The Sins of Fat People

By Ranjan Yumnam *

Did I offend you with the title of my column today? Take heart, you are not alone. Obesity has become an epidemic and it has engulfed populations in almost all countries, even the poorest of the poorest. I did a research to back up my claim in the internet and what I found was nothing less than mind boggling.

Based on data from the World Health Organization and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, for every two people who are malnourished, three are now overweight or obese. Among women, even in most African countries, overweight has surpassed underweight.

Why all of a sudden have we become fat? Despite economic backwardness, despite turmoil in our personal lives, despite setbacks to our career, despite the violence and the sorry state of affairs in our state, there seems to be only one thing that keeps on increasing: our waistline.

This is particularly interesting because the problem of obesity presupposes that we have sufficient food to gorge on and rich enough to buy delicacies to stuff into our mouth and become big and fat. We seem to have solved the food problem and created another problem in its place: the obesity epidemic and the alarming cost of treating fat induced diseases.

Before discussing all these, let's do a quick recap of our relationship with food since times immemorial. In the hunter-gatherer era, the primary concern of our forefathers was to eat whatever they could by killing animals using bows and arrows. Less able among them died of starvation. When men discovered the art of agriculture, their source of food became more stable and they settled near fertile areas and toiled in the fields. But they were never fat.

Even the richest men in the ancient times had to go hungry sometimes because of the primitive level of productivity. Food was a necessity and not a luxury then. Our ancestors ate to live. With the advent of the modern era, everything changed. Those who produced food changed; the methods of processing food changed; the places where the food is served changed and even the nature of the food changed beyond recognition.

Instead of home cooked food, we had started to rely more on fast food; McDonalds and other supersize evangelists came up in every nook and corner; bora kangou canteens became a necessity in every offices and locality even as we became more sedentary being tied to our workstations—looking at the computer screens doing Excelsheets and Facebook 24/7.

In fact, food is available everywhere we go whether we like it or not, as if we were born to live to eat. This food abundance has thoroughly proved Malthus wrong; the population may be rising by leaps and bounds, but we still have enough grains to feed the world's bulging population, thanks to better food technology and innovations in agriculture that have put the Malthusian fears of food scarcity to rest.

Instead of scarcity, what we are facing is a problem of abundance. Mind you, this abundance is not in good nutritious healthy food, but oily, calorie-high worthless and salty munches. These are easily available food laden with colourations and additives mostly fat, and they are cheap. So day after day, we have them because they are easy on pocket and taste great on our palette with little health benefits.

With fast-food joints mushrooming faster than mushrooms could mushroom, we are witnessing the globalization of our food habits. The effects are not flattering but fattening, and if we throw in the inequality dynamic into this issue; we have a real public health issue at hand.

Let me tell you a thing: it's the poor again who will be affected mostly by the obesity epidemic. Studies have been done on the correlation between health and wealth, and there in fact is a health-wealth gradient. The richer you are, the healthier you are. The poorer you are, God helps you with the medical bills. This health-wealth gradient applies to the obesity-wealth correlation. Now, the poor are prone to get heavier than their thin, lean and mean rich neighbours.

Why? Because the rich people have their gyms, personal trainers, protein soups, low carbs, vegetables, fruits and juices which the poor can't afford. The poor on the other hand tend to guzzle up whatever they can find, making themselves fatter, sick and ill and they end up paying high medical bills, making themselves poorer further.

Chubby people also are more likely to face discrimination on the job because of their size. They are sneered at, considered as incompetent, weak-willed and lacking in self-discipline. And when they go to hospitals because of their weight related problems, the doctors consider them as ugly, lazy and lacking in motivation and prescribe medications thinking it's a "waste of time". Our anti-fat bias is so entrenched that obese women are less likely to attend college due to stigma and get involved in a romantic relationship.

Other than these negative reactions from the society to the extras kilos hanging on the body, overweight people are more likely to experience shame and anguish leading to psychological hurt and guilt. To some extent these prejudices against the Tuntuns are unfair. Obesity, as research has found out, may be induced by one's genes and environment. This must be true.

I know many friends who binge on ice-creams, chocolates, meat…all the pariahs of food, but still they remain much thinner than I am, a meal a day person. Then our environment of work and neighbourhood can also add those pounds into our body mass. Our nearness to green grocery stores, whether we walk to office or commute by vehicle, whether there is a park nearby, whether there are many fastfood joints in the proximity of our house, etc has a bearing on our weight.

Yes, there is an indisputable element of individual responsibility involved in gaining or curbing our extra kilos, but environment and our culture also affect our BMI (Body Mass Index). Our culture of hospitality demands, for courtesy sake, that we offer our guests more portion of rice and steaming fish dishes, as it were, and would insist on whomever we love to "have more, have some more". Our collective aspiration is to acquire more and more of everything and food is no exception.

In a way, it is somehow fortunate that there is a stigma associated with obesity. Social stigma acts as a huge pressure on an individual and may force the people with unhealthy food habits and sedentary lifestyle to shed their excess flab by changing what they stock in their fridge and taking up sports and other physical activities.

Even beverage makers like Pepsico are now shifting their strategy to healthy products like juice and as Indra Nooyi, its Indian born CEO, said recently, Pepsi would now make over its "fun for you" product line to "good for you" one, implying that colas would be sidestepped and more fruit juices and wholesome cereal products would roll out.

A little bit of tidbit before I sign off : A finding of Harvard researchers reveals that obesity is contagious, meaning if you mingle with fat people with insatiable appetite, you also tend to become fat like them presumably by having the same kind of food with them and approving each other's size. So ditch them all, the fatsos (just kidding).

So you see, food has moral and cultural implications. Lean people are considered smart while obese people are immoral, incompetent, lousy, good-for-nothing pumpkins. Food gives us pleasure, thrills and excitement and is necessary no doubt, but it has to be consumed within acceptable social norms.

Food is the new sex with all its moral dilemmas, from whether you should have it or not, how much, how many times, how long, where—to with whom you can have it. And obesity is the new plaque. Salad for me please!

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was webcasted on March 21, 2010.