The Obesity Warriors
What will it take to end this epidemic? These experts are very glad you asked
By Claudia Wallis
ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY ZOHAR LAZAR
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June 7, 2004
Nutritionist Marion Nestle stares in wonder at the latest bit of
marketing wizardry to hit American sweetshops: sour green
tamarind-flavored Shrek candies. She pops off the Shrek-shaped
cap on a Crazy Hair confection and, after some initial
befuddlement (of a kind no one under 12 would suffer), turns a
dial on the bottom of the plastic tube. Sticky strands of
chartreuse goo extrude through a nozzle and "grow" upward in
apparent defiance of gravity. "Wow!" says Nestle, who has a deep
appreciation for such ingenuity. She plunges in with a taste
test. "Yech! So sour!" she complains. "And it sticks to your
hands." Popping on her reading glasses, Nestle, who chairs the
department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New
York University, casts a practiced eye on the label. "Nothing but
sugar, corn syrup and a bunch of food additives," she says,
sighing. "What kid can resist this?"
Some 70 miles up the East Coast in New Haven, Conn., psychologist
Kelly Brownell pulls out a full-page advertisement he has torn
from the Wall Street Journal and marvels over the message. The ad
displays a new snack-food product from Frito-Lay called Munchies
Kids Mix, packaged, once again, in that child-friendly chartreuse
hue. It reads, "Mom and Dad, you'll feel great about offering it
to your kids because Munchies Kids Mix is a good source of 8
essential vitamins and minerals, has 0 grams trans fat and meets
nutritional guidelines established by [Texas fitness expert] Dr.
Kenneth Cooper for sugar, fat and sodium." The snack is a mix of
Cheetos, Doritos, Rold Gold pretzels, SmartFood popcorn, Cap'n
Crunch cereal and M&M-like candy. "See what we're up against?"
laments Brownell, who is director of the Yale Center for Eating
and Weight Disorders. "This is being promoted as a healthy
product? No wonder people are confused."
For Nestle (rhymes with wrestle), Brownell and a handful of other
researchers and clinicians, the fight to control America's
obesity epidemic has become more than a scientific quest for new
data and better ways to help individual patients battle the
bulge. It has become a crusade to change the way Americans live.
The nation's landscape, they argue, is littered with junk food
masquerading as health food, candy and candylike cereals
featuring kids' favorite cartoon characters and toylike
packaging, schools that shamelessly hawk soft drinks and snack
foods, and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns to promote
such unwholesome products. Schools, in particular, "have become
nutritional disaster areas," says Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard
pediatrician who directs the obesity program at Children's
Hospital Boston. Experts like Ludwig and Brownell are equally
worried about what's missing from the landscape: sidewalks and
bike paths; neighborhoods with safe, accessible parks and stores
you can walk to; daily physical-education classes in public
schools; and staircases in office buildings. "We've created
environments that are hostile to physical activity," says
psychologist James Sallis, director of the Active Living Research
Program at San Diego State University.
Working in their individual fields—nutrition, psychology,
pediatrics—each of these scientists has concluded that it is
simply too difficult for Americans to stand up to the many forces
that propel them to eat too much and move too little. For
decades, they say, the country has seen obesity as a personal
problem to be solved by each overweight individual waging a
lonely war to trim pounds on the diet du jour. While it's true
that we are each responsible for what we put in our own mouth,
they note that the personal-responsibility approach has been a
big, fat flop. In the past 30 years, the percentage of Americans
who are overweight has ballooned from 48% to 65%. The percentage
of children who are overweight has tripled, from 5% to 15%, and
another 15% are considered borderline.
While biology and personal habits play an undeniable role,
there's abundant evidence that environmental factors loom large
in the obesity rate. Brownell likes to point to studies of
immigrants from low-obesity countries such as India, Somalia and
Japan. "When people move to countries where there is more
obesity, they tend to gain weight," he notes. "Did they suddenly
become less responsible when they moved?" More likely, they are
responding to their new environment's cues to eat more calories
and be less active. After years of trying to help obese patients
lose weight in the land of the fat, says Brownell, "it became
clear to me that there was this disastrous environment that
almost guaranteed an obese population and something had to be
done about it. That's when science became advocacy."
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