Everything from livestock fatteners to government
marketing dooms Americans looking to lose weight.
October 27, 2014 |
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.
1. Antibiotics in food and as medicine. 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 1974, 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 researchers
found 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.
As 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.