New York Stories...

At the beginning of December 2005 I travelled to New York. In the last (I promise) of a series of articles I take a look at the obesity epidemic that has swept America.

Fat City

One of the highlights of a visit to New York City has to be the range and variety of venues where you can gorge yourself on whatever food takes your fancy. From chow mein in China Town or spaghetti and meatballs in Little Italy to countless fast food restaurants seemingly on every block, you’re never far from an eatery that will serve up enormous portions of fat-filled food for very low prices. While we didn’t eat in the classiest restaurants in the city, we had some fantastic meals and never paid more than thirty dollars - great for a dinner for two.

New Yorkers certainly know how to do breakfast (bagels, French toast, pancakes!) and I recommend the pizza anywhere - though I discovered paradoxical truism in the apparent fact that the dingier the restaurant, the better the pizza is likely to be. Overall the trip was a culinary indulgence of belt-bursting proportions. At home I try to eat my veg, drink water, cut down on the fat (without being obsessive about it) and I’d like to think I don’t drink to the excesses of some of the lads. I can’t claim to have the healthiest of diets but, in a way, on my return to Ireland it was almost a relief to once more eat food not filled with sugar, salt or grease.

Stereotypically Americans are portrayed as lumbering behemoths of shuddering blubber. With the food available over there it's not hard to see why. Over a third are classified as obese by the American Medical Association; six percent, morbidly so. According to todays Guardian 800,000 New Yorkers have diabetes - a disease almost unique to the West where cheap, fatty food is in abundance. The obesity epidemic hits America’s ethnic minorities disproportionately because of worse diets due to poverty and genes that are more susceptible to the disease. As a result the problem is a massive one in New York with it’s large Black, Asian and Hispanic communities.

Obesity is clearly a crisis for the city and the United States. It has been recently been highlighted by the likes of Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s hit documentary Super Size Me where Spurlock survives (barely) on a diet of Mc Donalds food for a month. One sign of this literally huge problem that I noticed while in the States was in Newark Airport where defibrillators (the machines that administer electric shocks to heart attack victims) are installed in every corridor. That ’s something I haven’t seen in airports in any other country in the world.

Europe can’t afford to be too smug however. It is said that New York sets trends and that the rest of the world is about two decades behind. There is already evidence that Europeans are getting fatter. A recent study estimates that almost a fifth of Irish Teenagers are overweight. There are already US-style ’Fat-Camps’ for kids in the UK if not in Ireland too. Heart disease - which can stem from being overweight - is one of our biggest killers, accounting for forty-two percent of all deaths in Ireland every year. America may have its fat crisis now but ours is just a few pizzas away…