George Monbiot on the Role of Food Companies in Making Us Fat
In his Guardian article “We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised,” George Monbiot points to beach pictures to dramatize how much less people used to weigh than they do now. “Why are we fatter now?” he asks, then argues, based on data, that it is not because we are eating more calories or doing less physical activity.
Why then do we way more? George Monbiot points to what we are eating now: processed foods specifically designed to overcome our willpower—most often by a high sugar content. I think that is an important mechanism, but would point to one more he doesn’t mention: we have made it a norm for people to eat throughout the day, from soon after waking up to shortly before going to sleep.
One of the cruelest things is that after food companies do everything they can to design food to overcome our willpower—and of course, encourage us to eat all day long—they then blame us for getting fat. Here is how George Monbiot says it:
As Jacques Peretti argued in his film The Men Who Made Us Fat, food companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defences, including through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance.
They hire biddable scientists and thinktanks to confuse us about the causes of obesity. Above all, just as the tobacco companies did with smoking, they promote the idea that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. After spending billions on overriding our willpower, they blame us for failing to exercise it.
Cognitive, financial and social resources help some in resisting the willpower-overcoming power highly designed and processed foods. This means that the efforts of food companies to maximize temptation that leads to metabolic dysregulation especially hurt the poor, seriously exacerbating inequality. Here is George Monbiot again:
… obesophobia is often a fatly-disguised form of snobbery. In most rich nations, obesity rates are much higher at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. They correlate strongly with inequality, which helps to explain why the UK’s incidence is greater than in most European and OECD nations. The scientific literature shows how the lower spending power, stress, anxiety and depression associated with low social status makes people more vulnerable to bad diets.
Conclusion: Please put purveyors of highly processed food—and especially highly processed food with a high sugar content—in the same category in your mind as tobacco companies. They intentionally confuse issues and to the extent they don’t confuse themselves in the process, they knowingly do evil.
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: