Japanese Obesity

It's almost an oxymoron to say "Japanese obesity."  Johann Hari, who has written a new book, "Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs," discussed purported miracle drug Ozempic with Bari Weiss.  His bottom line is that there are straightforward solutions to the out-of-control obesity of Americans. But there is so much more to this interview than Ozempic. Here is Hari's discussion of how obesity is seen in Japan:

Johann Hari: So Japan has 4 percent obesity. Americans have 42.5 percent obesity. But Japan shows us that is not inevitable, right?

I went to a Japanese school, a normal middle-class school, with a thousand kids. It was bizarre walking around this school. There were no overweight children in this school. Every school in Japan has to employ a professional nutritionist. Her job is to design the meals. All processed food is banned.

So I go to the school and I’m watching these kids eating these unbelievably healthy meals. And I said to them, “So what’s your favorite food?” And one of them goes, “My favorite food is broccoli.” Another one goes, “My favorite food is white fish.” And another one goes, “I like boiled white rice.”

And I turned to my translator and I said, “Are these kids fucking trolling me? Their favorite food is broccoli?” She said, “We teach our children to love healthy food, don’t you?” No Japanese person understood why I was shocked.  One of the funniest experiences I ever had was trying to explain the concept of “fat pride” to Japanese people. They were just completely baffled.

They have a law; it was so bizarre witnessing. . . in 2008, in Japan, obesity went up by 0.4 percent, and there was a massive national freakout.

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Is the goal of health care reform merely to save lives?

Is the goal of health care reform merely to save lives? If so, there are much better ways to do it than universal health insurance, as indicted by Daniel Akst in The Atlantic:

A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips.

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Fat and salt and sugar and fat and salt and . . .

Amy Goodman recently interviewed David Kessler, who used to be Commissioner of the FDA under Bush I and Bill Clinton. He has really turned up the heat on the unhealthy food industry, and it is a huge industry. It's repeat clients also frequent hospitals in droves, as reported by DemocracyNow:

[A] new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the direct medical costs of obesity total about $147 billion a year. That amounts to nine percent of all US medical costs. It’s also over $50 billion more than the annual spending on cancer.

The problem is that we have these innate and insatiable cravings for salt and sugar and fat. Fat and sugar, fat and salt, fat, sugar, and salt stimulate us to eat more and more. Does the food industry understand the inputs? Absolutely. They understand that fat, sugar and salt stimulate us, and they understand the outputs. They understand we keep on coming back for more and more, as Kessler explains:

Have they understood the neuroscience? Have they understood how fat and sugar work? I don’t think so. But we now have that science. But what’s important is the fact that they have figured out—they’ve learned it experientially—what works, and they construct food to stimulate us to eat more . . .

What has the food industry done? They’ve taken fat, sugar and salt, they’ve put it on every corner. They’ve made it available 24/7. They’ve made it socially acceptable to eat at any time. They’ve added the emotional gloss of advertising. Look at an ad; you’ll love it, you’ll want it. They’ve made food into entertainment. We’re living, in fact, in a food carnival.

But how much fat, sugar and salt can you possibly pump into food? More than you can imagine. Kessler explains the formula:

So, take an appetizer in a modern American restaurant. Take buffalo wings. What are they? You take the fatty part of the chicken, fried usually in the manufacturing plant first. That loads about 30, 40 percent fat. Fry it again in the kitchen of the restaurant. That loads more fat. That red spicy sauce? What is it? Fat and sugar. That white creamy sauce on the side? Fat and salt. What are we eating? Fat on fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt.

But aren't the obese people the real problem? Why blame the terribly unhealthy food industry (Did you like this framing of the question)? Yes, people need to get disciplined about the way they eat. No doubt. But when 2/3 of American adults are overweight, it's time to assume that the artery-clogging food manufacturers of American are immorally creating an environment ubiquitously filled with toxic supersized portions. In short, I fully support new Congressional legislation would provide up to $10 billion a year for a prevention and public health investment fund that would include a focus on curbing obesity. See this related post on the effect of growing portion sizes.

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Adult baby food

Dr. David Kessler has written a new book called "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite." He was recently interviewed by Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com. You can also listen to their discussion here. I was intrigued by Kessler's notion that much of the food to which people become addicted is "adult baby food":

We're eating, in essence, adult baby food. Twenty years ago the average chews per bite was about 20, now it's two or three. The food goes down in a whoosh and it's very stimulating. It's layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt. It's as if you have a roller coaster going on in your mouth. You get stimulated, it disappears instantly and you reach for more.

But it's not just the fat or the sugar. We dress up food really well here in the United States:

We make food into entertainment. We make it into a food carnival. Go into a modern American restaurant: the colors, the TVs, the monitors, the music. You do it with your friends. We've taken sugar and added all these multiple levels of stimuli. What do we end up with? Probably one of the great public health crises of our day.

Go visit Salon for the entire article. Lots of worthy observations. For instance, he discusses why people get fat (it's not because fat people enjoy eating more than skinny people). Also, there is no body "set point" to protect you from gaining weight. Kessler offers lots of ideas for not allowing your brain to get hijacked by high calorie food. On a related note, I've had to constantly monitor my own eating and exercise to keep myself where I need to be (I'm now 5' 11" and 170), and I use a variety of techniques I described here, especially the need to avoid refined carbohydrates and to constantly aim for whole grains and lots of vegetables and whole fruits (not juice).

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Ballpark food lighting up our Pleistocene taste buds.

What is it about ballpark food that makes it so delicious? I think that these new truth-in-marketing signs at the ballpark pretty well sum it up. Photo (etc) by Erich Vieth These stadium food vendors truly excel in offering superstimuli for our not-ready-for-modern-times stomachs and eyes. What should we do about this mismatch between our pleistocene cravings and our modern abilities to pump out this life-shortening quality-of-life-diminishing fare? That's the question raised by Dr. David Kessler, former Commissioner of the FDA:

Fifty years ago, the tobacco industry, confronted with the evidence that smoking causes cancer, decided to deny the science and deceive the American public. Now, we know that highly palatable foods—sugar, fat, salt—are highly reinforcing and can activate the reward center of the brain. For many people, that activation is sustained when they're cued. They have such a hard time controlling their eating because they're constantly being bombarded—their brain is constantly being activated.

For decades the food industry was able to argue, "We're just giving consumers what they want." Now we know that giving them highly salient stimuli is activating their brains. The question becomes what do they do now?

When I say "superstimulus, I mean it. I can't believe how many obese people I recently saw at the stadium. Half of them wore Albert Pujols jerseys, but none of them looked like Albert Pujols. Now, while we're still discussing stadium food, here's an untouched photo clearly demonstrating that the world is almost out of fresh water. After all, there's no other explanation for why anyone would pay twice as much for 20 ounces of drinking water than for a gallon of refined gasoline. image by Erich Vieth I can just imagine the conversation: Child: Daddy, can I have a few sips of water? Father: Billy, how many times have I told you that we can't afford to drink water!

Continue ReadingBallpark food lighting up our Pleistocene taste buds.