The Fattening of America
Eric Finkelstein is a health economist at a research institute in North
Carolina. In “The Fattening of America” (Wiley; $26.95), written with
Laurie Zuckerman, he argues that Americans started to put on pounds in
the eighties because it made financial sense for them to do so.
Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in the past
few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a bargain.
Between 1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils declined by
sixteen per cent. During the same period, the real cost of soft drinks
dropped by more than twenty per cent.
“For most people, an ice cold Coca-Cola used to be a treat reserved for
special occasions,” Finkelstein observes. Today, soft drinks account
for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United
States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American
diet.” If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank
water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds
less.
The correlation between cost and consumption is pretty compelling; as
Finkelstein notes, there’s no more basic tenet of economics than that
price matters. But, like evolution, economics alone doesn’t seem
adequate to the obesity problem. If it’s cheap to consume too many
calories’ worth of ice cream or Coca-Cola, it’s even cheaper to consume
fewer.
The End of Overeating
In “The End of Overeating” (Rodale; $25.95), David A. Kessler, a former
commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, takes a somewhat
darker view of the situation. It’s not that sweet and oily foods have
become less expensive; it’s that they’ve been reëngineered while we
weren’t looking. Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often
anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion
products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as
“eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial
elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these
ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A
food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to
create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese
Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt
and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is
trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the
effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”
Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how
people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like
Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he
maintains, like drugs: “Conditioned hypereating works the same way as
other ‘stimulus response’ disorders in which reward is involved, such
as compulsive gambling and substance abuse.” For Kessler, the analogy
is not merely rhetorical: research on rats, he maintains, proves that
the animals’ brains react to sweet, fatty foods the same way that
addicts’ respond to cocaine. A reformed overeater himself—“I have owned
suits in every size,” he writes—Kessler advises his readers to eschew
dieting in favor of a program that he calls Food Rehab. The principles
of Food Rehab owe a lot to those of drug rehab, except that it is not,
as Kessler acknowledges, advisable to swear off eating altogether. “The
substitute for rewarding food is often other rewarding food,” he
writes, though what could compensate for the loss of Nacho Cheese
Doritos he never really explains.
Fat Land
In the early nineteen-sixties, a mannamed David Wallerstein was running
a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost
popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and
two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the
author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him:
jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes,
popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another
high-margin item, soda.
A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was
serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a
similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft
drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded
to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted
skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that
if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.
“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat
two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let
himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.
Mindless Eating
The elasticity of the human appetite is the subject of Brian Wansink’s
“Mindless Eating” (2006). Wansink is the director of Cornell
University’s Food and Brand Lab, and he has performed all sorts of
experiments to test how much people will eat under varying
circumstances. These have convinced him that people are—to put it
politely—rather dim. They have no idea how much they want to eat or,
once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on
external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result
is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do French-fry eaters.
Consider the movie-matinée experiment. Some years ago, Wansink and his
graduate students handed out buckets of popcorn to Saturday-afternoon
filmgoers in Chicago. The popcorn had been prepared almost a week
earlier, and then allowed to become hopelessly, squeakily stale. Some
patrons got medium-sized buckets of stale popcorn and some got large
ones. (A few, forgetting that the snack had been free, demanded their
money back.) After the film, Wansink weighed the remaining kernels. He
found that people who’d been given bigger buckets had eaten, on
average, fifty-three per cent more.
In another experiment, Wansink invited participants to cook dinner for
themselves with ingredients that he provided. One group got big boxes
of pasta and big bottles of sauce, a second smaller boxes and smaller
bottles. The first group prepared twenty-three per cent more, and
downed it all. In yet another experiment, Wansink rigged up bowls that
could be refilled, via a hidden tube. When he served soup out of the
trick bowls, people, he writes, “ate and ate and ate.” On average, they
consumed seventy-three per cent more than those who were served from
regular bowls. “Give them a lot and they eat a lot,” he writes.
Before McDonald’s discovered the power of re-portioning, it offered
just a small bag of French fries, which contained two hundred calories.
Today, a small order of fries has two hundred and thirty calories, and
a large order five hundred. (Add fifteen calories for each package of
ketchup.) Similarly, a McDonald’s soda used to be eight ounces. Today,
a small soda is sixteen ounces (a hundred and fifty calories), and a
large soda is thirty-two ounces (three hundred calories). Perhaps owing
to the influence of fast-food culture, up-sizing has by now spread to
all sorts of other venues. In a 2002 study, Marion Nestle, a nutrition
professor at New York University, and Lisa Young, an adjunct there,
examined the offerings, past and present, at American supermarkets.
They found that during the nineteen-eighties the amount of food that
was counted as a single serving increased rapidly. A similar jump
showed up in cookbooks; when the researchers compared dessert recipes
in old and new editions of volumes like “The Joy of Cooking,” they
discovered that, even in cases where the recipes themselves had
remained unchanged, the predicted number of servings had shrunk.
According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years
swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories
each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to
determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in
an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the
habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a
weight gain of more than a pound a month.
