Fat Land
How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World
by
Greg Critser
Pub date: January
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0-618-16472-3
$24.00

In Fat Land, journalist Greg Critser (USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post) takes us seamlessly through the historical 'supersizing' of the American public, of which currently 60 percent is overweight.

Critser notes, it began in the late 1970s, when David Wallerstein, a peripatetic director for McDonald's, convinced the chain's founder to sell larger portions of food. Wallerstein thought, "They don't want to eat two bags - they don't want to look like a glutton." (21) The answer: just make larger sizes for a little more money. "Large sizing was a new kind of marketing magic." (22) "By the end of the century, super-sizing - the ultimate expression of the value meal revolution - reigned."

But the concept of super-sizing carried over to more than just food. "Bigness" effected "just about everything from cars (SUVs) to homes (mini-manses) to clothes (super-baggy)..." (29) In USA Today, Irma Zall theorized, "Bigness is addictive because it is about power." Marketers had successfully "banished the shame of gluttony" and "Fast food companies...see the American eater as an endlessly expanding vessel for their product." (31)

Obesity and type 2 diabetes soared in the eighties. It was a time when snacking or 'grazing' was encouraged. People were encouraged to eat whenever they were hungry, a "quasi-regimen fawned over and packaged by the mainstream media." (39) This trend affected the poor more than any other group. Between 1977 and 1996, "the snacking rate per day among low-income households went from 67 percent to 82 percent." By the mid-1990s, "our children were growing. ... and diabetes rates were soaring." (75) "Between 1966 and 1994, obesity prevalence among youth jumped from 7 percent to 22 percent." (74) Children defined as 'morbidly obese' were physically larger than 95 percent of their peers, leaving them singled out and teased, leading to "deep cuts in self-esteem." ( 79)

The change was seen in adults, too, who moved from jobs that were 'sweat friendly'- factory and field work - (86) to professional jobs where the majority of time was spent sitting in front of a computer. Sixty-hour work weeks left little time for exercise or eating well. As America became more industrialized, it also become more sedentary. Further, international trade increased with nations that provided cheaper, and more fattening, food ingredients like palm oil and high fructose corn syrup.