America the Corpulent

I’ve been to Europe three times in the past several years. I’ve visited Britain, France, and Italy. The one consistent observation of these three countries is that the people who live there are rarely fat. When one does see an immensely overweight person it is a good bet that he or she is American. In Venice a very fat woman and her somewhat fat husband were boarding the same boat as my squeeze and I were. “Hey, USA! Where ya from?” “Minnesooota” was the reply.

This observation of American obesity is not mine alone. On several occasions on my trips fellow American tourists would remark “Have you noticed that no one here is fat?!” Yep. I noticed. In the recent French animated film The Triplets of Belleville, Belleville is clearly New York City (we can discern this because in the harbor of Belleville is a chubby Statue of Liberty). All of NYC’s citizens are shown as rolly polly figures waddling up and down the streets of the city. Obviously, the French have noticed that we’re fat too.

Every time I mention our national plumpness to one of my countrymen this is always the reply “Oh, that’s because...” and every explanation differs. Some say the Europeans exercise more (they do), or eat less (they don’t), or food-match, or eat more fresh food, or eat less red meat, or... well, fill in the blank. This are always offered as objective fact and thus a complete and undeniable explanation. Of course, these are only untested hypotheses. It may be any one of these explanations, or all of them in combination, or none at all. I don’t know the answer.

I know that I came home from Italy the heaviest I have ever been. I exercised the same as the Italians, I ate the food they ate, I rarely could eat everything I was served in a restaurant (so I didn’t) and I still came home fat. Genetics seems an unlikely culprit; bring an Italian to America to live for a couple of years, and watch him inflate. Societal forces? That’s always the easy explanation from those who don’t think things through much. Why would it be acceptable to be fat in America and not in Europe? Where did that social force come from? When someone offers a societal forces explanation it generally is based on the assumption that societal forces are the result of capricious whim and thus really have no explanation. I reject such non thinking (to the chagrin of the sociologists in my circle of acquaintances - without capricious whim, the discipline of sociology has little justification for its existence. Fine with me).

So we’re fat. We’re so desperate not to be fat that we even catapult books on weight loss by Dr. Phil, a fat guy, into national prominence. It’s a interesting phenomenon,