Episode 2 of The Men Who Made Us Fat aired this past Thursday. You can watch part 1 (above) as well as parts 2, 3, and 4. You can also read Zoe Harcombe’s summary.
For a counterpoint, you can read Evelyn’s “rant” over at CarbSanity. Me, I don’t get (or agree with) Evelyn on this one. Her wheelhouse is science, and I think when she gets into history and policy, she’s just another person with an opinion that she’s making forcefully (I see similarities to Woo’s take on CIH between the two).
I do NOT think that nanny statism is the way to go. Frankly, I don’t think our government has the ability to create policy that wouldn’t be squashed like a bug by our food lobby.
But this decade is not like the 70s or 80s with more choices. Consider The Keg’s 2300-calorie carrot cake. I like what they had to say over at He Ain’t Heavy:
ordering carrot cake and ice cream after a steak may never have been a particularly healthy decision, but now it’s a mistake that costs you more than a day’s worth of extra calories. This up-ratcheting of caloric density is the result of specific, deliberate action by food companies. Rather than using food science to make food more flavorful with fewer calories, they’ve used it to manufacture food that is so calorific it practically has a gravitational pull.
I suspect that it’s really going to be a grass roots effort that will help to bring about change. Some food literacy work for sure, but more about putting market pressure on the food industry.
As they say over at He Ain’t Heavy, why aren’t we angrier?
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! 
Haven’t eaten fast food since 2008, no reason to be angry.
Really? Your family and friends are all unaffected? And you’re unconcerned about the costs to society related to lifestyle-related disease? You’re luckier than I.
So what do you think *is* the solution? (Not a leading question whatsoever. I really have no idea if there is a solution that isn’t monstrously complicated.)
Certainly, getting subsidies for already-cheap ingredients (GM corn that is resistant to pretty much everything, etc.) to go would be a great first step, but then what? The food industry has *already* gotten tons of people hooked on their ‘magically delicious’ foods, and making those foods somewhat more expensive isn’t going to get rid of that uncanny acquired taste for them.
So if people recognize that they have a neurochemical addiction or even mildly unhealthy attraction to such foods…isn’t the onus on them to figure out how to address it (portioning or total avoidance or other techniques)? I feel that what you’re getting at, with the grassroots response against the food industry, makes sense for making sure the next generation doesn’t grow up with a warped idea of what is ‘normal’ eating (assuming parents are doing their part, too). But once adults are aware of the problems they have with certain foods-recognizing that they are designed to be overconsumed-doesn’t that oblige them to make certain decisions in their own interest?
Great question. I really rather doubt I have “the” solution, but I have some thoughts. I’m going to write a post about it, as sharing it in the comments is a bit unwieldy. Stay tuned!
Hey Beth, do you think that the extremely high calories is part of what makes these foods so irresistible and addictive? I have wondered about that - if the crazy number of calories is just a side-effect of making foods hyper-palatable, or part of a strategy for making them hard to resist.
I think it’s hard to disentangle high calories from what would be the markers for them (e.g., fat and sugar). But given that people tend not to overeat pure fat, I suspect it’s more side effect. Just off the top of my head, I think the two reasons we overeat them so much is that sugar and salt especially provide the taste that leads us to keep going. And these high cal foods also also lead to overeating due to lack of both satiety and satiation.
From what I’ve seen (first episode and 1/2 of the second), this show is basically a TV show version of the book ‘Fat Land’, which was the first food/nutrition/obesity book I ever read- way back in college I think! It’s a good book (or I remember it as being good at least!).