Fat of the land

Archimedes: “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Chicago mayor and former White House aide Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Substitute “childhood obesity epidemic” for crisis and you can better understand how the Obama administration has levered the growing waistlines of Americans into one more opportunity to grow the federal government.

The problem with the effort is not the cause itself. Every president’s wife chooses a cause. Dolley Madison, the first to be called “first lady,” supported the Washington City Orphan Asylum. Mary Todd Lincoln was nutty but did good volunteer work for the Contraband Relief Association. (“Contraband” was the name for wartime-freed former slaves.) Lucy Hayes emphasized education for all and visited the National Deaf Mute College in Washington.

Those were all nonpolitical activities, but in recent times some first ladies, reflecting government centralization, have turned to legislation. Lady Bird Johnson campaigned successfully for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. Betty Ford pushed unsuccessfully for the feminist-backed Equal Rights Amendment, with some conservatives cruelly calling her “No Lady.” Nancy Reagan emphasized local communities in her Just Say No anti-drug campaign, but after only one year Washington buzzed with the appointment of a “drug czar.”

Over the past five years Michelle Obama’s cause, the war on fat, has followed the new, government-centric pattern. She deserves commendation for kicking off her Let’s Move! campaign in 2010, with former football pro Tiki Barber acting as emcee and peewee football champions lined up behind her. The first lady eloquently laid out the problem: rates of obesity tripling in the past three decades, and one-third of children overweight or obese. She pointed a finger at some of the culprits: unhealthy school lunches, confusing nutrition labels, inconvenient grocery stores, high prices for fruits and vegetables, too few parks and sidewalks, and convenience foods high in salt, sugar, and fat.

But also in the room were cabinet secretaries from major federal agencies including Health and Human Services, Interior, Education, and Agriculture. Earlier that same day, President Obama had tasked them with solving “the problem of childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.” Their goal: lower the child obesity rate to 5 percent by 2030—a rate last seen in the 1970s. And instantly governmental and corporate bureaucracies sprang into action: Robber Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” and when a first lady finds a platform, officials and opportunists know federal dollars aren’t far behind.

The Asheville, N.C., region is fairly typical of America’s fall into fat. About 37 percent of Asheville’s residents have a “healthy weight,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 63 percent are “overweight” or “obese.” Metro Atlanta is the same, sports-happy suburban Boston is lower at 56 percent, and gambling-sad Atlantic City, N.J., is higher at 69 percent. Only one metropolitan area has a majority of its residents at a healthy weight: The Fort Collins/Loveland, Colo., metro area inched its chin over the bar at 50.2 percent.

Five World Journalism Institute interns nosed around western North Carolina this year and ran across programs that were up and running long before the last five years of federal direction. For example, since 2001 the Verner Center for Early Learning in eastern Asheville has worked to form healthy habits for kids before they enter kindergarten. The center accepts kids 6 weeks to 6 years old. On one afternoon five dozen children played there. A little boy hung on a railing and, instead of demanding television time, said, “I want to go outside and play in the garden.”

That’s what he did. Each classroom opens to mulched play areas connected by fence gates with bike paths, plants, trees, and climbing structures. A jungle-like nature path leads to a garden featuring boxes with young plants and a teaching station with stump seats under a tree. Every day the kids help pick weeds and tend tomatoes and beans. When they ripen, the vegetables become part of the center’s meals. The center gives extra garden produce to families in the program.

The Verner Center developed its own nutrition curriculum, Rainbow in My Tummy, to encourage kids to have fun, flavorful foods of many colors on their plate each day. Teachers eat family-style with the kids and are not allowed to bring in outside food or beverages: “You won’t even see a Coke bottle,” said center manager Chris Tucker.

For older children, “fat camps”—their directors don’t like that name, of course—have been around for a long time. Wellspring Adventure Camp in the mountains of western North Carolina helps its campers lose weight by focusing on behavioral change. They receive personalized training sessions and take part in group exercise classes like Zumba and yoga. Campers get three meals a day and learn to modify their favorite recipes: pita bread instead of dough for pizza. Michaela Clinton, the Wellspring admissions director, said some campers “come with hesitation because it’s a little stigmatizing, but after a while they make friends, lose some weight, and end up having a great time.”

Other camps with mostly nonobese kids challenge fat indirectly, through activities. Camp Merri-Mac offers a ropes course and classes in climbing, archery, riflery, and diving, among others. “They burn so many more calories here just because they are having fun,” said Adam Boyd, the camp’s director. Boyd said role models are also important: “Camping is all about who your counselor is. There’s just no way to be here and be obese without aspiring to be healthier. … Campers want to be like their counselors,” who are health-conscious.

Weight loss groups for adults recognize the power of peer pressure. At a meeting of the Hendersonville, N.C., chapter of Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS), one man—“Frank”—and 35 women had brought their water bottles to the weight loss support group in a high-ceilinged room at Grace Lutheran Church. Connie sat hunched in her purple sweater near the edge of the room, waiting patiently for her turn in roll call. She had lost 9.8 pounds the previous week: When her friends heard the news, they cheered. Later in the meeting, the leaders gave out rewards for weight loss for the year. Frank won in his division: 22.5 pounds gone.

The meeting displayed a formula. Women who gained weight stood up and said, “I’m glad to be here.” The group chorused back, “We’re glad you’re here.” Those who stayed at the same weight announced, “I’m a turtle.” Roxanne Queen, the group leader and a turtle that week, sat at a table in the front of the room and said, “We’re crazy, but we love each other.” She joined TOPS six years ago, desperate to lose weight. She said she needs the motivation of standing up for the meeting’s roll call and telling her friends whether she’s gained or lost. It can help her say no to treats, like cakes at parties: “It’s very hard. You can’t do it by yourself.”

Similar meetings and activities go on across the United States. At Thanksgiving time two years ago a WORLD cover story (“What goes into the mouth,” Nov. 30, 2013) detailed the success of church small groups that were following “The Daniel Plan” or other programs that emphasize fruits and vegetables and excommunicate (most of the time) cheeseburgers. Some church groups compete against each other for most pounds lost: Although no church to our knowledge has set up treadmills at the back of sanctuaries, many churches say, “Let’s move.”

And so, to her credit, does Michelle Obama. She has danced and push-upped her way across television talk shows. She charmed kids by making a video in which she boogied with a turnip. She donned gardening gloves and tilled the White House kitchen garden. Personal commitment like that goes back to Dolley Madison, but the first lady is also in the Lady Bird Johnson tradition as honorary chair of The Partnership for a Healthier America, which twists corporate arms to get food companies and chains to join the campaign.

Smart corporate marketers have jumped on board, as in this press release: “The Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), which works with the private sector and PHA honorary chair First Lady Michelle Obama to make healthier choices easier for busy parents and families, today announced that Sheetz, one of America’s fastest growing family-owned and operated convenience store chains, has made a two-year commitment to deliver more nutritious options across its 475 convenience stores.” The chain will still offer Burgerz and Hot Dogz, Pretzel Meltz, Nachoz, Fryz, Chicken Stripz, and Shnack Wrapz, along with more than a dozen types of doughnuts, but it will also carry four whole-grain items, some fresh produce, and kids meals that meet PHA standards.

Grant-seeking state and local officials are also salivating. An Obama task force issued a report with 70 fat-fighting recommendations covering everything from breast-feeding to parks and bike lanes, with committees and task forces at every level of government told to write laws, issue regulations, and craft explanatory memos. For example, “Recommendation” 1.10 says the federal government “should provide clear, actionable guidance to states, providers, and families on how to increase physical activity, improve nutrition, and reduce screen time in early child care centers.” That sounds good, but “actionable” in this context means using the carrots and sticks of funding to make sure child care centers provide more carrots. Federal pressure supplants local initiative and stifles creative solutions like those in North Carolina.

“Recommendation” 1.12 is more explicit: “The Federal government should look for opportunities in all early childhood programs it funds”—then comes a list of programs including Head Start—“to base policies and practices on current scientific evidence related to child nutrition.” The problem is that the “science” is still in flux. Nutritionists for years recommended skim milk and nonfat yogurt rather than the regular variety, but recent studies published in the European Journal of Nutrition, the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, and other mainstream publications are pro-fat. Nutrition scientists such as Mario Kratz now argue that the fatty acids eliminated in reduced-fat dairy products help children and adults feel full and stay full longer, so many who go skim end up eating more. We’d be better off with local control of such decisions: Over time we’d find out who is right and who is fat.

Other recommendations include 3.12, which tells schools to make sure “that choosing a healthy school meal does not have a social cost for a child.” That’s bureaucratese for noting that rich kids might stigmatize poor kids stuck with free or low-cost government food, so schools should give everyone government lunches and ban food that moms pack. Some of the standards are sweetly idealistic—3.4 has schools “swapping out deep fryers for salad bars”—and sound like beating swords into plowshares.

Here’s one more benign-sounding example: 3.1 instructs us to “update Federal nutritional standards for school meals.” To achieve the 5 percent obesity goal by 2030—right now the sad statistic is seven times that amount—“average fruit consumption should increase to 75 percent of the recommended level by 2015, 85% by 2020, and 100% by 2030.” Eating fruit is good, but how can the federal government get kids to eat more of it? One answer: Don’t provide options. No more “let them eat cake.” Now, “you must eat fruit.”

That fine goal received legislative support in the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that increased federal authority over all foods available in schools during the day—and after school, and in summer lunch programs. The rules implementing the act mandated at least a 150 percent increase in the amount of fruits and vegetables in school meals, and spelled out the kinds of vegetables—dark green, red/orange, starchy, etc. Problem: Five years of experience showed lots of fruits and vegetables hitting the trash can, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture on July 22 tried to stem the rebellion by saying vegetables in smoothies would count. To be precise: Memo SP 10-2014 (v.3), CACFP 05-2014 (v.3), SFSP 10-2014 (v.3) declared that “allowing yogurt in smoothies to credit toward the meat/meat alternate requirement at breakfast may provide a more acceptable taste and texture, which could help increase participation in the breakfast program while reducing waste.”

But here’s the problem: As Cornell professor T. Colin Campbell’s Center for Nutrition Studies (CNS) pointed out, drinking kale smoothies is like “tasting slime, or perhaps cow cud.” A spoonful of sugar may make this medicine go down, but CNS notes that consuming vegetables and fruits in liquid form may leave partakers “less satisfied, less full, and subsequently eat[ing] more calories during the day” than they would otherwise consume: “Also consider that by taking those foods as liquids instead of solids you may be significantly changing the immediate blood sugar spike and subsequent blood sugar fall you experience (in a bad way).” Great: More kids with sugar highs (and then lows). But how else will kids voluntarily eat their veggies? It seems that the calories Washington removes with one hand it adds with the other.

Federal pressures are at war with each other in additional ways. “No Child Left Behind” testing regimes terrorize some teachers whose raises and even jobs depend on kids filling in bubble sheets correctly. The National PTA website complains that schools finding time for “academics”—often test preparation—“cut out physical education classes and recess,” so most students don’t get even 20 minutes of recess every day. Instead of relying on local common sense, National PTA is meeting legislation with legislation by advocating the federal “Fitness Integrated with Teaching Kids Act” (FIT Kids Act, get it?) that would give money to schools developing phys ed programs: State educational agencies would monitor such programs and tell Washington how many minutes students are physically active during each school day.

Washington policies, though, are consistent with the materialist philosophies that underlie so much legislation. Certainly, healthy food choices are important, but officials often focus on what goes into a body but not on why it goes in. Asheville psychologist Lisa Wolfe recalls one client, a single mom in her 50s, who struggled with weight, low-level depression, and negative self-talk. After five sessions the client stopped showing up: She wanted to keep eating food in the wrong way, as comfort in her busy, stress-filled life. Wolfe said, “She just gave up.”

Husbands and wives with children have it hard if they are both working full-time jobs outside the home. Unless they are wealthy, they are likely to rely on convenience foods. Similarly, some children—particularly if they are “latchkey kids”—come home after school to parentless apartments and eat out of boredom and loneliness. Theodore Roosevelt said he used “the bully pulpit” to advocate changes in behavior, but James Zervios of the Obesity Action Coalition notes that bullying the obese is a losing game: Many eat more to gain comfort.

To its credit, the Let’s Move! campaign does note some nonfood factors that lead to fatness. Many urban parents don’t let their children walk to school for legitimate fear of crime, and many suburban parents live in realms laid out for car use. In days gone by many parents let their children out on summer mornings and Saturdays and might not see them again until nightfall: Kids played baseball on sandlots and went “down the creek” or “into the big thicket” to explore. That’s rare in 2015.

But among the outpouring of papers and studies on why some adults and even some kids weigh more than 300 pounds, no one seems to be scrutinizing the 800-pound gorilla in the room: fewer families with married moms and dads in the home, and more families with mothers who come home from full-time work exhausted. Few things are more politically incorrect than to speculate on the connection between family and fat, yet until we do that we’re driving blind. And if studies do prove that we’ve sold our birthright for a plate of french fries, what then?

Fat figures

Obesity rates for children in the United States have stayed constant since 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The number of overweight children aged 2-19 is around 32 percent, and an additional 17 percent are obese (body mass index—BMI—higher than 30). The numbers are worse for adults: About 32 percent of American adults are overweight, and an additional 35 percent are obese.

Other developed countries have lower obesity rates: 25 percent in the United Kingdom and 21 percent in Canada. Less than 4 percent of Japanese adults have a BMI of 30 or higher. Obesity is the second leading contributor to preventable death in the United States—only behind tobacco use. Carrying excess body fat contributes to higher rates of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and even certain cancers, and can also lead to psychological problems. According to the CDC, overweight children are at higher risk for many diseases as they grow older, and bad eating habits among children predict obesity-related health issues as an adult.

—with reporting by Katlyn Babyak, Onize Ohikere, Abby Reese, Jae Wasson, and Evan Wilt

Listen to Marvin Olasky discuss “Fat of the land” on The World and Everything in It.