Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
by Marion Nestle
Aug
3
2007
Everybody causes obesity?
And now yet another study, this one in the July 2007 Economic Inquiry, says that social factors influence body weight. This study doesn’t say friends make friends fat, but says that the average body weight in a population has a “social multiplier” effect. This, they say, in conjunction with low food prices, encourages weight gain. Read what Dr. David Katz at Yale has to say about obesity “contagion.” He says: “There was virtually no obesity 100 years ago, but I’m pretty sure people did have friends back then. What they did not have was cars, suburban sprawl, fast food, and video games. Human nature and relationships are not the root cause of epidemic obesity; the obesigenic modern environment is.” Indeed.
