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

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."

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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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