THE NAKED ANIMAL

The title of this post comes from a bon mot one of my ESL students--a postgraduate in finance from Turkmenistan--came up with when I asked him what his first impression of Americans was when he arrived in the US several months ago: "Always smiling, always hungry," he said in a sing-song Black Sea drawl--I laughed for a minute straight; it could be our national tag line.

On the flip side of the happy hamburger culture, though, we have a new report that claims seven of ten American women and nine of ten American men will eventually become obese before they kick the bucket. Work your ass off, get fat, die: the great American way.

Apparently I'm halfway out of the woods: according to the study, I am 50% less likely to get fat from this point on because I've made it to (almost) 40 without ballooning. In fact, I've recently rediscovered my 30-inch waistline (misplaced some time in the early 90s), but it wasn't easy; and that's a different post. My dad had a potbelly by 30, and even today, most straight guys I meet who are over 30 are also sportin' the ol' gut. That's a mystery to me. Can some straight guy or girl fill me in on this? I'd bet you anything that the one out of ten American men who stay lean are 90 percent gay (vanity is an honored and integral part of our culture), and the other 10 percent of that small number is probably dominated by the gloriously undefined "bi-curious" set.

Now, I don't know if being straight was a prerequisite for the study, but it was conducted exclusively within a group of white, middle class, midlifers. What, no minorities?--a group at even higher risk of obesity, as "Fat Ass Nation" on the freestylin' "My Amusement Park" blog perspicaciously points out.

No matter what color they are, the poor are in extreme danger of growing ever larger due to the fact that, calorie for calorie, junk and fast food are cheaper than fresh fare--not to mention vastly easier to deal with for people whose already jeopardized will is wasted on simply making enough money to eat the nasty stuff they feed themselves; oh, and not to mention the fact that the stuff is "as addictive as heroin," according to Princeton University. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd be suspicious, but I'm not (either the former or the latter). However, if you look closely at the evolution of modern industry and advertising alongside the rise in obesity, I'm almost positive you can find a correlation.

Britain is hot on the trail of obesity these days--literally, with National Walk to School Week, as reported by TreeHuggerMum--specifically due to "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver's recent television campaign against the truly putrid mush and junk that was being fed to schoolchildren all over the isle. The government has pledged a great deal of money to school lunch reform and has already outlawed junk food vending machines on school campuses. Way to go, Jamie - now that's good television! Read all about it here.

Down under, they're making interactive video games so that kids can sit on their fattening little asses for hours in front of the TV and learn about how dangerous and unhealthy it is to get fat (while they're munching sweetened cereal from the box -- yum!). Then again, it is possible that they prize the potbelly in Australia.

And here in the US? Um...well, the government wants to put a warning on french fries, for a start. Hey, it's just a drop in the empty KFC bucket, but it's something. We can always supersize it, right?

permalink posted by rob @ 6:51 PM