America: The Fattest Country

"It pays to remember, perhaps while ordering that next supersized meal, that Dante put the gluttonous in the third circle of hell, where they were to endure 'eternal, cold and cursed heavy rain.' The slothful, one might consider as one cues up one's satellite dish, fared even worse; in the fifth circle they would 'languish in the black slime' of the river Styx. In the twenty-first century, we have put ourselves in the first circle of fat hell."

Like a hungry man attacking a Big Mac, Greg Critser does not hold back. In his new book, "Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World," the journalist and former fatty goes straight for the heart of America's obesity epidemic. The above quote, from Critser's concluding chapter, emphatically outs the parallel evils of over-consumption and inactivity as fundamental reasons why 50 million people in the United States are clinically obese.

"Fat Land" is no biblical polemic, however. The obesity epidemic is both deadly and draining. It kills approximately 300,000 people in the U.S. every year and the nation annually spends $117 billion on obesity-related healthcare. But its mortal roots are much more tangible than the seven sins. Using a holistic approach comparable to Eric Schlosser's multifarious method in "Fast Food Nation," Critser details the dozens of congealed factors at the core of this societal illness. Gluttony and sloth are blamed, but only after he targets political and agricultural policies, globalized trade, class inequity, nutritional monkey-wrenching, corporate marketing strategies, school district irresponsibility and fad psychology.

In its recent review of "Fat Land," the New York Times calls Critser's core subject "the nutritional contradictions of capitalism." In a world where the ability to consume is held aloft as an ultimate goal, where bigger is better because others can see how much you have, we're literally gorging ourselves to death. "The way to deal with obesity is to reduce our consumption," Critser says in a phone interview from his home in Pasadena, California. "But consuming is half of our identity. The other half is producing. And this is not a message that anybody wants to hear."

Essentially, we're a continent in denial, says Critser, who considers eating an extremely intimate function. "I think people are more secretive about food than sex," he says. "It's the ultimate primal act." Accordingly, there's tremendous hesitancy to deal with the obesity issue straight-on, which is what he set out to do after experiencing his personal awakening five years ago. Forty pounds overweight at the time, Critser nearly clipped a cyclist with his car door and received an angry "Watch it, fatso!" in response. That same day, out of the blue, his doctor left a message about a new obesity drug on his answering machine, telling Critser that he was a candidate. Putting himself through a jumble of health clubs and medications, eschewing Krispy Kreme donuts and striving for regular-cut jeans, Critser lost weight. He kept a detailed journal about the process; it was published in a magazine, a newspaper and evolved into a Harper's cover story in 2000. As he writes in "Fat Land," Critser saw his successful shedding " not as a triumph of will, but as a triumph of my economic and social class." He noted that not everybody could afford to pay for drugs and exercise expertise. He also saw a bigger story that he'd need a book to flesh out, especially after meeting people like University of Colorado physiologist James Hill, who warned that at the current growth rate almost all Americans will be overweight by 2050, that becoming obese "is a normal response to the American environment."

Paving the Road to Fat

The roots of this environment can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when people like U.S. agriculture secretary Earl Butz instigated a chain of events that would by the end of the century lead to 450-pound teenagers requiring emergency stomach-stapling gastroplasty surgery. Butz, a Richard Nixon nominee, lowered food prices for American consumers and helped American farmers lock up new markets. In order to do that, he pushed products like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and palm oil into our diets. HFCS, which improves the shelf-life of vending machine goodies and protects frozen food from freezer burn, is six times sweeter than cane sugar and can be made from U.S.-grown corn. Palm oil, imported in massive quantities from Malaysia to give American agricultural exporters a green light overseas, has been described as "more highly saturated than hog lard." Yet they both became staples.