K is for King Corn and Killer at Large: Obesity in America

     Sad, inspiring, disturbing and revealing. American's are sick, and it's because of the foods we eat, the advertisements we see, and the way the system controls food that is processed and spit out to the masses.   

     The other day I snuggled into my warm bed in the late afternoon. There was a chill in the air for the first time in California, and I was coming down with a cold. So, after many cups of yerba matte and a large bowl of steel cut oats, I let go of my failed attempts to feel better and enjoyed the pleasure of the fabulous "Instant Gratification on Netflix". You wouldn't believe this gigantic world of movies you can watch, instantly on your computer! Cheap and instant, two words everyone likes.
     So tea in hand, Kleenex at my side, and many DayQuil down, I began watching Killer at Large: Obesity in America. To be completely honest, I wasn't entirely interested or excited considering its ominous title. It could have turned out to be a bunch of overweight Americans complaining about how the system made them this way and that the government should pay for their lipo surgery, and blah blah blah. However, I was pleasantly surprised. This documentary directed by Steven Greenstreet, was well crafted, thought provoking and mostly turned out to be a call to action. It made me physically ill with facts that reveal how terrible our government is about regulating our food supply. The thousands of advertisements to hook children early and the badly regulated high calorie USDA school lunch program. It also illustrates how basic human nature within all of us has created this monster of a problem; excess does not equal health, obviously.
    So, what exactly are the brass tacks of the problem labeled obesity? I have outlined some of them from the film to help you understand the depth and breadth of this issue:

• We have created a system where the least healthy food energy in the market are the least expensive, and the more healthy items, like fruits and vegetables are more expensive. Therefore, if you are poor, your food quality is also poor. 
• The risk for obesity for a child increases by 6% for every hour of TV watched per day.
• 46% of the USDA approved "fruits and vegetables" consumed by kids per year are eaten as Ketchup and French Fries.
• 2/3rds of American's are considered overweight or obese. 
• Everywhere we go there is food available. Everywhere. Hardware stores, clothing stores, book stores. We can not go one block without seeing food. We are surrounded by cues to eat.  
• Food is a cultural problem of not valuing it, not revering what it is, as the most important engagement of the natural world. -Michael Pollan
• Quantity is not the key measure as opposed to quality. 
• It takes 10 kcals of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 kcal of processed food in the US. 
• For every extra pound of weight the average American gains, we use nearly 39 million additional gallons of oil.
• Corn is in EVERYTHING. (I will elaborate on this later.)
• Oil, Corn and the Pharmaceutical companies are inextricably linked. Oil goes into fertilizer to grow corn, corn is used in processed foods which is eaten by humans, all the processed food and fast food makes us fat and sick and then the pharmaceutical companies sell us drugs to make use better. All of these companies, making tons of money and all of them killing us. - Conversation between Bill Mahr and Michael Pollan

    So what do these facts tell us? Well, I trust you will see the film after reading this, but in the mean time, these facts show obesity is rapidly destroying our society from within. This rising rate of obesity is not only a "crime on the body" and but it is one of the most pressing issues that we as American's should be trying to control.
    In 1946 the surgeon general warned us about the problem of excessive weight gain and the over abundance of advertising to children.  Now, nearly 60 years later, we are fast approaching what will be the largest population earth has ever held as well as the largest people. Obesity costs the US over 75 million dollars a year. Think about where that money could have gone? National Parks, new bike paths,  city parks, school physical education, organic farmers, nutrition classes to elementary school children, anything. There is so much more in the film, but I am counting on you to see it for your self, and act accordingly from the facts presented.

    After watching what was truly Killer, I was all riled up, I needed more activism, more fuel to my fire, and feeling slightly better thanks to my dosage of DayQuil, I moved on to view King Corn. A documentary by two friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, both graduates from Yale, who discover that they are made up of mostly corn, or better yet, the food they eat (because, you are what you eat) was made up of mostly corn. This revelation was the jumping off point for them. With a few bucks and a common thread of heritage in Iowa, they set off from Cambridge to learn how an acer of corn is planted, fertilized, grown, harvested, shipped, and eventually processed into our food supply to eventually be eaten and become a part of our biomass. 

    

"Hair is a tape recorder of diet.... so this hamburger will eventually find it's way into my hair..." - Steve Macko, explaining how food becomes a part of your body.

"...the carbon in your body originates from corn.... not corn on the cob.... the corn thats being used as a material thats going into the food that we use ubiquitously... high fructose corn syrup.... beef, chicken, we feed them corn which is turned into their biomass that we consume.... corn starch... hydrolyzed corn solids... " - Steve Macko, University of Virginia.

     So think about this statement when you are at the grocery store the next time. Go and look at food labels and packages. Find out what your meat is being fed. All of it. You will be surprised by what you are made up of. 

     The tale of these two is fascinating. Full of great cinematography, stop motion, excellent time lapse photos, wonderful farmers, open hearts, genuine shock, and extremely surprising facts about the amount of corn grown and used in this country. One writer brought me full circle back to Killer. Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food, The Omnivores Dilemma and The Botany of Desire are books I have read, highlighted, quoted in presentations, and pushed on friends and family, makes a great point in King Corn: 

     

"You take that McDonald's meal, and you don't realize it when you eat it,  but you're actually eating corn. Beef has been corn fed. Soda is corn, it's all high fructose corn syrup, thats the main ingredient. Even the french fries, half the calories of the french fries come from the fat they are fried in, and that fat is liable to be corn oil... everything on your plate is corn."  

     

     Now, it is not to say that all of this is terrible for you, but it is just not natural. The production or better yet, the over production of corn is on-going because of the government subsidizes given to farmers. The mountains of golden corn all over the mid-west is "cheap", it is "surplus" and it goes into our bodies. It is not eaten off the cob, but boiled down, ground up, digested, mashed and repackaged as Pepsi or Big Mac's or Twinkies.  My favorite quote from the film: 

"We subsidize the happy meals, but we don't subsidize the healthy ones."  

    

    I realized that our money is going to the companies that end up making the masses sick.  For the first time in American history, my generation is at risk of having a shorter life span than their parents. Not necessarily a surprise considering all of these facts presented. But, via my years in school and the abundance of great documentary and literary work I have delved into, it is a surprise to me that all of this information is out there and yet there are very few doing anything about it. 

    We vote every time we spend money, we vote with our time, how we participate in every day life, but it seems to me that there is a better question here : why don't we vote more consciously with our bodies? 

    I'm not going to say that food is poison, and I'm not going to say that meat is murder, and I'm not rallying against the government or protesting the great farmers of America, but there needs to be some kind of recourse for what is being done. 
     Watch, take notes, listen to facts and understand that everyone makes a difference. 

     
There is no better time than now. 
  


  PS:  As far as weight goes, here is the Interpretation of Body Mass Index (BMI) in adults, by the National Institutes of Health. These are the measurements for "health" or the overall mortality and nutritional risk that most health practitioners go by. 


BMI is calculated as :   weight (in kilograms) divided by height (in meters) squared. 
       More simply : kg body weight / [height in m]²
    So:  If your weight is 120 pounds, to find it in kilograms (kg) you divide 120 by 2.2 : 120 lbs./ 2.2 kg = 54.5 kg 
            If your height is 5 feet 7 inches, convert that to inches total : 5 ft X 12 inch = 60 inches + 7 inches = 67 inches.
            To convert Inches to meters, use the conversion factor of 0.0254.   So, 67 inches X 0.0254 meters = 1.7018 m 
                                 So our calculation is:   54.5 kg / [1.7018 m]2  = 54.5 / 2.9 = about 18.9 BMI
So what is Obese classified as? 


A BMI of 30 or above is classified as obese. 
A BMI between 25 - 29.9 is classified as overweight.
A BMI between  19 - 24.9 is classified as healthy weight.
A BMI of 18 or below is classified as underweight. 

Simple to understand? Right, no. But, with these easy calculations you can grasp what the government and the health care industry considers you.