Back in MY day, we drank vats of oil for breakfast and never gained a pound

In what is perhaps the most simultaneously self- and other-loathing article ever, the NY Times finds Greek children to be not just "overweight," as it calls American flabsters, but positively bulging--"husky," "stocky," "chunky." Well, 9-year-old Maria Loukakis of Kasteli, Crete, now everyone in America knows that you're kind of a cow. And PS: that spanokopita is at least 300 calories. (For the record, I Nexised this, and the NYT never uses the term "chunky" to refer to specific American children.)

But it's not really her fault; it's ours. You may not have been aware of this, but in the golden age of Greece, before America spread its greasy curly fry-shaped tentacles across the Atlantic, all Greeks were actually supermodels. Yes, even though their average height was about 5 ft, and they were often starving, those were good times. Remember when we had to subsist off of onion bulbs from the garden during the Civil War, and the communists kidnapped our child and brainwashed him? Such a healthy ratio of greens to meat we had then! That was before the loss of innocence ushered in by candy stands at the supermarkets (and supermarkets themselves). Rue the day that chewing gum came to Athens!

While this article makes no mention of internal trends that might lead to increased obesity like urbanization, economic growth, sedentary lifestyles (hello, sitting on this park bench for three hours is not exercise?), it is very concerned with American food imperialism in the form of "fast food." Ok, so I've never been to Crete, but I've been to boring small towns in mainland Greece, and I never saw a hamburger outside of the McDonald's and Goody's chains. To be sure, there was tons of fast food, and it consisted almost entirely of souvlaki, gyros, and what Greeks call "spaghetti," but is more accurately a plate of cold noodles floating in ketchup. Thanks probably to Greece's protectionism, non-Greek brands are, as a rule, pretty expensive, so the cheaper and more convenient options are national. Fast food in Greece is Greek fast food, not the Greek arm of America's evil plan for world domination through Big Macs. Sorry fat Greek people--it's your own fault.

As for the fabled Mediterranean and other magical European diets (cigarettes, croissants, etc.), this is really Phoebe's domain of comment.