The Real Villain
Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay
In what is now a global pandemic of obesity who is the real villain in this story? Is it the individual who is overweight or obese or is it the food industry that has been allowed to produce and market food that is high in sugar and carbohydrates ?
Are the foods we generally eat, that are often as not ultra processed themselves to blame or is it the individual who just eats too much of the stuff ?
To understand the riddle I think it good for me to go back to my childhood and to remember a television series that featured a comic book hero now understood by some to be one of the greatest detectives of all. Batman. Along side the greats such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, it was the great Batman that solved the mystery of the crime and brought the super villain to justice.
Not just one thing that can be easily identified but a panoply of chemicals would be used together in some dastardly way to poison the city of Gotham and to drive its inhabitants mad. The great detective was able to identify the cleverly concocted array of chemicals used to then trace them back to source and bring the villain to justice.
So too it is so with our so called friends in the food industry who are able to cleverly concoct foods that we simply cannot afford not to buy, eat and over consume.
Super processed foods are designed to be addictive and to be consumed in large quantities. They are designed to be cheap to produce and to be sold at a high profit margin. They are designed to be consumed in in ever larger quantity in order to incrementally increase profit and to drive the consumer to even greater levels of consumption.
In an interview with Channel 4s Krishnan Guru-Murthy a doctor and TV presenter Chris van Tulleken talks about this with considerable authority and in a way far more erudite than I can attain to. He has of course written a book. Well done for that then.
You can buy the book or you could just give up sugar, carbohydrates and ultra processed foods, eat healthy fat, lose weight and get healthy.
I leave the former to the reader to decide upon but I implore all of us to pursue the latter.