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A big fat crisis -- stopping the real causes of the obesity epidemic | Deborah Cohen | TEDxUCRSalon

Jun 08, 2021
We are in the middle of a major fat

crisis

, an

obesity

epidemic

and everyone knows that

obesity

is bad for our health, it is an underlying cause of heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, cancer and premature deaths, it is costing to our health care system more than a hundred. Fifty billion dollars each year and in the United States two out of every three adults and one out of every three children are overweight or obese, so why is this happening and what can we do right about it? The dominant conversation about obesity is that it is a matter of personal responsibility.
a big fat crisis    stopping the real causes of the obesity epidemic deborah cohen tedxucrsalon
We think that if people are overweight or obese it is a result of their own conscious choices and we also think that people should have the ability to control their weight, but think about it, if people had the ability to control their weight, why would they? Shouldn't they do it? This is my mom and dad and you can see them. My dad struggled with his weight for a long time for most of his adult life and he knew what to do. He was a dentist. He knew he should eat less and exercise more but he was never able to keep the weight off and was only successful for a few months in a row and you know the weight came back and he was a hardworking person, he served in the army in World War II and in the War from Korea worked six days. one week he rarely took vacations he raised three kids he sent us all to college and graduate school and he was the kind of guy that if he said he was going to do something or be somewhere you could always count on him.
a big fat crisis    stopping the real causes of the obesity epidemic deborah cohen tedxucrsalon

More Interesting Facts About,

a big fat crisis stopping the real causes of the obesity epidemic deborah cohen tedxucrsalon...

Don't know. I think anyone could call it personally irresponsible and that's how it is with most people who are overweight or obese, show up to work on time, pay taxes, raise their children, volunteer for their communities, if controlling one's own path was out of the question. as simple as meeting a person. responsibilities there is no doubt that we would not be having an obesity

epidemic

and that is why what I want to suggest is that personal responsibility is neither the cause nor the solution to the obesity epidemic. Well, I specialize in public health and so I would like to offer a health perspective on this so what is public health?
a big fat crisis    stopping the real causes of the obesity epidemic deborah cohen tedxucrsalon
It's about creating conditions in which people can be healthy, and one of the biggest successes in public health is clean water. 150 years ago, diseases like typhoid and cholera were among the leading

causes

of death and now we don't have to worry because in the United States the water is quite safe today in countries where they don't have drinking water. Waterborne diseases are big problems and are the leading

causes

of death among children under five years of age. Now imagine if we relegated drinking water to personal responsibility and didn't require all homes and buildings to have clean water pipes, we had to fetch it, boil it, filter it and store it, we wouldn't have time for anything else, so public health Not only does it reduce our risk, but it reduces the burden on people and therefore to appreciate how the conditions we live in

real

ly matter for obesity.
a big fat crisis    stopping the real causes of the obesity epidemic deborah cohen tedxucrsalon
I'd like you to imagine that we can take food out of the equation and replace it with alcohol. Now imagine that today in America we treat alcohol the same way we treat food, so imagine that for a few cents more we make huge servings of alcohol and what if we had all-you-can-drink buffets at one price and if alcohol sold little in the United States? vending machines and there were in every office building on every floor and in every break room and what if there was alcohol everywhere and if you went to the bookstore instead of candy at the register they had alcohol and what if there was alcohol in the car? it was washed when you went to pay and what if the hardware store instead of candy chips and soda had beer, wine and whiskey?
And what if we had no restrictions on selling alcohol to children and it was only up to parents to control what they do? kids drank or drank all the time what would be the consequences to be ok just a guess but we would probably have a lot more people drunk all the time adults and kids we would have a lot more alcohol related traffic deaths more violence , more people. dying from cirrhosis of the liver and more chronic alcohol-related diseases, well you know what I don't even have to guess because we can look at our own history because 200 years ago we had no regulations or restrictions on the sale of alcohol and the United States had a reputation for being a nation of drunks, alcohol was ubiquitous, it was the drink of choice, it was served to children, it was drunk all day at work and employers often paid their workers with alcohol allowances as part of their salaries 200 years ago .
Alcohol consumption was twice as much per capita as it is today, so here's the graph of alcohol consumption and it goes from the late 18th century to today and you can see how 200 years ago we drank a lot and when we got better. technology to distill whiskey there was even more alcohol and it was

real

ly a problem because a lot of people were drunk all the time and society realized that we had to do something and when they analyzed the situation they said, well, people are being tricked into to drink. too much because alcohol was ubiquitous and that is why they developed a regulation where they decided to limit its availability and accessibility so they prohibited the sale of alcohol to children they limited the days and hours in which alcohol could be sold they had policies to prohibit drinking at work and businessmen even subsidized alcohol-free taverns so that people could socialize without being pressured to drink and you can see that in the period of 10 years those very dramatic changes a sharp drop in alcohol consumption and and in that short period it fell to a third of what it was when we continued with more regulations and of course we had prohibition, which in retrospect we can say went too far, but even after it was repealed we kept a lot of regulations to control alcohol sales and therefore therefore, the policies we have. today to control alcohol that work standardized portions that restrict accessibility and restrict impulsive marketing that is where the conversation should begin to control obesity now it is fair to compare alcohol with food I say absolutely because consuming a moderate amount of each is not a problem you know we all need to eat, but when we consume too much of either, that's where people get into trouble. 200 years ago people drank too much because they lived in a swamp of alcohol and today people eat too much because we have allowed our country to become a swamp of food and food, and particularly junk food and sugar-sweetened drinks. , they are ubiquitous, cheap and marketed relentlessly, so I want to do an experiment so that you understand why things in a food swamp are problematic, so you have two inches here and I with a raise your hands those of you who you feel like you're looking at the hat more raise your hand okay, how many of you are looking at the cake? okay, that's because people are programmed to pay more attention to food than other things in The fact that simply looking at food can make you feel hungry and having the ability to feel hungry when looking at food was an evolutionary advantage when the Food was scarce, but now that we are producing twice as much food as people need in America today, it is killing us and The food industry knows how vulnerable we are to the location and availability of food and that is why they pay retailers to place the products they want to sell in prominent places so we can't ignore them and when they place food in these places, such as end-of-aisle displays. or in special displays, sales of those items increased between 50% and two or three times and, in fact, sales in these places represent 30% of all sales in supermarkets, so, if so, what they put in those places influences what we eat if we put more junk food there, we're going to eat more junk food, so even if we know we should make a different decision or eat less or avoid certain things, it's very difficult for us.
Most of us keep going because there is always so much food available and part of this is because we have limited cognitive ability, so I want to tell you about an experiment that shows you know why people have trouble making good decisions all the time, So Shiban Federica got a group of participants and randomly divided them into two. They had one group memorize a two-digit number and the other group memorize a seven-digit number. They then asked them to select a snack, either fruit salad or chocolate cake, and what happened was the group had to memorize the seven digits that were there. 50% more likely to choose chocolate cake and that is because we have limited mental capacity, so if we are worried, tired or stressed even with something as simple as memorizing a seven phone number digits, we are more likely to impulsively choose the item it has. more calories, that's our evolutionary wiring that leads us to be impulsive, you know, get as much energy as we can, think short term, so I think we need regulations that protect us from the standards and regulations of the food swamp. it wouldn't be about telling people what to do, it would be about

stopping

companies from putting us at risk and they are serious risks, you know, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, so we need to start by asking food establishments that they do not put us in danger. risk so right now if you go out to eat most restaurants serve people more calories than they can burn and people can't really tell just by looking at how much they are consuming and that's why people who go out to eat frequently are more likely to be overweight. or obese, so if we had standardized portions and restaurants only served a single serving, we would reduce our risk of obesity and if people wanted more, they could always order a second or third serving just as we can always order a second or third alcoholic portion. drink if we want, but standardizing portions would allow us all to really control how much we eat and another Public Health approach is to restrict impulse marketing.
I mean, do we really want people to make impulsive decisions or do we want them to be careful? and deliberate on what they are selecting and if we want this type of food within reach of the children well I am a mother and I have four children and when they were little they were very naughty and then when I couldn't find a The babysitter and I had to take them shopping with me . You can imagine they were always grabbing food like this or buying sugar-sweetened cereal and hiding it in the cart and hoping I wouldn't notice until we got to the checkout. but if we could have some rules and regulations that moved foods associated with chronic illness and obesity away from these prominent positions, away from caste, searched the end-of-aisle displays, and put the melt in the store, that would especially help a lot of people. parents and children avoid these foods and that would not stop people who really wanted them from eating them and would make their choices deliberate, so we will never end the obesity epidemic if we continue to treat it as a problem of individuals that we must shift the conversation away from personal responsibility toward creating a safer food environment.
Science tells us that people are being tricked into eating too much by the way food is promoted and marketed and by preventing companies from serving us too much food or putting it in our faces every day. The moment we walk out the door won't stop people from buying or eating whatever they want if that's really what they want. If the alcohol example tells us one thing, it is that dramatic improvement is possible and sustainable with moderate regulations. Millions of people were able to do it. control how much they drank when they didn't have to deal with alcohol everywhere, so we need to stop talking about this as a hundred million individual failures and instead recognize that the problem is the food swamp and if we don't, We are going to have a bigger and fatter

crisis

, it's time to drain the food swamp, thank you

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