Fast food is not just fast to get, it's fast to eat ... and people pay for it not with their wallets but with their health.

AFP

How healthy? ...food portion sizes are growing, say researchers.

THE clichéd image of poverty everywhere in the world is of thinness: stick-like figures who have had too little to eat, their hair and eyes bearing witness to the lack of nourishment, their bellies distended in hunger, their swollen stomachs making a mockery of their emptiness. The cliché is true, but not everywhere. In the United States, the poor aren't thin: they are fat. In fact, they are, in a startling number of cases, not just fat but clinically obese.

Last year, a court in the New York suburb known as the Bronx (where per capita income is considerably lower than in Manhattan) threw out a suit against the burger giant McDonald's, brought by two teenage girls who blamed the fast-food outlet for making them fat. The basic facts were not in dispute: the young ladies tipped the scales at 170 lbs and 267 lbs respectively, and they loved stuffing their substantial faces with Big Macs. It was also pretty much all they could afford to eat. But the judge felt that it was not entirely unreasonable to assume that most people knew that eating fatty food made you put on weight.

The girls' lawyers were undeterred: one, John Banzhaf, who made his name taking cigarette companies to court, pointed out that in the area of anti-smoking litigation it took over 700 cases before one actually made it to trial, and over 850 before a judge and jury really socked it to a tobacco giant. McDonald's, he argued, failed to warn customers of the dangers of consuming their products, never disclosing the saturated fat content of their kiddie meals, their nutritional benefits or lack thereof and the deleterious effects on the health of their consumers. And the company of the Golden Arches compounded its "failure to warn" with enticing marketing campaigns that lured poor kids to eat too much, under Ronald McDonald's benignly smiling gaze.

Of course, Mr. Banzhaf might be on to something. One in every five persons in the United States is classified as obese. (Ten years ago, that figure was 12 per cent, so this is a 74 per cent increase in a decade.) And that's not counting those Americans who are simply overweight — a category that embraces 61 per cent of the population, who wear size "16s" and "baggy fit" pants with insouciance. If the obese poor of America are looking for someone to blame, the people who feed them may be the right target.

Fast-food restaurants have been increasing prices, but also the size of their portions: "supersize bags" and "value meals" sell because poor Americans love a bargain, but they also get poor people accustomed to bigger meals. Average portion size in America grew 60 per cent from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Soft drink sizes grew 50 per cent, or 49 calories; hamburger portions by 23 per cent, or 97 calories, and French-fried potatoes (what we in India call finger-chips) by 16 per cent, or 68 calories. Studies cited by the writer Greg Critser prove that people offered larger portions consume a third more than they otherwise might. Fast food isn't just fast to get, it's fast to eat: a salad would take longer to consume than a Big Mac and give you a fraction of the fat in twice the time. So people eat fat fast, and they pay for it not with their wallets but with their health.

Eighty per cent of soft drinks and commercial desserts use fructose, derived from corn syrup, as their principal sweetener, despite its direct links to diabetes and obesity (it helps that corn subsidies have made the product plentiful, and cheap). Indeed, diabetes, heart disease, and other food-related illnesses have overtaken tobacco as the principal causes of death in the U.S.. And obesity-related health services are costing America more than a hundred billion dollars a year.

The trend continues. Over 2,000 new candy products are brought on to the market every year, most clogged with fructose — which is metabolised differently by the body, going straight to the liver and being stored by the body as fat. Increasingly stressed-out parents, particularly among the poor, very few of whom can afford to devote much time to the kitchen, keep turning to fast food to feed their young (whose cafeteria fare is often outsourced to fast-food companies as well). And Americans don't exercise nearly enough: television is the favoured leisure activity.

Democratically enough, it's the U.S.'s poor who suffer most from weight problems, because they're the ones who can't afford the time to go to the gym or take the kids to soccer practice — and the ones who most need the "bargain" big portion meals.

Of course, this raises another question altogether. Are fast-food companies deliberately selling their wares to Americans in dangerous quantities? "Anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature," says John Doyle of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a pro-industry group, "will understand that excessive consumption of food served in fast-food restaurants will lead to weight gain."

He adds: "This is all about trial lawyers looking for the next big pay day." And what could be more American than that? Maybe apple pie. You can get one from McDonald's, dripping with fat and fructose.