Kolbert, reviewing The Fattening of America by Eric Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman, notes that food has gotten cheaper relative to the other goods and services. And fatty foods have gotten a lot cheaper. The price of soft drinks, for example, have dropped by more than 20 percent, and they now account for seven percent all calories in the US. The New York Times offered a striking graph that told just that story:
But, Kolbert follows up with a good question: Sure, food became cheaper -- fatty food especially. But that doesn't mean our bellies had to grow at an equal and opposite pace. Why didn't we just spend less money easting less? How did our appetites grow so suddenly in the 1980s and 90s?
The most convincing idea she floats is the "elasticity of the human appetite." Simply stated: We have no idea how hungry we are, so we respond to growing portion sizes with growing appetites. In one depressing experiment, participants ate bowls of
The elasticity of our appetites is perhaps most visible in our relationship with fast food and chain restaurants. McDonald's used to offer one size of french fries, with 200 calories. Now it also offers a large, with 500 calories. This jives with a graph, also produced by the New York Times, that compares time spent eating and national obesity.
The conclusion I would draw is not that you should spend more quality time with your Burger King Quad Stacker. I'm more interested in the relationship between the fatter countries and fast-food proliferation. If you draw a horizontal line just under Canada to isolate the countries with the highest obesity rates, you get a group of six countries. Four of those countries -- the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada -- happen to be the four countries with the most McDonald's per capita in the world (the UK is number 9). Our evolutionary instinct to maximize caloric intake befriends our economic instinct to buy cheap, and the result is, well, something like this.*Thanks to Suzanna Pacaut for soup/pasta mixup. Pasta, in retrospect, could be prohibitively difficult to refill through a tube.
That graph does not show that "fatty" foods are getting cheaper. If fruits and vegetables, including fatty avocados, are getting relatively more expensive and fatty butter is getting relatively less expensive, whereas non-fatty fruits and vegetables are getting more expensive and non-fatty beer and sodas are getting less expensive, then fattiness doesn't seem to have any relationship to price.
As a economics student and a personal trainer, the second graph demonstrates less effect of fast food restaurants on our waistlines, than the fact that eating quickly leads to over eating. It takes the brain about 20 minutes to realize it is full and for the typical American who takes his food in front of the television where eating is not slowed by dinner conversation, that 20 minutes is ample time to put down far more calories than needed.
Then there are sodas, which not only are cheap and getting cheaper, they are addictive, spike insulin, and increase appetite. If there is a reason to stop subsidizing corn, its because high fructose corn syrup is making America so so fat.
Joshua, as the title clearly states it's comparing "good" and "bad" foods, not "fatty" vs. "non-fatty" foods. Are you really dense enough to think that a beer is better for you than an avocado because it has no fat?
1. What title are you talking about? I see no title that mentions "good" and "bad". The first graph does mention "unhealthful", which is not quite the same.
2. Derek Thompson made the claim -- twice -- that "fatty" food has become cheaper, when the graph indicates nothing of the kind.
3. No, I'm not dense enough to think that beer is more healthful than an avocado for the sole reason of their relative fat content, but apparently you are dense enough to not realize that I was simply pointing that healthfulness and non-fattiness are not the same thing, not that healthfulness and fattiness are positively correlated.
Any further questions?
There are really two separate questions involved in this issue, and one cannot be answered without addressing the other. First, individuals get fat because they eat too many calories and don't burn them off. (Not to downplay the importance of macronutrient ratio.) Of course, those in the "fat acceptance" crowd wish to obfuscate this simple truth and decry the notion that impulsive gluttony combined with physical sloth is the root of the problem. But that does not negate reality. The second question--why is the average American's waistline increasing--must be analyzed through the lens of the first answer. Rephrased, the question becomes: Why is the average American amassing a surplus of caloric energy? I'm quite certain the answer has much more to do with most Americans' general lack of self-control combined with inaccurate health education and the crack-pusher style antics of the food industry than it does with elastic appetites. Magic soup bowls aside, if you don't realize that a super-sized Wendy's Baconator meal exceeds any reasonable bounds of caloric necessity, evolutionary survival instincts are the least of your problems. Henry Rollins's 7 word diet would go a long way to solving this problem: eat better, eat less, move your body.
Sure, but it's also important to keep in mind that there isn't necessarily an independent relationship between calories consumed and calories burned. If people worked like bonfires, you could throw a lot more fuel on the fire (eat more) and have the fire burn hotter and faster (burn more). Of course, people aren't bonfires, but their metabolism is complex and affected at least somewhat by their food intake.
Draw a line through Canada just because that's where we choose to draw the line. The countries above the line have more vowels in their names than those below. QED.
Oh come now, tcrosse. It's not like I'm drawing a 45 degree angle through the graph and excluding the states that rhyme with "ania." The point is simple enough: Of the six fattest countries in the world, four have the world's highest McDonald's per capita. If you find the fact redundant -- Duh, Derek, of course countries with significant Anglican ties will be the fattest! -- then I'd love to hear your reasons. Otherwise, I don't think I'm exaggerating the role of cheap, fatty food on our fatness, and McDonald's density seems to me like an un-silly proxy of cheap, fatty food.
What I don’t see addressed in this article is the disparate impact these food costs have on lower income Americans. If the lower-cost foods have the worse nutritional make-up, it’s no surprise that the poorer Americans who buy those foods are generally the fattest and unhealthiest.
I’ve seen several ‘nutrition makeovers’ on programs like the Today Show trying to address the rapidly expanding waistlines of the average American family. They take lower-income families who are living on fast food and revamp their lifestyle to include more fresh produce, whole grains, beans, etc. The families are always assured that preparing their own healthy foods at home will save them money in the long run.
I’ve always wondered how that could possibly be the case, and this article only strengthens my skepticism. When a parent could spend $3-4 on a red bell pepper that would buy their child an entire meal at Taco Bell, it’s no surprise they choose the latter.
As the old saying goes, your eyes are usually more hungry than our bellies.
We need to consciously stop over-feeding ourselves just because of the availability of food. Fast food sells by duping hungry customers that they need that much food to be content. Unfortunately, not many can put down the burger and fries despite being full.
Eating less fatty and more nutritious foods will leave you feeling more content and less likely to over-feed yourself.
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