How Fat Went Global
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How Fat Went Global
It's not just Americans anymore; the whole world is becoming obese, and we have more than just the advent of cheap cheeseburgers to blame.
Mary Carmichael
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Two years ago, when Barry Popkin announced that more than a billion people worldwide were overweight—easily outnumbering the 800 million who were malnourished—folks looked up from their Big Macs in shock. Then they went back to eating, pushing the number of overweight people to its current number, an astonishing 1.6 billion. And it's not just Americans, or even Western cultures; obesity has become a global problem. Popkin has a new book that goes a long way toward explaining why that happened. "The World Is Fat" (Avery) pins the blame for the ever-growing obesity crisis on some well-known villains: sugary drinks, couch-potato lifestyles and yes, cheeseburgers. But Popkin also reveals some less obvious culprits: evolutionary biology, for instance, and a host of other forces beyond any individual's control. A professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he spoke with NEWSWEEK's Mary Carmichael. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Your thesis is that we're all getting fat because we're eating more and moving less. That makes sense for individuals: if I sit around eating donuts, I'll gain weight. But you're talking about whole countries--the whole world, really. So what is going on?
Barry Popkin: The constant thing we've heard in America for the last 20 years is "You fat, gluttonous Americans, you should feel guilty. You're overweight and it's your fault." But all of a sudden, we're seeing the same problems in places where 20 years ago all they worried about was hunger: in Egypt, and among blacks in South Africa, and in China, where a third of adults now are overweight and obese. In Mexico, nobody was overweight 15 years ago; now 71 percent of Mexican women and 66 percent of men are. When you get to this kind of point, you've got to step back and say, "Wait, what is going on?"
What's happened is that from 30 years ago to today, we've had an exponential explosion in what we can think of as the "obesogenic environment." You see food available everywhere. You can't move more than 100 feet without seeing a caloric beverage. In most of the world, it used to be that people mostly drank water, and today they're consuming more and more sweetened beverages. Fruit juice didn't even come into being until the late 1950s, except for what you squeezed at home, and milk—there was some, but people didn't drink so much of it. The average American has not changed the amount of water he consumes in the last 30 years or so. But he's added 22 ounces of caloric beverages to his diet, and that's 300 extra calories per day. Then you match that kind of diet with human biology. We naturally prefer sweet and fatty foods because of what those foods used to mean for survival when we were hunter-gatherers. They had the nutrients we needed, and they let us store more energy for the hungry season.
And now, for most people, there is no hungry season.
Right. But we're still eating the same kinds of foods. From the beginning of humanity, we've always wanted to have tastier food and less work to do. These are innate drives, and we can't change our biology.
It's not just about what we eat. People around the world are less active now, too.
When I started working in China in the '80s, everyone biked to work. Today it's dangerous to bike, so people take mass transit or cars or motorcycles, and kids under 12 are banned from biking because it's not safe. They don't walk, either.
How important a factor is globalization? Your title, a play on Thomas Friedman's book on the global economy, "The World Is Flat," suggests it's a big factor, that we created the obesity crisis in America, then exported it.
Well, let's take an example. Up until three years ago, there was no snacking in China. Now it's exploding. Why? Because all of a sudden, there are Chinese equivalents of Wal-Mart. A lot of people used to live in a subsistence world, a more primitive world, and they couldn't afford things like modern vegetable oil. But now we have supermarkets everywhere, and everybody sees the same TV we see and wants the same things we want.
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