Tag Archives: obesity

Junk food is engineered to be addictive

This is why there is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S.: food deliberately engineered to make people eat until they get fat. Georgia is not quite one of the fattest states, but Lowndes County is one of the fattest counties. There is something we can do, even while Big Food continues to act like Big Tobacco.

Michael Moss wrote for NYTimes 20 February 2013, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to Continue reading →

Via Campesina: locavores worldwide

Claimed to be “the largest social movement in the world, with more than 400 million members,” it’s Via Campesina:
Enterremos el sistema alimentario industrial!
La agricultura campesina puede alimentar al mundo!

Bury the corporate food system!
Peasant agriculture can feed the world!
Peasant agriculture as in local agriculture. It’s a global movement of locavores!

They’re planning an International day of Peasant’s Struggles on 17 April 2011: Continue reading →

HFCS and Cancer Tumors

It’s bad enough that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) makes you fat with resulting diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and cancer. Now Maggie Fox reports in Reuters that Cancer cells slurp up fructose, US study finds:
Aug 2 (Reuters) – Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.

Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.

“These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation,” Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.

“They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth.”

Americans take in large amounts of fructose, mainly in high fructose corn syrup, a mix of fructose and glucose that is used in soft drinks, bread and a range of other foods.

How large amounts? Continue reading →

Food Conversations Quantified

Bill McKibben on Why Future Prosperity Depends on More Socializing — Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate and left us lonely, and what to do about it:
Often a farmers’ market is the catalyst — not just because people find that they like local produce, but because they actually meet each other again. This is not sentiment talking; this is data. A team of sociologists recently followed shoppers around supermarkets and then farmers’ markets. You know the drill at the Stop’n‘Shop: you come in the automatic door, fall into a light fluorescent trance, visit the stations of the cross around the perimeter of the store, exit after a discussion of credit or debit, paper or plastic. But that’s not what happens at farmers’ markets. On average, the sociologists found, people were having ten times as many conversations per visit. They were starting to rebuild the withered network that we call a community. So it shouldn’t surprise us that farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy; they are simply the way that humans have always shopped, acquiring gossip and good cheer along with calories.
Local food isn’t just about food: it’s also about conversations and community.

So if you want to act the way you feel, one way to start is to change your obesity network by going to the farmer’s market. It’s good for the local economy and environment, too.

Act the way I want to feel

Gretchen Rubin recommends “Act the way I want to feel:”
…often we feel because of the way we act. So by acting the way we wish we felt, we can change our emotions – a strategy that is uncannily effective.

Second, the world’s reaction to us is quite influenced by the way we act toward the world. For example, in situation evocation, we spark a response from people that reinforces a tendency we already have — for example, if I act irritable all the time, the people around me are going to treat me with less patience and helpfulness, which will, in turn, stoke my irritability. If I can manage to joke around, I’ll evoke a situation in which the people around me were more likely to joke around, too.

This is also the light side of the obesity network. If we are influenced by our friends to become obese or not, we also influence our friends.
Which leads, as always, to the same conclusion: that even though it’s tempting sometimes to think that I’d be much happier if other people would behave differently toward me, the only person whose behavior I can change is myself. If I want people to be friendlier to me, I must be friendlier. If I want my husband to be tender and romantic, I must be tender and romantic. If I want our household atmosphere to be light-hearted, I must be light-hearted.
And if we want our spouses, friends, neighbors, community to be health weight, we can help them become so by doing it ourselves first. And invite our friends to exercise, to pass up the donut for an orange, to go outside instead of watch TV.

Beyond the immediate personal effects, try to persuade the local supermarket to stock High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)-free cereals or grass-fed beef or local fresh vegetables. And if they won’t, start a farmer’s market or a CSA or a you-pick-em. If enough of us do it, eventually we get successes like Gatorade, Hunt’s ketchup, Wheat Thins, and many other products having HFCS removed by their vendors.

Gretchen Rubin was writing about happiness, but it’s the same principle. If you want people to be happy or healthy, start with yourself, find like-minded people, and eventually maybe it becomes the way things are.

Obesity Network

‘A subset of the“obesity network” mapped by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler … Each dot, or “node,” represents one person (red borders indicate women; blue, men).The yellow dots represent obese people—those with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more—and node sizes are proportional to BMI. Colors of “ties,” or links between nodes, indicate relationship type: purple for friend or spouse, orange for family. Note the visible clusters of obese people….’
Elizabeth Gudrais writes in Harvard Magazine about Networked — Exploring the weblike structures that underlie everything from friendship to cellular behavior:
The two men started publishing their findings with a splash: a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting that obesity spreads through social networks, as people are apparently influenced by friends’ weight gain to become obese themselves. More perplexing is their finding that obesity spreads through up to three degrees of separation. If a subject named a friend who was also in the study, and that friend’s friend became obese, the first subject’s chances of becoming obese were roughly 20 percent greater. Across one more degree of influence (husband’s friend’s friend or friend’s sibling’s friend—i.e., three degrees away), the risk was 10 percent greater. Weight gain appears to ripple through friend groups via some unseen mechanism such as altered eating or exercise behavior, or adjustment of social norms regarding weight.

The authors found similar patterns for happiness, loneliness, depression, alcohol consumption, the decision to stop smoking, and even divorce. “Our health depends on more than our own biology or even our own choices and actions,” they write in Connected. “Our health also depends quite literally on the biology, choices, and actions of those around us.”

We are our brother’s keeper, and our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, children, friends, colleagues, and neighbors are our keepers.

Fat Rats on HFCS

Hilary Parker writes about research at Princeton:
“Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”
Every single rat got fat on HFCS.

And the researchers are not talking about a little extra weight: Continue reading →

Jamie Oliver on Food Education

Jamie Oliver is a cook from England. He’s trying to organize an intervention into the food system that’s killing us.

We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it, it’s on the front page of every paper, CNN…. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God’s sake!

Every single one of those ones in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist, will tell you that.

The top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Number 6 is diabetes. Those are the ones in red on Jamie Oliver’s graph. Homicide is number 15. See CDC for numbers. ( In 2006 72,449 people died of diabetes and 18,573 of homicide. You’re almost 4 times as likely to die of diabetes. And about 40 times more likely to die of heart disease.)
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittney. She’s sixteen years old. She’s got six years to live. Because of the food that she’s eaten. She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home or in school. Or her mum. Or her mum’s mum. She has six years to live!
More pictures of people with very round faces and rounder bodies:
This is a normal family, guys!.
We need to change normal. That’s what Jamie Oliver wants to do.

Obesity leads to diabetes and heart disease. And what leads to obesity? Lack of exercise combined with food stuffed with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), salt, and fat in massive portions.

Fast food has taken over the whole country, we know that.
Time to take it back.
I wish I could come up here today and hang up a cure for AIDS or cancer, you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That’s the good news. It’s very preventable.
How? Vote with your food purchases. Demand a food ambassador in every supermarket. Demand big food businesses back food education. Get the government to work with the fast food purveyors to wean us off the fat, sugar, and salt. Schools, ages 4-whenever: proper fresh food cooked from local sources on site. Every child should leave school knowing how to cook ten recipes that will save their life. Corporate American should feed their staff properly. You can care and be commercial.

That’s his prescription. Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?

Graphs: HCFS and Obesity

Update 2012-08-30: old graph links decayed; replaced with other graphs of same data.
Almost as many obese as healthy weight adults in the U.S., and the rest are overweight. Something changed starting about 1980. Data source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2005) Health, United States, 2005. Graph source: Wikipedia Blue Cross Blue Shield, with this accompanying text:
While the percentage of the U.S. population considered overweight has been stable since 1960-62, the percentage considered obese has more than doubled.
What happened? Continue reading →

Enlisting the Health Industry Against Big Food

Michale Pollan points out that if we actually get health care reform that removes terms like “recission” and “pre-existing condition” from health insurers’ playbook so that they can’t exclude artificially unhealthy people from their insurance pool, something else will change:
The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda.

High fructose corn syrup treated like nicotine: it could happen.