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According to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Americans are piling on the pounds, especially over the last ten years. This has lead to many health-related problems. The media promotes a deathly thin ideal which too many girls, young women, and even young men have struggled to attain. Meanwhile the food industry bombards us with never ending choices to tantalize our appetites, tempting us to buy and eat more than our bodies require. We are inundated with new surgeries, drug therapies, and diets daily. This chapter begins with articles from JAMA, CDC, and Scientific American that establish the nature of the problem in medical and biological terms. In an editorial for a 1999 issue of JAMA entitled "Caloric Imbalance and Public Health Policy," Jeffrey Koplan and William Dietz call for concerted effort to defeat an "epidemic." Two tables, "Prevalence of Obesity Among U.S. Adults, by Characteristics" and "Prevalence of Obesity Among U.S. Adults, by Region and State," by the CDC, summarize a study on the prevalence of obesity in America. From the August 1996 issue of Scientific American, Wayt Gibbs' "Gaining on Fat" provides an overview of biological approaches to understanding weight gain. The remaining readings explore how cultural factors color the way we perceive the overweight and the obese. In "Too Much of a Good Thing," Greg Crister calls for us to stigmatize "the unhealthful behaviors that cause obesity" and to teach children that "[e]ating too much food is a bad thing." The National Association To Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) in "Policy on Dieting and the Diet Industry" claims that the "diet industry's advertising and marketing strategy is based on the creation and perpetuation of fear, biases, and stereotypes." Mary Ray Worley's "Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance" believes it is "possible to be happy with your body even if it happens to be fat." Roberta Seid's "Too `Close to the Bone': The Historical Context for Women's Obsession with Slenderness" reviews changing attitudes regarding fat and the cultural and spiritual dangers of our current preoccupation with slenderness. In "Fat and Happy?" Hillel Schwartz shows us what the world would look like in a "Fat Utopia." Eric Schlosser, in "Why the Fries Taste So Good," gives us an inside look at the flavor industry, where scientists invent tastes for the foods we love to eat. The chapter ends with an article about one of the popular surgeries for obese patients, gastric-bypass surgery, in "The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating" by Atul Gawande. Note: Internet sources are generally transitory, so if a link given for an activity is no longer available, notify the administrator of this site. The link will be fixed or replaced with a suitable source for the activity.
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