Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hrdlika appeared, in the first years of the twentieth century, the tribe was still raising what crops it could but was now relying on government rations for day-to-day sustenance.
    So why were they fat? Years of starvation are supposed to take weight off, not put it on or leave it on, as the case may be. And if the government rations were simply excessive, making the famines a thing of the past, then why would the Pima get fat on the abundant rations and not on the abundant food they’d had prior to the famines? Perhaps the answer lies in the type of food being consumed, a question of quality rather than quantity. This is what Russell was suggesting when he wrote that “certain articles of their food appear to be markedly flesh producing.”
    Hrdlika also thought that the Pima should be thin, considering the precarious state of their existence, and so he said, “The role played by food in the production of obesity among the Indians is apparently indirect.” This left him leaning toward physical inactivity as the cause, or at least
relative
physical inactivity. In other words, the Pima might have been more active than we are today, considering the rigors of preindustrial agriculture, but they were sedentary in comparison with what they used to be. This is what Hrdlika called “the change from their past active life to the present state of not a little indolence.” But then he couldn’t explain why the women were typically the fat ones, even though these women did virtually all the hard labor in the villages—harvestingthe crops, grinding the grain, even carrying the heavy burdens when the pack animals were unavailable. Hrdlika was also troubled by another local tribe, the Pueblo, who had “been of sedentary habits since ancient times” but weren’t fat.
    So maybe the culprit
was
the type of food. The Pima were already eating everything “that enters into the dietary of the white man,” as Hrdlika said. This might have been key. The Pima diet in 1900 had characteristics very similar to the diets many of us are eating a century later, but not in quantity, in quality.
    As it turns out, half a dozen trading posts had opened on the Pima reservation after 1850. From these, as the anthropologist Henry Dobyns has noted, the Pima bought “sugar, coffee and canned goods to replace traditional foodstuffs lost ever since whites had settled in their territory.” Moreover, the great bulk of the government rations distributed to the reservations was white flour, as well as a significant amount of sugar, at least significant for the Pima of a century ago. These were quite likely the critical factors, as I will be arguing throughout this book.
    If the Pima were the sole example of a population that was both very poor and beset by obesity, we could write them off as an exception to the rule—the single eyewitness whose testimony disagrees with copious others. But there were, as I said, numerous such populations, numerous witnesses to the presence of high levels of obesity in extremely poor populations. The Pima were the flag bearers in a parade of witnesses whose testimony never gets heard and who demonstrate that it’s possible to become fat when you’re poor, hardworking, and even underfed. Let’s examine what they have to say, and then we’ll move on.
    A quarter-century after Russell and Hrdlika visited the Pima, two researchers from the University of Chicago studied another Native American tribe, the Sioux living on the South Dakota Crow Creek Reservation. These Sioux lived in shacks “unfit for occupancy,” often four to eight family members per room. Many had no plumbing and no running water. Forty percent of the children lived in homes without any kind of toilets. Fifteen families,with thirty-two children among them, lived “chiefly on bread and coffee.” This was poverty almost beyond our imagination today.
    Yet their obesity rates were not much different from what we have today in the midst of our epidemic: 40