"The Role of Toxic Food Environment in the Obesity Epidemic"
When it comes to uncovering the root causes of the obesity epidemic,
there appears to be a sort of manufactured confusion.
Major studies assert the causes
are extremely complex, fiendishly hard to untangle.
Having just reviewed the literature, it doesn't seem
like much of a mystery to me. It's the food.
Attempts at obfuscation—rolling out hosts of implausible explanations
like sedentary lifestyles or lack of self-discipline—
serve the needs of the manufacturers and marketers
more than the public's health and the interest of truth.
When asked about the role of restaurants in the obesity epidemic,
the president of the National Restaurant Association replied, "Just because
we have electricity doesn't mean you have to electrocute yourself."
Yes, but they're effectively attaching electrodes to shock and awe
the reward centers in our brain to undermine our self-control.
It is hard to eat healthfully against the headwind
of such strong evolutionary forces. No matter what our level
of nutrition knowledge, in the face of pepperoni pizza
the ancestral heritage baked into our genes is screaming, "Eat it now!"
Anyone who doubts the power of basic biological drives should see how long
they can go without blinking or breathing. Any conscious decision
to hold your breath is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe.
In medicine, shortness of breath is sometimes even referred to as air hunger.
The battle of the bulge is a battle against biology.
So obesity is not some moral failing. It's not gluttony or sloth.
It's a natural, normal response to the abnormal, unnatural ubiquity
of calorie-dense, sugary, and fatty foods.
The sea of excess calories we are now floating in—and some of us
are drowning in—has been referred to as a toxic food environment.
This helps direct focus away from the individual towards the societal forces
at work, such as the fact that the average child is blasted
with 10,000 food commercials a year. Or maybe I should say pseudo-food
commercials, as 95% of the ads are for candy, fast food, liquid candy,
and breakfast candy. Wait a second, though.
If weight gain is just a natural reaction to the easy availability
of mountains of cheap yummy calories, then why isn't everyone fat?
Well, in a certain sense most everyone is. It's been estimated
that more than 90% of American adults are overfat,
defined as having excess body fat sufficient to impair health.
This can occur even in normal-weight individuals,
which is often due to excess abdominal fat.
But even if you just look at the numbers on the scale,
being overweight is the norm.
If you look at the bell curve and stick in the latest data,
more than 70% of us are overweight,
with a little less than a third on one side normal weight,
and more than a third on the other, so overweight that we're obese.
But if the food really is to blame, why doesn't everyone get fat?
That's like asking if cigarettes are really to blame,
why don't all smokers get lung cancer?
This is a genetic pre-disposition and other exposures
can weigh in to tip the scales.
Different people are born with different susceptibility to cancer,
but that doesn't mean smoking doesn't play a critical role
in exploding whatever inherent risk you have,
and the same with obesity and our toxic food environment.
It's like the firearm analogy:
genes may load the gun, but diet pulls the trigger.
And we can try to switch the safety back on
with smoking cessation and a healthier diet.
If you lock up two dozen folks and feed each the exact same number of
excess calories, they all gain weight, but some gain more than others.
Overfeeding the same 1,000 calories a day, 6 days a week for 100 days
caused weight gains ranging from about 9 pounds to 29 pounds.
The same 84,000 extra calories caused different amounts of weight gain.
Some people are just more genetically susceptible.
The reason we suspect it's genetics is that the 24 people in the study
were 12 sets of identical twins, and the variation in weight gain
between each of them was about a third less.
A similar study with weight loss from exercise found a similar result.
So yes, genetics play a role,
but that just means that some people have to work harder than others.
Ideally, inheriting a predisposition for extra weight gain shouldn't give reason
for resignation, but rather motivation
to put in the extra effort to unseal your fate.
Advances in processing and packaging, combined with governmental policies
and handouts that fostered cheap inputs for the "food industrial complex"
led to a glut of ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat, ready-to-drink,
hyper-palatable, hyper- profitable products.
To help assuage impatient investors,
marketing became ever more persuasive and pervasive.
All these factors conspired to create unfettered access to copious,
convenient, low cost, high calorie foods, often willfully engineered
with chemical additives to be make them hyper-stimulatingly sweet or savory,
yet only weakly satiating. As we all sink deeper
into a quicksand of calories, more and more mental energy
is required to swim upstream against the constant bombardment
of advertising and 24/7 panopticons of arms-length tempting treats.
There's so much food flooding the market now that much of it ends up in the trash.
Food waste has progressively increased by about 50% since the 1970s.
Perhaps better in the landfills, though, then filling up our stomachs.
Too many of these cheap, fattening foods prioritize shelf life over human life.
But dead people don't eat. Don't food companies have
a vested interest in keeping their consumers healthy?
Such naivety reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the system.
A public company's primary responsibility is to reap returns for investors.
Consider the fact that the tobacco industry produced products
that kill one in two of their most loyal customers!
It's not about customer satisfaction, but shareholder satisfaction.
The customer always comes second.
Just as weight gain may be a perfectly natural reaction
to an obesogenic food environment, governments and businesses are just
responding normally to the political and economic realities of our system.
Can you think of a single major industry that would benefit
from people eating healthier?
"Certainly not the agriculture, food product, grocery, restaurant, diet,
or drug industries," wrote emeritus professor Marion Nestle
in a Science editorial when she was chair of nutrition at NYU.
All flourish when people eat more junk, and all employ armies of lobbyists
to discourage governments from doing anything about it.
If part of the problem is cheap tasty convenience,
is the solution hard-to-find food that's gross and expensive?
Or might there be a way to get the best of all worlds:
easy, healthy, delicious, satisfying meals that help you lose weight?
That's the central question of my latest book How Not to Diet.
Check it out for free at your local library.