Marsha’s Reviews > Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World > Status Update

"The challenge in changing the environment is not to 'go back in time,' but to engineer physical activity and healthy eating back into our lives in a way that is compatible with our socio-cultural value." As Peters and Hill see it, the challenge is to give everyday people the same cognitive tools--essentially a series of goals and rewards--that the more affluent always have had when it comes to managing weight.

Won't that make black girls just as weight-obsessed as white girls? "No one wants to overemphasize the problems of being fat to these girls, for fear of creating body image problems that might lead to anorexia nd bulimia." He adds: "The problem with that is: For every one affluent white anorexic you create by 'overemphasizing' obesity, you foster ten obese poor girls by downplaying the severity of the issue."

In almost every endeavor at the council he had encountered not just resistance to change but often outright insubordination. "I just don't understand and will not accept that it will take you six months to get me the minutes of the last meeting!" he barked at staff members at one board meeting. "What is it here?" He suspected the AAHPERD of not doing its job on the information front.

This is not to say that Americans have never attempted to deal with fat children. But the thrust of those efforts were almost always social and aesthetic: Fat Joey was being harassed by the slimmer boys. Nowhere in those efforts was childhood overeating paired solely with health concerns. The notion that overfeeding might be a health problem and a health problem alone never entered the American psyche.