There is a lot of focus in the mainstream media on the growing epidemic of obesity in western countries. The media pretty universally places the blame on individuals. Overweight adults are guilty of “poor lifestyle choices.” While obesity in children is blamed on the failure of the parents to control their kids’ unhealthy lifestyle choices. This emphasis on “poor lifestyle choices” has led many pundits to call for a “fat tax” to penalize Americans for buying fast food and junk food. In my mind this is a totally wrong-headed approach.

Why Neoliberalism Promotes Individual Solutions

I am always very skeptical whenever I see any major social problem transformed into a personal problem that can only be solved by individuals and their families. Mainly because the ideological notion that only individuals can solve community problems has been part and parcel of the neoliberal economic agenda rolled out by Milton Friedman in the seventies in eighties (first in Chile and ultimately by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher). In fact Thatcher said as much: “There’s no such thing as society- only individuals and families.”

Moreover it’s well-known that the CIA, via their office of public information, has long played a formal and informal role in all facets of US publishing and electronic media (books, magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, and now on-line publishing). I was only fifteen when I noticed there was something very odd about the Reader’s Digest. Nearly every article follows an identical formula, in which some individual overcomes some immense adversity purely through positive thinking and their own individual accomplishment. It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties I figured out why this was – namely that the CIA strongly influences the magazines editorial policy – via some kind of monetary arrangement with their publishers and editors.

Individual Solutions Have Never Worked for Obesity

There is really no reason why the obesity epidemic should different from other epidemics. In fact the political and social factors underlying obesity are a lot more obvious than with most infectious diseases. For nearly five decades, doctors and weight loss franchises (such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig) have tried every individual approach imaginable for weight loss – with spectacularly poor results. With a few well-publicized exceptions, the vast majority of dieters lose some weight and then overcompensate by regaining even more weight than they have lost. I would even hazard that the individual, case-by-case approach to obesity will remain pretty hopeless until the underlying social and political causes are addressed.

Political and Social Causes of Obesity

In my view, the political and social causes of obesity fall into two broad categories: ideological (corporate messaging that triggers unhealthy eating) and economic. I include under economic America’s for-profit, insurance-dominated health care system, which I view as the single reason why Americans are the most overweight nationality in the world (it’s the single major factor that differentiates us from the rest of the industrialized world).

How Corporate Messaging Fosters Excessive Weight Gain

What is often overlooked in analysing obesity is that 250,000 years of evolution have biologically programmed human beings to crave high calorie fatty and sugary foods. Food security was a life and death issue for the vast majority of our hunter-gather ancestors – who often went weeks or months without access to food. Obviously those genetically programmed to scarf as much high calorie food as possible when it was abundant had a much better chance of surviving to pass their genes to the next generation.

The corporate planners, advertisers, and psychologists who advise them are very much aware of the immense profits to be derived by exploiting this inborn tendency to crave high calorie foods. Which is the major reason we are all constantly bombarded by billboards, TV, radio, and print ads designed to create an irresistible desire for French fries, Big Macs, deep fried KFC chicken, and chocolate.

To be continued with an outline of the economic causes of obesity

from adbusters.org