Eating our way to early graves

Over the past four decades, global population has doubled, but food output, driven by increases in productivity, has outpaced it. Poverty, infant mortality and hunger are receding. For the first time in our planet’s history, a species no longer lives at the mercy of scarcity. We have learned to feed ourselves.

We’ve learned so well, in fact, that we’re getting fat. Not just the United States or Europe, but the whole world. Egyptian, Mexican and South African women are now as fat as Americans. Far more Filipino adults are now overweight than underweight. In China, one in five adults is too heavy, and the rate of overweight children is 28 times higher than it was two decades ago. In Kuwait, Thailand and Tunisia, obesity, diabetes and heart disease are soaring.

Hunger is far from conquered. But since 1990, the global rate of malnutrition has declined an average of 1.7 percent a year. Based on data from the World Health Organization and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, for every two people who are malnourished, three are now overweight or obese. Among women, even in most African countries, overweight has surpassed underweight. The balance of peril is shifting.

Fat is no longer a rich man’s disease. For middle- and high-income Americans, the obesity rate is 29 percent. For low-income Americans, it’s 35 percent. Fourteen percent of middle- and high-income kids age 15 to 17 are overweight. For low-income kids in the same age bracket, it’s 23 percent. Globally, weight has tended to rise with income. But a recent study in Vancouver, British Columbia, found that preschoolers in “food-insecure” households were twice as likely as other kids to be overweight or obese. In Brazilian cities, the poor have become fatter than the rich.

Technologically, this is a triumph. In the early days of our species, even the rich starved. Barry Popkin, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, divides history into several epochs. In the hunter-gatherer era, if we didn’t find food, we died. In the agricultural era, if our crops perished, we died. In the industrial era, famine receded, but infectious diseases killed us. Now we’ve achieved such control over nature that we’re dying not of starvation or infection, but of abundance. Nature isn’t killing us. We’re killing ourselves.

You don’t have to go hungry anymore; we can fill you with fats and carbs more cheaply than ever. You don’t have to chase your food; we can bring it to you. You don’t have to cook it; we can deliver it ready to eat. You don’t have to eat it before it spoils; we can pump it full of preservatives so it lasts forever. You don’t even have to stop when you’re full. We’ve got so much food to sell, we want you to keep eating.

What happened in America is happening everywhere. Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut are spreading across the planet. Coca-Cola is in more than 200 countries. Half of McDonald’s business is outside the United States. In China, animal fat intake has tripled in 20 years. By 2020, meat consumption in developing countries will grow by 106 million metric tons, outstripping growth in developed countries by a factor of more than five.

Soon it’ll be a poor man’s death. The rich have Whole Foods, gyms and personal trainers. The poor have 7-Eleven, Popeye’s and streets unsafe for walking. When money’s tight, you feed your kids at Wendy’s and stock up on macaroni and cheese. At a lunch buffet, you do what your ancestors did: store all the fat you can.

The answer to these trends is simple. We have to exercise more and change the food we eat, donate and subsidize. Next year, for example, the U.S. Women, Infants and Children program, which subsidizes groceries for impoverished youngsters, will begin to pay for fruits and vegetables. For 32 years, the program has fed toddlers eggs and cheese but not one vegetable. And we wonder why poor kids are fat.

The hard part is changing our mentality. We have a distorted body image. We’re so used to not having enough, as a species, that we can’t believe the problem is too much. From China to Africa to Latin America, people are trying to fatten their kids. I just got back from a vacation with my Jewish mother and Jewish mother-in-law. They told me I need to eat more.