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Societal notions of what constitutes a healthy body weight and pleasing
form have varied greatly over the centuries, and it is only in eras of
nutritional abundance that anxieties about the effects of too much food
have figured prominently in the public psyche. Scarcity was the overriding
concern of millions of Americans who struggled to find enough to eat during
the Great Depression, such as these New Yorkers waiting for bread.
The subjects of Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens’ canvases were
amply endowed with body fat—a sign of beauty, good health and prosperity—as
seen in this version of The Judgment of Paris, circa 1635-1638. In the
New World, where famine struck the Jamestown settlement three decades
earlier, colonists would have been grateful to emulate them.
In the 1940s, promoting proper nutrition was the aim of this poster produced
by the Works Projects Administration. By the end of the 20th century,
Americans had become obsessed with thinness—and fatter than ever—as
they looked to medicine, fad diets and technology to solve the problem.
Here, three thermograms of an obese woman show the distribution of both
heat and body fat.
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A Yale medical historian studies how famine
and feast influence our bodies and how we view them.
By Cathy Shufro
Living as we do in the “low-carb nation”—where,
despite the gospel according to Atkins, obesity rates are escalating—it’s
easy to forget that as recently as the 1930s many Americans worried about
eating too little, not too much.
Yale medical historian Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., sees the end of World
War II as a turning point. Until then, scarcity dominated people’s
anxieties. Now, we worry about the effects of abundance on our bodies.
Given her scholarly perspective, you’d think Lederer might have
anticipated that even her daughter might be affected by “an ideal
[of thinness] that virtually no one can achieve.” But when five-year-old
Emma declined to sample a Flintstones vitamin after seeing a picture of
a chubby baby Pebbles (“It’s going to make me fat.”),
Lederer recalls, “I was really kind of stunned.”
That incident, in part, inspired the associate professor of the
history of medicine to offer a course at Yale College called “Fat
and Thin: A History of American Bodies.” Lederer expected 50 to
75 students, and she ended up with 358. She had to expand her team of
teaching fellows from two to nine.
The course, offered last spring, surveyed the evolution since Colonial
times of notions of nutrition, food choices and ideal body weight, and
how both scarcity and plenty can mark the body. The story began with scarcity.
Although Native Americans had developed strategies to avoid famine, by
following food or by storing it, European newcomers arrived unprepared.
In a 1607 diary entry, Jamestown settler Master George Percy describes
his group’s reprieve from hunger: “It pleased God, after a
while, to send those people which were our mortall enemies to releeve
us with victuals, as Bread, Corne, Fish and Flesh in great plentie. …
Otherwise we had all perished.” During the winter of 1609-1610,
80 percent of the James-town settlers did perish, of starvation and sickness.
Three centuries later, Lederer’s students learned, scarcity
still marked the bodies of Americans. In the South, prisoners and orphans
suffered from “the four D’s” of pellagra—dermatitis,
diarrhea, dementia and death. U.S. Public Health Service physician Joseph
Goldberger, M.D., set out to prove that pellagra resulted from their cornmeal-based
diet. In his 1915 Rankin prison farm experiment, he induced pellagra in
convicts in return for clemency. (Except for one protest, the only objection
to this experiment came from those who were upset that convicts in prison
for serious crimes were released in return for their participation.) Even
then, he failed to convince detractors that the disease was caused by
a diet deficient in niacin, not by microbes.
The contemporary obesity epidemic derives in part from the plethora
of manufactured snacks, says Lederer. In the 1920s, she notes, ready-made
snacks were few: popcorn, Graham crackers, biscuits, penny candy. “Now
we have more food choices than anyone else on the planet, and we’re
so conflicted over them,” she says. When researchers asked people
what they associate with a slice of double-chocolate cake, French respondents
said “Celebration.” Americans said “Guilt.”
A study of 2,600 elementary school children in New York City, reported
by the city’s health department in 2004, found that 40 percent were
overweight, and one in four was obese. Hispanic children were most likely
to be overweight and Asian students were least likely.
Among Yale students, Lederer says, “There’s a lot of
interest in bodies,” especially among athletes. Twenty-five women
from the Yale track team enrolled in the course, along with football player
Nate Lawrie, a senior who was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last
spring. The caption next to Lawrie’s photo on the team’s website
reads: “TE Nate Lawrie has the frame to add weight without sacrificing
speed.”
For historical perspective on obesity, Lederer uses a cartoon from
The New Yorker. Two witches watch as a plump boy and girl walk by the
witches’ candy-festooned gingerbread cottage. One witch asks the
other: “Remember when we used to have to fatten the kids up first?”
Cathy Shufro is a contributing editor of Yale Medicine.
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