WE MUST BE fat. After all, Katie Couric did a two-hour special on it on Friday night. And even Dr. Phil, who previously spent his time shrinking heads, has moved on to shrinking bodies.
That’s why I was so happy to see that my favorite academic publication, the American Journal of Public Health, had devoted its entire September issue to why Americans are so freakin’ fat.
If you guessed, “Because we eat so freakin’ much,” guess again: The supersized portions are only the half of it.
You may not be a regular reader of the august AJPH (and when I say “august,” of course I mean, “widely unread”). That’s understandable. There’s not a hot celebrity on the cover or articles that offer new details of why Ben dumped Jen. Second of all, the writing isn’t too stylish. For instance, they keep using academic terms like “the built environment” when they really just mean houses, roads and neighborhoods.
But this issue is chock full of reasons why we’re a flabby nation:
We’re the only animals on the planet that live in communities that make us more obese. We’ve built suburbs (“the built environment”) so spread out that people must rely on cars because walking or biking simply isn’t an option. Many developers today don’t even bother to install sidewalks and some communities intentionally build new schools on the edge of town, hindering children’s ability to safely walk or bike to school (whatever happened to President Bush’s “Run No Child Over” education reforms?).
Americans bike and walk far less than their European counterparts (what article about American obesity would be complete without a gratuitous comparison with good ol’ Europe?). In the U.S., only 7 percent of all trips outside the home are made by walking or biking, compared to 39 percent in Sweden (hey, it’s cold there), 34 percent in Switzerland (hey, it’s hilly there) and 46 percent in The Netherlands (hey, it’s low and swampy there).
If you put less than three items in a list like this, it feels like the problem is too small to worry about, but if you put too many items in a list like this, it sounds like the problem is so vast that it will never be solved. I’m going to err on the side of the latter.
Transportation, environment, economic development, legal and public safety officials typically must sign off on new development. But public health officials are rarely, if ever, consulted, so our subdivisions actually make us fatter and lazier. And a lack of public health scrutiny goes well beyond new construction. New York City just signed a deal with Snapple to become the exclusive vendor of soft drinks in the city. A spokeswoman for the city’s health department told me that the Health Commissioner was not even asked to review the deal, even though Snapple drinks are actually just liquid sugar. (Snapple’s own website admits that a 16-ounce bottle of “Snapple Apple” has 240 calories and 20 percent of your daily recommended intake of carbs and consists of only 10 percent real juice. The “best stuff on Earth” turns out to be “water, high fructose corn syrup, pear juice and apple juice from concentrates, citric acid, natural apple flavor with other natural flavors, fruit and vegetable juice (for color).”
Suburban sprawl also makes us lonely. Our communities, the journal says, “are not interconnected” and cause “a lack of social networks and diminished social capital, which can contribute to obesity, cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, and increased rates of mortality.”
And not only are we fat and lonely, we’re poisoning ourselves. Suburban sprawl turns farmland into housing, meaning that food producers must create the same amount of food on less and less farmland. That makes “agriculture more dependent on the use of pesticides [which] has had a debilitating impact on human health, resulting in greater rates of asthma and other respiratory problems.”
We haven’t learned from the past. In the 19th century, a new type of architecture was developed to cut down on epidemics of cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Yet in the 21st century, we’re doing just the opposite: Instead of designing walkable cities, we build sprawl that makes us even more dependent on the automobile–and only exacerbates the epidemic of the age: obesity.
And last but not least: No. 8. No one is doing anything about all these problems. OK, that’s not entirely fair. One of the articles lauded a handful of politicians who have been waging the battle of the bulge with their constituents, among them Mayor Charlie Ealy of Bolivar, Missouri (“Visit our new airport!”). After the 300-plus-pound mayor’s doctor gave him two choices–start exercising or start shopping for a casket–Ealy began walking. And he encouraged the citizens of Bolivar–average, patriotic Americans who, like Ealy, are very fat–to join him.
The journal article filled me with the vision of thousands of Bolivarians walking briskly with their mayor every day. But I knew something wasn’t right, so I called Ealy immediately. The Bolivar City Hall operator told me he couldn’t come to the phone right now because, wouldn’t you know, he’d just had quintuple bypass surgery. But under my relentless questioning, the operator gave me Ealy’s home number.
The mayor, it turns out, is recuperating nicely (I sent your best wishes, by the way). In fact, he credited the “Walk and Talk with the Mayor” program for keeping him alive.
“The doctors told me I would be dead if I hadn’t been walking for the past nine months,” Ealy told me. “It’s a real lifesaver, if you’ll pardon the pun.” (Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but only the governor has the power to pardon a pun that lame.)
But while Ealy was pleased with the personal results of his walking regimen (some regimen! One mile around the park three times a week. The mayor is a regular Rocky Balboa), I felt he was holding back, so I asked him the tough question: Just how many Bolivarians were joining him on these walks?
“We were averaging about 10 or so,” he said. “A lot of people didn’t find it convenient.”
Most of the country knows what Ealy means. On a recent road trip through Pennsylvania, a recent headline in the Daily Item (“serving the Central Susquehanna Valley”) caught my eye. It said that “many find it hard to exercise” because they can’t find the time. But you wouldn’t need to “find” the “time” if walking wasn’t “exercise” but a way of life.
“Going to the gym or using exercise equipment in the basement is not something most people have the discipline to do,” said John Pucher, a researcher who wrote about the importance of promoting walking and biking. He also walks roughly 10 miles a day because he doesn’t own a car.
“Whether I’m tired or it’s cold out, I have to walk to the office and back. My exercise is part of my daily life.” (So is bumming a ride from friends whenever he needs to buy something bigger than he can carry, Pucher admitted.)
So what’s the answer? Simply put: Burn down the suburbs, junk all the cars and start over.
“We need to change people’s minds about the benefits of living in places where you walk more,” said Richard Jackson, director of the National Center of Environmental Health and the editor of the AJPH special issue.
Will people really give up their Hummers? As we like to say in America: Fat chance.
