>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Perhaps you’ve seen the TV commercial where the man pulls up to the fast food place and orders a double chin and love handles while his significant other orders thunder thighs.

Face it. As a country, we’re jowl-shakingly fat.

At the latest census, the country had 300 million people — and 600 million chins.

The subspecies Americus Gluttonous have supersized not only our McMansion homes and car seats but our fries and thighs.

Perhaps you, too, suffer from unsightly bulges.

Blame gastronomic ecstasy. We can’t get enough Cheez-Its, Cheez Whiz, chicken gumbo and cocktail wieners.

As we grow in size — one in three Americans are significantly overweight — we have become diet-crazed. But as most of us know, dieting can be fattening. A diet changes our internal thermostat so that as time waddles on, we can eat less and gain more.

Our food pyramid knowledge, meanwhile, is eroding. We’re getting fatter at exponential rates as we meet our daily requirements of whole milk, preservatives, sugar, cholesterol and Ding-Dongs.

We’ve unabashedly embraced the fast-food culture with a taste for the McDominance burger and the industrial-strength Twinkie.

We know the highway to heaven is paved with cheesecake, and we cruise the fat lane, licking bright orange Cheetos fingers.

It’s the land of love handles the size of third-world people.

Sure, exercise would help us pull muscles we didn’t know we had. But as one of the sedentary masses, we can barely gather enough energy to reach for the next Ding-Dong. And if anybody asks, we’ll tell them we have a serious gland condition.

We believe we are not to blame, even after waddling around stuffed to pudgy-cheeked oblivion at an all-you-can-eat buffet featuring UFOs (unidentified fried objects).

All the while we risk arterial blockage in an oxygen traffic jam.

Many Americans no longer fit into European car seats or the seats of the coach section of airliners. We blame the carmakers or the airlines when we should be blaming ourselves for buying chips bags that can double as pillows if we need a nap, which we assuredly will once we finish off the bucket of fried feather meat.

Farmers work hard to meet the demands of a food-obsessed culture. Their ingenuity knows no bounds. In fact, they now grow chickens that have such large breasts they can barely stand.

In the old days, people were skinnier. One reason is diet. Neither Lewis nor Clark were fat. Maybe they lost their appetite after becoming the first Americans to eat prairie dog.

Then, too, fewer people worked at desk jobs. In many jobs today, our most energetic task seems to be scribbling on Post-It notes or deleting e-mail spam. Fewer jobs now burn the sort of calories our ancestors did busting broncs or sorting wildcats.

Today we have more paradigm shifts than body shifts.

It’s time companies with an eye on the fat bottom line began offering health club memberships as a perk. People who religiously work out would have fewer health problems and make more infrequent demands on company health plans in a country that pays twice as much for health care than the average industrial giant with no appreciable gains in service.

In the end, the investment in memberships would make the company money.

But for now, we’ll continue to see double chins.

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