In many ways, obesity is a very complex disease, and it’s likely to remain so for many years. You can always go deeper down the rabbit hole, regardless of whether you are researching fat cells, metabolism, eating psychology or socioeconomics. Researchers are usually very happy to do this, it’s what we trained for.
There comes a point, however, when new studies do not add very much to what is needed in order to bring about a certain outcome, such as prevention of obesity. It’s true that we need much more research, for example on obesity etiology, but do we really need more evidence to tell us that junk food and inequality/poverty (this latter risk factor only applies to countries that have already made the nutrition transition from natural food to junk food, such as Europe and North America) are major causal factors? I think not.
Indeed, we can and should act now to reduce both, and in so doing, we would very likely help to prevent new cases of obesity and probably many other diseases that are also linked to both risk factors, such as depression, arthritis, diabetes and heart disease.
Apart from getting rid of junk food and lowering rates of poverty, we should also be promoting healthy nutrition across the lifespan, where the food contains minimal quantities of pesticides, preservatives, sugar, salt, unhealthy fats, steroids, and antibiotics – just plain natural food, it’s simple. We should also be doing things like promoting physically active transport, and reducing sitting time at work and at home. Healthy eating and regular physical activity will not get rid of obesity, but they can probably go some way in lowering the obesity incidence rates at the very least.
And while messages to promote healthy eating and physical activity can be helpful, we have to be much more comprehensive in how we change the environment. Indeed, the food environment has become so toxic that it feels like we almost have to completely rethink how we produce food. Junk food simply has no place in a society where we value and place emphasis on prevention on chronic disease. Reducing poverty will also require much more than pretty messages, it requires major political decisions and pressure from voters. Bear in mind that the difference between the rich and the poor is at its widest in over 7 decades.
There will always be times when we have to do more research in order to understand more about a particular disease or problem, but if we are talking about obesity prevention, this is probably not that time. This is the time for action, like what is happening in Mexico (see my previous post), where they are successfully working to reduce their more or less catastrophic childhood obesity rates, for example by taxing soda, during very challenging conditions.
Actually, if there is one thing that we should do more research on, it would be to find out why we are not implementing much more serious obesity prevention programs and why we have let mega food corporations take over close to our entire food supply. And while we try to find answers to those two question, there is nothing stopping us from implementing healthy nutrition and physical activity habits for everyone, especially for children in socioeconomically challenged areas.
If you have an answer as to why we are not doing more to prevent obesity, I would love to hear from you. Please share.
Erik Hemmingsson