How ironic to learn this week that the British government is resisting pressure to tax sugary foods just as Oprah Winfrey has announced she has purchased a 10% share in Weight Watchers. Oprah’s decision had immediate consequences: $700m in revenue for the weight-loss company over the course of the two days following the announcement; dozens of articles extolling the move as a savvy business deal for both parties; and, for people like me, a growing suspicion that the transaction signified a fundamental flaw in our culture.
Winfrey was quoted in a press release praising the “lasting shift” that Weight Watchers induces in its members. In some ways she’s right: this seems a reasonable programme that introduces its clientele to an intelligent way to think about food and exercise. Among weight-loss companies, it is a lesser evil; for some, it is a lifesaver.
Like most such programmes, however, it operates on the premise that personal responsibility is the key to weight reduction – and that weight reduction is the key to happiness. Both suppositions are faulty.
When I published my novel, Heft –the protagonist of which is kind, heroic, and, coincidentally, morbidly obese – I received a positive response from most readers. But I was alarmed to receive responses from others that ranged from disgust to near-violence. I can’t forget the woman in the audience of one of my readings who told me that she had always found fat people grotesque. (“Something about the way they eat,” she said, chillingly.) Her question: how did I manage to write about a fat person without feeling ill?
I thought of her , and the other readers who expressed similar sentiments, when I read the news about Oprah. I thought how nice it would be to see Winfrey – and Michelle Obama, for that matter, whose “Let’s Move!” initiative to reduce childhood obesity in the US is well-intended but misdirected – using their celebrity to point the public’s attention and ire instead toward two problems.
First, the terrible prejudice faced by overweight and obese people. Second, the ways in which corporations are responsible for the obesity crisis in many western societies. These companies, both those that sell us overprocessed and sugary foods and those making huge amounts of money out of people trying to lose weight, are literally making a profit on our flesh.
Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, once said: “We ourselves hold the instrument that makes us fat.” Do we, though? A recent study published in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice brought startling new findings to light. In 2006, a person who ate a given daily number of calories and expended a given number of daily calories through exercise was likely to have a body mass index 2.3 points higher than someone taking in and expending the same number of calories in 1988.
As the authors concluded: “Factors other than diet and physical activity may be contributing to the increase in BMI over time. Further research is necessary to identify these factors and to determine the mechanisms through which they affect body weight.”
Though it may be years before this research is finished, a recent article in the Atlantic speculates that three separate factors may be at play: an increase in our exposure to chemicals, such as flame retardants, that may cause weight gain; the growing prescription of pills such as antidepressants, which may have the same effect; and, most intriguingly, a change in the number or type of “microbiomes” present in our guts. It is possible, posits Professor Jennifer Kuk in the Atlantic article, that this last item might be traced back to what food itself consumes: “hormones and antibiotics to promote growth” most obviously in the case of the US.
Sheer personal willpower and discipline can take us so far in managing our diets, but there are factors that are out of our control. Huge power rests with the multinational corporations that produce our food, medicine and consumer goods. But increasingly, I fear that western governments find it easier to lecture individual citizens about their eating habits than to take on a food industry, and its lobbying power, that works against our efforts towards health every step of the way.
Many British primary care trusts now subsidise membership of weight-loss organisations such as Weight Watchers, thus indirectly lining their pockets with money that could better be spent on prevention programmes. What will it take for governments instead to tackle those who put sugar, salt, antibiotics and other unhealthy ingredients in our food?
Simultaneously, we must work to reduce the outrageous judgments we levy on overweight and obese people. Just as it is possible to be fit as well as overweight, it is possible to be unfit or unhealthy due to circumstances – poverty, mental illness, medication – that are beyond our control. We, as consumers, need to be one another’s allies in the fight against the global corporations that do so much to make us unhealthy. We could start by being kinder to one another in all our various shapes and sizes.