A FAT NATION

America’s ‘supersize’ diet is fattier and sweeter - and deadlier

Pretty, dark-haired Katie Young has been successful at most things. She’s an excellent student, a star on her softball team, and a good dancer. But like so many Americans - kids and adults alike - the New Orleans 10-year-old struggles with one thing: keeping her weight under control.

When Katie started day camp in June, she discovered a snack bar where she could buy pizza, hot dogs, candy, ice cream, chips, soft drinks, and more. “Katie went nuts,” says her mother, Judy Young. In the first two weeks of camp, Katie spent nearly (11) $40 on snack foods. “I bought a lot of pizza,” Katie says. “And I bought candy and everything. I didn’t feel good seeing the other kids eat those things. I wanted them (6) too.”

Of course she did. Katie was acting on a basic driving force of human biology: Eat whenever food is available and eat as much of it as possible. Throughout most of human history, food was scarce, and getting a hold of it (7) required a great deal of physical energy. Those who ate as many calories as they could were protected against famine and had the energy to reproduce. The problem today, says Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, is that there’s “a complete mismatch” between biology and the environment.

America has become a fat nation. More than 61 percent of adults are overweight, and 27 percent of them - 50 million people - are obese, according to a U.S. surgeon general’s report released last December. In the next decade (1), weight-related illnesses threaten to overwhelm the healthcare system (1).

Weight is also taking a heavy toll on the nation’s children. The percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who are overweight has nearly doubled in two decades, and for adolescents the percentage has tripled. Pediatricians are treating conditions rarely (12) before diagnosed in young people. In a recent study of 813 overweight Louisiana schoolchildren, for example, 58 percent had at least one heart disease risk factor, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. (...)

Eating opportunities (2) are endless because food is sold almost everywhere. “Just go back 20 years,” says Yale’s Brownell. “You never used to find more than a candy counter in a drugstore. Now there are aisles and aisles of food (2). If you see a gas station that does not have a food store attached, people are afraid to use it (8). There are food courts (3) in shopping malls. And in the schools, there are vending machines and soft-drink machines - and they (9) aren’t selling carrot juice (3).” (...)

Obesity has been linked (4) to everything from the decline of the family dinner to the popularity of computers and video games to supersize portions of fast food (4). But it (10) all comes down to a simple calculation, says University of Colorado nutrition researcher James Hill: “The primary reason (5) America is fat is that we eat too much compared to our activity level (5).”

By Amanda Spake. U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 18, 2002

In all the lines below the author presents arguments to justify why America is becoming a fat nation, EXCEPT in: