It is true that poor people in America are more likely to be fat than rich people, which helps explains Aspen’s generally skinny population.

It is true that Americans have steadily put on weight since 1980.

And it is true that Aspenites sometimes come back from journeys to middle America and comment on how fat people are in other parts of the country, which may reveal as much about their prejudices as it does about their powers of observation.

These "big" ideas were discussed, or prompted, by a panel discussion Friday at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival called “Why Are Americans So Fat and What Can We Do About It?.”

But a University of Colorado law professor, Paul Campos, discounted the premise of the panel and said the issue of an overweight America is overblown.

It is “a product of the pharmaceutical industry softening up the regulatory environment for the purpose of selling the next generation of diet drugs,” Campos said. “That is why people have gotten together at the Aspen Institute to talk about the ‘terrible, terrible problem’ we are having with obesity so that Bristol-Myers Squibb and Glaxco and all the other big makers of drugs can sell their next generation of drugs.”

Campos is the author of “The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health.”

“The problem isn’t obesity, really, the problem is the panic that we are having as a society over weight,” Campos said.

While he said he is not discounting the relationship between being severely overweight and medical issues, he does feel the topic should be looked at in a sociological framework.

“Fat is disapproved of by the American upper class as a sign of lower-class status and it is also associated with minority ethnicity,” said Campos, who writes a column for the Rocky Mountain News. “And that moral disapproval has been medicalized because medicalizing it makes that moral opprobrium more acceptable as opposed to just saying ‘we don’t like fat people,’ ‘we don’t like poor people,’ ‘we don’t like ethnic minorities,’ etc.”

Adam Drewnowski, the director of the Center for Public Health and Nutrition at the University of Washington, backed up some of Campos’ points.

“Obesity is not necessarily coming to this neighborhood,” Drewnowski said. “It is rampant elsewhere. In other words, obesity is a marker of social class. Poverty breeds obesity. Obesity is the toxic consequence of living in an increasingly uncertain economic environment.”

Drewnowski said that mapping by zip codes in Seattle has shown a direct correlation between income and weight and that poor neighborhoods have more overweight people living in them.

“There is every connection to be made between poverty and obesity,” he said.

Three kinds of poverty — material, cultural and emotional — all lead to weight gain, he said. Healthy food costs more, people lack cooking skills, and the insecurity and stress of being poor can lead to weight gain.

Poor people don’t “cling to guns and religion; what they cling to is fried grease and donuts,” Drewnowski said.

James Hill, a professor of pediatrics and the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Denver, represented the more common viewpoint that obesity in America is a problem that needs to be fixed. But he said some Americans are struggling against a strong cultural river of factors leading to excess weight gain.

He first noted that when looking at the weight and “body mass index” designations — the same ones that Campos rejected as being too strict — a third of Americans are considered healthy, a third are considered overweight, and a third are obese.

“The American lifestyle is making us fat,” Hill said. “It’s fast food. It’s large portions. It’s increased fat, increased sugar. It’s communities with no sidewalks. It’s reliance on the automobile. It’s computers — Bill Gates is just as responsible as Ronald McDonald for obesity. It’s lack of sleep. There is very strong evidence that too little sleep is causing obesity. It’s the way we are building communities. It is a lot of little things.”

And those little things add up to a cultural “current” that people are struggling against. He said that since 1980 the average American adult has gained one to two pounds a year.

“The poor are totally being swept downstream,” Hill said. “Now you take a place like Aspen, guess what, the current is less in Aspen. If you took 1,000 people from Jackson, Mississippi and put them in Aspen, what would happen to their weight?

“We’ve got to lessen the current,” Hill concluded. “We’ve got to the look at the environment. That’s hard. That’s complex. But it can be done.”
bgs@aspendailynews.com