About 65% of Australian adults and a quarter of children are overweight or obese and about 60% of Australians are trying to lose weight at any one time. Overwhelmingly, the evidence indicates that being obese increases your risk of premature death. And yet policies to reduce obesity have been startlingly unsuccessful. Instead obesity is increasingly accepted, normalised and celebrated.
Why is this happening?
The main cause of the obesity epidemic is our changed food environment. Industrialised food production, distribution and marketing are making us fat. Australia now has an ‘obesogenic‘ environment characterised by high levels of processed food, heavy on added fat and sugar, animal products and refined carbohydrates, preprepared and delivered to your door or car window, or packaged for your super market trolley.
Why haven’t we fixed the problem?
None of this will come as much of a surprise. But why has public policy to address obesity been such a monumental failure?
The biggest problem is that there has been too much emphasis on individuals managing their own weight and not enough focus on the environment that led to weight gain in the first place. Obesity is more and more seen as a disease. While making obesity a disease avoids blaming individuals, it also takes pressure off the social, cultural and economic factors that have produced the obesogenic environment.
Not surprisingly, being overweight and obese is becoming normalised. The body weight explosion has led to social and political movements objecting to body shaming, denigration and discrimination and there is a growing fat pride movement promoting obesity.
Paradoxically, as food industrialisation has dominated the landscape, we have seen cooking and eating become performance art and fodder for ideology. Television chefs, celebrity recipe books and arty cuisine restaurants abound.
Public health advocates have understood that social, economic and environmental influences are the main causes of population obesity, but they have had little success in doing much about it. Much of the effort has gone into information campaigns (including food labelling), and localised community strategies focused on individuals, school, family and community behaviour, with little impact on the obesity epidemic.
Rethinking the problem
Doing more of the same is tantamount to accepting that we have given up on obesity. Instead, we need to think about obesity as a symptom of an unsustainable model of food production and distribution.
Today the global food industry is vast, concentrated and powerful. Huge conglomerates like Bayer shape agriculture. A limited set of large companies like Cargill, Archer Daniels and Nestle dominate food production. Major retail chains control food distribution. The food industry shapes and creates consumer demand for convenient, energy dense food high in salt, sugar and fat.
The food industry accounts for about 10 percent of global GDP there is a significant global food surplus with an estimated capability of feeding 10 billion people. But the surplus is unbalanced leading to regionalised food insecurity, hunger and mal nutrition.
The underlying economic model for the food industry is now unsustainable. Production techniques, storage, processing, distribution and consumption patterns result in about a third of food being wasted. Additionally, the food industry is responsible for significant environmental degradation and over 25 percent of carbon emissions. Increasing industrialisation and expansion in less developed countries also disrupts local communities and exploits and displaces workers thereby increasing poverty and inequity.
The industry depends on ever increasing consumer demand to maintain growth and profitability. Super markets, drive through pick ups, online ordering, home delivery, convenient packaging, taste and product reformulation are all innovations to drive greater demand, particularly for high preference easy to eat high fat, high salt and high sugar food.
But there are now broader concerns, largely driven by the existential threat of climate change. Unrestrained, profit driven, economic growth in consumption is unsustainable. A broad social and environmental coalition focused on environmental and social sustainability has emerged. Industry is increasingly being pressured to take account of ethical, social and governance concerns. Institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank are turning their attention to the need for sustainable development, including agriculture, food production and distribution.
Whether the dominant underlying economic model will be forced to shift far enough and fast enough to avoid widespread environmental and social catastrophe remains to be seen. But reigning in over production, waste, mal distribution and over consumption of food is part of the overall campaign for sustainable development.
Where to from here?
If we want to address obesity, we need to reduce over consumption and our unhealthy dietary mix by better managing our food supply. A sustainable food policy will need to have a much greater focus on the improving the production and supply of food for populations, particularly in relation to energy dense, processed food with high levels of sugar, fat and salt.
The food industry will be highly resistant to reducing overall consumption and the dietary mix of the population because of the impact on growth and profitability. In part this will see the valorisation of individual choice, competition and markets and scare mongering about the terrible dangers of regulation by the ‘nanny state’. Industry will argue that individual choice leading to obesity should not be restricted by industry incentives and regulations.
In reality, choice is shaped by our social, cultural and economic environment and communities always regulate those to help individuals make better choices to reduce harm. When two thirds of the Australian population, including a quarter of children are overweight, there is clearly a case for better managing the food industry.
Hal Swerissen
Hal Swerissen, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, La Trobe University
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