Alternate Causes of Obesity

[Legbiter]

My exhaustive research Tim, has led me to believe you might be on to something here.

Yep.

[11B4V]

 

Take that mongers

[Ed Anger]

Boner: lost

[Ideologue]

Abomination.

[MadImmortalMan]

He has three of those Big Green Egg smokers at home

Three? Even I haven't put that much cash into outdoor cooking gear.

[Tamas]

Good work, Tim.

I was ready to dismiss this as the abomination, fat enabling, but then:

I will paraphrase Wells's intricate argument (the only one I've ever read that references both receptor pathways for leptin and data on the size of the Indian economy in the 18th century). It is a saga spanning many generations. Let's start with a poor farmer growing food crops in a poor country in Africa or Asia. In a capitalistic quest for new markets and cheap materials and labour, Europeans take control of the economy in the late 18th or early 19th century. With taxes, fees and sometimes violent repression, their new system strongly 'encourages' the farmer and his neighbours to stop growing their own food and start cultivating some more marketable commodity instead – coffee for export, perhaps. Now that they aren't growing food, the farmers must buy it. But since everyone is out to maximise profit, those who purchase the coffee crop strive to pay as little as possible, and so the farmers go hungry. Years later, when the farmer's children go to work in factories, they confront the same logic: they too are paid as little as possible for their labour. By changing the farming system, capitalism first removes traditional protections against starvation, and then pushes many previously self-sufficient people into an economic niche where they aren't paid enough to eat well.

Eighty years later, the farmer's descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world's 21st-century middle-class consumers, thanks to globalisation and outsourcing. Capitalism welcomes them: these descendants are now prime targets to live the obesogenic life (the chemicals, the stress, the air conditioning, the elevators-instead-of-stairs) and to buy the kinds of foods and beverages that are 'metabolic disturbers'.

But that's not the worst of it. As I've mentioned, the human body's response to its nutrition can last a lifetime, and even be passed on to the next generation. If you or your parents – or their parents – were undernourished, you're more likely to become obese in a food-rich environment. Moreover, obese people, when they have children, pass on changes in metabolism that can predispose the next generation to obesity as well. Like the children of underfed people, the children of the overfed have their metabolism set in ways that tend to promote obesity. This means that a past of undernutrition, combined with a present of overnutrition, is an obesity trap.

Wells memorably calls this double-bind the 'metabolic ghetto', and you can't escape it just by turning poor people into middle-class consumers: that turn to prosperity is precisely what triggers the trap. 'Obesity,' he writes, 'like undernutrition, is thus fundamentally a state of malnutrition, in each case promoted by powerful profit-led manipulations of the global supply and quality of food.'

CAPITALISM MAKES YOU FAT.

So there's another reason to overthrow it.

Clearly traditional agriculture was a fool-proof protection against famine. It never happened before evöl colonialism and industrialism.

[mongers]

Take that mongers

[grumbler]

Clearly traditional agriculture was a fool-proof protection against famine. It never happened before evöl colonialism and industrialism.

Yeah, it is amusing to watch Ide get on his high horse and charge windmills, isn't it?  Most people work that out of their system by their sophomore year of college, but not Ide.  His depiction of the happy peasant of the pre-industrial era isn't as well-done as Tolkien's, but it is as fantastic.