Two-thirds of all Americans are fat.

I didn’t make that up. That’s what “F as in Fat 2009” - a report just published today - tells us.

And by “fat” they don’t mean an extra few pounds. They mean overweight. And obese. And it’s everyone. Men. Women. Children. And it’s not just here or there. It’s everywhere.

Okay so maybe you knew that, or guessed that. But guess what? The 2009 results are even worse than the 2008 results. So we’re getting cumulatively fatter year over year.

And bigger clothing sizes and portions and diabetes cures aren’t going to make a difference to our fat nation. We need to throw out the bad habits we’ve learned and take on new ones.

But how did we get here?

Our eating habits have changed drastically in the past five decades, but even that date is expandable. Mr. J.L. Kraft applied for his processed cheese patent way back in 1916 — that’s 95 years ago — and McDonalds started in 1940 — nearly 70 years ago — two of the most recognizable American food corporations. With women moving out of the home and into the workforce, food manufacturers started looking for ways to make products that were cheap to produce and easy to sell with pitches promising less time in the kitchen. Products like instant rice and canned soups were born, and the lines of instant or fast, easy to prepare foods have expanded dramatically since then.

“The average number of products carried by a typical supermarket has more than tripled since 1980, from 15,000 to 50,000,” according to a 2002 article by Marian Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University.

Each year, ten thousand plus food products are introduced into the market in an attempt to satisfy the American consumers’ hunger for fast, easy ways to satisfy our growling stomachs, and most of these are packed with sugar and calories. But they go well with our Cafe Latte Grande’s that we’re sipping on the way in to the office — they don’t leave crumbs all over the car like homemade cakes might, or drip juice on our suits like a ripe peach or even an apple might do. We are a nation of telecommeaters.

And, with “food” like this, all this convenience is making us lazy. And we’re getting lazier by the day, as “F as in Fat 2009″ underscores.

Food Inc. is a movie by Robert Kenner which shows us how the American food industry works — and it’s not appetizing. Using real people to explain the food world as they know it, Kenner has farmers talking about the food they produce because of what the market demands. One farmer says “If it can take you only 49 days to grow a chicken to full size, why would you want one that you grow in 3 months?”

But people can make a difference by stop buying all that junk and demanding good ingredients, and perhaps films like Kenner’s can help the wave of change — because it is out there, popping up in mainstream articles on vegetarian cooking, on 60-Minutes, in best-selling books. Speaking of which Kenner also interviews author and whole food evangelist Michael Pollan – who wants consumers to get back to basics — and this is how he thinks we should do it:

1. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
2. Don’t eat anything that contains more than 5 ingredients
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket — shop on the perimeter where the real food tends to be.
4. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
5. Always leave the table a little hungry
6. Enjoy meals with the people you love
7. Don’t buy food where you buy gasoline.

I have written this because as a new US resident coming from Europe, I came close to a panic attack the first time I stepped into a supermarket here. There was so much choice of things I had never known I would want, and it made me anxious to think that these are the things that my neighbors buy the most of, otherwise they wouldn’t be on their shelves.

And by instinct rather than instruction, I found myself clinging to the outside aisles of these stores, searching for vegetables and fruits grown as close to where I live as possible in the hope that the “fresh” I’d be serving for my family was not a carefully timed ship to market facade of looking good and tasting dull which often can be the case — moreso in supermarket-bought organics. I have searched for Farmers’ Markets in my area but sadly they are not as common here as in other cities I’ve lived in, including my hometown (population 205,000).

But convincing the American public to change their eating style will be the hardest thing ever. It won’t be hard to convince the people in the know — remember when Barack Obama was in Whole Foods buying arugala? As Kenner points out, shoppers are faced with blatant economic decisions each time they enter a store: when the cost of one piece of fruit is the same as 2 hamburgers, which are you going to buy? Cheap, starchy, fatty food may eventually pack on the pounds but their lower cost or convenience factor makes them still the most attractive option to many Americans on a budget.

Things to do:

>Go see the movie Food Inc. 
>Go buy one of Michael Pollan’s books, such as In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
>Go shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s
>Tell me your suggestions.