24 Sep Don’t Blame Big Food For Our Health Problems, Just Stop Buying Crap
Dr. Will Clower, an award-winning author, argues in this article in MindBodyGreen, that we shouldn’t blame big food for our health problems, we need to just stop buying crap.
The obesity epidemic is so profound that over 65% of Americans now range from overweight to morbidly obese. As a result, weight problems threaten to overtake tobacco as the number one preventable cause of death and chronic disease. One common response to this epidemic has been to reflexively point fingers at the food industry for producing unhealthy foods in the first place.
The argument goes that the food industry is much more concerned with profits than people. As a result they load our foods with high-fructose corn syrup (which may contribute to obesity), hydrogenated oil (which may contribute to heart disease), nitrates and other preservatives (which may contribute to cancer and stroke), and synthetic colors, fat, and sweeteners.
This portrayal casts the food industry as a dietary Darth Vader that targets children with sly cartoon advertising, lures dieters in with low fat labels on high sugar products, and promotes “all natural” products loaded with excessive amounts of sodium.
While the facts are all true, the caricature is just not.
Our confusion centers around the thinking that food companies are moral entities who have some civic responsibility to better the common good. They’re not, and they don’t.
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