There’s now unequivocal evidence that humans, across age groups and countries, did not gain weight over the last three decades of the obesity crisis because they became slothful or lazy. They gained weight in large part because of changes to the food environment. Specifically, foods engineered to be overeaten became cheap and ubiquitous. Large portion sizes and fast and ultraprocessed foods became more dominant. For too many families, the most available and accessible meals are obesity- and disease-promoting, devoid of the nutrition kids need to become healthy adults.
Childhood obesity in America is at a record high, according to the C.D.C.’s last count. Between 2021 and 2023, 21 percent of American kids ages 2 to 19 had obesity, compared with 5 percent in the early 1970s. While a small minority of cases are caused by rare genetic conditions or medical disorders, the population increases are driven by how we eat now. Many of the children who need these drugs today, for obesity and Type 2 diabetes, are the victims of a food environment that made it nearly impossible for their parents to feed them in ways that nourished their growing bodies. Only through improving food environments can we prevent more harm.
I see a ton of data and argument on how our new food systems are hurting us. I have no doubt those things are all true. But what about the ‘not food systems’ changes?
E bikes and scooters, electric skateboards etc mean even physical activities are less physical. More automation is rapidly reducing the number of blue collar jobs and making those that do remain less physically demanding. Great for RSIs, less great for ripped construction guys sexily drinking sodas while sweaty and shirtless.
Big Food / Big Pharma is doing nasty shit. The rest of society isn’t helping much. We are progressing toward WALL-E blobs in hover chairs more quickly than I anticipated.
When I first watched WALL-E, I thought the same thing.
2 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
4
I think this is part of it. I used to volunteer at our local hospital, staffing an information point. I’d see many people in a morning’s shift. Something that quickly became noticeable was that the very overweight folk were, almost always, working class. My theory is that those families are still cooking dishes that their parents and grandparents cooked but have not got the heavy physical work that would have burned calories. Only a theory of course.
Industrial problem, industrial solution. Sadly it’s a self fulfilling doom cycle, a systematic issue. However when you focus on children the alarm bells should go off. So good for the opinion piece.
This isn’t an indictment of anyone overweight because few or any have a choice in where and when they were born, or born into. I experienced big weight gain in my 40s/50s, largely due to junk food/UPF started in the “free food at work to keep you in the office and extract maximum labor value deal” started in the dot com boom (puritan ethic my ass) but of course we’re talking children and the future. Imagine growing up eating all kinds of UPF.
Is there hope to change the food system? Yes and no. You can do it on your own if you the time and or resources…but of course kids don’t have control of that, nor do busy parents trying make a living in increasingly difficult times. I’m generally an optimist but on this I’m not because it’s systematic and wide spread. Another interest informs me sideways - all the new tech (ground penetrating x-ray, drones, etc) used to find yet another advanced civilization that collapsed and literally got buried in the earth. Seems we’re, the US, a catastrophe or two away from some bad stuff.
OTOH, cultures that are currently still using small scale horticulture/agriculture or still have a healthy link might survive…if the displaced don’t try to take those resources. Smaller countries with roots in the past that are more mono-culture might also survive like SE Asia and the Nordic countries.
Oh well, not going to solve the world’s problem this morning. But doesn’t mean you can’t be aware.
I don’t generally go for conspiracy theories. However, the seamless way in which the United States and its copycats have turned our food into Franken food and then come up quickly with a whole bunch of medication to fix us after we eat it seems to me to have strong analogy in the way that the diet and modeling and cosmetics and plastic surgery and fashion industries all have a way of making us feel bad about ourselves and then offering up solutions on how we could be better people while simultaneously taking all of our money and our self-confidence. The only losers in this equation are the average Joes who pinball between the various companies that are seeking a dollar off of our misery.
oh dear. . . .
the obesity ‘epidemic’ is way whole lots older than ‘the last three decades.’
fast food ala McD’s & White Castle have been prolific since the 1960’s.
‘chubby’ kids abounded in the 1970’s.
‘junk food’ since the 1950’s . . .
methinks the real change has been ‘parenting’ - just nuke something and call it dinner . . .
as parents, we restricted ‘junk food’ availability in our house.
my parents refused to buy Coke/Pepsi/etc. - - -
we held a line treating junk food as ‘now-and-then-treats’ - breakfast/lunch/dinner was home/scratch cooked.
Well, it’s clearly reaching epidemic levels, and UPFs are relatively new.
I will say that when I grew up in the last century , there was no snacking between meals. If you were hungry, you grabbed an apple & that was it (I still do that, actually). Now there’s fruit leather or rollups (or whatever that stuff is called) with presumably twice the sugar. Cereals that are basically 90% sugar. Did they exist in the 50s? 60s?
On top of that, there’s 3 aisles with chips and candy in every store, and the register areas abound with fun-size this, snack-size that.
Affordability is another issue, of course. Cheap UPFs vs. $$$ lean protein, veg & fruit.
I’d place a good deal of the blame on the marketers, advertisers and PR people. You can produce as much UPF as you want, until those particular departments convince you that it’s necessary, the product won’t sell. Of course, the devaluing of people who don’t work outside the home is also part of the problem. Once that culture is lost, it’s a hard slog to regain old knowledge that used to be passed down through families. How can you know how to feed yourself well if you haven’t seen it to begin with?
I’m always shocked at how much crap is sold in the guise of food. And people think it’s ok.
2 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
12
Me too. But then, I’m also a lot older than you. For the first four years of my life, we still had postwar food rationing. I think sugar was the last item to come off ration.
So, the other day, I spotted something new in the supermarket. A pistachio cream - to drizzle over ice cream, pancakes and the like. Now, I’m a big fan of pistachio so that quickly went in the supermarket trolley. I was unpacking the shopping and the jar was spotted by Mrs H. “Do you realise this is 52% sugar”, she shrieked. “And you’re an effing diabetic”. She has a way with words does Mrs H. I promised I would be careful in its use but did give the pancake dessert that night a hefty drizzle. It tasted sweet and nothing at all of pistachio. It’ll sit in the cupboard till we can find some unsuspecting family member that we can give it to.
At my father’s funeral, my cousin talked about how when they would come over, if he said he was hungry, he didn’t get candy or cookies from my father, but a small box of raisins.
And my parents were so thrifty/frugal/cheap that after they had bought one package of single-serving boxes of raisins, they would just refill the boxes from a regular box.
The mentality of Big Pharma offering a pill isn’t necessarily evil to me. They are trying to solve a problem (self-inflicted or not) that exists in society. You can certainly argue that the long, hard lifestyle change approach is so much better – and free – but there are true benefits to sometimes getting the impact you need for health immediately. Which is why GLPs have been a big difference maker for those who are truly obese or have underlying health issues that contribute to the weight issue. I think Big Pharma is more problematic because it’s profits over actual health and access.
But the issue does indeed stem from big food and big farms, and all those issues that are hot button issues that we can’t discuss. It will not be solved unless we get actual corporate leaders put health before profits and develop a responsibility towards society and their fellow human beings. We also need to train Americans on resiliency. We want things quick and without much effort, and the biggest businesses thrive on selling Americans on that concept. We have people who consider everything they don’t want to hear as “triggering”., so there isn’t going to be an easy path to tell them that if you want better health you need to act and do things differently.
As a young kid I remember when my mom asked if we wanted soda, and everyone (4 kids) said yay. Then my mom would open one 12 oz can and fill four tiny Dixie cups. That was it and it was rare. Soda wasn’t a big thing but then the marketing began and then the Big Gulp era began.
If there’s one single thing that has driven modern obesity it’s soda and sugary drinks and the use of HFCS. And make no mistake about it, chips and salty snacks and fast food got linked to soda because it created thirst . There’s a reason why PepsiCo bought Doritos.
This perspective isn’t a conspiracy theory nor is the drug issue a moral failing. The point is that the US dismantled its social welfare services in order to turn health into a for profit industry. That’s what neoliberalism is (what Reagan and Thatcher kicked off in fine style) and the responsibilisation (individuals are responsible for their own health which looks like dieting and drugs) that is made so visible in the diet industry.
And yes, food systems are also part of this (particularly in terms of who has access to what. What’s described is how systemic harm works except that “throw a drug at it” continues to stigmatise individuals using the only recourses left to them and not the hyper privatisation that has produced this.
I must be older than you–I remember the same behavior, but with a bottle instead of a can, and split three ways (my brother, my mother, and I). In high school I once won a radio contest and got a case of 6-ounce bottles, which I could drink all by myself.
Growing up, my parents never bought soda. Some of this is cultural, and some of this is the practicality of a not so well off immigrant family with young kids. But when we had special occasions and had the big celebratory banquets for a wedding or a birth, all of those traditional Chinese restaurants would put the 2L sodas on the tables. This like a party for us so naturally we (and many of the kids) would just drink as much as we could on those evenings. If there was leftover soda, the guests could take those home, and my parents almost never let us take it. My sisters and I were so bummed.
As adults now, none of us drink much soda. We just don’t have the taste for it, and even as a teenager when we could buy our own junk food, soda wasn’t something we craved. So I am super grateful my parents were cheap and withheld that from us!
I honestly cannot recall having soda in the house. At most, it was ginger ale, and that was for if we got sick, Mom would pop one open, pour a glass and let it go flat before we could see if we could keep it down.
When I moved out on my own, I was a Pepsi drinker; not a lot, but that’s what I would get. But I quickly grew away from it and only have the mini cans of ginger ale (or ginger beer) in the house for Moscow Mules. I just got a crispy chicken sandwich at the pizzeria downstairs for lunch, and it comes with a soda. I called over to my CEO, who was waiting for his food to be ready, asking him if he wanted my Coke. He took it.
The Big Gulp AND the overly sugary mocha-chocha-double-foam-triple-caramel-drizzle-latte-Frappuccino drinks from Dunks and Starbucks are anathema to me.
It’s interesting how scarcity produces different reactions with families and even individuals in that family. I had a conversation about the same topic of not drinking much soda with a friend the same age as kids. The scarcity or rarity created a demand and liking for me and my friend’s sibling but not so much for my friend or my siblings. Same families, different reactions.
In HS the giant fountain sodas became a thing and after school sports a buddy and I would down 32 oz like no big deal, and it was cheap so we thought it was great. Should have been drinking water but no one told us, even the coaches. Hydration wasn’t a thing…and if it was, no water bottle just water fountains.
In any case, I think I’d consumed soda on an average scale, a drink every few day through my 30s and 40s…then the dot com boom came and free junk food in the office all the time, to keep you in there. Just about every work place replicated the idea. So I started drinking the free soda but it wasn’t really free. I didn’t pay for it with $$$ but I paid for it with weight gain and then having to lose it, which anyone can tell is not fun. Something must have gone off in my head…hey it’s free, go ahead…and the caffeine will keep you awake. I was working like 60+ hours a week, so there’s plenty of rationalizing.
We got 7-up as kids when sick. George Lopez once did a bit about 7-up and being sick…like it was a cure.
, there was no snacking between meals. If you were hungry, you grabbed an apple & that was it (I still do that, actually). Now there’s fruit leather or rollups (or whatever that stuff is called) with presumably twice the sugar. Cereals that are basically 90% sugar. Did they exist in the 50s? 60s?
I just got a crispy chicken sandwich at the pizzeria downstairs for lunch, and it comes with a soda. I called over to my CEO, who was waiting for his food to be ready, asking him if he wanted my Coke. He took it.
