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The Fat of the Land

The Washington Post / BOOKS
The Fat of the Land

Jonathan Yardley

LOSING IT: America’s
Obsession with Weight And the
Industry That Feeds on It
By Laura Fraser
Dutton, 328pp, $24.95

1    LAURA FRASER is here    $500 a year per dieter. Despite    among relatively serious and
 to say, to thee and me: our efforts, we are still gaining responsible people who know
 Lighten up! Obsessing weight: In the past decade, the that diets simply do not work - at
 about weight, she says, is average American adult has put least not diets as the interconnected
 pointless, counter-productive and on eight pounds.” interests of commercial
 self-destructive. That she is5    The ideal of thinness, as Fraser clubs and food products define
 absolutely right makes it not a and many others have pointed them - she finds a prevailing
 bit easier to believe her, for her out, is relatively recent. The assumption that, as one reformed
 message runs contrary to every- Victorians celebrated the well- dieter put it, “dieting doesn’t
 thing else our culture would have padded physique, and the robber work, but we don’t want to
 us believe. barons measured their success at discourage people from doing it.”
2    On the question of weight as their waistlines. But around the8    This is hypocritical indeed, but
 on so many other matters, turn of the century, an it is a clumsy way of saying that
 America is terminally weird. On evolutionary chain began that even if the stereotypical
 the one hand it insists that only ran from the plump Lillian American “diet” is a fraud, the
 thin is genuinely beautiful, a Russell to the athletic Gibson question of weight is far from
 message reinforced by mass Girl to the boyish flapper to the unimportant. What Fraser calls
 media that fawn over pencil-thin “ubiquitous ideal” of Barbie, with “the new paradigm about weight”
 female models and impossibly “proportions beyond the reach of - it “encourages people to stop
 trim male movie stars and ordinary women.” For all dieting, to develop lifelong
 athletes as well as by a food Americans, but for women most healthy eating and exercise
 industry that has turned “local” especially, thinness became at habits instead, and to accept
 and “fat free” into cash cows.Yet once mandatory and elusive. whatever weight they end up
 on the other hand the dominant6    The industry that soon settled with” - is admirable, but one
 ingredients of the American diet down to cater to and profit from need only look at the human
 are high in calories and fat, and this enduring contradiction is all evidence all around us to
 the weight of the average too well-known to most of us, but understand that it is a paradigm
 American bulks ever larger year Fraser provides an illuminating still in search of a following.
 after year. On the one hand we tour. She presents a parade of9    Still, the essential drift of
 talk incessantly about weight and diet doctors and gurus, from Jack Fraser’s reportage and her
 spend staggering amounts of LaLanne to Herman Tarnower to argument is on target. Dieting as
 money trying to get rid of it, yet Dean Ornish to Susan Powter; most Americans practice it does
 on the other hand we are she explores the underworld of them far more harm than good.
 probably the fattest nation on diet fraud, with its “long history... Yo-yo weight shifts are generally
 earth. Go figure. full of colorful American believed in responsible quarters
3    Fraser is less interested in character types: confidence men, to put the body at greater risk
 figuring than in reporting. She is hucksters, shady doctors and fly- than steady if moderate overweight,
 better on the whats than on the by-night entrepreneurs”; she and many of the food
 whys, but that is a forgivable examines the corporate interests products low in fat and calories
 shortcoming in what is otherwise that roll out diet and fat-free are poor eating and inadequate
 a sound and informative tour food or food “products”; she visits nutrition.
 through the darkest recesses of (and enrolls in) some of the10    In what is generally a sensible
 what she calls Dietland, the basic more notable commercial diet and balanced presentation, Fraser
 character of which she defines at groups, Weight Watchers and skips too quickly over one
 the outset: Jenny Craig among them; and important element. However
4    “Nearly half of all American she explores the scientific, fraudulent and exploitative many
 women, and a quarter of all men, academic and industrial world of inhabitants of Dietland may be,
 diet... Most diets, several studies “bariatric physicians” and “obesity most of them could not have got
 have shown, don’t work for at research.” where they are without the eager
 least nine out of ten people, who7    It is hardly a pretty picture. cooperation of the press. Most of
 will just regain the weight. The sum of all this labor is a these media people know as little
 (People who lose weight on their system determined upon “proving about nutrition and biology as
 own and aren’t counted in that everyone is at an increased the rest of us, but this does not
 medical studies seem to do risk of dying early if they aren’t prevent them from acting as
 slightly better at keeping the super-thin, frightening people messengers of false hope and
 pounds off.) Still, we keep trying, into going on starvation diets to inner panic. The media worship
 and collectively we spend an reach an improbable weight, and thinness and shamelessly promote
 estimated $34 to $50 billion a ignoring reams of studies that impossible means of achieving it.
 year on dieting - that’s about the demonstrate there are much In Dietland, they are as much at
 gross national product of Ireland more sophisticated ways of fault as anyone else.
 - which comes down to roughly looking at health risks.” Even 
   ‘The Washington Post’,
   January 19, 1997