this is why you're fat

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08/12/11 01.02This is Why You're Fat - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic

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Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage forthe website.More

He is a visiting research fellow at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America

Foundation. Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek , and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest onradio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.





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This is Why You're Fat

By Derek Thompson

0 Jul 20 2009, 4:08 PM ET 10

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the New Yorker, asks a simple question: Why are we so fat? The short answer --We eat too damn much -- is unbefitting a proper New Yorker essay, and so we're served a long, fascinating look

at the literature of "weight-gain" books that aim to explain how Americans gained more than a billion pounds inthe last ten years. The most convincing answer I found is: Price and elasticity of appetite.

Kolbert, reviewing The Fattening of America by Eric Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman, notes that food hasgotten cheaper relative to the other goods and services. And fatty foods have gotten a lot cheaper. The price of soft drinks, for example, have dropped by more than 20 percent, and they now account for seven percent allcalories in the US. The New York Times offered a striking graph that told just that story:

7Recommend





But, Kolbert follows up with a good question: Sure, food became cheaper -- fatty food especially. But thatdoesn't mean our bellies had to grow at an equal and opposite pace. Why didn't we just spend less money eastingless? How did our appetites grow so suddenly in the 1980s and 90s?

The most convincing idea she floats is the "elasticity of the human appetite." Simply stated: We have no ideahow hungry we are, so we respond to growing portion sizes with growing appetites. In one depressingexperiment, participants ate bowls of pasta soup that were secretly being refilled through a hidden tube. Onaverage, people eating out of these "trick bowls" consumed 73 percent more than the regular bowl eaters.Somewhere between our brain and our stomach, the word "stop" is swallowed -- along with a lot of calories.

The elasticity of our appetites is perhaps most visible in our relationship with fast food and chain restaurants.McDonald's used to offer one size of french fries, with 200 calories. Now it also offers a large, with 500calories. This jives with a graph, also produced by the New York Times, that compares time spent eating andnational obesity.





The conclusion I would draw is not that you should spend more quality time with your Burger King QuadStacker. I'm more interested in the relationship between the fatter countries and fast-food proliferation. If youdraw a horizontal line just under Canada to isolate the countries with the highest obesity rates, you get a groupof six countries. Four of those countries -- the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada -- happen to be the fourcountries with the most McDonald's per capita in the world (the UK is number 9). Our evolutionary instinct to

maximize caloric intake befriends our economic instinct to buy cheap, and the result is, well, something likethis.

*Thanks to Suzanna Pacaut for soup/pasta mixup. Pasta, in retrospect, could be prohibitively difficult to refillthrough a tube.

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3. No, I'm not dense enough to think that beer is more healthful than an avocado for the sole reason of their relative fat content, but

apparently you are dense enough to not realize that I was simply pointing that healthfulness and non-fattiness are not the same thing, not

that healthfulness and fattiness are positively correlated.

Any further questions?

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There are really two separate questions involved in this issue, and one cannot be answered without addressing the other. First, individuals get fat

because they eat too many calories and don't burn them off. (Not to downplay the importance of macronutrient ratio.) Of course, those in the "fat

acceptance" crowd wish to obfuscate this simple truth and decry the notion that impulsive gluttony combined with physical sloth is the root of the

problem. But that does not negate reality. The second question--why is the average American's waistline increasing--must be analyzed through

the lens of the first answer. Rephrased, the question becomes: Why is the average American amassing a surplus of caloric energy? I'm quite

certain the answer has much more to do with most Americans' general lack of self-control combined with inaccurate health education and the

crack-pusher style antics of the food industry than it does with elastic appetites. Magic soup bowls aside, if you don't realize that a super-sized

Wendy's Baconator meal exceeds any reasonable bounds of caloric necessity, evolutionary survival instincts are the least of your problems.

Henry Rollins's 7 word diet would go a long way to solving this problem: eat better, eat less, move your body.

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Sure, but it's also important to keep in mind that there isn't necessarily an independent relationship between calories consumed and

calories burned. If people worked like bonfires, you could throw a lot more fuel on the fire (eat more) and have the fire burn hotter and

faster (burn more). Of course, people aren't bonfires, but their metabolism is complex and affected at least somewhat by their food

intake.

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Draw a line through Canada just because that's where we choose to draw the line. The countries above the line have more vowels in their names

than those below. QED.

Like

Oh come now, tcrosse. It's not like I'm drawing a 45 degree angle through the graph and excluding the states that rhyme with "ania." The

point is simple enough: Of the six fattest countries in the world, four have the world's highest McDonald's per capita. If you find the fact

redundant -- Duh, Derek, of course countries with significant Anglican ties will be the fattest! -- then I'd love to hear your reasons.

Otherwise, I don't think I'm exaggerating the role of cheap, fatty food on our fatness, and McDonald's density seems to me like an un-

silly proxy of cheap, fatty food.

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What I don’t see addressed in this article is the disparate impact these food costs have on lower income Americans. If the lower-cost foods have

the worse nutritional make-up, it’s no surprise that the poorer Americans who buy those foods are generally the fattest and unhealthiest.

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2 years agoTyler

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2 years agoJoshua Lyle

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2 years agotcrosse

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2 years agoDerek Thompson

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2 years ago jwescott





I’ve seen several ‘nutrition makeovers’ on programs like the Today Show trying to address the rapidly expanding waistlines of the average

American family. They take lower-income families who are living on fast food and revamp their lifestyle to include more fresh produce, whole

grains, beans, etc. The families are always assured that preparing their own healthy foods at home will save them money in the long run.

I’ve always wondered how that could possibly be the case, and this article only strengthens my skepticism. When a parent could spend $3-4 on a

red bell pepper that would buy their child an entire meal at Taco Bell, it’s no surprise they choose the latter.

Like

As the old saying goes, your eyes are usually more hungry than our bellies.

We need to consciously stop over-feeding ourselves just because of the availability of food. Fast food sells by duping hungry customers that

they need that much food to be content. Unfortunately, not many can put down the burger and fries despite being full.

Eating less fatty and more nutritious foods will leave you feeling more content and less likely to over-feed yourself.

If you're interested in learning about how to Value [the] meal check out http://valuethemeal.blogspot.com

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