totalhealth’s Special Report
Obesity, Weight Loss and Glucose Control
Fat City
by James J. Gormley
What’s fueling America’s obesity crisis?
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of pow’rful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
—Second Witch, Macbeth, (4.1.12-19) |
In 2002, people drank nearly 49 million
gallons of soda (185 million liters),
making it the third most popular commercial
beverage after milk and tea. The typical
bottling plant churns out over 79,250
gallons of soda per day. Here in the U.S., as
annual soda consumption doubled to 49
gallons per person between 1970 and
2001, milk consumption fell by 30 percent.
National “cruel” lunch program
In light of exploding rates of childhood
obesity and type II diabetes, school nutrition
has become a growing public health
concern. While most meals offered as part
of the federal school lunch and breakfast
programs may be relatively less unhealthy
than the offerings available outside of the
school cafeteria, “these school food programs
compete against the widely available and aggressively advertised fast food, soft drink, and snack foods that fill vending
machines, school stores, and a la carte
cafeteria lines,” wrote the Urban and
Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) in a
September 2002 report entitled
Challenging the Soda Companies.
Many of the “same schools that offer
health and nutrition education in the
classroom are undercutting their own lessons
by filling their hallways with chip and
soda-dispensing vending machines,”
noted the UEPI.
Boil and bubble
Speaking of soda, this beverage is a significant
part of the problem of poor child
nutrition, representing, as it does, hundreds
of empty calories per day that contribute
to several important health risks.
For example, a standard 12-ounce can of
soda contains about 160 calories and 1.5
ounces of sugar. Worse yet, many vending
machines offer 20-ounce bottles that contain
a whopping 250 calories and 2.3
ounces of sugar. According to government
data, the average 12-to 19-year-old sodaconsuming
male drinks more than two
cans per day (868 cans annually), while
the average female consumes 1 3.4 cans
a day. For soda consuming youth, these beverages provide
from nine to 18 percent of total
caloric intake and displace more nutritious
foods and beverages from the diet.
Teenagers drink twice as much soda as
they do milk, a nearly inverse relationship
from the consumption patterns of 20
years ago. For each additional can or
bottle of soda consumed per day over
time, the risk of obesity and related health
conditions increases by 160 percent.
In addition, soda consumption by kids
also contributes to poor bone health.
Because most girls have inadequate calcium
intakes, they are more likely to suffer
from osteoporosis (brittle bones) as they
age and have an increased risk for broken
bones while they are still young. Those
who drink soda have a three-to-four times
higher risk of bone fracture than
do those who don’t drink soda.
Soda consumption in young
people is a concern to many health
professionals because it displaces
milk (a source of calcium) from the
diet. In addition, soda also represents
the largest single source of caffeine
in children’s diets (45–100 mg
per can), and the sugar and acid in
sodas combine to contribute to tooth
decay.
According to Challenging the Soda
Companies, “soda companies like
Pepsi and Coca-Cola have adopted
marketing strategies to establish brand
loyalty as early in a
consumer’s life as possible, explicitly targeting
school-aged children. Schools
offer these companies an ideal venue for
targeting young people with their
branding activities. A Coca-Cola official
stated that his company would ‘continue to
be very aggressive and proactive in getting
our share of the school business.’”
Food and beverage companies spend
billions of dollars on advertising, and
have started offering large payments for
exclusive marketing rights in schools and
other locations where children are
present.
“These pouring rights contracts involve
lump sum payments to school districts
and additional payments over 5–10 years
in return for exclusive sales of the company’s
products in vending machines and
at all school events,” says Challenging the
Soda Companies.
“The contracts often allow constant
advertising through display of logos
on machines, cups, sportswear, brochures, and school buildings,” the UEPI report adds. “In this way, students receive constant exposure to thelogos and products, an attempt by companies to create loyalty.
Pouring rights contracts result in students
drinking more soda, vending
machines in schools that previously did
not have them, and vending machines in
schools with younger children.”
 “Non-happy meals”
According to a 2003 article by Barry
Yeoman in Mother Jones, at a time when
weight-related illnesses in children are
escalating, “schools are serving kids the
very foods that lead to obesity, diabetes
and heart disease.” According to Yeoman,
under the National School Lunch
Program the federal government actually
purchases over $800 million in farm
products each year and makes them available
to schools.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA), “which administers the system,
calls this a win-win situation: schools get
free ingredients while farmers are guaranteed
a steady income. The trouble is,
most of the commodities provided to
schools are meat and dairy products” that
are high in saturated fat, wrote Yeoman.
For example, in 2001, noted Yeoman,
the USDA shelled out “$350 million on surplus
beef and cheese for schools, more
than double the $161 million spent on all
fruits and vegetables, most of which were
canned or frozen.”
Since the School Lunch Program’s
inception in 1946, agribusiness has been
able to exert significant control over what
foods schools buy and don’t. According
to Mother Jones, “In the mid-1990s, a
group of health advocates met with the
USDA to ask that schools be allowed to
serve soy products like veggie burgers.
According to one participant, a department
official asked them, ‘Have you
spoken with the Cattlemen about this?
Until the Cattlemen go for this, we aren’t
going to be able to move on it.’”
Agribusiness’ gain in our (weight) gain
All in all, poor diet and a sedentary
lifestyle kill 400,000 Americans a year,
according to the President’s Council on
Physical Fitness and Sports, and U.S. deaths
from poor diet and physical inactivity make
up 17 percent of total deaths in the U.S.
About 64 percent of American adults
are overweight or obese, and this is no
surprise given soda over-consumption
and the state of affairs at the National
School Lunch Program that we discussed,
our kids are catching up in weight gain
and obesity. Over the last 25 years, the
number of children in the U.S. who are
overweight has tripled—22 percent of
kids are overweight. Specifically, 13 percent
of children aged 6 to 11 and 14 percent
of kids aged 12 to 19 are obese.
In fact, 60 percent of overweight children
aged five to 10 have at least one risk
factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD); 25
percent have over two risk factors. Tied to
obesity, sugar-packed diets and physical
inactivity, type II diabetes in children is
now the “new children’s epidemic,” a disease
which used to develop almost exclusively
in adulthood.
It’s not just kids—some sobering stats
According to a story run on CBS News on
September 21, 2004, researchers at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill studied national beverage consumption
patterns for more than 73,000
Americans between 1997 and 2001, and
found the following:
- overall calories from sweetened beverages went up 135 percent;
- Americans took in 38 percent fewer calories from milk;
- Americans now get an average of 144 calories a day from sugary sodas and only 99 calories from milk; and
- for young people aged 2 to 18 years, milk consumption plummeted from 13.2 percent of total calories to 8.3 percent, and soda consumption doubled.
What is worse, a study that appeared in
the August 25th issue of the Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA),
researchers found that “greater consumption
of sugar-sweetened beverages is
associated with greater weight gain and
an increased risk for development of type
II diabetes in women, potentially by providing
excessive calories and large
amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars.”
“Get up (off the couch), and boogie”
 In addition to those excess calories and
sugars, exercise is critical to health.
Nevertheless, according to the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005, 25 percent of adult Americans did not participate in any leisure-time physical activities in the past month, and, in 2003, 38 percent of students in grades nine to 12 watched three or more
hours of television per day.
Although the Dietary Guidelines’ call
for 30 to 60 minutes of moderateintensity
physical activity a day could
scare off many, fortunately the following
activities also qualify: light gardening/
yard work and walking. In fact, light gardening
(330 calories an hour) burns even
more calories an hour than do bicycling
(290) or weightlifting (220). Hey, break
out those gardening gloves!
Take-home tips
Based on our over-consumption of soda
and junk food, we should be aware that
the best foundation for responsible, sustained
weight loss is vigorous, regular
exercise and a nutrient-rich diet. Try the
following tips:
- Avoid refined carbohydrates, including white flour, white rice, white sugar and other caloric sweeteners.
- Eat foods in as natural and fresh a state as possible.
- Emphasize non-starchy vegetables (such as salad greens, asparagus, broccoli, and green beans) as your primary sources of carbs.
- Avoid soft drinks, fruit juices, alcohol, and other highly processed drinks.
- Choose high-quality omega-6 oils: safflower, sunflower, borage, black currant seed, evening primrose, and one specific omega-9 oil: first cold pressed extra-virgin olive oil.
- Choose high-quality omega-3 oils: flaxseed, hemp, pumpkin seed, and marine oils (DHA).
- Avoid fats rich in palmitic acid, such as coconut and palm oils. Steer clear of trans-fatty acids found in deep fried foods, traditional tub margarine and foods that contain partially hydrogenated oils.
For references, send a SASE to totalhealth.
James J. Gormley is an award-winning journalist,
consumer health advocate and commentator
who has been a frequent guest on
television. A U.S. delegate to a major health
conference in China in 2001, Gormley was the
editor-in-chief of Better Nutrition magazine
from 1995 through 2002. Gormley is the Policy
Advisor to Citizens for Health (www.citizens.org) and a Senior Policy Advisor to the Natural Health Research Institute. He is a
respected natural products industry analyst
and advisor to health-freedom groups nationwide.
He is a prolific author and a associate
editor of totalhealth.
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