The Politics of Obesity: Why We're Fat.

I had a few spare minutes to sit down at a cafe with a cup of mint tea the other day and, since I didn't have my book with me, I picked up a NOW Magazine - an independent Toronto area alternative paper distributed for free on seemingly every street corner and business in the Toronto area. My usual modus operandi is to flip straight to the music section to see what bands are coming to town or the latest record reviews, but this time I started from the beginning and flipped through gingerly, looking for anything of interest that would catch my eye. And I'm glad I did.

As well as coming across a really interesting article about what can only be described as a professional sh*t disturber, there was piece written by Wayne Roberts called "The skinny on what's eating us". Reading this article I was thinking "yes, now here is a guy who gets it".

Roberts talks about how Statistics Canada released two reports on January 13 that detailed the rise in body mass of Canadians since 1981. For example, in 1981 the average middle-aged male weighed 171 pounds whereas today that average has climbed to 191. Similarly, a typical 12-year-old girl weighed 95 pounds in 1981 and today that average weighs in at 105. While the report speaks about how "taller, heavier, fatter and weaker," children will effect health care costs, Roberts is looking more at the big picture, if you'll pardon the pun.

"Being overweight is the least of the problems that come with obesity," he says. "Since foods that over-deliver on calories also under-deliver on nutrients... dietarily induced disorders multiply in bodies that are both overfed and undernourished." So why are we eating such nutrient-light, calorie-dense foods? Because it's cheap.

The typical reaction to obesity statistics is to chastise the general public for their lack of self control (after sucking in our own guts and giving our shirts a tug, of course). But the growing size of our waistlines has little to do with the individual's willpower, according to Roberts. "The original sin of bad diets – too many nutrient-light edibles and too many high-energy inputs to grow, ship, grease-fry and package them – could not last long without government subsidies. It's public money that converts these high-tech and ecologically pricey edibles into ones that come out cheap at the checkout."

Obesity is a political consequence, says Roberts. It is a direct result of governments sending money in the "wrong direction." While governments implement questionable ideas like "soda tax" that raise the price of processed junk foods to both attempt to discourage over-consumption and provide revenue for the health care system, Wayne Roberts has inspired me to see that burdening the consumer is working at the wrong end of the chain. Making changes much further up the chain seems to me to make a lot more sense.

Why not subsidize the healthy foods like fruits and vegetables instead of the stuff that ends up as unhealthy stuff, like corn and soy that either end up in processed foods or as cheap animal feed? Canadian farmers receive government-backed crop insurance when they produce grains but none for vegetables.

There is also an environmental price to pay for this lower priced nutrient-lacking food. "Agricultural subsidies and lax enviro regulations account for this magical pricing transformation. It's the public purse that pays for the results of pesticides, carbon emissions and soil and water degradation."

So when we're decrying the price of good quality food, remember that our food system is regulated to be this way. The empty, grain-heavy foods are designed to be cheap while the nutrient dense fruits and vegetables, especially if they're organic, are expensive. Apparently we live in a world where eating healthy is considered a luxury, not a right. Roberts says in closing, "we need to cut the fat, but to cut well we need to consider that obesity is fundamentally a political, not an eating, disorder."