America may be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it is also the country of the overweight. Yet "fat" is a dirty word, even an insult.
This is odd because the figures show that most people are overweight and many are officially obese. Why should a majority be on the defensive?
The prestigious National Institutes of Health in Bethesda played a mean trick last year when it changed the guidelines and at the stroke of a pen added 29 million Americans to the "overweight" category. The NIH uses an Einstein-like formula called Body Mass Index, and if your BMI is above 25 you are overweight.
Under the old guidelines you needed a BMI of 28 to be overweight. My BMI of 26 pushes me into that dreaded category. But now 97 million Americans or 55 per cent are officially overweight, so if you can't beat them join them.
This increasing American girth is causing problems for airlines, car-makers, bus and ferry companies, jeans manufacturers, and even tractor designers like Caterpillar. The Society of Automotive Engineers and the Air Force are spending $6 million on research into the changing shape of Americans.
Back in the 1940s, studies by academic researchers of the American shape concluded that seats 18 inches across could accommodate most rear-ends. But that is not working today in fast-food, calorie-devouring America.
The Washington Post has reported from Seattle on efforts to make the commute across Puget Sound less uncomfortable for the 25 million who annually take the ferries. They have seating for 250, and no more are allowed to board but more and more people are having to stand.
The reason is that the passengers are getting wider and overflowing those 18-inch seats. The ferry-owners decided to reduce the number of passengers to 230 to give the bigger bums more room.
Some passengers objected that this caused delays and mocked the scheme by bringing tape measures on board and starting a petition against the "butt police".
But Seattle, home of Bill Gates, Microsoft and Starbucks, is fearlessly looking into the future of the bigger-bum world. New cinemas and stadiums are surreptitiously providing wider seats.
A seating consultant, Kevin McGuire, is training cinema staff "in how to make subtle overtures to obese patrons who might not be aware of the special seating available to them".
This will obviously please the American Obesity Association which for years has been campaigning for "ending social, economic and legal discrimination against those who suffer from obesity", now estimated to be one-third of adults and one-fifth of children.
The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) will also be happy. For 25 years it has been telling its members and the world that it is OK to be fat. It points out that the fat figure used to be seen as the desirable one.
"At the turn of the century, Lillian Russell - at a weight of over 200 pounds - was a reigning sex symbol." But "today, the American cultural aesthetic of beauty ranges from the thin supermodel, whose figure's proportions are unrepresentative of the naturally occurring shape of the human female, to an emaciated, sunken-eyed look termed `heroin chic'."
NAAFA hits out at the "multi-billion-dollar commercial weight-loss industry that sells people on dissatisfaction with their bodies". This is unfair on fat people "since fat people are not considered attractive or desirable by modern American society", even though there is "anecdotal evidence that five to 10 per cent of the population has a sexual preference for a fat partner."
The NAAFA position is denounced in a recent book as the "fat acceptance mentality".
Michael Fumento, author of The Fat of the Land, complains that "obesity activists are demanding not just to have the same rights as thinner Americans but that obesity also be completely accepted socially".
Mr Fumento claims that groups such as NAAFA "do their best to refute the growing evidence that fat is a major factor in heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other health risks".
Asian immigrants reared on a a diet of fish, fruit and vegetables are seen as specially at risk from the American "fastfood" diet of more meat, fat, salt and fried foods. The research shows Filipino, Chinese and Japanese immigrants becoming more prone to type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
Irish immigrants do not seem to figure in this research.
NAAFA is not deterred and "advocates that the media represent fat people as normal, desirable, and as love interests in movies, television and print".