I’m reading Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser and loving every minute.
I’ll post a more detailed review when I’ve finished. In the meantime, this book is a compelling rebuttal to the rather puritan notion that the overweight have no one but themselves to blame. Of course, we ultimately control what we eat and how much exercise we get. The problem with the simplistic individual-responsibility theory is that it fails to account for the effect of our environment and the cultural, commercial, and political forces that affect what we eat, where and when we eat it, and why.
The point is not to suggest that we aren’t responsible and should passively accept obesity and ill-health. The point is to uncover the factors that encourage obesity (e.g., lack of PE classes in schools; entrance of high-fat fast foods into school cafeterias; lack of parental time to cook; unsafe neighborhoods that encourage poorer parents to keep their kids inside watching TV rather than playing in the mean streets; agricultural policy that has encouraged the marketing of cheap, starchy snacks; reluctance on the part of health educators to stress the importance of restraint).
I find all of this fascinating. Also enlightening (but less entertaining) is Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It by Kelly Brownell. This more scholarly volume presents much of the same information and in addition makes numerous recommendations that could help families, community groups, and government tip the scales (so to speak) in the other direction.
