Super-Sizing Is Not Pc Or Healthy

The strangest thing has happened: All the while we’ve been worrying about too-thin models and whether Ally McBeal has an eating disorder, Americans have been growing dangerously fat. We are - the realization is suddenly coming upon us - in the full throes of an awful epidemic. And it’s fueled not by a strange new virus but by our very lifestyle. Eat badly, exercise little and you grow obese.

One of the worst manifestations of the epidemic is its quick spread among children. Last week, as I sat in a park reading a magazine, I saw two little boys playing nearby. Well, one of them was playing - hopping up steps on one foot and down on the other, twirling in the air, rolling in the grass. The other boy mostly watched. He was hugely fat.

The article I was reading (in the current Harper’s magazine) was about childhood obesity, which the surgeon general declared an epidemic a couple of years ago. “Becoming obese,” the article quotes an eminent academic as saying, “is a normal response to the American environment.”

And we are surely responding. Last October, JAMA - the Journal of the American Medical Association - carried a piece about “The Spread of the Obesity Epidemic in the United States, 1991-1998.” It found that in 1991, 12 percent of Americans were obese. In 1998, almost 18 percent were.

The Agriculture Department sponsored a Great Nutrition Debate here recently to see if the nation’s most popular weight-loss experts could agree on anything. They agreed that Americans are too fat, exercise is good for you, and sugar isn’t - which of course we already know. We just don’t act on it. Eating bad food in huge quantities and moving around very little has become as American as - well, as apple pie was, before junk food supplanted it as our hallmark.

Last week, The Washington Post’s Health tab had several articles on one drastic response to our national pigout: gastric bypass operations. One of the pieces began with one of those fat-person stories that you keep rolling around in your mind. A 740-pound man, 32 years old, went to visit an obesity surgeon. His legs couldn’t support his weight, so he slid himself along the wall, stopping every few steps to gasp for breath, clutching the canister of oxygen that he needed to breathe. He was eating himself to death.

Why are we doing this? The Harper’s author, Greg Critser, fingered several villains: Junk food corporations that supersize everything. A decline in physical activity among children. And, interestingly, a change in attitudes. The President’s Council on Youth Fitness, in its early days in the 1950s, had slogans like, “There’s no such thing as stylishly stout.”

That was before fat became “a feminist issue,” as the 1978 best seller put it. It was before the recognition of eating disorders focused (justifiably, to be sure) our attention on the perils of equating beauty with thinness. And it was before the “fat acceptance” movement. Now, the fellow who feels nervous about his girth can visit a Web site called BellyBuilders - ”a place for guys with huge beer guts to hang out.” His portly wife can log on to find paintings of lavishly lovely women by Rubens or Renoir, or get answers to questions like, “Where can I find scales to weigh a very large person?” Or, “Our bed frames keep breaking, help!”

Not that America is alone in this problem. The Worldwatch Institute released a report Saturday that said for the first time in history, there may be as many people overweight as there are underfed. In developing nations like India, China and Brazil, the rich are growing fat, while the poor majority remains hungry. But in countries like our own, it is the wealthier and more educated who eat better and get more exercise. It’s the poor who eat cheap and fatty fast foods and live more sedentary lives.

As different as their profiles may be, the poor in both instances share one problem: malnutrition. A kid eating glazed doughnut breakfasts and double cheeseburger dinners, with 42-ounce soft drinks for refreshment, is a kid headed for trouble - for diabetes, kidney and pancreatic damage, heart disease, osteoarthritis, stroke, gall bladder disease or sleep apnea.

It is humane, of course, to have moved beyond the days of circus fat ladies. But condoning obesity is no act of kindness. We mortals need the assistance of valid societal brakes on our tendencies toward self-indulgence. Obesity is not a cosmetic issue. It’s a health problem and it’s time we called it that.