Chips and racks

British food explodes

When my hair was far redder, I was considerably rotunder, and I was far younger, I visited Britain for the first time about four months before starting at the London School of Economics. That adventuresome aunt who had the Scottish friends also was godmother for the daughter of a London couple. I had met them in 1973 so I certainly took them upon an invitation to stop at their home en route from Cairo back to the States. It was a dream come true as I had longed since my wee youth to go to England (before one of my graduate professors informed me in no uncertain terms that “England ceased to exist in the early 18th century, Miss Watson, when united with Scotland into Great Britain”). I finally made it one spring.

It was a wonderful week except for a single conversation. The aforementioned daughter gathered some mates to take me to the local that first evening. It was Graham, Neville, and two women whose names I cannot recall. But I most painfully recall the comment of one of the women.

After a couple of pints, she asked me why I was so fat. Didn’t Americans know how fat they were and how eating much less would make that happen easily? Didn’t they care what they looked like?

She may have used the plural but I knew it was moi to whom she referred. My cheeks burn at recalling the humiliation as I type. Yes, I knew I was heavier than a lot of people but I certainly was not gargantuan or a Sumo wrestler or a Cowboys offensive tackle.

The painful evening made me aware of how reasonable portions were in Britain for the remainder of the trip. When I became a resident student here that fall, I also saw that meals were definitely smaller, a reason that British women were pretty svelte. They were not Argentina anorexic but svelte.

Fast forward forty plus years. Britain has picked up our penchant to eat—and I am not sure they haven’t bettered us on the size of portions, based on this past ten days’s visit.

We spent the morning photographing and painting around the western Lake District as the sun was out. When we finally got to Keswick, a charming market town, it was seemingly well past lunch so we finally settled on a pub, thinking it would be quick.

It took about 15 minutes for them to produce my husband’s chicken sandwich and my beloved jacket potato with baked beans so we had some time to eye our fellow guests—and their meals. I could not help but note how enormous each and every one of the meals had become. I have seen it everywhere, including in Scotland last week.

The woman next to us on the left inhaled a full rack of ribs, a serving of proper chips, and the token rocket (salad) on the plate. I mean she left the bones but I saw the meal put in front of her, then it was gone. The older gentlemen at the end of the table had a smaller portion of something that looked like a sweet but I think he ate it in two gulps. The other two with them are huge portions but a bit more leisurely.

To the other side, a man and woman had foot-long sliced slabs of bread laden with some sort of creamy something that was falling off the plates. The other tables around the room were identical.

One gets one’s money’s worth in British dining these days—along with a commensurate explosion in waistlines since I started coming in the 70s. It is yet another way that the special relationship between Yanks and Britons is strong: far, far too many of us consume vast portions of food.

That would all be ok except that physics comes into play: no “diet”, defined as a specialized, temporary approach to eating that jiggers an element or restricts esting to a three hour period will affect weight long time. As I have learned painfully and repeatedly, and as my father tired to reason with me decades ago, one can only lose weight for a sustained lifestyle by eating fewer calories than one burns. It is a law of physics, regardless what the diet d’jour maven dangles in front of us. As my father used to say, it really is both simple and unavoidable truth.

As a result of bigger portions and perhaps other factors like not caring, being too busy, more modern conveniences like cellphone rather than walking to the landline, etc. etc. etc. etc., Britons look more like us all the time. It amazes me how things could have shifted so radically in a couple of generations.

But, the difference that will play out, I suspect, between our cultures is that the National Health Service likely will never come close to paying for the new, expensive weight loss drugs that people seek to solve one problem (being overweight) which creates attendant issues like diabetes, pulmonary strain, and heart problems.

No, I am not, repeat not, a doctor so you may well advise me I am way off but the studies that seem to pop up about once every eighteen months to argue that additional weight doesn’t cause these additional conditions seem strange, if credible at all. How can carrying the additional weight (with the required additional blood vessels, strain on knees, hips, and feet, to name a few consequences) not matter? I don’t get it.

I have long said, only somewhat tongue in cheek, that the greatest threat the United States poses to China is not armed conflict but McDonald’s (actually, KFC has many more outlets so I should cite them) because China’s weight problems began skyrocketing thirty years ago in tandem with diabetes rates when western food outlets and eating habits really took root. Western food is weight creating, along with lifestyle changes, a factor that Xi Jinping hasn’t kvetched about yet but I am sure he will at some point.

National health systems with limits on spending, true in China and Britain as I understand their systems, constrain the doctors’s ability to prescribe these weight lowering drugs. In the United States, where our litigious society has some unexpected outcomes and significant portion of the population earning a lot of disposable income, the use of these extremely expensive options still are accelerating according to press reports.

Certain there are also people in the United Kingdom or the PRC who also have adequate resources to go this route but far fewer than in the United States. And the decision, I think, puts one on a lifelong course for the medication since losing the weight apparently reverses when one stops the injections (please, please correct me if I have any of this wrong as I am so needle averse I could not do this).

The point is that increased food consumption, resulting weight gain, and ultimate additional adverse health effects confront institutional barriers to “solving” the weight explosion problem. Yet, health conditions probably decline significantly with few options for the patient.

I have also read many studies that the rise in weight results from many factors rather than a monocausal one. Fair enough. having struggled with it my whole life, I am happy will power is not the only issue but larger portions must be contributing since it is a physics issue of too many calories against too little burning of those calories. The challenge of why we aren’t burning them may be different. How could portions falling off the plate not be relevant?

Or is this all just fanciful worry based in fact on the resulting personal looks rather than health effects? Is it true that everything really is genetic so what one eats or what one’s weight on the scale registers really is not all that significant? Is my personal concern with all of this not increasing costs for society but is a reflection of my personal humiliation as a pudgy redhead (add freckles so I grew up with the negative trifecta)?

I wonder because I think so much about actions and consequences. I think about skyrocketing health care costs around the world as so many people develop increasingly costly chronic illnesses when perhaps using personal restraint in engaging in known health-deteriorating behaviors could have been deployed (smoking, guys, smoking). In most societies, somebody pays real Yankee dollars to deal with the medical costs of addressing chronic problems but I guess in the contemporary era we don’t talk about that issue.

Anyway, as we close our fabulous holiday here, I can’t help but reflect on this single change over the past five plus decades. I suppose by the next time I come, people may have decided they don’t need chips with each and every meal or they may have stopped having such large portions. I don’t count on it any more than seeing the same adverse behavior come to a grinding halt stateside.

Actions do create consequences but so do individual choices, in my mind.

Thank you for reading Actions today. I genuinely welcome your thoughts on this expensive question, regardless where you live or what your thoughts are. Thank you for subscribing, if you do so, because your financial support makes this possible.

It was sunnier so it was a marvelous day in the Lake District

Be well and be safe. FIN