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By: Madeleine Nash Time Magazine 
The developed world is clearly in a state of nutritional crisis and in need of radical remedies. The statistics are sobering. After 30 years of seemingly solid advice aimed at lowering dietary fat, Europeans have grown collectively fatter than ever. Today more than 50% of the adults in the European Union are classified as overweight or obese. So many children have become heavy that pediatricians are now facing an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes and hypertension – diseases that are closely associated with being overweight and were unheard of among youngsters just a generation ago. On one level, there is no mystery about why we as a society are fat: because we consume too many calories and expend too few. Though it is true that the proportion of fat in our diet has fallen from 40% in 1990 to roughly 36.5% today, the calories available in the food we consume have gone up, from 3,187 calories per capita per day in the 1970s to 3,400 in the 1990s, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Even the traditionally slender French are succumbing to the trend. A recent study by the French National Institute of Medical Research found that the proportion of obese people rose from 9.6% in 2000 to 11.3% in 2003. In principle, at least, no one should ever become obese. That’s because the genetic system for regulating weight would seem to be exquisitely tuned. Researchers calculate that a man who keeps his weight stable at 80 kg will take in 1 million calories a year on average and will also expend 1 million calories. Genes, of course, do not make us fat. They merely set up a susceptibility to gaining weight under certain conditions – and without question, these conditions are now ubiquitous. With fast-food outlets lining our streets and time- and labor-saving gadgetry proliferating, the energy balance is increasingly tipped in favor of fatness. We expend less than a calorie every time we change channels using the remote control. If we’d only get up and go over to the TV, we’d use three. Using a car wash consumes 18 calories, while washing and waxing the car yourself consumes 300. Since they are having trouble changing our sedentary lifestyles, health professionals are focusing on making us at least eat more healthily. The British Medical association, for example, is discussing levying a fat tax on high-fat foods. One of the reasons that fast foods are so attractive is their high fat content. Fat is energy dense, with twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein. “It’s very easy to eat a little bit more with every meal”, says Dr. John Wilding, a consultant physician who runs an obesity clinic in Liverpool. “An extra 100 calories a day and you will be 7 kg heavier at the end of the year”. What is most disturbing about the adults’ overeating is that they are unwittingly passing on that tendency to children. There is growing evidence that what you eat early in life can permanently boost your body’s desire for food. A 2001 study by German pediatrics professor Berthold Koletzko found that breast-feeding children for at least six months gave them a 40% lower risk of becoming obese in later life. If we were to start from scratch, how would we design a diet to keep our weight under control? For starters, we could concentrate on diets geared for life rather than quick and easy weight loss. Over the years, we pick up a lot of bad eating habits, and it’s tough to break them. So what’s to be done? Crash diets are no good. At obesity clinics nutritionists recommend reducing fat intake from 40% to 30% of total calories, increasing mono-unsaturated fats like olive oil, and ensuring that a majority of carbohydrates come from fiber-rich sources like pulses, oats and rye bread. And we must get moving to use up more of those calories. Perhaps, the future will bring better medications, at least for people who are morbidly obese. But for the broader population, the remedy must be sought elsewhere. As we can’t change the genes we are born with, we are left with one alternative – to change the environment we live in. |
