Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

Greg Critser

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0618380604

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this astonishing expose, journalist Greg Critser looks beyond the sensational headlines to reveal why nearly 60 percent of Americans are now overweight. Critser's sharp-eyed reportage and sharp-tongued analysis make for a disarmingly funny and truly alarming book. Critser investigates the many factors of American life -- from supersize to Super Mario, from high-fructose corn syrup to the high cost of physical education in schools -- that have converged and conspired to make us some of the fattest people on the planet. He also explains why pediatricians are treating conditions rarely before noticed in children, why Type 2 diabetes is on the rise, and how agribusiness has unwittingly altered the American diet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

baggy pants–prison garb of the nation's rap stars—many of them not just fat but morbidly obese—such enterprises prided themselves on making "fat" into "phat." Phat, they would proclaim, was really about empowerment—about rejecting mainstream notions about power and fashion and conformity. "We about a buncha obese playboys!" proclaimed the rap star Big Pun in 1999. It didn't hurt that the same attitude also sold millions of records. But the same attitude was also a tremendous enabler. Consider

un-unionized—was the one thing that made them extra valuable in the constantly changing L.A. labor pool. There their services enabled the middle and upper middle classes to continue their upward, double-income ascent. Latino maids cleaned the house, Latino nannies watched the kids after school, Latino gardeners mowed the lawn and blew the leaves away. Yet if they were expending so much energy, why were they gaining so much weight? The question is a road map to an even bigger concern: How does

the way that the thrifty gene expresses itself through and combines with different environmental experiences. The nutritionally poor environment of many men and women born in Mexico and Central America, for example, might accentuate the effects of the thrifty gene and its relatives. One way it might do so is through what scientists now call in utero programming. The theory holds that a pregnant woman who experiences starvation during pregnancy is more likely to have a child that is metabolically

school to witness this new phenomenon. All around the field, while boys and girls are running drills under the supervision of coaches, their waiting families are also at play. Papa teaches tiny Miguel how to skip rope. Mama jogs on the adjacent track. Brother José shoots hoops with a school friend over on the basketball court. The scene is re-created daily at hundreds of locations around the country. Instructively, all of this ancillary physical culture comes spontaneously. It is not the work of

impact on one's ability to solve life's problems, see also Faith McLellan, "Countering poverty's hindrance of neurodevelopment," Lancet, v. 359, 2002, p. 236. Much of that cocoon: Michael Stamler, "SBA Loan Guarantees, Select Cities, 1982–2001," Report in Response to Memo from Greg Critser, Small Business Administration, February 21, 2001; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. 101–102. No wonder that, by the late 1990s: A. M. Freedman, "Fast Food Chains Play

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