History of Dieting in America

This article in Newsday has some very interesting passages about the history of dieting in the United States:

Sporadic, documented cases of dieting stretch back 1,000 years or more. But in America, dieting only took off with a vengeance at the end of the 19th century.

The stage was set by the early 1800s. Americans were bolting their food in great quantities. (As a consequence of this new nutrition, they were several inches taller than Europeans. Foreigners were apt to exclaim at the size, frequency and speed of American meals; one Russian visitor likened Americans' eating habits to those of sharks.) Health reformers began railing against gluttony and the endless, immoral procession of pies, cakes and meats. They wrote treatises lashing out at Sunday lunches and Thanksgiving tables.

Chief among these was the Rev. Sylvester Graham, creator of the famous Graham cracker. He preached that gluttony not only led to sinful sexual practices but also to such maladies as constipation and indigestion (or "dyspepsia," as people then termed it). Americans flocked to water cures, mercury-based laxatives and Graham's pure-food, brown-bread diet in order to settle their stomachs.

The goal of Graham's earliest followers was not shedding pounds. Then, plumper bodies were fashionable, even a symbol of success. Businessmen joined the Fat Men's Club of Connecticut. "Thin girls" wrote tearful letters to the Ladies' Home Journal for weight gain advice. Women padded clothing to look like well- rounded actress Lillian Russell.

As the century bore on, interest in weight loss grew. A succession of figures proffered their surefire solutions with confidence and authority.

Then came the explosive sea change. Dieting became a widespread national preoccupation - and no one knows quite why, says historian Peter N. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University and author of "Fat History" (New York University Press, 1997).

"You could say that, well, people started getting increasingly concerned about dieting right around the time they should have," he says. Food was abundant. Public transportation and sedentary jobs were on the rise. Yet there is little evidence to suggest people were getting much fatter at that time, he adds.

Fashion played its part in the dieting phenomenon. Corsets became unstylish, and natural slenderness gained ascendancy. The life insurance industry contributed, too. Early actuarial tables revealed that fat people, on average, lived shorter lives than slimmer people.

In addition, distaste for obesity had slowly, and inexplicably, been growing, and a list of derogatory words had been invented to describe it: "porky" in the 1860s, "jumbo" in the 1880s, "butterball" in the 1890s. By 1903, plumpness was so out of favor that the Fat Men's Club of Connecticut shut its doors forever. By World War I, being fat was deemed more than unattractive; it was unpatriotic.