Food Industry

In the Middle Ages, alchemists sought to turn common metals into gold. Today some doctors and scientists seeking to prevent and treat obesity in the United States are attempting an equally difficult transformation. They want to change people, their willpower, their lifestyles, their metabolism, even their DNA to make it harder to gain weight and easier to lose it.

However, transforming people with drugs, weight-loss surgery, genetic engineering, hypnosis and other extreme steps is not the answer to obesity, because people are not the problem.


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The problem is the food industry, which provides us with the calories we consume but washes its hands of responsibility for causing the worldwide obesity epidemic. Food industry marketers say they are only offering people what they want and that individuals choose what they put in their mouths.

Is it plausible that two out of three Americans have an eating disorder? And if we really believe that people are choosing to eat foods that are making them fat, does that mean we think that two-thirds of Americans are foolish, stupid, and lazy? Or that overweight and obese people have weaker characters and are morally inferior to people who have a normal weight?

The food industry spends billions of dollars each year to develop products, packaging, advertising and marketing techniques that entice us to buy more food because selling more food means making more profits. And businesses exist to make profits.

Food marketers test whether the color, the font size of words and the images used to market food will grab our attention by studies of eye movement. They conduct focus groups to come up with catchy names and symbols that recall positive memories and thoughts to condition a response that may lead us to purchase their products. And food marketers work to increase the frequency with which we see their products and their presence in stores, wanting to make their products always available.

The food industry also alters the nutritional content of foods to make them longer lasting on store shelves by increasing fats, sugars, and salt, making it less healthy for the average person to consume them.

Much evidence shows that individuals are not the cause of America's obesity epidemic. A wealth of research on marketing and decision-making reveals that people are easily manipulated, biased and influenced to make decisions that are not in their own best interests by how choices are presented to them.