Monday, May 12, 2008
Food is unhealthy only if you stress over it.
Dec 24, 1999 | It's the Fat Guy's favorite time of year again. At holiday time, the average American gains between one and 10 pounds -- and I gain 15. It's when people eat real food, salty and rich with animal fats, and drink to excess. And, sadly, it's when you can't get through a single meal without some neurotic idiot nervously commenting that "This meal is a heart attack on a plate!"
The new national pastime is feeling guilty about food. We've all heard the same lame jokes: "I'm going to schedule a quadruple bypass for right after dinner!" "I can feel my arteries hardening as I eat!" "I better go see my cardiologist tomorrow!" Everybody chuckles, but does anybody really think it's appropriate to joke about heart disease at the table, or anywhere else? (How about sitting next to a guy on an airplane who says, "Gee, I hope some suicidal Egyptian doesn't crash us!" Likewise, I've never seen a comedian kick off a monologue with a few chemotherapy jokes -- and I've seen some pretty bad comedians.)
Still, the average citizen is merely parroting the message that is repeated constantly on television and is trumpeted by just about every newspaper and family physician in America: Fat is bad for you. No, the true villains are the media and the medical establishment, who will not rest until they have deprived America of its basic ability to receive pleasure from food; until, like the Grinch, they have stolen the joy from Christmas dinner itself.
These guardians of national health are flabbergasted that Americans gain so much weight at holiday time. But what really worries me is that some people don't gain any. After all, it's winter. It's cold. The days are shorter and we spend more time indoors. We're supposed to gain weight. Yet I occasionally run across proud people who proclaim that, through rigorous monitoring of every bite of food consumed during December, they suffered no weight gain at all over the holidays. What miserable dining companions they must be.
Luckily, we have reason to believe that the joke is on them, thanks to some groundbreaking research by my new best friend, Dr. Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania. Rozin, a psychology professor, has just completed a major cross-cultural study of food attitudes among more than 1,000 Americans, French, Belgians and Japanese. His research shows that, while the French overall associate eating with pleasure, Americans worry about food and associate it primarily with nutrition (the Belgians and Japanese come out statistically in the middle).
"There is a sense among many Americans that food is as much a poison as it is a nutrient, and that eating is almost as dangerous as not eating," says Rozin. For example, Americans are so freaked out about food that, when asked if they would be willing to give up eating altogether in favor of a pill that could fulfill all their nutritional needs, 26 percent said yes. This number actually strikes me as a little low, and would probably be higher if the cheese steak and Tastycake-loving population of Pennsylvania (the source of the U.S. data) were replaced with, say, the residents of Los Angeles. In any event, it was double the percentage of French.
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