Obesity and health reform

By 2015, four out of 10 Americans may be obese. Until last year, the author was one of them. The way he lost one-third of his weight isn’t for everyone. But unless America stops cheering The Biggest Loser and starts getting serious about preventing obesity, the country risks being overwhelmed by chronic disease and ballooning health costs. Will first lady Michelle Obama’s new plan to fight childhood obesity work, or is it just another false start in the country’s long and so far unsuccessful war against fat? — Beating Obesity, The Atlantic

Reading this article by Marc Ambinder (at right), with The Atlantic, I was struck by the irony of the moment.

The story was titled “Beating Obesity” and was framed in Ambinder’s personal struggles with obesity and how, through bariatric surgery, he was able to overcome the oftentimes crippling physical, mental and social implications behind the disorder.

IMAGE CREDIT: LEFT, PHOTO COURTESY OF MARC AMBINDER; RIGHT, PHOTO BY STEPHEN VOSS

Now, since I barely push the century mark in weight and, however futilely, do all I can to actually put on pounds. Thus, I was enjoying a hearty burrito de carnitas at one of my favorite local Mexican joints and reading a story about obesity. Just in front of me, and later seated at a nearby table, came a middle-aged couple, and the man, by any standards, could rightly be categorized as overweight. His corpulence was not initially apparent to me until he got up to go to the bathroom. Upon returning, and already breathing heavily, he, with no small measure of effort, slid back into the booth across from the woman. He then continued his labored breathing for a good 3-4 minutes after that, and I thought, unless he has a genuine breathing condition, he really isn’t helping himself by loading up on Mexican food. And I then thought: “This really is what’s wrong with this country.”

Admitting my own guilt — although to many people’s chagrin, and to mine, I can eat just about anything and stay the same size — we readily recognize our own unhealthiness, personally and as a nation, yet continue, week after week, to pony up to the buffet line as if we have lived off a diet of  food and water for two straight weeks.

Although I don’t really have a dog in that hunt, obesity really is far-reaching problem in the United States, and we should all be concerned about the horse-trough mentality that pervades this country. Some individual cases of obesity do have ties to genetics and societal pressures. We can’t dispute that. But the overarching health issues we have in this country, rising cases of diabetes, for instance, is inextricably linked to our Wahoo, gung-ho, manifest destiny, I-want-it-all-and-I-want-it-now culture.

And, ever a capitalistic engine, we exploit this culture to entertain our baser impulses. Ambinder notes that

For the average fat person, life can be an endless chain of humiliating experiences. On a flight to Denver not too long ago, I watched as a very large woman struggled to settle into her seat. Next to her, a much skinnier man curled his lip in disgust. The woman softly asked a passing flight attendant for a seat-belt extender. The flight attendant didn’t hear her over the roar of the engines, so the woman had to ask again, and this time, everyone looked at her. Grocery shopping, eating at restaurants, going to the movies, having drinks at a crowded bar—for the fat person, these are situations to be negotiated and survived, not enjoyed. The workplace is no different: a television executive once remarked to me that my career as a political analyst would “really take off if [I] would just lose a few pounds.” When I was fat, I avoided meeting people’s eyes. I didn’t want to subject them to my ugliness.

Unfortunately, our culture reinforces this anxiety by turning obesity into pornography. This is not surprising. Obesity has become not just a scientific fad of sorts, generating intense research, curiosity, and public concern, but also a commercial gold mine that draws on the same kind of audiences that used to go to circus carnivals a century ago to peer at freakishly obese men and women. The TLC network, which long ago transcended its “Learning Channel” origins and gave the world Jon and Kate, now features obesity-programming blocks. One recent special followed the progress of an extremely obese teenage boy who struggled through bariatric surgery and its aftermath. Another special chronicled the life of the fattest man in the world. In addition to The Biggest Loser, NBC’s popular weight-loss boot-camp competition, and Fox’s More to Love, a dating show for larger people, the Oxygen network now has a dancing competition called Dance Your Ass Off. Fat people are funny.

Our obsession with the obsessive has to end and the much debated health care reform package must contain elements geared toward education about diabetes; the dangers of overeating, fast food and sodas; and general healthy living. And the education must begin with children in elementary school. I’m no star student and enjoy a meaty, messy, 1,000-calorie burger like everyone else, but we could also use a good measure of conscience-raising , or else, Americans will continue to be among the least healthy people in the modernized world.