This question became famous in Regency times in England, when Beau Brummel, the famous fashion creating dandy asked one of his friends who his companion was. The friend’s fat companion was the then Prince of Wales! That may have affected Beau Brummel’s future career in high society a tad.

My very favourite author has his Julius Caesar saying “Let me have men about me that are fat.” Shakespeare’s Caesar would have approved of the current condition of some of the American public, though he would draw the line at obese. Obese people couldn’t be good soldiers under Roman army conditions of long marches, crazily swift erection of fortifications and swift action on the field of battle for hours on end.

I have mentioned in previous articles that the major impression made on tourists to this country now is not how wonderful the skyscrapers are but how fat the people are in the stores they visit. That impression has increased markedly in the last few years as soft drinks and junk food have permeated the population.

Our own everyday experience leads to the same conclusion that we are getting fatter as a nation. The ultimate proof that this is so is not found in political speeches which are spin, or in the intensity of a health journalist going crazy because nobody takes any notice of the truth for at least ten years after the facts are known. It is found in the totally undeniable, profit oriented, unsentimental, totally pragmatic, manufacturing statistics of those who make hospital beds. In more and more hospitals across the country the beds are now being designed to accommodate a weight of 600 pounds.

Think of it as three heavy people. And these beds are now often installed with what are politely called ‘built-in patient lifts’ that can transfer this mass from a gurney to a bed without harm to the backs of the nurses or orderlies concerned.

The same thing is happening to stretchers. There is an industry-wide call now for stretchers that can handle over a quarter of an American ton. So it looks like 600 pounds is becoming a new standard.

Yet even this standard seems too low to the states of Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia. These states are calling on manufacturers to produce beds capable of supporting 1000 pounds. That’s half an American ton. That is asking that beds be as strong as pick up trucks. I submit that this is irrefutable evidence that Americans are becoming more and more obese.

The specialists in this heavy duty manufacturing are KCI and SizeWise. They are working at capacity, and their business, and the business of similar manufacturers is growing at a rate of about 20% annually. Industry totals are said to be around $3 billion a year, and rising.

This kind of numbers seems to me to be the best way to check trends of any kind in this country. You can usually ignore the government numbers as the result of spin, but look at the growth or demise of industries that cater to that trend. The gross facts, pardon the totally intentional pun, appear to be that more than 60% of Americans are overweight. About 30% are clinically obese, and about 2% of the adult population are 100 pounds heavier than is considered healthy by any standard.

And then of course many fat people fly to their destinations. And now the airlines have to take this extra mass into account when budgeting for fuel costs. See how one thing leads to another. In the wake of 9/11, when fewer people are flying (and not to mention the skyrocketing cost of the fuel itself), this extra expense is really forcing the major airlines to tighten their belts —obviously that isn’t something their passengers are doing. Check out the major airlines. Most of them have been reporting steady losses in the last few years because of rising fuel costs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report that Americans have gained an average of 10 pounds apiece since 1990. This extra weight, passenger freight, made airlines in the year 2000 spend more than $275 million in fuel costs to ferry us around. The total fuel bill since the 1990 starting line is likely to be more than $3 billion.

Look at the repercussions. This means that when we fly, we're all paying extra to ship the millions of tons of excess human freight sitting next to us. And it doesn’t end there of course. The 300 million gallons of extra fuel burned every year carrying this extra mass affects the environment too. This burning fuel adds nearly 4 million tons of harmful gases to our fragile atmosphere, every year. And that’s just from aircraft emissions.

And there are probably a few millions of tons extra pollutants being emitted by the buses and cars that are working harder than need be to carry the fat people around.
Dr. Douglass, a famous maverick MD who was so good at curing his patients without drugs that he had to leave the country to practice, suggested the mantra: "Save the whales — stop being one!" for those people concerned about obesity.

But the food industry is doing something about it. When I was at elementary school some seventy years ago, students were rewarded for outstanding or excellent work by being given little colored stars to put on their personal meritorious card record.

That kind of thing is apparently passé. An AP article recently reported that Krispy Kreme is offering kids a doughnut of their choice free of charge for every A on their report cards. Make the smartest kids fat, in other words. I had a Krispy Kreme doughnut once. Never again. The Krispy Kreme ‘plan’ enables the A grade kids, many of who may be hyperactive already, a choice of any six doughnuts per grading period from the 30 or so that the company produces.

Some of these, as you may already have read from recent publicity about the company and their decline since the advent of the Atkins diet, and the current low fat fad, contain as many as 350 calories, over 40 grams of carhohydrate and nearly 30 grams of sugar. Train up the kids in the way they should go. Some schools are complaining, though their own soy based cafeteria lunches aren’t much better for the kids.

One of our local pizza joints apparently thought the Krispy Kreme idea was good and is offering free pizzas depending on the number of A’s on the grade report.

To quote Dr. Douglass again from a recent article… “The only folks who should use food as a reward for good conduct are animal trainers.”

And a great many of the ‘expert’ recommendations about how Americans could lose weight are totally wrong. The fat-free diets are a cogent case in point. The important thing to note is NOT the amount of fat in any food, but whether the food causes your body to produce fat. And fat is produced in response to the secretion of insulin. How much insulin is released into your blood when you eat the food is the crucial information.

Consider this scientifically proven fact. A quantity of ice cream releases less insulin into the blood stream than the same mass of corn bread or a LOW FAT bagel.

Instead of checking the fat or carbohydrate content of the diet, the important thing to look at is how high your insulin and blood sugar spikes when you eat the food. A high insulin spike can cause you to change ANY food you eat into fat. And the bad boys in this scenario are the starches. Starches cause a more extensive raise of sugar and insulin than simple sugars.

The simplest measure of how a food will release insulin is called the Glycemic index. It is an indication of how much the food raises the blood sugar and therefore the insulin.
The numbers are based on a comparison with glucose, which is the pure, natural sugar. So if a food has a Glycemic Index (GI) of 25% it means that it will cause a quarter the rise in blood sugar that the same amount of glucose would. So, the higher a food’s GI the more fat you will make from it, even if it has the same number of calories as a food with a lower GI. Read that last sentence again.

So, armed with this data, all the weight reducer has to do is cut down on the foods with a high GI and substitute those with a low GI. The dieter could eat a lot more and still lose weight, if he or she ate the proper foods.

And be prepared for some shocks. High GI’s are the cause of obesity, not the fat in the food. For example, whole wheat bread raises blood sugar just as much as white bread, and there’s the added problem of a common allergic reaction to wheat. Corn flakes have twice the GI of orange juice, and a little snack of spaghetti does more to raise your blood sugar, therefore insulin, therefore fat, than an equal amount of ice cream.

Here is a list of the GI for some common foods. Check how many of these you eat if you are overweight:

Based on Glucose as 100% we have Corn flakes, Carrots, Honey and White Potatoes coming in at 80-90%. Whole grain bread, Millet, White rice and New Potatoes measure in at 70-79% . These are all high. And read labels. Anything with corn syrup is a major cause of insulin spike and fat production.

White bread, Shredded Wheat, Bananas, Raisins and Mars Bars all rate around 60-90%. Spaghetti, Corn, Whole cereals, Peas, Yams, Potato-Chips are all around 50-59%. Oatmeal, Sweet Potatoes, Navy Beans, Oranges and Orange Juice are in the range 40-49%. Everything from 69-40% is considered moderate.

Well, what foods have a low GI? Here are some: Peaches, Cherries, Blueberries, Apples, Ice cream, and Milk all rate around 30-39%

Lower yet at 20-29% are: Kidney beans, Lentils, Fructose… this last one is a main sugar found in fruits.

And very low are: Soybeans and Peanuts at 10-19%. I don’t recommend Soybeans ever as you may recall from the article on The Trouble with Soy 7/14/2008. But the deleterious effect the unfermented soy products can have on protein metabolism isn’t the point at the moment. It’s the GI.

And no surprise to one group of people, green vegetables rate 0-10%

These data come from a medical newsletter written by Dr. Al Sears, another maverick, who is an MD working for holistic health. Here are the two simple rules that he gives his overweight patients:

• Don't eat anything made from grain regardless of whether it's "whole grains."
• Don't eat anything made from potatoes.

Using just these two rules has enabled hundreds of his patients to get down to a healthy body weight and shape. You can eat uncontaminated fish, or fowl, or eggs, or standard non-injected meats and by following these rules you will find your body transforming into the body of a human being.

As a rule of thumb, every extra pound of body fat utilizes an extra mile of blood vessels and capillaries, making the heart beat harder just to get the blood to go the extra miles, so to speak. This is one reason that being overweight is a no-no for the thousands of Americans with heart problems.

But here’s where the U.S. cavalry ride in to save the encircled wagons, they say,or maybe the knight on the white charger thunders in to rescue the helpless maiden, he says. Be afraid, be very afraid. A famous drug company is about to save the day.

Merck is actually pretty infamous for its current crop of drug disasters and the unchallengeable fact that they knew, and the FDA knew about the dangers of Vioxx and other drugs in their hawker’s wagon for YEARS before taking them off the shelves. They run sponsorship points on Public Radio in which the hired, deep voice says “Merck, where patients come first.” That statement has no truth value at all. It’s the bottom line that comes first in the drug company’s methodology.

With its share prices falling, and even the sensation seeking public looking askance at the Vioxx disaster, Merck is entering the fat-fighting battle. In cahoots with another major drug company it is introducing a multimillion dollar campaign to market an anti-obesity drug. The spokespersons of the new partnership are spinning the yarn that the new drug combats not only obesity, but related problems such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer. The drug makers do not seem to have noticed that they are finally admitting that many diseases are due to poor nutrition. What you eat becomes the building blocks of body you are creating. Eat junk, get a junk body.

But this new wonder drug is not a pill. It’s an inhaler. I have written before about a famous drug company that sold inhalers for asthmatics with no anti-asthmatic drug inside, and how the FDA said “Tut, tut” for several warnings, over several months, before taking action. So don’t hold your breath that the inhalers will even be what they are advertised to be.

What you do is spray some of this wonder drug up your nose before a meal. The theory is that the contents contain a peptide with the catchy name of YY-36. This ingredient makes you feel full faster, (there’s a catchy commercial for them), so that you finish the meal before you have eaten as much as usual. Therefore the total calories you eat will be less than before you used the drug. The druggists expect, and probably correctly, that the uneducated public will be able to grasp the simply wrong but profitable slogan, “Fewer calories, therefore less fattening.” It isn’t true, as you now know, but the public must never be given a slogan that is true or actually requires thought and knowledge.

Being drug chemists they never address the real problem. Drugs always and only address the symptoms. As you have picked up already, it’s not the number of calories on the plate, it’s the quality of the food that counts. But I don’t doubt this will be another multi million dollar success with the people who refuse to change their life style. If people ate healthy food instead of breads, pastas and desserts, all with a very high Glycemic Index, there would be no need, and no market for the latest inhaler gimmick.

So, will you or your fat friends change their life style to a healthier set of ingredients on their plates, or will they follow the American syndrome, “I’m too busy to think about this Doc. Gimee a drug.” And the Doc, well primed by the drug salesman, will do just that. And with the market share that Merck has to make up because of Vioxx, I don’t doubt it will be expensive and not available to Medicare patients, because it’s a preventive drug.

If you want to get advice from MD’s who are holistic in practice and more concerned with your health than your disease symptoms, check out Agora Press on the web. They publish several free e-zines from such doctors.

Everything I have written so far has been known for years by people aware that food is the source of their current body. The latest research that appeared this month, August 2009, is not known by many so I’ll summarize it here for you

A new study funded by the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Center for Research Resources, and the American Heart Association has found that obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue than normal-weight individuals. Their brains look 16 years older than the brains of lean individuals, researchers said this month. Those classified as overweight have 4 percent less brain tissue and their brains appear to have aged prematurely by 8 years.

The results, based on brain scans of 94 people in their 70s, represent "severe brain degeneration," said Paul Thompson, senior author of the study and a UCLA professor of neurology.

"That's a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at much greater risk of Alzheimer's and other diseases that attack the brain," said Thompson. "But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer's, if you can eat healthily and keep your weight under control."

I’ll just add here that people in Germany drink black German beer from bottles to avoid Alzheimer’s. Apparently the silicon in the beer preferentially removes the aluminum plaques from the brain. Drinking beer from an aluminum can won’t work therefore. Your doctor here won’t be able to recommend that remedy even if he or she knew of it. Recommending alcohol in moderation is a no-no here. In England a doctor may actually write you a prescription for Guinness because of its health benefits…in moderation. Maybe that’s the problem. Moderation is not an American virtue. I drink one glass every day, during the evening meal.

The brain findings are detailed in the online edition of the journal Human Brain Mapping.

Obesity produces many other negative health effects, including increased risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and some cancers. It's also been shown to reduce sexual activity, which I would think would be self evident at the weights mentioned, and the sizes of the people with those weights.

More than 300 million people worldwide are now classified as obese, according to the World Health Organization. Another billion are overweight. The main cause, experts say: bad diet, including an increased reliance on highly processed foods. And who needed to be an ‘expert’ to see that? Every health writer has known it for decades before doctors even dreamed of a food sickness connection.

For those who know a little bit about the anatomy of their brain, here is what the researchers said in a statement this very week: obese people had lost brain tissue in the frontal and temporal lobes, areas of the brain critical for planning and memory, and in the anterior cingulate gyrus (attention and executive functions), hippocampus (long-term memory) and basal ganglia (movement).. Overweight people showed brain loss in the basal ganglia, the corona radiata, white matter comprised of axons, and the parietal lobe (sensory lobe).

So when you see the waddling leviathans in your super market, moving from side to side as much as they do forwards, picking up shopping carts full of junk food and cartons of soft drinks just think, “There but for the grace of knowledge that I actually used, waddle I.”