Due to the absence of any clear, specific answers, a lot of people believe that obesity comes down mostly to one thing. Of course, what that one thing is differs from person to person: too little exercise, too much food, too many carbs, too many fats, too much processed junk, and so on. And to the extent that we blame society, we are often blaming different things: junk food, soft drinks, TV, lack of fresh vegetables, chocolate milk, and so on. Most people agree that it’s more than one thing, but believe that if we fixed this one thing (or one or two), we would make serious headway.
I’m sure that longtime readers will not be surprised to hear me say (again) I am rather skeptical of this. To take one example, soft drinks, I believe pretty thoroughly that for most people, if soft drinks were banned tomorrow, they would simply switch to something else. I believe this way mostly from experience. Attempts to cut out soft drinks have always been met with greater caloric intake somewhere else. Without fail. And my recent weight loss included a diet regimen of 3-5 sugar drinks a day*.
I consider fast food to be another one of those things. On the one hand, fast food does make misbehaving very easy. And so it’s tempting to blame increasing obesity on the people making it easy. But absent fast food, you still have junk food from the stores. Also easy. Maybe if you get rid of both, but that’s hard. And ethically problematic when you consider how many people consume these things responsibly. Should they be penalized because others can’t? Increasing the taxes on these things hasn’t actually been shown to work. It’s mostly just a regressive sales tax.
But here’s one of the things that I think frequently gets overlooked: fast food establishments actually give you more control over your intake than many of the alternatives. Go to a fast food place, and chances are that they have a 99c menu. Or a cheapskate menu. This menu will typically include reasonably-sized portions for proportional pricing. When it comes to a lot of restaurants, the price incentives are ridiculously skewed towards more, more, more. A half-helping of pasta? $8.95. A full helping? $9.95. When, in fact, the half-helping is likely to be more than you need. The full is twice-as-much. Now, good people are able to eat half and take half home. The ones we need to worry about are those that lack that self-control (note: I am one of them). Fast food establishments do have combo meals, super-sizing, and the like, but their prices remains largely incremental. A buck for a burger. Two? Two bucks. It’s much harder to get anything from Applebee’s for $2, to say the least. And you’re in for a dollar, in for a pound. You get a lot of food – and better food, for that matter – for $7.95… but it’s a lot of food.
Of course, some people will argue that’s the point. When you can get a burrito from Taco Bell for a buck, people get five! The cheapness is part of the problem! But restaurants, whether fast food or family dining, have to make their money somehow. And the factor that there seems to be the most consensus on is that dieting is a matter of portions more than anything else. At least fast food places give you the option of small portions. And don’t financially penalize you for doing so. People don’t take advantage of this, but… having the option is important.
And it all reels back to one of the main things that makes weight so intractable. It’s difficult to externally change someone’s behavior. Making a point of offering healthy food can actually make matters worse. And the same goes for exercise, which people reward themselves for with calories far more than they burned. Fruits and vegetables are nice, but not convenient (even where available fresh, they do not preserve). Junk food is convenient, but not nice. So the enemy becomes convenience itself. How do you fight that?
* – A single sugar drink is a 12oz soft drink can. A 20oz coke counts as two. Fake sugary coffee typically counts as one. It’s inexact, but it’s how I keep track.
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9 Responses to Fast Food Is What You Make Of It
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When we look to blame, I think what we need to look at is whether we’re heavier than our parents were at our age. I’m heavier than my mother was but slimmer than my father was, so I probably can’t blame any recent changes in society for my weighing more than I want to. I blame lack of time to work out, and lack of time to plan and prepare healthier meals. But that prevents me from being fashionably slim; it’s not causing obesity.
It’s the poor and lower classes whose weight has skyrocketed. I blame welfare and food stamps. And notice that dangerously overweight people rarely if ever have jobs.
Depends on what you mean by “dangerously overweight,” I guess, but I’ve met several computer programmers who appeared to fit the technical definition of morbidly obese (100+ pounds overweight).
It’s not the norm, and certainly not anywhere near as common as I suspect it is among your clients, but you do find some cases of severe obesity even among the upper middle classes.
Brandon: Yes, especially with bright technical types! I was thinking about this at a pool party this afternoon, where there was an engineer’s son, really bright kid, about 9 years old and already substantially overweight. Rolls and boobs. His parents were tubby but not alarmingly so for their ages. His sister was slim. I was remembering how back when I was a kid, the fat kids were either really dumb of either gender, or really smart boys like this one. I was wondering if he’d have been fat in the 1970s.
If they grew up and lost weight, their social skills were still warped from having been the fat kid. Now, however, there are lots of fat kids.
I wonder if it’s less a matter of engineering types being more likely to be fat as of the interviewing process leaving less room for discretion. I’ve never actually interviewed for a non-technical full-time job, but from what I’ve heard, it’s often more of a personality assessment than a test of relevant skills.
There’s a lot of room in there to decide for vague, nonspecific reasons that a fat person isn’t a good fit for the job. With technical interviews, it’s hard to justify rejecting a candidate who nails all the technical questions without a specific reason for doing so, and “too damn fat” usually doesn’t cut it.
That said, I am 100% confident that the reason I didn’t get a job offer from Google when I interviewed there is that they didn’t like my shirt.
If you ever work in a call center, you will see a number of hella obese people there, both male and female. Of course, it’s the quintessental job where appearance doesn’t matter. Beyond which, heavy people often have the best voices.
None of which is to say that welfare and food stamps don’t matter (can you get fast food on stamps?). I remember the KFC at the reservation where Clancy worked was all but closed the last week of the month, as they had to wait for the new round of welfare checks to come in.
If they grew up and lost weight, their social skills were still warped from having been the fat kid. Now, however, there are lots of fat kids.
This is a point not made often enough. Even those that lose the weight end up with problems. Even their physical problems can persist (I can’t remember who, but some researcher noted that people who were fat and lose a lot of weight are scarcely healthier than people who are still fat), but psychological problems for sure. Someday I’m going to write a novel on the guy who grew up fat and disgusting, fixed himself up, and found that his social problems still doomed him without additional measures being taken.
“None of which is to say that welfare and food stamps don’t matter (can you get fast food on stamps?).”
Yes, if the restaurant chooses to accept EBT cards, it can. Subway is well-known for doing that.
can you get fast food on stamps?
Not in NJ. In other states, YMMV.
One thing you can’t buy on stamps that you should are vitamins.
Of course, a lot of people sell their stamps on the black market anyway. That way they can buy their booze, cigs, and fast food.
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I think the only way to lose weight is to eat less. Exercising works ceteris paribus, but most people get more hungry the more they exercise. The expression working up an appetite didn’t come from nowhere.
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It bears mentioning that the obese are the last true victims of lawful discrimination.
One thing you can’t buy on stamps that you should are vitamins.
Interesting. I hadn’t really thought of that.
Of course, a lot of people sell their stamps on the black market anyway. That way they can buy their booze, cigs, and fast food.
Isn’t the way around this by using debit cards? That’s what Delosa does, when it can.
Exercising works ceteris paribus, but most people get more hungry the more they exercise.
Exercise (except when expressly “bulking up”) is supposed to be good at preventing you from gaining weight to begin with, but it’s not typically good for losing weight to begin with for the reason you cite. It makes you hungrier. And people consistently overestimate the indulgences that moderate exercise allows them. It requires the sort of strict behavior that, if one has, one can lose weight anyway.