Everywhere in the world, the richest people build the biggest homes, but as the world's wealthiest nation, the United States is also building the biggest bodies. It's hardly cause for patriotic pride. "We're leading a race we shouldn't want to win," says associate professor of pediatrics David Ludwig. Many foreigners already view Americans as rich, greedy over-consumers, stuffing themselves with far more than their share of the planet's resources, and obese American travelers waddling through international airports and hotel lobbies only reinforce that image. Yet our fat problem is becoming a global one as food corporations export our sugary, salty, fatty diet: Beijing has more than a hundred McDonald's franchises, which advertise and price the same food in the same way, and with the same level of success.
The epidemic of obesity is a vast and growing public health problem. "Weight sits like a spider at the center of an intricate, tangled web of health and disease," writes Willett in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, arguably the best and most scientifically sound book on nutrition for the general public. He notes that three aspects of weight—BMI, waist size, and weight gained after one's early twenties—are linked to chances of having or dying from heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several types of cancer, plus suffering from arthritis, infertility, gallstones, asthma, and even snoring. "Weight is much more important than serum cholesterol," Willett asserts; as a cause of premature, preventable deaths, he adds, excess weight and obesity rank a very close second to smoking, partly because there are twice as many fat people as smokers. In fact, since smokers tend to be leaner, the decrease in smoking prevalence has actually swelled the ranks of the fat.
The obesity epidemic arrived with astonishing speed. After tens of thousands of generations of human evolution, flab has become widespread only in the past 50 years, and waistlines have ballooned exponentially in the last two decades. In 1980, 46 percent of U.S. adults were overweight; by 2000, the figure was 64.5 percent: nearly a 1 percent annual increase in the ranks of the fat. At this rate, by 2040, 100 percent of American adults will be overweight and "it may happen more quickly," says John Foreyt of Baylor College of Medicine, who spoke at a conference organized by Gifford's Oldways group in 2003. Foreyt noted that, 20 years ago, he rarely saw 300-pound patients; now they are common. Childhood obesity, also once rare, has mushroomed: 15 percent of children between ages six and 19 are now overweight, and even 10 percent of those between two and five. "This may be the first generation of children who will die before their parents," Foreyt says.
