Forgive the unintended pun, but this is an enormous problem both for the US and the world the reasons for which have become clearer as the years have passed. And possibly the biggest factor involved relates to how and what we consume today.
Our consumption habits derive from the distant past, but there is now a huge variety of food and drink and we are consuming ever growing amounts. Much of the products contain sugar and highly processed ingredients which can seriously affect our health. But health professionals and scientists say governments are failing to legislate to protect the public largely because of lobbying efforts by the industries involved, as well as how they finance research biased in their favor.
For anyone unsure about what being overweight or obese means, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines the terms collectively an as abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat that presents a risk to health.
A common way of getting to know the condition of your body is to use the Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement – you can calculate your BMI at the following link. It is a formula that takes your weight and divides it by the square of your height. Health professionals use the BMI to screen and categorize people’s weight as underweight, healthy weight, overweight, and obese. They define the latter two as being strongly associated with various metabolic disorders and disease.
Here is a practical example: if your BMI is over 25 the guidelines will categorize you as being overweight. If it is over thirty then you are obese, foretelling a bleak outlook for your health if you do not take measures to reduce your weight. You can do this by following an appropriate nutrition plan coupled with physical exercise, under medical supervision, to ensure a safe and effective schedule.
It is a good question. We could start by asking another question; why is it that many of us who have a good sense about the short and long-term impacts on health of what we consume we consciously ignore the warnings in our head?
As we shall see, this is not necessarily all our fault: the evolutionary process of our species may have played a telling part in affecting the way we react.
Just for a moment picture what it would have been like to be among our ancient proto-human ancestors roaming the plains of Africa millions of years ago long after the disappearance of dinosaurs. Hunting, fishing, and foraging were dangerous pursuits as you too would always have been potential food for other hungry beasts of prey such as rhinos, lions, wolves, and grizzly bears.
The availability of food would have been seasonal and carbohydrates rare. Food being often scarce in an extremely harsh and hostile environment meant you could never be sure if you or anyone else would survive from season to season. It is thought that what we now call cannibalism would have taken place both from within tribal groups and with other variations of the species.
In the 1950s, the Anthropologist, Raymond Dart, graphically described some of our ancient ancestor as “carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death … slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.”
Such was the hardship that the average lifespan of our ancient ancestors was only between 20 and 35 years, though these numbers can be misleading owing to the extraordinary high rates of infant and child mortality. A few of you would have lived into what we now call old age.
Most of your food would have been plant-based collected by women. Only occasionally would you have had meat from small game. You would not have had the tools or other means to hunt and kill big game, though you may have rarely come across the remains of an animal carcass which had died or been killed by another beast.
When food appeared to be plentiful you and everyone else would have made absolute pigs of yourselves first because of hunger and second because you could not know when and where your next meal would come from.
Had you continued to survive the hardships, overindulging like this would have gradually put on some body fat. And this would have provided you with an albeit precarious reserve of energy when food was hard to come by.
As we evolved over vast periods, the survival behavior of overeating became hardwired in the brain, and it remains with us to this day. It helps to explain why we find ourselves wanting almost naturally to eat more than we need, a situation exacerbated by the range and abundance of food available.
Unfortunately, much of our food nowadays is designed to tempt us to eat more. And its success lies in the large amounts of sugar, salt and processed ingredients that are added.
But our increasing consumption of such products have led to an explosion of health issues affecting whole swathes of populations, both on a national and global scale, and about which doctors and scientists are learning more.
To start with, the numbers are astonishing.
According to a 2014 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, half of mankind could be overweight by 2030, far and away above the number of undernourished people in the world. The report noted at that time that obesity was responsible for 5% of all deaths globally each year, with economic impacts amounting to around US$2 trillion, or about 2.8% of world GDP.
Dr Fred Stare, the now deceased founder and chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said publicly as far back as 1976, “we eat too damn much”.
While on the face it, we appear to eat and drink too much and the evidence points to much of it being potentially harmful, this might not be the whole story, as outlined below.
In the meantime, we sometimes hear “you are what you eat.” To paraphrase Steven R. Gundry, MD, from his best-selling book “The Plant Paradox“, you are also what ate what you eat. This is to say that when you consume organically raised produce and pastured animal products their own natural nutrients combine with the good and bad nutrients ingested from the earth, and in the case of animals the plants they ate, enter your body and into your cells.
Some examples of this are pesticide sprayed crops and factory-farmed meat which contains growth accelerating additives and preventative antibiotics included in animal feed. The presence of antibiotics is an additional reason why we have developed a resistance to antibiotics.
The correlation between worsening global health statistics, in areas such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity, provides compelling evidence that some responsibility lies in certain foods and drinks we have become used to consuming. Our behavior is spurred on by persistent marketing and persuasive advertising able to change the way we act, coupled with ready availability and increased portion sizes.
However, instead of confronting the industries involved some governments have been accused of focusing more on transferring the ballooning costs of healthcare and the associated social services to the private sector where critics say making money takes priority over the well-being of patients. This is said to be happening, for example, in the United Kingdom where the National Health Service (NHS) provides universal health care services. There are warnings that the Conservative (Republican equivalent) government means to privatize by stealth the NHS along American lines.
How we have grown in weight is a visible sign of the damage changing eating and drinking habits have had on society. A study published in 2012 in the journal BMC Public Health ranked Americans as the world’s third-heaviest people. More specifically, men in the US put on an extra thirty pounds when compared to their counterparts in the 1960s. Women fared slightly worse.
Some of the weight gains have been offset by slight increases in height. But most of the extra pounds are to be found around the girth, made worse by a comparatively sedentary life-style and a lack of physical exercise.
The authors of that study, written ten years ago, sent a clear warning that “tackling population fatness may be critical to world food security and ecological sustainability.” Since then, numerous other studies have underlined similar warnings. But the growing numbers of overweight and obese show that governments in the US and elsewhere have for whatever reason largely ignored the warnings.
More recently, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), report that the prevalence of obesity in the US has been steadily growing, reaching about 42% in 2020 with severe obesity rising from 4.7% to 9.2%. That represents over 139 million Americans and is a huge and expensive burden on health systems, estimated at US$173 billion (about $530 per person) in 2019 dollars. Worse, projections indicate on current trends the number of obese will rise to 47% by 2030, equivalent to over 164 million, using population numbers from Population of United States of America 2030 – PopulationPyramid.net
From a global perspective, World Obesity https://www.worldobesityday.org/ predict that by 2030 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men will be living with obesity. That equates to over 1 billion people.
There has been a long-standing assertion that eating too much leads to overweight and obesity. While that may be true, more recent research shows that our unique metabolic systems are more likely to blame. The subject is controversial, but there is mounting evidence which overturns traditional thinking that fats are the root cause of heart and other diseases, and the finger points more towards overconsumption of carbohydrates. It has been called an hormonal regulatory disorder.
The overeating phenomenon is also augmented by our present-day habit of having three meals a day, which are often supplemented between meals with snacks, such as biscuits, a pack of crisps, or a chocolate bar. In many societies, meals are highly social family affairs. But the habit of three meals a day was not always the case, as this interesting article by the British BBC explains.
There may also be a connection with how most individuals and families now increasingly live in urban environments. Those with poor incomes may tend to consume the cheaper prepared food; others might face the daily grind of a stressful schedule and have neither the time nor the will to prepare their own food, and even less to consider the longer-term consequences of eating convenience / fast foods.
In contrast to the compelling evidence provided by doctors, scientists and others, the food sector has the financial muscle to spend huge sums lobbying policy makers to influence and dilute any legislation that many experts believe is needed to combat the growing health crisis in the country. After all, why would a senator or member of congress support any legislation that would affect employment and the economies of their state, as well as their chances of re-election.
Their goal is to ensure a healthy growth in a highly competitive market and make money for owners or shareholders. To achieve this they strive to increase the value and attractiveness of processed products and spend millions marketing them to persuade the general public what amounts to consuming more than needed.
How the food sector structure is tightly intertwined with national economies was underlined in this 2017 report by the Committee for Economic Development. The report noted that the food sector plays an essential role in the US economy accounting for about:
No one can doubt how important the food sector’s industries are to the health of the nation. But as far as population health is concerned, it tells only half the story.
According to Marion Nestle, a former professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University “they lobby about anything that might affect their business, no matter how remote.” Dr Nestle is the author of Food Politics – How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, an eye-opening book which the Economist describes as:
“A provocative and highly readable book arguing that America’s agribusiness lobby has stifled the government’s regulatory power, helped create a seasonless and regionless diet, and hampered the government’s ability to offer sound, scientific nutritional advice”.
She has also written about the soda industry and in her book “Soda Politics – Taking on Big Soda (and Winning)”, which reveals the extent to which the big and well-known corporations with a global reach vigorously market their sodas despite the devastating impact on public health.
And that leads us to tell you a bit more about sugar.
We have written about these new drugs and the potential they have to combat weight-related problems.