Book. “We will always live longer! » If there is a received idea – more topical than ever with the pension reform – whose reading of the species suicide makes you doubt, it is indeed that one. In this brief, lively and hard-hitting essay, written as a follow-up to a previous work (The Great Expansion. History of human health, Denoël, 2021), the French doctor and epidemiologist Jean-David Zeitoun sets out to elucidate the root causes of the epidemic of chronic diseases affecting humanity – diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancers, etc. – and whose effects on mortality are beginning to overshadow the progress made by medicine over the past century.
The author begins by breaking down the problem as one analyzes a market, that is to say by observing supply and demand. There is a “offer of risk” as there is a “demand for risk”and it is their unbridled encounter that produces this “species suicide”. On the one hand, a constellation of pathogenic industries (hydrocarbons, chemicals, agri-food, tobacco, alcohol, etc.), on the other, billions of humans who are directly affected by these risks (tobacco, alcohol, opioids, ultra-processed foods ) or indirect (pollution, chemical contamination, etc.).
The originality of the author’s approach is to articulate the results of several disciplines to conduct his demonstration. From the biochemistry of industrial food processing to epidemiology, economics and behavioral psychology, The Suicide of the Species shows how an ever-increasing part of our economies becomes pathogenic, and why we consent to it as consumers – out of ignorance, inattention, addiction or desperation.
Incomplete policies
The book is not content to refer supply (industrialists) and demand (consumers) back to back. It’s quite the opposite. The current suicide is rather the result, according to Jean-David Zeitoun, of a misguided vision of liberalism, which makes people believe that our collective health destiny is first and foremost the fruit of the sum of individual decisions. And that there would be nothing to do there, as long as these are free and not constrained.
Jean-David Zeitoun shows how this vision of things, to a large extent erroneous, remains significant in public health policies. These are largely based on prevention messages addressed to individuals and are at best incomplete, at worst ineffective. Firstly because the indirect risks (pollution, etc.) are invisible and not consented to, then because the demand for direct risks (processed food, etc.) is determined by a supply that the public authorities do not regulate.
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