Dr. W.W. Austin
English 102
November 12, 2009
Paying the Price: What it Means to be Fat in America Today
In America today, constant reminders of health and well-being flood the view of our surroundings. We are expected by the government to make sound healthful choices in our life, or pay the price. Demands are being made to eat healthy and get the proper amount of exercise. There is without a doubt an ideal human form personified in the media today, one that as Americans we are expected to live up to or else fall to the shameful scrutiny of our peers. To ensure that these healthy and thoughtful choices are being made, the government is implementing laws and regulations. What the government does not realize about these implementations are the negative effects it poses for American citizens. In this “land of the free,” Americans are unwillingly being subjected to lies that give them low self-esteem and take away their rights.
Small Steps is a campaign implemented by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Their website states their overall goal is to improve the health and well-being of Americans today by implementing healthy choices into a day to day routine of activities. While this might all sound harmless, there are condescending undertones and forceful attitudes about actions you should take to improve your health. The website includes information about what you should eat, how you should exercise, what you should avoid and what you need to embrace. Complete with quizzes about your fitness, startling health related statistics at the bottom of each page, and images of beautifully trim people to make you feel bad about yourself, the website alarmingly connotes an aura of propaganda about the whole topic of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It really makes you wonder why the government feels so strongly about the whole issue. Aren’t there more important things to worry about?
Although the Small Steps campaign seems a bit incriminating, America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, takes the cake. This bill, approved just a few weeks ago in October of 2009, blatantly discriminates against people who are overweight, and thus, considered unhealthy by their standards. It introduces incentives for people who are deemed to have maintained “healthy lifestyles” with beneficial health care coverage through Medicare and Medicaid. As a whole, the bill actually “Lets insurers increase financial incentives (i.e. penalties) based on weight and other outcomes.” (Big Brother)
The implementation of this bill is discriminatory and weak minded. There are plenty of other countries around the world that provide government funded health care and see positive results without voicing these prejudices. Maybe we should take note of what has worked for them instead of starting from our feeble base of little experience with the topic. This is a sheer act of discrimination and it is abominable that this has actually passed through the legislative system.
Along with these oppressive government actions there are still more measures being taken as well, including proposed and implemented social solutions including snack taxes, corporate sponsored exercise breaks, stronger food labeling laws, and state mandated weigh-ins at public schools (Guthman 1). Also, on a more corporate level, the introduction of the Mini Coke Can will premiere on the market in December. William Saleton refers to this innovation as “the new light cigarette,” as Coca Cola attempts to market the mini Coke cans to health conscious individuals (Coke Suckers). Should being healthy really be debased to a mere trend in popular culture? People have such an aloof opinion about people who make “unhealthy” choices. This is really just a new way to justify an unhealthy choice by marketing the product as health conscious as well as trendy.
Bennett Gordon poses a very interesting argument in Healthy Options Make People Eat Unhealthy posing that these reforms, such as the mini Coke can, actually have an opposite effect on humans psychologically. He quotes Psychology Today by saying “twice as many subjects tended to choose the least healthy item when the choices included a healthy option, compared to when one was not available.” These results clearly show the backlash that could potentially happen in the U.S. if the government starts implementing more health reform laws. Unhealthy food is being lowered to sinful and wrong, which makes people want to indulge and rebel against societal moralities. This is much like the child who is told to not stick anything up his nose. Because he is told not to, he is intrigued by what might happen if he does.
Another reason as to why this health reform will not work is due to the simple fact that for some people, becoming thin or staying thin is nearly impossible. Some people were born and will always be overweight, no matter how hard they try to change their body. According to Julie Hanus:
To abandon the ranks of the overweight or obese, an American must achieve some Herculean combination of the following: overcome a genetically predisposed weight; starve through the hunger that naturally stems from exercise; resist the savvy marketing cues that trick us into consuming even larger portions; and move into a better neighborhood, one with access to fresh foods, fewer fast food joints, and safer sidewalks. (1)
Junk food is everywhere around us. Processed food has become an accepted norm of our every day diets. Unwholesome corn has taken the reigns to add unnecessary sugar and fat to our every day food choices without us even realizing it. Eating processed foods is only unavoidable if you make a severe conscious decision that, quite frankly, is difficult to keep up. The FDA has accepted these food additives as satisfactory for our every day diets. It is possible that they could also be at fault for the allowance of processed foods on the market today. But, if they controlled these foods from being on the market, could it be an invasion of our rights as consumers?
Although weight is often a predisposed state for many Americans, being considered overweight does not necessarily mean that you are unhealthy, especially by the skewed standards that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services employs. One of these standards used regularly by the government is the calculation of one’s Body Mass Index, commonly referred to as BMI. On the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) website, there is a BMI calculator to determine if your current BMI is at a healthy standard. They calculate this bogus number by taking your height and current weight to determine your overall body fatness. No doctor appointment needed! It is so simple! So simple that the results you will obtain will really tell you close to nothing about your current health. These BMI calculations are “based on a remarkably elaborate series of lies- lies about fat, lies about fitness, and health that, not coincidentally, serve the interests of America’s $50-billion per-year diet industry” (Campos 207).
A common misconception, which is deemed as somewhat of a universal truth, is that all overweight people are unhealthy. This is false and has no scientific base proving that having a diet containing foods high in fat have a negative effect on your mortality. In fact this theory has been tried and tested only to conclude that, “the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.” (Tierney 3) Tierney attributes this chain of falsified information to what social scientists call a cascade. He describes this chain in relation to the television show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” referring to the studio audience, posing:
Suppose instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong. If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he is liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects the other answer is right, she is more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins and “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong (1-2).
This cascade theory leads doctors and scientists to believe this false notion without ever doing any research on the topic themselves. They assume that the information is correct, as it has been passed down to them by other scholarly sources that also did not do any research to prove this theory. At the center of the issue, when research has been done on the topic of obesity and its negative effects on health, there has been no correlation when put to rigorous scientific study.
Although fattening foods may have no correlation to overall health, the social perception of fatness does have an overall negative emotional impact on individuals stigmatized by the label. As Hannah Lobel puts it, “to be fat in our culture is to be labeled a glutton and a vessel of disease” (1). American culture simply has an extraordinarily skewed judgmental view about the physical stature of humans. Fat people are viewed as unattractive; the government advertises an overwhelming amount of imagery of an ideal thin being as a constant reminder of health consciousness. In turn, overweight people think negatively about themselves, as they struggle to fit the prototype of that American ideal. Lobel describes this emotion as “sending people into prisons of self-loathing that have them seek refuge in yo-yo diets that feed the multi-billion dollar weight-loss industry” (2) Americans, especially women, fall into the trap of being overly weight conscious as “obesity talk further stigmatizes those who are fat” (Guthman 3). Everyone is aware of the eating disorders Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa caused from being overly body conscious, but few are aware of the dangers of Orthorexia Nervosa, which has noticeably been on the rise since the new American push for health.
Orthorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder that begins as a seemingly benign goal of improving health (Hanus 1). An Orthorexic strives to gain purity of their body by eating only foods that are organic and pure, which in theory will increase their health and well-being. This drive can then amount to a “degeneration of their body and spirit,” as they start to feel alienated socially and creatively (Rosenthal qtd in Hanus1). Their focus on being healthy is insurmountable. It becomes the center of every waking moment and “overtime, what to eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater proportion of the orthorexic’s day” (Tsoukanelis 1). They generally keep taking more and more foods out of their diet, as they do not meet their increasing standards of purity. Their bodies slowly but surely start to waste away, often to their amazement.
This serious disease is a relatively new phenomenon, a disease that until now has never been addressed. The increase in the presence of Orthorexia Nervosa cannot be ignored. The government wants people to become more health conscious particularly in the way we eat. It would be juvenile to not think that the government’s overwhelming push for health might not be part of the problem dealing with the rise of Orthorexia and the disease’s victims.
If the campaign has so many negative effects on the well being of Americans, why would they still make the push for health reform? Money. This health reform has jump-started a 50-billion dollar per year weight loss industry (Campos 207). Consumers buy into gimmick products, expensive diet foods, fitness centers, and harmful drugs in order to submit to the demand of health. There is no doubt that this is a stimulant to the dwindling American economy. Because the issue of obesity is on an individual level, it is something that Americans tend to take to heart very seriously. In turn, they will do whatever they can to improve themselves, in attempt to escape the “moral decrepitude” (Guthman 1) of being fat. These actions include putting their money into the fight against their body weight and therefore stimulate the economy. This is a much more effective, and subconscious, way to convince Americans to spend money to subdue economic turmoil.
The exploitation of the American population and the implementation of discriminatory laws are stealing the rights we, as Americans, are entitled to. The government is controlling our visual field to view fit and trim people as the ideal form, to convince us to eat healthy and exercise daily, and to scare us with consequences if we do not heed their word. This visual stimulation causes an inner “sizeism” to take over, we judge fat people instantly, bargaining how they might be a better version of themselves if they could just lose some weight. Much like racism, these harsh judgments are completely unprovoked, our minds morphed into hating machines. To quote the United States Surgeon General Richard Carmona: “[Obesity is] every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat we face today. It is the threat from within” (qtd in Balko 1). Stigmatizations such as this, going as far as to compare fat people to terrorists, are causing extraordinary amounts of subconscious brainwashing as Americans fight to eradicate fat. The propaganda and the actions taken by the government to solidify this propaganda about being fat are an invasion of our rights.
As Americans, we should be allowed to be fat if we damn well please! Instead of promoting the alienation of fat people, we should be promoting the joys of having high self-esteem. We should love ourselves and the people around us for more than simple outward appearance. There is more to the human race than just fat and thin. Humans are complex beings capable of amazing feats of knowledge, skill, and creativity. We are vessels of emotion, action, and thought. We should be celebrating instead of punishing ourselves. We are more than what we eat. We are what we think, the way we act, and the things we do. We are what we learn and what we create. We are all human, and it is about time that we stop bastardizing our race to such superficial terms of acceptance.
Works Cited
Balko, Radley. "The "War" Against Obesity." Cato Institute (25 Jun. 2004): 1-7. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
Campos, Paul. “Being Fat is Okay.” Jewish World Review 2001. Rpt. in “They Say/ I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. New York: Norton, 206-09. Print. 16 Oct. 2009. Print.
Gordon, Bennett. "Healthy Options Make People Eat Unhealthy." Utne Reader 28 Aug. 2009: n. pag. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
Guthman, Julie. "The Food Police. Why Michael Pollan Makes Me Want to Eat Cheetos." Utne Reader Jan./Feb. 2008: 1-5. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
Hanus, Julie. "The Healthy Eating Obsession." Utne Reader 06/26/2009: n. pag. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
Lobel, Hannah. "How an Obsession with Obesity Turned Fat into a Moral Failing." Utne Reader Jan./Feb. 2008: 1-2. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
Saletan, William. "Big Brother is Watching Your Weight: Your Tax Dollars at Work, Penalizing Fat People." Slate Magazine. 21 Oct. 2009. Web. 3 Nov. 2009.
---. "Coke Suckers." Slate Magazine. 19 Oct. 2009. Web. 4 Oct. 2009.
Smallstep Adult and Teen. Web. 12 Nov. 2009. http://www.smallstep.gov/.
Tierney, John. "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus." New York Times 9 Oct. 2007: 1-4. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
Tsoukanelis, Erika Alexia. "Obsessed With Health: Orthorexics Take Healthy Eating to the Extreme." EMagazine n. pag. Web. 16 Oct 2009.
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