Bottoms up!

Daniel Thwaites

Chief Medical Officer, Dr Kevin Harvey, revealed that 80 per cent of Jamaican women were overweight when he appeared before Parliament's PAC. That headline jumped off the page! And so did the follow-up on Wednesday: 'Too much fluffy is dangerous for your health'.

Hmmm. Too much fluff? I think we can all agree that you have to be careful in certain situations and know weh yuh a do! I never forget the sad story of Mikal Middleton-Bey who made the mistake of quarrelling with his babymother, Mia Landingham, at their home in Cleveland. Mia sat on top of 126-lb Mikal, father of her three children, when he was face down in the couch. He died. The police had a scale that only went up to 350 pounds, so they were unable to determine Ms Landingham's weight. True story.

But before you get to that stage of the relationship, it's like with everything else - you have to know your limits. And you find out what you can manage by experience - and failure.

Of course there are serious public-health concerns and considerations that arise from such a startling statistic as that 80 per cent of Jamaican women are obese, and I'm sure that the many responsible columnists and public-health advocates will talk about them. Pearnel Charles was reported to have "urged the health ministry to stage public-education drives to sensitise persons of the dangers of particular lifestyle practices". I agree. But at this point, who doesn't know that stuffing yourself full of sugar, salt and starch without doing any exercise isn't good for you?

We have moved away from wholesome, fresh, traditional foods and are eating too much processed rubbish from cans and bags. That's why we are following closely behind America's large behind. In the US, 82 per cent of black women and 77.2 per cent of Hispanic women are obese.

Of course, there is a cultural preference for well-fed women. Remember the greatest STAR headline ever: 'Fowl food for slim chicks'? And it's not just recently that we've started to prefer a little meat on the bone. Look no further than the Heptones, who said they "need a fat, a very very fat girl". Butt we can't stop there. Obesity touches on two perennially interesting subjects - beauty and poverty.

We know that fashion and style icons are important because they set the trends for much happiness or misery. This is because, being very social animals, we judge ourselves by how we perceive others judge us. So when rounder forms are in vogue, we can be sure it's to the great relief of normal-size men and women.

Speaking personally, my own sense of justice won't be satisfied until Oprah Winfrey, in one of her fat phases, becomes the iconic sex symbol. This is why I was flummoxed by the hype about Lupita Nyong'o, who embodies the very stick-like form that I'd been told was oppressing the heftier members of our species.

Anyway, in opposition to the tyranny of the skinny, there is an aesthetic of fat emerging, meaning that people are pioneering (or reinventing) models of beauty based on larger sizes. Look at how Beyonce and the Kardashian family, with their famously large bottoms, have been revolutionising standards of beauty in the US. Of course it is a good thing, not just because it conforms to my own liking, but because people ought to be more comfortable in their naturally shaped bodies without trying to look like the skinny models.

Apparently the trend for larger bottoms has led to an increased demand for fake ones, particularly in Miami. Bottom enhancement has been booming, and today's students should look seriously into shaping bottoms for a living. In 2013 alone, there was a 58 per cent increase in butt-implant surgeries, and an enormous black-market butt-enhancement business has been thriving.

The 'Brazilian Butt Lift' entails suctioning fat from the hips or thighs and implanting it into the bum. It's reportedly more popular than silicone implants, which are also doing a roaring trade.

I find this enormously amusing. It's a typical example of "wanty wanty cyaan't get it; getty getty nuh want it". Whites tan; blacks bleach. The fat pay to be skinny, and the skinny pay to be fat. Everyone wants to be, or at least look like, someone else.

For most of human history, one important signal of poverty was the inability to get adequate caloric content in the diet, and daily average caloric intake was a way of measuring poverty and standard of living.

That measure has been turned on its head and is, perhaps, no longer useful. Flowing from the 'food revolution' and the mass production and distribution of cheaply priced and calorie-rich food, fatness has become democratic. So even though it used to be that the rich were fat and the poor were skinny, in a remarkable reversal, nowadays the opposite tends to hold true.

But obviously we are using the term 'poor' relationally, and not as an absolute measure. People are just no longer poor in the way we used to think of it, and nowadays when we say someone is poor, we have very different things in mind than a generation ago.

If someone from just a few generations back time-travelled into the present and saw the consumption patterns of today's poor, they would be staggered. Something different is definitely going on when the primary complaint of the lower class, in the United States at any rate, isn't that they're chronically hungry and emaciated, but rather that they are beset by the chronic diseases that flow from eating themselves to death.

Consider that the average daily intake of someone in the US is a massive 3,770 calories. Jamaicans are at a more reasonable, but still very solid, 2,850 calories, almost 1,000 more than the Haitians, and way more than Ethiopians.

By the way, it's estimated that our Paleolithic ancestors took in about 3,000 calories daily, but they were very active hunter-gatherers, running miles and scaling mountains. Nowadays, we eat the same 3,000 calories then settle down to play video games, surf the Net, and watch Schools' Challenge Quiz. I groan about the work if the remote control gets lost.

All over the world, people are doing better, even though they feel worse. At the very least, it would seem that a rising tide (of fat) lifts all boats. Bottoms up!

Daniel Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.