When I was in junior high, Arnold Schwarznegger got together with the United States government to boost fitness among the youth of America.
While the program was ambitious in theory, it played out as just another day in gym class.
Sure, instead of wrestling on dirty mats, we were subjected to competitive tests, but in the end, the result was the same: humiliation. That was the point of gym class wasn't it?
Except for those lucky few who could climb a rope like Tarzan, and are now stealing CD players out of cars for a living, gym class was what we would later learn to call a Life Lesson. We closed our eyes and took our medicine, because we had no choice.
So, for the one semester that the Austrian bodybuilder's plan was still on the American consciousness, the gym teachers would hustle all of us outside to run as far as we could until we heard the horn, then they would come to us, tsk tsk at the short distance we'd been able to cover in 20 minutes, and schedule wrestling for the next day.
Needless to say, we never learned about fitness, eating habits, weight training, or any other applicable information that might actually help us become healthier as we got older.
Apparently, my school was not the only institution that skipped over the learning portion of the fitness plan and jumped right to the demoralizing results.
In the new book Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, by Greg Critser, we revisit the past several decades to discover how our nation has become one of the fattest in the entire world.
Except for some islands in the South Seas, we're the biggest, and we seem to be readying ourselves to keep the title for an indefinite number of years to come.
While the Nixon years saw food prices as a political issue (remember the outcry over beef prices?), subsidies and advancements in growing technologies effectively took this issue off the table.
Since 1970, the amount of kids in this country who are overweight has doubled, which leads Critser to investigate exactly what produced this jump in big boys.
What it all boils down to, according to the author, is the success of capitalism in our society.
As the population of the United States leveled off, food producers needed an outlet for the increasing amount of product that they were able to produce.
What was a loyal American to do, but eat more?
Of course, this equation wasn't laid out nearly as clearly to the public.
Instead, food packagers and restaurants looked to the example begun by a man who worked for a movie theater chain, who tried to solve the problem of flat sales at his concession stands.
After trying the typical promos without much success, he hit upon the idea of offering sizes bigger than large, and his profits went up considerably.
According to the author, Americans were happy to eat more, but they were just embarrassed to, when it involved ordering a second helping.
Moviegoers who finished their bucket of popcorn, and wanted more, would be forced to admit to themselves and anyone else in the theater paying attention, that they were eating a whole new helping.
With the advent of what would later be called Big Gulps and Supersizing, moviegoers could pig out on what was really two purchases in one.
The portion was bigger and the price was higher, but the stigma of going back up to the counter was gone, and all us piggies could go home happy—and full.
The theaters, and later the food companies and restaurant outlets, could add more food to portion size for just pennies, but they could jack up the price at a much larger percentage rate, so that profitability rose substantially.
Gotta sell all that popcorn the farmers were growing. So, the grain belt wins out, sellers are happy, and Junior becomes bigger than daddy.
See, we don't stop when we're full.
Critser ties this back to times we were hunter gatherers who ate as much as we could when the situation presented itself, as it could be a long time until we would have the opportunity to feast again.
For whatever reason, though, it's just plain tough for most of us to stop eating when there's food left on the plate—or, in this case, fries left in the bag.
Budding entrepeneurs may wonder what's so bad about a little obesity, if it keeps the economy chugging along. Well, about several billion dollars worth of bad, actually.
It turns out that in addition to bigger Americans, all this supersizing has led to an epidemic of what used to be called Adult Onset Diabetes. Now, however, more and more children are finding themselves victims, due to their increased sizes. So, all the extra profits on one end are being paid for in the other.
Unfortunately, the trend toward fatness shows no signs of subsiding, so clothes sizes are being rejiggered, restaurant seating is being reconfigured for larger butts, and Happy Meals are looking pretty sad.
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