Not THAT again

Food companies love, and I mean LOVE, to trot out the old "It's not us, it's you" argument about obesity. It's not our delicious, salty, high fat, high sugar, tasty snacks and sodas that are making you fat...it's that you are not exercising enough! Pepsico's Indra Nooyi is just the latest in a long line of companies making some version of this claim. The Wall Street Journal's health blog has a great piece on exactly why the math on this doesn't work.

Food companies don't want to admit that the hard sell they are giving us every day to buy their snack foods are part of the problem.

I recently made a similar point in one of my take-home finals (the books I referenced are listed below):

§ All that time we’re saving by eating more convenient processed foods? We’re not using it to exercise. The modern world has done an amazing job of making our lives easier. In fact, maybe it has made it too easy. A lot of these books make a strong case for unprocessed, home cooked whole foods- all foods that, by nature, don’t carry health claims. I strongly support this stance. And yet, we haven’t found the right balance between convenience and health. As big box supermarkets open in parts of the world primarily dependent on open air markets, there is a strong desire to press pause and prevent this occurrence. However, as Dr. Popkin implies, denying these folks the ability to shop in a convenient, climate controlled environment is denying them an improvement in standard of living, as well as ensuring population weight gain. The advent of processed foods, prepared foods and takeaway meals was both a reaction to more women in the workforce and a necessary factor for it. This, coupled with great strides forward in technology, has greatly increased our standard of living in the United States. However, as technology enriches our lives, our backsides widen. We’ve been fortunate to live in a world where technology has made our lives easier, but we’ve neglected the other side of the energy equation: expenditure. A number of the books I read pointed out the need for a greater emphasis on physical activity and exercise in our daily lives. Now that we don’t have to work so hard to survive, we will have to find ways to build meaningful energy expenditure back into our routines. It’s worth nothing this point because big food often takes the stance of supporting physical activity initiatives and promotes physical activity as the way to dig the country out of the obesity crisis (Brownell, Nestle and Popkin all note this big food tactic). In this way, physical activity has become another health claim by big food: it’s not us, it’s you. You just need to exercise!

Books referenced: Barry Popkin's "The World is Fat", David Kessler's "The End of Overeating", Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma", Kelly Brownell's "Food Fight" and Marion Nestle's "Food Politics"