October 18, 2018
Alivia Shattuck
October 17, 2018
Eng. 133
As I read the article, XXXL: Why are we so fat? There were many things that I found interesting and surprising. This article can be seen as informational or controversial. The journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert, explains how America is one of the leading countries, obesity wise and why that is. She goes into detail on how and why our country is overweight. She explains the many different views, in order to help find an answer to why we are so fat? You can ask this question to anyone and they will all have a different answer.
I couldn’t help myself but having my own opinion to what Kolbert had to say as I kept on reading. One thing that David A. Kessler said that drew my attention was “Conditioned hyper eating works the same way another ‘stimulus response’ disorders in which reward is involved, such as compulsive gambling and substance abuse” (paragraph 15). This interested me because I did not know that food is as addictive as substance abuse. He also said, “brains react to sweet, fatty foods the same way that addicts’ respond to cocaine” (paragraph15). I do not understand what addictive chemicals are both food and cocaine, but I am intrigued to learn more. People who are overweight tend to eat more and this is where the addictive chemical plays into place.
Over the past decades, companies have risen the calories in their food. A small fry at McDonalds used to be two hundred calories. Today, a small fry is two hundred and thirty calories and a large fry is five hundred calories. As Kolbert states, “During the nineteen-eighties the amount of food that was counted as a single serving increased rapidly” (paragraph 23). That statement has a correlation to the increase of human weight. As people eat more, the more weight they gain. Kolbert also says that “the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories” (paragraph 23). After she said this, I was surprised because I eat a bagel almost every day.
While I was reading the article, I came across something that that worried me as a future educator. She explained how “three out of five of the heaviest kids have been teased at school” (paragraph 27). This statement really did hurt me. Children, no matter their size should never be judged. Then she went on to talk about how “Teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children…..” (paragraph 27). Teachers in a classroom should never have expectations on children no matter their weight, race, gender or even their financial background. This conversation really did fight with my thoughts. I am having a hard time processing why this would even happen.
As you look throughout the United States you can see that people who are overweight tend to get rude things said to them or they are starred at. This is because we have a “size bias” (paragraph 28). In the U.S., it is seen okay to be skinny or underweight but when someone is overweight they are hated on. When people think of the heaviest country, they think of America. Francis Delpeuch, Bernard Maire, Emmanuel Monnier, and Michelle Holdsworth states how “Americans were the first to fatten up, they no longer lead the pack” (paragraph 30). As of current data, it reveals that Finland, Malta, Slovakia, Germany, Greece, the Czech Republic and Cyprus all have a higher proportion of overweight adults than America. This astonished me because I have always been taught that America is the fattest country.
When you go to the grocery store and you look at the shelves you can see that the unhealthy foods are always less expensive than the healthy things. With over 29% of adults in the United States being classified as lower class, some of the families do not have enough money to buy food. In that case, they tend to buy unhealthy food because it is less expensive. In the past few decades, fattening foods have become cheaper. In the book “Fattening America”, Eric Finklestein talks about how between “1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils have decreased sixteen percent” (paragraph 12). There is a big correlation between consumption and cost. When people buy unhealthy food, they tend to be less expensive and come with more food. With the prices in food decreasing, children in schools being bullied, calories getting higher and many more. All of these examples are to help explain the question of “Why are we so fat?”
As I read this article, I thought of the ways that writer began and ended the argument. She began by starting the conversation with a question, “why are we so fat?”. As she kept writing and gathering information, she would ask smaller questions through the article. As she read other books and talked to people, she found out that there are many different answers to her question. Finding the real and exact answer to her question is going to difficult but know people know that sometimes you may not be able to get one answer out of a question.
