Word: expending
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What really makes Americans fat? Your story said it all in this sentence: "We are fat because we consume too many calories and expend too few." All other explanations--genes, hormones, carbs and fats--strike me as pale excuses. Want to lose weight? Get off the couch, get off the fad diet, get smart about what you eat, and get moving. TIM HEFFERNAN Somerville, Mass...
...level, there is no mystery about why we as a society are fat. We are fat because we consume too many calories and expend too few. Though it is true that the proportion of fat in our diet has fallen from 40% in 1990 to roughly 34% today, the calories available in the food we consume have gone up, from 3,100 calories per capita per day in the 1960s to 3,700 in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). "And that alone," says New York University nutritionist Marion Nestle, "is sufficient to explain the obesity...
Rather like the ant in an Aesop's fable, people with thrifty genotypes--wisely, it might be argued--prepare for hard times by consuming and storing more calories than they expend. In this fashion, they create a reservoir of fat that comes in handy when food grows scarce. It's easy to imagine that repeated famines over the course of human development practically forced the biological system for regulating weight to skew strongly toward resisting weight loss rather than protecting against weight gain...
...least, no one should ever become obese. That's because the genetic system for regulating weight would seem to be exquisitely tuned. Researchers calculate that a man who keeps his weight stable at 175 lbs. will take in a million calories a year on average and will also expend a million calories. "Think about it," says Dr. Michael Schwartz, head of clinical nutrition at the University of Washington in Seattle. "How do you match a million with a million? It doesn't happen just by chance...
...producer Charles Granata is a first-rate Sinatra scholar, with a scholar's interest in the details. Same for the exceptionally knowledgeable critic Will Friedwald, who contributes an essay. But having Granata and Friedwald expend their energies on this material is like having Stephen Hawking explain why the little hand counts the hours and the big hand counts the minutes. For the rest of us, it's just a matter of being suckered. --By Daniel Okrent