They Don’t Understand Why

Today’s New York Post offered an article blaring the headline American women are more obese than ever before, which noted that 40% of American women are overweight. I had to dig into the source material to find the historical data to discover what more obese than ever means, and it turns out the figure represents a 5% jump from a decade earlier. The data on men indicates an overweight fraction of 35%, up a point and a half from the previous decade.

So, we’re getting fatter. Not really a surprise. The interesting thing about this story isn’t the trend itself (or the finger pointing – more on that in a moment), but rather this:

Scientists were baffled as to exactly why – despite hundreds of millions of dollars poured into health education and outreach in recent years – American women just continue getting fatter, according to the medical journal.

They don’t understand why their combination of education, guidelines, calorie count laws, nutrition labels, food bans, attempted food bans, and initiatives hasn’t produced a nation of svelte, fit, athletic and nutritionally conscious people.

They point the finger of blame, of course, at any convenient target that is not themselves. The Post article devotes half its text to a study that looked into the frequency of celebrity endorsements of foods of poor “nutritional quality,” and specifically called out Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake and will.i.am for endorsing junk.

There’s no mention of the government’s culpability in the nation’s obesity surge (38% today vs 16% in the 1980s), no mention whatsoever of the past excoriation of fats and past suggestion that our diets should rest on a foundation of starches, no mention of the food pyramid that the government put forth back then as part of educating us. We know today that what they told us then was very wrong, but who among the nannies of today steps up and says overtly “the government was wrong and the government made us fat?”

Governments throughout history have attempted and failed to regulate behavior. Prostitution is dubbed “the world’s oldest profession,” and has survived every attempt at banning. America famously banned alcohol for 13 years, and in doing so not only failed to counter the ills brought about by firewater, but spawned and institutionalized the organized crime industry. Recreational drugs were banned in the early part of the 20th century, and the War on Drugs was declared 45 years ago, but today anyone can buy any drug of his choosing, with very little risk, and in greater purity and potency than ever. And now, the very things we eat have become a casus belli for nannies, do-gooders, and control freaks.

Does anyone really think that government can fix the obesity “epidemic?” As I’ve written before, government is both a blunt instrument and one that lags society, and has demonstrated few qualms in infringing on the liberties of the responsible to effect societal changes it deems positive. History tells us that it’s stunningly bad at accomplishing these changes. So, between the brutishness with which it seeks to induce change, the everyone-gets-affected nature of its methods, the bandwagon-jumping timing of its efforts, and the history of failure, we should expect that anyone who says “government should do something” might also say “but wait, government stinks at doing this sort of stuff and causes much collateral damage when it tries.”

Instead, they ignore history and cast about for reasons their efforts have failed. In this particular case, they blame celebrity endorsements.

History makes it abundantly clear that governments cannot legislate behavior, and have a poor track record of coaxing it. The advice they give seems to work only when it acts as an excuse for people to engage in behaviors they like but know are bad for them. Consider the advice from that old food pyramid: eat lots of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. Today’s state of nutritional knowledge tells us the opposite, with sugar identified as the devil and low carb diets as a preferred means of losing weight. That old advice provided “cover” for people indulging their cravings, when in the past they may have noticed they were getting fat from all the extra bread and connected the dots. After all, if the government says “eat more bread,” it can’t be bad for you, can it?

The nannies also miss the point of celebrity endorsements. Those endorsements aren’t meant to tell people to eat junk food, but to eat a particular brand of junk food. People like junk food. It’s in our DNA. Junk food provides certain sensory overloads that feed our pleasure centers. They’re also missing, at least in this story, the real societal trends that may be contributing to this, pardon the pun, growth. Society is awash in efforts and initiatives to destigmatize obesity. Barbie dolls are denigrated for promoting unrealistic body images. Traditional runway model body types are under attack (France has legislated a minimum Body Mass Index). We are told we should prefer plus-size models. Fat-shaming is now considered a [Thing]((http://time.com/4010748/oxford-dictionary-update-2015/) the Oxford Dictionary last year. and has become one of the increasingly long list of things that social justice warriors have identified as a no-no.

Interestingly, though, and despite people getting fatter, it seems that there’s only so much even society’s self-appointed stewards can manage. There’s been a bit of mission creep in the plus-size model realm. The anorexic/waif look has increasingly been supplanted by the fit look, and fitness models are proliferating. The fitness industry is growing, and it seems that a new exercise trend (e.g. Zumba, CrossFit, boot camps, spin classes, stripper-pole workouts, ropes, barre classes, rowing classes, katami, wave shape) appearing every week.

What does all this tell us? It’s a reflection of a broader truth. Society will move as its constituents, in the aggregate, decide it will. Those who think they can manage to move it in a contrary direction have a mighty rough time of it, rarely enjoying success and often causing unintended adverse consequences. Government tries to tell us what to eat. When government gets it right, people are loath to comply if the guidance doesn’t fit their predilections. When government gets it wrong, people have an excuse to feed their predilections or (as an example, with trans-fats, which were first pushed by the government then banned by the government) potentially suffer bad outcomes. Social justice types push us to be more accepting of the overweight even as they lament and demand action against the obesity epidemic.

At the end of it all, when things don’t go as intended, they’re loath to gaze back at all they’ve done and wonder if they’ve been complicit in causing that which they decry. The final line of the Post story:

“I don’t know if anyone truly knows for sure,” Hunnes said of why the obesity epidemic is worsening.