Food fight Health advocate sounds earnest alarm about America’s increasingly dire ‘obesity epidemic’

FOOD FIGHT: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It, by Kelly D. Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen, McGraw Hill Cos., New York, 2004, $24.95.

Be warned: This earnest, humor-challenged manifesto on the “obesity epidemic” and the “toxic food environment” in the United States may leave you guilt-ridden and uneasy the next time you eat fast food, hum the advertising jingle for a soft drink or buy your child a popular breakfast cereal.

The sole comfort in “Food Fight” is that the lead author – psychologist and nutritionist Kelly D. Brownell, PhD. – doesn’t blame us for our bad eating habits and our extra pounds.

A high-profile public health advocate and food activist, Brownell ratchets up the rhetoric about an “indifferent” culture that “feeds its pets better than its children.” He assails a powerful food industry that takes advantage of humankind’s primal taste for fats and sugar to market abundant, cheap junk food while our economic system conspires to keep nutritious fruits and vegetables from the poor.

In combination with sedentary lifestyles, Brownell says, the result is a “tidal wave” of obesity-related diseases such as diabetes – particularly among children – and an unhealthy environment in which “today’s children may be the first in American history to live shorter lives than their parents.” The United States also is spreading its nutritional mayhem to other calorie-defenseless countries, he says.

This 356-page, easy-to-digest book is one of the latest in an increasingly militant genre that has reinvented the obesity problem as a social justice issue. Brownell even trots out Gandhi’s famous words, “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win,” likening the nation’s urgent “food fight” to the crusades over tobacco and seat-belt use that ultimately legislated what many people still consider matters of personal freedom.

In fact, Brownell calls for such measures as government oversight of food marketing to children, promotion of healthier foods in schools, pressure on celebrities to stop endorsing unhealthy foods, a “national strategic plan” to increase physical activity and taxes on junk food, with the proceeds making healthy foods more affordable and available. He suggests that tobacco-like lawsuits may be in order if these remedies fail to turn the toxic tide.

Needless to say, “Big Food” has aggressively responded to its depiction as the villain in the obesity debate. The Web site of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a pro-industry group, derides Brownell’s “whining” about abundant, reasonably priced food, and snidely notes that the author has an obvious weight problem of his own, appearing much thinner in his book jacket photo than in recent appearances promoting “Food Fight.”

Brownell cites statistics that 65 percent of Americans are overweight, with a dramatic rise in recent years in Type 2 diabetes and overall obesity-related health care costs in the United States. His characterization of

the problem as an epidemic is widely shared, although a backlash is developing among scientists who are leery of the debate’s increasingly political nature, much as in the global warming wars.

Jeffrey Friedman, the respected Rockefeller University researcher who discovered the human obesity gene leptin, recently challenged the epidemic alarms as a “political” manipulation of statistics. Friedman supports the view that genes determine human body weight, as they do height, and told The New York Times that free will is an “illusion” when it comes to eating.

Brownell – who serves as director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders – feels that personal responsibility for obesity is limited but concludes that only “25 percent to 40 percent of the variability in population body weight can be explained by genes.” He confidently attributes the majority of the problem to “the obesifying environment.”

Fortunately, there are simpler and less controversial targets in this book. There is little doubt that food marketing to children is shameless and manipulative, as seen in television cartoon commercials, movie tie-ins at fast-food restaurants, and food industry funding for cash-strapped schools in exchange for exclusive placement of their products such as soft drinks and snack foods. Readers will cringe over the “infiltration of educational materials” into elementary schools of thinly disguised advertising gimmicks such as “Skittles Math Riddles,” “Reese’s Pieces Count by Fives” and the “Hershey Milk Chocolate Bar Fractions Book.”

But it’s a real stretch to argue that we are helpless to resist fat, sugar and oversized portions because our ancestors were evolutionarily driven to gorge on those foods to survive the boom and bust cycles that once ruled human existence. One fairly insulting comparison describes an experiment with rats, in which the rodents were unable to resist junk food when offered large quantities alongside more nutritious fare. So much for innate “nutritional wisdom,” Brownell tells us, and implies that the results extrapolate to two-legged mammals.

“Food Fight” isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about the causes of obesity and who’s to blame. Some of Brownell’s solutions are common sense; most are radical, inflammatory and politically unworkable. Particularly lame is his call for a national exercise initiative, something which has failed repeatedly in this country and always raises the hackles of independent Americans.

Perhaps the role of this book is to push the envelope on the obesity debate, and to remind us that overabundance carries its own costs and responsibilities. Brownell makes the dubious, culture-centric statement that “overconsumption has replaced malnutrition as the world’s top food problem.” If that’s true, then the real food fight is a battle for our souls, not our waistlines.

Luther Young works as a grant writer at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor and a copy editor at the Bangor Daily News. A former science writer at The Baltimore Sun, he can be reached at young@media2.hypernet.com.