Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

What in American society has changed so dramatically that nearly 60 percent of us are now overweight, plunging the nation into what the surgeon general calls an "epidemic of obesity"? Greg Critser engages every aspect of American life - class, politics, culture, and economics - to show how we have made ourselves the second fattest people on the planet (after South Sea Islanders).Fat Land highlights the groundbreaking research that implicates cheap fats and sugars as the alarming new metabolic factor making our calories stick and shows how and why children are too often the chief metabolic victims of such foods. No one else writing on fat America takes as hard a line as Critser on the institutionalized lies we've been telling ourselves about how much we can eat and how little we can exercise. His expose of the Los Angeles schools' opening of the nutritional floodgates in the lunchroom and his examination of the political and cultural forces that have set the bar on American fitness low and then lower, are both discerning reporting and impassioned wake-up calls.Disarmingly funny, Fat Land leaves no diet book - including Dr. Atkins's - unturned. Fashions, both leisure and street, and American-style religion are subject to Critser's gimlet eye as well. Memorably, Fat Land takes on baby-boomer parenting shibboleths - that young children won't eat past the point of being full and that the dinner table isn't the place to talk about food rules - and gives advice many families will use to lose.Critser's brilliantly drawn futuristic portrait of a Fat America just around the corner and his all too contemporary foray into the diabetes ward of a major children's hospital make Fat Land a chilling but brilliantly rendered portrait of the cost in human lives - many of them very young lives - of America's obesity epidemic.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction 1
1 Up Up Up! (Or, Where the Calories Came From) 7
2 Supersize Me (Who Got the Calories into our Bellies) 20
3 World Without Boundaries (Who Let the Calories In) 30
4 Why the Calories Stayed on Our Bodies 63
5 What Fat Is, What Fat Isn’t 109
6 What the Extra Calories Do to You 127
7 What Can Be Done 155
Appendix: Fat Land Facts 179
Notes 185
Index 223

INTRODUCTION Obesity is the dominant unmet global health issue, with Western countries topping the list. - World Health OrganizationSet the soul of thy son aright, and all the rest will be added hereafter! - Saint John ChrysostomThis book is not a memoir, but it is undeniably grounded in a singular personal experience. My experience was not, for those hoping for something juicy, a moment of childhood drama. Nor was it anything that led to any form of spiritual or true psychological revelation. Compared to the harrowing tribulations that so much of the worlds population endures, it was, when all is said and done, rather mundane and petty. Here it is: Some guy called me fatso. Specifically, he screamed: "Watch it, fatso!" Here I should note that I deserved the abuse; after all, I had opened my car door into a busy street without looking into my side mirror first, and so had nearly decapitated the poor fellow. I could have killed him. But why... fatso? Could it be because I was indeed forty pounds overweight? Or that I could not fit into any of my clothes, even the ones I got at the Gap that were labeled "relaxed" (which, come to think of it, I wasnt), let alone the ones considered "baggy" (which, again come to think of it, I was)? Could it be because I had to back up ten feet so as to get my entire face into the bathroom mirror to shave every morning? Or that when I dined with friends they hid their small pets and seemed to guard their plates, one arm curled around them, as if I might plunge my fork into their juicy pieces of duck and make off with them? Im obviously joking about the latter, but the point is that the insult hit home. In upwardly mobile, professional America, being fat - and having someone actually notice it and say something about it - is almost as bad as getting caught reading Playboy in your parents bedroom when youre ten. Shame shame shame. Fatness was hardly a new issue for me. My wife and my physician had been after me for some time to do something about my problem, the former quite gingerly, the latter not so. My doctor, in fact, had recently suggested that I consider a new weight loss medication. At the time, I had promptly brushed the idea aside. Now, the sting still fresh, I reconsidered: Why not? And so, for the next nine months, I put all of my extra energy into the task of shedding my excess avoirdupois. In modern America, this, I would find, was a rite in itself, replete with its own social institutions (health clubs), tonics (Meridia), taboos (Krispy Kreme), and aspirational totems (Levis 501 regular cuts). I was apparently ready for this rite, for, to my delight, I slowly but surely lost the weight. What followed was encouraging, if somewhat predictable: congratulations from friends for "sticking to it"; enhanced self-esteem; a new wardrobe; a newfound confidence and spring in my step; phone calls from J.Lo. and Julia. Yet the more I contemplated my success, the more I came to see it

---

Excerpted from Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.