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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Fatal fat is how nature
culls the herdTOMMY Thompson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has announced that Americans are too fat and getting fatter.
If this trend continues, the sheer weight of all the fat people in the country will cause the entire land mass to sink, putting all of the coastal states underwater. The news caused an uproar among investors, sending them stampeding to buy stock in fast-food companies and grab up future oceanfront property in Colorado.
Because Hawaii sits on giant volcanic underwater mountains, the islands are not expected to sink under the weight of all the fat people here, although things could get crowded to the point that when a person scratches his nose on the North Shore, an auntie is knocked into the ocean in Hawaii Kai.
I'm being facetious. Or jocularious. Or sardonic. Or one of those other words that score big in Scrabble. The fact is, we didn't need Thompson to tell us that we all are a bunch of fatty-fatty-boombalatties. Go to the mall. Try to squeeze past anyone on the escalator. Find yourself butt-checked into the hardware department of Sears.
Thompson says that obesity is killing more and more people. It's killing almost as many people as smoking. If I'm not mistaken, killing is obesity's job. It's nature's way of culling the herd. When you do bad things to your body, you die. When you do good things to your body, you live. Surprise!
Looking down the genetic road 4,000 to 5,000 years, I don't think you are going to find the planet populated by fat, cheeseburger-eating, cigarette-smoking, whiskey-swilling, heroin- shooting, cocaine-snorting individuals. (Why anyone would want to live in such a world, I don't know. But that's another column.)
SO WHY ARE people so fat? Lawyers are trying to blame fast-food restaurants and pick up a third of the punitive damages at the same time. This week, Congress is considering protecting the fast-food industry from such lawsuits. It should. Americans are lucky to be able to go into clean, modern establishments and obtain tasty, healthy food at reasonable prices. In other countries people have to go to disgusting open-air markets where meat masquerades as 14 pounds of flies in a bucket and where the only thing super-sized is the dose of salmonella you take home in your jug of raw goat milk.
If you are fat, it's not Col. Sanders' fault. Or Ronald McDonald's. Or the Taco Bell Chihuahua. The little dog isn't stuffing chalupas down your gullet. You are.
The danger with Secretary Thompson moving the country's Obesity Alert Level from Orange (Danger! Incoming Big Macs!) to Red (Laser-guided tater tots at 3 o'clock!) is that it implies that the government needs to step in and stop people from getting so fat. If Americans need the government to stop our hands from moving from french-fry container to mouth, we are in big trouble, my friends.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com