Conflating legit obesity health warnings with "fat shaming"

Great Debates
81

You’re not wrong, but my point is that the food industry is unique in successfully blaming the totally predictable results of its actions on the individual choices of consumers. When mountaintop-removal mining poisons the water of local communities, for example, we don’t tend to scold the individuals in those communities for their poor choices in living near a mining site and drinking tap water instead of buying bottled water from less contaminated locations.

But when the food industry deliberately and successfully encourages millions of people to make bad choices about their nutrition and they become less healthy in consequence, it seems that the only people we’re willing to blame for that are the individual sufferers for having made poor choices.

82

If I successfully market (to everyone btw) and my product sales skyrocket, you are blaming the manufacturer of said product instead of the few folks who maybe might shouldn’t eat/use said product?

Seriously, re-read that.

Blame lies on the purchaser. In this case the person stuffing it in their mouth.
Now can it be helped in other ways? Sure but not by blaming or holding liable the maker of some product that isn’t “healthy”

If the product was outright bad and held no benefit then we as society should ban said product.

I’ll hold my breath while alcohol and cigarettes are banned.

83

There’s monumental amounts of readily available information that informs us of the dangers of tobacco and alcohol, but there are actually laws that prohibit slander and libel of FOOD. Seriously, was it Texas that passed a law that makes it criminal to say anything negative about the beef industry because Oprah said she don’t do red meat because it’s bad for you?

And what about the jiggery pokery of the USDA food pyramid and how it changes according to lobbyist pressure and the whims of whoever’s in charge?

And again, I challenge anyone to go on a shopping trip to your local grocery store and shop keeping a goal of maximum 30-60 gm net carbs per day in mind (net carbs are the total carbohydrates minus dietary fiber) and just see how incredibly stacked the deck is in favor of really awful food. Mind you, 30-60gm isn’t even in ketogenic range but that was my personal goal that resulted in losing 25lbs in about eight months. Go do this a few times then ask yourself again why Type II diabetes and obesity are rampant.

84

…then make sure you go back and do it again on poverty wages. Without a decent kitchen. Without ever having been taught how to cook. Without a lot of things that middle class America takes for granted when they snark out “just eat less, just eat healthier.”

85

A governmental entity is beholden to donors? Say it ain’t so. Sounds like a failing of our government. Let’s change that.

86

Also this–I’m lucky I’m a good cook and have a stocked kitchen with spices and proper equipment and the education to be able to parse out nutritional information and make quick judgments so my shopping trip doesn’t take six hours out of my life every time I go. I have a car so I can go to multiple stores to take advantage of what stock is most optimal in each store and can take advantage of loss leaders. Trying to do what I do as a matter of course would be flatly impossible for a huge percentage of people in this society for one reason or another. I definitely appreciate my privilege that allows me to take better care of my health and be in charge of what I eat. Heck, I’m a cord cutter who doesn’t get exposure to much of any advertising even, that really helps a lot.

87

This is exactly the tension, the dynamic, at play, and food/obesity is not alone in having this public health vs. personal responsibility yin-yang. Think alcohol and opiates abuse as another.

Alcohol can be consumed without abuse and with real benefits, in moderation. Opiates can and are powerful medical tools when used correctly as part of treating serious pain. To no small degree abuse of both involves the abuser making a choice to do so. There is and should be some personal responsibility regarding how both are used.

Nevertheless as a society we recognize that society has an obligation to protect those prone to abuse from their harms. We in particular try to protect children from having unfettered access and from being targeted by those who would push these products. We also hold those who sell the products liable to some degree - a bar is liable if they serve too much and the intoxicated person then goes out and kills someone in a car crash; legal sale of opiates is restricts and tightly controlled and those who sell outside of those restrictions are subject to punishment.

There is a conflict between the threads of the responsibility for harm is on the one who “chooses” to consume, and the responsibility of “the state” to control those who promote the substances to those at risk or underage for profit.

We have a fair sense of that balance for alcohol and opiates even though of course abuse still occurs, especially as when the state fails to exercise its responsibility well. For the products produced by The Food Industrial Complex - substances, as described above, designed to be “hyperpalatable”, designed to be over-consumed, to hit the brain centers that say eat more and to bypass the brain centers that say enough, we have less sense of the balance. We are heavy on the personal responsibility side and we even include our youngest as among those for whom little protection from these abusable products seems to be required.

I do not pretend to know exactly where or how the balance should be hit. It is more difficult than for alcohol where it is fairly simple to pick an age to say none legally allowed before with only few exceptions. We’d all like to allow a treat here and there. Nevertheless the obligation to find that balance, to find a way that protects children from so much of the hyperpalatable that it becomes a health risk, to create an environment that does not overly encourage obesity in anyone biologically prone, exists. As does personal responsibility at the same time.

Meanwhile I can stretch this analogy even further. Best not to be a heroin addict in the first place but given an addict we want to reduce the harm. Minimally clean needles and hopefully to oral methadone and off the street drugs completely. Is being on oral methadone as good as being completely clean? No of course not. But the harms of being on methadone for a few years or even as long term maintenance are much less than the harms of abusing street drugs. Now in comparison the harms of being obese but down 5 to 10% from where you were and simultaneously having moved into the middle tertile for cardiorespiratory fitness are even more of a harms reduction.

Prevention is the first priority (by way of fostering healthy behaviors for ALL from early ages on, including by ways of controlling the food and exercise environment) but after that harms reduction is the order of business.

88

I did, especially the part where you said “instead of”. Which, again, is a counterproductive distortion of the concept of “responsibility” here.

Once again, nobody is claiming that all responsibility for nutrition-related public-health problems rests solely with the makers and sellers of unhealthy foods “instead of” with the individuals who choose to consume them.

What we are doing is challenging your equally unrealistic claim that the responsibility for these problems rests only with individual consumers.

We can encourage consumers to eat less unhealthy foods without demanding that they should instead be stuffing their mouths with the dicks of food-industry executives, which is what you seem to be advocating.

Seriously, we do not have to treat this situation as though the only two choices are (a) pretending that individuals bear no responsibility at all for what they eat, or (b) groveling obsequiously before industry leaders and requiring that they be treated as superbeings above all criticism merely because they “successfully marketed” a product.

Eating too much junk food is a poor choice, and individual consumers should take responsibility for improving their choices. Pushing junk food as the dominant element of an entire national food industry, and making it substantially more difficult for consumers to obtain and afford non-junk food, is also a poor choice from the point of view of public health, and the food industry should be held responsible for helping cause the (again, entirely predictable) harms resulting from that choice.

Other posters have already rebutted your attempt at an analogy here, by correctly pointing out that other substances that carry significant public-health risks, such as alcohol and tobacco, are already heavily regulated.

We don’t have to accept a false dichotomy between outright banning something and refusing to listen to any criticism of the irresponsible ways in which it’s marketed and sold.

89

See also: firearms and automobiles.

90

Now, that criticism would make sense if only poor people happened to be fat, which does not happen to be the case. Although the part about having no idea how to cook does apply to a lot of people of any class in many cultures, your conceit that middle class Americans do know how to cook falls flat on its face.

91

Poor people are substantially more likely to be obese or overweight than the more wealthy in the US. Same goes for low education levels.

And to be clear, all of this stuff is statistical. It’s not impossible for poor people to maintain a healthy weight, just harder. That difference in difficulty shows up in the statistics.

92

Not so much ****Kimtsu, what I am advocating is simple.
That every single person in this world makes choices, those choices are no ones but THEIR’s to make. Are there things that make these choices hard, unpalatable, difficult ? Yes, sometimes they are. It is still THEIR choice.

Those revelations do not change the personal responsibility.

I have no quarrel with regulating food, none at all. But after that regulation, you will find the same things occur. People are STILL going to make the same bad decisions that they did before.

Unless they have some sort of medical reason that they just can’t say no to something, then they have free will. Use that free will.

There are a whole lot of folks like you that think they need to protect people from themselves.

You are wrong.

93

Well back at ya. You are wrong.

I’m pretty sure that you realize that for other issues of public health concern that have been the subject of regulation. Let’s use tobacco as our illustration.

A significant element of the tobacco industry’s attempts to avoid responsibility for the harms their products caused and to minimize regulations that potentially decreased their sales and profits was the exact same argument, often framed as “freedom of choice” (almost same as your preferred phrase of “free will”). From industry documents of the time:

As the industry had to defend against lawsuits an explicit tactic of choice as blame became clear.

Fastforward. We now live in a world in which there is more tobacco use regulation, nudges for behaviors by taxation, and has been successful litigation. There has been a greater understanding of the harms to kids from secondhand smoke as well.

DO people STILL make the same bad decisions that they did before?

Some. But many fewer. And cancer rates from smoking have decreased dramatically.

Your argument is explicitly disproven by the facts.

You are wrong.
Let’s even take this from a different angle. How do we know that there would not be as much obesity if the food and exercise environment was different, despite people having the same degree of self-control they have had for pretty much all of time? Because obesity rates changed as that food environment changed. We saw it in the United States and then as that American style diet spread across the world we saw it in other countries.
Again: you are wrong.
There is zero question that the changes in food and exercise environment, including but not limited to near constant exposure to the hyperpalatable from very early ages, triggered this epidemic, even as it is equally true that some are more prone to being so triggered than are others and that there is also still some element of personal choice as well.

The actual question is what sort of intervention makes sense. The “freedom of choice”/“free will” argument has been abused by the industry (food this time, as tobacco did before them) but is not completely without any merit. Outlawing tobacco would be too far and outlawing soda would be as well. And while one can state that there is no moderate use of tobacco that is not of risk, it is harder to say the same of the hyperpalatable. Few would be of the mindset protecting children from these products completely. So it is no doubt trickier.
Again pulling this back to the op - messaging in a way that is perceived as shaming the obese for the choices they have made is well shown to decrease the success of them making successful changes within the context of our obesogenic world. It is accepting the industry sales pitch, the same one that tobacco made, that the problem is the choices people make, not what industry has done. It does NOTHING to actually address what has changed that triggered the problem. We can encourage accomplishing healthier choices even in a world that makes such difficult for those predisposed to obesity and reduce harms dramatically. And we have to figure out what sort of ways to modify the current unhealthy environment make sense and are simultaneously doable.

But TLDR? Just “you are wrong” then. :slight_smile:

94

Picking up here on your important point about “food and exercise environment”. From a public-health standpoint, it is not just the food industry but also the automotive and automotive-support industries that have been making some irresponsible choices here. It has been shown that obesity very strongly correlates with amount of driving.

When fossil fuel companies try to undermine public-transit projects, and when businesses and developers oppose bike lanes and sidewalks in communities in order to maximize convenience and space for automobiles, and automotive lobbies lean on municipalities to enact more off-street parking requirements, they are all making a choice to put pressure on individuals to be more sedentary and increase public health risks from obesity.

Sure, individuals need to take responsibility for getting healthy amounts of exercise. But companies and governments also need to take responsibility for their choices to make it substantially more difficult for individuals to incorporate healthy amounts of exercise into their daily lives. Same deal as with the shared responsibility for public health problems from poor nutrition choices.

95

Specifically, in my post, I say that regulation would be just dandy with me. But if you can’t outright BAN a food or drug, then personal choice relies firmly on the person making the choice.

Then you explain how I am wrong because a winning lawsuit (s) against a tobacco company that then got regulated.

Regulate to your hearts content, I don’t care. Even more, I support regulation against harmful products.

Regulate fast food, increase its cost. Decrease the cost of healthy options. Anything but take the blame from someone who is deliberately making a choice, albeit a choice that is bad for them.

They don’t need protection from making bad choice, it isn’t you or anyone else’s decision what they do to themselves.

You can help by regulating what choices they can make.

96

Returning to the original issue, I think the “obesity causes cancer” campaign is somewhat different than obesity causing heart disease or diabetes. The latter two are well known but the former not so much so. It’s not fat shaming for medical professionals to bring up something that is not well known yet and publicize it more.

97

“Personal choice” also doesn’t take into account how childhood exposure to hyperpalatable (great word, BTW) foods can influence adult nutritional decision making. When I was a baby, salt was regularly added to baby food in an attempt to make it more palatable to parents and therefore more profitable. Problem is that babies given a lot of salt grow up to be adults with a propensity toward using more salt than is strictly healthy and a conscious effort has to be made to learn to enjoy foods that haven’t been heavily salted. I’ve struggled with this for decades, with quite a lot of success but I’m still looked at as being a person who uses way more salt than most.

Realizing this is an issue, I don’t use much or no salt in my cooking and didn’t allow my kids to use the shaker at the table either. Both of them are now in their 40s, with no desire for added salt on their food. I also raised them on very little sugar, not allowing anything but natural style peanut butter, no white sugar (I kept brown sugar for baking and used raw sugar for table use) and avoiding most commercial jams and jellies and avoiding high fructose corn syrup as much as possible. This worked as planned on one kid, who has almost no sweet tooth at all and who’s been vegetarian and vegan for quite some stretches of time but who had to go back to being flexitarian after experiencing some anemia issues. The other one picked up a sugar habit in his teens that persists to this day–but he doesn’t go for a lot of the sugar added processed food, he just loves candy bars. He still avoids most sources of simple carbs and neither kid has a taste for those hyperpalatable foods that short circuit normal fullness cues–if they eat chips it’s going to be plain tortilla chips rather than the super flavored ones.

So simple changes in childhood, like whole grain seedy breads rather than white bread, keeping sugary stuff to the bare minimum and making a huge variety of veggies and fruits readily available along with good lean meats and few processed snack foods resulted in adults with good eating habits and no outright obesity–the sugar junkie does have a belly on him but a lot of that is inherited body shape. His dad looks much the same even though he does tons of yoga and physical work, they’re both just built like fireplugs–dad was a vegetarian during his childhood and still is mostly flexitarian.

Basically, early childhood eating habits can either short circuit the kind of reflexive eating habits the food companies prefer us to have or they can ensure lifelong profitable snack junkies that keep Cargill’s coffers as fat as their customer’s asses. It’s a lot easier to keep an early pattern than it is to retrain your tastes as an adult, by a long shot. So again, having nutritionally disastrous foods as the default in availability and price ensures a tubby population that can’t stop themselves from gorging on garbage.

Given that these patterns start in babyhood, the question of “personal responsibility” is a bit more complex than most would have us believe.

98

It’s interesting you write this about the food industry because thinking about consumer choice and corporate power in the food industry is one of the things that has softened my stance on a pure market economy. Addictive and unhealthy products, and certain foods imo fit into that category, need to at least be considered for some form of regulation.

99

Without question individuals need to take ownership over making changes to improve their health. Shame and blame are proven to be counterproductive tactics in dealing with individual obesity but removing what get called “the locus of control” (the degree to which we feel we are in control over our fates rather than everything that happens to us being all due to things outside our own control) is also not going to be helpful.

What is most under one’s control though, and what should be focused on, are the nutrition and exercise behaviors … not the number from the scale or superficial appearance. And these behaviors are important for those of all BMIs and body fat percentages.

From the public health POV the most impact is to be had by preventing obesity in the first place, which means getting those who are not yet obese to engage in behaviors that avoid it in an environment that makes doing so difficult, and in getting the obese to lose that modest amount of weight and to make that modest amount of cardiorespiratory fitness gain, even if they are still officially obese end of day.

But many share your big investment in being able to blame the obese for being obese. It’s a mindset we see with drug abuse as well in debates about help vs punishment.

Can you help me understand what the highly emphasized importance of blame is to you and the many others who share that perspective?

Agreed. And those who design the campaigns are trying to accomplish something with the campaign: improve public health outcomes. Given that such is the goal being aware of how messaging is heard (whatever the intent) has to be considered, and whether or not the messaging is helpful to achieving the goal also has be the highest consideration.

“Obese bad” … even “Obese unhealthy also in a way you did not know before!” is not an effective message. It has to somehow be coupled with messaging on how healthy nutrition and exercise choices can help “avert the severe decree.”

My frustration (okay one of them) is that we do not adequately message the latter. Maybe the public does not well know that obesity increases cancer risks. But the public also does not know well how much of the health benefits can be achieved without having to become “normal weight”, with modest weight loss and modest improvement in CRF, that the behavior changes goals that make major impact are not overwhelmingly difficult to accomplish.