The ‘Cheers for Chubby’ PSA scared many Americans into thinking they were too fat
Welcome to the theater, here’s a short film to shame you!
When high school football star Mr. Chubby married the most beautiful girl in his class and settled down for a long and happy marriage, he found an unexpected downside to his contentment. The happier he got, the fatter he got, as did his wife Mrs. Chubby. Eventually, Chubby found himself busting buttons and sitting, glum and obese, in his doctor’s office. “As Chubby’s doctor knows,” a voiceover explains, “there is a clear relation between overweight and health.”
This is the plot of the “Cheers for Chubby” short film, a cross between a public service announcement and a newsreel, which played before the main feature in movie houses in the 1950s. As the film handily informed American audiences, “The longer the belt line, the shorter the life line.”
That slogan belonged to MetLife, which produced the film. It was one of the earliest campaigns to spread the word that weight loss was crucial for better health. The science behind the film’s advice comes from the work of Louis Dublin, then the vice-president and chief statistician for the insurance giant. Dublin was the first to note a connection between weight and life expectancy in the 1940s, when he analyzed the massive data sets that came from MetLife’s health evaluation of policyholders. Based on an association between weight and mortality, he became an evangelist for the idea that our best bet for longevity was to maintain the weight of our younger years — at age 25 or 30 — until our death.
Dublin’s research, however, didn’t show an ideal weight, but only demonstrated an association between weight and longevity. He didn’t try to find out why the association existed, and for his purposes, it didn’t matter. Dublin was simply doing his job as an actuary, identifying which people would live longer lives, pay more into their insurance policies, and therefore contribute to the profits of MetLife.
But the MetLife findings became accepted medical wisdom.
“Cheers for Chubby” was just one part of a determined MetLife campaign to get Americans to stay thin. That determination was perhaps to blame for the film’s tone of borderline cruelty. “Mrs. Chubby found that they were making dresses in much smaller sizes than they used to!” The narrator says, mockingly, as Mrs. Chubby walks from store to store trying to find dresses in her size. She’s waved off by saleswomen, until she is welcomed enthusiastically by a store that could accommodate a woman of her size — one selling window awnings. When Mr. Chubby weighed himself, the scale waved an angry sign that read “Watch that tub, bub!”
MetLife also ran a print campaign — ads in magazines and a brochure — that emphasized some of the key points of “Cheers for Chubby.” “Medical authorities report that there are some 25 million Americans who, like the Chubbys, are overweight, or who tip the scales to a point at least 10 percent higher than is best for their physical or mental health,” was the somber message from one ad. Another picked up the PSA’s unfortunate humor, and showed the Chubbys visiting a doctor called Y.B. Fat M.D. for help with their weight problem.
In addition to the MetLife ads, Dublin also promoted his work himself. He reached out to the public directly with magazine articles. “Stop killing your husbands!” he implores women in Reader’s Digest in 1952, by “feeding him luscious pies.” He gave decades of talks to the medical community and published flurries of papers in scientific journals.
He’d sold the American Medical Association on the need to address obesity as a pressing problem by 1951. At the time about 2 million Americans were obese, according to Dublin’s stringent ideal weight ranges. The allowable weight for an average height, medium-frame woman topped out at 126 pounds; for the average sized man it was 159 pounds. Since average weights were considerably higher than that in the 1950s, millions of Americans found that they had become “fat” overnight. Presumably, this was not the case for the Chubbys, though they would likely be happy to hear that gaining weight as we age is now not only expected, but in some cases considered good for our health and longevity.
