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Clever research
Until now, obesity research has concentrated on measuring the numbers of obese people, and attempting to identify the predisposing risk factors. This tends to identify individual behaviours, but not the push and pull factors that encourage or oblige people to display them. We can count the number of hours spent in a car or playing video games, but if we don't understand comprehensively why the car was used or the game was played, efforts to tackle obesity are doomed to failure.
Every new moped or litre of petrol sold, every new supermarket product purchased, is one more small step along the economic transition – and one more turn of the screw by the profit-led industries.
These industries need people to indulge in obesity-causing behaviours in order to achieve their quarterly targets. Until commercial practices become the target, first of research studies and then of interventions, we are likely to retain our role of documenting, rather than truly understanding and preventing, the obesity epidemic.
Understanding the obesogenic niche, rather than what happens to the people in the niche, is an urgent but relatively ignored priority. The kind of research needed to probe this issue is very different from conventional biomedical research. Ideally, researchers should have expertise in the same skills that the companies use to maximise their profits — advertising, economics, and forecasting social trends.
Public health scientists need to take on commercial companies at their own game. Perhaps researchers should begin by measuring the same outcomes that companies use to maximise their profit. If the company knows how to sell more biscuits, health researchers need to know how to achieve the opposite.
Government strategies
As yet, governments have been very reluctant to go on the offensive against commercial interests, because the two parties are interconnected. With substantial tax revenues deriving directly from corporate profits, the financial risks to national economies are obvious.
At the simplest level, only when the cost of treating obesity and its co-morbidities exceeds the tax levied from the obesogenic companies is there an economic logic for taking action.
Something similar has already happened with smoking in Europe. A more sophisticated approach suggests it would be prudent to act before this tipping point is reached. Obesity is so difficult to treat that prevention is the crucial target.
Maximising profit and incessantly maintaining economic growth are central to the western industrial economic model. This is our mode of capitalism, and the same model is driving the nutritional transition.
As countries are absorbed into this model and pass through the transition, an increasing proportion of the population are drawn into new behavioural patterns, altering their physical activity and their access to food. And the obesogenic niche is not exclusive to adults, it also affects foetuses, infants, toddlers, children and adolescents. Each stage of the life-course is a target for commercial interests.
Capitalism out-competes other economic systems, as evidenced by its worldwide spread. So on purely economic grounds it is successful. But the costs may be expressed in other currencies, such as the prevalence of hypertension, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Capitalism has been studied primarily by economists. It's time health researchers got in on the act.
Jonathan Wells is a reader in childhood nutrition with the University College London Institute of Child Health in the United Kingdom.
This opinion piece was originally published by SciDev.net.
the profit from obesity
the writer is bang on ... how does society deal with economic interests that create negative outcomes for society but positive outcomes for the organization?
coca cola generates huge profits, taxes and jobs ... positive outcomes to be sure ... by taking water, adding sugar, flavour & co2 and then packaging, distributing and marketing the stuff ... the result is tooth decay, obesity & diabetes ... never mind lousy advertisements
i don't have the numbers but i would guess that the benefit to society is overall negative ... this is analogous to tobacco and alcohol which are often taxed at higher rates to discourage consumption & compensate for increased costs to the rest of society... carbon taxes are being similarly bandied about to influence our use of fossil fuels
the primary purpose of a commercial enterprise is to make money ... other goals are secondary ... this is fine ... unless the product it produces generates negative outcomes ... then society ie. government and ngo's, has the right and duty to deal with it ... taxes seem to be a popular route but not without huge difficulties including the opposition of the affected and powerful commercial interests
identifying, costing and then taxing these negative outcomes is only one avenue ... education and investment in alternatives such as fitness facilities in this case, hopefully funded by the taxes from the bad guys are also needed
Familiar Argument
This argument has been heard before, that capitalist interests exist the products of which create stimulus for weight gain. As often happens, however, it does not mention other capitalist interests which directly or indirectly utilize or actively promote anti-fat sentiment to sell their products, from weight loss products themselves to cigarettes, clothing, exercise equipment and so on.
All it takes is a sufficiently capital-friendly government, and the tax revenue from commercial activity will fall short of any need to speak of.
As for what is obesogenic, one could argue, and I'm sure some do, that democracy is itself. In an authoritarian system, the ideal is that a citizen is conscripted into military service, is told what to do, and simply does it. In democracy, the ideal is that a citizen maintains information about political matters and becomes involved in crafting of policy. This involves study and debate, which are necessarily sedentary activities. In more base words, you have to sit on your big ass and read texts of initiatives and candidate statements, and talk them over with other people.
If more people become fat, then either there will be an overwhelming demand to make health care a higher priority and to back it up with money, or the population will be shamed by market and government leaders into accepting the idea that they deserve not to be cared for, as far too many "overweight" and "obese" individuals already are by some quite vicious capitalist and government interests.
Gil Scott Heron said it himself, "The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner."
The Profit From Obesity
Over the past decade there have been numerous attempts to explain the nature of obesity. Some say its a genetic disposition. Some say its a social phenomenon. This article seems to suggest that capitalism is to blame, or at least is partly to blame. This is a tiresome subject, of which the author himself gives a straight-forward answer: we eat more food than we burn in exercise. Why not just blitz America with this insight and be done with it (just as cigarettes have their government health warning). In this way the question of whether obesity is genetic or not is sideskipped.