
Last year Michelle Obama came under heavy scrutiny from conservatives due to her role in Let’s Move, the campaign that seeks to fight obesity by improving school lunch programs, increasing focus on physical education, and giving poor people better access to healthful foods.
I was angered by these attacks because, number one, Michelle Obama is as classy a first lady as we’ve ever had, and these attacks were personal. And number two, she wants us to eat better. So why would anybody have a problem with that?
Misogynist-extraordinaire Rush Limbaugh said, “she does not project the image that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.”
It felt like I was trapped in some sort of bizarre, alternate universe. Michelle Obama is in ridiculous shape. She looks GOOD! Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh is so chunky he has to jump on a trampoline in order to pull his pants up!
But it wasn’t just Rush. It was the A-list of Republican nutjobs. Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin all took turns in criticizing the First Lady.
Any efforts to battle obesity is portrayed as efforts to rein in the “freedom” of Americans. Trouble is, for all the healthcare problems in the United States, the obesity trend is a ticking time bomb unlike any other.
A third of all Americans are obese. Another third are overweight. Obesity-related diseases are responsible for over 100,000 deaths each year.
27 million Americans have heart disease.
25.8 million have diabetes.
20 million have gallbladder disease.
18 million have sleep apnea (including my morbidly obese uncle who, when he sleeps, scares the daylights out of me).
Obesity is the number two cause of preventable death in the U.S. (second only to tobacco use). America's average daily consumption is 3,830 calories per person (the global average is 2,800 per person).
By 2020, it will cost America a whopping $344 billion a year to treat obesity-related diseases.
By 2020, obesity will reduce life expectancy by an average of 13 years!
If we built the Statue Of Liberty today in the image of the average American she would be bootylicious. And also, she would have cankles, thunder thighs, and a muffin top!
And when it comes to children, the news is even more depressing.
American children get half of their calories from fat and sugar. And their obesity rate has doubled in the last 20 years. For adolescents, it has tripled. A quarter of obese kids have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other signs of heart disease. Adult onset diabetes can no longer be called adult onset diabetes because so many kids now have it.
And this is why I was so angry when moronic conservatives attacked the First Lady. They acted as if Michelle Obama was going to send armed guards into people’s homes and force them to eat broccoli.
If only . . .
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“So what are you saying Keith? You’re saying that people are overweight because they’re poor?”
“Yup. That’s exactly what I’m saying!”
“But that doesn’t make sense to me.”
No matter how hard I tried, I could not convince a dear friend of mine that obesity is directly related to a person’s wealth (or lack thereof).
She, like most Americans, think that people are fat because they lack discipline. In a lot of cases, this is true. But it is also true that in America, healthier foods cost more. Salads, fruits, and vegetables all cost more than a Big Mac. And if you’re struggling to feed a family of four, and you’re poor, you’re going to eat from that McDonald's dollar menu again, and again, and again.
This still didn’t make sense to my friend. So I tried again.
“Have you ever noticed that there are more fast food joints in poor neighborhoods than there are in well-to-do neighborhoods?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean anything. Rich people eat fast food too.”
“Yes, they do. But only on occasion. Only every blue moon. Meanwhile, poor people have to eat fast food because it’s all they can afford.”
Here in Richmond, there used to be a chain of supermarkets called Community Pride. They were owned by a local black businessman named Johnny Johnson. But here’s the thing about Community Pride: they were only located in poor black neighborhoods.
I remember walking into these stores and sometimes the A/C was working, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes all the lights wouldn’t be working. So, one aisle would be brightly lit, and the next aisle would make you think you were trapped in one of those Alien movies with Sigourney Weaver.
Now, compare that to the grocery stores on the other side of town. When you walk into those stores, you get blasted in the face by the cold air. The place is brightly lit. And there’s a zero percent chance you’ll get mugged in the produce section.
So when you combine the cheap fast food, and the supermarkets that aren’t up to par, you see a situation in which obesity affects those who earn less.
And speaking of cheap fast food, if there’s one thing that angers me the most, it’s how food marketers target children. Look at Ronald McDonald. Look at the cartoon characters you see on the cereal boxes. Look at the pro athletes you see in all the soda commercials.
A part of me dies every time my 14 year-old brother asks me to take him to McDonald's. No matter how often I try to change his mind, no matter how often I try to convince him that McDonald's food is infinitely unhealthy, his brain can’t comprehend what I’m saying. And it lets me know just how powerful their advertising really is.

And not only am I concerned about what he eats outside of school, I’m concerned about what he eats when he’s in school.
I think school lunches suck! And I think they need to take all of these soda machines out of these schools too! It’s bad enough that adults drink sodas (a.k.a. liquid diabetes), but it’s 50-times worse when our kids drink it.
Every time a kid puts a dollar into a soda machine and pulls out a can of soda, he or she is ingesting nine teaspoons of sugar. And a 20 oz. bottle of soda is akin to drinking a cup of coffee with SEVENTEEN teaspoons of sugar!
The average consumption of soda has gone from a few bottles a year (100 years ago), to 200 bottles a year in the 1950s, to, and I hope you’re sitting down . . . 600 bottles a year in 2012!
In the 1980s soda became more popular in this country than water. And when you include other sugary drinks like Gatorade and Vitamin Water, the average person drinks a quart of sugar a day!
Here’s a fun fact that will impress your friends at your next dinner party (not really). If we taxed soda a penny per ounce, it would reduce consumption by 15 percent, raise 15 billion dollars a year, and reduce public health care costs by 5 billion a year.
And even if we didn’t do a soda and junk food tax, why don’t we use warning labels? We use them for cigarettes. Why not a warning label that says, “Hey kids. If you continue to eat twinkies and drink Pepsi, one day in 10 years, you’re going to look in the mirror and see the Stay Puff Marshmellow Man staring back at you!”
As America's waistline has expanded, the ripple effects have been shocking. Last year theweek.com published a story called "The 7 Things Americans Are Too Fat To Do."
Here's the top six.
1. Too Bulky For Buses – To accommodate heavier passengers, the Federal Transit Administration wants to “update the structural strength and distortion test procedures” for public buses.
2. Too Fat To Fight – A 2010 study reported that more than 27 percent of Americans aged 18-24 (over 9 million people) are too overweight to be in the military.
3. Too Plump For Planes – United requires passengers who cannot fit comfortably into one seat to purchase the adjoining one as well.
4. Too Extra Large For Emergency Vehicles – Multiple cities have had to modify their emergency vehicles to accommodate increasingly heavy patients. Fort Worth, Texas recently boosted its stretcher capacity from 500 pounds to 650 pounds.
5. Too Corpulent For Car Seats – A 2006 study reported that 280,000 children aged 1-6 were “heavier than the weight limits for their car seats.” One car seat manufacturer, Britax, makes a “husky” model that fits unusually big babies.
6. Too Massive For MRIs – In 2006, the journal Radiology reported that the number of scans that had failed due to overweight patients had doubled over the last 15 years.
In 1906, The Jungle from Upton Sinclair was published. It exposed the corruption and horror of turn-of-the-century meat production. Sinclair’s work spurred readers to demand a safer food system from their government. The result was the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and eventually the creation of the Food and Drug Adminstration.
Might be time for someone to publish a sequel.
The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years, than in the last 10,000 years.
As Eric Schlosser said in an editorial for the Washington Post:
“America’s current system of food production is overly-centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly-reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies, and fossil fuels and is profoundly undemocratic."
So true.
Do you KFC lovers know exactly how those pieces of chicken ended up in that bucket you just bought? Well chickens are now raised and slaughtered in roughly half the time than they were 40 years ago. And now they’re twice as big and pumped with so many steroids that most of them can’t even walk.
Hey, pop quiz!
Did you know that cows are fed genetically modified corn (instead of grass)?
Did you know that it takes a hundred gallons of water and 300 pounds of topsoil to produce one hamburger?
Did you know that densely-stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics, are ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans?
Did you know that we use 80% of our antibiotics on the animals we eat?
Did you know that scientists fear the misuse of antibiotics in poultry and livestock is a major contributor to our global antibiotic resistance dilemma?
Did you know the World Health Organization announced that we’re quickly heading towards a post antibiotic era, an era in which many common infections will no longer have a cure, and once again, will kill unabated?
Did you know that 1 in 6 Americans get sick from food-borne illnesses every year, and that the top 10 pathogens associated with food costs the US economy 8.1 billion a year?
Did you know that migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, who work these physically demanding and often dangerous jobs at these industrial farms, are paid 50% less (when adjusted for inflation) than they were 30 years ago?
Did you know that while small farmers make less than $20,000 a year, wealthy farmers receive handouts from our government? From 1995 to 2009, about 250 billion in federal subsidies was given directly to farmers – 75% of which went to the wealthiest.
Did you know that 13 states passed “veggie-libel” laws in the 90s? These laws intimidate critics of industrial food by threatening them with lawsuits.
Did you know that corporate powerhouse Monsanto has blocked labeling of genetically modified foods, while the meat packing industry has prevented the labeling of milk and meat from cloned animals?
Did you know that there are videos you can watch that show how calves are beaten with pickaxes, how pigs are buried alive by bulldozers, and how baby chicks are tossed into meat grinders?
And finally, did you know that Minnesota, Iowa, and Florida are passing laws that would charge people with misdemeanors if they are caught videotaping animal cruelty at factory farms?
Speaking of farms, I grew up on one in North Carolina. My grandfather had chickens and pigs. When I was a kid I would feed them and play with them. On occasion my grandfather would decide that one of the chickens had to go (and by go, I mean eaten).
He would grab a chicken, hold it down, and chop its head off with an ax. The chicken would then run around with no head for about five minutes. Every time that chicken came in my direction, I would run and scream like I was Icabod Crane being chased by the Headless Horseman.
And then my grandfather would place the headless chicken into a pot of boiling water so that he could pluck the feathers off. And then he would remove its internal organs. A few hours later, voila! Dinnertime.
And I remember the first (and only time) I saw a deer strung up after it had been killed. My mother’s boyfriend, who was a deer hunter back in those days, took a blade, sliced the deer from its stomach to its neck. And the deer’s internal organs fell out of its body and landed with a loud splat.
My mother’s boyfriend (and a few of his friends) would spend all day on that deer. And by the time daylight turned to dusk, voila! Dinnertime.
I was a carnivore because it was all I had ever known. I didn’t debate whether or not I should eat meat. I just ate it. But that all changed last year.
Last September I decided to become a vegan. I did so because I believe it’s the single most powerful step any one individual can take toward the preservation of this planet. It takes about one-twentieth the resources to feed a vegan that it takes to feed a non-vegetarian. Intensive animal agriculture is not sustainable. It’s the number one cause of global warming. It pollutes the air, the water, the soil, and it’s among our greatest contributors to deforestation, desertification, and species extinction.
I became a vegan because I’m still that little kid who enjoyed playing with animals. I’ve come to believe that the process of turning compassionate children who identify with animals, into desensitized adults who participate, directly and indirectly, in the violence of animals, is what keeps us from being the compassionate adults that we are meant to be.
And here’s the crazy thing about meat. I don’t miss it. At all.
Meat is like the girlfriend who I caught cheating on me. I’ve kicked meat to the curb. I told meat “get your shit and get out!”
And I’ve moved on.
I remember an ex coworker of mine named Jackie. She was the healthiest eater I had ever met. She shopped at the Farmer’s Market and she didn’t eat meat. But her husband was a hard-core carnivore. And she would tell me how she tried to explain to him how unhealthy his food was. But he would never listen. Instead, he would always say this:
“Jackie, I’m going to say grace, and pray over this food, and it’s going to be alright.”
When she told me this my first thought was, “Wow! That doesn’t make any sense!”
That’s like me saying, “I’m going to shoot this heroin in my arm, but before I do, I’m going to pray over this needle.”
I imagine most Americans are the same way. Yeah, they may have heard about mad cow, pink slime, the beef that's washed in ammonia, the mercury in the fish, the E. coli outbreaks, the salmonella outbreaks, and the listeria in the deli meats. They heard it all, and they’ve decided to tune it out.
Everything’s going to be alright. Just as long as they say grace.
If only . . .







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