*65 The apparent severity of this epidemic is inflated by the way in which obesity is defined. The use of a threshold for establishing whether or not you’re obese—a body mass index (BMI) of 30—means that one can move from the overweight category to the obese category by virtue of gaining a few pounds. As a result, the 10-percent rise in obesity between 1991 and 2000 actually represented an increase in the average BMI of Americans from 26.7 to 28.1, an average weight gain of seven to ten pounds.
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*66 Between the second and third National Health and Nutrition Examination Study.
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*67 The USDA has a variety of mechanisms for estimating macronutrient intake—i.e., protein, carbohydrates, and fat—and has published a variety of reports on the subject. Not all are consistent, but the findings on fat consumption are. For instance, in April 1998, the USDA published an article entitled “Is Total Fat Consumption Really Decreasing?” This article reported that average total fat consumption for men aged nineteen to fifty, for instance, dropped from 113 grams per day in 1977–78 to ninety-six in 1989, the period that encompasses the beginning of the obesity epidemic. The relevant numbers for women of the same age group are seventy-three grams of fat per day in 1977–78 and sixty-two in 1989.
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*68 According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, sales of sporting equipment, apparel, and shoes increased from $21.9 billion in 1987 (the earliest year for which they have data) to $52 billion in 2004.
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*69 If each Pima drank two eight-ounce soft drinks a day, this would add roughly two hundred calories a day to Hesse’s estimate of both carbohydrate and calorie consumption, and so would drop the fat in the diet to 22 percent.
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*70 The Sioux were “essentially carnivorous” prior to their reservation life, the report noted, and so they “were never in the habit of eating much fruit and vegetables.”
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*71 Hrdlika did publish a list of diseases treated by the local agency physician, which did include one case of diabetes.
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*72 In 1804 and 1805, when the Corps of Discovery under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their historic overland expedition to the Pacific Ocean, they described game so plentiful in places that they literally had to club it out of their way to make progress.
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*73 This conclusion was supported four years later, when German researchers published their protocol for keeping these desert sand rats healthy in captivity. “It is well known that these animals will develop diabetes mellitus soon after their natural vegetative diet is removed and replaced with standard laboratory rations,” they noted. But both diabetes and obesity can be avoided if the animals are reared on a suitable diet: in this case, fruits, vegetables, and herbs, supplemented by an unlimited supply of insects, shrimps, worms, and grasshoppers.
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