Last summer a New York lawyer sued McDonalds, charging the hamburger chain was making kids fat. A lot of people laughed and the lawsuit was dismissed. Marion Nestle, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, believes the fast food and junk food industries market their products to kids too aggressively. “We have an epidemic of obesity in this country that is unprecedented in public health terms,” says Nestle, who places much of the blame on the food industry. Now, more lawyers are fighting “big food” the same way “big tobacco” was fought a decade ago — with new laws and new lawsuits.

Food Industry Fights Back
The industry’s response so far includes paying for newspaper ads ridiculing the lawsuits and charges from the National Restaurant Association that it’s “overly simplistic to target food” and the food industry in the debate over obesity.

The simple truth is that mass marketing of high calorie, high fat, high sugar “junk foods” are addicting. They are mostly snack foods that are extra calories that we simply do not need. The foods themselves cannot be blamed, however the food industry has learned that these types of foods cause cravings for more and more of the same, which makes the manufacturers rich at the expense of the consumer’s health.

By official government estimates, being overweight or obese costs some 300,000 American lives and more than $117 billion in lost productivity every year — numbers only slightly lower than those associated with smoking.

Americans Driving too Much / Exercising too Little
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill once said. Today, there’s new meaning to Churchill’s often cited quote: A growing number of public health researchers blame our sprawling suburban landscapes in part for Americans’ bulging bellies.

Americans are also becoming less physically active, not so much out of laziness but because of changes in the “urban form” that are dictating less walking and more sedentary behavior lifestyle. “It’s not just a matter of our having “super-sized” our meals or that we don’t exercise enough,” says Thomas Schmid, a public health researcher at the Centers for Disease Control. We’ve also drastically reduced the amount of regular walking, biking or getting around under our own steam as part of our daily activities, says Schmid.


“We have in a short time become a nation in which 30 percent of adults are sedentary and more than half are overweight,” Schmid told the group. Today, nearly 108 million adults (61%) are overweight and nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is obese. Lack of physical activity — particularly among young people — is a major cause of the obesity epidemic, which, among other things, threatens to reverse progress made in combating cardiovascular disease. It also contributes to diabetes, stroke and colorectal cancer, all of which add up to a colossal $93 billion health care bill for the nation each year.

The scale of the epidemic — and the speed with which it has grown — seem to challenge the idea that laziness or genetics alone can be blamed. Schmid says a major reason why we’re so inactive is that we have built houses, streets, roads and schools too “spread out” to walk between, creating the type of low-density urban design known as “sprawl.”

“Now, instead of parents blaming fast-food restaurants for their kids’ weight problems, ‘smart growth’ groups are blaming the suburbs for our nation’s obesity and health woes,” writes Chris Fiscelli of the free-market Reason Foundation. “Some of the anti-suburb sentiment is downright ridiculous, not to mention highly unscientific.”

The truth is that they both contribute, but the real culprit is more likely the stress in our lives that causes the brain to crave carbohydrates in search of Serotonin, the calming neurohormone. If the food industry provided more whole grain breads instead of all of the refined white pastry-like breads and confectionary foods, we would get all of the Serotonin we needed without eating too much sugar or getting fat. And if Henry Ford hadn’t invented the automobile, we would all have to walk more and we would burn up more calories that we could consume.

The bottom line is that we have to learn recognize the enemy and make the choices to avoid empty calories and burn more calories that we consume. We have to learn to live in our fast paced, high stress, world without getting stressed out and we have to learn how to eat for optimal health rather than taste alone.

For more information about Why Your Brain Craves Carbohydrates and How Stress Causes Weight Gain, click here