Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman thinks we pretty much need “socially acceptable coercion” to deal with our evolutionary preferences for gluttony and sloth:
When you walk into a train station and there is a staircase and an escalator, your brain always tells you to take the escalator. Given a choice between a piece of cake and a carrot, we always go for the cake. It’s not in your best interest, but it’s probably a very deeply rooted evolutionary instinct. …
If we want to practice preventive medicine, that means we have to eat foods that we might not prefer, and exercise when we don’t want to. The only way to do that is through some form of socially acceptable coercion.
Lieberman said in a talk at Harvard’s TED equivalent (Harvard Thinks Big — below) a year or so ago that as we can’t change our biology, we need to change the environment in which we live. Hmmm. Not so sure that the latter is easier!
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! 
Isn’t this a form of “fat shaming”?
I don’t think so … I think he thinks coerced exercise is important regardless of weight!
Oh, OK.
So it’s lazy-ass shaming.
Exactly! Now you know why I disagreed with it a year ago ;).
When you read things like this it’s disheartening because it is a case of a very smart guy saying very stupid things. Article’s interesting, though.
If you choose the escalator it’s because you feel tired or have sore feet and want to save energy for some later task, if you choose the stairs it’s because you feel like it, your energy is up. As long as you have a choice, the sight of stairs or escalator shouldn’t prompt a conditioned response, unless perhaps you had training to create such a response.
Surely unnecessary exercise is a wasteful use of food-growing capacity and contributes to global warming. You can feed two inactive people with the land it takes to feed one over-exerciser.
I read the article and although its true he’s specifically talking about exercise, I do think that fat shaming falls into this ‘coercive’ category. Which we do. I think that we’ll always socially enforce statistical norms.
You can’t get rid of elevators and escalators. Some people can’t take the stairs. You would have to throw out the ADA