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Monbiot: increase in obesity due to food industry

lmsaa
lmsaa Posts: 51 Member
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: 2,298 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: 33,939 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: 11,752 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: 4,088 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.

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