Everything's Bigger In Texas, Particularly The People

01/17/1998

Eric Ellis reports from El Paso, the fat capital of the United States.

EVERYTHING is famously big in Texas, but when LBJ put that line around years ago, he probably didn't reckon it would also apply to his constituents.

Consider the Monday before New Year in suburban El Paso. McDonald's is doing a roaring trade dispensing fries, Big Macs and ice-cream sundaes with gay abandon to sundry Latinos, blacks and white Paula Jones look-alikes that Clinton aides might describe as "trailer park trash". There's perhaps 200 people in the store and it's barely 9.30am. And it's not breakfast McMuffins these punters are scoffing down. It's burgers at 99cents.

An obese black woman waddles up to the counter, her folds busting out of her bright blue Lycra slacks. She debates the menu with her almost-as-large daughter. "Mom, I'll have two Big Macs, large fries, choc sundae, shake and a Coke," the daughter says.

"Oh honey, I think you'd better have the Diet Coke, ya know," mum says, laying down the law.

Little wonder from this episode that El Paso - call it El Bypaso - has become the "biggest" city in a State celebrated for its size where Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are growth companies. The International Size Acceptance Association chose Austin, the Texas State capital, to hold its convention in April.

When the Washington-based Coalition for Excess Weight Risk Education recently studied the "size" of 33 major US cities, it found that El Paso's civic compatriot San Antonio to be the fattest in the State with 32 per cent of its people considered obese. The study didn't include El Paso, because it wasn't, er, big enough to be included.

That prompted El Paso's regional Paso del Norte Health Foundation to look closer to home. It found that one-third El Pasenos are obese.

The foundation discovered that fewer than a 10th of El Pasenos eat the recommended five daily portions of fruits and vegetables and that 75 per cent don't exercise adequately. "We were shocked," said Ann Pauli, who heads the foundation.

One consolation for the Texans was that the Washington study showed porky New Orleans, in neighbouring Louisiana, to be the fattest place in the US of the places studied, with 37.55 per cent of inhabitants found to be obese.

The survey showed further that Denver was the slimmest city in the US -thanks in part to all that Rocky Mountain air and attendant activities, and that the capital, Washington DC, was one of the top three slimmest towns.

But even at its slimmest, urban America is still extremely fat, with more than 25 per cent of people considered obese or extremely overweight. "From a national standpoint, all of the numbers are high, they are extraordinarily high," said Roland Weinsier, nutritionist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

In many places, it is almost impossible to buy anything other than fast food, always in huge servings, or flavoured soft drink for on-the-road sustenance.

It's a problem of plenty and it's a problem that kills - more than 300,000 people a year, second only to smoking-related illnesses. Another study from the National Centre for Health Statistics shows a staggering 54.4 per cent of adult Americans are overweight and 22.5 per cent are obese.

In 1980, US Government surveys showed that about 25 per cent of the population were too fat. Today, it has risen to a third. It's partly explained by the boom in fast-food, a phenomena which has part of its roots in a more complex and demanding society. Consumer data shows that the average American family eats out for half of its food budget.

As fat and obese people become the majority in the hyper politically correct US, its natural that attitudes towards them are changing. One such lobby that plasters pro-fat messages over the internet is the "human-rights" group, The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Another is the International Size Acceptance Association, whose director Allen Steadham works for the Texas Department of Health in Austin. Steadham is on a mission to sell the ISAA as an "activist organisation with a mission to bring the message of size acceptance and self acceptance to the world". He is urging that social opprobrium be heaped on Coca-Cola for its Diet Coke advertisements that "perpetuates the myth that thin equals beautiful and fat equals ugly".