FIGHTING 'BIG FAT'

摘要

When physician and author Don Colbert steps up to the altar at large evangelical congregations in the South, he looks out and sees churchgoers who are, to put it bluntly, too fat. Colbert, energetic with a mane of blond hair, tells the faithful that God has a nutritional plan. Break your junk-food addiction, he exhorts. Eat what Jesus ate: fish, whole grains and vegetables. "Do it for yourself and for your children," thunders Colbert, the author of a best-selling book, "What Would Jesus Eat?" "Do it for God!" Colbert is a soldier in a growing army of lawyers, doctors and otherwise ordinary citizens who are taking on the sprawling and powerful junk-food industry. They're charging that somewhere along the line, America's long romance with fast food, soda and junk has morphed into an abusive relationship. And they've set out to change the finger-lickin' eating habits that have made obesity, particularly in children, a national concern. On the front lines of this grass-roots movement are suburban moms fighting to get healthier fare in cafeterias and lawmakers around the schools, but some sta country who are trying to pass laws to limit the junk food sold in schools. Behind the scenes, doctors are trying to figure out how junk food affects our metabolism and just how much is too much. Now lawyers are filing class-action lawmakers, charging that deceptive marketing practices encourage obesity. "For years I ate fast food because it was efficient and cheap," says Caesar Barber, 56, a maintenance worker with heart disease and the lead plaintiff in an anti-fast-food lawsuit filed in New York last week. "I had no idea I could be damaging my health." This fall, Northeastern University law professor Richard Daynard is holding a closed-door strategy session for nearly 100 lawyers interested in pressing similar claims against Big Fat, or what―in reference to "Big Tobacco"―they're calling "Big Food." "Five years ago, when we said we'd take junk-food makers to court," says Daynard, "people laughed."