Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own by Mika Brzezinski
Authors: Mika Brzezinski
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national debt and our deficit if everybody in America would recognize obesity as the public health hazard that it has become.
— Senator Claire McCaskill
To understand how we got here, let’s take a look at evolution and human biology.
“The truth is, we are the first generation, or the second, where getting fat is the path of least resistance,” says David Katz, MD, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center and editor of the medical journal Childhood Obesity . “Throughout most of human history, people were struggling to get enough to eat.” For most Americans, that struggle is a thing of the past. “If you look at the food supply of the United States today versus, say, 1970, we have about five hundred to six hundred additional calories available per capita per day now than we did then,” explains David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers. “Most of those new foods are coming with added sugars andfats, otherwise known as heavily processed foods and known in some quarters as junk food.”
Our biology makes it hard to say no to junk food. We’re hardwired to go after the concentrated energy in high-calorie fats and sweets. Just look at me: I know that empty calories are the quickest route to unwanted pounds, and that’s the last thing I want. I know I’ll have to make up for an extra snack with an extra run. I’ve learned these lessons the hard way, and I’ve learned them over and over again. Yet what I know flies out the window when I see that bag of chips or that pint of ice cream; it’s as if my body is overriding my logic. There are days when I struggle not to pick up the fork.
Same thing with Diane. She loses the battle more often than I do, yet she’s got more drive than most people I know. Her problem is not that she lacks discipline.
What’s really going on here?
“We’re simply not genetically programmed to refuse calories when they’re within arm’s reach.” That’s what Thomas Farley, New York City’s health commissioner, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni. Bruni makes the case that America’s obesity crisis is partially the result of its prosperity and economic dominance. “Over the last century,” he writes, “we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat—a positive development, for the most part.” 2
The less positive element in that equation is that America also became efficient at “processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap, and addictive seductions,” Bruni explains. “Densely caloric and all-too-convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we’re chromosomally hardwired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it.”
Densely caloric and all-too-convenient food now envelops us.— Frank Bruni
Soda and sugary drinks are one of the worst culprits, providing the single largest source of calories in the American diet. We’re drinking twice as much of them as we did forty years ago. For many Americans, it’s all feast and no famine. We no longer need those stores of energy to keep us going through the lean times. Instead, the extra calories turn into fat.
“We are products of our times,” says Yale’s David Katz. “Human character hasn’t changed, personal responsibility hasn’t changed, but the world has changed, and it’s a very obesigenic world.”
One feature of that world is that food is everywhere, available 24/7, and marketed to the tune of some $36 billion per year. Yale’s Rudd Center reports that the fast food industry alone spends $4 billion in advertising yearly, much of it aimed at children. 3 By comparison, for every dollar the industry spends pushing fast food, the US Department of Agriculture spends about one-tenth of a penny encouraging people to eat their vegetables.
When there’s a downturn in the economy, those marketing dollars flow even more freely, and the stock prices of fast food companies often rise as they roll out offers like “dollar
— Senator Claire McCaskill
To understand how we got here, let’s take a look at evolution and human biology.
“The truth is, we are the first generation, or the second, where getting fat is the path of least resistance,” says David Katz, MD, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center and editor of the medical journal Childhood Obesity . “Throughout most of human history, people were struggling to get enough to eat.” For most Americans, that struggle is a thing of the past. “If you look at the food supply of the United States today versus, say, 1970, we have about five hundred to six hundred additional calories available per capita per day now than we did then,” explains David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers. “Most of those new foods are coming with added sugars andfats, otherwise known as heavily processed foods and known in some quarters as junk food.”
Our biology makes it hard to say no to junk food. We’re hardwired to go after the concentrated energy in high-calorie fats and sweets. Just look at me: I know that empty calories are the quickest route to unwanted pounds, and that’s the last thing I want. I know I’ll have to make up for an extra snack with an extra run. I’ve learned these lessons the hard way, and I’ve learned them over and over again. Yet what I know flies out the window when I see that bag of chips or that pint of ice cream; it’s as if my body is overriding my logic. There are days when I struggle not to pick up the fork.
Same thing with Diane. She loses the battle more often than I do, yet she’s got more drive than most people I know. Her problem is not that she lacks discipline.
What’s really going on here?
“We’re simply not genetically programmed to refuse calories when they’re within arm’s reach.” That’s what Thomas Farley, New York City’s health commissioner, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni. Bruni makes the case that America’s obesity crisis is partially the result of its prosperity and economic dominance. “Over the last century,” he writes, “we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat—a positive development, for the most part.” 2
The less positive element in that equation is that America also became efficient at “processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap, and addictive seductions,” Bruni explains. “Densely caloric and all-too-convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we’re chromosomally hardwired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it.”
Densely caloric and all-too-convenient food now envelops us.— Frank Bruni
Soda and sugary drinks are one of the worst culprits, providing the single largest source of calories in the American diet. We’re drinking twice as much of them as we did forty years ago. For many Americans, it’s all feast and no famine. We no longer need those stores of energy to keep us going through the lean times. Instead, the extra calories turn into fat.
“We are products of our times,” says Yale’s David Katz. “Human character hasn’t changed, personal responsibility hasn’t changed, but the world has changed, and it’s a very obesigenic world.”
One feature of that world is that food is everywhere, available 24/7, and marketed to the tune of some $36 billion per year. Yale’s Rudd Center reports that the fast food industry alone spends $4 billion in advertising yearly, much of it aimed at children. 3 By comparison, for every dollar the industry spends pushing fast food, the US Department of Agriculture spends about one-tenth of a penny encouraging people to eat their vegetables.
When there’s a downturn in the economy, those marketing dollars flow even more freely, and the stock prices of fast food companies often rise as they roll out offers like “dollar
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