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Monbiot: increase in obesity due to food industry

lmsaa
lmsaa Posts: 51 Member
edited November 28 in Debate Club
George Monbiot looks at the increase in obesity in the last four decades and concludes that it isn't that people are eating more, have less activity, or lack willpower. He puts the blame on the food industry. Article has lots of interesting links, including one on the use of subliminal scents to manipulate us.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/15/age-of-obesity-shaming-overweight-people
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Replies

  • Fuzzipeg
    Fuzzipeg Posts: 2,303 Member
    I'm sure I've seen a gadget which enables placing a filling in something, I think it was part of my icing set, a very long nozzle, then you can choose your own lower calorie filling. (I've not seen it for years, giggle)
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
    Vanilla and cinnamon. Scents are tied strongly to memory.

    I'm in a personal battle by the way, not from any concerns about health, but to save money!
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,458 Member
    jgnatca wrote: »
    Vanilla and cinnamon. Scents are tied strongly to memory.

    I'm in a personal battle by the way, not from any concerns about health, but to save money!

    ...and Save the Orangutans...who are in trouble due mostly to the palm oil industry.

    All those bakery-made goodies use palm oil. It's not sustainably produced. Slash and burn.
  • livingleanlivingclean
    livingleanlivingclean Posts: 11,751 Member
    Fuzzipeg wrote: »
    I'm sure I've seen a gadget which enables placing a filling in something, I think it was part of my icing set, a very long nozzle, then you can choose your own lower calorie filling. (I've not seen it for years, giggle)

    I use an apple corer to pull a chunk out of cupcakes, then fill it and cover in icing. Or bake stuff into the centre (caramel, chocolate spread or jam... Mmm)
  • Millicent3015
    Millicent3015 Posts: 374 Member
    I'd say we're eating more highly processed foods than we were before. Most food is processed-- it undergoes at least one process to change it from it's raw state. So a boiled potato, for example, is processed food. But where we might have boiled, roasted, fried and mashed our own potatoes in the past, now we can buy ready made roasties, a lot of which are lightly coated with added flour or batter to give the potatoes that familiar crunch.

    Oven chips have several extra ingredients like flour, colouring and additives, and may be prepared using several different fats, where home fried chips use one ingredient and usually one type of fat. Even shop bought mash has more milk and butter than we might normally use at home.

    So while we may be consuming the same basic foodstuffs, the processes used to make them appealing have become more complicated, and we're consuming them differently-- less milk, more yogurt, for example. However, Monbiot has an agenda, as every campaigner does, and while his message of not fat shaming people is important, if his main impetus is "BigFood is Bad", his own biases may be informing his opinions, and the reality may be that both the food industry and individual consumers have a responsibility to demand more nutritious, less heavily processed food, and look after our collective health as well.

    We may not be eating larger portions of our main meals on the whole, but we are eating more additional foods in the form of snacks and drinks that either weren't available in the past or were not as highly processed as they now. We're also exposed to much more advertising that employs multiple techniques to make food objects of aspiration rather than units of nutrition.
  • psychod787
    psychod787 Posts: 4,099 Member
    lmsaa wrote: »
    George Monbiot looks at the increase in obesity in the last four decades and concludes that it isn't that people are eating more, have less activity, or lack willpower. He puts the blame on the food industry. Article has lots of interesting links, including one on the use of subliminal scents to manipulate us.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/15/age-of-obesity-shaming-overweight-people
    Well... they are there to make money. So, we either over intake on hyperpalatable / calorie dense foods, or we don't. Our choice. Yes, we also move less.....
  • schubaccah
    schubaccah Posts: 5 Member
    edited August 2018
    Nevermind. Nooooot worth it :)
  • happytree923
    happytree923 Posts: 463 Member
    edited August 2018
    I think he has a point in that a mass loss of willpower doesn’t really make sense as an explanation for the rise of obesity. There has to be some environmental change (more easily available, calorie dense food, more sedentary lives) to explain why so many people have become obese at the same time. I know nobody forces you to eat the food, but mindless eating is incredibly easy especially if you’re not educated about nutrition. Plus children don’t have the ability to control impulses the way adults do so it’s not reasonable to expect them to practice portion control when there are chips after every soccer match and cupcakes for every classroom birthday. But he also seems to be implying that diet quality trumps quantity, which is not helpful at all to people trying to make a change.
  • CSARdiver
    CSARdiver Posts: 6,252 Member
    NorthCascades wrote: »
    I read that, too. I was going to start a thread on it, thanks for saving me the trouble.

    The article claims we're eating and drinking almost 400 fewer calories per day. It says more if them are from sugar, which prevents our appetite inhibitors from working, so we eat more. But we just went over how we eat less.

    How did this make it past an editor??

    What's an editor?
  • jdubois5351
    jdubois5351 Posts: 460 Member
    edited August 2018
    [quote="mariluny;c-42480619"Humans know instinctivelly what we can eat, what's easier to digest, what makes you feel the most energetic... we just choose to ignore it often.[/quote]

    I think you're right, but I also think very many people have forgotten how to listen to the cues their bodies give them. Take hunger, for example. Most people don't even know anymore, what real hunger feels like. We get cravings and confuse them with hunger, and so we overeat. It takes the knowledge of what is happening and the will to truly deal with what your body might be telling you to change that. Stuffing your pie-hole is soooo much easier and more satifiying short-term.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,644 Member
    livingleanlivingclean wrote: »
    Fuzzipeg wrote: »
    I'm sure I've seen a gadget which enables placing a filling in something, I think it was part of my icing set, a very long nozzle, then you can choose your own lower calorie filling. (I've not seen it for years, giggle)

    I use an apple corer to pull a chunk out of cupcakes, then fill it and cover in icing. Or bake stuff into the centre (caramel, chocolate spread or jam... Mmm)

    Baking a little cube of cream cheese in the center works swell, too.
  • chris_in_cal
    chris_in_cal Posts: 2,566 Member
    jdubois5351 wrote: »
    Take hunger, for example. Most people don't even know anymore, what real hunger feels like. We get cravings and confuse them with hunger, and so we overeat.

    It is never good to generalize. (see what I did there) but this is true for me. When I have been counting my calories and logging in MFP it took months of eating very carefully and losing extra weight before I got to a place where being a couple hours late on eating, or not getting a sufficient amount of calories in a meal, I began to experience hunger. Being 60 lbs overweight, I don't think I really have experience hunger in a couple of years. On the one hand, it is good to be me (evolutionarily speaking) on the other hand there are consequences of this access and abundance. 400 kcal everyday for every is pretty sweet for survival, but not for thriving.
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