Genes vs Personal Responsibility

I have observed some urge or desire to pinpoint the source point for anything we deem to be an ailment. The battle line today regarding obesity seems to be processed food vs genetics. This does very little for me personally, in fact it seems to just be more of the either/or world we live in that disregards nuance and individuality.

I find America to be highly over medicated, where there’s a problem, there’s a solution in pill form. Of course, there have been many weight loss medications, but often after some time on the market, they are pulled because either harmful side effects are discovered, or they just don’t work.

I took fen-phen as kid, I don’t remember losing weight, but I can vividly recall laying down to go to sleep at night and my whole body feeling like it was vibrating with electricity. It was just a few, very long and sleepless nights before my parents threw it away.

As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to eat processed food. My mom shopped at a store called Mrs. Gooch’s (which later became Whole Foods) and Erewhon (long before the Kardashians made it famous). These stores weren’t the pillars of opulence that they are today, they were dusty and bare, Erewhon felt like it could barely keep it’s lights on! I used to sit in my mom’s car on Beverly Blvd, refusing to go into “Nowhere” as I called it, while she bought our weekly self-flagellation in the form of bland and tasteless food.

Eating non-processed foods did nothing to stop my weight gain as a child, I still simply ate too much. 

So maybe my genetics played some part in me eating more than my body needed for its own physical survival? Maybe that tells me some of the story. Calley Means, a former consultant to both food and Pharma who now works to expose their practices makes a fairly strong argument against genes being a culprit. His point is that lasting evolutionary change take about a million years.

Perhaps then it’s not “lasting”? 

There are some interesting studies (Dutch Hunger Winter is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944–1945) that would suggest that those genes which would encourage weight gain can be rapidly developed in as little as a single generation. So, the argument that it can’t have anything to do with genes because it’s happened in about 50 years, doesn’t make too much sense to me. Of course, the primary cause of this genetic change would seem to be an impactful famine. Perhaps our food supply has become so nutrient lacking that it’s tricked our bodies into thinking there was a famine? 

There are also studies that suggest obesity is socially contagious (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa066082). That means that if you know or interact with obese people, you are more likely to become obese yourself. Should the thin people avoid the fat ones in some attempt to retain their thinness? I’m fairly confident that this would seem like a good solution to some. When I was a kid, I felt very much like my weight and I were being avoided by many for this very reason. Is our modern drive towards acceptance playing some role in the spiking obesity levels?

I look around and just see food everywhere. You can’t buy a pair of headphones at Best Buy without running a gauntlet of candy to get to the cash register! 

I went to some fancy furniture store recently with my wife. I was thrilled to see NO FOOD anywhere. I thought, how nice, I’ve found the only store in America that wasn’t pushing food on its customers. When I brought this up to my wife in the car, she said they’d offered her champagne and chocolate covered strawberries. 

Cheap and delicious food is EVERYWHERE!

I find no solace in wanting the world to bend to my needs. Would my life be much easier if I could go into Office Depot to buy a ream of paper without some temptation? Maybe. But there would be something else for me to get bent out of shape about, and I always liked the idea of “being the change I wanted to see in the world” more than “what I want must be correct for all.” 

I think Ozempic could be beneficial for some people who have struggled for years with their weight, people who have been on countless diets, who “eat clean” and still cannot win this fight. But in the Over Medicated States of America, I think very many people who really just need to recognize that they are in a food battlefield and act accordingly, have just been given a hall pass.