All We Can Eat

All We Can Eat
by Tyler Huddleston

“Look at all the people in this restaurant, what do you think they weigh? And out the window to the parking lot, at their SUVs taking all of the space…” – Ben Folds

America is getting larger. Our cars, television sets, and cities are bigger than ever, but unfortunately, so are the American people. Dateline NBC’s anchor, Stone Phillips, attempts to find out who is to blame for our nation’s recent obesity epidemic in his MSNBC.com article, “Who’s to Blame for the U.S. Obesity Epidemic?” With interviews of lawyers and parents who believe junk food companies misrepresent their unhealthy products, Phillips’ article suggests that major corporations are the culprits for fattening our nation, and in doing so he almost completely ignores blaming the junk food victims: us. Phillips portrays the junk food companies as tycoons with “brainwashing” advertisements for “addictive” products that are “misrepresented,” and he puts little (fair) emphasis on these companies’ perspective. No matter how morally wrong it may seem to persuade consumers to consume unhealthy food, junk food companies are doing nothing illegally (as far as marketing), because American consumers have the right to choose what they put into their mouths. I disagree with Phillips, who suggests we blame others for our personal weight issues, because we are responsible for the actions we take upon our bodies, therefore, we can only blame the cause of our overweight population on ourselves.

Politicians do it, schools do it, and even churches do it. Advertising to persuade us to do something is nothing new, and it is everywhere. Food companies have been advertising their products for many years, but now that we are all overweight, some of us have come to believe that their advertisements are so good that they have convinced us to buy and get fat off of their food. Phillips interviews Harvard psychologist Susan Linn, who calls the $10 billion industry of food marketing towards children: “brainwashing” (pars. 36-38). Phillips points out that “A typical child sees 40,000 commercials a year. More than half of them for fast food, candy, soft drinks, and sweetened breakfast cereals” (par. 40), but he misses an even bigger issue: if the typical American child sees 40,000 commercials a year (just a little over 100 commercials a day), then our typical American kids spend too much time in front of the boob tube and too little time getting the exercise their bodies need. Watching TV may be entertaining enough to keep the kids quiet for awhile, and at times maybe even a little educational, but it certainly is no way for them to burn any energy. Kids, as well as adults, should participate in physical activities daily. If everyone knew how important exercise is, then surely they could schedule around the TV Guide to find time to work out for at least thirty minutes a day. Before I started working and driving, I certainly got my 40,000 commercials a year in, and only because neither my parents, nor I, knew any better. One of the problems with today’s society is that we do not know the significance of exercise to a long healthy life, but that is not any food company’s fault, and certainly not their problem. The food companies should not be expected to play any role in exercise awareness, but they should be expected to want to sell their products. Of course food companies are going to target kids, their brains can be persuaded easier and molded to make them become the ideal consumers, but it is up to the parents to keep their kids away from the 40,000 “brainwashing” commercials a year and to make sure they are getting an adequate amount of exercise every day.

Phillips suggests that maybe somehow the food industry has made it hard for us to turn down their food by making it “addicting.” Chocolate is probably my most favorite food to eat, but I could go the rest of my life without it and be fine, Hershey’s has not eroded my ability to say no, unlike Phillips implies (par. 67). To please my Catholic girlfriend, I gave up chocolate for Lent and went forty days straight without tasting chocolate and I did not experience any kind of withdrawal, like Phillips’ interviewee, lawyer and medical doctor Dr. Joe McMenamin, suggests: “We see withdrawal, when one is denied access to his [or her] drug of choice. Foods don’t do that” (pars. 83-84). Phillips attempts to depict food as being similar to drugs by interviewing Dr. William Jacobs, who studies addiction at the University of Florida. Dr. Jacobs claims that “the brain respond[s] to food in a nearly identical manner as it [would] respond to cocaine in the patients who met the criteria for food addiction” (par. 74). People eat for pleasure, it is expected, unfortunately though, it leads to overeating, which leads to weight gain, which would ultimately lead to suing a food corporation for having food that tastes good. Imagine if I tried suing my car dealership because I got a speeding ticket, because my car made me want to drive fast. We cannot blame the obesity epidemic on food corporations, because they have products we enjoy, we have to blame ourselves for overeating them. Our country takes food for granted, we overeat it for pleasure, not for a fix. Attorney Joe Price says “A moderate amount of smoking is bad for you. A moderate amount of eating is what we all should be doing” (par. 90) and he is right. We need food to survive, there is no need for drugs, there is no need for overeating.

John Banzhaf is a law professor at George Washington University, and he is trying to sue major junk food corporations because, he claims, they “misrepresent” their products. He thinks fast food industries should be forced to display, on the menu board, how fattening their food is, and they should be required to offer more nutritious alternatives (par. 13). He believes fast food restaurants should present warnings that say “Eating fast food frequently can lead to obesity, which doubles your risk of a heart attack” every time we walk through their door (par. 14). Phillips himself, suggests that could lead to warnings on everything (“Beware of that neck tie you’re wearing because you could pull it too tight and choke yourself”) (par. 14). Fatty foods do not need warnings on them for us to know they will make us fat, but they do have them, it just takes a little knowledge to see them. Every manufactured food product is required to display how many calories it contains. Every fast food chain has “nutrition facts” for their products, bad ones, and maybe even difficult to find ones (because they are on the internet or hidden on a wall in plain sight), but I know that if am going to put something in my body, I would at least like to know what it is and how I should expect my body to react. Good nutrition plays a vital role in achieving a long, healthy life, but for some reason we fail to realize how important it is. Our society has become so fast-paced and lazy that wholesome meals have become a rarity simply because fast food is more convenient. People are responsible for what they do to themselves. If someone jumped off a cliff, we would not blame the cliff for any injuries. We claim that junk food products mislead us in their advertisements, but that is what almost every advertisement does with the exception of medicines. Even Dateline’s advertisement for tonight’s broadcast fails to include that the show will be interrupted by several commercials, and ironically, some of them for junk food.

To answer Phillips’ question “who’s to blame for the U.S. obesity epidemic?” We are, the people of America. We have become a sedentary, skip-forward society that either ignores the importance of nutrition and exercise or never learned it in the first place. We do not get enough exercise because we are too busy. We are forced to eat fast food meals because we do not have enough time to cook real meals. We get fat because the junk food we eat does not tell us it will make us fat. We are a nation full of excuses used to avoid personal responsibility. We blame others for our mistakes instead of ourselves. Well America, you are fat, it is your fault, and it is time you did something about it. It is time to decide what is more important: a long and healthy life, or 99 cents value meals. If we want the junk food companies to stop selling unhealthy food, then we need to stop buying it. If we don’t want to be fat, then we need to stop overeating. If we are tired of being out of shape, then we need to exercise more. It’s this simple America: you are what you eat. If we want to be healthy, then we need to eat healthily.

Works Cited

Phillips, Stone. “Who’s to Blame for the U.S. Obesity Epidemic?”. MSNBC.com 19 Aug 2006 144 pars. 29 Oct 2006
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14415766>