  urlLink The Observer | Food monthly | The big issue : "The beginnings of America's little weight problem can be traced to the Seventies, when Richard Nixon appointed Earl Butz to be his secretary of agriculture. Butz's job, among other things, was to ensure that disgruntled farmers voted the right way. The result, to cut a long story short, was that corn production soared to an all-time high. By the early Eighties, Butz's legacy was clear: prices on most commodities were down, a state of affairs that has continued ever since. The government still underwrites the production of corn to the exclusion of just about everything else. President Bush has recently passed a bill giving farmers $800 billion over the next 10 years. Then came several crucial technological developments.
In 1971, scientists in Japan found a way to produce a cheaper sweetener than sugar: high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. Made from corn, it was six times sweeter than sugar. However, unlike sucrose or dextrose, it takes a different route into the human metabolism and, as a result, is rather less healthy than other sugars. In the mid-Seventies, palm oil, previously tricky to process, became available as commercial fat, fit for frying French fries and for baking cookies; moreover, products made with it last.
Unfortunately, it is also 45 per cent saturated fat. Palm oil and HFCS changed the nature of the foods Americans love to eat forever. Finally, there was the abandonment of portion control. It took the fast food companies a surprisingly long time to realise that people would rather buy one vast portion of fries or one giant bucket of Coke than look greedy and buy two smaller ones.
But once Taco Bell and McDonald's had trialled this idea and their sales rocketed sky high, there was no going back. Bigness was here to stay; customers felt ripped off if they were offered anything less. As of 1996, 25 percent of the $97 billion spent on fast food came from items promoted on the basis of larger size or extra portions. Such changes have had a startling effect on what an American requires to make him feel satiated. " 
