Separating Fact from Fiction in the Age of Obesity

Feminist theorist Susan Bordo once wrote, "People used to try to develop a better self and act out all the projects of transcendence, transformation and purification in the context of community or religious work. Now they go to seminars with diet gurus." If dieting has become the new religion, then we are not only financially daft but spiritually bankrupt. The good news is that there is a growing movement trying to wake us up from our calorie-counting hypnosis and target the fat-pocketed CEOs behind the swinging crystal.

The pathetic success rate of diets isn't news, but what is groundbreaking is the growing awareness of just how unethical the $34 billion-a-year (some estimate as high as $50 billion) diet industry is. Organizations like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and books like Laura Fraser's "Losing It: America's Obsession with Weight and the Industry That Feeds It" and the just published "Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss -- and the Myths and Realities of Dieting" by New York Times health writer Gina Kolata, reinforce that it is not a lack of willpower that is standing between the average American dieter and her perfect body but a corrupt industry that keeps so many of us -- women in particular -- unsatisfied, obsessed and misinformed.

Separating fact from fiction in the age of obesity

If you've just emerged from an ashram or a remote cave, let me fill you in: The last few years have seen a wild spike in the media coverage and public conversation of all things fat. The obesity epidemic became the topic du jour for every nightly news program, sending America racing off to Weight Watchers meetings and downing diet teas in terrified droves.

Most of the diet industry big-hitters toe the party line between quick-results dieting and long-term lifestyle change (Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.), but there is a whole underbelly of the industry chock-full of dangerous schemes. These fast-fix pills, exercise and diet plans promise rapid weight loss -- sometimes at medically unsafe levels -- to desperate consumers.

There have been two dozen deaths from ephedra-based products in the last decade. Americans take 6 billion doses of PPA (what Fraser calls a "close chemical cousin" to amphetamines) every year even though it can causes a rise in blood pressure, anxiety and stroke; it is a common ingredient in diet pills like Dexatrim, Acutrim, Thinz and Appedrine. Many of the makers of these drugs have profited from the seemingly ubiquitous public conversation about fat in America.

J. Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, asserts that the advent of the obesity epidemic story was less about fact and more about funding. In "Obesity: The Making of an American Epidemic," he explains that the hullabaloo was the result of "a relatively small group of scientists and doctors, many directly funded by the weight-loss industry, [who] have created an arbitrary and unscientific definition of overweight and obesity. They have inflated claims and distorted statistics on the consequences of our growing weights, and they have largely ignored the complicated health realities associated with being fat."

Instead of talking about the food industry, genetic predisposition, or sedentary, fast-food lifestyles, nightly newscasts featured fat, headless B-roll edited with voiceover from the nation's doomsday celebrity nutritionists spreading fear and misinformation. Being slightly overweight raises risk of death! Life expectancy plummets for the first time in two centuries!

Thanks to books like Oliver's -- and "The Obesity Myth," by Paul F. Campos -- public hysteria over the obesity epidemic seems to have finally come to a more sober summit. The truth is that many of us are overweight -- according to Scientific American, six out of every 10 of us, in fact. After decades of speculation, and let's face it, downright discrimination when it comes to fat Americans, researchers are finally finding out how genetics, environment, and psychology play into our overweight millions. And they are finally asking the question that women, pulling on waistbands and frowning in mirrors, have been asking for years: "Why doesn't my diet ever work?"