Americans have become huge. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, Americans grew, on the average, an inch taller and
24 pounds heavier. The
average American man
today weights 194 pounds and the average woman 165 pounds. The growing
girth has led to the creation of special-sized ambulances, operating
tables and coffins as well as bigger seats on planes and trains. Almost a
third of American children and teens are overweight, but
84 percent of parents believe their children are at a healthy weight in one study. Why? The adults are probably overweight too.
Still
there are scientific reasons why Americans are blimping up and they
aren’t limited to eating too much and exercising too little. Here are a
few areas under suspicion.
.
A recent article in the New York Times confirms suspicions that the
antibiotics routinely given to livestock to make them fat do the same
thing to people. Antibiotics are thought to fatten by changing gut
bacteria to make absorption of nutrients more efficient. In
an
experiment was done on several hundred Navy recruits to see if they
would gain weight on antibiotics and, after only seven weeks, they did.
An experiment was also done, unethically it sounds, on “mentally
deficient spastic” children in Guatemala in the 1950s, reports the
Times. The children gained an extra five pounds over a year compared
with children who were not given antibiotics. Denmark
babies given antibiotics within six months of birth were more likely to be overweight by age seven.
Most researchers blame over-prescription of antibiotics for excessive human exposure; US children get as many as
20 antibiotic treatments
while they are growing up, says Martin Blaser, a leading antibiotic
researcher at New York University Langone Medical Center. But studies
show there are
antibiotic residues in US food too, especially in meat and milk, and the
government tests for them. That means even if you avoid unnecessary antibiotics from the doctor, you could be getting them from the grocery store.
2. Other livestock fatteners. If
antibiotics used to make livestock fat could make us fat, is there any
reason to think other weight-producing drugs for livestock wouldn’t do
the same?
Ractopamine, marketed
as Paylean for pigs, Optaflexx for cattle and Topmax for turkeys is
widely used in the US and banned in many other countries. It is given to
60 to 80 percent of US pigs, 30 percent of ration-fed cattle and an
undisclosed number of turkeys. There is no withdrawal period for
ractopamine before slaughter but Big Ag says the drug is not in the meat
because it exits the animal as manure. Okay, but what happens to the
manure?
Also banned in European countries are the
hormones US cattle growers rely upon, such as oestradiol-17, trenbolone
acetate, zeranol and melengestrol. Zeranol may have more actions than
just making mammals fat. It is a “powerful estrogenic chemical, as
demonstrated by its ability to stimulate growth and proliferation of
human breast tumor cells in vitro at potencies similar to those of the
natural hormone estradiol and the known carcinogen diethylstilbestrol,”
says the
Breast Cancer Fund. Translation: it may be linked to US breast cancer rates, too. No wonder Europe doesn’t want our beef.
3. Pesticides and other endocrine disrupters.
Some antibiotics and artificial sweeteners are similar molecules to
endocrine disrupters—the chemicals used to make fire retardants and
plastics that are increasingly in our food and environment. Endocrine
disrupters, like BPA (Bisphenol A), banned in some baby bottles, and
Triclosan found in Colgate’s Total and many dish detergents, are linked to a host of
shocking symptoms like
genital deformities in wildlife and infertility, low sperm counts and
possible early puberty and diabetes in humans. But they also may be
linked to obesity.
s early as 2003, the journal
Toxicological Sciences
addressed effects that endocrine disruptors have on fetal development
that likely play a role in adult obesity. “Obesity has been proposed to
be yet another adverse health effect of exposure to endocrine disrupting
chemicals (EDCs) during critical stages of development,” echoes an
article in the
International Journal of Andrology.
Pregnant women with high levels of the endocrine disrupter PFOA
(perfluorooctanoic acid used in the manufacture of as Teflon and
Gore-Tex) in their bodies were three times as likely to have daughters
who grew up to be overweight,
reported the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.
4. Sugar substitutes.
Artificial sweeteners have always been billed as a way to cut calories
and lose weight. But recent research shows they may do just the
opposite. When researchers at the University of Texas Health Science
Center
studied 474 people who
drank two or more artificially sweetened soft drinks a day they found
the people gained five times as much as those not drinking diet drinks.
Thanks for nothing!
There are three reasons artificial
sweeteners may do more harm than good. One is that some of the
sweeteners—which tend to be chemicals like acesulfame potassium and
aspartame—may slow metabolism, speculate researchers. Secondly,
artificial sweeteners separate “food seeking behavior” from the “reward”
of real nutrients and can set up sweets addictions because the reward
is never received. They literally “train” people to crave sweets.
Finally the presence of artificial sweeteners in a product doesn’t
automatically mean natural sweeteners aren’t present too. Some food
manufacturers use both. Read the label. Marion Nestle, a professor in
nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and
leading food expert, told me she isn’t aware of any convincing evidence
that proves artificial sweeteners help people to lose weight. One
artificial sweetener, Splenda, has similarities to endocrine disrupting
pesticides….
5. Industry and government marketing. Most people are aware of aggressive junk food marketing, especially to children, and everyone from
Disneyland to First Lady
Michelle Obama has spoken out about it. In a
study in the journal Pediatrics,
children who tasted identical graham crackers and gummy fruit snacks,
some with and some without cartoon characters, “significantly preferred
the taste of foods that had popular cartoon characters on the
packaging.” Who says advertising doesn’t work?
Researchers who studied
500,000 California middle- and high-school students found
those who attended schools located near fast-food
outlets—surprise!—weighed more. Still, it is not just the food industry
that is responsible for our growing national girth.
The
USDA, even though it cautions food consumers about high-fat,
obesity-linked foods, plays the other side of the street as well and is
linked to a group that seeks to get people to double their cheese intake
to help milk sales.
Dairy Management,
a USDA “marketing creation” with 162 employees, according to the New
York Times, has helped Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy’s and
Domino’s cheesify their menu options!
“If every pizza
included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250
million pounds of cheese annually,” rhapsodized the Dairy Management
chief executive in a trade publication. Though Dairy Management is
mostly funded by farmers, it received $5.3 million from the USDA during
one year, for an overseas dairy campaign, which almost equals the total
$6.5 million budget of USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and
Promotion—the group that cautions us about fatty foods like cheese. Yes,
the government is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it tells
the public what to put in its mouth.
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