Update: Some comments seem to be in line with this ad paid by an industry group called Americans Against Food Taxes, I wonder why?
Cross-posted at Immizen.com with obesity charts.
Obesity is responsible for an additional $190 billion a year in healthcare costs, or one-fifth of all healthcare spending. Billions more come in the form of higher health insurance premiums, lost productivity and absenteeism.
HBO's “The Weight of the Nation” is a wake-up call for America. The LA Times has a great article introducing the HBO documentary and notes that the program painstakingly documents “how hard the body fights weight loss and how ubiquitously our social and economic systems sabotage our best efforts to shed pounds.”
I believe there are two main culprits, (1) the US food industry and (2) the belief by many Americans (and promoted by Republicans at the $$$ bequest of the food industry) that eating habits are a personal matter and nobody has the right to regulate it, especially not the government.
A majority will easily agree with the first one, but regarding the second one, I believe it needs to be discussed a bit more and compared to the tobacco smoking situation. It took decades to convince people that smoking is bad. Even if some people still smoke today, they know it’s bad. And it was because the government intervened. But people have been told that food is good and have difficulty distinguishing between good and bad foods and the right and the wrong amounts or the right body weight.
What is the ‘normal weight’ in America?
Here in America (I have also lived in Europe and Latin America), some parents scoff at me when they hear me tell my daughter not to eat too much of certain foods and when I explain that I want her to have a normal weight. And they ask, rightly so, what is a “normal weight” to you? What I can say is that normal weight is already a very different concept if you ask anyone else in the world than if you ask an American.
The parents sometimes worry about their kid’s weight and talk about diet, but when it is time to eat, it is the big portions and about half the time it is unhealthy food. When the French grandparents came to visit, they were surprised at the big portions of food in restaurants (at Disney World and around Orlando), the bacon and grease in the plates of the other diners and the amount of sugar in the American desserts they tried (and they did not even try the sodas because they don’t drink them).
Yes, I told them, America is a sugary fat place. But why? Why this culture of food excess?
I am sure the HBO documentary will investigate that. And I am sure the answer is a mixture of “food as addiction” and the “greed of the US food industry”. The documentary focuses mostly on solutions and that is good, but in order to find solutions, one needs to know the source of the problem.
I have hinted at the “personal responsibility” problem, where people themselves have to make better eating and exercise choices. But I have also hinted at a society-wide problem that is not addressed in the articles, except to present the argument of some people who basically say, “Nobody should tell me what to eat or drink”.
I think that once the problem affects all of us in society and affects the amount of taxes that are spent on treating obesity, that it is no longer a personal matter of choice. Some people may not like the message but when the problem permeates throughout society and the whole US territory, it is the responsibility of the government to take action.
The Catholic Online asks a good question and answers with an equally good answer:
Does the U.S. have an 'obesity-promoting environment?'
‘People have heard the advice to eat less and move more for years, and during that time a large number of Americans have become obese,’ IOM committee member Shiriki Kumanyika told journalists. ‘That advice will never be out of date. But when you see the increase in obesity you ask, what changed? And the answer is, the environment. The average person cannot maintain a healthy weight in this obesity-promoting environment.’
That same article states that “The number of overweight and obese people in the United States is one of national shame.”
But it is not clear to me that people are ashamed. They seem to have accepted their new body sizes and the illnesses that come with them, the same way many smokers and other addicts accept and maintain their addiction habits. But shame and concern has to be part of the equation. “Big is beautiful” should be a thing of the past and a “Big Government” that regulates the food industry should be the top choice on the menu.
The Food Industry
As argued in a
New York Times article, the commercials for sugary snacks and gut-busting meals that appear on TV are seducing our senses and are especially difficult to resist for children.
HBO television executive John Hoffman knew exactly which buttons the ads were trying to push and why, yet he still was not immune to them. “When salt is sprinkled over fries and juicy meats are sliced open in front of my eyes, I can feel myself going, ‘Oh, that looks good,’ ” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview, recounting a day when one of the advertising sequences was being stitched together by editors. The ads, he said, “were operating in parts of my brain that are outside my control.”
Just as difficult as it is for some people to fight the temptation of eating junk food or overeating, an equally difficult task is to regulate the food industry. From
the LA Times article:
The Center for Consumer Freedom, funded by restaurant, food and other industries, condemned the National Institute of Health as joining forces with the nation's "food nannies." The Center said the agency's recommendations would "actively reduce the number of choices Americans have when they sit down to eat" and emphasized that "personal responsibility" alone was to blame for the obesity epidemic.
No. And the food industry (and their Republican friends) will fight tooth and nail to prevent food regulations, including using lame arguments such as that one. I can already imagine the billions of dollars that the food industry will be spending on Romney supporting PACs that will tell the American people: “Don’t let the government tell you what to eat”.
The Solutions
As the LA Times article writes, there are many solutions that will not work by themselves but need to be implemented together. One solution they offer is the easy way out, the solution that would make it easier on people to keep eating. I will not count it as a viable solution because it has the terrible consequence of perpetuating the production of garbage food and taking food away from other countries in the world that need it more, in order to overfeed the American people. The dream solution for obese Americans would be for a miracle pill that disrupts our bodies’ desperate hold on fat, the second best choice would be a pill that breaks the link between excess fat and ailments like diabetes and heart disease. But this is what I consider the best solutions as also stated in the article:
Restaurant giants and food manufacturers must curb their drive to hawk products that entice our brains’ pleasure centers and promote overeating; health insurance companies must quit their long-standing practice of paying doctors only to treat obesity-related diseases and make it their business to prevent obesity in the first place; and Americans must band together, pull themselves and their neighbors off the couch to exercise, and agitate for policies and communities designed to fight fat and promote health.
As the HBO documentary subtitle says, "To Win We Have To Lose".