johncip's Journal, 29 Jul 19

Like many (all?) of us I have plenty of opportunity to think about weight loss, overeating, willpower, and the like. I mostly don't post journal entries about it, but sometimes will comment on others', and the comments get very long. So I'll make this one a journal entry.

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This isn't really a problem on FS, but on the wider internet there's a movement to label any sort of portion control as part of a toxic "diet culture" which causes eating disorders and normalizes mistreatment of overweight people. Also, what I'll call "the boring diets" -- counting calories, counting macros & calories, counting points, even just rough portion control, are never really fashionable, except maybe with bodybuilders.

Why is that? I (somewhat cynically, I'll admit) think part of the reason is that making the conversation too strongly about excess intake makes people feel like it's all their fault. And what I mainly want to say here is that it isn't. (But we should distinguish between fault and responsibility. It is indeed our responsibility to manage our own weights, because no one can do it for us.)

Whose fault then? Food comapnies? Well, yes, and no. Nobody's force-feeding us. But our food environment, as a result of many years and billions spent figuring out how to make food look, taste, and ultimately sell better, has become very hedonistic. Especially when it comes to processed food, and chain restaurant food. It's rare that somebody in their home kitchen would sneak sugar into a savory dish, then fry it, freeze it, and fry it again. But many chain restaurant appetizers are made that way. We've also become masters of synthetic flavoring. Frito-Lay had "biscuits & gravy" chips on the shelves not long ago. I thought they tasted great. But isn't it a little strange to have one food taste like a completely different one?

As processed food has gotten better, our produce, by and large, has gotten worse. We kill chickens here at a few months old. It's bird veal. My Italian family used to farm, and my grandfather, after coming here, wouldn't eat American chicken because it grossed him out so much. Old recipes for chicken used to just call for salt and pepper -- who'd want to eat it that way now? But apparently chicken used to taste like something.

Apricot season is over, but you can still buy them. The out-of-season ones taste like soap and are the size and texture of an apple. I don't know what kind of mutant trees they're coming from. I've heard that out of season tomatoes are grown in what is basically fertilized sand. And they're of course picked green & artificially ripened, to enhance shelf life. Etc. We mostly don't breed things for taste, outside of a few specialized crops, like coffee beans or wine grapes.

It's possible that our practice of fortifying staple foods with vitamins & minerals they don't already have also has a bad effect on our palates. The point of a palate, after all, is to know what nutrients foods have (which we experience as flavor), but we break that link on both the flavor side and on the nutrient side. (If you're interested more in this vein, I strongly recommend Mark Schatzker's "The Dorito Effect" and David Kessler's "The End of Overeating." Also Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation.")

In "Supernormal Stimuli," Deirdre Barrett talks about how the biologist Niko Tinbergen was able to make plaster "eggs" that birds would sit on instead of their own. The eggs just had to be painted a brighter shade than the birds' real eggs. So it is with a lot of modern food. We don't need it, but damn is it good.

And we just aren't wired to say no to the stuff our lizard brain think that it needs to survive. We do have willpower & reason, to let us correct our short-term instincts when they put us in long-term danger. But losing weight is painful, more painful than maintaining it. For many in the wider public, once they've gotten past a certain size, they don't see fixing it as worth the effort.

To bring it back to blame -- 40% of America didn't wake up one day and decide that they wanted to be so heavy it impacts their health. And even though it's a personal crusade of mine to control my eating to the point where I have the body composition I want, if I'm being honest, I don't think a society-wide cure for obesity will come in the form of individual personal responsibility. We've already lost that war. I think that if a solution comes, it will resemble what happened with cigarettes. A generation of smokers didn't quit en masse. Instead, marketing regulations led to increased awareness & changes in the culture, which led to more regulations, and more changes, etc. Over the years, fewer people *started* smoking than in previous generations, which means fewer people have had to quit.

As far as policy goes, I think more labeling is always good, like the new requirement that US chain restaurants list calories on their menus. (Besides the main benefit, in some cases it's also led to restaurants reformulating items to have less embarrassing calorie counts.) Also, all of these recent changes to nutrition facts labels: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/changes-nutrition-facts-label (trans fat, added sugar, more realistic serving sizes...)

This is worth a read, though I think things have improved a hair since it was written: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2012/08/schools-limit-campus-junk-food-have-lower-obesity-rates/ (Soft drink companies love marketing to kids, and although they claim to avoid marketing to children under 12, they still do. And nowadays they market more aggressively to Black & Latino kids.)

It's worth noting too that alcohol companies make most of their money on alcoholics, and casinos on gambling addicts. I'm not opposed to anyone making a buck, but we're in the midst of a public health crisis of enormous scale, which has to be taken into account when setting policy.

I don't really have a conclusion. This post is already very long, and writing about food is making me hungry. Thanks if you read this far. I mainly wanted to say that, although we get fat from eating too much, we eat too much because our food has changed, and our palates with it. I hope we can reverse that somewhat, and prevent some of the pain I've witnessed in family & friends, and myself.