Bacon

The headline reads, “Do Fatty Foods Act Like Cocaine in the Brain?” But if you actually read the study, the rats were fed “bacon, sausage, cheesecake, pound cake, frosting and chocolate” so obviously the animals were eating a lot of sugar besides fat. Worse, the study uses the word “fat” numerous times, but the words “sugar” or “carbohydrate” never appear in the study, not even in the supplemental information. But this post isn’t about critiquing yet another obviously anti-fat biased study. Instead I’d like to use the study to illustrate a subject which gets almost no press and that is the importance of “circumstance” in the obesity problem.

For 2 millions years we hunted and gathered. Although it appears that hunting was the primary activity and gathering was the backup plan. During this time food was scarce. So scarce in fact that it limited the total human population and probably produced virtually no obesity. This is the first example of the importance of circumstance. There are two primary problems with hunting. First, the prey migrates to find greener pasture, so you have to migrate too. Second, hunting is a relatively low yield activity. Many hours are spent stalking, driving, attacking and running down prey. By contrasting, buying a steak at the grocery store is a high yield activity. So eventually, we developed our hunting techniques into herding techniques and began to domesticate animals. But meat, and all food really, has never been truly abundant until the end of World War II. But even then, it wasn’t until the 1970s, when the obesity problem started, that we entered a new era of food availability.

Grain

It all started with the Soviet crop failure of 1972 that led to a doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices. Housewives picketed in front of the Nixon White House. Scared that high food prices would unseat the Republicans from power, they devised a devious plan to lower food prices. Up to that point our farm subsidy program was called the “ever normal granary”. Here’s how it worked: When a farmer harvested their crop, they could either sell it at market, if prices were high, or they could store the grain and get a loan from the government using the grain as collateral. Then later, if grain prices went up, they could sell their grain at a profit and pay off the loan. If grain prices went down, they could just give the grain to the government to pay off the loan. This system kept grain prices relatively high because farmers couldn’t produce grain if the market price was less than the price of production.

Nixon’s colorful agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, flipped the whole system around. He ended the “ever normal granary” and replaced it with the system we have today. The current system pays farmers for the difference between the cost of production and the market price. This lets the market price fall below the cost of production. It also provides an incentive for farmers to grow more grain, not less. The exact opposite of what the market is signaling when prices fall below the cost of production. This subsidy program has increased the amount of grain grown nearly every year since it was put in place. It is this system that has allowed for the explosion of processed foods and the dramatic lowering of food prices.

So what do farm subsidy programs have to do with obesity? In a word, circumstance. You see until food prices began to fall after 1972, food was relatively scarce (expensive) and obesity wasn’t a problem. As soon as food prices began to decline significantly, obesity rates began to go up. Why? The reason is that the human race has never had to use “willpower” to control our food intake. Instead, circumstance provided the “willpower”. I don’t think it is a coincidence that as soon as circumstances changed, food prices dropped, obesity rates went up. The above study shows that when food, not fat, is basically freely available, people will over eat because of how our brains respond.

So what does this have to do with real food and Liberation Wellness? Real food appears to be more expensive than fake food, at least at the cash register. But of course, the low price of the fake food doesn’t include all the future costs of carbon from fossil fuels used for fertilizer, pesticides, processing and transportation. Nor does it include the cost of wars fought for control of oil. Nor does it include your future medical costs or loss of income from the illnesses it will produce in your body. Real food is also harder to obtain. You can’t get it at just any grocery or convenience store–yet. You have to work harder to obtain it. So the circumstances of real food can be used to your advantage to make real food a little more scarce then fake food.

The last piece of circumstance is the difference in how real and fake food makes you feel. When you live on fake food, your are chronically sick. But it feels normal because it’s how you feel all the time. This is why people feel so much better when the switch to real food, because it makes you healthy. But once your healthy from eating real food, when you slip and eat some fake food, you realize how sick it makes you. Again circumstance.

Please let me know what you think about this.

Paul Ericson is a certified Liberation Wellness Educator and the Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader for Barrie, ON Canada