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Should We be Happy? It’s Not Our Personal Fault We’re Fat

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You know an article is important when you get links to it in multiple emails, tweets and facebook updates. We got numerous links to Saturday’s Fixing a World That Fosters Fat, in the business section of the New York Times. And it truly is an interestin g piece, touching upon a critically important question:

WHY IN THE WORLD ARE WE [collectively] GETTING SO FAT?

Before we even get a chance to respond, the article provides an answer:

[Dieting and exercising] won’t work on their own without seismic societal shifts, health experts say, because eating too much and exercising too little are merely symptoms of a much larger malady. The real problem is a landscape littered with inexpensive fast-food meals; saturation advertising for fatty, sugary products; inner cities that lack supermarkets; and unhealthy, high-stress workplaces.

In other words: it’s the environment, stupid. read more…

We couldn’t agree more. There are too many daily cues that trigger food consumption in this country.

The wonderful efficiencies of scales that made automobiles, TV sets, and computers accessible to the average Jane & Joe, worked fantastically in the food industry too. From a hungry country in the 1930′s, the US became, within less than 100 years, the fattest.

Problem is that government policy is still directed at solving the malnourishment of the 1930′s, for example in the form of silly subsidies for the mother of High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn.

As a result of a misaligned government policy, the food industry has optimized itself for providing as much food as possible for as low a price as feasible. We call this efficiency. This cost cutting has led to the use of truly ingenious substitutions of real food ingredients with chemicals (artificial colors, for example. Vanillin instead of real vanilla, another example, HFCS instead of sugar). But the price of this efficiency has been a loss of of long term effectiveness: We are no longer effective at nourishing our nation.

The food machine, if you will, has made it cheaper today to eat junk food than it is to eat healthy food. A greaseburger costs less than an apple per calorie. If you’ve got a buck and you’re hungry, what will you choose?

Dr. Adam Drewnowski of the University of Washington has written many times on Nutrient Dense Foods, and recently published a paper on nutrition density of foods per dollar spent. Turns out there is a growing disparity – prices of nutritious foods rose almost twice as fast as those of non-nutritious foods in the years 2004-2008.

With innumerable options daily to reach out for dirt cheap junk food, The question shouldn’t be way are 200 million Americans overweight, rather how come not all 300 million of us are…

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  • http://www.thetableofpromise.blogspot.com The Table of Promise

    This is a frightening issue. Many people aren’t aware of farm subsidies. Why hasn’t the media latched onto the irony of the recent attempt by New York State to impose a soda tax. The US Federal Government subsidizes corn to make it cheap, New York State deems it to be an unhealthy substance on the line of cigarettes and imposes a tax just to make it as expensive as it would have been without the subsidies….Does anyone else think this is ironic? Too bad the Beverage association couldn’t get that one to pass.

    Also one of our fearless leaders, Nancy Pelosi, single handedly (ok–maybe not single handedly, but surely she is complicit) made sure that subsidies will continue. I wrote about it last week.

    http://thetableofpromise.blogspot.com/2010/08/farm-subsidies-did-you-know.html

  • http://www.thetableofpromise.blogspot.com The Table of Promise

    I mean rather too bad the Beverage Association KEPT that one from passing (because it was all their lobbying and ridiculous ads that forced lawmakers to kill the bill)

  • http://www.feedyourheaddiet.com Ken Leebow

    I do presentations about this subject. One visual that I would like to present is the main road near my home.

    On a one mile stretch, you will find:

    13 fast food joints
    7 gas stations that sell only junk food
    3 Pet store, hardware store, and office supply store that sells junk food at register
    Many other miscellaneous stores that sell junk food

    And, to top it off, 3, yes 3 CVS pharmacies. And, when you walk around the CVS store you will find tons of junk food!

    However, we think of this as normal. As Dr. David Katz states: “We are like polar bears in the Sahara Desert.” We are not in our normal environment. However, we have been led to believe it is normal.

    And we have swallowed it…hook, line and sinker.

    Ken Leebow

  • http://www.newtaste.com Dave Schy

    Last night I had two ears of corn for dinner. It was the kind of corn that you wait all year to find. I started thinking of all the great, healthy recipes that I post on my website that I make using corn.
    Healthy cornmeal muffins, polenta, corn tortillas, corn chowder, whole grain corn pancakes, popcorn, vegan cornbread, all sorts of grain dishes and salads garnished with corn….I’m just sayin’

  • http://www.eatdinner.org Grace @eatdinner

    Thanks for this post and keeping up the dialogue on this important NYT article. The environment along with social and economic policy play a huge role in the obesity epidemic, but we are brainwashed into thinking it is ALL about individual choice and habits. I liken it to the tobacco issue 20-30 years ago, when the public health establishment was basically told smoking was all about individual choices and there was nothing that gov’t policy could do. I hope that better policy plus better individual choices will help us break the obesity cycle.

    A related post is on my website: http://www.eatdinner.org/2010/08/lost-in-translation-can-i-have.html

  • Heather

    Thank you thank you for publishing this – I come from a family of yo-yo dieters, most of whom have slowly gained weight over the years, some to scary proportions. Yes, personal choice and decisions play a large part in that, but it’s also environmental. I’m tired of the way the media portrays this entire issue as personal choice, blaming those of us who are individually overweight rather than looking at personal choices in the context of our environment. It’s not about making good choices vs. bad choices, it’s more often making less-bad choices vs. bad choices.

  • azure

    Not unlike the “health insurance” industry in the US, given exemption from anti-trust laws, which increasingly fails to provide access at a reasonable price to health care for the majority of people in the US, but which somehow/for some reason, US lawmakers just can’t get rid of. Even though there are a number of models for better ways to do it, some of which have been “tested” for close to 50 years by users in other nations.

    Another factor in the “why are we so fat” discussion, is how difficult it is, in some ways, to incorporate exercise into your life. How many people live in areas where it is pleasant, or even safe, to walk even part of the way to work (or bicycle), to do some of your daily errands, etc.? Where I live, many of the streets lack sidewalks (which wasn’t such a big deal before traffic increased so much), within city limits. Reason: property owners have to pay for them. Funny how they have to pay for those but the streets, everyone who lives in the city helps pay for those.

  • http://www.ConsumerFreedom.com Consumer Freedom

    You blame obesity in America on our making food affordable (specifically corn), but it’s too easy to point a finger at that. Blaming ag subsidies removes the ultimate decision-maker from the equation: us. We have the final say of what we buy and eat. It is a disservice to your readers to remove personal responsibility from “what makes us fat.” Also, high fructose corn syrup is just one ingredient in our diets. Harping on one ingredient seems like a poor way to encourage healthy eating across the board.

  • http://www.livingitupcornfree.com kc

    I think more Americans should vote with their dollars. It is a lot of work, but we can avoid contributing to the industrial food machine which is the only way improvements will be made. As long as processed foods are so profitable, they will continue to gain market shares and swallow up the competition (small farms growing actual food instead of endless acres of GM monoculture crops). Shop at farmers markets and food co-ops and buy only foods that aren’t advertised on television (or better still, cut off the television). Try to minimize purchases of items with an ingredient label instead of spending so much time trying to decipher them. Use your pocketbook to encourage growth of grassfed beef, pastured eggs and diverse organic food crops and discourage highly processed pseudo-food.

    I am allergic to corn so I already do all those things, but I didn’t know how until I did a ton of research on avoiding corn. Even well-meaning consumers can’t avoid GM crops unless they are aware of them. Almost 80% of the corn grown in America is GM and all of it is combined when processed. If it is made from corn in the US, you have to assume it contains genetically modified organisms. Hidden sources of GMO’s include the corn wax on the pretty red peppers and apples in the produce section, citric acid saturated soaker pad beneath fresh beef and chicken, cornstarch inside the packaging of deli meats and dusting shredded cheese and frozen vegetables, vitamin enrichment of wheat flour and cow’s milk, cheese-making enzymes (all of the major American brands), Hawaiian papayas, zucchini, pectin in yogurt, vitamin D3 in dairy products, iodine in salt, citric acid residue in bottled water, corn adhesive in tea bags, coffee beans roasted in dextrose, and on and on. Now, even some of the packages are made from corn like cups from Starbucks, those clear plastic containers full of fresh berries, styrofoam meat trays and some disposable silverware and straws.

    I know this is a very difficult thing to do (believe me!) but we have a long history in America of going out of our way to make change. Remember dumping perfectly good tea into the harbor to protest taxes, walking to work instead of taking the bus to protest discrimination, riding bicycles instead of SUVs to protest dependency on foreign oil, going to jail to win the right to vote, growing a victory garden to help the war effort, marching for equal rights. Avoiding the purchase of GMOs is the only way we will break their hold on our economy, health, government policies, environment and future.