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

percent of the adult women on the reservation, more than a quarter of the men, and 10 percent of the children, according to the University of Chicago report, “would be termed distinctly fat.” It could be argued that maybe their reservation life of what Hrdlika had called “not a little indolence” was causing their obesity, but the researchers noted another pertinent fact about these Sioux: one-fifth of the adult women, a quarter of the men, and a quarter of the children were “extremely thin.”
    The diets on the reservation, much of which, once again, came from government rations, were deficient in calories, as well as protein and essential vitamins and minerals. The impact of these dietary deficiencies was hard to miss: “Although no counts were taken, even a casual observer could not fail to note the great prevalence of decayed teeth, of bow legs, and of sore eyes and blindness among these families.”
    This combination of obesity and malnutrition or undernutrition (not enough calories) existing in the same populations is something that authorities today talk about as though it were a new phenomenon, but it’s not. Here we have malnutrition or undernutrition coexisting with obesity in the same population eighty years ago. It’s an important observation, and we’ll see it again before we’re done.
    Let’s look at several more examples:
1951: Naples, Italy
    Ancel Keys, the University of Minnesota nutritionist almost singularly responsible for convincing us that the fat we eat and the cholesterol in our blood are causes of heart disease, visits Naples to study the diet and health of the Neapolitans.
    “There is no mistaking the general picture”—he later writes—“a little lean meat once or twice a week was the rule, butter was almost unknown, milk was never drunk except in coffee or for infants, ‘colazione’ [breakfast] on the job often meant half a loaf of bread crammed with baked lettuce or spinach. Pasta was eaten every day, usually also with bread (no spreads) and a fourth of the calories were provided by olive oil and wine. There was no evidence of nutritional deficiency
but the working-class women were fat
.”
    What Keys didn’t say was that most people in Naples and in fact all of southern Italy were exceedingly poor at the time. The Neapolitans had been devastated by the Second World War, so much so that a tragic sight during the latter years of the war was lines of mothers and housewives prostituting themselves to Allied soldiers to get money to feed their families. A postwar parliamentary inquiry portrayed the region as essentially a third-world nation. There was little meat to be had, which was why little meat was consumed, and malnutrition was common. Only by the late 1950s, long after Keys’s visit, did reconstruction efforts begin to show any significant progress.
    One other fact worth noting is how closely Keys’s description of the Neapolitan diet matches the Mediterranean diet that is all the rage these days, even down to the copious olive oil and the red wine, or the grandmotherly diets that Michael Pollan recommends in
In Defense of Food:
“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Certainly these people were eating not too much. A 1951 survey ranked Italy and Greece as having less food available per capita than any other countries in Europe—twenty-four hundred calories daily, compared with thirty-eight hundred calories available per capita in the United States at that time. And yet “the working-class women were fat.” Not the rich women but the ones who had to work hard for a living.
1954: The Pima Again
    Bureau of Indian Affairs researchers weigh and measure the Pima children and report that more than half, boys and girls both,are obese by age eleven. Living conditions on the Gila River Reservation: “Widespread poverty.”
1959: Charleston, South Carolina
    Among African Americans, 18 percent of the men and 30 percent of the women are obese. Cash incomes for the heads of