We Can't Fix Obesity One Candy Bar at a Time

In the discussion of our obesity epidemic, a lot of emphasis is placed on personal responsibility. Cut back on the amount of soda you drink, the argument goes. Or buy a bunch of grapes instead of a bag of chips. Kids, get outside and play.

These are all laudable ideas, so a discussion of how they aren't enough gets tricky; you don't want to sound like you're saying personal choice is not incredibly important.

Yet, the choices people make in the United States occur in a context that makes it all but impossible for them to choose well enough on a consistent enough basis to fix the obesity problem for good.

If the basics of the eating universe — both the material reality of what's available and promoted as well as the widespread understanding of what's a "normal" amount of various elements in a diet — don't change, then nudging people to make better choices on a one-by-one basis is only going to be like putting a band-aid on a gaping chest wound.

A New York Times article on the topic emphasizes that losing weight over the long term isn't as easy as cutting out an indulgent snack here or there. “There is a much bigger picture than parsing out the cookie a day or the Coke a day,” Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of Rockefeller University’s molecular genetics lab, told the Times.

What we really need are "significant lifestyle changes," which are hard to accomplish in a world designed to push us toward less-than-healthful food choices and woefully inadequate amounts of physical activity.

The Small Bites blog provides a good example of the way normal daily routines are actually dramatic downfalls in people's diets. The writer asked readers to guess how many teaspoons of sugar are in a large Dunkin' Donuts mocha coffee. The eye-popping answer: 11.5. That is a teaspoon and a half more than you find in a 12-ounce can of soda.

This one coffee drink — undoubtedly the go-to morning Joe for many a commuter — exceeds the recommended daily amount of added sugar for both men or women. According to MSNBC, most women shouldn't be consuming more than six teaspoons of added sugar in a day, and most men should limit themselves to nine.

So even after targeting our favorite villains — the sodas and chips of this world — we are going to be remarkably far from changing people's dietary habits in a real way. Until we start seriously developing a food culture in which, for example, consuming a sugary coffee beverage in the morning is an unthought-of indulgence, we are going to get nowhere fast.

Until we change entirely what is considered a baseline acceptable diet, our biology will not cooperate with us; the small changes many encourage are not enough to get us back down to a healthy size.

“We need to know what we’re up against in terms of the basic biological challenges, and then design a campaign that will truly address the problem in its full magnitude,” Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston, told the Times.

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography on Flickr