An epidemic of McDonalds

painting by
Fernando Botero 

A few days ago I went to a water park with my family.  Being a middle aged woman, I was very self conscious about hanging around in a bathing suit.  

It might not be the nicest thing to say, but after seeing all the 200+ lb. women around in bathing suits, I felt much better. 

While the following article laments how fat we all are, the real problem is not our lack of control while we eat.  It is that there is SO LITTLE that we can eat that isn't bad for us.  We of the McDonald's, frozen pizza generation are learning too late.  Before you know it, you are 42 years old and you wear a size 24W bathing suit.  You never ate much desert, but lots of bread with so much high fructose corn syrup.... so you didn't have a chance.

I go to the grocery store and in every single aisle there are things we shouldn't eat. EVERYTHING has high fructose corn syrup or transfats -- even the bread (at the store I shop at there is only one brand that doesn't have this poisonous stuff). Most every major road I drive in Houston has a dialysis center, especially in the Latino neighborhoods.

Our growing size is not because there is something wrong with us.  There is something wrong with our capitalist system that is all about selling -- doesn't matter if it is good or bad food, it needs to be sold -  even if people die from eating too much of it.

p.s. having done a demographic survey at the water park of women from different ethnic and racial groups, I can say that Latinas do not have the market cornered on obesity.   Just a note, recently immigrated women from Mexico are very rarely overweight.  But take a look at their cousins who have been here 10 years...and have gotten used to the American diet.

see article on the banning of fast food restaurants in south Los Angeles:  LA Times "Council Bans Fast Food Restaurants in South L.A."

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August 10, 2008

New York Times
GUEST COLUMNIST
Honey, I Plumped the Kids

By OLIVIA JUDSON
LONDON

...pregnant females with access to junk food ate, on a daily basis, roughly 40 percent more food (by weight) and 56 percent more calories than rats that just had chow. Moreover — and this is the interesting bit — pups whose mothers ate junk food while pregnant and lactating had a greater taste for food high in fat and sugar than those whose mothers did not. The junk-food pups ate more calories and were more prone to gaining weight.

What goes for rats does not necessarily go for humans. Nonetheless, such results are thought-provoking. As everyone knows, humans are getting fatter and fatter. According to the World Health Organization, 400 million adults around the world weighed in as obese in 2005. In the United States, more than a third of women between 20 and 39 are obese, some of them extremely so. For the first time in history, large numbers of obese women are having children.

Being obese during pregnancy is dangerous for the mother and expensive for the health care system. But does it affect the babies?

There are reasons to think it might. The period between conception and birth is crucial — after all, you’re growing from a single cell into a baby. Your heart is being built; your brain is being wired. Exposure to alcohol during this time can disrupt brain development; lack of iodine may permanently stunt growth. Being starved in the womb can lead to health problems such as heart disease later in life, especially if food becomes abundant. So what about overnourishment? Does an “obese” environment in the womb somehow predispose babies to obesity later on?

...the results of several studies suggest that the very fact of a woman being obese during pregnancy may predispose her children to obesity. For example, one study found that children born to women who have lost weight after radical anti-obesity surgery are less likely to be obese than siblings born before their mother lost weight. Another study looked at women who gained weight between pregnancies; the results showed that babies born after their mothers put on weight tended to be heavier at birth than siblings born beforehand. Since the mother’s genes haven’t changed, the “fat” environment seems likely to be responsible for the effect.

Why might this happen? Perhaps an “obese” environment in the womb alters the wiring of the developing brain so as to interfere with normal appetite control, fat deposition, taste in food, or metabolism. Studies on other animals suggest that parts of the brain that control appetite develop differently under “obese” conditions. And in humans, one study has found that babies born to obese mothers have lower resting metabolic rates than babies whose mothers are of normal weight.

For most of our evolutionary past, the problem has been avoiding starvation. An environment awash with sugars and fats is, therefore, an evolutionary novelty: in hundreds of millions of years of evolution, this is the first time such foods have been abundant. Giant quantities of fats and sugars have not, historically, been available to a developing fetus, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they do have a harmful impact.

If this is right, it raises the alarming possibility that the obesity epidemic has a built-in snowball effect. If children born to obese mothers are, owing to the environment in the womb, predisposed to obesity, they may find staying thin especially hard. Reversing the epidemic may thus rest on helping women to lose weight before they conceive and helping them to eat a balanced, non-junk-food diet while they are pregnant. The well-being of the next generation may depend on it.

Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.

for link to NYT essay click here