By Tom Kando
A Sacrament Bee article by Ellen Shell on obesity (November 13) illustrates a problem with contemporary pop science: The issue is America’s obesity epidemic -- what causes it, and what can be done about it? Her magic-bullet-of-the-day is the hormone leptin.
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In the old nature-nurture argument, the nurture side has been losing ground for years . We desperately want to find a bio-chemical/genetic explanation not only for physical conditions , but also for a growing list of behavioral and mental phenomena -- obesity, criminality, intelligence, mental illness, alcoholism, sexual preference, addictiveness, etc. But we should question this growing tendency towards bio-chemical reductionism.
Ms. Shell’s article is drenched in pseudo-scientific rhetoric: "people act on biologically wired drives....pathways in the brains...the brain’s weight control center, ...scientists are decoding....leptin signals..." etc.
However, such language is metaphorical, inspired by computers and the other gadgets with which we are so enamored. It makes little contribution to our understanding of human motivation, consciousness, social life, or dysfunctional behavior.
Let’s be Aristotelian: Americans have become overweight. The other 96 % of the world’s people do not have this problem (yet), and neither did America until a few decades ago. So how could this new and primarily American problem be caused by (insufficient) leptin or some other genetic trait? This would only make sense under the absurd assumption that Americans are genetically different from (1)everyone else and from (2) their ancestors a few decades ago. For A to be the cause of B, there must be concomitant variation of the two, right?
Isn’t it obvious that the obesity epidemic is caused largely by sociological trends? Two things distinguish Americans: (1) we are the least ambulatory people in the world, and (2)we eat more than anyone else. The culprits are our diet and our relentless quest for comfort -- in sum: lifestyle changes!
Shell’s article is symptomatic of today’s culture, of the decline of common sense and of the death of a meaningful science of psychology, distinct from biology. Instead, we have the mumbo-jumbo of chemical reductionism, which increasingly attributes all behaviors to genes and biology. Next we’ll be told that one is born a racist, or born divorce-prone, or born with Republican tendencies.
The underlying message: We don’t have to lift a finger to help ourselves, because biology has the solution to all our problems. So there is no need to clean up our act (exercise, quit smoking, stop pigging out, etc.), or for social policies such as less reliance on cars and more governmental monitoring of the junk food.
This is irresponsible. It reminds me of those chain-smoking patients milling around in front of Kaiser Hospital, waiting for the doctors to fix them up. leave comment here
