By Matt Crenson, Associated Press, 11/9/2002 12:16

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) All Kelly Brownell wants is a breakfast that won't kill him.

In this diner on the outskirts of New Haven, Conn., that requires some difficult negotiations.

He has just ordered a bowl of oatmeal, with skim milk. Now he asks the waitress: ''Do you have any fresh fruit? Cut up bananas or something? Fruit salad, maybe?''

No, no and no.

''The closest thing we have is blueberry pie filling,'' the waitress tells him apologetically. ''You know, in a can.''

''I'll live with the oatmeal then,'' Brownell says, sighing, not happy, but trying to be pleasant about it.

The waitress walks away.

''No fruit,'' Brownell says, shaking his head in disgust.

It's no wonder America is in the throes of a raging obesity epidemic, he says. Childhood obesity has tripled in the past 20 years. Adult obesity has doubled in the same amount of time. Now one child in six and nearly one adult in three is obese.

Only one thing can account for such a rapid change over the past 20 years, Brownell says, and if people would just open their eyes they would see it all around them.

The waitress comes back with his oatmeal, and Brownell asks her why they don't have any fruit in the place. Is it because nobody orders it?

Pretty much, she responds.

''We have one old guy, brings his own banana.''

The waitress has no way of knowing it, but she is talking to a man who has been on a crusade for much of the last decade against the proliferation of junk food in America. Director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, Brownell believes the nation is plagued by a ''toxic food environment.''

Sodas, snacks and fast food have taken over America's culinary landscape, Brownell laments, much the way mini-malls and office parks have scarred the nation's scenery. It has become about as hard to get a decent, healthy meal of reasonable proportions in this country as it is to locate a thriving five-and-dime. Worst of all, few people seem to have noticed.

''Oh my God. I didn't even see that,'' Brownell exclaims.

He's in this Walgreen's drugstore to point out some of the tricks corporate marketing savants use to entice people into buying food they otherwise wouldn't. After a stroll down the aisle leading to the pharmacy department (mostly candy), Brownell stands before it like a man who has just had a cold drink tossed in his face.

There on the prescription counter, right where people go for medicine that's supposed to make them better, is a cardboard display hawking cookies and Kit Kat bars.

''So this,'' Brownell pronounces in an ironic tone, ''is a DRUGstore.''

He turns to walk out, only to find himself having to negotiate a shelf of Fiddle Faddle.

Humans are biologically designed to hoard calories. The gift protected the species from extinction during prehistory, when long periods of starvation were the rule. But now that we live lives of relative ease in a land of abundance, the gift has become a curse.

You don't have to give in, of course. Many of Brownell's critics argue that people get obese because they lack self-control, not because sinister corporations force them to eat.

The public appears to agree. A 2001 poll by Princeton University researchers found that most people consider obesity a problem of individual willpower, not the increased availability of unhealthy food.

But people shouldn't have to struggle to maintain a healthy weight, Brownell insists. Forced to live in an environment that is specifically designed to lead them into temptation many, if not most, will succumb.

Brownell himself is an example. He sports a good-sized paunch thanks, he says, to a book project that has kept him relatively sedentary and snack-prone for the last year or so. In photographs taken a few years back, he looks much trimmer.

It is 10:15 a.m. The cafeteria of the public high school in Branford, Conn., a wealthy New Haven suburb, is buzzing with students on study hall. They are milling, chatting, reading, posing, laughing but most notable to Brownell they are munching on snacks purchased at the school's 13 soda and snack machines.

''This is awful,'' Brownell moans.

Soda and snack companies pay for the right to put machines in schools. In an era of shrinking budgets, schools use the money for band uniforms, sports equipment, sometimes even textbooks.

To corporate marketing executives, putting vending machines in public schools amounts to sheer brilliance. Not only does it sell snacks, it develops brand loyalty in a lucrative demographic.

To Brownell, the practice is a menace to public health. All around him, kids are gulping sodas, quaffing sports drinks, nibbling candy bars. The tables are littered with crumbs and wrappers.

''This is America,'' Brownell says.

In 1994, Brownell wrote an op-ed column in the New York Times suggesting that a junk food tax might help alleviate the obesity problem.

''Fatty foods would be judged on their nutritive value per calorie or gram of fat; the least healthy would be given the highest tax rate,'' he wrote. ''Consumption of high-fat food would drop, and the revenue could be used for public exercise facilities bike paths and running tracks or nutrition education in schools.''

The government taxes alcohol and tobacco, Brownell argued, two notorious scourges of public health. Obesity is beginning to rival smoking as a public health hazard. Why not slap a tax on the foods that cause it?

Food industry lobbyists and conservative pundits soon lambasted the idea as another meddlesome intrusion on personal liberty. They called it the ''Twinkie tax.''

Brownell was lambasted by Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and even supermarket tabloid columnist Ed Anger of the Weekly World News.

''The high-fat Gestapo is trying to follow in the footsteps of the smoking Gestapo, in an effort to force the American people to act in the 'proper' way,'' Limbaugh complained on his radio show.

Now Brownell is in the grocery store. All he can talk about is cartoons. Every box of sugary cereal or gummy snacks has a picture of some TV character beloved to America's children. If it isn't that blue dog, it's that yellow sponge guy or the kid with the weird hair. Brownell can't remember most of their names.

With a few rare exceptions (Apple & Eve ''Elmo's Punch'') he pronounces every product with a cartoon character on it pure junk. If they'd only use their influence to sell healthy foods instead of this junk, kids might eat better.

''People need to get mad,'' Brownell says, pointing to a box of ''Blue's Clues'' fruit snacks (mostly sugar, not fruit). ''The parents need to put pressure on Nickelodeon not to do that kind of thing.''

The average child sees 10,000 food commercials a year on television, many of them featuring charismatic celebrities such as Michael Jordan, Britney Spears and Shaquille O'Neal. How can a parent compete with that?

Imagine a world where those ads featured Michael Jordan endorsing oranges instead of McDonald's, Brownell says. Shaquille O'Neal could sell asparagus instead of Burger King.

It's a pity so much attention, and bile, has been directed at his tax proposal, Brownell says, because his other ideas get lost in the bedlam.

He has almost finished writing a book about cleaning up the toxic food environment, and indeed the tax is last on a list presented in the chapter on public policy. The first four:

1) Encourage physical activity with more recreation centers, bike paths and school physical education programs.

2) Regulate food advertising aimed at children, perhaps by mandating equal time for messages touting healthy foods.

3) Ban snacks, fast food and sodas from schools.

4) Replace the pizza, burgers and fries that are staples on most school cafeteria menus with healthy alternatives, and use the lunch program to teach kids how to eat right.

Brownell is sitting in a hot little seminar room on the second floor of Yale's psychology department with 15 slim students. They are debating the significance of a recent announcement by McDonald's that the company is changing the composition of its fry oil to one containing a healthier combination of fats.

McDonald's fries will still have the same total calories. But with more ''good'' polyunsaturated fats and less trans-fats, the fries will do less damage to arteries.

But will they do less damage overall? Brownell worries that people will eat more of the newfangled fries in the mistaken belief that a slightly less unhealthy food is actually good for them.

He calls it ''the Snackwell effect,'' after the popular fat-free cookies. Under the false impression that Snackwells are intrinsically ''healthy,'' Brownell says, many people eat a dozen Snackwells at a time and end up consuming the equivalent of eight Oreos.

Perhaps, he suggests, McDonald's expects to see a similar response to its newfangled fry.

''They may know this is going to help their business and ultimately lead to more calorie consumption more total fat consumption,'' Brownell speculates.

When asked whether they think french fry sales will rise or fall as a result of the McDonald's decision, every student predicts an increase.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2002