Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Scaling Back

How Changing Attitudes Went Along With a Drop in Calories

Fifteen years ago, in July 2000, a Newsweek cover depicted an overweight boy clutching a giant, melting ice cream cone. “Fat for Life?” read the headline.

The Newsweek cover was striking, but not unique. The early 2000s featured a series of obesity-themed magazine covers. Most depicted children.

Image

America had its misgivings about excess weight, even as it packed on the pounds. There have been fitness booms and diet crazes for decades. But in the early 2000s, something changed, many public health experts say: Many people started seeing obesity as a health crisis instead of a personal problem. This shift explains the surprising reduction in calorie consumption since about 2003, the first in decades. Obesity became a national issue — and not just a health issue but a cultural and economic one, too.

Around that time, Americans’ daily calorie consumption, which had been climbing for more than two decades, peaked and started coming down. The sustained calorie declines, combined with a flattening of the obesity rate, have persuaded many public health researchers that something is changing about how Americans consume food and indeed how they think about it.

The changes began with a growing scientific recognition that obesity was a worsening nationwide problem — and that excess weight was tied to health problems, including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

But acknowledging those consequences came slowly over the last 15 years, perhaps changing more quickly in public opinion than in our restaurants and dining tables. Now, about 95 percent of people believe it is important to prevent obesity, according to polling for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Yet 35 percent of adult Americans are considered obese.

There’s no straight line between public health messages and public behavior. But many researchers contend that increased knowledge of obesity’s risks and a broader discussion of the evidence helped shape public consciousness of the issue.

The Centers for Disease Control, the federal government’s principal public health agency, began talking about an epidemic, language evocative of a health emergency. “All of the sudden, we turned around and saw the explosion of Type 2 diabetes, and the public health community started to use the words ‘obesity epidemic,’ ” said Dr. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

So did the public. Take one simple measure: the mentions of the word “obesity” in The New York Times. The share of Times articles mentioning the word tripled from 1998 to 2003. The phrase “obesity epidemic” first appeared in The Times in 2002 and has stayed in circulation ever since. (The word “fat,” by comparison, has long been in The Times.) Discussion of diabetes, rare before the 1970s, soared tenfold at the turn of the century.

A growing share of people began telling pollsters that they wanted to lose weight. In a Gallup survey, the number reached 60 percent in 2003, up substantially from previous decades.

But many researchers say that the growing recognition that obesity was spreading rapidly among children — along with obesity-related illnesses — helped nudge public attitudes more than anything else. Children are rarely responsible for their own diets. And evidence suggested that it was easier to prevent obesity in children than reverse it.

Jim Marks, an executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said that the growing prevalence of childhood obesity — and all those magazine covers of overweight youngsters — really appeared to get people’s attention. “People became aware it was wider spread,” he said. The foundation has pledged to spend $1 billion on obesity research and advocacy.

Two years ago, the American Medical Association classified obesity as a disease. That classification has not come without controversy. But Nikhil Dhurandhar, a professor of nutrition at Texas Tech University and the president of the Obesity Society, a group of obesity researchers, said the change was the culmination of changing awareness that obesity is a complex condition with health consequences, not just an aesthetic problem or a sign of a weak will.

“The focus has been now on the health aspect, not the cosmetic aspect,” he said.

A correction was made on 
July 30, 2015

An article on Tuesday about changing attitudes toward obesity referred incorrectly to the percentage of Americans considered obese. It is 35 percent, not 39 percent, and the figure refers only to adults, not everyone.

How we handle corrections

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind a Drop in Calories, a Shift in Cultural Attitudes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT