For fast-food youth, a side order of facts

Chew on This

Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food

Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

Houghton Mifflin: 304 pp., $16

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AT the dawn of the 1960s, our newly elected, youthful president, John F. Kennedy, popularized a nationwide physical fitness program for schoolchildren. Even in those days before computers and video games, he worried that kids were spending too much time watching television, being chauffeured by their parents and just not getting enough exercise.

The situation then, however, wasn’t nearly as serious as it is now.

“Since the 1970s,” as we learn from Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson’s fascinating -- and alarming -- new book, “Chew on This,” “the rate of obesity among preschoolers has ... doubled. And among children aged six to eleven it has tripled.” According to one nutritionist they quote: “ ‘We’ve got the fattest, least fit generation of kids, ever.’ ” Doctors today are seeing things they almost never saw 30 years ago: youngsters developing Type 2 diabetes, a life- and limb-threatening disease that used to be called “adult-onset diabetes” because, until recently, kids didn’t seem to get it, and children as young as 10 having heart damage similar to a middle-age smoker.

What’s happened? Although many factors -- including genetic traits -- may contribute to obesity, Schlosser and Wilson write, “the basic family and racial traits of the American people haven’t changed in the past thirty years. What’s changed are their eating and living habits.”

What’s happened has been the proliferation of fast-food: burgers and French fries high in fat, and giant servings of sugar-rich, nonnutritious soda.

Even at school, kids can buy and consume soda pop, candy bars, potato chips and other junk food (only last week did the soft drink industry finally agree to halt nearly all sales of soda in middle and elementary schools and limit them in high schools). And outside, everywhere they turn, another franchised fast-food eatery.

Prize-winning journalist Schlosser is also the author of “Fast Food Nation,” a hard-hitting investigation. Now, he’s teamed with journalist Wilson to tackle the problem with a book aimed at major consumers of fast-food: American kids.

Written for preteens and teenagers, “Chew on This” is an unusually lively, accessible book, filled with colorful stories, photographs and other eye-opening material, much of which will be news not only to kids, but also to adults.

But since kids are among the most dedicated consumers of fast-food, it’s particularly good to find a book designed for this most important of all audiences.

High in calories, sugar, salt, fat and starch, low in fiber and nutrients, fast-foods “are the perfect meals for making you unhealthy.” And it’s not just Americans who’re cursed with this craving. Now that the chains have taken hold all over the world, the problem has spread.

Consider Okinawa, Japan, once an island full of lean, healthy oldsters who had been living on fish, rice, soy and vegetables. There, young people have been downing burgers like nobody’s business and developing the out-of-shape, unhealthy bodies that come from them.

The authors explain how in some ways our bodies and brains may be programmed to crave fat and sweetness. In early times, when we had to expend huge amounts of energy gathering roots and fruits or chasing wild game, getting too fat was not a problem.

There was no refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup, and when early hunters were lucky enough to bag a quail or an antelope, the meat was leaner than the people who pursued it. But now, alas, when fatty and sugar-rich foods are all too available, our bodies “still function as though the food may run out at any moment.”

Like many good teachers, the authors know how to be entertaining and informative, funny and serious. Although kids may assume that all new things represent progress, this book offers a salutary view of some recent developments that are more like regress.

The proliferation of soda machines in schools, for example, was resisted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture until the soft-drink industry muscled its way in, finally getting a federal judge to rule its way in 1983.

Since then, kids who once drank more calcium-rich milk than soda now drink so much more of the latter that some adolescents have osteoporosis. Nor has regress been confined to nutrition. The authors provide accounts of what it’s like for teens who work at McDonald’s: low wages, long hours, no job security.

They also take us into factory-style chicken farms and nonunionized meatpacking plants where the health and safety standards brought about by decades of labor union activism and government regulation are not keeping up with the fast-food industry’s demand for processing.

So what’s a kid to do? This book is full of inspiring examples of how one person can make a difference, even today when politicians can often be bought by moneyed interests.

We learn about chef-restaurateur Alice Waters’ project to teach schoolchildren how to grow foods and cook them; we meet a Canadian teen who fights to organize a union and an Eskimo girl who campaigns against soda machines in her school.

And best of all, the authors point out, because kids are the chief consumers of these foods, it’s kids who have the power (to borrow Nancy Reagan’s mantra on drugs) to “just say no.” Or, as Schlosser and Wilson put it, “have it your way,” and walk out the door.

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Merle Rubin is a critic whose reviews have appeared in the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor.