* How the government gave us diabetes
Topics: Health
20 Dec 2006
From: Ervan Darnell
Too much food is a much bigger health problem than too little.
Childhood hunger is now at about 0.7% [1] and childhood obesity 17.1%
[2]. Adult obesity for that cohort will be much worse than 17%, so 17%
is an understatement of the problem. The government is aggravating the
former problem by subsidizing the latter.
I heard an interview of KQED Forum a few months ago with a UCSF
researcher on childhood obestity[0]. He had a great story to tell: he
was helping a Central Valley Latino community with 100% childhood
obesity rate (yes, absolutely every kid was obese). He wanted to find
out why that place was so bad, as maybe a clue to childhood obesity.
He was interviewing one mother with a 150# six-year-old boy (or
something like that). He asked her what her son drank every day. Her
answer was two gallons of orange juice. The doctor explained to her
that oranges were good (they have fiber) orange juice is bad (it has
added sugar) and asked why she bought orange juice instead of oranges.
Her answer: WIC [food stamps] only covered orange juice, not oranges.
The government program that was meant to prevent hunger instead caused
obesity.
One thing especially interesting about his analysis was that our
obesity level is already set quite early. What our parents feed us as
children determine our obesity levels the rest of our lives. For
instance, he turned around TV watching and obesity causation by saying
that people already (falsely) in starvation mode are too tired to do
anything except watch TV. Or, at least, that's what their bodies are
telling them. TV is the symptom not the cause. Similarly, "super
sizing" is irrelevant to the problem because our bodies are demanding
those calories. What might matter more is the sugared soda (because of
a different metabolic path for high fructose corn syrup) being part of
it. What definitely matters is high fructose corn syrup in foods we
eat as children (apparently this is metabolized directly in the liver
instead of the normal glucose-insulin route and that creates trouble
[4]).
Of course, oranges are only one example, but now I wonder how much of
low-income obesity (which is worse than middle-income obesity) is
because of government feeding programs versus cheap foods being less
healthful? If this theory is right, that it is set when we are
children, the damage is all the greater. Here are some data points [3]:
year -- 12-19 year old obesity rate
'66-'80 -- 5 - 6%
'80-'00 -- 5 - 15% rising steadily through the period
In other words, after food stamps got ramped up about '65-'67, we see
increasing obesity for that set of children when they reach teenage
years. There could be many other explanations of course, but it's
suggestive all the same.
The interviewee made the following additional point: the "Great
Society" effort to produce cheap food so that no one went hungry meant
that shelf life had to be increased, which in turn meant that foods had
less fiber and more high fructose corn syrup, both nutritional
disasters in his opinion, but with higher shelf life. This seems only
half right to me in that the push for cheaper and quicker foods was
happening of its own accord as well.
My point here is that when the government says it's going to make our
food safe, run for cover. It doesn't have the scientific knowledge to
do the right thing, and even if it did it would never have the
political will as rent seeking takes over. Lack of accurate
information will not slow a politician for a second. Just a decade
ago, fat was seen as the big culprit. Hillary wanted a fat tax. That
would have shifted caloric consumption to high fructose corn syrup.
Now we have reason to think that's even worse for us than unsaturated
cis fat (though perhaps not as bad as trans fat). Even trans fat came
about because saturated fat was seen as a bad thing (trans is actually
unsaturated). How much worse off would we be had a saturated fat tax
gone into place and pushed more people to consuming trans?
Think of the torque already applied by a misguided tort system. You
can sue for E. Coli, likely to be found in fresh produce, but not for
low fiber canned vegatables. The risk of the former might (in the long
run sense) be less than the latter. But the legal system's lack of
connection of good science and unmooring from the idea of being
permitted to accept personal risk has left us with the wrong outcome.
And, of course, you could never sue the government for creating a fat
tax that ended up causing you to get diabetes.
------------------------
[0] http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R608151000
[1]
href="http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/health_nutrition/food_consumption_and_nutrition/">http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/health_nutrition/food_consumption_and_nutrition/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#_note-8
[3]
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=6&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iom.edu%2FFile.aspx%3FID%3D22606&ei=YVSIRZ_AE42YgwT09szaCg&usg=__tyKjqL8fY4OWr6HLG5Cer1qAR3M=&sig2=6nN3IcWXT3ivkRA6ZxvFTQ
and
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/overwght99.htm
[4] http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/2/1/5
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