Obesity
By Yusra Qadir
Despite the rich abundance of resources and fertile pasture across the globe, paradoxically it is a time where much of the planet is deep in the folds of poverty. We currently live in a world where one billion people live on less than $1 a day; where hunger kills up to 168,000 people every week, and an average of 11 children die every minute from malnutrition. However it is the same world, albeit in a different part, where lawsuits are filed against food companies accused of causing abnormally increased weight in people who chose to consume their products in vastly excessive proportions. Indeed, while the Southern half of the world starves to death, by stark contrast obesity has become a growing problem in the Northern part, to the extent that it has reached almost epidemic proportions.
The obesity debate is highly complex and one that has generated much discussion over the years in an effort to establish who is at fault, if anyone is at all, for creating an obese population, whose existence increasingly impacts on the well being and productivity of society as whole. Obesity is a medical problem that kills thousands of people each year, results in more chronic illnesses than smoking cigarettes and can contribute to heart disease and diabetes. The media is awash with allegations about who is responsible for the crisis. Institutions, ranging from corporate giants in the food industry to advertising companies with their elaborate advertisement and marketing schemes, have been accused of contributing to rising rates of obesity. Can the individuals whom after all are the ones filling their bellies by their own hands really be absolved from all guilt? Who or what is really to blame?
Prevalence of Obesity – Implications for Individuals and Society
Food is the vital source of energy necessary for the human body to survive, all types of which with the exception of water contain calories. If the calorie intake exceeds the amount required for the body to function to optimum levels, the body chemistry converts and stores unused energy as fat. Obesity is calculated using a formula known as the Body Mass Index (BMI). It is a measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies to both men and women. A BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight and one of more than 30 is considered obese. Being significantly overweight is linked to a wide range of health problems including, heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes, indigestion, gallstones some cancers, snoring and sleep apnoea, stress, anxiety and depression, to name but a few.
Whilst the bulging waistline has rapidly become a major feature in most of the Western world, it is in the USA that the problem is most evident. Increased calorie consumption can be a reflection of increasing wealth, and the average American has swelled during the 20th century as a result. Since 1980 the problem has worsened, so further increase in weight has done nothing but harm health and life expectancy. Yet the overeating has continued with the mean calorific intake rising by about 10% between the mid-1970’s and mid-1990’s. According to some calculations, close to a third of the Americans are clinically obese which is 50% more than the next leading country.
The World Heart Federation warns that obesity will overtake tobacco smoking as the biggest cause of heart disease unless the current trend of unhealthy, sedentary lifestyles stops. Further breakdown reveals that in the UK one in four Britons is obese and as many as 30,000 people die each year from obesity-related conditions. In the US, two out of three adults are obese and approximately 400,000 deaths occurred in the year 2000, with poor diet and lack of exercise being major contributors to the cause of death.
Obesity is not just a problem restricted to adults with a lifelong history of indulgence. The once euphoric image of youth which was synonymous with good health and vitality has became a thing of the past since the advent of a culture dominated by junk food, PS2’s, X-box’s and the like. According to the World Heart Federation obesity is alarmingly appearing amongst the younger generation; an estimated 22 million children under the age of five are now severely overweight. Nearly one in three children in the United States between the ages of 5 and 14 are obese, compared to one in six thirty years ago. In Britain, figures for 2002 showed that 8.5% of six year olds and 15% of 15 year olds were already obese.
Fat Problems Vs Fat Profits
The impact on society when faced with the prospects of soaring obesity figures becomes all too apparent by way of spiraling health costs. A study by the National Audit Office has estimated that obesity costs the National Health Service at least £500m a year and with the wider economy suffering from more than £2bn a year in lost productivity. In a Capitalist world, the financial cost becomes the real bottom line in the equation of health – for it is in the market place that the real battle against obesity will take place.
Experts maintain that the cause of obesity is complex and points to more than one factor. Proposed causes range from genetic predispositions and parenting to the change in culture that demands keeping up with the fast and demanding pace of life. However, the fast-food industry has come to be held as one of the main culprits. Indeed there has been a real shift of change in the human diet during the last century since the advent of snack food chains such as McDonald’s and KFC. Homemade food has given way to convenient high-energy or high calorie food rich in fat, salt and sugar. Experts at the Medical Research Council found most fast food is very dense in calories, and only a small amount is needed to bump up calorific intake significantly. A typical fast food meal has a very high density, more than one and a half times higher than the traditional British meal and two and half times higher than a traditional African meal. There are also concerns surrounding the ‘super sized’ portions of food, already popular in the US. David Hinchliffe, in an inquiry into obesity held by the Commons health committee last year pointed out that a cheeseburger with fries and milkshake added up to 1,050 calories, which would require a 9 mile run to burn off. In addition to the fast-food culture has been the onset of sedentary lifestyle brought on by the technological advancement of society through cars, television, computers and video games.
However, the fast food industry has become a huge international business. With a multi-billion dollar turnover in the global fast-food industry, it is no surprise that such international companies will do all they can to keep people eating and the profits rolling in, attempting to convince the public that their products are healthy. These large corporate companies have extensive powers and can exert pressure on governments to influence policy masking. The obesity debate was recently re-ignited by the passage of a bill in the US, the “Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act,” which seeks to ban lawsuits against producers and sellers of food and non-alcoholic drinks arising from obesity claims. The bill comes after a long line of cases stretching back to the first US fast food lawsuit that was filed in 2002 by a New Yorker, who blamed his frequent visits to McDonald’s for his obesity and diabetes. It has been seen as a test case in which the fast-food industry won a clear victory which critics argue effectively absolves the food industry of any responsibility with respect to public health.
Conflicting Interests – Diet Industry or Fat Tax?
The obesity crisis has brought forward an array of so-called solutions to the problem. As a consequence, true to the core values of Capitalism we have seen the meteoric rise of a diet industry that holds itself as a solution to this problem. From the lengthening queues outside gyms and slimming clubs, to the raft of celebrity-led fads such as the Atkins diet, it now seems to be a prerequisite for healthy living to follow some kind of fitness regime or weight-busting eating programme. According to a BBC report, diet product spending is estimated to vary from $40bn to $100bn for the US alone; that’s more than the combined value of the government’s budget for health, education and welfare. According to research in the UK the average weight watcher spends approximately £300 on diet each year. Despite such expense, only one in a hundred dieters manages to successfully lose and keep weight off. Does the diet industry actually work in solving the problem of obesity?
Last year in a bid to control the burden upon the NHS due to obesity related diseases doctors at the British Medical Association (BMA) debated a proposal to impose the full 17.5% VAT rate on a wider range of high fat foods such as biscuits, cakes and processed meals. The full rate is already charged on some foods including fizzy drinks, crisps and heated burgers. In addition the British Medical Journal recently claimed a ‘fat tax’ could help prevent 1,000 premature deaths from heart disease every year in the UK.
Other solutions have included the call for banning of food marketing advertisements that target children, and the discouragement of celebrities endorsing such foods. It will have to remain to be seen whether such actions will prove successful.
The Root Cause of Obesity
The West’s doctrine; freedom and all that it leads to, from the pursuit of personal gratification to self-benefit, has paved the way for droves of individuals to indulge in a lifestyle of greed and gluttony. This viewpoint about life has led the average Westerner to pursue an unbridled quest to amass wealth, and satisfy all material pleasures to the utmost level. From the viewpoint of food, it is the unabating drive for immediate gratification that has led to the huge increase in the fast-food industry. Driven by such forces, people become unable to evaluate long-term implications on their health against an insatiable appetite. The consumer, which is how people have come to be known in free-market terminology, has become a slave of his own desires, pushed beyond all limits to satisfy every urge.
It is this concept; the unbridled pursuit of satisfaction of desires, that is the real root cause of obesity. In effect it is none other than a manifestation of two basic axioms of the Capitalist way of life upon which the Western world has come to be built; freedom and satisfaction of desires. This self-destructive way of life is the ultimate cause of obesity in the West, and it is these same notions that are the root cause of numerous other social ills that the West falls victim to, from corruption, crime, economic inequality, sexual exploitation – all are an inevitable result of people living in a society where they are encouraged to pursue their desires without limit.
It comes as no surprise that the West flounders in its quest to find a solution to the obesity problem, offering up piecemeal answers that fail to deliver the needed results. Its proposals are almost in all cases reactionary and superficial and in no way come close to solving the problem of obesity. Specialised low fat diets, high carbohydrate diets or 200 press-up a day exercise regimes do not address the root of the problem. Rather, the true solution lies in deconstructing the very beliefs and ideas that Western life itself is built upon, and exposing them as false and self-destructive.
Global Implications of First World Greed
The implications of First World greed do not stop with the limits of the hemisphere. When natural instincts of eating coupled with the notion of freedom come together the end result that ensues is inevitable. Individuals lose control and are carried away with the insatiable desire to want more and beyond what is necessary. When the fat of the native land is no longer enough to provide this, it becomes necessary to look further a field. In this way, the whole world is made to suffer as a result of the excesses of Western civilization.
The West’s colonial and imperial expansion throughout the world this century was driven by the need to maintain this lifestyle of unbridled satisfaction of material desire, even if it was achieved at the expense of others.
As a result of this, through a series of social, political and economic policies the developing world became the main suppliers of raw materials, fuel sources and food that they exchanged in lieu of their debt repayments. Markets in the starving continents of Africa and Asia have become fertile sources of cash crops and child labour. Consequently much of the food grown in the Developing World was not for the satisfaction and the needs of the needy indigenous population, but for the over consumption by the gluttonous West. A sharp example of this was seen throughout the famine in Africa in 1984-85. While Band-Aid were singing to Britons to bring to light the plight of emaciated, starving Ethiopians, the same country was producing green beans which were exported to Great Britain, for consumption by its already obese population.
Curbing the Desires
In today’s society individuals who make satisfaction of desires, their aim are trapped in a vicious cycle of binging and dieting, emotionally imprisoned through depression and low self-esteem whilst physically tortured as a result of succumbing to their appetites. When the brief moments arise in which they take control of their will power in order to fulfill another desire for example, to lose the weight, they feel temporarily satisfied. However, moved by the very same type of urges, it is not long before they jump back on the bandwagon as the desire and temptation set in to strike once again. The nature of desire as a criteria for controlling actions is such that it is constantly fluctuating, with the individual being torn between a variety of differing pleasures. The aim of satisfying desires will never bring peace and contentment to an individual and comes at great cost to both body and soul. When this concept is applied to food and drink, it leads to people enjoying these things to excess; obesity can be considered a natural outcome.