Americans have become very fat. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), two-thirds of Americans are overweight and a third of Americans are obese. A third of our kids are overweight and five percent of our kids are obese. Adults are fifteen to twenty pounds heavier than they were in the seventies. The good news is that the rate of increase in weight may finally be leveling off. We are no longer the fattest nation–Germans and Finns, for example, now outweigh us.
To a lot of Americans, weight is strictly a private matter of individual rights. We have the right to choose what and how much we eat, and it’s no one’s business but our own how much we weigh. On this account, even broaching the topic of weight is unacceptable. There’s even a “fat rights” movement claiming that being fat or not is simply the way you are, of the same order as being black or white, or gay or straight.
It would be a lot easier for everyone if fatness were merely another battlefront for human rights. Yet with 9 percent of all medical spending now directly connected to problems associated with obesity, and the direct link between obesity and a multitude of health problems, obesity has become an expensive health care issue. Although it disproportionately affects poor people and minorities, in the end it affects us all.
Not that long ago, being fat was thought to be a moral problem–evidence of a lack of self-control. Being overweight was strictly “your own fault,” caused by a poor exercise of “free will.” Cruelly, this applied equally to children (who clearly are not responsible for their weight) and adults. With exceptions made for hormonal or genetic problems, extra pounds offered foolproof evidence that a person was a glutton. Those were the olden days, however, when food moved from farm to market in a relatively straightforward manner, exercise came naturally, and most people, most of the time, ate food that the woman in a home prepared, cooked and put on the table.
Now we live in what’s known as an “obesogenic society”–that is, a society that promotes a combination of increased food intake, non-healthful foods and physical inactivity. Maintaining a healthful weight in this environment requires both education and vigilance. For beleaguered individuals struggling to apply their sense of free will to control their weight (i.e., trying to eat well through carefully shopping and dieting), a treacherous enemy awaits–food itself.
In her article, “Why are we so fat?” New Yorker author Elizabeth Kolbert discusses the findings of several researchers who have studied why Americans have put on so much extra weight during the past few decades. One researcher, for example, is David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the F.D.A. and author of The End of Overeating (Rodale: 2009). Kessler argues that much of the weight gain occurred as a direct result of corporations applying scientific know-how to come up with food that appeals to the specific parts of our brain that desire fat, sugar and salt, leading us to what he calls “conditioned hypereating.” Those who self-righteously strut their perfect bodies ought to show some humility. A lot of good bodies come about not so much from the disciplined exercise of free will as from the accidents of wealth, education and more than a dash of good luck.
Free will was never designed, either by God or Nature, to do battle with Super-Size-Me corporations, let alone a single Nacho Flavored Dorito. (Speaking of Doritos, the new 14.5 oz bags of chips proudly advertises itself as containing 20 percent more for the same price as the old large size–an extremely clever and inexpensive way for Frito-Lay to intensify chip addiction.) Nor was it meant to be of use to people frantic to grab lunch on a 30-minute lunch break, where tracking down a healthful, affordable sandwich is harder than finding a unicorn.
Free will was never a tool to help young children, who must eat the food offered them by adults. Nor was it designed to help adults resist the powerful tools of science, which can lead us to prefer food that’s bad for us to food that’s good for us. Its nature isn’t such that it can go against the steady increase in the number of calories in what’s labeled “single portion.” Finally, free will was never meant to resist an endless assault of advertisements that apply sophisticated psychology to make us yearn for food that is bad for us.
As Kolbert puts it, “Human appetite is elastic: give us more and we’ll eat more.” Or think of it this way: Just as Parkinson’s Law asserts that work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion, nature’s law asserts that the appetite expands so as to consume whatever food is available.
Given modern food, then, it’s wrongheaded to approach American obesity in terms of free will, as if millions of people have a terrible moral flaw. Blaming individuals for not having the discipline to lose weight through diet and exercise ignores the real culprit–the obesegenic society in which we live. Besides, by the time someone’s put on fifty extra pounds it’s difficult as all get out to get rid of them.
Even with a redesigned medical system that emphasizes preventive medicine through healthful eating, there’s limited hope of changing the eating and exercise habits of adults. The best bet is to get at children. First, we should change the way we deliver health care (early childhood intervention, in the form of school nurses, would be a reasonable start). Second, we should change the food in schools–specifically, by offering nutritious lunches and nutrition education, and by banning all soda, candy and unhealthful snack foods from school premises. (It would nice to ban the ice cream truck from parking on the street outside the school as well.) Third, we should reinstate physical exercise for all children in schools, instead of giving it only to those on athletic teams.
In the developed world, soda and chips, as well as apples and broccoli, will exist side-by-side. The plethora of choices in food necessitates using free will–old-fashioned self-mastery, where one deliberately limits one’s freedoms. Yet no matter how strongly a person applies free will to choosing what to eat, free will can never be a match for the corporate food-scientist devil that’s now wangled its way into our food. Nor can it completely fight off the nasty advertising serpent that beckons us to eat Doritos, not apples, whenever we’re hungry between meals. For these monsters, we need good public policy.
