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
8 comments:
I think it is because of subsidized corn, which makes meat in America (and subsequently hamburgers) ridiculously cheap compared to healthier food.
A "Big Burger" at Carls Jr. should not cost 1,29 and a sandwich at Subway 5 dollars.
There is such a thing as the leptin hormone, it is just as real as testosterone and just as removed from will power. It does have a role in appetite suppression.
Obesity is a physical condition not a mental condition. Doing research on the genetic causes of obesity does not amount to bio-chemical reductionism. Yes, it would be nice if we could send Ms. Fatso to the shrink and make her thin.
The fact that Americans are more overweitght than other nations is not so surprising, considering the type of food one finds in American supermarkets. There IS a difference between what we eat in this country and in many other countries. You don’t have to look for a different American gene to explain this difference.
We actuallty consume fewer calories than our ancestors. Yes, we move less because of the great distances between localities. I would have to walk an hour just to go shopping. But people reacting to the food industry piling up sugar, salt and fat to tempt our taste buds is not such a bad thing. In short, I don’t believe obesity is something a person chooses as a life style. There must be more to it than a matter of will power.
I'm sure there are several contributing factors related to both diet and exercise, but one major contributor is the amount of corn syrup contained in food. Our livers are not designed to process so much of it, and it can cause us to get get fat around the middle. You find lots of it in soda, candy, minute-maid lemonade, canned fruit juice and many of the things we eat.
I am sure the corn lobby has something to do with this. If cane sugar were used in candy, soda pop, and other foods it used to be used in, you would see a reduction in obesity.
Of course, less carbs and exercise are important too, but a campaign to reduce the amount of corn syrup in manufactured foods is something that can be done socially and politically.
I am fat, although I hate to say it out loud. I have been since I was a child with the exception of a few years when I made losing my number one priority. I still believe it is one part genetic, with the tendency to gain weight, but 3 parts nurture, as in nurturing myself with food when I am sad, angry, happy, lonely, too busy, too bored, etc. I am again trying to find that thin space within me. I go to bed at night, every night, saying that tommorow I will remember how I feel tonight about losing weight. Trouble is, the day starts with one of those emotions and I am off and running. I asked one of my daughters today how she manages to stay slim. She said, "I like to be hungry, not full, so I don't eat a lot." Isn't that simple??? I think I will try starting now.
Tom:
If you really want to get aggravated, you should follow the "new" research
on fat studies, which are basically a "shout out" for fat people. What I
love about Michael Pollan's work is that he reduced the question of "Why are pople fat?" to a really simple idea, viz., they are fat because they don't
eat real food. Once you focus on that as the problem, you can take steps tward solving it.
S.
P.S. Like the material on the blog; it must be cathartic.
In response to several of you, but especially to “Anonymous” on Aug. 22:
Obviously, it would be foolish to choose sides entirely for “nature” (biology, genetics) or entirely for “nurture” (habits that we pick up), when it comes to obesity or anything else we humans do. Scientists have been arguing about nature-vs-nurture for centuries. The only thing of which we can be sure is that people are the product of BOTH. The only disagreement is about HOW MUCH each contributes.
Furthermore, I don’t mean to be judgmental. Changing habits is terribly difficult. I know. It took me many years to quit smoking. Being overweight is not a moral flaw. Bad eating habits are similar to smoking. They are bad for you, that’s all. And I am sure that it is more difficult for some people to control their weight than it is for others, due to their innate body chemistry. To tell you the truth, I am not doing all that well on the weight front myself.
Then, too, there are many political aspects to this topic: lower-class people are more often obese, for obvious socio-economic reasons. We eat bad-for-you food for the same reasons that millions of us smoke: These are the things that are produced and marketed.
What I DID object to in my post is the ideological spin machine, which often mobilizes “science” for political ends. One should always be skeptical when reading about new “scientific evidence” supporting this or that political position.
they eat too much crap and are weak
James Baldwin described the unsolvable gravity of racial relations in the 1950's with an anecdote that went something like this: Two friends are sitting in a room and they both know that one of them has just murdered his mother and put her body in the wardrobe. They are sitting there at the table but cannot speak to each other in case one of them accidentally mentions anything to do with the body in the wardrobe.
In a similar fashion people in the "developped" world do not want to know the truth about why there is an obesity pandemic with 60% of children under ten being grossly overweight.
Extract from "The Cattle Rancher Who Wont Eat Meat" By Howard Lyman.
"I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. You have something in common with most of the cows you've eaten. They've eaten meat, too When a cow is slaughtered, about half of it by weight is not eaten by humans: the intestines and their contents, the head, hooves, and horns, as well as bones and blood. These are dumped into giant grinders at rendering plants, as are the entire bodies of cows and other farm animals known to be diseased. There is simply no such thing in America as an animal too ravaged by disease, too cancerous, or too putrid to be welcomed by the embracing arms of the renderer.
Another staple of the renderer's diet, in addition to farm animals, is euthanized pets -- the six or seven million dogs and cats that are killed in animal shelters every year. The city of Los Angeles alone, for example, sends some two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a rendering plant every month. When the gruesome mix is ground and steam-cooked, the lighter, fatty material floating to the top gets refined for use in such products as cosmetics, lubricants, soaps, candles, and waxes. The heavier protein material is dried and pulverized into a brown powder-about a quarter of which consists of fecal material. The powder is used as an additive to almost ALL pet food as well as to livestock feed. Farmers call it "protein concentrates." I used to feed tons of the stuff to my own livestock. It never concerned me that I was feeding cattle to cattle. Animals munch on ground-up dead horses, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, and turkeys, as well as blood and fecal matter of their own species and that of chickens. About 75 percent of the ninety million beef cattle in America are routinely given feed that has been "enriched" with rendered animal parts. The use of animal excrement in feed is common.
In Arkansas, for example, the average farm feeds over fifty tons of chicken litter to cattle every year. One Arkansas cattle farmer was quoted in U.S. News & World Report as having recently purchased 745 tons of litter collected from the floors of local chicken-raising operations. After mixing it with small amounts of soybean bran, he then feeds it to his eight hundred head of cattle, making them, in his words, "FAT AS BUTTERBALLS." He explained, "If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feeds are too expensive." If you are a meat-eater, understand that this is the food of your food.
The consumption of diseased or unhealthy animals causes diseases in humans. Rabies, for example, is transmitted from the host animal to humans. We know that the common food poisonings brought on by such organisms as the prevalent E. Coli bacteria, which results from fecal contamination of food, causes the death of nine thousand Americans a year and that about 80 percent of food poisonings come from tainted meat.
The production of livestock and its waste produces 18% of the CO2 contributing to the greenhouse effect. This means that eating meat has a larger share in the climate change than all means of transportation worldwide."
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