Weighing obesity in 'The World'

Reporter Patrick Cox interviewed Velvet D'Amour, an American model living in Paris, for his series for "The World." (patrick cox)

Are Americans the only people getting fat? Is obesity the problem elsewhere that it is here? Those were the questions reporter Patrick Cox asked while proposing a story on global obesity to his producers at "The World."

"There's been so much coverage of obesity in the past 10 years in all of the United States media," says Cox, whose series "Weighing In: Obesity Goes Global," will air next week on "The World," Monday through Friday at 4 and 7 p.m. on WGBH-FM (89.7). "It started to really frustrate me because the only time [reporters] would go abroad would be to say, 'Oh, Germans are fat, too!' It felt like we were chasing our tails."

The larger story, which Cox has spent much of the past year reporting from countries around the world, reveals a health crisis of staggering proportions. The rate that obesity is increasing, says Cox, "is much faster in some developing countries" than in the United States. "In countries where there's some form of transition, migratory or commercial, with people who are moving from rural areas to cities, there's more money in their pockets, but they're not spending it on things that will make them more healthy."

The results he uncovered are deadly. "I take a look at people who are underfed and malnourished in utero and in the first few years of life," says Cox. "Because their vital organs don't develop the way they should, they stand a far greater chance of growing out rather than up [when they overeat]. They get early onset diabetes and hypertension, etc. It's a really terrible situation."

Such health problems are increasing here, too. But, as Cox points out, in Tanzania, for example, diabetes is deadly. "You're 12 times more likely to survive it here," he says.

Cox finds some promising - and unusual - news as well. As the weeklong series progresses (each segment runs approximately eight to 10 minutes during the hourlong show), he looks at British treatments for obesity, which include drugs not yet approved in the States. And in France, "which has such powerful images of beauty and pleasure," as Cox puts it, he has lunch with a plus-size model who is now spearheading the "fat-acceptance movement."

For the past 10 years, "The World," a co-production of WGBH, BBC World Service, and Public Radio International, has focused on bringing a global perspective to the news. But this series, says executive producer Bob Ferrante, was surprising.

"When Patrick started working on this, [obesity] wasn't thought to be [a problem] in France and in England," says Ferrante. During the year that Cox was working on the series, says the producer, "the problem kept growing."

Sexton set to music

Anne Sexton is best remembered for her confessional poetry, but the late Boston-based poet was a music fan as well, collaborating on an opera and working with an eclectic ensemble in the late 1960s called Anne Sexton and Her Kind. The musical side of the poet will be remembered today, when she would have turned 79, with a concert by the Chorus pro Musica at 8 p.m. at Old South Church featuring the premiere of Roger Ames's "Requiem for Our Time," which draws on eight Sexton poems. (For tickets, go to choruspromusica.org or call 800-658-4276.)

Yesterday on WBUR-FM's (90.9) "Here and Now," Sexton's friend and collaborator Robert J. Clawson and her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, discussed the poet and her music.

"Anne's poetry had great scope and the music that has been written using her poetry has great scope," said Clawson, a Nantucket-based poet, by phone after taping the interview. Clawson acted as creative director for Anne Sexton and Her Kind and recalls the poet as an active collaborator in what the group called its "chamber rock."

"It stretched all the way from fusion jazz to country," he said. "We'd present things to Anne and she'd say 'go' or 'no go.' She would talk the pieces with the group behind her. She had a great ear and was a very rhythmic reader."

Musicians from Ames to Peter Gabriel have continued to work with Sexton's poetry since her 1974 death - a legacy, said Clawson, that Sexton "would have loved."

"That's what poets are supposed to do," he said. "Put music in the language."