Harvard Magazine
May-June 2004
The Way We Eat Now
Ancient bodies collide with modern technology to produce a flabby, disease-ridden populace.
by Craig Lambert


Last year, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat all his meals at McDonald's for a month. For 30 straight days, everything he took in—breakfast, lunch, dinner, even his bottled water—came from McDonald's. Spurlock recorded the results on camera for his film Super Size Me, which won the Best Director prize for documentaries at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Super Size Me is also a kind of shock/horror movie, as viewers see the 33-year-old Spurlock's physical condition collapse, day by day. "My body just basically falls apart over the course of this diet," Spurlock told Newsweek. "I start to get tired, I start to get headaches; my liver basically starts to fill up with fat because there's so much fat and sugar in this food. My blood sugar skyrockets, my cholesterol goes up off the charts, my blood pressure becomes completely unmanageable. The doctors were like, 'You have to stop.'" In one month on the fast-food regime, he gained 25 pounds.

Spurlock's total immersion in fast food was a one-subject research study, and his body's response a warning about the way we eat now. "Super Size Me" could be a credo for the United States, where people, like their automobiles, have become gargantuan. "SUVs, big homes, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, bulking up with steroids—it's a context of everything getting bigger," says K. Dun Gifford '60, LL.B. '66, president of the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, a nonprofit organization specializing in food, diet, and nutrition education.

Everywhere in the world, the richest people build the biggest homes, but as the world's wealthiest nation, the United States is also building the biggest bodies. It's hardly cause for patriotic pride. "We're leading a race we shouldn't want to win," says associate professor of pediatrics David Ludwig. Many foreigners already view Americans as rich, greedy over-consumers, stuffing themselves with far more than their share of the planet's resources, and obese American travelers waddling through international airports and hotel lobbies only reinforce that image. Yet our fat problem is becoming a global one as food corporations export our sugary, salty, fatty diet: Beijing has more than a hundred McDonald's franchises, which advertise and price the same food in the same way, and with the same level of success.

Two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and half of these are obese. (Overweight means having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or greater, obese, 30 or greater: to calculate BMI, a widely used measure, take the square of your height in inches and then divide your weight, in pounds, by that number; then multiply the result by 703. Or calculate it on-line at www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm.) Even adults in the upper end of the "normal" range, who have BMIs of 22 to 24, would generally live longer if they lost some fat; add in these people and it appears that "up to 80 percent of American adults should weigh less than they do," says Walter C. Willett, M.D., D.P.H. '80, Stare professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the School of Public Health.

The epidemic of obesity is a vast and growing public health problem. "Weight sits like a spider at the center of an intricate, tangled web of health and disease," writes Willett in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, arguably the best and most scientifically sound book on nutrition for the general public. He notes that three aspects of weight—BMI, waist size, and weight gained after one's early twenties—are linked to chances of having or dying from heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several types of cancer, plus suffering from arthritis, infertility, gallstones, asthma, and even snoring. "Weight is much more important than serum cholesterol," Willett asserts; as a cause of premature, preventable deaths, he adds, excess weight and obesity rank a very close second to smoking, partly because there are twice as many fat people as smokers. In fact, since smokers tend to be leaner, the decrease in smoking prevalence has actually swelled the ranks of the fat.

The obesity epidemic arrived with astonishing speed. After tens of thousands of generations of human evolution, flab has become widespread only in the past 50 years, and waistlines have ballooned exponentially in the last two decades. In 1980, 46 percent of U.S. adults were overweight; by 2000, the figure was 64.5 percent: nearly a 1 percent annual increase in the ranks of the fat. At this rate, by 2040, 100 percent of American adults will be overweight and "it may happen more quickly," says John Foreyt of Baylor College of Medicine, who spoke at a conference organized by Gifford's Oldways group in 2003. Foreyt noted that, 20 years ago, he rarely saw 300-pound patients; now they are common. Childhood obesity, also once rare, has mushroomed: 15 percent of children between ages six and 19 are now overweight, and even 10 percent of those between two and five. "This may be the first generation of children who will die before their parents," Foreyt says.

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