Where's the beef? Thank McDonald's for keeping you thin.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Fast food chains' products and the American obesity problem - Critical essay

IMAGINE IF McDONALD'S picked up your bill any time you managed to eat 10 Big Macs in an hour or less. What if Wendy's replaced its wimpy Baconator with an unstoppable meat-based assassin that could truly make your aorta explode--say, 20 strips of bacon instead of six, enough cheese slices to roof a house, and instead of two measly half-pound patties that look as emaciated as the Olsen twins, five pounds of the finest ground beef, with five pounds of fries on the side? Morgan Spurlock's liver would seek immediate long-term asylum at the nearest vegan co-op.

Alas, this spectacle will never come to pass. McDonald's, Wendy's, and the rest of their fast food brethren are far too cowed by their critics to commit such crimes against gastronomy. But you can get a free dinner with as many calories as 10 Big Macs at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, if you can eat a 72-ounce sirloin steak, a baked potato, a salad, a dinner roll, and a shrimp cocktail in 60 minutes or less. And if you're craving 10 pounds of junk food on a single plate, just go to Eagle's Dell in Boston, Massachusetts, where the 10-Storey Challenge Burger rises so high you practically need a ladder to eat it.

Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it's easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the Golden Arches and its ilk. It's also easy to forget that before America fell in love with cheap, convenient, standardized junk food, it loved cheap, convenient, independently deep-fried junk food.

During the first decades of the 20th century, lunch wagons, the predecessors to diners, were so popular that cities often passed regulations limiting their hours of operation. In 1952, three years before Ray Kroc franchised his first McDonald's, one out of four American adults was considered overweight; a New York Times editorial declared that obesity was "our nation's primary health problem." The idea that rootless corporate invaders derailed our healthy native diet may be chicken soup for the tubby trial lawyer's soul, but in reality overeating fatty, salty, sugar-laden food is as American as apple pie.

Nowhere is this truth dramatized more deliciously than in basic-cable fare like the Food Channel's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and the Travel Channel's World's Best Places to Pig Out. Watch these shows often enough, and your Trinitron may develop Type 2 diabetes. Big Macs and BK Stackers wouldn't even pass as hors...