The February 2011 issue of Scientific American ran an 8-page article on obesity which starts with this stark assessment of the situation:

"Obesity is a national health crisis — that much we know. If current trends continue, it will soon surpass smoking in the U.S. as the biggest single factor in early death, reduced quality of life and added health care costs … " (1)

That′s hardly an exaggeration. Obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, two of the leading causes of premature death. In addition, the same lifestyle that leads to obesity also increases cancer risk. According to health experts from the Americal Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund, simple lifestyle changes could prevent a third of all common cancers (2).

How did we ever get into this mess? By replacing real food and drink with processed junk. Not only is this stuff — you can′t call it nutrition — unhealthy but it is literally addictive (3). Food and drug abuse affect brain function in similar ways, and junk food eating patterns resemble drug addiction — binge eating, an inability to stop even though one is aware of adverse health consequences, an increase over time in the frequency and quantity of junk food eaten, etc. Small wonder then that the author of the SciAm article considers behaviour modification techniques developed for dealing with addiction to be society′s best hope for combatting the obesity epidemic:

"Behavior-focused studies of obesity and diets as early as the 1960s recognized some basic conditions that seemed correlated with a greater chance of losing weight and keeping it off: rigorously measuring and recording calories, exercise and weight; making modest, gradual changes rather than severe ones; eating balanced diets that go easy on fats and sugar rather than dropping major food groups; setting clear, modest goals; focusing on lifelong habits rather than short-term diets; and especially attending groups where dieters could receive encouragement to stick with their efforts and praise for having done so." (1)

Is this where we are headed? One of life′s most basic and pleasurable activities — eating — needs to be guided and supervised by behavioural psychologists, with therapy group meetings for reinforcement? We can′t seem to prevent the food processing industry from hooking us on their addictive junk, so we′ve created another industry, the weight loss industry complete with psychologists and therapy groups, to help us manage our addiction to the stuff.

Admittedly, some pressure is now being applied to the food industry to stop their nefarious business practices, but we still have a long way to go. Take the case of McDonald′s "Happy Meals". Apparently, the company gives away some cheap junk toy with every so-called Happy Meal. The kids want the toy and nag their parents until they get what they want. Clearly, McDonald′s manipulates parents through their children into buying junk food, and good luck to any parent trying to resist. This is about as blatant an example of manipulating children as you will find, yet there is opposition to banning the practice; such regulations are considered by many to be too intrusive (1).

We are in the grips of an ideology called capitalism, the naive belief that everyone′s selfish actions will automatically optimize the common good. This "invisible hand" may have worked in Adam Smith′s day, but it doesn′t work in this age of multinational corporations.

Power tends to corrupt; we have no trouble seeing this in the political arena. So why is it so difficult to recognize that economic power corrupts just as much, even in the face of the outrageous criminal behaviour of big multinational corporations in recent years. In fact, vested business interests arguably do more to corrupt the political process than political ambition. And this happens in broad daylight — it′s called lobbying.

Where does this naive belief in the automatic benefits of capitalism get us? A publicly traded company is expected to maximize financial returns for their share holders, but the company is perfectly free to sicken and kill those same share holders and their families with the junk they sell them in order to generate those financial returns.

Have we lost our way, or what?

Sources

1. David H. Freedman. How to fix the obesity crisis. Scientific American, February 2011.
2. Kate Kelland. Simple life changes could stop millions of cancers. Reuters, February 4, 2011.
3. Gearhard AN, Corbin WR, Brownell KD, Preliminary validation of the Yale Food Addiction Scale. Appetite (2009), doi:10.1016/j.appet.2008.12.003
   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2008.12.003