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From the Guardian:
We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised ...
We are being had (like guinea-pigs) by an industry the sole pursuit of which is profits, profits, profits.
Typically, when this happens, it's up to LaLaLand on the Potomac to take the cudgel in hand and officiate the correction by means of legislation. But when even that means has been "bought", what's a country to do?
Change governments, that's what ...
We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised ...
So what has happened? The light begins to dawn when you look at the nutrition figures in more detail. Yes, we ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy half as much fresh milk per person, but five times more yoghurt, three times more ice cream and – wait for it – 39 times as many dairy desserts. We buy half as many eggs as in 1976, but a third more breakfast cereals and twice the cereal snacks; half the total potatoes, but three times the crisps. While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly.
Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue.
The shift has not happened by accident. As Jacques Peretti argued in his film The Men Who Made Us Fat, food companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defences, including through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance.
They hire biddable scientists and think tanks to confuse us about the causes of obesity. Above all, just as the tobacco companies did with smoking, they promote the idea that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. After spending billions on overriding our willpower, they blame us for failing to exercise it.
To judge by the debate the 1976 photograph triggered, it works. “There are no excuses. Take responsibility for your own lives, people!” “No one force feeds you junk food, it’s personal choice. We’re not lemmings.”
We are being had (like guinea-pigs) by an industry the sole pursuit of which is profits, profits, profits.
Typically, when this happens, it's up to LaLaLand on the Potomac to take the cudgel in hand and officiate the correction by means of legislation. But when even that means has been "bought", what's a country to do?
Change governments, that's what ...