The obesity epidemic is an effect of a capitalistic society with not enough checks and controls on the free market system. Even though, what someone eats and how much someone exercises is a personal choice, personal choices are dictated for the most part by environmental factors. All people are motivated under the basic paradigm of getting the most from the least amount of effort (this is hard-wired for our survival). When this paradigm is applied to the motivation of making of food and supplying food-- for profit--coupled with the motives of food consumption (getting the most calories for the least amount of money) along with the dichotomy of the need for exercise (exercise, being an inherent feature of daily life and survival for millions of years as a species, has been adapted to be necessary for circulation and maintenance of the body through the mechanism of efficient evolutional design) and the natural instinct to conserve energy (which is also adaptive based on the pre-civilization relationship of human to environment) , the problems of corporatizing this paradigm into a for profit model compound upon each other to catastrophic effect.
The large-scale profit-seeking food supplier has the greatest incentives to provide the most food possible at the cheapest cost to him or herself. This most often means buying the lowest quality food in very high quantities and altering it to appear as a higher-quality than it is. The typical consumer is looking for the most satiating food possible for the lowest cost; nutritional content and quality are a far second to basic satiation(high calorie meals that taste good) and concern future survival (expressed by reduced spending, i.e. getting fast food). Because this is the basic structure of supplier-consumer relationship for the entire for-profit food industry, providing food with the optimum nutrition is counter-productive to all parties. Instead of food being made to be satisfying by providing what the body needs, it is more economical to artificially engineer food to trigger “satiation” by exploiting the human body’s senses with artificial taste and smell augmentations. A negative feedback loop occurs between the body’s need for nutrition not being met by the food being provided, and the artificially induced but ineffectual satiation engineered into the food being consumed. Obesity, in effect, is a symptom of nutritional starvation. Curing obesity is matter of changing food content of what people are eating rather than how much food people eat, and changing food content is nearly impossible in the for-profit food delivery system.
The infrastructure of where and how Americans live has maximized the use of the car and consumption of oil. This is a failure of government in urban planning toward its mass population in favor of large for-profit industries. It is inconvenient to walk to shop for food and the daily necessities in most of America; this is deliberate, to give people very large incentives to buy costly and wasteful automobiles. Walking is where most other industrialized nations get their exercise. They walk more in other countries because it is convenient for them to do so. Cities and urban areas are designed to mix business and residential zoning to allow for minimal driving time and put most amenities with-in walking distance of where one might live. Exercise has been de-engineered out of the American lifestyle for the gain of big business at the effect of creating incentive structure that locks the typical American into living a dangerously sedentary lifestyle.
The most alarming result of the effect of the created problems engineered by the capitalistic incentive design is that the problems create even more opportunities to make more profits. Instead of adopting a culture that harmonizes a citizen’s lifestyle to his or her inherent needs. Solutions are invented that compound the existing problems even further. The medical and pharmaceutical industry makes more profit the sicker the population, therefore have incentives to keep people as sick as possible for as long as possible. Alone they kill almost a quarter million people a year through malpractice, adverse drug reactions, and hospital induced infections. The exercise and “health” industries waste billions of dollars of ignorant people’s money on fad diets, ineffectual supplements, and gym memberships (patrons rarely if ever use). The root cause of obesity epidemic is the flaw in the logic of American culture or the just the lazy acceptance of the lie that the free-market organization of society is providing the highest quality of life for its citizenry; it is the ignorance of complacently accepting greed and selfishness as a core motivator and value in America society, which is rotting its population from the inside out.
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