Hot Dog Country
Living in the land of obesity and processed foods
Every July 4th our nation celebrates winning independence with small town parades, firework shows, and contests where competitors eat insane amounts of hot dogs.
This year’s female division champion of Nathan’s annual hot dog eating contest, Miki Sudo, ate a record 51 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
I’m someone who has never been exceptionally skinny nor extraordinarily overweight. I’ve hovered somewhere between average and above-average weight for a long time. My friend Evan teases me for every trip I make to Chick-fil-A (moderate but not too often) and for every time I reach into a bag of Doritos (often).
I’ve been reading more about exercise and diet but I feel like I have a long way to go to become a really healthy person. As I read more I’ll share more here.
Today’s stories:
1. “How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really?” - Casey Zhang for The New York Times
2. “Breaking Down Japan's Food Culture” - Johann Hari for TIME Magazine
3. “The Obese Police” - Tamar Haspel for The Atlantic
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
1. How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really?
Casey Zhang for The New York Times (Link)
SUMMARY
You can think of foods in three categories:
Unprocessed Foods - whole foods like vegetables, eggs, meats, rice, etc.
Processed Foods - whole foods combined with other foods like salt, sugar, vinegar, butter.
Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) - made using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores — like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate.
Ultra processed foods are a big part of the American diet, accounting for 67% of the calories consumed by teens and children in the U.S. That may be a very bad thing due to UPFs association with heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and earlier death. But there is less research than I would have thought on the topic.
SELECTION
Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs [Ultra Processed Foods] directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, she said.
In that study, published in 2019, 20 adults with a range of body sizes lived in a research hospital at the National Institutes of Health for four weeks. For two weeks, they ate mainly unprocessed or minimally processed foods, and for another two weeks, they ate mainly UPFs. The diets had similar amounts of calories and nutrients, and the participants could eat as much as they wanted at each meal.
During their two weeks on the ultraprocessed diet, participants gained an average of two pounds and consumed about 500 calories more per day than they did on the unprocessed diet. During their time on the unprocessed diet, they lost about two pounds.
2. Breaking Down Japan's Food Culture
Johann Hari for TIME Magazine (Link)
SUMMARY
Some 42% of Americans are obese, compared with just 4.5% of Japanese people. This writer visited Japan to figure out why. He found schools that educate their students about nutrition daily. He found companies that measure their employees waistlines regularly (and that offer weight counseling to those with measurements beyond normal). He found a historical cuisine focused on simplicity. Great piece. Worth your time to read.
SELECTION
I went to Japan, to discover: how did they avoid this trap? My first assumption was that the Japanese must have won the genetic lottery—there had to be something in their DNA that makes them stay so slim. But in the late 19th and early 20th century, large numbers of Japanese workers migrated to Hawaii and they have now been living on the island for four generations. They are genetically very similar to the Japanese people who didn’t leave. It turns out that after 100 or so years, Japanese Hawaiians are now almost as overweight as the people they live among. Some 18.1% of them are obese, compared to 24.5% of Hawaiians overall. That means Japanese Hawaiians are four times more likely to be obese than people back in Japan. So something other than genes explains Japan’s slimness…
3. The Obese Police
Tamar Haspel for The Atlantic (Link)
SUMMARY
The AP Stylebook is a best practice manual of sorts for journalists.
The usage guide’s lead editor announced in April that the entry for “Obesity, obese, overweight” had been adjusted. That entry now advises “care and precision” in choosing how to describe “people with obesity, people of higher weights and people who prefer the term fat.”
SELECTION
…The new guidelines endorse what has been called “people-first language”—the practice of trading adjectives, which come before the person being described, for prepositional phrases, which come after. If you put the word that indicates the condition or disability in front, then—the thinking goes—you are literally and metaphorically leading with it. Reverse the order, and you’ve focused on the person, in all their proper personhood.
Instead of saying “an obese person” the Stylebook would have journalists descibe the person in a people-first manner by saying “a person living with obesity.” This articles author, a columnist on eating and diet, isn’t onboard with the change:
Language is, by its nature, majority-rule. A word’s meaning changes when enough people use it in its new, changed way. And I understand the hope and the compassion behind a top-down effort to change the way we talk about fatness. But I do not, cannot, see the value in replacing garden-variety adjectives with phrases that only call attention to themselves.
If ideas like this get traction, it’s because we don’t have many effective strategies to combat bias, so well-intentioned people latch on to anything that looks even remotely promising. But our public discourse shouldn’t be victim to attempts to rally consensus for a position that is largely unsupported by the evidence. Using people with obesity will not make much difference in the end. But the policing of language and, by extension, the ideas that it expresses, certainly might.
Postscript
We have a problem. 42% of Americans are obese, or, forgive me, are living with obesity.
Obesity is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30. The BMI measures your body weight against your body height.
There are limitations to this measure - body builders may have high BMIs but very low body fat. They would not be obese. But for most of us, BMI is a measure to pay attention to.
Obesity puts more pressure on your skeleton and joints. More importantly, the Cleveland Clinic explains, it leads to all kinds of metabolic problems. I’ll just list 3:
Type 2 diabetes. Obesity specifically raises the risk of Type 2 diabetes seven-fold in people assigned male at birth and 12-fold in people assigned female at birth. The risk increases by 20% for every additional point you gain on the BMI scale. It also diminishes with weight loss.
Cardiovascular diseases. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and inflammation are all risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, including coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, heart attack and stroke.
Fatty liver disease. Excess fats circulating in your blood make their way to your liver, which is responsible for filtering your blood. When your liver begins storing excess fat, it can lead to chronic liver inflammation (hepatitis) and long-term liver damage (cirrhosis).
So when 42% of your population is obese, you have a huge public health problem.
I love that this guy Johann Hari traveled to Japan to find out why the Japanese are so thin and why the Americans are so thick. He found a lot to like in the Japanese culture toward food, resulting in Japan having the lowest obesity rate in the rich world. But one thing that he had mixed feelings about:
In 2008, the Japanese government noticed that obesity was slightly rising. So they introduced the “Metabo Law,” which was designed to reduce the negative consequences of a large waistline. The law contained a simple rule. Once a year, every workplace and local government in Japan has to bring in a team of nurses and doctors to measure the waistline of adults between ages 40 and 74. If the measurements are above a certain level, the person is referred to counseling, and workplaces draw up health plans with employees to lose weight. Companies with fattening work forces can face fines…
…I told all the Japanese people I talked to that if you tried this in the U.S. or Britain, people would be outraged and burn down their offices. They invariably looked puzzled, and asked me why. I said that people would feel like it was not their employer’s business what they weighed, and that it was a monstrous intrusion of their privacy. Most of them nodded politely, said nothing, and looked at me like I was slightly crazy. Nagira said simply: “Being fat is not good.” I felt like I was communicating across a cultural chasm.
I have friend whose family tradition every New Year’s is to do a “weigh-in” and see how much each family member has gained or lost during the year. I found that idea simultaneously horrifying and kind of attractive - horrifying for the obvious reasons of embarrassment and shame, but attractive if it could somehow be done in an environment where one felt unconditionally loved but had some real personal accountability. I cannot imagine doing it at work. Maybe that’s because I live in a culture where we are arguably more afraid of offending each other (by describing someone as obese) than we are of the consequences of not doing something to improve our health.
But the consequences couldn’t be more serious.
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
Obesity is by no means an American problem- it is very much a global problem where I believe the focus of responsibility should shift more to the corporate side of the products being made, marketed, and sold. Just like back in the day with cigarettes, to the iPhone in my hand, to so many of the food items shipped in a brightly colored plastic bag we are participating in a highly profitable and highly addictive society. It’s too easy to say the individual should be more responsible- we know this is not practical…that there is way more to the story.
There is a lot of work as a global society we can and should do to make it easier and affordable to buy, prepare, and eat high quality food which is less addictive. As much as I love my Cheetos, I do wish the corn and derivative products would not be subsidized. This comes back to yet another area where we’ve outsourced our lives and the end results, while quick, may actually be doing more harm than good.