I got a lot of warm, positive response to my fat post a few weeks back, and I’m grateful for it.
But some of the negative response — oh, maybe about ten percent of the total, I guess — surprised me.
That negative response broke down into two categories. I’ll deal with the negative response from some fat-acceptance-oriented folks in a later post. Suffice it to say for now that despite the time I spent pointing out my affinity for most of the goals of the fat acceptance movement, my focus on my own weight loss goals as a part of an overall health strategy rubbed some people the wrong way.
And we all know how willing I am to listen to the “shut up because your experience is detrimental to our political goals” thing. But more on that later, along with discussion of the dreaded Law of Conservation of Energy.
The feedback that surprised me the most was made by people who refused to allow that their prejudice against fat people might not be justifiable. This feedback arrived mainly in email, and mainly made the point that some rich people are obese, and went on to draw the conclusion that obese rich people are fat because they’re rich, and that obesity, therefore, has a political dimension related to conspicuous consumption of the earth’s resources, gluttony, and greed.
In other words, they’re fat-cats.
This viewpoint might have been accurate in the 1890s, but to make the argument nowadays is to ignore reality, to flog anecdotal evidence and ignore statistics. To a first approximation, these days, the very affluent are slender. This thinness is sometimes maintained at extreme cost to their own health, but is perhaps more often a result of access to healthful food, personal trainers, and large amounts of free time in which they can play and burn off calories, along with the ability to burn those calories in interesting and expensive locations.
Which is not to say that there is no link between rapacious greed and obesity. It’s just that people who get fat are not the winners of that politics.
For instance.
On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. NAFTA removed most of the legal barriers to trade among Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Almost immediately, Mexico’s agricultural infrastructure began to collapse. Before the agreement was signed, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had amended the Mexican constitution to gut the ejido system, in which peasant farmers received government grants of land, the rights to which could then be passed onto family members but not sold. The amendment allowed farmers to sell their land outright. It also made it possible for farmers to lose their ejidos due to debt. Until 1993, the Mexican government was legally obligated to guarantee a minimum price for corn by buying it under the CONASUPO program. Salinas ended CONASUPO price supports just before NAFTA passed.
With the trade barriers relaxed, US firms began to dump cheap, government-subsidized corn in Mexico. The price Mexican farmers earned for a bushel of corn fell by nearly half between 1993 and 1999. In the meantime, the retail price of corn actually increased in Mexico. The reason: the same companies who were dumping US corn in huge amounts were also buying up the corn companies. By 2001, for instance, agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland owned a controlling interest in the Mexican company Gruma S.A. de C.V., the world’s largest producer of cornmeal and tortillas, and partial ownership of two other corn milling companies. In 1998, in response to urging by US NAFTA representatives, Mexico dropped its law capping prices on tortillas, increasing US companies’ profitability and causing the price of tortillas in Mexico City to jump by half. The price jump was even greater in rural areas. Many poor people in Mexico get half their daily calories in the form of tortillas.
In other words, rural people were earning less money, and yet were forced to spend more just to survive. Farmers lost their land, whether on ejidos or in long-held family plots sold to cover mounting debts. The disruption was mind-bendingly massive. Some observers estimate that one Mexican in six lost his or her home as a direct result of the US corporate invasion of Mexico’s corn economy.
Between 1993 and 2002, Archer Daniels Midland’s annual profits tripled. Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de la Nutrición estimates that one Mexican child in five suffers malnutrition as a direct result of the corn crisis. The genetic diversity of Mexican corn, which once boasted thousands of distinct varieties, dwindles under the onslaught of hybrid, and now genetically modified, corn. And millions of displaced Mexican farmers seek work to feed their desperate families, lately becoming targets of hatred from the corporate-funded American right.
Most days when I run down to the mouth of the creek, a row of black tank cars sits idle on the railroad tracks fronting the bay. A dozen of them, or two, each with a capacity of 8,000 gallons, pinging as their black-painted tanks cool in the twilight breeze. Each of them bears similar labels: High Fructose Corn Syrup. Most of them are the property of Archer Daniels Midland.
In the 1970s, Japanese scientists devised a method for producing a strong sweetener from cornstarch by treating the starch with a series of enzymes. In the United States, where massive government subsidies to agribusiness corporations generate a massive supply of cheap cornstarch, the resulting High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) turned out to be much cheaper to produce than cane or beet sugar. Starting in 1975, HFCS was added to soft drinks and other processed foods.
The average American eats about 52 pounds of HFCS each year, according to the USDA: a little less than five gallons of the stuff. That works out to about 130 calories a day. An average means that half of us eat more than that, some of us a lot more. One fifth of Americans consume more than 316 calories per day from HFCS. If that one fifth of Americans who consume more than 316 calories’ worth of HFCS daily were to drop it from their diets without replacing the calories — say, drinking water instead of soda — and without slacking off on physical activity, they would lose about a pound every eleven days.
Some argue that consumption of HFCS is linked to increased obesity even more than the equivalent amount of cane sugar:
The increased use of HFCS in the United States mirrors the rapid increase in obesity. The digestion, absorption, and metabolism of fructose differ from those of glucose. Hepatic metabolism of fructose favors de novo lipogenesis. In addition, unlike glucose, fructose does not stimulate insulin secretion or enhance leptin production. Because insulin and leptin act as key afferent signals in the regulation of food intake and body weight, this suggests that dietary fructose may contribute to increased energy intake and weight gain. Furthermore, calorically sweetened beverages may enhance caloric overconsumption. Thus, the increase in consumption of HFCS has a temporal relation to the epidemic of obesity, and the overconsumption of HFCS in calorically sweetened beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity.
(Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity George A Bray, Samara Joy Nielsen and Barry M Popkin American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 79, No. 4, 537-543, April 2004)
Regardless of whether HFCS plays a greater role in obesity than other sugars, one thing is undeniable. HCFS is cheap in the US, and so companies added more sugar to food and beverages, made them available on a wider basis, and in markets they had not tapped before — for example, as HFCS-laden soft drinks pop up in vending machines in elementary schools across the country. We are eating more sugar more often and developing a taste for it earlier.
Poor kids in Mexico suffer bone loss and scurvy and lowered disease resistance, and dehydration and heatstroke when their families leave their homes and cross the desert into the north. Poor kids in Oakland suffer high blood pressure and adult onset diabetes. Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill, and ConAgra, and Tenneco, and Beatrice profit from the misery of both groups.
And HFCS is but one modern food substance implicated in the burgeoning obesity rate in the US.
That is how you link greed and obesity.
Complex issue that taps into all kinds of addictive and emotional stuff. It would seem as if the answer would be to educate people about what these foods are doing to them—but I, for one, know, and still crave them. Once you’re hooked, the best you can hope for is to be a recovering HFCS (or lard) addict for life.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece, and for the one that spawned it.
ditto patry. also, when i moved to california from canada, i noticed that a) soft drinks taste entirely different, a fact i attribute to the use of hfcs; and b) that restaurants serve fountain drinks in massive quantities. here, it’s standard practice to allow customers to serve and refill their drinks from the fountain. in canada, it is not.
the entire apparatus, here, seems to geared toward maximising consumption. being a sucker for sweets myself, i can see how it could quickly get out of control.
A-freakin-men. US-endemic ignorance about the effects of NAFTA makes my hair light on fire.
It’s interesting that you mention HFCS today. While shopping for, say, cereal, I’ve been trying to find a healthier, yet palatable, choice. Lately the big advertising thing is “Whole Grain!!!!!” added to the cereal boxes. The average individual would stop at the big letters, and not look for what the actual ingredients are. Upon reading the small print, I have found that most cereals contain ENRICHED wheat flour (bad) and High fructose corn syrup (bad). At one point in my quest, I wondered if EVERY cereal contained HFCS, until I ended up picking out my usual choice because I knew it was “safer” (no enriched flour or HFCS). I already knew that most cereals use flour that has absolutely no nutritional value, but I wasn’t aware until just last week that most cereals contain HFCS. Could be that I’ve been having to do the shopping lately, instead of Bob…
well done chris. life is a kind of intelligence test.
first mexico, then canada? oh, right. we sold out too. gotta love those multi-nationals. if you own shares, at least?
hard to imagine how ruining *any* childrens’ lives (mexican/canadian/whateverian) makes the world as a whole any better, short-or-long-term. is that some sorta twisted evolutionary/economic process? or as g. carlin might say: it’s “negotiable”!
great writin’ on a tech. issue, btw.
Thanks, Chris; I had not heard that side of the NAFTA story before. No wonder hundreds of thousands of Mexican people are leaving rural Mexico.
For a much smaller instance: Check out the ingredients on a bottle of Heinz ketchup. Two of the top five (maybe four, I forget) ingredients are “corn syrup” and “high fructose corn syrup.” I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that if you added those two together there would be more corn syrup in the ketchup than tomatoes. My 4 year old boy—like just about every boy—loves ketchup. Fortunately, he thinks the organic ketchup tastes better.
A further thought that struck me as I was clicking submit. You began your post by noting that it is now the well-off who can afford to be thin. The organic ketchup without the hfcs that my son loves is more expensive than the Heinz brand. We can afford it but not everyone could see their way clear to that extra dollar or so a bottle.
Well, that was brilliant.
Its funny reading this today - I am not the healthiet or thinnest person around - but I have a few things I try to completely avoid when shopping - HFCS is near the top of the list. It is amazing to me how hard I have to look to find food without it - and how much more the food without it usually costs.
What completely frustrated me last night - many of the “honey” breads are actually sweetened with HFCS even when the brand doesn’t use HFCS in any of their other breads.
I forwarded this entry last night to a friend who is knowledgeable in these areas and received the following in reply, w/ her permission to post it here:
“This is good linking and explaining what happened in Mexico and what is happening here.
One small error, not significant in the argument but significant because it also divided communities, is that the ejido is communally owned land and was farmed cooperatively. When Salinas changed article 27 of the Mexico constitution to make it legal to divide it and sell it, he destroyed something that had been set up after and by the Mexican revolution- the only small bit of land that people had and shared.
The ejido saved people. But there was injustice with them too.
The town of Morelia in Chiapas is situated in the middle of very fertile land, green and lush, that was owned by a cattle ranching family. Cattle grazed all around the little village. The ejido is a 2 1/2 hour walk away, and is rocky scruffy land on the side of a mountain.
Thanks for forwarding this.”
but it’s better than just plain “wheat flour.” All they do to enrich it is add vitamins and minerals. Which, admittedly, it would have been better for many uses to leave in the flour in the first place, in the wheat germ that’s milled out of white flour. But if your choice is between generic wheat and enriched, enriched is the better choice, I think.
Sorry this is so far off topic, Chris. He’s baaack.
http://fafblog.blogspot.com/
Chris,
Something I’m confused by: Was the retail price for corn itself high, or for corn-based products, like tortillas? I’m assuming the latter, since otherwise, couldn’t the farmers sell their corn directly to the markets?
If this isn’t how the corn economy works in Mexico, please explain. Thanks in advance.
Most of the corn being grown in Mexico in the 1990s and earlier was bought by processors. Farmers had a strong incentive to sell to corporations as opposed to their neighbors: the government offered a guaranteed price and other subsidies. An infrastructure grew up to suppport this stratified distribution system, and Mexico is not so easily traveled a country that all farmers — many of them in remote areas — could just pick up and drive a truck to the nearest town of any size on a Saturday morning as an alternative.
The Jalisco Ecological Collective and other eco-groups are working to promote community food systems, and there is a long-standing tradition of local mercados to take advantage of. But the modernization of Mexico’s ag sector has been in progress for a century, and its momentum is considerable.
What an exceptional piece of work, Chris. Nutrition, NAFTA, the immigration issue and the damage wreaked by the soullessness of corporate bottomlinethink all in one very tight post. I’m awed by your skillful effort.
American consumers face health complications and earlier deaths, working class Mexicans struggle for survival and the profits flow to a major contributor to Republicans and Corn Belt red state politicians. And it’s labelled with the ethics-free free-trade mantra.
If Jesus was a mortal today and observed this, he wouldn’t overturn the carts of Archer Daniel Midlands in the temple. He’d crush them with a tank.
And HFCS is also a trigger for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is something that 10-20% of the US population has. I don’t know if HFCS causes the high rate of IBS here, but it can’t help. (Wheat bran is also a trigger, so don’t be trashing my white flour!)
In CO the further away one gets from Boulder the harder it is to find food that is free of HFCS. Although you occasionally come across the fake organic and healthy foods (eg. labelled All Natural or in minimalist recycled cardboard pakaging)that have it as well. The lesson being even in a crunchy town always read the ingredients
Then of course I moved to the suburbs and there was HFCS in my damned Kraft salad dressing. If nobody looks at the labels even making healthy choices is difficult. If you do not know the implications of the words High Fructose then making healthy choices is difficult. There needs to be a massive educational effort as far as healthy eating is concerned.
People may like their lives as they are but their lives do not like them very much.
Wow. I heard something about HFCS the other day on the radio. Then I went through my pantry.
It is indeed easier to be thin and healthy if you’re well off. (The term “Social X-Ray” that writer Tom Wolf coined to describe the skeletal New York haute couture socialites in Bonfire of the Vanities popped into my mind as I read your excellent post.)
Just visit your local Whole Foods (a.k.a. Whole Paycheck) if you live in/near a city that has one. I grew up rural for the most part, but when I went to college in the midwest, I used to ride the bus downtown and saw the grocery bags of those living at the poverty level. They were filled with Wonder Bread, potatoe chips, fake cheese ... I guess if I were a poverty-level single mom trying to feed my kids, I’d be buying that too. When I contrast the food in the trendy organic markets in trendy Santa Fe with the food sold at the Albertson’s or Smith’s, say, it’s very clear to me that access to healthy food is clearly the domain of those with money.
I grew up roaming the woods, ice skating on farm ponds, climbing trees, riding horses. We took it for granted. My parents weren’t rich. Having room to roam and a safe outside place to play would be considered priveleged by many these days.
I’ve been part of an equestrian program for several years that makes equestrian activities accessible to all children, regardless of their finances. It’s a great way for kids to be out of doors, doing something physical, interacting with nature, etc. We’ve offered a full scholarship for kids to participate. We’d been so hopeful that we’d reach more children, and the fact is that most of our participants have been children whose families already have horses and several even do the whole horse show circuit thing (talk about wealth). I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a throng of kiddos beating down our door to participate. What you’ve written makes me more determined to find a way to bring horses and physical activity to children who might not otherwise have the opportunity. Am going to have to think about that one.
And as the 44-year-old who (like one of your commenters) was also once a 125-pound babe in her twenties and thirties and who now has an extra 30 pounds on her frame, I could rant about the whole societal expectation regarding womens looks for days. As the mother of an intelligent, insightful, witty, and lovely 9-year-old girl, I’m quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) engaged on this front every day. I’d like to see my daughter grow up free and unencumbered of these ideas about how we should appear. If that’s even remotely possible today.
Superb and informative writing, Chris!
A comment to the readers of your comment who think that fat is a matter of willpower: it isn’t. After fighting with myself for years about why I cannot win that constant struggle of trying to force myself to “just say no”, and after decades of self-hatred based on the type of societal attitudes you reported, I read a book that posited that highly refined sugars and flours literally work as addictive agents on some of us and that food addiction is comparable to alcohol addiction in terms of physical and mental health issues. Giving up these foods completely would remove compulsions and cravings around those substances (not all the emotional issues would be resolved of course, and the author recommends support structures on the order of AA, etc.)
I gave up sugar cold-turkey and went through a few bad days of detox (felt like a bad flu), and since then I have experienced cravings, I have not binged, I have not made myself sick with food, I have not been exhausted and dragged out on a daily basis. “Will-power”, that illusive beast, is no longer an issue.
I haven’t completely removed processed foods, I haven’t given up flour, and I’m sure these steps would make more of a difference again.
Our Western diet is poison and folks among us (myself included) suffering from obesity and food-related illnesses are simply our “canaries”.
There was an article in the NY Times a year or so ago on subsidized corn and its affect on weight. It also mentioned that the cheap hamburgers you get at McDonald’s are also a product of cheap corn. Of course cattle bulked up on corn are also subject to digestive problems that require massive amounts of antibiotics, etc.
I didn’t know about the Mexican corn situation, though. That breaks my heart. Talk about putting people between a rock and a hard place. Bad for all around except Archer Daniels Midland.
I’m late to the party here, but wanted to thank you for writing about this, Chris. I just linked to this—many of my regular readers have young children, and I wanted to make sure they heard about the damn high-fructose corn syrup.
Now can you write about the new trend of marketing food labeled “50% LESS SUGAR”? Less sugar/corn syrup, yes, but they’ve swapped it for artificial sweeteners (usually sucralose). I can’t help but think it’s a bad idea, caloric benefits aside.
Great post Chris. That article in the NY Times was almost certainly by Michael Pollan whose wonderful book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” goes into considerable and appalling detail about the HFCS industry.