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Making Us Obese
The regulation of the food industry seems unchecked in the scheme of
value in society. The value is only measured in dollars and no sense.
Although, regulation is also often abusive in nature and often a quick
fix for a much deeper problem, nevertheless, necessary to protect
innocent people.
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150 Million Americans are Overweight or Obese
11 March 2007 - Deborah Cohen - dallasnews.com
In the Middle Ages, alchemists sought to turn common
metals into gold. Today, some doctors and scientists seeking to
prevent and treat obesity in the United States are attempting an
equally difficult transformation. They want to change people, their
willpower, their lifestyles, their metabolism, even their DNA, to
make it harder to gain weight and easier to lose it.
However, transforming people with drugs, weight-loss surgery,
genetic engineering, hypnosis and other extreme steps is not the
answer to obesity, because people are not the problem.
The problem is the food industry, which provides us the calories
we consume but washes its hands of responsibility for causing the
worldwide obesity epidemic. Food industry marketers say they are
only offering people what they want and that individuals choose what
they put in their mouths.
Is it plausible that two out of three Americans have an eating
disorder? And if we really believe that people are choosing to eat
foods that are making them fat, does that mean we think that
two-thirds of Americans are foolish, stupid and lazy? Or that
overweight and obese people have weaker characters and are morally
inferior to people who have a normal weight?
The food industry spends billions each year to develop products,
packaging, advertising and marketing techniques that entice us
to buy more food because selling more food means making more
profits. And businesses exist to make profits.
Food marketers test whether the color, the font size of words and
the images used to market food will grab our attention by studies
of eye movement. They conduct focus groups to come up with
catchy names and symbols that recall positive memories and thoughts
to condition a response that may lead us to purchase their
products. And food marketers work to increase the frequency with
which we see their products and their presence in stores, wanting to
make their products always available. The food industry also alters
the nutritional content of foods to make them longer lasting on
store shelves by increasing fats, sugars, and salt, making it less
healthy for the average person to consume them. |
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Comment:
Making products always available is a major reason for the
destruction of our society through transportation overload, and
depleting of all resources so someone can make money.
Much evidence shows that individuals are not the cause of America's
obesity epidemic. A wealth of research on marketing and
decision-making reveals that people are easily manipulated,
biased and influenced to make decisions that are not in their own
best interests by how choices are presented to them.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel Prize by proving that
rational decision-making is limited. Another school of
research indicates that people typically make decisions about what
and how much to eat unconsciously and can be
manipulated to eat excessively without their awareness, simply by
altering factors such as portion size, variety, ambience and
packaging.
Just as a bell became a cue for Pavlov's dog to salivate, the
current environment has ubiquitous cues that condition people to
eat, even when they know they shouldn't. It is difficult for people
to resist the largely reflexive and automatic nature of our
response to available food.
We can throw up our hands and say that's the way it is, and let the
marketing that is leading more Americans to become obese and ill go
unchecked.
A wiser choice would be to demand that government bring more
regulation to the food environment, making sure that what is
available is healthy and that the contents of foods are transparent
and easily understandable, even to those who are illiterate.
Such regulation could reduce the magnitude of flawed
decision-making by presenting us with healthier choices. And
such regulation is a matter of life and death. Food marketing
efforts are the modern Sirens, leading us inexorably to chronic
diseases and sometimes to early deaths. Just as Ulysses was able to
defeat the Sirens by having his men plug their ears and tie him to
the mast, today we need active protection from an aggressive food
industry that is luring us to obesity and illness.
People who are overweight and obese are unknowing victims of a food
environment created for corporate profits rather than health.
When people suffer from an unhealthy environment that is cutting
years from their lives, they need help from government to assure
healthy conditions through regulation and enforcement.
As a society, regulation has served us well. We regulate building
construction as a means of assuring quality and value. If
contractors use substandard materials or techniques, inspectors
require the work to be done right before granting approval.
We regulate the car industry. Seat belts and air bags have saved
tens of thousands of lives. We regulate the alcohol industry,
allowing sales only in licensed establishments to people 21 and
over, and have found fewer alcohol-related traffic fatalities in
localities with more controls. We regulate water quality, air
quality and tobacco.
We view clean air and water as a right to which we are
entitled. Regulation is an assertion of, not an infringement to, our
rights. Regulation of the food environment is the next right we
must claim.
An estimated 150 million Americans are overweight or obese.
Too many will die before their time because of heart disease,
diabetes and other ailments. While the nation remains focused
on waging war on terrorism, which has claimed thousands of
lives, millions are dying prematurely because they aren't getting
the government protection they need from the Sirens of the food
industry.
Deborah Cohen is a physician and a senior natural scientist at
the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization. She is co-author
of the book "Prescription for a Healthy Nation, a New Approach to
Improving Our Lives by Fixing Our Everyday World." Her e-mail
address is deborah_cohen@ rand.org.
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A synopsis of the first 5 hours in the series Planet Earth.
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