The Diet Racketeers
by Wentworth Sutton, assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto
January 31, 2007
Last week we looked at how government turns people into problem gamblers and then the “helping professions” offer to solve their problems – for a fee. This week we’ll look at how the corporate world makes people fat and then:
The media are full of warnings about the dangers of obesity. They even frequently tell us that obesity is the most serious health problem facing society today. But what else do they frequently tell us?
- shames them into wanting to be thin,
- promises (sic) to make them thin,
- makes them even fatter, and
- returns to step 2.
Well, they’re full of commercials and advertisements which tell us about:
One thing they never say in these commercials and ads, by the way, is that this food will make you fat. You get the impression from the commercials that everyone who eats this stuff is fit and trim. And you never see Dad coming through the door at home with the all-dressed pizza with the cheese-filled crust (and the complimentary Toblerone) and yelling “Honey, I’m home! Start letting out my pants!”
- wonderful giant hamburgers with over 1200 calories and enough fat to make votive candles for a small Italian town (the Burger King Triple Whopper with Cheese, for example)
- ”healthier” French fries
- pizza with cheese-filled crust (cheese-filled crust!) at a mere 470 calories a slice
Strange, that, isn’t it? On TV the supposed information programs are full of stories about the dangers of obesity, but the corporations that produce those stories don’t insist that advertisers desist from trying to make people obese.
No, it ain't strange. Once you've sold them enough Triple Whoppers to get them shopping for clothes at the big and tall/plus size store, you can then sell them stuff that will supposedly make them thin!
Once you’ve got people fattened up with all that fatty food your advertisers are pushing, you then stuff your programs full of items about the dangers of obesity and about the latest miracle wonder diets which just melt the pounds off! So the people you first made fat and then made scared about their health rush out to buy the diet books and programs that will save them from the hell you’ve designed for them.
And once they get on the diets, they get fatter! It ain’t easy to lose weight. Once they’re on their diets the body responds to the reduced energy available to it by slowing its metabolism, so after a while they stop losing weight. If they then give up their diets as failures, their slowed metabolisms make them gain any lost weight back faster than they lost it, and they will probably end up gaining back more weight than they lost.
And who’s there to help them? Why authors of other diet books, who have the real secret to losing weight, or the chains of diet studios with their lines of proprietary diet food. The authors appear on news and information shows and the chains advertise in the commercial breaks on those shows. Eventually people not only get more worried about being fat but also start to feel ashamed of their earlier failure to lose weight, and they try another diet. And gain more weight. And so on and so on and so on.
Yes, we all know people who lost weight and kept it off. We all also know a lot more people who try repeatedly to lose weight and never lose any. It’s easy (and profitable for some) to blame that on their inferior willpower, but if these miracle diets were so miraculous you’d expect them to – like – work, wouldn’t you?
Yes, you can go on a diet and lose weight. You can also pray that your wart will go away and once in a while it will. Usually it doesn’t though, and usually if you go on a diet you don’t lose weight.
And what is it all about, anyway? Is obesity a health hazard? As the authors of Diet Nation observe, in the West people are now the fattest they’ve ever been, and the healthiest. You can explain that as the result of improvements in medicine, but in an age in which some of the most serious costs to the health care system are the products of longevity one may reasonably question whether obesity is holding us back all that much.
Whether obesity is a health hazard or not, the exploitation of the obese by the peddlers of diets is simply wrong. And what is government – which these days chiefly likes to pose as the protector of consumers – doing about it? Is it charging people with practising medicine without a licence? Is it looking into laying charges of fraud? Is it sponsoring research into the most effective ways to deal with any problems caused by obesity?
Nope. It’s too busy fleecing the video lottery and slot machine suckers.
The Diet Racketeers © John FitzGerald, 2007
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