On conspiracy and obesity

Obesity? It's all a conspiracy by massive food corporations!

My reading has led me to believe this; Middle aged spread is a natural consequence of over-consumption of processed carbohydrates much earlier in life. Our bodies produce a great deal of insulin to deal with these processed carbohydrates and in time the insulin receptors become resistant. This forces our body to produce more and more insulin. The end result is that we now experience wildly fluctuating blood sugar levels which causes us to crave simpler and simpler carbohydrates to correct the low blood sugar levels, and the cycle repeats. The processes of the brain making us crave sugars is exactly the same process that causes smokers to crave cigarettes and David Duchovny to crave sex. The challenge faced by sufferers of this hyperinsulinism is similar to those faced by smokers. Telling them to eat less is an obvious solution in the same way you might tell a smoker that the answer to all his woes is to simply stop smoking or an alcoholic to drink Gatorade instead. History has shown this to be ineffective advice. Telling sufferers of hyperinsulinism to eat low GI foods or restrict caloric intake is like telling a smoker to smoke pencils.


Interesting theory, but OTOH we could just crave sweet and fatty food because it tastes good and evolution has made us that way.

And the food corporations simply play - or prey - upon our human nature. (Which doesn't make it right, but it's nice and simple.) Perhaps something else held our cravings back in the past, too? Maybe we have become wealthier over recent times (on average) and are now able to afford - and thus have the luxury to crave - more "stuff", including junk food, takeaways, packaged food and 'enrobed' bars, regular restaurant food and so on. Post WWII we have shifted a lot of our working class into so-called "middle class" whilst simultaneously making almost everything cheaper (via mass production, computerisation and other economic efficiencies). It's empowered and enriched more people whilst offering far more choice in foodstuffs, including what we may consider poor food choices. And food makers have set about making those poor food choices more easily available in order to tap the market. The rise of cravings and impulse eating is thus explained: it's just that saturated fat and sweet things taste good and we have the money and access to buy and eat such junk anytime we want. 60 years ago (or less) it was much, much harder to sustain a craving - it was even harder to find shops open on Sundays let alone 24x7; and of course food wasn't as glorified in the mass media like it is now. There's good and bad in there of course.

The other point about the last 60+ years or so is the proliferation of labour-saving devices, especially cars but also every electrical appliance and accessory you can think of....it goes hand-in-hand with industrialisation, globalisation and mass marketing and in many ways is a wonderful thing, but in a very short period of time we have almost totally eliminated every major manually-powered household cleaning or kitchen tool, wiped out the hand mower, removed the need to walk down the street to have a chat (we SMS instead) and largely (in Oz at least) rendered the bicycle a novelty item for the well-off. Whereas pre-WW2 cars were relatively rare ; few had phones; walking or riding to the tram stop or to the shops, work or school was "normal"; the washing machine, ice-cream maker and the meat grinder took actual physical effort; and bicycle racing drew 30,000 people to Henson Park, Marrickville on a Saturday night. Significantly many of us now shop weekly by car at big centralised outlets rather than walk daily to the local shops. And our working lives have similarly been robbed of physical effort. We have simply tipped the world on its head in just a few generations. These "little" things have been the big behavioural changes in our lives.

That leaves scope for exceptions, people who exercise their butts off, watch their diet religiously yet still gain weight for whatever reason; but for the most part increased wealth + decreased daily exercise = increased obesity. Do we thus tax junk food, promote cycling, educate or legislate? How we deal with this, and how quickly, will be an interesting test for our society.