Hi friends – here’s my weekly column. (It’s typically posted on Saturdays!) Friends, I’ve been asked to occasionally tell a little about, well, what I write. A little backstory about what prompted me to write about the particular column, what response did I expect, what response did I get, that kind of thing.

So here goes – this one deals with America’s growing obesity epidemic, and since so many of us struggle with that issue ourselves these days – 2/3 of all Americans – it means I step on a lot of toes when I write about this. But I feel it’s so important to deal with this issue head-on, most especially for all our kids’ sake,that I don’t dare pull back. The “startling” medical news on which I based the column really grabbed me when it came out last Wednesday. (I usually write on Thursday mornings.)

Anyway, I think struggling with weight issues has to be, in some ways, harder than struggling with alcohol or cigarettes, because, well, we have to eat something. And no one is talking about just a few extra pounds here. We’re talking about being truly overweight. But my fear is that too many in the media and the public world have conveyed the very wrong impression that one can be “fat” and “fit,” and we should accept our bodies even if we’re so overweight it’s literally killing us. What a terrible disservice to anyone who suffers from being overweight.

I’m also begininng to see how very much a culture, awash in food everywhere, is a terrible impediment to healthy eating. I haven’t always been so accepting of that part of the equation.

(BTW, at “Family Camp” with my kids this week I’ve gained 5 pounds! Why? Because three delicious, large meals a day are prepared for me and put in front of me. It’s so easy to eat – and ask for seconds – and I’m not used to that. I know that wonderful food service is ending for me! But I have to wonder, would I be able to walk away if it weren’t? I’m not sure.)

Anyway, we have to treat our obesity problem seriously, as the national epidemic it is, and get folks the help they need to lose weight and be healthier. If we tell them “it’s okay,” we fail them! I have to wonder why are we so willing to help people when it comes to the smoking habit by, as a culture, telling them it will kill them – but we won’t help people in the same way when it comes to dramatic weight gain?Well, in tomorrow’s “Daily Parenting Tip,” I’ll be posting some great resources for weight loss, for both kids and adults.

Meanwhile, have a great day!

By BETSY HART
Scripps Howard News Service
2007-07-26

Why am I not surprised? Second hand obesity has now been documented.

That according to a study just out in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, and funded by the National Institute on Aging.

AP science writer Alicia Chang summarized the study this way — “If your friends and family get fat, chances are you will too, researchers report in a startling new study that suggests obesity is (both) ’socially contagious’ and can spread easily from person to person.”

The study found that one’s chances of becoming obese through “contagion” is most significant when it comes to good friends, even friends who live far apart, much more so than among those who swim in the same gene pool. If your pal becomes obese, your chances of tipping the scales too much will go up 57 percent; 40 percent if your sibling becomes overweight; and 37 percent if your spouse does.

Two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese. Obesity is America’s second leading cause of preventable death, after smoking, and it’s fast closing in on becoming number one. It claims about three hundred thousand lives a year.

The finding that it’s social relationships, not genetic ones, which offer the biggest risk in weight gain just — again — reiterates that obesity is not primarily about random genetic malfunction. It’s about a generation of us who just can’t say no to anything, including food. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s also very much about a food culture that feeds that lust pun intended.

In any event, the idea that this is “startling” to researchers is the element of all this that I find most, well, startling. I’ve written in the past that I genuinely feel obese people, particularly the rapidly growing number of obese kids, present a health risk to my kids. After all, when my children look around and see overweight and obese people and children everywhere, it could easily make them think it’s, well, at some level OK.

It’s just human nature to think that “everybody is doing it” or “that guy is doing it even more than I am — so no problem!”

And seeing food itself everywhere only “feeds” into this too.

I hear from friends who tell me about the office “foodie.” The typcially heavy person who fills his or her desk with chocolates, potato chips, cookies and is always ready to share.

If one is struggling with weight — that’s a way to fail. Where are the second-hand smoke police when you need them?

Why can’t such people be told, “this is a snack free zone,” and then be forced to suck down the goodies outside the front door of the office on a freezing cold day? Seriously.

But if the “foodie” doesn’t get you, the food culture might. Snacks and goodies at every church, school, or kids’ event, it’s always somebody’s birthday in the office (don’t we have to have cake?) and the grotesquely huge portion sizes at most restaurants, especially when it comes to desert, never cease to amaze me.

I continue to think that resisting this stuff is ultimately up to each one of us. (We had junk food when I was a kid, too.) But more and more, I’m beginning to see that the increasingly ubiquitous food culture is becoming something like our increasingly ubiquitous pornographic culture.

It’s just everywhere. And so a good thing, sex, food, in the right context, becomes a perverted, controlling monster in the wrong one.

If that perversion is not of interest to you in the first place, of course, it might not matter how much is around you, you typically won’t succumb to it. But if you have a weakness for the stuff at all, watch out. It can destroy you.

In other words, this latest study shows — again — that Americans have to wake up and stop taking our obesity epidemic … so lightly.

(Betsy Hart hosts the “It Takes a Parent” radio show on WYLL-AM 1160 in Chicago. Reach her through betsysblog.com.)