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Who’s responsible for the obesity epidemic?
An excerpt from a column at Rationally Speaking:
There is no question that we are in the midst of an obesity-related health crisis. The numbers are staggering and keep getting worse every year. The current situation in the United States is hard to believe: one third of adults are clinically obese, and so is one fifth of all children; a whopping 24 million Americans are affected by type II diabetes, usually the result of a poor diet. And the numbers are getting worse in much of the rest of the developed world as well. This is going to cost a lot in terms of lives, pain and suffering, and of course financially, to the nation as a whole. It’s a good question to ask ourselves who bears responsibility for all this, and the answer is not at all obvious or simple.
The New York Times has recently published a long, fascinating article by Michael Moss (author of the forthcoming Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us) on the relationship between the food industry and the obesity epidemic. Yeah, I know, the first time I heard of someone blaming McDonald’s instead of its customers for their bad eating habits I too thought “oh c’mon,” but that was the same reaction many had when the tobacco industry began to be blamed for the health problems caused by smoking, and nobody’s laughing dismissively at that any more.
Before we proceed, let me warn the reader that this post is going to be largely about the sins of the food industry, but this doesn’t mean I don’t think other actors bear responsibility. Indeed, I’ll make the case by direct analogy with smoking by way of a very personal experience: my father died in 2004, aged 69. He got hit by four primary cancers in the span of five years or so, survived the first three, got killed by the last one. The ghastly and eventually lethal sequence — which ruined the last several years of his life and likely significantly shortened the time he had to spend on earth — was very likely the result of his life long habit as a heavy smoker. Do I blame the tobacco industry for his death? You bet, and I’ve got well established evidence to back me up on that, from their sneaky advertising tactics to their purposeful campaigns of addiction to augment their customer base. But I also blame my father. At some point in his life, well before the onset of his first cancer, he was well aware of the risks posed by smoking, but he ignored them and never looked for help. He paid a high price for it, and so did our family.
So, yes, personal responsibility pretty much always plays some role in human decisions. But it would be naive to the utmost degree — given the available evidence — to think that the food industry doesn’t bear some, likely even a great part, of the blame as well. And when we talk about responsibility we also usually talk about punishment and regulation, which means that what Moss is arguing in his article and book is literally worth billions of dollars.
more ...
The New York Times has recently published a long, fascinating article by Michael Moss (author of the forthcoming Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us) on the relationship between the food industry and the obesity epidemic. Yeah, I know, the first time I heard of someone blaming McDonald’s instead of its customers for their bad eating habits I too thought “oh c’mon,” but that was the same reaction many had when the tobacco industry began to be blamed for the health problems caused by smoking, and nobody’s laughing dismissively at that any more.
Before we proceed, let me warn the reader that this post is going to be largely about the sins of the food industry, but this doesn’t mean I don’t think other actors bear responsibility. Indeed, I’ll make the case by direct analogy with smoking by way of a very personal experience: my father died in 2004, aged 69. He got hit by four primary cancers in the span of five years or so, survived the first three, got killed by the last one. The ghastly and eventually lethal sequence — which ruined the last several years of his life and likely significantly shortened the time he had to spend on earth — was very likely the result of his life long habit as a heavy smoker. Do I blame the tobacco industry for his death? You bet, and I’ve got well established evidence to back me up on that, from their sneaky advertising tactics to their purposeful campaigns of addiction to augment their customer base. But I also blame my father. At some point in his life, well before the onset of his first cancer, he was well aware of the risks posed by smoking, but he ignored them and never looked for help. He paid a high price for it, and so did our family.
So, yes, personal responsibility pretty much always plays some role in human decisions. But it would be naive to the utmost degree — given the available evidence — to think that the food industry doesn’t bear some, likely even a great part, of the blame as well. And when we talk about responsibility we also usually talk about punishment and regulation, which means that what Moss is arguing in his article and book is literally worth billions of dollars.
more ...
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