The woman who hates food
From The Observer:
Quote:
The woman who hates food
American TV presenter MeMe Roth has attacked everyone from her own mother to Angelina Jolie in her one-woman campaign against obesity. She tells Gaby Wood why shaming people is the best way to a thinner world
MeMe Roth is on TV. She is swishing her long blonde hair from side to side, widening her eyes behind sexy-secretary glasses, holding up a large pair of trousers to illustrate the size of the average American woman's bottom, and generating hate mail. Daily. "I'm called the C-word more than anyone I know, and they don't say 'cute'," Roth tells me when I meet her. "People have wished cancer upon my kids, I've had death threats ..." She's been compared to Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot and Stalin. YouTube, to which Roth directs me unflinchingly, boasts a clip entitled MeMe Roth is a Psycho.
That's not her official title. Technically she is president of the National Action Against Obesity, a one-woman campaign run out of Roth's home in Manhattan. An intense, sweet-voiced - and yes, very thin - mother of two, Roth, 39, has elected to combat the number one threat to global health, and has landed herself in the middle of one of the hottest political and economic debates of our time. While she does not enjoy the hate mail (as she meekly puts it), Roth sees herself as the bold purveyor of uncomfortable truths.
But is she taking on the fast-food industry? The sugar barons? The government? No, she is taking on Jennifer Love Hewitt in her unflattering bikini ("She'll be doing some serious squats from now on") and Angelina Jolie ("Every picture of Angelina Jolie shows her children eating a bag of Cheetos. How dare the richest, most educated people who have access to everything do this to their kids?"). While every media outlet of the relatively new century makes at least a token effort to help women of all shapes and sizes feel comfortable with their bodies, Roth manages to be swashbucklingly offensive. But she has a rationale for this. "Love it or hate it, whatever socio-economic category you're in, we are a People-magazine society. So if you get it right with Angelina Jolie, the kids will listen and everything will change."
I meet Roth in New York for not-lunch one afternoon. I had invited her for a meal but she suggested we meet "after lunch" instead, at one o'clock. The place Roth had chosen was canny, if a little soulless: the lobby of a large midtown hotel, where we could sit for hours without having to consume anything. As she intimates later, she is a master at finding ways to meet people that do not revolve around food. Roth arrives wearing jeans and a coat with a tightly cinched waist; she never takes the coat off. She's attractive, in a Lois Lane-meets-Ann Coulter way, and speaks with a shrill sort of effusiveness and indignation.
One thing to know about MeMe Roth is that she's not wrong. Obesity is widely acknowledged to contribute to heart disease, some cancers and type 2 diabetes. In other words, a condition that could be prevented is seriously stressing the health-care system. Being overweight - as defined by the World Health Organisation - means having a body mass index of 25 or over. Obesity is defined as a BMI of 30 or more. The WHO reports that in 2005, the most recent year for which there are statistics, at least 400 million adults were obese, and 1.6 billion adults and at least 20 million children under the age of five were overweight. According to current predictions, 87% of all women will be overweight by the year 2030.
But chastisement is not the same as persuasion, and some of Roth's formulations are of such questionable sanity that they can't possibly help her cause. For instance, she tells me: "The defence has been made in the case of sex criminals that there is pleasure on the part of the victim. The same is true with what we're doing with food. We may abuse our bodies with food, but it's incredibly pleasurable. From a food marketer's point of view, when your quote unquote victim is so willing and enjoying of the process, who's fighting back?"
Two basic facts behind the rise of obesity are that high-calorie foods are cheaper than fresh fruits and vegetables, and that the food industry is big business. In 2004, there was a scandal when a WHO report warning of the dangers of sugar, fat and salt was attacked by the Bush administration. Campaigners argued that the government's resistance to the report was connected to the fundraising power of Florida sugar barons in this crucial swing state. Yet when I ask Roth who are the really bad guys in this situation, she replies: "High fructose corn syrup", as if these larger factors were not even part of the picture.
Marion Nestle, the author of Food Politics and professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York university, explains that "the basic problem is that if people are going to do something about obesity, they need to eat less, and eating less is bad for business. The food industry is a trillion-dollar-a-year business." Nestle tells me that 3,900 calories are produced per capita every day - roughly twice the average need. "We're talking about capitalism here," she says. "It was very difficult for the Bush government in particular - they couldn't tell people to eat less." Couldn't they? I ask. "Well, they could if they hadn't cared about getting elected."
Nestle also argues that nutrition and medical societies won't act because they are funded by the food industry. So who is going to give this issue priority? "People have to," Nestle concludes.
And that is just what Roth, in her apparent naivety, is proposing. "As much of a saviour as people have made him out to be, Barack Obama cannot fix this problem," she says, getting heated now. "The government is not going to fix this problem, for every reason that you pointed out - economic, political, social. It can't happen. And you know as well as I do that 80% of Coca-Cola's revenue is from overseas.
"So we have to get people really pissed off. What do you know about bovine hormones? Are you 100% certain that they make girls start their periods at age eight or nine? No, but do you want your children to have it? Exactly. So what we have to do is, ingredient by ingredient - artificial food colouring, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oil - we have to get everybody pissed off and then we can force the unwilling in public office to do what they have to do."
But as someone who gets so much hate mail, Roth may be taking an important message and making it backfire. Why, I ask her, do you think anyone's going to listen to you?
Roth sighs. "You know how in The Poseidon Adventure, or any of those action movies, there's always someone who people say: 'Don't follow them!' But they end up being the person maybe you should follow? I kind of feel like that's who I'm trying to be."
MeMe Roth's real name is Meredith Clements - transformed by marriage and PR into Me plus Me. MeMe was her great-grandmother's name, Roth explains, and she loved the way it echoed her own ambition to "change the cultural MeMes that have ushered in this era of obesity". But when Roth realised that she would be spending her spare time, as she puts it, "calling people fat", she knew she needed a recognisable identity.
"How long have you had that name?" I ask, and Roth barely blinks before replying: "Since I started making television appearances. It's a brand extension, and it worked out great."
She grew up in Atlanta, headquarters of Coca-Cola, where she was taught that "you'd better drink from the red can and not the blue can or you will put your neighbour's dad out of business". To this day, if she caves in to a craving, that's the direction she'll fall. "I never saw a prettier shade of red than a can of Coca-Cola," she says wistfully, then adds with a smirk: "I have a little Coke problem, and it kills me to say it."
Roth's mother, father, grandmother and uncles are all obese. Her father weighs 300lb. Her mother is diabetic. Her grandmother needs 24-hour nursing care. When I ask what her family thinks of her crusade, she acknowledges that "it's hurtful", but says they are "highly supportive". The thing is, Roth doesn't just see her parents as victims of obesity: "I've been to obesity," she says, "and I don't want anyone else to go there."
Her suffering was apparent early on. "When I was in kindergarten," she recalls, "no one taught me to be ashamed of obesity, but the day, on my birthday, that my mother was to bring cupcakes to my class, I put my head on the table because I knew that within minutes my mother would be there and everyone was going to know that my mother was fat. I felt ashamed. I was grateful that down the block there was another mother who was fatter than my mother."
When I ask Roth what her greatest fear is, she replies: "That my children will become sick, because this culture refuses to foster healthy children. Thank goodness my husband, who also comes from overweight people, also feels the way I feel." She wonders who Mason, 10, and Julia, seven, "will partner with. It scares me. And it's Darwinian. This isn't just my opinion: males with obesity have lower sperm counts and sperm motility; females have higher rates of infertility, higher rates of pregnancy complication and a higher rate of birth defects. So don't listen to me, listen to Darwin!"
But why doesn't she use her own story to soften her image a little? If her experiences and fears are so personal, I ask her, why hasn't she invoked them in a more helpfully Oprah-like way?
"When I first started doing this," she responds, "I wasn't sure that I should talk about my family. And I feel that no matter who you are, you don't earn the right to talk about obesity just because you have those snappy before-and-after pictures where your whole body fits inside one leg of your jeans. I am the perfect person to talk about it because I'm talking about prevention. And I'm saying that even though I have fat parents, and even though I live in the same world as everyone else, I have refused to go down that path. I'm telling people things that aren't warmly received," she admits. "And my personality type may not be something a lot of people like. But I don't think those are reasons not to do what I do."
What does Roth do? When I ask her if she's ever been anorexic, she gasps: "No! I've never even been on a diet!" So I ask her what she eats in an average day. On this, Roth is reticent. She now runs a private nutrition counselling business, she says, and because of that, "I don't spend a ton of time telling people what I do personally. What works for me may not work for other people."
That's fine, I say, but just as an example?
"I eat beans like nobody's business," she says hurriedly. "I eat more black beans than anyone else I know."
I try to pin her down to something more specific. Let's just do a sample day, I say. What about breakfast? Roth grimaces. "I hate to say this, because I think it's counter to what most people should do, but I never in my whole life have enjoyed breakfast. For me, it doesn't work as well as other things."
Right, I say. So how about lunch?
She squirms visibly. "You're taking me where I don't want to go ... What works for me doesn't work for a lot of people."
Well, you've said that, I insist, so taking that into account: lunch? Roth hesitates. "I discovered when I was in college that I work best when I get a workout in and eat after that. Sometimes I'll delay when I eat until I get a workout in. But I don't let a whole day go by without running four miles."
OK, I go on, but supposing you couldn't work out until four o'clock in the afternoon - would you not eat until after that?
"I might."
I look at my watch. It's 3.30pm. Alarm bells start to ring in my head. How about today, I ask. Have you eaten at all today?
Roth is a little quiet.
"No," she says.
There is a pause.
"But I feel great!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandst...esity-nutrition
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