Kurt Harris had a pretty pessimistic prediction over on the PHD blog yesterday:
The elephant in the room for fat loss is that for many if not most people they will never achieve healthy fat levels until they stop using food for stimulation and entertainment beyond their nutritional needs. …
But the resistance to [reducing highly palatable food & drink] is monumental.
For that reason, I predict there will be no progress made at large. There will be victorious skirmishes for a subset of the population that read PHD or maybe my blog and others, but we will not save the world from obesity any more than we will eliminate late industrial corporate capitalism or stop using petroleum.
Perhaps you’ll be surprised, but I tend to agree. It’s not just the bickering over just how many carbs that is the real issue; it’s that people live in a world where they work too hard, make too little money, and are pretty stressed out. But hey, no problem, here’s the food industry to help make it better … at least until tomorrow. Rinse and repeat!
Mark Bittman, who promotes a whole foods approach to health, shared his two cents recently in Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? in the NY Times last month:
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. …
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch.
This is one of the challenges with a paleo or WAPF or ancestral approach. It doesn’t come out of a box and it’s nearly impossible to pick up on the way home from work. That’s a real challenge.
And then there’s policy
I’m not opposed to government intervention (won’t get my Paleo[TM] libertarian card any time soon), but while I don’t care for the conclusion of this article as far as personal responsibility, I think it’s spot on as far as public health/policy:
Based on our research, it seems that [policies such as a sugar tax] wouldn’t affect obesity rates in a significant way because the underlying factors they address are such small contributors to the rise in obesity rates.
One option then is to battle obesity by tackling each of its many factors, in a kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy. But public policy is a blunt instrument, too ham-handed to pull it off. There are simply too many factors and individual choices.
The solution is instilling personal responsibility.
Sorry guys … the answer is NOT to “educate people about nutrition and how the calorie equation works.” Yikes.
Instead, I’m cautiously optimistic that what may work is the hive mind of the Internet. We won’t always be arguing about the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis. With folks like Kurt, Paul, and others (many in the ancestral health space) we can keep on educating people about industrial food the way we educated folks about cigarettes. After all, the ad at right (click to enlarge) shows where we once were with cigs!
Of course, this is not an easy task (it’s probably pushing Sisyphean, pun intended). Look how many people still smoke. But if you consider the math (the first Boomer became eligible for Medicare this year), we are looking at a pretty scary couple of decades given lifestyle-related diseases and health care costs.
So, no easy fix, but it’s essential to trudge on!
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health & food policy. And cats! 
It’s definitely not about educating people, it’s about industry and government. Right now things are structured in a certain way that makes it do difficult to see real change. I too am not that optimistic with the current structure.
Like you, I am not that optimistic with the current structure, but I’m even less optimistic that we’ll see fundamental change any time soon. Corporate lobbying dollars, along with other tactics (e.g., suing municipalities who do try policy solutions like food taxes) are going to be pretty major obstacles to any meaningful industry/govt change. So if it’s not about education, but about industry and government, aren’t we’re essentially damned if we do, damned if we don’t?
There are people who aren’t “working too hard, making too little $, too stressed out” who are also overweight/obese for myriad reasons. I am continually stunned by my peers (intelligent, educated adults in their late 30s/early 40s, fairly comfortable economically, mostly parents) who have NO FREAKIN CLUE about nutrition and are just as snowed by Big Food’s marketing as a cartoon-watching kid. They think skipping breakfast (or eating a sugar/chemical Special K bar and a diet Coke) is a good way to lose weight…they think that “vitamin fortified” colorful cereals are “healthy,” they shy away from olive oil and avocados because of demon fats; they have no reference for proper portions, what foods (or “food products”) cause insulin resistance and fat storage and are happy to spend $5 on a sugar/chemical Starbucks drink every day but balk at spending $5 on a loaf of Ezekial bread that would last their family 4-5 days. Also, they spend a shitload of time watching football or Netflix or The Biggest Loser parked in front of the couch mindlessly snacking on bags of chips…and they “reward” themselves for walking the dog in the morning by going out for a huge breakfast of pancakes or waffles.
Count me among the skeptics.
I don’t think you can compare public health policies on smoking to those on obesity. Remember when office workers were initially forced to go outside the building if they wanted to smoke? There was grumbling at first, but the smokers went outside, and many of them were encouraged to give up. Employers can hardly insist that staff take their sugary and processed foods outside to eat. The anti-smoking agenda was furthered when we all learned about the dangers of second-hand cigarette smoke. But I can hardly claim that my chocolate bar chomping colleague is posing a threat to my health.
As well, taxing food products is a far more complex issue than taxing tobacco products - who gets to decide which foods get taxed and which don’t? Food manufacturers will only need to tweak their recipes a bit to lower the sugar/saturated fat (or whatever the food demon du jour is) to skirt around the rules. Then they can just keep tweaking and reformulating as the rules change - in fact, to some extent, food manufacturers are already doing this to skirt around food labeling laws.
You mentioned the “hive mind of the Internet”. But we’re only reading and commenting on your blog because we’re interested in these issues. Most people don’t give a stuff.
Then there’s the stunning level of ignorance among even educated people that Michelle referred to. (See my point above about most people not giving a stuff.)
I hate to be so negative, but I can’t see things changing anytime soon.
I agree with you. The only way I think it’s going to get better is for it to get a lot worse so the average person does start giving a damn.