over the years.

In the early days, a soda at Burger King was 12 ounces. That’s now called a “small” soda. A medium is 20 ounces, and a large is 32. A super size soda at McDonald’s was 42 ounces. The Double Gulp at your local 7-Eleven comes in a bucket the size of a wastepaper basket, which holds 64 ounces of soda—half a gallon! Depending on how much ice you put in it, that’s 600 to 800 calories. And it contains the equivalent of 48 teaspoons of sugar. It’s liquid diabetes! Who needs to drink a half-gallon of soda at one time? Nobody, that’s who. But we buy it—because the offer seems like a great deal.

One nutritionist has said that your average fast-food meal isn’t one meal, it’s more like three, and a Cornell professor has proved it. Each year, he sends his students to McDonald’s with an assignment: figure out how to satisfy—but not exceed—your daily nutritional requirements eating only McFood, for the least amount of money. He arms them with the McDonald’s nutritional chart and the government’s Recommended Dietary Allowance information and nutrition guidelines. For a healthy young adult male, the best they could come up with, ringing in at a price of $6.70, was:

⅓ of a regular hamburger
a little more than one side salad, without dressing
four butter garlic croutons
a little more than one hotcake with margarine and syrup
three nuts (from a sundae)
⅓ of a baked apple pie
nearly all of a 32-ounce Chocolate Triple Thick Shake
about 3 ounces of orange juice

In other words, it was totally impractical.

I had to laugh when Playboy magazine published its “Women of McDonald’s” pictorial in November 2004. It was pretty obvious to me that none of these young ladies ate much of the McFood they were serving up.

These joints have influenced us to eat more at home, too. A recent study showed that the average American dinner at home has also been super-sized over the last twenty years. Portion sizes have increased dramatically at home. They’ve also increased in the snacks we munch on, often when we’re not even thinking about it. Now we don’t just go through half a bag of the Cheez Doodles while watching Monday Night Football, we wolf down the whole bag.

Have we all become compulsive eaters? Are we all gluttons? Are we actually, physically hungrier than we used to be? Or will we simply eat more if you put it in front of us, whether we’re really hungry or not?

A study done at Penn State suggests the latter. Volunteers were served a series of lunches that kept increasing in size and “as portions increased, all participants ate increasingly larger amounts,” no matter how hungry they were. A University of Illinois study found that if you hand the average person a one-pound bag of M&Ms, he’ll eat 80 pieces; hand him a two-pound bag, and he’ll eat 112 in the same period of time.

If you put it there, we will eat it. Just keep your hands away from our mouths.

John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, offers a wise, and I think true, explanation. “The quality of food that we’re eating is degrading so rapidly,” he told me. “We’re eating more of it, because it’s advertised so massively and it’s so convenient…. So we’re always wanting to eat more and more and more, because there’s something inside us that’s saying we’re not getting what we need and want…. We lose touch with that inner compass by which we can sense what’s good for us. Instead, we give up control over what we eat to the corporations and the fast-food companies.”

The evidence is clear, America. We don’t really need to eat more. We’re not really hungrier than we were thirty years ago, and God knows we’re not more physically active. No, friends, we’ve been trained to eat more. Conditioned to do it. Have you seen that commercial where the pizza guy rings the doorbell and the guys in the house go running like Pavlov’s dogs, literally salivating and slobbering all over themselves? It was played for laughs, but I saw that commercial and thought, “What the hell is funny about that?” That’s what we’ve become—lab rats for the junk-food industry!

We’re not only eating more food, we’re eating more food that’s bad for us, that doesn’t satisfy us and that makes us hungry for more soon after. Fast food is terrible for you. It shouldn’t even be called “food.” It should be called more like what it is: a highly efficient delivery system for fats, carboyhdrates, sugars and other bad things. Most of those extra calories we’re putting on come in the form of carbohydrates. Especially fries. The average American now wolfs down 30 pounds of french fries annually—up from only 3.5 pounds in 1960. And don’t forget sodas. Soft-drink consumption in the United States increased 135 percent between about 1977 and 2001. It’s highest, not surprisingly, among kids: American kids now drink twice as much soda as they did twenty-five years ago.

In the late 1970s, the USDA reports, boys consumed more than twice as much milk as soft drinks, and girls consumed 50 percent more milk than soft drinks. By 1996, both boys and girls consumed twice as much soda as milk. One-fifth of American kids are now drinking sodas at the ages of one and two.

The average American teen drinks two or more 12-ounce sodas a day. How much sugar is in a single 12-ounce soda? Ten teaspoons. That kid is consuming the equivalent of twenty teaspoons of sugar every day. Just in soda. Throw in all the other sugar the average kid consumes in fast food, junk food and snacks. Then ask me again why we’re seeing an epidemic of type 2 diabetes in America’s children.

Soda is also bad for the teeth and bones, especially for teenagers. Between 40 and 60 percent of peak bone mass is built during the teen years. But the phosphoric acid in sodas prompts the body to pull calcium and other minerals out of the bones to counteract the acidity, which can lead to osteoporosis down the line.

There ain’t a nutritionist or physician on the planet who’d tell you that sucking down that much daily sugar—not to mention the caffeine—is good for a teenager. In fact, they’d tell you what health researcher David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital in Boston says—that “for every additional serving per day of soft drink consumed, the risk of becoming obese increased by about 50 percent.” But try getting Coke or Pepsi to admit they’re harming our kids and they just howl that you’re un-American, a pinko Commie and definitely a “food Nazi.” Meanwhile they’ve got that kid so surrounded with their product, and so inundated with their message, that trying to get him or her to stop drinking soda is worse than trying to get an alkie off the sauce.

Morgan Spurlock