A Sociocultural History of Obesity and the Western Diet

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• published: 15 Jan 2016
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Take our free online course on food & heath on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/food-and-health Transcript: The human body runs on food. Where once, food shortage was the major concern, after the Second World War, technological advances in food production led to a new era that was characterized by an overabundance of inexpensive food and relatively little physical activity. In the decades that followed, other socio-cultural shifts continued to contribute to the changing way we ate: women who had previously controlled most of the average family’s food preparation, now entered the workforce in significant numbers and the processed food industry began to capitalize on our need for fast, convenient food. This meant that fewer meals were being cooked at home and, since convenience foods were generally higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average person’s caloric intake increased dramatically. Michael Pollan: And it is no coincidence, because to the extent we outsource our food, first, we eat less healthy food, more salt, fat, and sugar, but we also eat more food, because processed food is often designed as snack food. And marketed to us as a way to eat continually through the day. These changes in the way we, as a society, ate, led to the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease with well-defined health consequences. And medical recommendations were made to try and address those consequences. In the second half of the 20th century, a lot of attention was focused on reducing saturated fat and total fat in our diets and the processed food industry responded by giving us what we wanted. But they still had a vested interest in selling their products, so they found other ways to make their reduced-fat products taste good – one way they did this was by adding significantly more sugar, and other forms of sugar like corn syrup, to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced-fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf-life, so the food industry had a huge incentive to add corn syrup and other sweeteners to packaged foods. The resulting increase in our intake of simple sugars, fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. But now, we may be at risk of making the same mistake again. If we only emphasize the need to cut down on our sugar intake, without simultaneously emphasizing moderation and balance in our diet as a whole, we risk a situation where fats and animal proteins are seen by the general public as “free food” and the processed food industry, again steps in and supersizes… If this happens, we could find ourselves facing new epidemics of disease associated with a diet that is too high in fat and animal proteins, and lacking in fiber. Pollan: It's been interesting to read the research and see the shift in attention from treating fat as the evil nutrient to treating sugar as the evil nutrient. Now we went overboard on fat. It turns out fat is not as evil as we thought, and saturated fat is not necessarily the thing to worry most about in your diet. And in fact, our obsession with saturated fat led us to promote trans fats, which turned out to actually be lethal. So I'm very wary of focusing all our attention on a single nutrient. Sugar has been part of the human diet for a very long time. It's prized by people all over the world. We have evolved to like the flavor of sugar for very good reasons. But we are eating too much of it. These shifts in our food consumption patterns have led us to a point in history where a physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat, has become maladaptive. The balance between food availability and energy expenditure has been disrupted and it’s left us with an exponential increase in the incidence of obesity over the past 60 years, an epidemic that the World Health Organization has labeled “a worldwide public-health crisis”. Course by Maya Adam, MD Directed by William Bottini Editing by William Bottini & Tamsin Orion Special thanks to Michael Pollan, Tracy Rydel, and David Eisenberg