Why We’re Fatter: A Selection from Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (2022)

“It seems incredible to us today, but fifty years ago, there was very little obesity in the Western world. Look at a photograph of a beach taken back then: everyone is, by our standards, slim. Then a whole series of changes took place. We replaced a food-supply system based around fresh, nutritious food with one consisting mainly of processed junk. We massively stressed out our populations, making comfort eating a whole lot more appealing. We built cities that are often impossible to walk or bike around. In other words, the environment changed, and that—not any individual failing on the part of you or me—changed our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. The average weight gain for an adult between 1960 and 2002 was twenty-four pounds.

Then what happened? Rather than acknowledge the wider forces that have done this to us, take them on, and build a healthy environment in which it’s easier to avoid obesity, we were taught by the diet industry to blame ourselves as individuals. We learned to think: I got fat because of a personal failing. I chose the wrong food. I got greedy, I got lazy, I didn’t get a handle on my feelings properly, I’m not good enough. We resolved to count the calories better next time. (I’ve been there.) Individual diet books and diet plans became the primary answer offered by the culture to a crisis with primarily social causes.

How is that working out for us? The scientists who have studied this have discovered that 95 percent of people in our culture who lose weight on a diet regain it within one to five years. That’s nineteen out of every twenty people. Why? It’s because this way of approaching the problem misses most of why you (and I) gained weight in the first place. It has no systemic analysis. It doesn’t talk about the crisis in our food supply, which surrounds us with addictive, highly processed foods that bear no relationship to what previous generations of humans ate. It doesn’t explain the crisis of stress and anxiety that drives us to overeat. It doesn’t address the fact that we live in cities where you have to squeeze yourself into a steel box to get anywhere. Diet books ignore the fact that you live in a society and culture that are shaping and pushing you, every day, to act in certain ways. A diet doesn’t change your wider environment—and it’s the wider environment that is the cause of the crisis. Your diet ends, and you’re still in an unhealthy environment that’s pushing you to gain weight. Trying to lose weight in the environment we’ve built is like trying to run up an escalator that is constantly carrying you down. A few people might heroically sprint to the top—but most of us will find ourselves back at the bottom, feeling like it’s our fault. . . .

There was a different way we could have reacted to the obesity crisis when it began forty or so years ago. We could have listened to the evidence that purely practicing individual restraint—in an unchanged environment—rarely works for long, except in one in twenty cases like Nir’s. We could have looked instead at what does work: changing the environment in specific ways. We could have used government policy to make fresh, nutritious food cheap and accessible, and sugar-filled junk expensive and inaccessible. We could have reduced the factors that cause people to be so stressed that they comfort eat. We could have built cities people can easily walk or bike through. We could have banned the targeting of junk food ads at children, shaping their tastes for life. That’s why countries that have done some of this—like Norway, or Denmark, or the Netherlands—have much lower levels of obesity, and countries that have focused on telling individual overweight people to pull themselves together, like the U.S. and U.K., have very high levels of obesity. If all the energy people like me have put into shaming and starving ourselves had been put instead into demanding these political changes, there would be far less obesity now, and a lot less misery.”—Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (2022)