Copyright © 2009
by Daniel Matthew Korn

All Rights Reserved

Much of the conventional wisdom about weight gain is incorrect. The factors in the modern American and Mediterranean diets which are widely blamed for weight gain are not causing weight gain when present in other diets. There is strong evidence that obesity is caused by the chemical additives in our foods. However, there is not yet enough evidence to convince everyone. That evidence will come from individuals demonstrating that a diet designed to increase healthful gut bacteria is anti-inflammatory and causes weight loss and from future research. Eventually, no foods will contain harmful additives that can cause weight gain. This will have benefits that extend far beyond improving public health.

People from all political affiliations want to raise living standards, develop cleaner and more efficient technology, raise educational achievement, and improve health care. Ending obesity worldwide would provide the necessary money to tackle many of these social and political goals. This may seem far-fetched, but consider the examples of the United States and Japan, two of the largest democratic industrial countries. While about one-third of Americans are obese, only a few percent of Japanese are obese. Obesity, or even just being overweight, leads to dramatically higher rates of chronic disease.

Despite having a population which is the oldest in the world and visits doctors more frequently, the fact that Japan’s population is healthier enables it to spend far less on healthcare than does the United States. A rough estimate reveals that if Americans became as healthy as the Japanese and spent the same percentage of their income on healthcare as the Japanese, they would save over one trillion dollars a year, an amount which would rise over time. The comparable savings for the world’s population as a whole would be much higher. We do not normally think in terms of trillions of dollars, so let us put that in perspective. A trillion dollars is slightly less than what the United States federal government spent in 2008 on defense, health care, education, foreign aid, energy, law enforcement, space exploration, agriculture, and transportation combined. This is a tiny fraction of what the world has cost itself by making changes to its food supply that were not fully understood and turned out to be harmful.

The lesson here is one of caution. In the future, we should be more careful with our health, our food supply, and our use of synthetic chemicals. The human suffering resulting from using the chemicals we mistakenly thought could be safely added to our food supply is immeasurable. A more cautious approach towards the use of these chemicals could have prevented this misery. Curing obesity simply requires an end to the use of the chemical agents in the food supply that cause it. As many people already know, failing to appreciate the effects of these chemicals has long caused diet and exercise to fail.

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