Hunger and Obesity: Two Sides of the Malnutrition Coin
“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.” - Wendell Berry
This January, Laurie Trieger, executive director of the Lane Coalition for Healthy Active Youth (LCHAY) and I hosted a session at the 2012 Food Security Summit in Corvallis exploring the root causes of hunger and obesity. Obesity and hunger are very much linked and we hope to eventually be able to identify key policy priorities that could begin to address these root causes.
I believe this discussion needs to start with the acknowledgement that, like hunger, obesity is a symptom of a deeply flawed economic structure that favors profits over health. The industrialized food production and food distribution system is responsive to economic goals and completely ignores the health or environmental needs of the community. This is why we have concentrated animal feeding operations where thousands of pigs and chickens can live in crammed conditions and are pumped with antibiotics to avoid mass infections.
The drive to make money is also the reason the food industry has spent billions of dollars in advertising fast foods, sugary drinks, salty and greasy snacks, and thousands of other edible products.
And by the way, advertising dollars has moved well beyond traditional media; the food industry is investing larger portions of their budgets in digital marketing to kids using Facebook, Twitter, and web-based video games that require the user to give personal information and buy their products. These techniques are based on brain research intended to understand the causes such mental health problems as ADD/ADHD, depression and schizophrenia. They are exploiting children’s underdeveloped brains to sell their products.
The food industry has made plenty of calories available because the price of food industrially processed food is economically efficient to produce. Unfortunately, those calories lack any real nutritional value. While there’s protein and other nutrients in a Big Mac, there’s also so much fat and sodium that, on balance, the nutritional benefit is less than the harm from eating it.
Scientists like Kent Thornburg at OHSU are finding that in fact our society is experiencing “high calorie malnutrition.” The result is a dual crisis of obesity and malnutrition.
Hunger in America indeed looks very different from hunger in places like Ethiopia. Hunger in America is not necessarily about not having enough to eat (though that also takes place, particularly in these hard economic times, with many parents skipping meals to feed their children). But hunger in America is more about quality than quantity.
So my question for policy makers and advocates is this:
What is the single, most important thing we can do to tackle the dual crisis of hunger and obesity?
