Akst: What to do about our big fat problem

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Here is what we've come to in this fat land of ours. America's restaurants, beset by local laws requiring calorie disclosures and the like, are fighting back by persuading a few friendly state legislatures to block local governments on this front.

At first blush, it's easy to point the finger at the restaurant chains -- local regulations often exempt mom-and-pop eateries -- as the villains of this story. Most big fast-food chains specialize in unhealthy food, after all, and the only reason they can influence lawmakers so effectively is because they're so big and powerful. In Ohio, for instance, they won limits on local control over restaurants by slipping a provision into the state's budget. Thus do appetite, politics and money join hands to uphold an unhealthy status quo.

The whole thing made me so mad I ate half a dozen Ring Dings. But once I was safely sedated by this feast, it became clear that all this sound and fury signifies very little -- except to underscore how hopelessly we're flailing against a serious public health problem.

And it is serious. Although two-thirds of Americans weigh more than they should, about half of this hefty group qualifies as obese. That's where the trouble is, medically speaking. So the questions are, why are these people so fat, and what can be done to help them?

Identifying the causes of obesity could point us toward a possible remedy. Fast food is certainly a strong suspect, even if the case is largely circumstantial. Many fast-food offerings are almost comically fattening, and the number of U.S. fast-food outlets per person grew more than fivefold from 1970 to 2004. Such places seem ubiquitous because they are.

But fast food chains aren't necessarily the right target, even if they are a fat one. When the Los Angeles City Council declared a moratorium on new ones in a poor and disproportionately obese part of town, it emerged that a nearby richer, thinner neighborhood had way more such eateries per resident. There was no difference in self-reported produce consumption, but residents of the poor area took in many more snack calories, especially from sodas.

The truth is that nobody's really sure why, in the past 30 years or so, Americans have grown so fat. Perhaps the likeliest culprit is technology, which has made calories cheaper and easier to access while emptying our lives of physical activity. Work has changed, for example, from farming, manufacturing and mining in favor of sitting in front of a computer. But some people blame high fructose corn syrups. Others suspect a virus.

While restaurant portions have expanded and Americans eat out more, it's not clear that calorie disclosures will help -- although, of course, people are entitled to know what they're eating. When King County, which contains Seattle, imposed calorie disclosure on chains, researchers found that in the first 13 months it made no difference in customer choices. Look, everybody knows eating at McDonald's is fattening, and the fancy restaurants that may offer poached fish--without mentioning that it's poached in lard--aren't usually required to disclose nutritional information. But they're fattening, too.

Soon it will matter less what restaurant lobbyists are doing in state capitols, because Uncle Sam is requiring chains of 20 or more to disclose calories by 2013, although state and local governments could still demand this of the many eateries not covered. Nassau County repealed its calorie-disclosure law in anticipation.

But don't expect miracles. Some restaurants might be embarrassed into lightening up their offerings. On the other hand, Ring Dings have calorie data right on the box. And I'm reaching for another one right now.