TV personality Tom Arnold

DATE November 25, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Tom Arnold discusses his life, career and new book "How
I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest Tom Arnold became famous the easy way, or the hard way, depending on
how you look at it. He was having a pretty modest career as a stand-up comic
when he teamed up with Roseanne, the comic and actress. He became her husband
and a partner on her top-rated sitcom working as an executive producer, writer
and actor. Their marriage was played out in the spotlight and so was their
1994 divorce.

Although the assumption was that he was riding on her coattails, she has
pretty much dropped out of sight while he has maintained his movie and TV
career. His films include "Hero," "True Lies," "Nine Months" and "Austin
Powers: International Man of Mystery." He's co-starring with Arnold
Schwarzenegger again in the forthcoming sequel to "True Lies" and he hosts the
Fox sports show the "Best Damn Sports Show...Period!"

Now he has a new autobiography called "How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years."
Food is just one of the things Arnold has find it hard to say no to, but he
says he's been clean and sober since 1989. I asked him first about his
relationship with Roseanne.

Excuse me if this is a kind of odd question, but it seems that one of the
things you both had in common was dysfunction--being overweight, coming from
troubled family backgrounds and, of course, you were funny, too, so that's
another thing you had in common. But I'm wondering if, like, kind of shared
dysfunction ended up being a good basis for a relationship?

Mr. TOM ARNOLD (Actor): Well, I think it is a basis to start a relationship,
certainly. When you're friends--well, I met Roseanne when I was 23 and she
was 30, but we'd both just started doing comedy. I lived in Minneapolis and
she lived in Denver, and this is before she moved to LA. And, you know, we
had a lot in common because we liked to be crazy and have fun, and yet she
sort of this second life because she was a mother with three kids and a
husband. And so she'd go back to that life and I'd stay in Minneapolis and
continue on doing all these crazy things. And when we got together in Los
Angeles I think that, you know, those things made it fun--the dysfunction and
the craziness--but to maintain--to keep a relationship going, you have to--you
can't be too much alike. I think that was a problem for both of us.

GROSS: In your book you say that your personal life defied the adage there's
no such thing as bad press. And because you started your career, or at least
the more public part of your public, with Roseanne, you were in the public eye
in a very enormous way. So what are some of the ways you think you defied
that adage that there's no such thing as bad press?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, I think that the way I got famous--you know, everybody in
my business--they dream of being famous and dream of being successful. And I
got famous for being with somebody that was famous. I mean, that's not the
way I would recommend being famous if you want to have a career because it's
hard to be taken seriously when the public knows you as, you know, this
goofball that's with this very talented woman. The bad press, you know,
having--and I mention this in the book, and I don't know if it's appropriate
to talk about, but having your ex-wife go on "Saturday Night Live" and say
that you have a three-inch penis is an example of maybe some press that you
don't really want to, you know, cultivate.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. ARNOLD: Right.

GROSS: Say no more. During the early part of your career, I think there was
some question about whether you were really talented or whether you were just
riding Roseanne's coattails. Did you believe at that time before you really
had more a track record of your own work, before you were in movies and you
had your own specials and your own TV shows and stuff like that--did you
believe that you had talent? Did you have real confidence in yourself?

Mr. ARNOLD: No, I really didn't have confidence in myself. I'd always
dreamed--my original dream was, when I lived in Iowa as a kid, I just wanted
to be on television once so that the people that I grew up with would like me
and say, `Wow, you know, look what he did.' But I really didn't have any
confidence. And Roseanne was the first person in my life that I respected
that said, `Oh, you're really funny and you're really talented.' And so what
I did was I didn't believe it, but I thought, `Well, if she thinks it and I
think she's pretty brilliant, then maybe it's true.' And what happened was
eventually by walking that walk, I started believing in myself a little bit.
And so that is--you know, that's what's kept me going to this day, is the
confidence--and that's one of the gifts that I got from her.

GROSS: One of your early movie roles was in "True Lies," which was directed
by James Cameron, who went on to direct "Titanic," and starred Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Describe your role in this movie.

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, this is an interesting part because at the time I got it,
nobody wanted to hire me to be in a movie. And Jim Cameron just kind of on a
fluke said he'd meet with me. And so we--I went in there and it kind of
worked out. I didn't--I was supposed to read some lines and I was so
embarrassed to be there, to waste his time, that I didn't even pay attention
to the script. And then he said, `Would you read these lines?' And I was
like, `OK.' And then he said, `Look, can I film you?' And so I started
thinking, `Well, this is kind of serious.' So he filmed me and he said, `I'm
bringing Arnold in an hour and I want you guys to be together, see how it
goes.' And he brought Arnold in and it worked very well. So--and then he
said, `Don't tell anybody, but you got the role,' so this great thing is
happening to me and I'm not supposed to tell anybody, which is very hard for
me. And, of course, I told people, but fortunately nobody believed it.

But the Fox--the studio was against it. Everybody was against it because
of--you know, I publicly had some problems in the press and had this
tumultuous marriage and a lot of crazy stuff, and had not done anything too
incredibly well up to this point. But Jim Cameron said, `He's the best guy
for my movie. That's who I'm going with.' And so I spent seven months
filming this movie, and at that same time my marriage was collapsing. So in
the summer of '94 I was going through a public divorce, my television show on
CBS had been canceled, I had no jobs. The only thing I had was this film,
"True Lies," that was in the can, and people were saying, `It's going to be
great. It's going to be great.' But by then I couldn't believe that, and I
just assumed that I'd be going back to Iowa soon.

And what happened was it came out, I think it was July 14th in '94, and
people's perception of me and the press's perception, at least, went from
`This guy's a loser. He'll never work again' to `You know, he's pretty good
in the movie. Maybe he's a decent guy.' So overnight, I mean, it changed
things, just by being good in this big hit movie. So it really saved whatever
career I had. And, you know, since then I've done things to hurt my career
with decisions I made, but it still was, you know, a very career-saving event.

GROSS: You titled your new autobiography "How I Lost Five Pounds in Six
Years," a funny title. Were you heavy as a kid?

Mr. ARNOLD: You know, I always thought I was fat as a kid. I never would
take my shirt of. I always felt fat. But when I look at pictures of myself
as a kid, I was in pretty good shape. So, you know, it's funny that as you're
bigger and you're older and you look back and you remember feeling fat when
you were younger and you think, `Why did I feel that way? What was wrong with
me? I wish I would look like that now.' So it's been something I've battled
in adulthood a lot, and do to this day, obviously, and I assume I'll always
battle it.

GROSS: When do you think you really started putting on weight?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, I put on weight in my 20s. I think when I was 20 I weighed
200 pounds, I remember that, for the first time. And then when I was 30, I
weighed 300 pounds. So I saw the progression of 10 pounds a year. And I kind
of played that out in my head, `Well, how soon till I get the record?' I
mean, if I'm 40 and I'm 400, and 50 and 500. So, you know, I got really
disgustingly big. You know, I drank a lot. And ironically, I was also a
cocaine addict, and a lot of time cocaine addicts tend to be the slimmer
folks. But, you know, I could still eat and everything when I was doing the
drugs, so it had no benefits whatsoever for me and I--it got a little scary.

And what I did was I went on a diet. I think Roseanne and I both did this,
but Oprah had lost a whole bunch of weight, and I saw on TV, by drinking this
stuff called Optifast or whatever it was. And you don't eat any food. You
just drink these shakes. So for about 65 days I didn't eat any food. I just
drank these shakes. And I lost over 80 pounds and that was great, but, you
know, I sort of lost my mind and, you know, immediately started gaining the
weight back. And there's no--you know, I learned a pretty good lesson that
there's no easy way out of this thing.

GROSS: How did being heavy effect your sense of yourself as a performer?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, you know, being the fat guy--you know, it's a little bit
easier in life to be a performer and be the fat guy because people accept
that. I mean, if you look at television today, look at the ABC or CBS
schedule, you'll see a lot of fat guys with a lot of very pretty, trim women.
So I think that this business accepts that to a certain point, especially if
you're the funny fat guy. But it affects the rest of your life in pretty
interesting ways. I think that, you know, people--you know, they accept it up
to a point, but if you look like you're the fat guy's who's going to have a
heart attack, then people start getting concerned and the audience doesn't
appreciate that.

GROSS: Are there, like, stupid fat roles that you turned down, roles that
strike you as really dumb based on, like, stupid fat jokes?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, there's a lot of roles like that in very stupid movies and,
you know, I've been in some movies that weren't so good, but I fortunately
have never had to go to that place where it's all about making fun of the fat
guy. The worst thing I ever did--I gained 40 pounds to be in an Oliver Stone
film and...

GROSS: Which one?

Mr. ARNOLD: "Any Given Sunday." And the story goes like this. I rehearsed
with Al Pacino. I did all this stuff. I did this and that and this and that.
And they changed the way my face looked, you know. They did a lot of
different things. And then I got a call that it wasn't working out. And then
I went to see the movie, and Oliver Stone played my part. So, you know, it
was a great opportunity to gain some weight and to, you know, spend a little
time with Oliver Stone and those guys, but, you know, it didn't pan out,
which, you know, in some ways--I write about in the book I was kind of
relieved.

GROSS: Why were you relieved?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, at the time it seemed like it would be a pretty chaotic set
to work on. I never felt like that Oliver was happy with me. And, you know,
I feel like if I'm going to spend three months with somebody, that I'd kind of
like to know that occasionally they felt like I was doing the right thing. So
I'm not sure if in the back of his mind he always said, `Well, I really kind
of want to play this myself,' but it wasn't that great of a part. You know--I
mean, it wasn't a--it would have been great to be in the film, you know, a big
honor, but it wasn't a bunch of acting. I was playing a sportscaster and
so--but the funny thing is, I put script notes as we were rehearsing and he
actually--when I went to see the film, he actually used some of them, unless
his ex-wife had 27 personalities, which it very may well be true.

GROSS: My guest is actor Tom Arnold. He has a new autobiography called "How
I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years." We'll be back after a break. This is FRESH
AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Tom Arnold is my guest. He has a new autobiography called "How I Lost
Five Pounds in Six Years."

One of the things you talk about in your new autobiography is your family.
And, boy, this is interesting. You have--I think there were seven kids in
your family. One of your sisters is in prison. One of your brothers is born
again. One of your brothers is gay. I have to say, this is a pretty wide
range of...

Mr. ARNOLD: Yes, exactly.

GROSS: Pretty wide range of personalities there.

Mr. ARNOLD: Yeah. My sister, Lori, who is--I'm the oldest, she's the second
oldest. She was arrested about 10 or 11 years ago for selling crystal meth
back in Iowa. And I tried to help her out and got her a lawyer, but she ended
up getting sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. It could have been 20
because she had a gun, so we felt--you know, when she was making her deals.
So, you know, the family pulled together and we--her son--well, we helped
raise him. We sent him to military school, which is great for self-esteem,
and did a lot of things. She got out of prison about a year ago with a whole
new attitude. And I got her a job at the meat packing plant, and she was
going to stay sober. And I went down to visit her, because I heard she was
drinking and doing things which you aren't supposed to do if you're on parole.
And so, you know, I had a little mini intervention with her. And she said,
`No, no. I've got it under control. I've'--you know, whatever. And then
about four months later, I heard she was arrested again. So she's back in
prison for 15 years now. So she was only out one year in a 25-year span.

GROSS: How does your born-again brother get along with your gay brother?
Does the born-again brother try to convert your gay brother to being straight?

Mr. ARNOLD: No. And my gay brother doesn't try to convert him to be gay.
It's pretty funny, because my born-again brother--you know, I'm Jewish, too,
and he--and so he's got--you know, he has some issues. He's a door-to-door
kind of guy, too. They go door to door and try to save people. But he
accepts us the--you know, as flawed as we are, he accepts us and I'm not sure
that his wife and his church group does, but we actually think it's pretty
funny and we try to torture him as much as possible.

GROSS: When your parents divorced when you were young, it was your father who
brought up the children, which was pretty unusual for the time. How did your
father end up being the parent with custody?

Mr. ARNOLD: My parents got divorced. They were going to court, you know,
fighting for custody of us. And the judge--he got to the end of the trial and
the judge said, `I have to put Tom on the stand.' I was four years old. He
basically was going to ask me who I liked more to live with. And my mother
was an alcoholic and she had these troubles, and my dad said, `Well, that's
it. You know, I'm not going to have my kid go on the stand.' So after three
months in court, my mother got us. The next day, she went to my dad's office
and said, `Here's the key to the house. The kids are there with the
baby-sitter. They're all yours.' So, you know, that decision that she
made--although I was upset about it, you know, for a long time that she'd
abandoned us, I was also very grateful because our life was so much better,
because we were raised by my dad.

GROSS: Do you think that set the tone for a lot of your childhood, that Mom
didn't want the kids?

Mr. ARNOLD: Yeah. Oh, definitely. And it set the tone for my relationships
with women, you know, later on in life, you know, knowing that no matter what,
every four years, a woman was going to leave your life. And that's--you know,
I've never had a relationship that went to five years, including with my
mother. So that is something I'm working on very hard right now.

GROSS: How long have you been married?

Mr. ARNOLD: I've been married for five months.

GROSS: Well, you've got a ways to go, huh?

Mr. ARNOLD: Exactly.

GROSS: Tom Arnold is my guest. He has a new autobiography called "How I Lost
Five Pounds in Six Years."

It's in your book that as a kid you were diagnosed with attention deficit
hyperactive disorder and that you were given Ritalin. And I'm just really
interested in hearing what it was like from your point of view to actually
take Ritalin.

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, I didn't like taking Ritalin as a kid because even though,
you know, it was pretty chaotic in my head and I'm very hyper--I still am
hyperactive. But I didn't like the way it made me feel. And so I wouldn't
willingly take it, and so my parents would put it in my food. And I can
remember the feeling of eating a sandwich or eating some cereal and then you
sort of get a warm feeling in your brain, you know, and everything's kind of
calming down. And I remember that feeling and thinking, `Oh, no, they got me
again.' And, you know, no matter what--you know, I think you just kind of get
used to the chaos when you're a kid and you kind of use that extra energy to
go about your life. And I didn't like being calm and just sitting there. I
just wanted to be whoever I was. And my parents--you know, when you've got
seven kids in the house, you know, you got to keep--you got to medicate the
wild ones. So my brother and I were medicated, you know, whenever they could.

GROSS: Did you feel like the hyperactivity of your childhood stuck with you
as an adult?

Mr. ARNOLD: Oh, yeah. I'm very hyper. In fact, before I got sober, I was
back on Ritalin as an adult, and I remember thinking, `Wow. This is pretty
good. I wonder if I could do cocaine.' And, you know, I mean, so since in the
last 13 years, I haven't taken anything and I'm very hyper and I just accept
it and go with it, and it's, you know, a positive thing if you're a performer
because you can always kind of get some energy. It's annoying to other
people. Sometimes it's annoying to people that watch me on television. I do
my best. I have my legs move a lot. And if I focus on my legs, then I sort
of start pinching my face if I can control one thing. So what I figured out a
long time ago is I'm just going to do my best at being myself and if people
accept me as that, you know, then I'm home-free. But there are things I can
do. I mean, if I exercise in the morning, it cuts down. If I don't eat
sugar, it cuts down. If I--you know, it tends to--if I abuse myself with, you
know, sugar or a certain food or by not exercising then, you know, it does get
a little out of control.

GROSS: Now you mentioned you took Ritalin as an adult. I thought Ritalin is
supposed to have the opposite effect on adults that it has on children, that
it would make you speedier and jumpier.

Mr. ARNOLD: That's true with some people, but not with me, and that's
probably one of the reasons I became a cocaine addict, is because it did give
me a kind of a calm feeling.

GROSS: The cocaine did?

Mr. ARNOLD: Yeah, it did. And, you know, things like alcohol and other
things, you know, I was so fired up. So still, those kind of things affect me
different. If I have surgery and have to take pain pills, I cannot sleep,
period. I am up and it still--it does affect some adults the way it affects
children. It does stay with you a little bit.

GROSS: So do you think that the cocaine habit you developed was almost a
continuation of self-medication?

Mr. ARNOLD: Oh, I'm sure it was. I started drinking when I was 14 pretty
heavily, and I said to myself, `Well, I drink, but I'm never going to use
drugs because those people are pretty bad.' And I never even smoked pot till
I got out of high school, and didn't really like that so much, but once I
moved to Minneapolis, this woman gave me some cocaine and I--you know, and I,
of course, did it all and I was like, `Wow. I got to get more of that,' so I
went to draw out all my money and, you know, this is a great thing. And the
irony is the woman that gave me my first cocaine also took me to my first
12-step meeting. You know, so she got better. So, you know, I loved it. I
mean, it made me feel powerful and interesting. But it took over my life
completely. You know, obviously by the end of it I was going to die, but
there was nothing I could do about it, you know.

But finally, and to her credit, Roseanne really saved my life in the way that
she said--once I got out to LA--`I can't live like this.' Because I was
lying. I was saying, `I'm not--you know, I just don't sleep,' I would say.
`You know, it's my allergies.' But finally she said, `That's it,' and that
helped me because then I knew that that was--I was going to lose her, I was
going to lose everything in my life and that was my bottom. And so I got in a
cab went to rehab and have been sober since.

GROSS: Tom Arnold will be back in the second half of the show. His new
autobiography is called "How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years." I'm Terry
Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, more with actor Tom Arnold. And we talk about the science
of fat and why Americans have gotten heavier with Ellen Ruppel Schell, author
of "The Hungry Gene."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with comic and actor Tom
Arnold. He's currently hosting the Fox Sports show called "The Best Damn
Sports Show...Period!" His new autobiography is called "How I Lost 5 Pounds
in 6 Years."

When you started doing comedy, you were doing stand-up for a while. What was
your act like? And did you have a persona on stage?

Mr. ARNOLD: When I first started comedy, I'd seen a comedian named Joel
Hodgson who was out of Minneapolis and he had props and ...(unintelligible).

GROSS: Is that "Mystery Science Theater" guy?

Mr. ARNOLD: Yeah. "Mystery Sci"--yeah. He was great. He had props and he
was very dry and very smart. And I said--I saw him at the University of Iowa
and he stayed at my house. And I said, `OK. What do I do to become a comic?'
And he says, `Well, you have to have a persona.' And I was like, `OK.' And
he left town and I thought, `That's my persona. I'll be Joel Hodgson. He's
funny.' So I started being very dry. And I moved to Minneapolis.

And I had these goldfish and they did tricks and stunts. And I'd pull a
goldfish bowl out on stage and get them out. And one did an impression of the
pope and one was a sword swallower and one rode a motorcycle through a ring of
fire. It was silly, but it was--you know, I was the goldfish guy, plus I was
Joel Hodgson.

So I remember Joel came and watched my show. And afterwards I said, `What do
you think?' And he said, `You know, it looks very familiar.' And I thought,
`Well, that's a great compliment.' But what he was saying was, you know, `You
can't be me.' Plus, I wasn't, you know, half as good as him.

So what happened before I left Minneapolis those five years is, you know, I
kind of got rid of the goldfish thing and then I just started being myself,
which at the time was kind of the wild, crazy, sweaty guy because of my
problems. But it felt good to just go up on stage as myself and be at least
marginally accepted.

GROSS: You're one of those people who always wanted to be famous and to be on
TV and all that. So how do you like being famous?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, I like a lot of things about it. I think that--you know,
I've always joked, `You know, I'd love to be the governor of Iowa.' And my
wife was like, `No, you wouldn't, because then you'd have to go out, you'd
have to meet people, you'd have to shake hands.' You know--I mean, I like...

GROSS: And you'd have to be the governor.

Mr. ARNOLD: Exactly.

GROSS: There would be a lot of work to do.

Mr. ARNOLD: Exactly. But I like--it's great because--in a lot of ways
because, you know, of the simple things, you know, it's easier at airports,
it's easier at restaurants, you get, you know, cool stuff. But you do give up
part of your soul. The greatest part is when a little kid comes up and
they're shaking and they're so happy to meet you, and that's so real. And
that's the best feeling ever, because, you know, that's the kind of kid I was.

The worst part is that everybody has an opinion about you whether they know
you or not. And, you know, I opened up this book about "Saturday Night Live,"
which I was so excited to get, that Tom Shales and this other fellow wrote.
And so I look in the--you know, I look in the back and I see Tom Arnold's
quote. There's something about me in there. So I start reading it and it was
devastating, because it was Will Ferrell, who I really like, talking about who
the worst host ever was. And he said Chevy Chase, but a close second was me.
`It was horrible.' And he's not wrong. It was horrible the last time I did
it. But, you know, that like--it took me about an hour and a half to get over
that funk. I just laid in bed after that. But that's a problem, too. You
just have to be prepared; you're the punch line of jokes sometimes and that
goes along with it.

GROSS: So when you read that Will Ferrell said that you were the second-worst
guest host and it devastated you for, you know, you say about an hour and a
half, so, I mean, how do you bounce back after that? Like, what do you tell
yourself? What do you do?

Mr. ARNOLD: Well, the process I used for this particular thing was that I
said, `Well, A, I was terrible that week. B, I was unfocused. My second wife
between sketches punched me in the face because she saw an ex-girlfriend in
the audience. It was a tough week.' And then I go to the fact that, `You
know, I've seen "Saturday Night Live" be not funny a couple other times. And
I think Will has probably been in a couple sketches that weren't so funny.'
Then I got to pull it back, because now I'm starting to get bitter.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. ARNOLD: So, you know--and I just say, `Yeah, that's really true. I
wasn't good. And I'm sorry.'

GROSS: Is that bitter thing an issue?

Mr. ARNOLD: I try to not get bitter. Every once in a while I can feel myself
going that way and then I just have to go, `Wait a minute. Twenty years ago I
worked in a meat-packing plant. You know, my grandpa worked there 50 years.
That could have been me. You know, I've been so lucky. You know, screw it.
I gotta not feel bitter.'

GROSS: So not that it's any of my business, but had you invited your old
girlfriend to be in the audience that night?

Mr. ARNOLD: No. Actually, she was my assistant. I write about her in--and
my old assistant when I was with Roseanne and we actually dated a little bit,
and that's in the book. And she had a friend that worked for "Saturday Night
Live" from the times that we used to go out there. But in all honesty, I
wasn't aware she was there, but I had not said, `Don't let her in,' either.
So, you know, I deserved a little bit of a punishment.

GROSS: It must be somewheres between embarrassing and really devastating when
something really personal happens in a professional setting, like your wife
pops you in the nose in the middle of a broadcast.

Mr. ARNOLD: It is embarrass...

GROSS: I mean, like, you know, when problems in a personal life kind of show
up in the professional setting.

Mr. ARNOLD: Yeah, the problems in personal life. When I was married to
Roseanne and we were running the "Roseanne" show, you know, we used to have
some pretty interesting arguments in front of people. Now the problem with
us, well, we didn't care. We didn't care and it's--and I think it terrified
people around us. And then we'd get over it and hug and it'd be all fine, but
the people around us were like in shock.

But I think the most embarrassing moment was I was doing my show and somebody
came up to hand me what I thought were new script pages, and so I started to
integrate them--and I realize this is a--you know, somebody's filed for
divorce here; it's a petition---during the middle of the show in front of the
audience.

And there was another thing she did once. She did take my script and she had
some people rewrite it and put it into the script and hand it to me. So I'm
in the middle of the show and I realize there's all these terrible things
about me and there's terrible things about Arnold Schwarzenegger and these
terrible things. So she is so devious that day that she took the time to get
all her writers together and rewrite my script, which I wish they would have
made it funnier, and just have these mean things in it. And they passed out
that copy to all the actors on the show. That was embarrassing.

GROSS: What did it say?

Mr. ARNOLD: Oh, just that I was a horrible, abusive person with a very small
penis.

GROSS: How would you compare what you think of as your stage persona with who
you are?

Mr. ARNOLD: I don't think I'm quite as goofy or quite as--in real life as I
am in front of the camera or on stage. I think I'm--you know, I can be a
little more crabby in real life. I get a little bit more depressed
occasionally in real life. I'm not as hyper in real life. So, you know, I
think that when you perform you just amp certain things about yourself up, you
know, when needed. And, you know, I'm more boring. I love to sit at home.
You know, I'd sit at home every night if I could and just sit there with my
wife or sit in my office and smoke cigars, and that's about all the excitement
I need.

GROSS: Tom Arnold, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. ARNOLD: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

GROSS: Tom Arnold's new book is called "How I Lost 5 Pounds in 6 Years."

Coming up, the new science of obesity. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Ellen Ruppel Shell discusses her book "The Hungry Gene:
The Science of Fat and the Future of Thin"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Obesity has become a health crisis in America. It was a year ago that the
surgeon general announced that 34 percent of Americans are overweight and an
additional 27 percent are obese. My guest, Ellen Ruppel Shell, is a science
journalist who has written a new book called "The Hungry Gene: The Science of
Fat and the Future of Thin." She says this new science liberates overweight
from the murky category of `character flaw' to the more potent status of
`disease.' Shell is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and has written
about science and medicine for The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian and
Discover. She co-directs the Knight Center for Science Journalism at Boston
University.

I asked her why she wanted to write a book about the science of appetite and
weight gain.

Ms. ELLEN RUPPEL SHELL (Science Journalist): I write about science for a
living. And a few years ago I was grappling with the idea of writing a book
on the genetic revolution and how it was going to transform our concept of
disease, so I decided to focus on one company. And the company I hit upon was
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I began with a series of interviews there and eventually I came to the
company's top executive, and we sort of sat there and talked and talked. And
he kept telling me how his company was going to revolutionize the treatment of
disease--all sorts of highfalutin things like how they were going to design
finely tuned weapons to search our and eradicate heart disease and cancer and
other killers. And I'd heard all this stuff before from other people and
other big shots in other industries, and I found it very, very unconvincing.

So finally I broke in and asked him point blank if there was one disease he
could cure what disease would that be. And he turned to me and his answer was
not the one I expected at all. I thought he would say, `Well, heart disease
or cancer.' But he said, `Obesity. Obesity is the trillion-dollar disease.'
So that, of course, knocked me for a loop, because before then I hadn't really
thought of obesity as a disease.

But I did a little research and I found out that obesity was, indeed, a
disease; in fact, it was a plague, it was a pandemic that was kind of
involving the entire planet. And so this book was kind of an adventure for
me. It was a way to get at the whys of that question, which turned out to be
very interesting and much more complicated than I had ever imagined it would
be.

GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about appetite and why we often eat far more
than we need or far more than we're even hungry for. Apparently we have a
tendency--I mean, we're almost designed to have a tendency to overeat, and the
mechanism that tells us to eat is stronger than the mechanism that tells us to
stop eating. Can you describe the science of that?

Ms. SHELL: This is something that has long been thought, but it was not
until, oh, the 1970s or so that we really started to get a grip on what these
factors might be in the brain. And at that time there was a scientist named
Doug Coleman who was looking at mice. He worked at a laboratory in Maine.
And at this laboratory they have what I guess you could call a living library
of mice. They have about 2,500 strains of mice. And these mice are used as a
model to study human disease, and there are a lot of very strange mice there.
Some of them are without fur and some of them have no sight and they have all
different kinds of problems and mutations. And among these mice at the time,
in the late 1960s when Doug Coleman arrived at Jackson Laboratory, was an
obese mouse, a very obese mouse. And no one knew why it was quite as obese as
it was. It was just enormous, about four times the size of a normal mouse.

So Doug Coleman decided to apply himself to this problem and he did some very,
very interesting experiments, probably the most dramatic of which was what you
call parabiosis, that is that he slit a mouse, an obese mouse, from stem to
stern essentially and sewed it to a normal mouse so they could share a blood
supply. And what he found from this was that when he did this the obese mouse
grew thinner and he surmised that there must be something in normal mice that
was allowing them to hear their appetite signals that was missing in the obese
mouse.

And so it wasn't until the mid-1990s that at Rockefeller University another
team made the discovery; and they not only found the gene that made these mice
obese, the obese gene, but they found the product that this mutant mice did
not make that normal mice do make, and that's called lepton.

A few years later the obese gene was also found in humans, a pair of cousins
from Pakistan who were living in London at the time. And these two cousins
were incredibly fat. There was one that was two and one that was nine. The
nine-year-old weighed about 190 pounds and couldn't walk. She was very, very
handicapped. And it took some time to determine that, in fact, these two
cousins also had the obene mutation(ph). And when this was discovered, the
scientist involved injected one of these children, the older child, with
lepton, and lo and behold over a period of years her obesity has declined
dramatically.

GROSS: So these two cousins weren't manufacturing lepton or weren't
manufacturing a sufficient amount of it?

Ms. SHELL: In this case, in these two cousins, and this is true of, oh, about
two dozen people around the world, they manufactured no lepton whatsoever.

GROSS: Do we know exactly what lepton does?

Ms. SHELL: Yes, and this is where the brain comes in. Lepton signals the
brain that we are full. It's produced in fat cells--it's the first hormone
that was found that was produced in fat cells--and it goes back to the brain
to tell the brain to stop eating. Now these two cousins had none of it, so
they never stopped eating. Whatever their parents did, there was no stopping
them.

And what was interesting about this was that this was a proof of concept.
While very few of us have the obese gene, what this showed was that obesity is
directed by the genes and some of us have it--there are about 200 genes that
are involved in regulating the appetite. And depending on what constellation
of genes we have, our appetite will be greater or less in a given environment.
So this was proof of concept. This was 1997. And when this discovery was
made in England, it galvanized the field of obesity and got many, many
scientists all over the world very interested in it.

GROSS: I think lepton has proven not to be the quick fix that scientists
initially thought it might be.

Ms. SHELL: That's absolutely correct. Lepton itself was not the quick fix.
It was at the time the Holy Grail. You know, people were saying, `Wow, this
is the answer.' It turned out not to be the answer, not lepton itself. For
most people, injecting more lepton will not help. In fact, obese people have
more fat cells and, therefore, they produce more lepton than average people,
so injecting more is unlikely to really help them.

But what this showed us was that there was a regulatory mechanism in the brain
that varied with our genetics that could to some degree cause us to be obese
or overweight or not.

GROSS: Now lepton, which signals us that we've eaten enough and we should
stop eating, is it easy to say, `Well, I'm going to ignore what that lepton is
telling me because I like the taste of food and I want to eat it some more'?
Can you override that signal pretty easily?

Ms. SHELL: That's a very good question, and scientists are looking at various
signals. Lepton is only one signal. There are other things. For example,
some people might have heard of grellan(ph). It's another hormone that was
discovered more recently that also is involved in appetite regulation. What
we now know is there are a number of hormones and peptides in the brain and in
the blood that are involved in appetite regulation.

And, yes, these signals can be overridden, but it's harder for some of us than
for others to either override those signals or ignore those signals.

GROSS: Now you mentioned grellan. This is a hormone that makes people
hungry.

Ms. SHELL: This is a hormone that makes people hungry; yes.

GROSS: And I think you describe in your book that people who have given
injections of grellan are voraciously hungry.

Ms. SHELL: That's correct; yes.

GROSS: So are scientists tinkering with grellan now to see if they can by
adjusting grellan adjust somebody's urge to eat?

Ms. SHELL: Yes. What's interesting, though, perhaps even more interesting is
that what we eat can adjust these levels of hormones. For example, by eating
carbohydrates, we increase the level of insulin in our blood and,
surprisingly, this increases levels of lepton and decreases levels of grellan,
and that actually helps us naturally control our appetite. So whereas some
people think, `Well, gee, eating carbohydrates is bad because it raises our
insulin levels and that makes us hungry,' in fact, what most scientists really
think is that this normal raising of glucose in the blood is helpful for the
control of appetite. It's a natural thing.

GROSS: That's interesting because you hear a lot about being addicted to
carbohydrates now. And what you're saying would really contradict that.

Ms. SHELL: Well, not quite, because we now consume so many carbohydrates,
especially in the form of sweeteners. High-fructose corn syrup, which in the
1970s became more and more ubiquitous in the food supply, has become so cheap
that we're now consuming more of it than ever before. And so we have
really--we are awash in the consumption of sweeteners and simple
carbohydrates, and so, in fact, that is very definitely a problem and a
concern. So when you overeat to that extent, the effect is beyond what would
be normal.

GROSS: Just to explain, high-fructose corn syrup is a sweetener made from
corn, and it's in so many processed foods, even processed foods that you
wouldn't think of as being particularly sweet, like breads. And so explain a
little more of the difference between, say, eating a lot of pasta and eating a
lot of high-fructose-sweetened carbohydrates.

Ms. SHELL: The thing about high-fructose corn syrup, or fructose itself, is
that scientists think that, in fact, fructose, as opposed to other
carbohydrates, may be muting the lepton signal--OK?--so that we may not be
hearing--when we consume large quantities of this particular product, we may
not be hearing the signal that our lepton is trying to give our brains. So
it's apparently quite easy to overeat foods containing high-fructose corn
syrup.

GROSS: My guest is science journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of the new
book "The Hungry Gene." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Woman: (Singing) Running, running, running. Running, running,
running. Running, running, running.

(Unintelligible). What do you know...

GROSS: Ellen Ruppel Shell is my guest. She's a science journalist and author
of the new book "The Hungry Gene: The Science of Fat and the Future of Thin."

Let's look at some of the drugs that are either on the market or in
development now that are designed to help with weight gain. First, let's look
at one of the more old-fashioned ones, which is amphetamines. People
basically used to take amphetamines as diet drugs. What was the principle
there?

Ms. SHELL: Well, the principle there was that it would speed up people's
metabolic rate, and unfortunately it came with a whole host of side effects
that ranged from nervousness and sleeplessness to psychosis. So the use of
amphetamines, which were very popular in the '60s and '70s for all sorts of
things, not just weight loss, is no longer recommended, of course, for weight
control.

But since then, there have been a couple of drugs that have been approved by
the Food and Drug Administration for use for obesity treatment. One is
brand-named Meridia and one is brand-named Xenical. Neither of these drugs
have proved very effective for weight control for most people, although people
can show maybe a 10 percent weight loss over a period of six months. The
weight, generally speaking, does gradually come back. Now some people don't
gain the weight back, but generally speaking it does come back.

So at this point in time there really is no recommended or, in fact, any
medication that's on the market that has been proven safe and effective--and
I emphasize the word `effective'--for long-term weight control.

GROSS: Now there's also something called ephedra, which is sold over the
counter. What is the premise of that and what do doctors have to say about
it?

Ms. SHELL: Well, ephedra M(ph) is sold in various forms in health-food stores
and drugstores, and people might have seen signs for it just along the road,
you know, put up on telephone poles. Metabolife is a common brand name for an
ephedrine-caffeine mixture. Doctors have been concerned about the use of
ephedra. It's not a prescribed drug. It's not well-controlled. And recently
Congress has asked that use of ephedra be very much looked into, because there
have been many complaints to the FDA of side effects that went unreported for
some time. This is actually quite recent that this concern was raised,
although we've always--you know, scientists have always been concerned about
the use of ephedra by such a wide number of people in the population.

The combination of ephedra and caffeine, which people think is the most
effective combination for weight control--and again, it's not particularly
effective, but it certainly is widespread and it has helped some people lose
some weight. But that combination has been implicated in raising high blood
pressure, which, as you probably know, is one of the side effects of obesity.
So any drug that raises high blood pressure--or any substance, I should say,
that raises high blood pressure is probably not something to be recommended to
most people with weight problems.

GROSS: Is there any way of generalizing about how much of America's obesity
problem has to do with genetics and how much of it is just a question of the
foods that we're eating and the lack of exercise we're getting?

Ms. SHELL: OK. It's impossible to separate genes from environment. Our
genes don't exist in a vacuum; they exist in an environment. And all of us
are to some degree vulnerable to becoming overweight in any given environment.
And as our environment becomes increasingly Obesegenic, more and more of us
will become overweight because our genes will no longer protect us from
overeating, and that's what's happened in the United States. We've become so
sedentary and our food supply has become so concentrated in terms of energy
and fat that it's becoming difficult for more and more of us to regulate our
weight.

So again, this is not really a matter of willpower; this is not something that
we can say, `Well, you know, you have no willpower and I don't.' If you find
yourself to be slim in this environment, you're just lucky. People who are
obese are less lucky. They have genes that make it more difficult for them to
regulate their weight in this environment. So what I'm hoping we can do as a
society is to deal with obesity as a societal issue. When you have 30 percent
of a population with a disorder, it no longer really comes down to individual
behavior; it comes down to some societal changes.

So I like to compare this, for example, to tobacco. We really need to
consider our priorities and consider whether big food, like big tobacco,
should be given the first priority or whether we as a society need to
reconsider and give human individuals the first priority.

GROSS: Well, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. SHELL: Thank you.

GROSS: Ellen Ruppel Shell is the author of "The Hungry Gene: The Science of
Fat and the Future of Thin."

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

We'll close with a 1945 recording by the pianist and singer Hadda Brooks, who
was nicknamed Queen of the Boogie. She died Thursday at the age of 86. This
was her first recording, "Swinging the Boogie."

(Soundbite of "Swinging the Boogie")
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