Public health, take one

Christian Century, June 19, 2002

PUBLIC HEALTH, TAKE ONE: Over 60 percent of American adults are overweight, and 27 percent are obese, figures which have nearly doubled the past 25 years. Moreover, one out of eight school children is obese, and "Type 2 diabetes is now epidemic, mostly because of our bulging waistlines." The food industry is to blame, according to Marion Nestle in her new book, Food Politics: the food industry produces 3,800 calories of food per day for each American, up from 3,300 in 1970 (which itself was more than most people need); more than two-thirds of the new food products on the market in 1998 were sweets and snacking food; often more money is spent each year on each new product introduced than is spent to educate the public about healthy nutrition; servings of food have grown substantially, like 64-ounce soft drinks and half-gallon buckets of popcorn at the movies.

Of course the food industry is not solely culpable; we are the ones who choose to eat this way. Says John Swartzberg, editor of the "UC Berkeley Wellness Letter": "There is a terrible irony here. We have the cheapest, most lavish and varied food supply in the world. Yet we are, in part, dying from abundance, at the same time that so many people in the world still suffer from malnutrition" ("UC Berkeley Wellness Letter," June).