WHY YOU’RE PUTTING ON WEIGHT: YOU’RE CAUGHT IN THE FAT TRAP

Australian men have never been so fat. More than half of them are now overweight or obese and research shows they are growing heavier by the year. The average man has gained about 3.5 kg in the past decade and, if the official Australian figures are correct, is presently laying down an extra gram a day.

This is happening despite the fact that men are drinking less and are more aware of the need to eat less.

Lack of exercise is not, as is often thought, the only culprit. The cause is far more complex. In the first instance it involves a subtle interplay between convenience and status.

Look, for example, at a small thing like an automatic garage door. When a well-to-do suburban man arrives home all he does is effortlessly push a button to open and close it. This activity probably uses up a fraction of a calorie, if he had manual garage doors, he would have to get out of the car, open the doors, get back in, drive in, get out and then close the doors. This could use three or four calories. If he went through this routine twice a day, he would make a significant dent in the nine calories contained in that extra daily gram that would otherwise be laid down as fat.

Similarly he could use that gram and more by hand-washing his car rather than pushing a button at the automatic car wash.

Convenience always comes with a price. The more convenient a man’s life becomes, the less he needs to move and the more at risk he is of growing fat. Convenience is creeping into every aspect of men’s lives. Where once they had to use a few calories to get to a bank, now they can use the telephone or Internet. If they want to lunch on a fat-laden pizza they don’t have to waste an ounce of energy procuring it. They just dial or fax and shuffle to the door to collect it.

These are all little conveniences but they have an incremental effect which male Australia is now amply demonstrating. At every age Australian men have more excess fat than women. National Heart Foundation figures show that 60 per cent of men over the age of 45 are overweight or obese compared to about 43 per cent of women of the same age.

The push for convenience goes beyond food and devices. It informs their lifestyle. Watch men circle a car park, looking for the spot closest to the entrance. They’re circling to save a few steps, to minimise their energy expenditure. What they are saving their energy for, no-one knows! At the workplace, men with the highest status usually have parking spots closest to the building. Our social values are such that high status is now equated with low energy expenditure.

Studies show the average person in the UK in the 1990s was expending 800 less calories a day than the average person did in the 1970s. They were also consuming 750 calories less each day.

The individual effect of this net gain of 50 calories a day depends, to a large extent, on the nature of the calories consumed. Some foodstuffs don’t convert as readily to fat on the human body as others. While fats tend to be stored as fat, carbohydrates are used as more immediate sources of energy.

Fats are the enemy. Modern nutritionists tell men they can eat what they like – as long as they avoid fat. Cutting dietary fat is the key to weight loss and they urge men to read food labels so they know what they are eating.

Many men avoid obvious sources of fat like chips, cheese and

T-bone steak but will freely eat biscuits and salad dressing which have loads of hidden fat. Labels must be read for fat content, not just calories.

If Australian men reduced the level of fat in their diet from 38 to 28 per cent, this would take up to 10 kg off their weight in a year. But that is a high hope as the consumption of fat has been steadily rising in the past two centuries.

This rise is vividly demonstrated in detailed records kept by a mental asylum in Paris. Since 1780 the asylum has recorded all food given to inmates. In 1780 inmates were fed about 2400 calories a day with a fat content of 12 per cent. By 1900 they were receiving 3300 calories of which 20 per cent was fat. In 1970 they had dropped to 2700 calories but the fat content of this diet had risen to 40 per cent.

More recent reseach mirrored this trend. It showed the fat content of the UK diet had increased by 50 per cent over the past 50 years. Basic calorie intake had decreased by around 20 per cent in the same period but this had been at the expense of carbohydrates. It blamed the increase in obesity on ‘sloths’ (reduced physical activity) and ‘gluttons’ (increased fat consumption).

Given that fat gets such had press these days, why do men still eat so much of it? Because they are biologically driven to do so. Fifty thousand years ago, if a caveman caught a fatty animal it meant he could survive longer. Fat has survival value and we’ve inherited a taste for it.

The problem is that over the years our gene pool hasn’t changed but our environment has. High-energy fatty fat food is now abundant and we have to expend virtually no energy hunting it. In just the last half century food that used to be a luxury has become a staple.

It’s a sign of social status to have high-energy food and not to have to move around to get it.

Another reason for its popularity is that fat is seductive. It melts and warms in the mouth and, more than other food, delivers flavour. When mixed with sugar, or a tantalising aroma, it becomes delicious. For many, fat also has associations with happy memories and celebration. Children’s birthdays and special occasions are usually celebrated with cakes not carrot sticks.

Fat, as a commodity, is highly desirable. No-one drives through a blizzard to get broccoli but they would to get chocolate. When you take a box of chocolates to dinner, it is accepted that you are taking something of value. But really, all you are taking are little nuggets of beautifully flavoured fat and sugar.

Sugar masks the presence of fat in many sweet foods. When eating a spring roll, the greasiness tells men they are eating something cooked in fat. But when they eat cheesecake it is smooth and sweet and there is no trace of grease.

The average man today eats fewer vegetables than his father did at the same age. He also goes out to eat more often and consumes far more convenience takeaway foods which are notoriously high in fat.

The problem with fat is that it is dense in calories (1 gram contains 9 calories, compared to 1 gram of carbohydrate, which contains 4 calories) and it doesn’t promote satiety. It’s difficult to tell when you’ve had enough. Fat consumption easily slips into the ‘eye-mouth’ gap – after eating it, you can’t estimate just how much you had.

Women suffer from this eye-mouth gap too – have equal access to fat but manage to carry less of it than men. This may be due to the pressure on the women to conform to the prevailing slim body image.

Men have less pressure. It is seemingly acceptable for them to carry pot bellies. They trivialise losing weight and joke about their tummies as ‘patios over the playground’.

Admitting fat is a problem would be tantamount to admitting weakness. Unlike women, men live with the ‘paradox of male company’. They want to talk to other men but can’t expose weakness. Before they venture to do so, they need social proof that it is acceptable, they need to see other men doing it first.

So even though they may be fat they’re under no psychological pressure to do anything about it. They don’t have to admit they’ve got a problem, don’t have to discuss it and are not being assisted in getting rid of it.

Women are knowledgeable about weight control and nutrition and have all the psychological complexities that go with years of pressure to conform to unrealistic norms.

Men invariably don’t have the psychological concerns because they’ve had no pressure but basically they are ignorant about issues of nutrition and weight control.

Traditionally, men also eat more. The pattern of eating more begins in childhood but as boys are growing and active, the excess doesn’t show. The pattern, however, is set and they continue eating too much. Past 30 their level of activity falls and it begins showing.

Mistakenly they attribute it to ageing. But ageing doesn’t cause weight gain. It’s the lifestyle associated with the ageing adult that does. If ageing were to blame, how could that explain why so many young men are overweight?