Weight Maven

A friend shared this — 5 Weight Loss Tips for Cynical Bastards — on Facebook this AM. My favorite part:

Society wants you to be fat, and the weight-loss industry is part of that system. So while restaurants and grocery stores want to sell you food, remember that exercise equipment manufacturers want you constantly buying new machines to replace the old ones that didn’t make you thin, and weight-loss programs want you hanging around forever. That won’t happen if you join for a couple of weeks, learn portion control, then spend the rest of their life a healthier and happier person. They lose money if you quickly defeat the problem — they make the most when you stay in a win/lose cycle that keeps you buying their product until the day you die.

Given the source (Cracked.com), the article is more funny than policy, but for all the talk of personal responsibility in health and obesity these days, it is worth remembering that there are competing forces at work here — and industry (both the folks making the food and the folks selling the diets) is laughing all the way to the bank while we get fatter and sicker.

I really do need to get to Stuffed Nation (which has been on the reading pile for a while). I’m sympathetic to Cardello’s contention that the solution is to effectively engage the food industry. Yes, may sound like tilting at windmills, but regulating industry in this political climate (ref: Sarah Palin vs Michelle Obama) is no picnic either!

Update: Just came across this September 2010 HuffPo piece by Justin Stoneman. A highlight:

A processed product with ‘zero fat’ stamped on it (invariably high in sugar, chemicals and carbs instead) is great for making profits, but useless for losing weight. Wreaking havoc with insulin and your body’s biochemistry is not clever. The majority of the western world now do so on a daily basis.

In both of his books, Gary Taubes likes to pooh-pooh the “toxic environment” arguments of folks like Kelly Brownell of Yale, for instance recently writing that “we can find numerous populations that experienced levels of obesity similar to” the US with “few, if any of the ingredients of Brownell’s toxic environment.”

This to me is silly. Taubes’ theory (which I don’t generally disagree with) is that it’s the quantity and quality of carbs in our diet that is at fault. But what is Brownell’s toxic environment except one big crappy carbfest on steriods?

IMO, Taubes does a bit of a disservice to Brownell and others by focusing primarily on carbs and their role in insulin metabolism. Yes, that’s certainly important (and something that it looks like we’ve gotten way wrong).

But policy (and culture) play a big role as well. Stoneman writes:

People in America like to think that they eat with freedom. Ultimately, however, they can only pick what is presented to them, and what they can afford. Then, the decision is based on what they believe to be healthy, tasty and safe.

You just need to look at the comparison between obesity and food deserts in the US to consider the role of “toxic environments” could play in making an already bad problem worse.