Harvard University Press Blog

Childhood Obesity Isn't History Yet

In Childhood Obesity in America: Biography of an Epidemic, medical historian Laura Dawes helps us to see the cultural dimensions of what’s more commonly considered as a matter of health. By drawing on archival sources, published scientific papers, government reports, court case records, cultural ephemera, and interview material, she presents the changing answers to critical questions about childhood obesity from late 19th century America to our time. When a recent study found a surprising drop in the childhood obesity rate over the past decade, we asked Dawes to situate this welcome development within the history of concern over the size of our children.

-----

In 1963, doctors and nurses from the National Centre for Health Statistics set out around the country in specially fitted out Winnebagoes. They were going to take a tape measure to American children’s health. That study—the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey—is still going today. The survey shows that childhood obesity has steadily risen, more than tripling in the fifty years since those doctors in the 1960s first hit the road with rulers and scales. The increases were even bigger in African American and Hispanic children. But late last month researchers from the Centre and from the Public Health Service reported a new development: for the first time since the study began, rates of obesity had dropped in 2- to 5-year-olds. In young children, obesity is still more common than it was back in the 1960s, but is about 40% lower than its peak in the early 2000s. In older children, the inexorable rise over the past fifty years seems to have plateaued and hovers at around 17%. This is cause for cautious—very cautious—optimism.

It has been true for a long time that American kids are big, and have been getting bigger. In 1877, a Boston physician named Henry Bowditch carried out the first significant study of American children’s heights and weights. He had teachers in Boston schools measure their pupils’ heights and weights. With no calculators or computers in the nineteenth century, Bowditch got Beantown’s accountants to crunch the numbers. Even then, American children were larger—taller and especially heavier—than children in Europe. At a time when undernourishment was the major childhood nutritional problem, the fact that American children were big was something to be proud of. Bowditch didn’t consider that there could be “too big.” Tall and heavy, American children were strapping specimens compared with their spindly European peers. The American way of life with its opportunities, its egalitarianism, its freedoms, was being written onto children’s bodies.

Legally Poisoned by Chemical Compounds

In Legally Poisoned: How the Law Puts Us at Risk from Toxicants, Carl F. Cranor documents the health threats posed by toxic hazards in commercial products such as cosmetics and cookware. Cranor argues that these chemical compounds should be subject to pre-market testing, as is the case with pharmaceuticals and pesticides, rather than presumed safe until harm is done. Below, Cranor presents the case for legal reform and outlines some of the additional channels of toxic contamination that have been documented since the initial publication of Legally Poisoned, which is new in paperback this month.

-----

Recent scientific findings on the developmental origins of disease pose major problems for laws that currently seek to protect the public from toxic substances. Existing laws permit our children and us to be legally contaminated with untested substances that may be toxic. We are “legally poisoned.”

Since the hardcover publication of Legally Poisoned in 2011, a number of studies have reinforced its concerns. New York University researchers found that the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA)—previously known to cause hormone abnormalities, asthma, behavioral problems and obesity—is linked to heart disease in children. BPA is used to line food and beverage cans to prevent corrosion and because of its pervasiveness contaminates our food supply. More than ninety percent of the public is contaminated by BPA.

Brazilian scientists found that infants whose mothers were exposed to the commonly used pesticide permethrin during pregnancy were up to seven times more likely to have leukemia. Even children whose mothers were exposed three months before conception were twice as likely to develop infant leukemia as those whose mothers reported no exposure.

Scientists at UC Berkeley have found that children’s exposures to brominated flame-retardants (PBDEs) in the womb or early childhood can lead to cognitive declines: poorer attention and motor skills and lower IQ scores. Other researchers have found that brominated flame-retardants reduce the male hormone testosterone in men. Children have higher concentrations of these substances than adults, but virtually all citizens are contaminated. Brominated flame-retardants are in carpets, upholstery, curtains, plastics, furniture and house dust, but once released into the environment return to contaminate various foods.

These studies and others on the developmental origins of disease are revealing how diseases and dysfunctions can be predisposed or triggered by toxicants, diet, or even infections in utero or in early life. Children are especially susceptible to diseases and dysfunctions during development and much more sensitive to toxic exposures than adults at the same concentrations. Major catastrophes resulting from in utero exposures to Thalidomide, methylmercury, and diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the 1960s and 1970s shattered the view of the womb as a protective shelter in which children could develop safely before they began facing some of the risks and hazards of the external world into which they would soon be born. Subsequently, researchers have found that early life exposure to PCBs, lead, radiation, DDT, phthalates, brominated flame retardants, synthetic estrogens, some pesticides, some pharmaceuticals and other substances can cause less dramatic diseases or dysfunctions, many affecting a person for a lifetime.

Dictionary of American Regional Turkey-Words

With a nod to Thanksgiving, we give you… every “turkey-” headword in the Dictionary of American Regional English:

• turkey
• turkey apple
• turkeyback
• turkey beard
• turkeyberry
• turkeyberry bush
• turkey bird
• turkey bur
• turkey bush
• turkey buzzard
• turkey cactus
• turkey cheese
• turkey corn
• turkey cress
• turkey egg
• turkey feed
• turkeyfoot
• turkeyfoot grass
• turkey foot mustard
• turkey frost
• turkey gnat
• turkey grape
• turkey grass
• turkey gull
• turkey haw(thorn)
• turkey in the oven, have a
• turkey jerk
• turkey lice
• turkey-mouth
• turkey mullein
• turkey mustard
• turkey oak
• turkey pea
• turkey pear
• turkey pen
• turkey pepper
• turkey pine
• turkey plover
• turkey roost
• turkey run
• turkey salad
• turkey’s beard
• turkey scratching
• turkey’s foot
• turkey snout
• turkey-snout pepper
• turkey sparrow
• turkey-strip
• turkey-tail
• turkeytail
• turkey-tail out
• turkey-tangle
• turkey-tongue
• Turkey Town
• turkey tracks
• turkey-troop
• turkey trot
• turkey-trot
• turkey-trotting
• turkey-turd beer
• turkey vine
• turkey vulture
• turkey weed
• turkey wing

Food and Memory

John S. Allen’s The Omnivorous Mind is an examination of the cultural and biological truths revealed by our evolving relationship with food. From the diets of our earliest ancestors, to cooking’s role in the evolution of the human brain, to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies, Allen’s take on how and what we eat is consistently revelatory. Below, Allen looks at the powerful role food plays in human memory. Also below, listen to a conversation with Allen on a recent episode of our podcast. 

-----

Not that long ago, at the counter of a gas station out in the country, something yellow and red caught my eye—it was a Bit-O-Honey candy bar wrapper. I had not had a Bit-O-Honey bar for nearly 40 years, having moved as a child from Bit-O-Honey’s midwest base to California. So I bought one. As I unwrapped and ate it, certain memories quickly came back to me: the difficulty of getting the inside wrapping paper off the sticky taffy, the little rectangles meant to be broken off one by one, the initial hard chewiness that always made me wonder if it was stale, and finally, the honeyed flavor of the taffy itself, offset by little bits of nut. The memories did not stop there, however: in an instant, I was transported back in time to the back seat of my parents’ car, looking out the window at the apparently endless rows of corn stalks that passed by for hour after hour as we drove down highways and interstates. I thought about AM radio and the backs of my parents’ heads. I finished my chunk of Bit-O-Honey, got in my car, and drove back to the present.

We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body. So my Bit-O-Honey experience is not all that unusual. Search for websites with the word candy combined with vintage, retro, or nostalgia, and it becomes readily apparent that many people use candy as a pathway to the past. But why should this be the case?

 

There are several reasons. First, evolution has seen to it that food in general may be a privileged target of memory in the brain. There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus (one in each hemisphere) that is critical for memory. The hippocampus is particularly important for forming long-term, declarative memories—those that can be consciously recalled and which contribute to the autobiographies that we all carry around in our heads. The hippocampus is also important for spatial memories, which may be its primary role for animals that do not possess language. The hippocampus has strong connections with parts of the brain that are important for emotion and for smell. This may explain why emotional memories can be so vivid or why certain smells trigger a sense of recall in us even before we consciously remember an event.

Biking for Cabinets in Rhode Island

If you found yourself at a backyard birthday party in North Providence this past Saturday evening, you may have overheard a conversation about bicycling. A handful of Rhode Islanders were describing recent long rides, commiserating over the mistake of overindulgence at the halfway mark. One told of marking the turn with too many boozey beverages, making for a risky ride back. Another recalled pausing in a long pedal for a heavy lunch, after which her partner wanted to get a cabinet, too.

You’d have been forgiven for assuming that the conversation had just taken a strange turn towards office furniture. But, actually, you’d just been gifted with a regionalism. As one of the partiers explained, “cabinet” is Rhode Island speak for “milkshake.” None present had a notion as to why, nor did they really need one, standing in that yard, fenced by knee-high chain link, driveway full of old station wagons, and having just gotten a tour of a home frozen in time, with a completely stocked basement bar seemingly untouched since the ’70s, and a lushly green-carpeted hallway, decked with old garden sprinklers wall-mounted like hunting trophies. Rhode Island’s just weird, no explanation needed.

Just kidding, OF COURSE we want an explanation. That’s what the Dictionary of American Regional English is for:

cabinet n: A milkshake. Chiefly used in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts.

The etymology is actually uncertain, but a woman from Fall River interviewed in 1968 claimed it originated in a drugstore there, named by the pharmacist who concocted it. “The ice cream was kept in those days in a cabinet that was part of the soda-fountain set-up,” reads the DARE entry.

The entry also cites a letter to the Today Show from 1971 that explains that a milk shake in Rhode Island is without ice cream, while a cabinet has ice cream. And a Smithsonian letter from a Rhode Islander in 1982:

In Rhode Island this term more likely refers to a milkshake (using milk, syrup, and ice cream) than a piece of furniture. I grew up five miles from the Massachusetts border. As a child I could order a cabinet in R.I., but had to remember to order a frappe just five minutes to the west.

Because “frappe” is totally normal. Carry on, America.

Making Chefs and Surgeons

The latest dose of Lucky Peach, the newish quarterly journal of food and writing, is the Cooks and Chefs issue. With their characteristic blend of smart, irreverent writing and terrific illustration and design, the Lucky Peach team spends the issue riffing on celebrity chefs, cooking shows, old masters, lunch ladies, and the changing world of the culinary arts. A common thread running through the issue is a collective sense of loss over the ways in which the forty hour work week has changed both the education of cooks and the workings of restaurants.

In a piece titled “I See a Darkness,” Lucky Peach co-creator and chef/owner of Momofuku David Chang issues his own lament in pink type on black pages beneath a stark opening line: “I am convinced that cooking is dying.” From his piece:

(I)n the past, at almost all high-end restaurants, you just worked. One of the fundamental changes to the profession is the elimination of “shiftpay”—i.e. you make $80 for the period of time known as “Monday” regardless of how many hours you’re there. That’s been replaced by the forty-hour work week. You just can’t learn to cook in forty hours a week.

“There is a whole style of restaurant that has evolved from that restriction,” (Andrew) Carmellini explained. “You basically come in at four in the afternoon and just go shopping, because everything is ready for you. Get your fish, chives, shallots, or whatever, and then you’re just waiting for the cream and whatever to come down the conveyor belt. Unfortunately, it does affect the process. No one was paid to teach me how to make pasta, but the Italian guy downstairs would put in the extra hours to do that, and I’d put in the time to learn. It’s hard to do that now. Even if cooks wanted to stay late or work from start to finish, they are legally not allowed to.”

The response of the restaurant world—and I’m as guilty as anyone—has been to systematize and streamline the way food is prepared. You either have to do that or break the law. The best restaurants used to have minimal staff; they’d have a couple of prep cooks, but everyone was responsible for their own station and partner. Time was relative to the work that needed to be done. Now many restaurants operate with multiple crews—one team preps, and then, as Carmelini put it, the next shift “shops” for their mise en place.

Now, despite there being foodies among us, we’ve published too many books on labor history to sit here and worry much about what worker protections have done to the state of pasta-making. That said, the general concern for the ways that new restrictions can impede the training of current and future generations has put us in mind of a book on a different sort of knife skills, Dr. Nicolas Tilney’s Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery. Forgive the implications of the comparison, but, hey, chefs and surgeons DO both wear white coats, get their hands bloody, and surround themselves with stainless steel. And Tilney’s explanation of what’s lost when budding surgeons have their work weeks restricted has a number of parallels with Chang on cooks.

Attn: food types -- "Freakonomics" on Fresh

The new guest poster on the NYT "Freakonomics" blog is none other than Suzanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History, the book that takes a look at what we mean when we say we want "fresh" food (hint: it's not always what we think we mean, and it's not what we meant by the word fifty years ago). Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner kicks things off with a Q&A with Freidberg, and then it's on to her first post, on "urban food deserts" -- at last count, three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with little or no access to fresh food, says the city's planning department. But it doesn't have to be that way, says Freidberg -- just look at Hong Kong.

Fresh: A Perishable History is out in April; this post happily gives me an excuse to post its exquisite cover art, which features an illustration from an actual California orange crate label, and which in its physical incarnation is even "orange-er" than it appears here on screen. Maybe you're thinking what we're thinking, which is that in better economic times a book like this verily cries out for that old favorite ... scratch 'n' sniff!

Happy Anniversary, 21st Amendment!

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. As Michael A. Lerner recounts in Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcohol, with the intention of making the country a bastion of health and morality. This "noble experiment" failed spectacularly, nowhere more so than New York, driving the thirsty underground to illegally manufacture and imbibe their intoxicants and sparking the first culture war of the 20th century. More than just a fight for the right to drink (and a nationwide example that people naturally want to do exactly what they are forbidden to do), Prohibition was a battle between social reformers and personal liberty advocates, two groups with two very different views of what America should be like. Lucky for lovers of cocktails (and personal freedoms), the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition 14 years later.

We're all for enjoying a good drink (in moderation, of course), so today we raise our glasses to those who helped win back this little freedom for us. Here's a toast to the 21st Amendment!