The Fast Food Trap: How Commercialism Creates Overweight Children

By Gary Ruskin
Issue 121: November/December 2003

Early in the 20th century, urban squalor was emerging as an unsettling fact of American life, and there was great concern in the US over undernourished children. "At least one-third of all industrial families in the United States are underfed," concluded one 1911 study of Americans' standard of living.1 Nervous parents measured their kids against weight and height charts. Public health officials sounded a continuous alarm. Dr. Josephine Baker, head of New York City's Department of Health, worried that malnutrition was "the most serious and widespread physical defect found among school children."2 These concerns continued into the Great Depression, and gave rise to the National School Lunch program, among other measures. Combined with the general prosperity that followed World War II, these measures were a stunning success. In 1955, a government expert wrote that the evidence "supports the conclusion that the nation as a whole is fairly well fed."3

There are still malnourished kids today. But in recent decades the malnourishment problem has been eclipsed by an opposite one: fat kids. Kids who eat too much and don't exercise enough. Kids, in short, who are sadly obedient to the commercial messages that besiege them, literally, from morning till night.

The rise of childhood obesity in America is part of a larger story: how corporations have laid claim to children's imagination and play-to childhood itself. In the process of redefining children as "consumers," as the open maws at the end of a giant marketing machine, corporations have redefined as well the nature of childhood disease. Increasingly, our children suffer not from the results of infection or lack, but from the role the commercial culture has assigned them-from occupational illness, one might say.

Of these occupational illnesses of childhood, obesity is probably the greatest. Certainly it is the most apparent, as a visit to just about any elementary school or mall will confirm. Depending on how you measure it, between 15 and 24 percent of American children are overweight-a threefold increase since the early 1970s.4 "The No. 1 health problem in the United States is not SARS," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "It is not emerging infectious diseases. It is the epidemic of obesity that we are watching unfold before our very eyes."5 Adds James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, "If these trends continue, within a few generations every American will be overweight."6

The Tragedy of Childhood Obesity
The epidemic of childhood obesity is a tragedy for many reasons, and portends poorly for the health of our entire nation in the coming decades. Obese children have a low quality of life; the quality of life of severely obese children is similar to that of kids with cancer.7 Obese children also have a strong predisposition to become obese adults, with a greater likelihood of developing a battery of serious chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and in the end, shorter life spans.

The obesity epidemic has spawned an epidemic of diabetes. The CDC recently warned that, if current trends continue, one in three Americans born in 2000 will develop diabetes. If the CDC's predictions are correct, 45 to 50 million Americans could have diabetes by 2050, according to Dr. Kevin McKinney, assistant professor of endocrinology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "There is no way that the medical community could keep up with that," he said.8

The obesity epidemic and its effects are striking younger and younger children. Amazingly, the warning signs of strokes and heart attacks can be detected even in children as young as two years.9 Type 2 diabetes, once known as "adult-onset" diabetes, now afflicts adolescents and even children. When these children grow up, they will face complications such as amputations, blindness, heart attacks, and kidney failure. Pediatricians think that the rise in type 2 diabetes can be attributed almost entirely to the obesity epidemic.

Why Childhood Obesity Came to the US
How did this happen? America is the richest nation in the world, and therefore should be the healthiest. How has it instead concocted a new epidemic to spread among its children? Though the forces had been gathering for decades, they came into full bloom in the 1970s, when the trend line of childhood obesity began to rise steeply.

Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Prevalence of Overweight Among Children and Adolescents: United States, 1999-2000.

There are many causes. Most children today sit too much and play too little. They spend too much of the day riding in cars and staring at video screens. They eat food designed for the health of corporate balance sheets rather than the health of children's bodies. But under all of this runs the persistent theme of how corporations have insinuated themselves into virtually every corner of children's lives, and written the master script for children's interactions with their own families and with society at large.