Weight Maven

Thanks to Marsha Hudnall, I got a pointer to an article that really resonated with me. Liz Snyder, “farm-starter, food activist, nutritional anthropologist, mama!” took a hard look Behind the Anti-Obesity Veil: Fat Bashing As ‘Science’.

Here’s the part that made me go “hell, yeah” (emphasis mine):

We are not just preyed upon by junk food advertisers and fast food peddlers, we are also plagued by a national eating disorder of epic proportions predicated on the faulty belief that no one can be fat and healthy, and that fat kids in particular are suffering an “epidemic” while thin kids are just fine — regardless of their food choices. …

Are we so stuck in this rhetoric that we can’t see how manipulated we are by the food and diet industries?

Word!!

Coincidentally, Marion Nestle posted an article today about the food industry’s efforts to make products look healthier:

What’s going on here? Processed food makers must be in trouble. “Healthy” and “natural” are the only things selling these days.

But isn’t a “healthy” processed snack food an oxymoron? They can tweak and tweak the contents, but these products will still be heavily processed. …

And as I keep saying, just because a processed food is a little bit less bad than it used to be, doesn’t necessarily make it a good choice.

I commented on the Nestle post that I think that the food industry, like tobacco manufacturers, are likely far more aware of the health implications of their products than we’re aware. But in our capitalistic, quarterly profits oriented society, those manufacturers cannot help themselves but ride this industrial food wave as far ($$) as they can.

Unfortunately, that means products that look healthy, but aren’t.

Let’s talk about food!

So I’m completely with Liz that we “need to re-create the way we talk about sustainable food.” As long as the overweight and obese are the “problem,” or gluttonous or lazy, or otherwise simply mismanaging calories in and out, it deflects from the real issue: we’re not built to be healthy on industrially processed foods!

I think we should look at the overweight and the obese as canaries in the coal mine. We’re the early (well, not so early any more) warning signal, and if we collectively don’t get it, it’s going to get far worse before it gets better (like even more kids getting adult diseases).

If our health system wasn’t seriously in peril, we could perhaps go on and on … letting big medicine and big pharma fix what big food was creating.

But that’s not economically viable any more. We will get to the point where everyone realizes it’s processed food, but I’m really afraid that we’re going to go through a whole lot more fat bashing before we’re through (I’m waiting for it to hit paychecks).

I loved what Zoe Harcombe has to say in the intro of The Obesity Epidemic:

I believe that nature knows how to feed humans better than food manufacturers. Nature has no vested interest, no profit to be made from us and no reason to provide us with anything other than nutritious food. I therefore believe that the human race must return to eating food in the form closest to that provided by nature: meat, eggs and dairy from naturally reared animals; fish; vegetables and salads; nuts and seeds; fruits and whole grains. I call this real food.

We can (and will) argue about macronutrient ratios and grass-fed vs feed lot vs vegetarianism and so on, but there’s something to be said for just starting with a premise of “eat real food.”

Fat *is* a feminist issue (among others)

So at some point, we’ll have to stop focusing on diets and weight and start focusing even more on food policy. Hank Cardello (author of Stuffed Nation) says that it’s important to “engage the food industry by incenting them to cut down the calories sold to consumers.”

Yes, and … the best incentive is competition. Here’s to more from folks like Liz!