Size Matters.

The Size of the Family is getter smaller. The Waistline is getting bigger.

Of course, no where near as in the US, because Italians insist on Smaller Portions, while Americans have had a tendency to "Super Size" everything.

Also, All Italians are dedicated to "the Stroll", and thereby have a modest "excercise" regime built in, whereby Americans have a tendency to "drive" to the
Mc Donald's on the corner. :)

Financial Times, London
By Tony Barber
December 7 2004
Sophia Loren, the curvaceous doyenne of Italian actresses, once remarked: "Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."

She was exaggerating. But at about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) a year, Italians are the world leaders in pasta consumption. According to surveys, some Italians start exhibiting symptoms of stress if they go without pasta even for a few days.

In the culture of material abundance that is modern Italy, pasta deprivation is not a common condition. More noticeable is its opposite: excess consumption, weight gain and even obesity.

In a landmark ruling in September the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court for non-constitutional matters, for the first time included obesity on a list of diseases whose "sufferers" can claim a disability subsidy...

But the court's ruling recognised one of Italy's most startling social trends of recent times: from being a people whose typical Mediterranean diet of fish, olive oil and vegetables helped keep them in shape, Italians are changing their food habits, taking less exercise and getting fatter.

Obesity experts estimate that 16m Italian adults are overweight and 4m obese - a 25 per cent increase since 1994. A health ministry study of the capital cities of seven of Italy's 20 regions concluded that 23.9 per cent of children were overweight and 13.6 per cent obese.

While the problem has not reached US levels, specialists estimate that well over one in three of Italy's 58m people is already overweight or obese. The trend is having a serious impact on Italy's overstretched public finances, costing the state about €22.8bn a year ($31bn, £16bn), close to 2 per cent of gross domestic product, in treatment of weight-related illnesses.

It is also affecting the fashion industry. Catering to larger customers is a growing opportunity for shops in Rome, where US and European tourists often despair of the slim-line stock in the great stores of the centro storico near the Spanish Steps. Pitran, a clothes retailer since 1933, opened a store for bigger clients in October 2001. It was soon followed by another outlet that calls itself, with uncompromising honesty, Extra Large.

Remedies for the expanding national waistline are being sought. Girolamo Sirchia, the health minister, has taken steps to reduce meal sizes at hospitals, schools and canteens, and proposed reinstating Friday as a day of fasting. But it is less easy for a government to reverse the longer-term changes in the social structure that explain why weight control has become a focus of public policy.

Since the late 1950s increasing affluence has reduced the size of the Italian family. The average woman has only one child. Women go out to work in larger numbers, making it more convenient to buy prepared food at supermarkets, including frozen pizzas, hamburgers and pasta.

One brand called Quattro Salti in Padella (Four Stirs in the Frying Pan) is a national favourite for its variety of delicious pasta meals, from wild boar tagliatelle to the spicy tomato and bacon flavours of bucatini all'amatriciana. All take a mere four or five minutes to heat up.

In tandem with the rise of the busy, two-career couple, large supermarkets have sprung up across Italy. There were 6,413 in 2000, up from 3,696 in 1996, while the number of small food shops declined to 193,000 in 2001 from 254,000 in 1991.

Italians still know better than most how to eat sensibly: fresh produce and dairy products are as much a foundation of the national diet as bread, meat and pasta. Many now go daily to the gym, others go on strenuous weekend cycling trips, and the less active still drink hopeful cups of "weight-control tea".

But whereas Italians before the second world war ate modest quantities of simple, healthy food because they were too poor to do otherwise, wealth and temptation are everywhere. This profound social change is reflected in the modification of a Sicilian proverb, according to which you could identify a powerful man - that is, a Mafia boss - by how well-fed he looked.

Now the saying has lost its Mafia connotations and simply says: L'uomo di pancia è un uomo importante (A man with a belly is an important man). But from another perspective, most "important" of all is how to maintain the bella figura.

Italians struggle to maintain the bella figura
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/
33d452f0-47f6-11d9-a0fd-00000e2511c8.html