(fatasses) 7.30.02

In case you haven't noticed, America is really fat, though considering that 61 percent of adults are overweight or obese, it would be kind of hard not to notice. More frightening is there are three times as many fat kids not running around as there were 20 years ago, diabetes is epidemic and we all sit around with our thumbs no where to be found. Thank you cable TV, video games, fat-packed fast foods and disinterested parents.
What is really starting to bug everyone is that it costs the nation $117 billion a year in health costs and lost productivity, according to the Surgeon General's office. Late night comedy pundits like Bill Maher and Dennis Miller get great mileage out of mocking fat folks and who can blame them. Fat people are the new homosexuals. Once upon a time, it was totally acceptable to work your hate out mocking gay people, now it's not so cool. But fat people? That never gets old. It's like they deserve it.
Let's be brutally honest, everybody hates fat people. Even fat people hate other fat people. I'm a fatty and therefore entitled to be as brutally honest in my observations as I want much in the same way as I am entitled to unleash on the French because I'm a bit Gallic.
I know fat people don't like fat people any more than skinny people do. We hate what fatness says about someone's personality, don't we? The slothfulness, the sloppiness, the gluttony.
You know the one's I really don't like are people who are just about 30 or 40 pounds overweight who have never even tried to lose that spare tire who feel they are entitled to tell me what I'm doing wrong when I have lost well over 100 pounds at different times only to gain it back. Those people really make me sick. If losing weight is so easy, tubby, dig those high school pants out of the closet and strut your stuff.
You see it in kids on the playground, they're like little animals fixating on the weak, torturing them physically and mentally. It's fun, especially if you don't have special ed kids in your school. The only thing that kept me from beating on the fat kid in my grade school was that I WAS the fat kid. If I could have kicked my own butt, I would have.
I dislike alternate terms for fatness like husky, chubby, plump, big-boned and burly. They soften the blow. I prefer the term "fat #@!$%&" because let's face it, that's what I am. If I had any self respect or will power, I wouldn't be a thunderchunk with a waistline the size of Rhode Island whose friends are embarrassed to be seen with him, who gets winded walking DOWN stairs and who has to pay women of questionable morality to talk to him in sleazy, out-of-the-way bars, now would I?
News specials all talk about the problem. Talk, talk, talk, talk. All we really do is talk, talk. Finding a solution is a big deal suddenly. As a nation, we're like that fight guy who needed firefighters to rescue his 1400 pound mass from his bedroom only we are just now screaming toward 500 pounds thinking, "hmmm, maybe I should go for a walk or lay off the Dove Bars?" Ya think?
Looking for a solution just mirrors the problem of losing weight on the individual level. A move is being made by lawyers currently to do to the fast food industry what they did to Big Tobacco, i.e. find a scapegoat to make them rich.
George Washington University Law Professor John Banzhaf, the mastermind behind the tobacco suits, recently said he believes it would be legitimate and feasible to sue fast food companies for misleading advertising. If it worked once, why not twice? If there is anything lawyers like it is a nice fat class action lawsuit they can dress up like activism as if the primary motivation to sue BK, KFC and Mickey D's is to help us all by raising costs. Yeah, that'll work. Food does grow on trees, doesn't it?
There is nothing quite so frightening as Americans looking for a solution to what is ultimately a personal problem. Pass a law! Sue somebody! No matter how much money it costs employers, the government or the economy, fat is a personal issue. Every fatty out there is fat for their own fat reasons. Eating too much really is only part of the problem - though you wouldn't think so to walk into some of the buffets around here.
Genetics, culture and lifestyle do play a part. So does psychology, food addiction, poor eating habits, bad dieting strategies, laziness and, yes, the content of fast food. These many different reasons alone make a class action lawsuit impossible because all the members of a "class" have to be fat for the same reasons and they could not possibly all be fat because they didn't realize fast food was fatty.
So put that aside, the only thing this will accomplish is passing the buck. The real source for our fatness is a long-term cultural inclination we need to work against like spawning salmon. Mmmm, salmon.
Americans in 2002 still eat like 98 percent of us are working the fields 14 hours a day. We like big food fast, fatty and tasty. We have little concept of what is good for us or what is bad for us and like cavemen we eat everything we can.
We are so bamboozled by fad diets we can't tell when science is giving us new clues. Carbohydrates may be a great source of nutritional energy, but not in the quantities we consume them. Huge bowls of pasta, bags of potatoes, sugar by the pound. I have seen "healthy" guys drink Mountain Dew like water for hours on end. Eight fluid ounces of Mountain Dew has 110 calories in it, 31 grams of sugar and 50 milligrams of sodium. Most non-diet pop is the same. That is like putting a gun in your mouth. Considering that "super-sizing" and free refills are common, a liter of this stuff has 440 calories, 124 grams of sugar and 200 milligrams of sodium. That's like consuming four apples dipped in salt only there is absolutely NO nutritional benefit.
Look around any given restaurant you frequent for people eating vegetables or fruit. I dare you to find any significant consumption of fresh fruits or veggies, not canned, not drenched in syrup and NOT breaded and fried. It doesn't happen.
Americans don't really care much for fresh food that is good for them and so long as that trend continues to grow, so will our waistlines. Litigation just forces this ridiculousness into sharp relief.
- Greg Jerrett is a Nonpareil staff writer. His column runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays. He may be contacted at 328-1811, Ext. 279, or by e-mail at gjerrett@nonpareilonline.com.